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 While many critics of the Awards wish to criticize the Oscars as culturally irrelevant, outdated, and plagued by insularity and elitism (not to mention plummeting viewership), nominations and wins have repercussions far beyond the glittering lights of the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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Falling in love with Peter Kavinsky—right along with Lara Jean—shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. And not just because of his swoon-inducing smile, his ability to make a back-pocket spin in the middle of a cafeteria look downright sinful, or even his impressive emotional depth, either. Rather, I love him—as so many other grown-ass women now do—because I have spent my life falling in and out of love with Peter Kavinskys, just as I was trained to.

I should begin by saying that my now, maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame. As a young black woman who came of age at a flashpoint in our nation’s relationship to and dialogue about race, it’s the dirty little secret I aimed to bury once I reached adulthood. I’d promised myself it would go the way of my heinous Aeropostale tee collection and my hot pink Samsung SEEK: matured past, grown out of.

My maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame.
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While I was never the type of girl to pour her feelings out onto the page like Lara Jean—for fear of making them tangible would make them too real, perhaps—I was the type of girl who daydreamed. Who imagined herself tangled in all sorts of intricate, decidedly un-Indiana romances with the kinds of boys that populated all of my favorite stories: the sensitive nerdy musician type a la Nick O’Leary (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), the bad boy with a troubled past in John Bender (The Breakfast Club) and especially the, “It’s your dream dad, not mine!” star jock and secret poet of Austin Ames (A Cinderella Story). These characters, or what I thought these characters embodied, helped me formulate what would become The Perfect Boy.

The “White” following “Perfect” kind of just went without saying. (The “Boy” and not “Girl” or “Nonbinary Person,” on the other hand, was reiterated strongly and often.)

You should know that I’ve only ever dated people of color. Even in high school, my not-so-spectacular track record with almost-boyfriends is exclusively black. Somewhere deep, somewhere beyond the formula of book-and-movie boyfriends I’d concocted, I was still much more interested in finding kinship and solace and—I can’t believe I’m gonna say this about my high school “ex”, but here we go—passion with other people who looked like me than I was with finding my Kavinsky.

But the white boy thing was more than an embarrassing blip on the radar of my adolescence—my longing for these boys was the product of a sound indoctrination from years of white media consumption.

To All the Boys I Loved Before (both the book and the movie) subverted narratives in which the quirky white girl is the one deemed worthy enough to get the get The Perfect Boy—girls like the one I was relegated to background roles and left romance-less by the end of the story—in so many of the right ways. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before created, for me, a rich world of beautiful, smart young women that neither relied on men to uplift them not validate them. But, you know, it was sort of a perfect bonus when that happened too.

Even now, weeks after its release, my inbox still occasionally pings with messages from friends watching it for the first time. Today, for instance, one of my closest friends couldn’t even wait for the credits to roll before she texted me. She said she’d tried to get away from her love of romances, but this managed to draw her right back in. There were moments throughout where she worried she’d have to turn it off, abandon it once it followed the same trajectory of so many of its predecessors.

“I just knew [Peter Kavinsky] had to do something to ruin things. I just knew there was no way they could end up together,” she said. “The happy ending just felt impossible.”

So many of us were waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the catch. The first time I watched it, I just knew that the inevitable breakdown seen was right around the corner. The part of the story where the young bookish girl, or so often the woman of color, has what seems like a light at the end of the tunnel, extinguished. Where she encounters some sort of embarrassment, some unearthed trauma that precludes her from a happy ending without also enduring great suffering.

The perceived impossibility of To All the Boys, I realize, is at the heart of why I loved it—why I found myself clicking replay before we’d even reached the brief mid-credits scene. The image of a young, smart, bookish woman of color falling in love without grief (related to the relationship) or shame on screen felt too big to assign a name. Felt too close to a dream not to hold tight to it, to close my eyes and will myself back to a world in which those things still seemed attainable.

Half of the story is the fact I didn’t grow up with images of young girls of color falling in love on screen at all, let alone with a heartthrob like Kavinsky. But the other half—perhaps the half that’s even more harrowing—is that I certainly didn’t see us falling in love separate from trauma, or rarer still, with another person of color.

I watched and read hundreds of stories in which the luckiest girls fell in love and rode off into the sunset—often in a cool Jeep!—with their Prince Charming. And that Prince Charming always looked like Peter Kavinsky. Peter Kavinsky—and by extension, Peter and Lara Jean’s fauxlationship—was everything, but it was also precisely what I’ve been implicitly taught to desire. In this way, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before did what so many of its genre forebears had done before it.

And the thing is, I’m not asking this movie to be some wild break from the genre. I don’t even really want that of this particular film. What I do want, though, is thousands of different narratives about what it looks like for girls from all backgrounds to fall in love. We deserve every iteration of story in which young women of color get to fall in love with a sweet, emotionally-adept, whatever-trope-suits-your-fancy partner.

So much of what makes To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before an unbelievably awe-inspiring, tweet-worthy movie, particularly for adults like me, is the element of unconscious wish fulfillment. Like, of course I’m not a teenage girl in a hyper white space, yearning for a story about a bookworm woman of color who falls in love—period, let alone with the “it” guy—anymore. And of course I’m no longer relying on these images to help me feel worthy of love and affection in the way I once was. But I’ve been sitting with that same yearning since then. That girl, the me who needed those things so desperately when she was a kid, never went away, she just evolved.

But even in that evolution, there are moments of deeply troubling considerations about what my love of Peter Kavinsky and this story might mean. Is it him, this particular character and this particular actor, or does my desire speak to something greater?

I’m 24 years old and settled into a community of black folks—friends and found family alike—that not only affirm, but uplift me. Everyday I am reminded of the beauty and brilliance of our people. And I am reminded of my own beauty and brilliance, by extension. This is a far cry from my hometown in suburban Indiana, from an upbringing that was largely populated by people and spaces that could do neither of those things. But that juxtaposition only serves to ground me more firmly in what I know to be true: one of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.

Yet, knowing those things doesn’t automatically undo the years of isolation and forced assimilation I endured to get here. Knowing those things doesn’t automatically help me unlearn the lies I internalized about myself and any potential partners who looked like me.

One of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.
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What I’m saying is shaking this doesn’t happen for all of us overnight. I’m saying that the mechanisms of white supremacy are complex and, oftentimes, hidden in plain sight. If I spent a lifetime both abhorring and simultaneously craving the white male gaze, then it’s going to take some time—ruminating on my understandings of desire and shame and identity—to walk back the decades of deeply entrenched ideologies which taught me to aspire to finding my happy ever after in the arms of a white man.

DISCLAIMER: Never share or distribute scenes or movies involving child pornography of any sort. Distributing these scenes to raise awareness can cause further victimization of children and may have legal consequences. Report child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

My husband accidentally showed me child pornography.

It happened a couple of years ago, when we first started dating. We were in that “getting to know you” stage and would frequently choose our own favorite movies to show the other when we went on dates. My husband decided on Moonrise Kingdom, thinking it would be right up my alley since I love coming-of-age stories. I understand why: Moonrise Kingdom is a poignant, critically acclaimed, visually stunning movie that paints a very realistic portrayal of the complicated emotions children experience when they are in the process of exploring their own growing independence. I was captivated by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola’s skillful storytelling, until the scene.

The two lead actors, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, were both twelve years old at the time of filming. I didn’t know this at the time. All I knew is that there were two children stripping down to their underwear on camera and French kissing each other. The young girl says that the boy “feels hard,” but that she likes it. The boy gropes the girl’s chest and the girl says she thinks they’re going to grow more.

I have post-traumatic stress disorder partly from childhood sexual assault. When I saw that scene for the first time, I felt like someone was sitting inside of my ribcage. I felt like I was suffocating under the weight of what I had just witnessed: two children being exploited in a public and permanent way. I sobbed so hard that we had to stop the movie.

“Anderson would have to get their parents’ permission, first,” my husband said. “He wouldn’t be able to do it without their consent.” My husband has always been incredibly sensitive and supportive toward my PTSD. He checks movies with me before we watch them to make sure they don’t have sexual content or nudity that might trigger a panic attack. When we decided to watch Moonrise Kingdom, he told me that I would have no problems watching it: since the main actors were children, the film contained no sex or nudity. I felt furious at my husband for showing me two children involved in a sexually exploitative scene. But beyond that, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

When I saw that scene for the first time, I felt like someone was sitting inside of my ribcage.
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Maricsa Evans, a licensed marriage and family therapist, explains that “Introducing children to sexualized behavior at an early age causes a lot of problems later on developmentally, emotionally, and mentally.” According to Evans, the children’s lack of ability to fully understand the situations they are being exposed to can lead to serious developmental problems, such as engaging in reckless sexual behaviors from a young age. “If they feel traumatized or violated from experiences like this, it can lead to dangerous behaviors such as drug addiction or emotional distress where they need to have mental health services,” Evans said. Later on, if the children become uncomfortable or feel that they were unable to truly consent, it can cause them to have a troubled or negative relationship with their own sexuality or even lead to disorders such as PTSD.

Considering that children are not able to consent to these scenes, their parents shouldn’t have the right to consent on their behalf. “It’s exploitation of your children,” Evans said. “That in itself is child pornography.”

Federal child pornography laws, as specified in 18 U.S.C. § 2258 (b), apply to “any parent, legal guardian, or person having custody or control of a minor who knowingly permits such minor to engage in, or to assist any other person to engage in, sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct or for the purpose of transmitting a live visual depiction of such conduct.” Child pornography is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving children under the age of eighteen. According to federal law, the scene in Moonrise Kingdom falls squarely under child pornography. Why, then, were no lawsuits filed over this movie?

Nobody Told Me My Son’s Camp Counselor Was Accused Of A Sex Offense
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When it comes to pornography, many people still subscribe to Justice Potter Stewart’s statement, “I know it when I see it.” In the case of Moonrise Kingdom, people fail to question whether the film constitutes as child pornography simply because it seems so “artistic.” Anderson relies on his signature storybook cinematography to entice viewers to feel detached from reality. Due to the soft fairytale aesthetics in Moonrise Kingdom, people are reminded that it is just a movie—thus, “art” and not pornography. Furthermore, people rarely question the scene because the children are engaging in exploratory behavior. “There is a normal developmental curiosity with children when it comes to sex,” Evans said. However, this behavior is never something an adult should facilitate—especially not for a film.

People are now opening up the discussion of films that include child pornography after Netflix began streaming Diego Kaplan’s 2017 film Desire. Viewers were outraged by the opening scene of Desire, which features two girls under the age of ten playing with pillows while watching a cowboy movie. One of the girls, mimicking the cowboy riding on a horse, begins to masturbate on the pillow. She eventually reaches orgasm. After Netflix’s choice to stream the film sparked such controversy, Kaplan released a statement defending the scene:

The girls never understood what they were doing, they were just copying what they were seeing on the screen. No adult interacted with the girls, other than the child acting coach. Everything was done under the careful surveillance of the girls’ mothers.

This defense misses the point entirely. If the children are too young to understand what they are doing, they are too young to consent to these behaviors. “Children involved in these situations might start questioning themselves: ‘What does that mean? What does that mean about me?’” Evans said. “A lot of doubt and questioning about themselves is going to happen, which is why certain things shouldn’t be introduced to kids too early in their life. It can impact their ability to trust their parents later on if they feel like their parents made the wrong calls protecting them, they’ll have a hard time trusting anyone.” This situation can be damaging to the young actress if she grows up and feels violated by what she was asked to do for the film.

In the case of Moonrise Kingdom, people fail to question whether the film constitutes as child pornography simply because it seems so artistic.
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These consequences become even more disturbing when I considered what Anderson was actually trying to accomplish with the kissing scene in Moonrise Kingdom. Gilman stated that in the month before filming began, Wes Anderson wanted him and Hayward to exchange letters in the style of the “Dear Sam”/”Dear Suzy” letters. He also said that they did not rehearse the kissing scene beforehand. The scene was both of the actors’ first kiss and, as Gilman explained, “Wes wanted it to be authentic.” Hayward further noted, “Wes wanted it to be these two kids’ first kiss. So that’s how we did that.” Gilman also noted that, for the sake of their privacy, they were given a closed set for filming.

Closed sets are used for actors who are filming scenes that involve nudity or sexual activity that they might want a greater deal of privacy for. A child actor should not need a closed set because a child actor should never be put in the same position adult actors are in when they require closed sets.

It is clear from the beginning that Anderson wanted to foster a certain kind of relationship between the two children. Gilman stated that he e-mailed Hayward at first, but then Anderson decided that the actual act of writing letters was important to help the actors get in character. Anderson did not want the children to act out a scene of two characters’ first kisses: he wanted to create and capture a real sexual experience between these two children. And regardless of whether parents or filmmakers intended on pressuring these children, the pressure of this being a job can make it even more difficult for the children to feel comfortable about the decisions their parents made for them.

How, then, can filmmakers responsibly tell coming-of-age stories? The rules are pretty simple. “Filmmakers have a moral and ethical responsibility to protect children from scenes involving touching, nakedness, and implications of sexuality,” Evans said. “I feel they have a higher call to prevent this type of thing from happening. Children should never be in real sexual situations for these movies.” Parents have an even greater responsibility to protect their children by not consenting on behalf of them for scenes that can be developmentally damaging.

“Parents should not let anything slightly related to a sexual encounter guide them to do anything but protect their children and others that are out there,” Evans said. “If no one else, your own children.”

Even In Art, ‘Free Speech’ Can’t Override Consent
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However, there are ways of telling stories about childhood sexuality without harming children. Gregg Araki’s film Mysterious Skin tells the coming-of-age story of two boys, one of whom is molested as a child and becomes a sex worker as he grows up. It’s a graphic, NC-17 rated film that has no issues depicting adult sexuality—but the filmmakers were careful to protect children when shooting scenes that had to imply child sexual abuse. In one scene, it is implied that an adult man is about to engage in sexual acts with a young boy. In order to accomplish this, the scene relies on close-ups of the actors faces that imply physical contact that is never actually depicted. This technique approximates intimacy between the actors without involving any actual interactions between them. By approaching the scene this way, the filmmakers ensured that they would not have to compromise their artistic expression when treating the scene—and the young actor—with the sensitivity they deserve.

Recent movies Love, Simon and Edge of Seventeen also create beautiful coming-of-age stories without featuring scenes of sexuality. The use of clever dialogue and imagery capture the relatable conflicts growing up. Teens in these movies experience the excitement and awkwardness of growing up, and struggle with trying to embrace an adult world they aren’t quite ready for while learning how to assert their independence and autonomy. Much of the beauty in these movies lies in the dialogue, which expresses the teens unique experiences with love, fear, and confusion in ways that are raw and nuanced.  

Dialogue, imagery, and point-of-view narration are just three tools that filmmakers can use to create poignant and realistic coming-of-age stories. Children should never have to be in legitimate sexual situations on camera. “It’s child pornography,” Evans stated. “No one should be able to consent to children doing sexual acts on camera.”

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.

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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.
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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.

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'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.
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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.

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'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.
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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.

I’ve been an actor in Los Angeles for over 15 years, and have over 100 credits to my name. I moved here in 2012 — and one of the first parts I played was literally a 9/11 terrorist.

When I started acting, I auditioned for and would have accepted any role Hollywood would give me the chance at. Not only was I desperate for credits (and a paycheck), but I felt that stereotypical or one-dimensional roles would pave the way to a larger cultural tapestry in which I and other Middle Eastern actors could play more complex and interesting characters. My thinking on this has changed as the world has changed. I now believe that when actors have the privilege to be able to refuse a job, as I am fortunate enough to have now, there are instances in which we should vocally exercise that privilege.

If you ever say “it’s just TV” or “it’s just a movie,” you are wrong. Every story shapes the person who watches that story. Three-quarters of white Americans have ZERO non-white friends, which means that their entire understanding of people of color comes from the media. So, until all those white people get some friends with more melanin, actors have a very important responsibility: For better or for worse, we will be teaching them, via the stories we tell, what people of color are like.

Three-quarters of white Americans have ZERO non-white friends.
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But there’s more. The stories we tell, and the lessons we teach, are not limited to ones of representation. It’s not just about simple questions like “Are all Muslims terrorists?” or “Are all Black people gang members?” We are also teaching larger cultural lessons, helping people answer complicated questions like “Are police trustworthy?” and “Is not-taking-no-for-an-answer a cool way to meet women?” These are questions that all actors can help answer, brown, black, and white alike.

Absent real life experience, people form opinions about the world based in part on what they see on TV and in movies. And when what they see is inaccurate, their opinions can lead to pernicious and harmful belief systems. Consider these connections, among many:

*A study by non-profit civil rights advocacy group Color of Change and Family Story found that “the media overwhelmingly depicted black families as poor and dependent on welfare, black fathers as absent, and consistently overhyped the link between black families and criminality. However, when it comes to white families, the picture painted is often of social stability.”

White Americans, including our president, overestimate the percentage of Black people that are on public assistance, and end up being more likely to oppose it. Further, most Americans think black people are dangerous (in turn making black people more likely to be shot, including by police).

*Shows and movies such as 24, Scandal, Person of Interest, and Taken “ use torture as a plot point in episodes designed to entertain,” as the International Business Times put it.

Many Americans, including our president, believe that torture is an effective and productive method of obtaining information, despite there being no conclusive evidence to support this.

*A meta-study published by researchers from UC Davis and the University of Vienna found that in the media, “Muslims tend to be negatively framed, while Islam is dominantly portrayed as a violent religion.”

In a December 2016 Pew survey, 41% of Americans said Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions, despite the fact that Muslim societies are among the least violent in the world.

When people hear “Islamic,” I’d venture to guess that a large number of Americans, including our president, immediately think “terrorist.” Heck, it’s one of the first things I think, and my grandmother is Muslim. How twisted is that?

White Filmmakers Must Ask: Do We Need More Movies About White People?

Our elected leaders, from Trump on down — and with the support of millions of Americans — are making fewer decisions based on evidence, and more decisions based on ignorance and (literally) what they see in the media. There is a straight line connecting the one-dimensional, ignorant stories we tell, to a host of threats against human rights, including Muslim bans, mass deportations, mass incarceration, and suspending the rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community.

Actors, this means our job as storytellers is more important than ever. Our choices as storytellers are having real-world effects, so we need to be smarter and more discriminating about the types of stories we help to tell. One of the very few things actors can control in this industry is the decision to participate in a project or not. So before you accept your next job, ask yourself what kind of lessons are taught by the story you’re going to be telling.

Our job as storytellers is more important than ever.
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To help you, here are some sample questions:

Are all the Muslims in this story terrorists? No? Oh, good. Are all the non-terrorist Muslims fighting the terrorists? Like, are there two types of Muslims — the terrorists, and the terrorist-fighters? Yes? Well, what story do you think that tells? Does it tell the story that every Muslim is engaged in terrorism somehow? Do you think that’s accurate? It’s not. Imagine if almost every time you saw a white guy in a movie, he was either a school shooter or a member of a SWAT team. Wouldn’t you naturally be scared of any white guy not wearing a SWAT vest?

In fact, contrary to the prevailing narrative in the media, relative to the billions of Muslims and other Middle Eastern people, the number of actual terrorists is miniscule. Most Muslims, most Middle Easterners, are just regular people going about their day, in a variety of jobs, from doctor to garbage collector to cabdriver to drug dealer to actor. But when this is not reflected in our media, and when people don’t know any real life Muslims, they form an inextricable link in their head between Islam and terrorism. And that is how you get a president who campaigns on, and then attempts to institute, a Muslim Ban.

Making Room For Diverse Voices With The Duplass Brothers
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Look, I have no idea if The 15:17 to Paris or 12 Strong are good movies. There are a slew of talented people involved with both, so I suspect they are. But does our country need more stories about terrorists right now? Do these stories ultimately engender understanding and compassion, or will they just lead us to hate and fear the Muslim guy across the street?

That was an easy one to figure out. Here’s a harder one:

Let’s say the story takes place in the world of politics or the military. Who is the president in this story? Is it Trump? If so, does the fact that Trump is trash have any effect on the story? If it’s not Trump, what does the story tell the viewer about the President? About the presidency? If the president is never mentioned, is it implied that the story takes place in a world where the president is honorable, or corrupt? I once auditioned for a TV show about a counter-terrorism unit. The president was never mentioned, except for once late in the first episode, when someone says “we got the OK directly from the president.” They wrote the script while Obama was in office, likely expected Hillary to win, but now we have Trump. That line of dialogue does not exist in a vacuum, and neither can our choice to work on that show. Had I been offered that role, we’d have had to discuss just what it means to the characters to “get an OK from the president.”

