From the Vault: May '22 Streaming
Dolls on Film, Pam Grier and Marilyn Monroe, "Motherhood is Hell," and May Day: Redux
May 2, 2022
Welcome to May streaming!
Spring is here, the sky is blue, and we've got a (quite literally) stacked line-up of fresh streaming programs, largely related to ideas of femininity: pastiche, play, obligation, sexuality, resilience, failure, and the Madonna. We're all just Barbie girls in the Barbie world, after all, and we're looking at playthings in particular this month, but we've also got Mother's Day programming, as well as an actor showcase honoring two gorgeous artists known for weaponizing their femininity to subvert and challenge the patriarchal order. Finally, it was suffragette Helen Todd who famously wrote, "As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men/For they are women's children, and we mother them again/Four lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes/Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses," and we've got fresh leftist film streaming recs in honor of May Day. Come on Barbie, let's go party:
Imagination, Life is Your Creation: Dolls on Film
The opening title card of the 2014 film Annabelle states: Since the beginning of civilization, dolls have been beloved by children, cherished by collectors and used in religious rites as conduits for good and evil. I found that summary quite compelling, particularly as I've been thinking this month about dolls. Ever since girlhood, I've been obsessed with dolls. This has the potential to be a serious understatement, so let me be absolutely clear: I still dream, constantly, about the dolls I once had, and the ritual of playing with them. Paper dolls, plastic dolls, cloth dolls, "action figures," microscopic Polly Pocket dolls...even a life-size Barbie that belonged to my friend Bolton and so terrified us that we hid it in the closet during sleepovers. Dolls that wet themselves and contorted and changed their hair colors and even performed tricks on monkey bars with a remote control...dolls that edged ever closer to something like a convincingly sentient object; a friend you can purchase (or make). Children of my generation were truly in the golden age of dolls, and there seemed to be an almost limitless horizon of doll possibilities: there was a Barbie for every hyperniche situation you could possibly find yourself in, and an action figure or LEGO minifigure for every moment in popular culture (a whole rigidly gendered, sanctioned space for "boys" to... play with dolls.) Speaking of "for the boys," there's also G.I. Joe: the hypermasculine "safe" iteration of Barbie who helped young men discover their own place within the Military Industrial Complex...(my friend Mo had "Action Man"). Recently, at a friend's party, I spoke with a group of young women about American Girl dolls: which ones we had, which ones we coveted, the stories we loved best, and how they shaped our lifelong love of American history... a past understood through the framework of dolls. For a lot of people, I suspect, dolls were a conduit for an impulse to shape our experiences outside the restraints of our physical body, which so often let us down or failed to bend to our desires to shape it: imagination imbues the doll with everything we dream for ourselves. The doll provides a total control of environment — down to the picture-perfect dream house — which at some point maybe manifests in a destructive impulse to tear down the trappings of adolescence (I can't think of a single person I know who played with Barbies and did not, at some point, rip her head off, cut her hair, or draw on her face). We love dolls, then hate dolls, then...yearn for them, in a sense, finding them in other outlets (like the Kim Kardashian Hollywood mobile game, which I had to delete from my phone years ago because it was legitimately disrupting my life). Film does something very similar with dolls: when you're a child, dolls are conduits for self-discovery. When you're an adult, dolls are largely malevolent, preying on children (that once-charming almost-sentience now recalibrated as a source of horror). Film uses literal dolls — in the use of stop-motion animation (for meticulously detailed creatives like Wes Anderson, for example, the doll must be the ultimate form of artistic control, even more than 2D animation) and miniatures, including elaborate sets and designs to scale. Film also tells stories about dolls: Chucky...Buzz Lightyear...Eve...Annabelle...Baby Annette...the titular Mannequin from Mannequin, etc. Despite declining sales of the big players and the push for gender-neutral toys, dolls will always be relevant — because they represent the human impulse to play God — and dolls will always matter to the film industry. What will Greta Gerwig's imminent Barbie film look like in a post-Barbie landscape? How will JJ Abrams' Bad Robot "transform Hot Wheels’ legendary IP into a thrilling story for the big screen?" And how did we wind up with three different Pinocchio projects just this year: Disney's live action, Tom Hanks-starring remake; Guillermo del Toro's stop motion animation take for Netflix; and Dreamworks' baffling English dub of a Russian animated film version of Pinocchio, in which the titular puppet is voiced by Pauly Shore?? Charlie Kaufman, who once made a movie about a man obsessed with building displays of the city he lived in as a simulacrum for his life and art, said, "It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there's no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something." This program looks at dolls, toys, puppets, avatars, miniatures, doll houses, and models.
