27 Days Later

That's all I fucking need, I think furiously. I check my planner: 27 days. Lately the intervals have gotten a few days shorter, hovering around the textbook 28, but flow duration is still longer than average. I've had 17 days off.

Looking at my planner, I remember what I thought last month, and the month before, and the month before that: That's all I fucking need. I think back over the past decade. Ten years – that's approaching half my life – I've been putting up with this monthly exodus of dark matter, and not once have I been able to feel anything remotely positive about it.

Every month: That's all I fucking need.

Fifteen years old, in the bathroom, crying and cursing my body for its monthly betrayal, uncontrollable, infuriating, pointless. Twenty-one years old, in the bedroom, being upbraided by my girlfriend for my squeamishness about bodily fluids. All the years in between, growing into feminism, learning to deconstruct my internalized misogyny, reading Steinem, finding out that many women see this as something empowering, something beautiful, something to celebrate.

I don't find it empowering.

I don't find it beautiful.

I don't want to celebrate it.

I'm utterly sick of trying not to hate it. I'm sick of trying to locate some essential femininity in it. Sick of trying to see it as emblematic of the life-giving facility of the female body. Sick of trying to view that same facility as a source of power rather than a source of visceral horror, something I would gladly relinquish given half a chance.

I hate it, this thing my body does. I want to be rid of it.

Dear "The Big Bang Theory": It's Over.

I hate you, The Big Bang Theory.

I've not always hated you. (I've always criticized you a lot, with good reason, but I've not always hated you.) A couple Decembers ago, when my relationship was falling apart and winter was doing its usual number on me, I marathoned your first three seasons. You've never been a good show as such, but you were an adequate guilty pleasure.

I mean, I was always troubled by your broadness, your reliance on lazy stereotypes, and your tendency to invite the audience to laugh at your characters rather than with them. (NERDS LIKE TYPICALLY NERDY PURSUITS! AHAHAHA!) But I put up with all that for the same reason my queer sisters suffered through five seasons of The L Word: when mainstream representations of people like yourself are so rare, you take whatever crumbs you can get. And also because Sheldon was awesome.

(Remember when Sheldon was awesome?)

Last year, though, you were in serious decline. The twin headlights in the darkness of season four were Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch, both criminally underserved as Penny's friends Amy and Bernadette. And now you've completely lost the plot.

You've always kind of mocked your characters, but it used to be in an affectionate way; now it's just outright contempt. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia this ain't – you're not a dark, edgy show about horrible people doing horrible things; you're a fluffy three-camera sitcom for mindless entertainment, and You're Doing It Wrong.

Look at How I Met Your Mother. It's always been better than you, of course, but the comparison stands because it too is a show well past its prime, coasting on its six prior seasons of audience goodwill. (Again, not like Always Sunny, whose seventh season is completely killing it and, if it continues like this, might just be the best thing to happen to television ever.) HIMYM has gotten lazy and is spinning its wheels, but – ideological problems aside – is still a pleasant, unchallenging watch, because it doesn't hate its characters.

You seem determined to make your viewers hate all your central characters. You've stripped them of every non-loathsome characteristic, reducing them to cartoonish bundles of broad tics, unfunny running gags, and unbelievable interactions.

And you're just so fucking offensive.

I've put up with so goddamn much of your shit. For four seasons I've overlooked your dumb gender essentialist stereotypes, your constant racism, your sneering at nerd culture; and I just can't take it anymore. The four episodes of season five that have aired so far turn the racism and slut-shaming up to eleven, but it's the most recent episode that was the final straw for me. It was so irredeemably loathsome on every level that I no longer feel even the slightest pang of regret in saying:

Fuck you, The Big Bang Theory. I hate you and will never watch you again.

Disneyfail: Pocahontas vs The Princess and the Frog

When I look at Pixar movies, I envy today's kids. Imagine growing up with your earliest cinematic memories being of Wall-E and Up and Toy Story 3.

But then, I myself grew up in a pretty sweet age of children's cinema. I'm a child of the Disney Renaissance: I grew up with The Little Mermaid and Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, which are hardly to be sniffed at. Of course, if we're talking feminism, they leave something to be desired, but Pixar has its own problems in that regard.

People who are new to feminist, womanist, or otherwise SJ-oriented pop-culture criticism sometimes miss a crucial point: just 'cause I love something doesn't mean I give it a free pass on its isms. Conversely, of course, I can slate something for its genderfail, racefail, etc. and still love it. As Sparky puts it, “My most favourite of favourite things I love are sadly rife with stereotypes, erasure, damaging tropes and out right prejudiced portrayals.” To my thinking, being a responsible pop-culture consumer requires applying critical thinking even to your most beloved properties, and it doesn't necessarily mean you love them any less.

That said, some beloved childhood properties are just too toxic to be looked on with any degree of fondness once you're old enough to think about them critically.

Take Pocahontas. I was six years old when Pocahontas came out, and, with the undiscriminating consumption of young children, my brothers and I watched and rewatched the video. We played at being the characters (primarily the animal sidekicks, so much more interesting than the tedious leads), and we often listened to a cassette of the soundtrack on car journeys. As I grew older, I maintained that the film wasn't very good but the music was.

This assertion was based on fickle memory rather than recent experience, because it's been well over a decade since I either watched the movie or listened to the soundtrack – until the other day, when combined nostalgia and morbid curiosity led me to give the songs a spin.

Wow.

Wow.

I realize this movie came out in 1995, when commercialized internet was a brand-new thing, and that it would be a good fifteen years before fuck yeah cultural appropriation came along to succinctly and brilliantly call out this kind of crap, but Orientalism was published in 1978. Are you telling me no one working at Disney in the early nineties had even a passing familiarity with the general concept? Because ICK. I know I'm saying nothing new in pointing out how gross Disney's Pocahontas is, but what shocked me was how much my skin crawled at just the songs, not even the movie itself.

Every damn song is like “woo, the brown people are ~spiritual~ and ~in touch with the land~! The brown people ~understand nature~ and can magically learn foreign tongues by ~listening with their hearts~ and ~communing with the trees~! Fertile valleys, dewy grass, wind, and clear water...” UM WHAT. And in the song “Savages” there's a painful attempt to draw an equivalence between the invading British forces and the defending American Indians.

Leader of invading British colonialists: “They're different from us, which means they must be evil!”

Leader of American Indians: “They're different from us, which means they can't be trusted.”

Even as a small child, I recognized the pungent stench of BS in that false equivalence, though I couldn't have articulated why it bothered me so much. Well, now I can: the invading British forces actually can't be trusted. The tribal chief is RIGHT. The invaders want to kill him and his people and steal all their things! Don't give me this “there was wrong and misunderstanding on both sides” revisionist horsepuckey. I'm supposed to condemn the indigenous peoples for not just cheerfully handing over their land, resources, vaginas, etc. to the invading colonial forces? Fuck right off.

Up until Mulan (WHO WINS ALL THE THINGS, NATCH), the only Disney heroine I identified with at all was Belle, obviously. She liked reading a lot, she wanted much more than this provincial life, and everyone thought she was a bit weird: she's just like me! – provided we ignore the entire second half of the movie where she up and Stockholm-syndromes her way to a “happy ending”, as this fabulously ranty piece points out.

That same piece does an able job of describing everything that's wrong with The Princess and the Frog. I don't disagree with any of Ashley's points, but heck if I didn't enjoy the mucus out of that movie. I think it's because I saw the Tiana/Naveen/frog business as a humdrum, easily-ignored subplot. The movie isn't really about princesses, frogs, or any iteration thereof. The movie is about celebrating New Orleans culture: the food, the music, the accents, the color of the city. If you conceive New Orleans as the protagonist, and the actual storyline as stuff that's just happening in the background so we get to enjoy the milieu, it's a less frustrating film.

Tiana's character arc is certainly profoundly disappointing. [SPOILERS, but it's a Disney movie so you knew what was coming:] Apparently we've progressed to the point where a woman can have ambitions of her own, but mayn't realize them unless she has an all-important Man first because what really matters is MARRIAGE!

...Um, Disney? Can I ask you a question? Why do all your movies have romance in them anyway?

I mean, I get that some kids must like love stories. They must do, because it takes all sorts and whatnot. But... in my house, at least, romance plots were something to be suffered through so you could have the awesome songs, wacky sidekicks, magical enchantments, and goofy jokes. My brothers and I were not fans of “mushy stuff”, and surely millions of kids feel the same way. Why have romance in your kids' movies at all? Kids are kids! They're not interested in ~love~ and ~romance~ and ~special feelings~. Kids want stories of adventure and magic and fun and friendship, the things they seek out in their everyday lives. At one stage during The Princess and the Frog, I briefly entertained the notion that Tiana and Naveen might just realize they liked and valued each other as friends, and that would've been awesome. If I were writing a kids' film, the interpersonal relationships would all be friendships, because I think kids deserve to know that friends are more important than romantic partners. (YMMV, of course, but surely we can all agree that's true for six-year-olds!)

But, for all its faults, The Princess and the Frog does take unmitigated delight in Louisiana Creole culture, in a way that seems genuine and reasonably non-gross. I'll take that over Pocahontas any day.

The Pursuit of Bootstrappyness

So I watched this movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, and it was pretty gross. I don't mean Trainspotting gross, or Saw LXIV gross. In fact it's directed strictly at middlebrow sensibilities, competently directed and well-acted, hitting all the predictable beats of your standard Oscar-nomination-getting story.

And it's precisely because a story like this is seen as so innocuous, such gloopy inoffensive awards-bait, that we need to talk about why it's so gross.

Will Smith plays a father and salesman who is struggling to make ends meet. He takes on a highly competitive unpaid internship at a stockbroker's, but when his baby mama walks out on him and their five-year-old son he's left destitute. His only hope is to be the bestest intern the stockbrokers have ever seen, so that they will choose him over the other 19 interns to get the paid position at the end of the six-month internship. Calamity piles on calamity, and before long Will Smith and his son are homeless and sleeping in public restrooms and homeless shelters – well, the son is sleeping; Will Smith studies by night, and, because he is a superhuman with no need for such mundanities as sleep, manages to be the bestest ever intern and win the job. Happyness: pursued, caught, skinned, barbecued, and eaten.

How is this narrative gross? Let me count the ways:

1. Harpyness

Thandie Newton plays Will Smith's girlfriend and the mother of their adorable moppet Jaden (well, he's Smith's moppet IRL). Newton gets to do exactly two things in this movie:

1. shriek at Will Smith over his inability to pay the rent; and

2. leave town, never to be heard from again.

Now, Newton's behavior toward Smith is actually pretty understandable. She's been working double shifts at her job, but they still can't make their payments because Smith is unable to sell the transmogrifiers he's invested in. Yelling at him isn't right or helpful, but I sympathize because I imagine she's under huge amounts of stress (especially since, as is implied later, she never particularly wanted to be a parent). However, I sympathize only because I have years of feminist deprogramming making me hypersensitive to any portrayal of a female character; the problem is, we never actually see her work problems or her stress (or her doing anything other than yelling at him, really) – and because the entire film is focalized through Smith's character, we see the ill fortune that dogs his honest attempts to sell his transmogrifiers, we see Newton not giving him a chance to explain before starting to shriek, and so your average filmgoer probably just thinks, “Damn, what a harpy.”

Personally, I'm fascinated by her story. It sounds as though she didn't want to be a mother, and only carried her pregnancy to term because of baby daddy's insistence. The story of a reluctant mother assailed by the mounting pressures of family and financial concerns until one day she can't take it anymore would be an original one for Hollywood, at least if it were told sympathetically; but, no, the concept that a mother might find something in life more important than motherhood is just too radical for our Extreme Leftist Hollywood.

2. Crappyness

These characters are working class. I know you don't use that term in America, but they are. They live from paycheck to paycheck; perhaps at the beginning of the film they are hovering on or just above the poverty line, but as it goes on they slump into undeniable poverty. A combination of accumulated parking tickets, unsympathetic landlords, and the ultimate evil that is TAXES leave our protagonist utterly destitute. He and his boy have to go live in a homeless shelter; with no income at all, Smith has to pretend to all the high-flying stockbrokers that everything is just swell and dandy.

(Now I'm thinking about it, how does he pay his son's daycare fees during their homeless period? Surely the $25 from donating blood would go toward food and bus fares.)

The rich white people treat poor black Will Smith like dirt. They make him fetch their coffees and donuts, they make him park their cars, they generally treat him like their darkie servant. And yet the film feels no need to make any comment on this racism. In fact, once Will Smith accepts an invitation to attend a football game with a very rich stockbroker and his creepily Aryan son, he manages to keep crawling on up until the rich white people accept him as one of them. Congratulations, poor black man! Because you did what the rich white people told you and swallowed their humiliations, you've been permitted to ascend to their level! If you lick their boots some more, maybe they'll let you join the whites-only country club! There's no critique of this system. The rich white people's position is presented as the ideal – as the happiness Will Smith's character is pursuing – and the fact that he's had to crawl on his belly and let them treat him with total indignity is a mere inconvenience. Suck it up, boy.

3. Bootstrappyness

Just as there's no critique of the racist aspects of Smith's ascent, there's no critique of the class system. A story like this is the ideal avenue to explore class inequity in America: rich people swan around to their boxes and golf courses, oblivious of the fact that right in front of their eyes are millions of people who can't afford basic amenities, who can't lend you $5. I'd like to see the story of Smith's character building relationships with the other poverty-stricken people around him, building solidarity with others who have been screwed over by a vastly unequal society. But he never engages with those around him in any way (except to fight another homeless guy for a place at the shelter). He's better than they are. Unlike them, he doesn't deserve to be here. He'll haul himself out of there by his bootstraps. He'll claw his way to the top of the system that screwed him.

The myth of the “American Dream” is that anyone can do anything. Will Smith's character even speechifies at his son to this effect: “Don't ever let somebody tell you you can't do something. Not even me. ...If you want something, go get it. Period.” But the vast, vast majority of people living paycheck-to-paycheck can't do anything they want. There are just too many obstacles, a whole system twisted against them. By only telling rags-to-riches stories – never acknowledging the inescapable poverty that is reality for millions – Hollywood is reinforcing the idea that the underdog can always win, that if you're still poor it's because you didn't try hard enough, you didn't want it hard enough, you didn't have enough grit and daring: that it's your own fault.

At the end of the movie, Will Smith and his son walk down the street in their nice new rich-person neighborhood. The houses are huge, the street is clean, and the shuffling hordes of the homeless, among whom they not so long ago were queuing desperately for a night's shelter, are nowhere to be seen. Out of sight, out of mind. You hauled yourself up by your bootstraps – they can darn well do the same.