Mad Max vs. Death Proof, or What does "feminist" art look like, and do we even want it?

It’s curious that lately, upon the release of a big-budget action flick, the trend has not been to talk about effects or explosions, but to talk about feminism.

Of all the things to get excited about in Mad Max: Fury Road - the nutso aesthetic, the ambitious action sequences, the revival of a seemingly defunct cultural icon - the thing that’s got a lot of people the most riled up is the movie’s portrayal of women.

Whether decrying the movie’s quasi-Amazonian cast as feminist propaganda or cheering it as a victory for equal representation, many commentators are treating Mad Max as an almost singular event. Articles have already designated Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa the spiritual heir to Sigourney Weaver’s alien fighter Ripley, even above recent contenders like Katniss Everdeen and Black Widow. And neither The Hunger Games nor The Avengers could boast being boycotted by men’s rights activists.

While there are certainly comparisons to draw between Furiosa and other action heroines, what Mad Max reminded me of more than anything was another movie that doesn't just swap out a male hero for a female likeness, but is actually interested in dealing with questions intimately related to women.

Like Mad Max, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007) uses a low-brow genre as a structure within which to explore issues of gender and violence. It too fixates on cars as a particularly masculine kind of imagery – and therefore, imagery ripe for female subversion. And it too is fascinated by women in extremis, both in peril and in revolt.

But while Mad Max has been pretty unanimously praised by feminist-identifying sorts, Death Proof was given a much chillier greeting. So why the difference?

Part of it, I think, has to do with Tarantino’s persona, which many interpret as cocky and abrasive - in other words, not necessarily an obvious fit to be a champion of women. George Miller, the director of Mad Max, is not really known as a public personality, so pre-existing impressions of him have not interfered with judgments of the film. The fact that men’s rights sympathizers instantly disqualified Mad Max also probably endeared it to feminists. The movies have also received differing attention for their sexualization of women. Death Proof does tease a lap dance performed by one of its female characters (the scene is cut short in one of many grindhouse genre in-jokes; nevertheless, that didn’t stop certain viewers from criticizing the scene as objectifying). Mad Max, with its willowy models in diaphanous white wraps, is no less avidly aware of the female bodies on display, but it doesn’t show its hand as frankly as Death Proof does.

Also, though, and more to the point, I think Death Proof is a much more complex film, which makes it far more difficult to pigeonhole into an ideological category. As a result, I also think it’s a better film (although the pleasures of Mad Max are certainly heady and plentiful).

Rather than just playing out feminist fantasies of empowerment or using its characters as mouthpieces for talking points, as Mad Max all too frequently does, Death Proof actually engages with the idea of fantasy, using its structure to lure out its audience’s presumptions, expectations, and appetites, before springing boobytraps for every single one.

(Spoilers, of course, follow.)

Death Proof uses a mirrored structure to present the very different fates of two different sets of women. The movie familiarizes us with the first group through long, relaxed scenes of banter, in which we watch these women’s interactions with various men and with each other. The introduction of the antagonist, played by Kurt Russell, almost seems like background texture - just another male character to act as a foil to our female protagonists - until, in a devastating twist, he slaughters the women all at once, using the titular “death proof” car.

But even before any of that happens, throughout these early scenes, we get hints of how these women are being emotionally and sexually manipulated by men. One girl is cajoled into a make-out session. Another, a DJ, waits in disappointment for her romantic interest to show (we see her dejectedly texting the guy while sad music plays on the soundtrack). And of course there’s the lap dance scene I mentioned earlier. That the scene is cut short doesn’t just function as a sly nod to grindhouse projectionists, who may have squirreled away the sexiest reels for themselves. It directly confounds and interrogates our expectations that when sex is promised in a movie, sex must be delivered.

Despite all this, though, the women in these scenes are presented as spirited and self-assured. They don’t “seem” like victims, so we don’t necessarily predict that they will all be dispatched so quickly and viciously.

When another, entirely different group of women is introduced in the second half of the movie, we are set up to expect a replay of the first half. But there are some subtle, significant differences in how these women are portrayed. There are no scenes where sad, tinkly music plays over a girl texting her boyfriend. Also, the conversation mostly does not circle around men at all, but touches on the women’s jobs, their favorite movies, their past misadventures, and so on.

The anticipated scene where they are finally confronted by Kurt Russell’s stuntman villain flips expectation not only once, but twice. Not only do the girls manage to escape the creep, they are able to turn the tables and exact a comeuppance.

The deviousness of this finale is that it satisfies its audience’s desires with great gusto while at the same time complicating them. We get to see these girls deliver brisk, brutal vengeance, but only at the cost of watching Kurt Russell sob in desperate pain.

Death Proof finds a way to challenge both men and women in the audience. The film sympathizes with female rage and acknowledges that rage can even be productive when channeled through a medium like art. But it also forces us to recognize the consequences of violent action, even that which seems righteous and justified.

In contrast, what has been identified as feminist messaging in Mad Max is both more overt and more tangential than anything Tarantino does with his female characters in Death Proof. As an indication that Mad Max is more concerned with things other than supplying feminist iconography, compare the characterization of the women in the movie to the movie’s technical aspects. Recall how lovingly every aspect of Mad Max’s world has been curated and set-designed, from the grafted-together big rigs to the costuming of the villains to even the extras. Think about how intricately and grandly staged the action sequences are.

As for the main female characters who are not played by Charlize Theron: we have the Very Pregnant One, the Short-Haired One, the One Who Falls in Love with Nicholas Hoult, the One Who Wants to Go Back Home, and the Slightly Batty Blonde One.

Slightly Batty Blonde One is my favorite.

Nevertheless, many parts of Mad Max have been enough to convince viewers that the film should be praised for its depiction of female empowerment. Charlize Theron’s character is an admittedly forceful combination of toughness tempered, but not diminished, by moments of tenderness. An all-female clan of motorcycle-riding sharpshooters, the repeated refrain of “Who killed the world?” (by implication: men), and a triumphant ending which shows the toppling of the old patriarchal order all lend further credence to a female empowerment reading of the film.

But even so, is this really all we want this movie to be - “empowering”?

Maybe the people who are currently celebrating Mad Max as “empowering” are starting off with a faulty premise. Because the thing is, and I know there are a lot of people who disagree with me…

…The purpose of great art is not to be empowering.

Great art disturbs, it complicates, it gets under the skin, it provokes delight and fear and awe. It should challenge its audience – and by that, I don’t just mean it challenges the people who disagree with you.

Too often, when people ask for art to be “empowering” all they do is enslave art to an ideological position. Those they ask to see “empowered” are always specific groups singled out for their political and social cachet, in order to bolster the one group against others. A movie that can be too neatly called “feminist” is also a movie that risks contesting one system only by becoming a tool of another.

Maybe Death Proof is ultimately not as “feminist” as Mad Max is. Maybe it is precisely Mad Max’s ideological directness, even simplisticness, that makes it easy for feminists to embrace. But I would rather have more movies like Death Proof - movies that, in bucking straightforward “feminist” categorization, actually come closer to achieving the original purported goal of feminism: the extension of compassion and complexity to the whole range of humanity.

That said, I do recommend others to go see Mad Max, if not for its messaging. It's a big, brash, idiosyncratic movie that had my jaw on the floor more than once.

And as warily as I anticipate the inevitable arguments about female representation in the soon-to-be-released Jurassic World (Velociraptor Bechdel Test: two female raptors with names have a conversation about eating something that’s not a man), I do think these conversations are necessary, maybe even useful.

Amber Tamblyn vs. Beyoncé, or Who gets to call themselves a poet anyway?

Epilogue - Amber Tamblyn

I took a break from writing about the dead
and drinking from writing about the dead
to walk around my childhood neighborhood.
Everything’s for rent. Or for sale, for ten
times the amount it’s worth.

Palm trees are planted in front of a mural
of palm trees under the Ocean Park Bridge.
In the painting, the metal horses of a carousel are breaking
free and running down the beach. Why didn’t I leave

my initials in cement
in front of my parent’s apartment in the eighties?
Nikki had the right idea in ’79.

I walk by a basketball court, where men play
under the florescent butts of night’s cigarette.
I could have been any of their wives,
at home, filling different rooms in different houses
with hopeful wombs. Agreeing on paint color

samples with their mothers in mind.
I’ll bet their wives let their cats go out
hunting at night like premonitions of future sons.
They will worry, stare out the front window,
pray that privilege doesn’t bring home bad news
like some wilted head of a black girl in nascent jaws.

To say nothing of the owl who’s been here for years. I hear him

when I’m trying to write about the deaths I’ve admired.
I hear him when the clothed me no longer recognizes
the naked. I hear him while writing and shitting and sleeping
where my mother’s seven guitars sleep.
I hear him in my parent’s house,
their walls covered in my many faces,
traces of decades of complacence.

My childhood neighborhood is a shrine to my success,
and I’m a car with a bomb inside, ready
to pull up in front of it and stop
pretending.


OK, so taking shots at a celebrity actress’s poem risks being a little cheap.

For the record, I defended Kristen Stewart’s (granted, unfortunately titled) poem “My Heart Is A Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole,” which for all its Beatnik cliché posturing had a guilelessness about it that I ultimately found charming, as well as having some feel for rhythm and phrasing.  “He hit your flint face and it sparked” is a morsel of condensed narrative.

But Amber Tamblyn’s “Epilogue” has been a featured poem of the day on poets.org and is part of a collection newly published by Harper-Collins.  The collection, Dark Sparkler, boasts a foreword by Diane di Prima, back cover plaudits from Sarah Vowell and Quentin Tarantino, as well as artwork by David Lynch and Marilyn Manson.  I don’t begrudge Tamblyn making use of her opportunities.  But clearly, she’s trying to position Dark Sparkler as a serious, mature work, so it should be fair to submit it to a more stringent level of critique.

The book is structured as a series of elegies to actresses, real and fictional, who died young.  It’s an interesting enough subject for a collection of poetry.  “Epilogue,” which closes the volume, is written from Tamblyn’s own perspective, but continues the previous poems’ meditations on fame, choices, and regret.

So where do I start with this poem?

How about the way the image of “the fluorescent butts of night’s cigarette” manages to be both on-the-nose, yet also weirdly amorphous and untethered (what are these supposed to be - stars? street lamps? how are there plural “butts” and only one “cigarette”?).

Even more grating is the poem’s smugness as it sketches out, in image after condescending image, a portrait of suburban life as predictable and passionless – hardly a novel sentiment in the first place, and made even worse by lines like “filling different rooms in different houses/with hopeful wombs.”  This line, meant to convey a connection to other women, comes across instead as false, insincere - reducing the role of mother and wife to a body part, and assuming a confessional stance while also palpably gloating in the poet’s superiority for having escaped such a banal existence.

Elsewhere, the poem too often defaults to rote juxtapositions of male violence and female victimhood or passivity, as in the line, “I’ll bet their wives let their cats go out/hunting at night like premonitions of future sons.”  In the same stanza, the proximity of the word “privilege” to the image of racial and sexual violence (“wilted head of a black girl”) feels calculated rather than compassionate.

This poem may not be worse than so many other preening confessionalist lyrics cluttering up university lit mags across the country.  But it’s pretty bad.  Also, simply by being a prominent, mass market poetry publication, it contributes to the damaging impression that this is all poetry is or should be.  In spite of its pretensions, the poem ultimately has little new or interesting to say about fame.

Then consider the below poem:

Bey the Light - words by Beyoncé, remixed by Forrest Gander

It’s my daughter, she’s my biggest muse.
There’s someone, we all find out soon,
more important than ourselves to lose.

I feel a deep bond with young children –
all those photos in my dressing room –
especially those who’ve been stricken,

Children I’ve met across the years –
they uplift me like pieces of moon,
and guide me, whispering in my ear

I’m turned to spirits, the emotions of others.
And I feel her presence all the time
though I never met my grandmother.

I learned at a very young age,
when I need to tap some extra strength,
to put my persona, Sasha, on stage.

Though we’re different as blue and red,
I’m not afraid to draw from her
in performance, rifts, even in bed.

I saw a TV preacher when I was scared,
at four or five, about bad dreams,
who promised he’d say a prayer

If I put my hand to the TV.
That’s the first time I remember prayer,
an electric current humming through me.

You call me a singer, but I’m called to transform,
to suck up the grief, anxiety, and loss
of those who hear me into my song’s form.

I’m a vessel for all that isn’t right,
for break-ups and lies and double-cross.
I sing into that vessel a healing light.

To let go of pain that people can’t bear.
I don’t do that myself, I call in the light.
I summon God to take me there.

Utopias, they don’t much interest me.
I always mess things up a bit.
It’s chaos, in part, that helps us see.

But for my daughter I dream a day
when no one roots for others to fail,
when we all mean what we say.


This is a strange poem.  It’s arguably much more difficult to like than Amber Tamblyn’s effort. But I also think it’s much richer.

While it may seem structurally straightforward, there is some intricate arranging going on here.  If Amber Tamblyn’s poem somewhat vindicates Robert Frost’s assessment of free verse being like “playing tennis without a net,” “Bey the Light” makes a case for the discipline and peculiar delights of structured forms.

The poem is also tonally quite complex.  The words are Beyoncé’s, so there is a level of sincerity at play – the cultivated air of both glamour and approachability is recognizably hers.  But Forrest Gander’s participation casts the poem at a somewhat ironic remove.  The closing lines - “I dream a day…when we all mean what we say” – could be read as a subtle, ironic acknowledgement of the speaker’s doubled voice.  But even that irony contains a hint of sincerity.  Rather than simply poking fun at Beyoncé’s grandiose self-image, the poem is interested in studying the origins and effects of celebrity’s appeal.  Why do we seem to need pop stars – need them to absorb and reflect our feelings back to us, to succeed and to fail for us, to transform themselves so that we can be transformed?

Invoking the muse as an emblem of inspiration that links the present to a history of creativity going back thousands of years (Beyoncé's daughter is named as a muse in the poem, but Beyoncé herself also acts as a muse for Forrest Gander), the poem turns what could have been a glib, winking spoof into a serious meditation on art and artists.

Plus, parts of the poem are just really beautiful.  In particular, I find the stanzas about the TV preacher strangely moving, managing to hold absurdity and emotional honesty in tension at the same time.

Published last year in CR Fashion Book rather than in any poetry press, “Bey the Light” positions itself very differently than does Amber Tamblyn’s “Epilogue.”  Rather than insisting on itself as legitimate poetry, this poem happily welcomes the ambiguity of its authorship and high/low culture status.  Amusingly, the poem did indeed engender some confusion about what it was and who should be credited for writing it.

If Tamblyn's poem represents what contemporary poetry too often is - narcissistic, jumbled, and overly earnest - Gander's poem (like all good poetry) challenges us to rethink what poetry can be. We need even more poems to be as wild, weird, and out-of-place as this one is.

What I'm excited for this weekend vs. What I am not excited for this weekend, or Come for the Flaming Electric Guitar Car; Stay for the Flaming Electric Guitar Car

Baroque action sequences = yes

Something something singing overcoming obstacles already asleep…sorry

Whedon followers vs. Whedon followers, or What does “sexist” really mean?

Last week, Joss Whedon tweeted his last tweet:

“Thank you to all the people who've been so kind and funny and inspiring up in here.

- Joss Whedon (@josswhedon) May 4, 2015”

Since Whedon’s deactivation of his Twitter account came in the immediate wake of a fairly venomous, relentless, but also routine (for Twitter) shaming about the alleged sexism of his latest movie, news sites were quick to speculate that militant feminists had chased him off of social media.

Whedon has been adamant that his departure from Twitter was not motivated by feminist backlash.  I won’t contradict him.  I also am not interested in parsing how feminist he “really” is. I’m more interested in what the response to this tweet may or may not say about Culture, Politics, and Juxtaposition, as the blog tagline reads.

The charges of sexism concern the portrayal of Black Widow (played by Scarlett Johansson) in Avengers: Age of Ultron.  Specifically [SPOILERS AHEAD], the revelation that she was sterilized as part of her training.

Criticisms had the potential to raise complex questions about how movies portray reproductive issues, and how that relates to cultural perceptions of women’s independence.  Instead, Twitter users began expending the words “sexist” and “misogynist” like it was Invectives Pay Day.  (It goes without saying that there were also the standard variations on “fuck you”.)

Curious, then, that just a month previous, the following missive is what Joss Whedon was getting attention for on Twitter:

“...and I’m too busy wishing this clip wasn’t 70’s era sexist. She’s a stiff, he’s a life-force - really? Still? https://t.co/qqts4jpSva

- Joss Whedon (@josswhedon) April 10, 2015”

This tweet, written in response to a clip from the forthcoming Jurassic World, was reported on approvingly by sites such as The Avclub and Hypable.  Nevertheless, within days, Whedon apologized for the tweet, explaining it was “bad form” and “not what a gentleman would do” to say negative things about others’ work.

There’s a way to view these two Joss Whedon tweets taken together as the first and second acts of a miniature tragicomedy of honor and hubris.  Doomed Nice Guy Joss Whedon foolishly tries to uphold a standard of courtesy that his fellow tweeters never respected or upheld in the first place.

Many of Whedon’s Twitter critics seemed to prefer the narrative where a patriarchal
hypocrite is unmasked and subdued by public justice:

come on @josswhedon, talk some more about how Jurassic World is sexist and how women who cant have kids are monsters. :)
— sheida skywalker (@snowstarks) May 2, 2015

Joss Whedon deleted his Twitter after being called out for being hypocrite. After calling other movies sexist, his turns out to be sexist.
— Piper (@fyzzgiggidy) May 4, 2015

I have my own criticisms of Whedon’s Jurassic World tweet, but at least the tweet was focused, honing in on a specific iteration of the word “sexist,” and also took into account subtleties of tone within the clip it was responding to.

It also, far from being hypocritical, was consistent with how Whedon had challenged gender stereotypes in the past.  The vitality of characters like Buffy Summers, River Tam, and yes, Black Widow poses a rebuttal to a very specific gender trope - the very trope Whedon was pointing out in the clip from Jurassic World, one where women play the stern scold to men’s charisma and dynamism.

But Whedon has never been concerned with upending all gender tropes.  In fact, his female characters consistently draw their political charge from the tension between unexpected and expected gender traits.  Buffy, a pretty blonde, is a slayer of the undead and a cheerleader. Firefly and Dollhouse feature characters whose active participation in their stories complicates their status as objects of fantasy or exploitation by men.  In my view, Black Widow – as battler, as banterer, as bombshell, and as would-be birth mom - fits in quite neatly among these heroines.  Even the potentially offensive line of dialogue, “You’re not the only monster on the team,” spoken by Black Widow in apparent reference to her own sterility, makes some sense in the context of previous Whedon heroines’ often fraught self-image.

Now, I have certainly taken issue with Whedon’s approach to integrating political or social concerns with art.  Frankly, I’m a little surprised to find myself defending Whedon after years of facetiously calling him “Josh Whedon” and poking fun at his dialogue.  But at least he seems to have a worldview, one that it is difficult to reduce down to words such as “feminist” or “sexist.” And a worldview – as evidence of something complex and human - is infinitely superior to a pre-approved set of positions, affirmations and niceties to be regurgitated on cue.  “Women are strong!”  “Women are independent!”  “Women don’t need traditional gender roles!”  Etc.

The critics on Twitter may not have been asking for statements as trite as those. But they also seemed totally uninterested in weighing Whedon’s various statements and writing efforts for their comprehensive, interwoven meanings, or in separating authorial views from those presented by a fictional subject.  What I see when I look at the responses on Twitter last week is a group of people so preoccupied with consistency that they perhaps end up disregarding complexity.

So why did this happen now?  Feminist critics of Joss Whedon have been around for a long time. But why, for a moment, did it seem like the extremists or “militants” had taken over?

Lately, various commentators have noted the increasing tension between liberals and more doctrinaire leftists.  Patton Oswalt, a pretty liberal dude, gestured to this in his own tweet: “Yep. There is a Tea Party equivalent of progressivism/liberalism. And they just chased Joss Whedon off Twitter. Good job, guys. Ugh.” (May 4, 2015)  A few months ago, Jonathan Chait published an article which argued that the left-wing perpetuation and enforcement of PC culture is a threat to traditional liberalism.

I’m tempted to view the Joss Whedon situation through the same lens.  But I think that risks letting liberals off the hook a little bit by casting them as the victims of some separate, run-amok movement.  I suspect that far too many liberals’ willingness to take rhetorical advantage of terms like “sexism” has created the conditions for those terms to be deployed more and more indulgently and un-self-reflectively.  After all, Whedon’s use of the word “sexist” did open himself up to the same criticism later.

So maybe this whole kerfuffle has to do with how flat and broad the term “sexism” has become in its attempt to address multifarious aspects of male and female life – like using just a shovel to build a house, when what we’ve needed are individualized tools.  Many responders were happy to agree that the Jurassic World clip was sexist.  Many also viewed Age of Ultron as sexist.  But that means using the same term to apply to two different cultural portrayals.  Even if they both relate to women, the questions and critiques we bring to a depiction of male and female stereotypes vs. a depiction of reproductive issues ought to be more nuanced and differentiated.

While it may have once seemed radical and important to point out how various, seemingly unconnected aspects of culture collude in a vast system of disempowerment, that kind of reading now risks being simplistic.  Even worse, it risks turning the reins of discourse over to the most fanatical of us.