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The Secret History of Wonder Woman

November 19, 2014 in Book Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Film Matters

Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.” Certainly that’s true when it comes to feminism. Women began the twentieth century fighting for the right to vote as well as for legal, affordable contraception. Although they achieved their goals, 100 years later voting is once again a problematic issue and the “right to choose” becomes more tenuous by the day.

Part of the problem is women today take their liberties for granted because they don’t realize how recently they were acquired. “Herstory” isn’t remembered well, even by many activists. And when that’s the case, we’re not just doomed to rhyme; we’re doomed to lose momentum.

In her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Women, Jill Lepore reminds us of the suffragists and feminist utopists of the early twentieth century who helped birth the most popular female superhero of all time. Although the raven-haired Amazon didn’t debut in a comic book until 1941 (just as the United States entered World War II), Lepore details how she harkens back to the first wave of feminism. Continue Reading →

Peters Never Grow Up

November 16, 2014 in Book Matters, Film Matters

All weekend I’ve been reading Peter Bogdanovich’s star-fuckery, slightly appalling memoir Who the Hell’s In It. It’s a series of profiles of Hollywood actors, many of whom he knew quite well, and many about whom I’m extremely curious. Cary Grant, Jack Lemmon, Stella Adler, Marlon Brando, River Phoenix, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Sal Mineo, for starters. Bogdanovich mostly defers–sometimes fawns–over these big names but I don’t hold it against him, even if the results read only a step above the kind of PR-ese that was my bread and butter at Us Weekly. Which is to say that the book’s not pulpy, only a little juicy. You know, Cary Grant wasn’t gay; Jerry Lewis wasn’t to blame for his fall-out with Dean Martin. Occasionally details drift in that fascinate: a drunken brawl between Lemmon and his then-new wife, Felicia; Montgomery Clift slurring his way through a revival of his own work.

I suppose I’m sympathetic. There is something breathtaking about these actors who continue to take up so much space in our cultural imagination, especially in an era in which we view films on the tinest of screens. It’s a kid thing, I think. As Bodganovich himself says, “The was, in fact, an innocence on some level with all the star-players I met; almost all the actors, young or old, felt an unspoiled, selfless love for the work and the medium itself.” You could say that of Bogdanovich himself, too. He has pretty much worn every hat possible in the still-amazing world of film, and I’ve always felt happy to see his name, even when he’s made the tackiest of missteps. It’s funny that, with his owly features, he seems so ordinary. Nobody recognizes him yet he knew—and knows!–everyone. That’s my kind of Hollywood legend–the kind whose charm creeps up on you. (Charmless features coupled with bright enthusiasm always do.)

Manifest Destiny and ‘The Homesman’

November 14, 2014 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

Too plain and too old by 1850s standards to be considered viable marriage material, ex-schoolteacher Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) lives by herself in the Nebraska Territory. She tends to her livestock and her land by herself, literally and metaphorically wearing men’s trousers beneath her floor-length dresses. At night, she sings in her unfaltering high voice, accompanying herself silently on a cloth she has embroidered to resemble the piano she played daily when she still lived East. In “The Homesman,” it is a life of making-do.

But other settlers in the still-mostly unpopulated region are having a more difficult time. The winter has been brutal, and not everyone has survived so far with their sanity intact. Arabella (Grace Gummer) has lost her children to diphtheria and becomes a silent, doll-clutching zombie; Theoline (Miranda Otto) has been so driven to despair that she threw her newborn baby down an outhouse hole; Gro (Sonja Richter) lost her mother in the snow and has since seemed demonically possessed. Unequipped for anything except basic survival, the men of the region determine these three must be sent back East. It falls upon Cuddy to shepherd them home in a locked box wagon and, upon rescuing loutish claim jumper George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) from a death by hanging, she forces him to accompany them on the trek. Despite her disapproval of him and her fierce independence, she accepts that she and the other women will not survive the journey by themselves. As it is, the journey through ice storms and hostile Indian territory proves untenable for some of them.

As sere and slow as the region it describes, “The Homesman” refuses to be a likeable film. Yet it is all the more compelling for its lack of accommodation, partly because of the unabashedly feminist perspective it takes on the pitfalls of Manifest Destiny and partly because of its fidelity to its source material, Glendon Swarthout’s eponymous, admirably spare 1988 novel. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy