From the Vault: March '21 Streaming

Women for Sale on Celluloid; Australian Cinema and Nicole Kidman; Cillian Murphy and Colin Farrell

March 1, 2021

Hi everyone! Welcome to March....................

A fruitless endeavor in Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971), set in the Australian Outback

I have a few new viewing themes I'm sitting with this month:

ETA: This was the newsletter in its earliest form (a brief email shot out into the ether), before I really began to actually sit down and write-up my thoughts. Hence, its proverbial breasts' are small and humble (so you don’t confuse them for mountains).

“I'm Gonna Take Him Like Grant Took Waterloo”: Women for Sale on Celluloid

Cathy Tyson is an expensive call girl shuttled around by Bob Hoskins in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa (1986)

At a time of incredible economic instability, when women are being shamed for pivoting to Only Fans and camming as a means of supporting themselves and sex workers are still finding themselves largely voiceless in mainstream leftist discourse despite building the kind of organizing structures that subvert the state, I thought it would be cool to explore movies about golddigging, stripping, camming, sex work, pornography; all the ways in which women negotiate their bodies within the oppressive system of capitalism that depends on their exploitation as much as their disenfranchisement. Given that so many film and tv narratives are meant to shame and control these women and their labor, I tried to mostly include films that subvert or complicate tired tropes about sex work and transactional dating (or at least foregrounded the woman/women), but it's an understandably messy process. Content warning tags where relevant.

Shine on Like Tina Sparkle: A Guide to Australian Cinema

Private school girls disappear into the maw of the Australian wilderness (the Hanging Rock geological formation in Victoria) in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)