For this month's actor showcase, we're featuring two of my favorite onscreen leading ladies, who have considerably shaped my own understanding of femininity and sexuality: birthday girl Pam Grier and Marilyn Monroe, two of the enduring icons of American Cinema Culture.
That's My Sister, Baby, And She's a Whole Lotta Woman: The Perseverance of Pam Grier
With her breakthrough performance in the Jack Hill blaxploitation classic Coffy (1973), Pam Grier became a defining icon of the 1970s and Black popular culture, as well as one of the first female action heroes in American film, kicking ass and dropping bodies long before it was normalized (ahistorical readings of film often cite Sigourney Weaver in Alien as the first female action star, but Grier's blaxploitation roles predate her by several years). Breathtakingly gorgeous, Grier became synonymous with Black beauty, a manifestation of the "Black is Beautiful" movement of the 1960s and 70s, which fought against Western, Eurocentric beauty standards. With her iconic afro (sometimes used to stash guns and razor blades in her films), naturally curvy body, and down-to-earth, no-nonsense onscreen persona ("You just handle the justice, and I'll handle the revenge myself," she tells a Black Panther in Foxy Brown), she represented a departure from Hollywood's typical onscreen depictions of Black women as marginalized at best and a whole host of degrading stereotypes at worst. Of course, the blaxploitation era wasn't perfect, and there's definitely aspects of the "jezebel" stereotype wrapped up in these early films, but Grier's legitimate talent as an actress elevates the material beyond such simple generalizations, and her characters often displayed a calculated control of their sexuality and general appeal to gain access to spaces denied to them and right wrongs against their communities. When the blaxploitation era ended and Hollywood largely shut its doors to black actors once again, Grier's leading lady roles dried up. It wasn't until a series of geeky 90s directors (John Carpenter, Tim Burton, and Quentin Tarantino) begged her to be in their pictures that she underwent a career resurgence, thanks in particular to her astonishingly nuanced performance in Tarantino's Jackie Brown, which is regarded by many to be one of the most fully-realized characters in the director's oeuvre: tough but sensitive, sweet but deadly, over-the-hill but better-than-ever. The talented star has acted consistently, albeit in more eclectic parts, including in the groundbreaking queer show The L Word, in an industry that seems committed to burying her and minimizing her legacy. Not in this house! The fleeting moment when I exclaimed "female empowerment!" to Ms. Grier while she graciously signed a copy of her 2010 autobiography, Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, is among one of the most humbling and embarrassing moments of my life, just as said book is one of my most coveted possessions. She's a survivor, and a trailblazer; as American as apple pie.
I Can Be Smart When It's Important, But Most Men Don't Like It: Marilyn Monroe, Living Doll of Mid-Century Americana
I once read an excerpt from one of Marilyn Monroe's diaries in Vanity Fair that has never left me: she recounts a dream she had, in which (father of Method Acting and director of the prestigious Actors Studio) Lee Strasburg — who she studied under for a time — is performing surgery on her, opening her up. How she describes what he found inside of her has always haunted me: "there is absolutely nothing there — Strasberg is deeply disappointed but more even— academically amazed that he had made such a mistake. He thought there was going to be so much — more than he had ever dreamed possible … instead there was absolutely nothing — devoid of every human living feeling thing— the only thing that came out was so finely cut sawdust—like out of a raggedy ann doll—and the sawdust spills all over the floor & table...The patient … existing of complete emptiness..." For anyone who has ever struggled with mental health issues, that image is quite potent, and speaks to a feeling that can be so difficult to explain yet overwhelming in its intensity. I've written before about the tragedy and irony of Marilyn Monroe, who means so much to me for reasons it would take too long to articulate: a terrific actress who was raked over the coals during her own time for her perceived stupidity, which was actually a carefully constructed persona shielding considerable mental health issues, as well as her reputation for being "difficult" on set (a result of deep insecurity, stage fright, lifelong endometriosis, and a reliance on barbiturates and amphetamines that would develop into a crippling addiction). Onscreen, no one imbues the ultimate ideal of femininity like Marilyn, with her hourglass silhouette, girdled waist, bleach-blonde hair, and gorgeous kilowatt smile. Onscreen, she has it: star power, that thing you can't fake, pulling focus (even in minor roles) like an angel fallen from heaven. Offscreen, her life was marked by tragedy and exploitation, culminating in her untimely death at the age of 36. She was a brilliant, inquisitive woman with an FBI file, who stood against racism in her time, had affairs and relationships with women, and held her own against intellectuals of her era, including her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller. Coming from absolutely nothing (as a child, she was made a ward of the state after her mother could not care for her due to her own mental illness) and surviving abuse, she is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of the American Dream, as well as a cautionary tale about its insidiousness. This perfect package of idealized womanhood had no real agency over her life, battered around as she was by the whims of disgusting men: for example, when old nude photos of her, taken when she was young and broke, were purchased by Hugh Hefner and published in the inaugural pages of Playboy in 1953, it turned the magazine — the definitive text of Post-War American sexuality — into an empire overnight. Marilyn gave no consent to having the photos published, nor was she even paid or thanked for the inclusion, and the scandal almost derailed her career. However much the Hollywood machine and celebrity complex destroyed her life, her sheer talent and effervescence has stood the test of time, just as her sly, knowing repudiations of the "dumb blonde" and golddigger stereotypes have helped elevate her films from the sexist messaging of her era. She seemed to have a way of performing sex that was potent as hell but also felt in on the joke; she's the blueprint for that form of weaponized sexuality. Everyone from Madonna to Kelly Le Brock to Kylie Minogue to Nicole Kidman to Lindsay Lohan to Anna Nicole Smith to Anna Faris to Lana Del Rey to Ariana Grande to Margot Robbie have used her bubbly, self-aware interpretation of feminine pantomime as a template for their own feminine pastiche. As mentioned above, Marilyn studied method acting at the Actors Studio to be taken seriously as an actress — as she was deeply insecure about her own abilities, relying on acting coaches her whole career — but she didn't need it: her phenomenal performances, imbued with her inner radiance, in films like Niagra, The Seven Year Itch, Clash by Night, Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Misfits, to name just a few, have arguably eclipsed a good amount of the work of the Actors Studio, including her own Method Performance in the (dreadful) Bus Stop (1956). It's truly tragic that she thought (like so many troubled women) that she had nothing inside her but sawdust, when her light extended so far past her own lifetime, inspiring every person of any gender identity who ever jiggled and cooed around their own bedroom in pantomime to "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," imagining themselves surrounded by a coterie of suited showboys (not me of course).
DON'T you swear at me, you little shit! Don't you EVER raise your voice at me! I am your mother!: Motherhood is Hell
With Mother's Day upon us, I wanted to conceive a tribute befitting my own mother, who both indoctrinated me into the Cult of Barbie, helped forge my love of film, and is, in fact, a good mother (she reads this newsletter). She does, however, dislike Mother's Day, which she sees as an excuse to make the children of mothers feel guilty. To each their own, but nevertheless, we have a running joke of watching anti-Mother's Day movies, featuring horrible mothers, or depressing stories of motherhood, in a perverse sort of tribute to the holiday. Taking that idea in a slightly different direction, we're debuting Motherhood is Hell, a look back at the films with the scariest takes on motherhood, demonstrating the kind of strength and fortitude of self it takes to truly raise and care for a child (an act that, as my mother loves to remind me, never ends, even when they're no longer a child). We're starting, of course, with Grey Gardens, a classic documentary about a dysfunctional, attention-seeking mother-daughter pair of former debutantes living in squalor in the Hamptons: basically, what my mother and I have the potential to turn into.
Le monde va changer de base, nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout: May Day Redux
A Happy (belated) International Workers' Day to you and yours! In honor of working class history month and the tireless fight of the international labor movement, we're reviving the messy Leftist Cinema list that Vince and I built last year with new insights, new films, updated streaming information, and new mess. It's a great start to the month, given the astonishing, groundbreaking recent victory by the Amazon Labor Union, who successfully organized the very first Amazon workers' union right here on Staten Island despite no existing labor involvement. This development comes on the heels of a spate of unionizations at Starbucks locations, which started in Buffalo, NY in December of last year and has grown to about 25 locations (out of 200 that have filed for union election). And on a much lower-stakes note, the powers that be finally put pro-union British classic Brassed Off! on streaming (I promise that you're going to love it). A special thank you this month to friend of the spread Luke, who offered his own insightful suggestions for the Leftist Film canon. Not to brag about the caliber of people on this newsletter, but he recently received a Fulbright scholarship to conduct dissertation research on industrialization and rural decline in the Asturias region of Spain under Franco, so...yeah, I feel particularly honored to share his expertise on Spanish and Leftist Cinema. Finally, another friend of the spread and Local Librarian, Peter, has put together a fantastic list of Working Class History Month literature recommendations for the Brooklyn Public Library, many of which can be accessed digitally for free with a library card. (I am dying to read Stayin' alive: the 1970s and the last days of the working class especially). Get your library card, talk to your coworkers, boycott Amy's, and stay strong out there compañeros!
Phew! That's all for May. April streaming is headed back into the archive, while our reference tabs have been coded green. We'll see you in June! Until then, bye, bye baby, remember you're my baby when they give you the eye...