In just two days, our societal spotlight will turn to the Dolby Theater for the 91st Academy Awards. Silver-screen celebrities, filmmakers, and every “industry peon” in between will don their designed-to-be-noticed garb and take to the crimson carpet to celebrate another year of filmmaking.

And while the Oscars are an undeniably pivotal moment in movie history every year, this year’s Academy Awards fails—again—to recognize the contributions of women for Best Director and other major categories. While many critics of the Awards wish to criticize the Oscars as culturally irrelevant, outdated, and plagued by insularity and elitism (not to mention plummeting viewership), nominations and wins have repercussions far beyond the glittering lights of the ceremony or the feverish clutching of a glinting gold statue.

Previously little-known directors find their names vaulted into a national discourse with nods from the Academy Awards; the historic and systematic exclusion of women from these nominations hobble the careers of women directors.

This year’s Academy Awards fails—again—to recognize the contributions of women for Best Director and other major categories.
Click To Tweet

There are myriad examples of male white directors’ careers experiencing an adrenaline rush after their success in securing an Oscar nomination. Sam Mendes’ first film American Beauty (1999) won him Best Director and resulted in a series of major films including Road to Perdition (2002) and several James Bond movies.

Oliver Stone had directed movies with middling box office and critical success until he won Best Director for Platoon (1986) which launched him into the big leagues. In another instance, after getting several Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay for Memento (2000), Christopher Nolan went on to direct several other blockbuster and critically-acclaimed movies like the recent Batman trilogy, Inception (2010), and last year’s Best Picture nominee Dunkirk.

After being nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015, Damien Chazelle became a media darling and soon saw a Best Director win for La La Land; his star has definitely risen, directing the well-received First Man (2018).

In terms of good old-fashioned capitalism, Oscar nominations have a huge impact on the box office returns of movies as well. In a 2011 study of films between 2006 and 2010, IBIS—a major market research firm—found that best-picture-winning movies receive an average of $20.3 million after being nominated and another $14 million after winning. Also in 2011, Box Office Quant found that a Best Director win bumps up the movie by an additional $10 million.

While further studies about the recent financial impact of Oscar nominations seems long overdue, these studies suggest that Oscar nominations (and wins) have a salient impact on the bottomline and the future viability of filmmakers’ future projects. Cash is king; hose bumps in dollars and critical recognition open up innumerable doors.

In terms of good old-fashioned capitalism, Oscar nominations have a huge impact on the box office returns of movies as well.
Click To Tweet

When we look at the other half of the population however? The numbers are dire. No women—none—were nominated for best director this year. In fact, in the 91 years of Oscar nominations, only five women have been nominated, and two were in the last ten years. That’s approximately 1% of all the Best Director nominations in the history of the Oscars.

Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to have won the award, and it’s no accident that her 2009 film, The Hurt Locker, focused entirely on the lives of men at war. Greta Gerwig made Oscar history in 2018 by being the fifth woman nominated, but only six women total won any awards in 2018; two were in categories of Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Women’s Media Center found that 2019 saw 75% of all behind-the-scenes nominees were men. The only category where women have fared worse is Cinematography, where Rachel Morrison alone has been nominated, for Mudbound in 2018.

Women have received just 1% of all the Best Director nominations in the history of the Oscars.
Click To Tweet

And despite what the industry sputters and pontificates, it’s not for a lack of movies led by women directors. FF2, a media organization led by Jan Lisa Huttner, which has been tracking and publishing about the problem for years, notes that 2018 saw 260 movies written and/or directed by women. Many were lauded by critics with almost perfect Rotten Tomato scores. Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace received a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and has been nominated for several awards including Independent Spirit Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and others. It won two awards from the National Board of Review in 2019, but was completely shut out of the Oscars.

Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? also did very well critically, winning the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor, among other awards and nominations. The film did pick up two acting Oscar nominations, including Best Actress for Melissa McCarthy, as well as best adapted screenplay. Chloe Zhao’s The Rider topped many critic’s top ten lists for 2018 including the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and others. For these three films, the Oscar campaign efforts ranged from a little for the indie The Rider and a lot for Can You Ever Forgive Me?  

Female directors have missed out on 91 years of Oscar nominations offering similar accelerants to their careers. Courtney Hunt directed Frozen River (2008)—which won many accolades including AFI Movie of the Year (2009)—and received two Oscar Nominations, but she didn’t direct her next major motion picture film until 2016 with the poorly received The Whole Truth.

Cash is king; hose bumps in dollars and critical recognition open up innumerable doors.
Click To Tweet

Lisa Cholodenko’s film The Kids Are All Right (2010) won several awards—including Golden Globes’ Best Motion Picture for Comedy or Musical—but has not directed a major film until the forthcoming Toni Erdmann. More recently, Patty Jenkins directed Monster (2003) that garnered a Best Actress Award for Charlize Theron, but she did not have another major motion picture release until Wonder Woman in 2017.

Dr. Martha M. Laurzen of Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film points out:

“Being excluded from the race to be crowned king—or queen—of Hollywood directors has short- and long-term consequences. The first, and most obvious, is that these filmmakers miss out on the avalanche of publicity in the run-up to, and following, the Oscars.”

And this publicity can aid them in securing their next film.

In 2015, Dr. Darnell Hunt, the director of the Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, noted, “The Oscars set a standard. The Academy establishes benchmarks… An Oscar win increases likelihood for more alternative points of view, if they’re being rewarded.” And of course, this cycle is perpetuated itself when women and minorities are left out.

In the Women Media Center’s annual report, Jane Fonda, a co-founder, said, “A nomination for an Academy Award can open doors. With three out of every four non-acting nominations going to men, women, again, are missing that stamp of approval.” Not only were women not nominated for Best Director in this Oscar nominations round, WMC notes, women were not nominated for cinematography, editing, visual effects, or original score.

There’s been a lot of discussion about supporting the diverse voices in filmmaking but it seems to be just that—discussion. Institutions are not providing the resources—funds for filming, critical recognition, advertising dollars—to help non-white male voices find success on a national or even international scale. The Academy claimed to diversify its membership as a way to expand the nominations, but these efforts seem insufficient to garner real change.

Only five women have been nominated for Best Director in the history of the Oscars and two were in the last ten years.
Click To Tweet

Part of the problem lays in the embedded structure of film criticism in the U.S. In a 2018 Thumbs Down report by Martha Lauzen, she found disproportionate numbers of male critics compared to their female critics: “Men comprise 68% and women 32% of all film reviewers.”

Moreover, the study found that women reviewers were more likely to review films with female protagonists than men: “51% of the reviews written by women but 37% of the reviews written by men are about films featuring at least one female protagonist.” However, Lauzen noted that: “63% of the reviews written by men, but 49% of those written by women are about films with male protagonists.”  

This skewed coverage and implicit bias impacts the movies getting pushed out to the award associations and the folks clamoring to the theaters—and the great wheel keeps spinning around itself. This broken system resides in a profound catch-22 wherein the industry desperate needs stories from and by more diverse communities, but the industry doesn’t reward these stories with awards, publicity or money, which in turn makes it more difficult to make them, so those same diverse voices shy away from trying to produce those films.

And of course, numbers for minority women are even more miserable—there are a host of more-than-worthy female directors of color—including Ava DuVernay for Selma (2014) and hard-hitting documentary 13th (2016), and Dee Rees for Mudbound (2018)—who have not been nominated. Of the meager five Best Director nominations for women, none were women of color.

Other major categories also boast dismal stats for WOC; per WMC, Hannah Beachler is the first African American woman to be nominated for Production Design for her work in Black Panther. In fact, April Reign, now activist and former lawyer, started the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 in reaction to the paltry nominations for minorities of color. Spike Lee credits her for his Best Director nomination.

Of the meager five Best Director nominations for women, none were women of color.
Click To Tweet

Amid the sea of these disturbing stats, there are some small glimmers in the Oscar pool will be more equitable. Notably, minorities found success in recent Oscar nominations including Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther for Best Picture and Spike Lee’s nomination for best director for BlacKkKlansman. Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro won for best director and film last year for The Shape of Water. Perhaps this year will pave the way to more promising wins and more equitable award nominations; after all, despite the controversy of the Oscars, it’s still a hell of an accolade.  

To borrow a line from The Maltese Falcon, Cinema is “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Let’s make that true for all people.

Crazy Rich Asians is being touted as the hit romantic comedy of the summer and a cultural win for Asian-Americans, but not everyone feels that way; the dialogue surrounding this charming and effervescent rom-com has been divisive and complicated.

The criticism Crazy Rich Asians has received for its promotion of the model minority myth and moments of anti-blackness are completely valid, but we also need to be realistic about the role pop culture plays in pushing a truly progressive agenda and the timeline in which that agenda unfolds.

As a poor, fat, queer, mixed Filipina-American, I didn’t relate to Crazy Rich Asians either, but as a person who studied film and works in the entertainment industry, I know better than to look for my story in the mainstream. This movie is not all of Asian American representation. It’s the introductory course that gets Hollywood interested in more complex lessons about our community.

It’s easy to focus our hatred on a tangible product rather than at the larger system. The Joy Luck Club was the last major American film with a majority Asian American cast and it was released 25 years ago. This film too—which is decidedly more serious and more relatable to a larger group of Asian-Americans, continues to receive hypercritical ire for not doing “enough” for the community. But Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club, and Kevin Kwan, the author of Crazy Rich Asians, have a responsibility as artists to share their truth—however small a slice of truth that is—and it’s unfair to demand that these singular pieces of art speak on behalf of all of Asian America.

This is a complex community—representing 21,655,368 individuals with ancestral ties from over 40 countries— comprised of multiple ethnic groups, social classes, and intersectional experiences.

We need to be realistic about the role pop culture plays in pushing a truly progressive agenda and the timeline in which that agenda unfolds.
Click To Tweet

When Kwan wrote Crazy Rich Asians, he was drawing from his experience as a wealthy Singaporean-American. In a video op-ed for Harper’s Bazaar titled “These are the Real Crazy Rich Asians,” Kevin Kwan says, “How much of my book is based on reality? About 150% of it.” This is the world he lives and knows. For Kwan to write a book based on any other Asian-American experience, but his own would be hollow and disingenuous. To expect more denies the validity of his experience and sets a dangerous precedent for other marginalized writers.

We already have to hide certain facets of our identities when navigating this bigoted world, we shouldn’t have to hide our truth from our own communities. All art deserves criticism, but it’s important to evaluate where that criticism is coming from. Our community’s resentment with Crazy Rich Asians and The Joy Luck Club has less to do with the actual films and more to do with the painful truth that Hollywood continues to deny our multicultural and multifaceted existence.

Crazy Rich Asians was never going to be a radical criticism of capitalism, white colonialism, and racism in the United States. The gatekeepers of Hollywood benefit from upholding those systems; to take aim at these systems would take aim at their own power. Despite its self-purported  progressive reputation, Hollywood is a business—a business that made $11.7 billion in 2017—and is still keenly focused on making a profit. And that profit is believed to stem from a film’s ability appeal to the whiter—ahem, wider—American audience.

The disillusionment felt by many Asian-Americans shows that marginalized people are hungry for representation in Hollywood and that they don’t fully understand the trials of filmmaking in a system as bigoted and bureaucratic as Hollywood’s.

There are three major parts to the film production process,  and a film can die at any of these points: Development, Production, and Distribution. For a major motion picture, every step of this process can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This goes to pay writers, talent, crew, executives, lawyers, and everyone else involved in the making of the film as well as costs for costuming, location, and props.

It’s impossible to find out how many scripts get passed over by the power players in entertainment, but here are figures from a small facet of the industry.  The Black List is a “an annual survey of Hollywood executives’ favorite unproduced screenplays” founded by Franklin Leonard, a Black Hollywood executive that wanted to get the industry to take chances on scripts that kept getting passed over. Along with the annual survey, the Black List has become a place where unrepresented writers can get feedback and industry eyes on their work.

The Black List “has hosted more than 55,000 screenplays and teleplays” since it started and of those 55,000 only 338 were put into production. Only 6% of the movies that were hosted on the site made it into production, and that’s coming from a place that wants writers to succeed.

With Crazy Rich Asians, the source material was already there in Kwan’s bestselling book. In August 2013, Nina Jacobson, the founder of the production company Color Force, bought the adaptation rights to Crazy Rich Asians only 2 months after the book was released. Once the rights were bought, it would be logical for production to start soon after. Well, that’s when the production entered its personal “Development Hell”— an industry term for a project that’s stuck in the development stage for years.

Crazy Rich Asians didn’t start production until 2017 for many different reasons, including a scheduling conflict with lead actress Constance Wu, due to her role on Fresh off the Boat. Roadblocks like this aren’t uncommon for productions, especially feature films. All of the normal struggles that a feature film faces—script, crew, actor changes, going over-budget, licensing issues, etc.—are heightened when the film centers on people of color. It is a lot easier to say no to a film that doesn’t have a profitable precedent, so it’s remarkable that people kept saying yes to Crazy Rich Asians at all.

As a poor, fat, queer, mixed Filipina-American, I know better than to look for my story in the mainstream.
Click To Tweet

When people see Crazy Rich Asians in theaters, the logos of the production companies flash before their eyes and the first few names aren’t recognizable to most American moviegoers—SK Global (made up of Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, and Ivanhoe Pictures), Color Force, and Starlight Culture Entertainment. The last logo to fill up the screen is the iconic Warner Bros. Studios shield, with the words “Distributed By” above it. This demarcation as distributor—and not as a production company—is extremely important.

Jacobson knew that if she wanted to make Crazy Rich Asians a reality, she would have to go outside the American studio system for funding, hence the partnership with Ivanhoe Pictures, a U.S.-based Asian film investment group. Starlight Culture Entertainment, one of the other production companies involved, is a giant Hong Kong investment company with stakes in multiple industries aside from entertainment, including chemicals, environmental protection products, and gambling. These production companies are the ones that believed in Crazy Rich Asians.

They are the ones that work on adapting the material and creating a package (attaching a director and producer to a script to make it more marketable). They are the ones that bring their creative assets to distribution companies to get more funding and guarantee that people will get a chance to see it.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. and Netflix were the two distributors that the creative team behind Crazy Rich Asians had to choose between. Kwan and Jon Chu, the film’s director had to make the final decision. They ultimately chose to go with Warner Bros., despite the lesser offer, because they wanted the cultural impact of a theater release.

As a traditional distributor, Warner Bros. backs the project and sends it out to their distribution channels— theaters, rentals, and personal copies—hoping to make a profit (or at least their investment back) in ticket, DVD, BluRay, and digital download sales. Warner Bros. shares of the profit come back to them, so they can continue the cycle with another film.

The disillusionment felt by many Asian-Americans shows that they don’t fully understand the trials of filmmaking in a system as bigoted and bureaucratic as Hollywood’s.
Click To Tweet

It’s not shocking that Netflix was willing to give Crazy Rich Asians a trilogy deal right off the bat. Netflix, and other digital subscription based distributors, have taken more chances on projects that feature marginalized characters than traditional studios because of their business model. They don’t have to gamble on ticket sales to make their money back—they already have a well of money from subscription fees to draw from. But if Kevin Kwan and John Chu had chosen the initial Netflix payday over Warner Bros. smaller budget, Crazy Rich Asians wouldn’t be a cultural touchstone that sold out theaters for multiple weeks.

The initial goal of any film is to make the backers’ investment back, but the stakes are even higher with minority-lead films. The experiences of people of color are automatically politicized, and subsequently othered. Studio executives don’t think general (i.e. white) audiences will relate to characters of color. They don’t believe that the stories of marginalized communities will succeed (even when it’s been proven they will time and time again).

Girls Trip was only given a $20 million budget (even with the star power of Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Regina Hall, and Tiffany Haddish) and it ended up making $140 million gross—seven times its budget back. Warner Bros. believed in Crazy Rich Asians enough to back it, but gave it a relatively small budget of $30 million considering the high-profile actors and the lavish backdrops, costumes, and set pieces that the story demands. In its first two weeks, Crazy Rich Asians, more than doubled its budget in box office revenue, proving that it wasn’t such a risky bet after all.

The American film industry has largely failed us since its inception in 1907, and will continue to fail the most marginalized of us. Supporting major releases—even begrudgingly—helps convince major studios and distributors to bet on more of our stories. All the odds were stacked against Crazy Rich Asians—a fun, apolitical, rom-com with light-skinned Asians that speak King’s English. It took years of community building and pushing against Hollywood gatekeepers to get this film made. It took allies with power to bet their good standing in the industry on the stories of people of color. It took the cultural groundwork of The Joy Luck Club, Fresh off the Boat, and every bit of honest representation in between.

If people still aren’t content with our victories in the mainstream, seek out and support the underground! There ARE independent filmmakers making the most brown, queer, anti-capitalist Asian-American films you can imagine—like the 2017 short film Salamagan (dir.  Elisah Oh) currently on the film festival circuit.

Organizations like CAAM, CAPE, Kore, and 18 Million Rising, are dedicated to uplifting diverse Asian-American artists through funding, fellowships, film festivals, screenings, and promotion through social media. CAAM’s film festivals feature some of the biggest names in Asian-American entertainment right alongside new talent (and they’re taking submissions right now!)

Many of these organizations have events with actors, writers, directors, and producers at all talent levels because they are meant to uplift our community through art and mentorship. I urge you to take all your anger, disappointment, and pain at Hollywood and Crazy Rich Asians and put that energy into artists and projects you want to see succeed.

Kwan told his story with Crazy Rich Asians. Now, let’s go share our own.

Cognitive disability is typically decorative in the horror genre—a surface on which to project our fears—but ‘Hereditary’ is one of the first horror films to complicate that narrative.

Warning: there be some spoilers ahead!

For me, the most haunting image of disability ever depicted in a horror film is a sequence in Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond (adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s short story). A woman peers at the inmates of a psychiatric institution through the tiny windows of their rooms, their aggressive performances of mania framed like paintings in a gallery. The imagery sticks with me for its tidy encapsulation of the attitude toward cognitive disability in the horror film.

Cognitive disability — specifically, a stylized form of cognitive disability that I will refer to as madness — is decorative in the horror film, a surface on which to project our fears. Unfortunately, this particular depiction of madness serves as little more than a colorful, sensational accoutrement, reducing disability to a storytelling or stylistic device, playing into a medical model of disability that reduces its complexity into a series of external expressions to be controlled and eliminated.

Ari Aster’s excellent film Hereditary risks the same fate and interpretation.

On the surface, Hereditary appears to be a film in which disability constitutes a prop in a play of terror, only to be overwritten and forgotten in the presence of overwhelming supernatural explanation. But to ignore the role of real mental illness in Hereditary would be to miss a salient facet of the disabled experience and the role of mental illness in horror cinema.

Terminology is important here, because different terms imply different models: I use “mental illness” deliberately because that is, I think, the lens of certain characters in the film, and it seems the most apt term to describe Annie’s relationship to the idea of cognitive disability, which dominates the early film.

---

To ignore the role of real mental illness in Hereditary would be to miss a salient facet of the disabled experience and the role of mental illness in horror cinema.
Click To Tweet

---

When Annie lays out her family history, she uses clinical terms to describe her family members’ various mental states — psychotic depression, schizophrenia, etc. — in a subdued scene that minimizes sensationalism and emphasizes Annie’s process of medicalizing, rationalizing, and therefore managing her family according to one of the most prominent models of disability.

Tobin Siebers, noted professor and disability scholar, usefully lays out the two major models of disability: “the medical model defines disability as a property of the individual body that requires medical intervention,” while “[t]he social model opposes the medical model by defining disability relative to the social and built environment.”

Siebers suggests that “the next step is to develop a theory of complex embodiment that values disability as a form of human variance.” Hereditarydramatizes a shift from the medical model — e.g. Annie’s representation of her family — to a model of complex embodiment exemplified by the film’s ending.

Disability theorist Robert McRuer suggests there is a transient nature to disability in the dominant cultural imaginary: “According to the flexible logic of neoliberalism, all varieties of queerness — and, for that matter, all disabilities — are essentially temporary, appearing only when, and as long as, they are necessary”; this may be enacted through the “miraculous cure,” as Martin Norden calls it, or through disavowal of a disability that was never really there in the first place.

Take the third Nightmare on Elm Street film, Dream Warriors, which is centered on teens incarcerated in a psychiatric facility. The terror the teenagers feel for the murderous Freddy Krueger— who hunts them in their dreams — is mistaken for mental illness, and the children must battle the staff whose misconceptions could (and sometimes do) prove fatal to them.

Dream Warriors encapsulates the ways that disability functions as a veil to be discarded and a label to be rejected: The protagonists aren’t actually “crazy,” not like those people — namely, the “hundred maniacs” said to have fathered Freddy Krueger. If Hereditary at first appears to be just such a film — in which disability appears early and is later discarded — closer readings reveal it to be a much more nuanced take on disability.

Where so many horror films use disability as a cover for or diversion from the supernatural, Hereditary is both part of a tradition of films that use horror to explore mental illness as lived phenomenon and part of a recent wave of body horror films that redefine the imagery of the genre.

Mental illness in horror is madness; not madness in the way that the word has been re-appropriated by, for example, a variety of groups and movements that have used the moniker “Mad Pride” in celebration of mental illness, but in the (arguably related) sensational, exploitative sense, preceding scientist or doctor: madness as the horrorization of disability.

Women-Directed Horror Films Take Aim At The ‘Celluloid Ceiling’

Madness is a cloak in horror cinema: It drapes its subject in meaning; it’s an easy shorthand for a medium whose mantra is show, don’t tell. The villain is mad: dangerous, unpredictable, shattering the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Whether in the tradition of tinkerers like Dr. Frankenstein or killers like Norman Bates, mental illness is stylized into madness (or perhaps the reverse: style goes mad) and then violence is projected onto it.

---

'Hereditary' is both part of a tradition of films that use horror to explore mental illness as lived phenomenon and part of a recent wave of body horror films that redefine the imagery of the genre.
Click To Tweet

---

It is a well-worn truth that mentally ill people are more likely to be the victims of violence than to inflict it themselves, but the problem with the “madman” trope is as much in its hollowness as in its inaccuracy: It is all surface and no depth, fleeting and ephemeral. However, there is another strain of horror, which I’ll call mad horror, that explores madness in a different way: namely, as an experience, a “complex embodiment” in which a person lives.

Mad horror cinema can be traced at least back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920), in which the exaggerated, subjective sets that have come to define German Expressionist cinema are the representations of a mind in the throes of madness.

Caligari, through its use of exaggerated, counter-realistic design, narrates the process of rendering mental illness into madness; it is the process of, in Siegfried Kracauer’s words, the “transformation of material objects into emotional ornaments,” the visualization of the ostensibly invisible. Caligarihelped set a precedent in horror for the visualization of cognitive disability in everything from cinematography and lighting to physical sets and props (since Caligari, sound cinema has allowed for the use of sound effects to signify madness as well).

The projection of madness into the physical environment of Caligari is echoed in Hereditary through Annie’s hyperrealistic miniatures and her daughter Charlie’s grotesque dolls. If Annie’s gallery of perfectly lifelike imitations reflects her attempt to maintain sanity in her family, Charlie’s suggests an abnormal mind that foreshadows an alternate reading of the film.

As much as it is the story of a coven of witches conspiring to place the spirit of Charlie (who was really a king of hell all along, or something) into Annie’s son Peter’s body, Hereditary may also be Peter’s slow break from reality, probably triggered when Peter accidentally kills Charlie. From this standpoint, it makes sense that Peter would symbolically resurrect Charlie the only way he can: within his own body.

Sex, Nudity, And Rape In Horror Comics: Where Are The New Lines?

Peter’s descent into madness echoes mad horror films like Repulsion and more recently films like Black Swan and Darling: films that explore mental illness as a lived, physical experience, in which the horror is derived from one’s mental state. Hereditary — in presenting multiple possible readings — is a film that revels in the slippages between psychosis and the supernatural and the indeterminate nature of that boundary.

The line between those two phenomena has always been tenuous in the horror genre, but Hereditary takes that boundary as its secret subject. Before Hereditary, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome more overtly explored the same slippage between reality and hallucination. “There is nothing real outside our perception of reality,” Brian O’Blivion tells Max Renn, suggesting that reality is just one shared hallucination.

Hereditary follows in Videodrome’s footsteps both by exploring madness as something lived rather than merely seen and by disrupting the line between the real and the unreal and that between body and mind.

In his book Crip Theory, Robert McRuer argues that:

“[a] system of compulsory able-bodiedness repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, ‘Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be more like me?’”

McRuer, by contrast, proposes the radical possibility of taking pleasure in disability, that “disability and queerness are desirable.” (McRuer’s focus on queerness — in addition to disability — is actually quite relevant to a film centrally concerned with the breakdown of a traditional nuclear family unit.) This desirability is central to Cronenbergian body horror, particularly the oeuvres of Cronenberg and Clive Barker.

Hereditary — along with recent films like The Neon Demon, The Lure, and Get Out — is a kind of post-Cronenbergian body horror focused less on dramatizing transformation visually on the body, but rather on redefining the relationship between self and body and between body and image.

Less sadomasochistic than their predecessors, post-Cronenbergian body horror (which actually may be said to begin, ironically, as far back as Cronenberg’s own Dead Ringers) focuses less on pleasure and more on the uses and abuses of the (literal and metaphorical) social body, like the dehumanizing cult of female beauty in The Neon Demon.

Hereditary explores not only the mad body but the familial body, specifically that of the nuclear family, whose supposed safety and stability — signified by Annie’s rigorous models — is seen to be, in reality, tenuous at best (while the models themselves comment on the constructedness of the nuclear family). That the film ends on a coven chanting around Peter at the coronation suggests that the conventional family has given way to a non-conventional family just as Peter has entered a non-conventional mental state. As in Hereditary’s predecessors, this ending may not be undesirable to those actually experiencing it.

---

'Hereditary' explores not only the mad body but the familial body, specifically that of the nuclear family, whose supposed safety and stability  is seen to be, in reality, tenuous at best.
Click To Tweet

---

Like Caligari, Hereditary has a frame of sorts, opening on a pan through a room full of miniatures before settling on a model of Peter sleeping in his bed, from which the action seamlessly begins. By framing the entire film as, quite possibly, an exhibit of Annie’s art, the film blurs the line of narrators: is the film Peter’s, or in opening on Annie’s model of Peter, is the film Annie’s?

Hereditary is a familial intermingling of consciousnesses — Annie’s, Charlie’s, Peter’s — that defies representations of mental illness as surface level stylization or as a problem in need of a cure and in doing so, resists the stigmatization of disability so prominent and dangerous in the horror genre. Despite a fraught and complicated history, the horror model of disability can offer a surprisingly nuanced and empowering way of looking at the experience of madness.

By Noah Berlatsky

If you had told fans of the Mad Max franchise circa-1986 that the fourth film in the series — up for an Academy Award at this Sunday’s Oscars ceremony — was going to be an explicitly feminist (or at least arguably feminist) narrative about overthrowing the patriarchy, said fans would probably have grunted and scratched their armpits in amused disbelief. Because whatever their virtues, the first three Mad Max films were, at best, only dimly interested in women.

Director George Miller’s series is devoted to manly men beating their manly chests while grunting and butting chests and cars and other manly bits. Tough guy, glowering-cowboy-biker-machismo and leather, and guns, and brutal death in gladiatorial combat: That’s what Mad Max was originally all about, not feminism.

The first film, in 1979, was particularly stark in its gleefully Neanderthal gender posturing. In a post-apocalypse that looked almost indistinguishable from the present, Mel Gibson as Max wanders through a right-wing nightmare in which evil thugs protected by oleaginous lawyers terrorize good neighborly folks and threaten the fabric of civil society. Max’s pure, sporadically spunky wife is casually offed to provide him with the requisite revenge motive. But the real energy of the film is in the male bonding, whether between Max and his shirtless, leather-pants-wearing police commander, or between the cops and their slavering biker gang antagonists. Men man the barricades of civilization to protect women from the barbaric manly hordes amidst the grim grinding of gear shifts, biceps, and gender stereotypes.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) shuffle male archetypes a bit, but don’t really challenge them. With an increased budget, the post-apocalypse looks much more post-apocalyptic, and Max transforms from an agent of the crumbling but noble state into a wandering loner. He’s a shaggy cowboy Han Solo swaggering into Dodge to declare his contempt for the sissified city folk before offering to die for them in an apotheosis of revving engines and gunfire. Women and children look up to Max and his giant swinging guns, and he laconically acknowledges their tribute by performing uber-competence and uber-violence. Then he heads back out into the desert: a man alone with only his penis and his car for companionship.

There are, though, perhaps a few foreshadowings of Fury Road in the earlier films — especially in the character of Aunt Entity in Thunderdome. Entity, played by an electric if under-utilized Tina Turner, is the boss of Bartertown, a precarious community of thieves and toughs. She has shakily reinstated the order which Max brutally but unsuccessfully defended in the first film.

“You think I don’t know the law? Wasn’t it me who wrote it?” she declares. Though she’s the villain of the piece, her motives seem admirable, more or less. She wants to preserve civilization, and build a functional community out of pig shit — the fuel which Bartertown uses for power. Entity isn’t exactly a feminist hero, but she’s still a precursor of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, who overthrows the evil patriarch Immortan Joe in order to establish a better, female-led society.

In fact, when you look at Entity, the gap between the women in the earlier Mad Max films and Furiosa doesn’t seem so great after all. Perhaps Furiosa isn’t a rejection of the Mad Max series’ gender roles so much as a re-crystallization of them. From the first film to the last, women are figured as a force for civilization; as Aunty suggests, they are the ones on whom the law is built. In the first movie, Max is a policeman — but only as long as his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) is at home, tending to the baby and providing an oasis of 1950s idyllic home life to ground her man. Once she’s gone, Max turns from lawgiver into vigilante outsider, riding sweatily towards isolation and death.

The various communities into which Max drifts in the second and third films are also anchored by women and the associated children. Men are sometimes in charge — but all-male communities in these films tend to be gangs, not civilizations. Notably in Beyond Thunderdome, when Max stumbles into a group of kids reminiscent of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, the children aren’t all boys. Instead, the leader, and the person who preserves the oral traditions, is Savannah Nix (Helen Buday). At the conclusion of the film, Savannah has found an abandoned city and has figured out how to generate electricity, to light many of the buildings at night. They keep them on, she says, in case Max, or others, should return — a beacon of civilization for all those lost men, traipsing about the desert as men do.

Fury Road is in some ways a radical break with Mad Max past. It puts a woman at the center of the story, and that woman gets to overthrow the patriarchal law giver. It’s almost as if Jessie from the first movie kneed Max (rather than the bad guy biker) in the crotch and stole his car.

But was Furiosa really that revolutionary? One could argue that the last film in the franchise could also be seen as a conservative embrace of Mad Max gender roles past. Women are civilization; Immortan Joe’s male patriarchy, in which women are enslaved and marginalized, is therefore innately uncivilized — an unsustainable innovation. Furiosa, in going from Max-like rebel to domestic leader, isn’t launching a progressive future so much as she’s turning the clock back.

The apocalypse rewinds, and the matriarchal civilization is reinstated. And Mad Max for his part fights for the women as he always does, before striding off toward the wilderness, where men are uncivilized men alone.

***

Lead image: flickr/Tom Blunt