Does our country need more stories about terrorists right now?
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Or how about this:

Are any of the cops or prosecutors in this story aware that the justice system is, to put it mildly, less just to people of color than it is to white people? Would it be realistic for them to not deal with this in any way? Do you feel like that is a fact that is being ignored or at the very least under-discussed in our society?

The point is, every project you participate in becomes a part of our national conversation. Of course, it’s impractical to only participate in stories that are completely realistic, and in which every single demographic group is represented in appropriate proportions. Every story has people who are good and bad, and to different degrees. And a story in which every character is honorable and infallible would likely be very boring. But before you accept your next job, if you can, place it in the context of our national dialogue. And ask yourself if participating in it will do more harm than good. And if it will do harm, think about using one of the very few powers you have in this town — say no. And better yet, tell them why.

Of course, your decision to not participate in a project will rarely result in the project not getting made. That story will likely still get told, with or without you. But if you turn down the part, the producers will have to go with their second or third or eighth choice for the part, which might force them to reexamine — if only for a moment — the story they are telling.

You may lose a job, but at the very least, you will know you refused to be a part of the problem, and tried to be part of the solution.

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.

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Lead image: flickr/Tom Blunt

The Ripening

These twisted tales will really keep you up at night.

flickr/Mackenzie Greer

All of the avocados Sarah O’Donnell just got for $1 each on sale at Whole Foods suddenly turn brown at the same time.

The Summoning

Cam Cameron is summoned by a judge for penalties on 54 parking tickets. Alejandro Iñárritu directs yet another stunning one-take film.

The Sexting

A man asks a woman online how she is. She responds, “I’m great, how are you?” The Wi-Fi cuts out just as he sends her a picture of his erect penis.

Mouth

For Danny Gill, what was supposed to be a night of reckless, rampant sex turns deadly when he discovers hot sorority sister Jenny Jiang has a secret: Real words come out of her mouth. She has already embedded lethal feminist thoughts into the minds of 40 men, and he is her next victim.

A Nightmare on Frat Row

Two white guys go in search for the perfect party and don’t end up losing their virginities. Jesse Eisenberg and Robert De Niro star.

A Nightmare on Bedford Avenue

Cal Rodriguez finds his Brooklyn walkup haunted by the ghost of his ex-girlfriend. Except wait — she’s not a ghost. She’s real. She never moved out because apartments in New York are too expensive and they agreed to keep splitting the rent, but now it’s awkward because she’s hooking up with this other dude.

The Concealing

A man wakes up one morning and finds that his lover has removed her makeup and become a grotesque kitchen cabinet with hands for legs. What he thought was a beautiful woman with a smooth complexion was actually just a piece of furniture wearing an inch of concealer.

A Nightmare on Frat Row: Part II

It’s Super Bowl weekend. A huge blizzard shuts down every liquor store and wing place in Urbana-Champaign. After the second hour, the men of the U of I’s Sigma Chi frat become rabid and turn on each other. When the police break down their doors on Monday, they find only spilled protein powder, a soiled American flag, and a digested can of Keystone Light.

The Purge: Part II

A young woman arrives at the University of Oklahoma and chugs a Solo cup of Everclear, thinking it’s water. What’s more: It was enchiladas night in the dining hall that same day.

The Settling

Lina and Drew Crawford move into their newlywed home. But something’s up. The house creaks. The wind blows. Lina realizes Drew is a dumb piece of shit and she should have married that hot Bolivian guy from study abroad.

12 Years A Dave

Richard Linklater follows Dave, an average Plano, Texas telemarketer, from the ages of 24 to 36.

The Capturing

Janine Robertson has the night of her life. When she awakes, however, she is horrified to see that while intoxicated she posted not one, not two, but 37 badly lit unedited selfies on Instagram. She would delete them, but they have a decent amount of likes.

The Comforting

The world’s girlfriends all begin crying at once. Their boyfriends react. Some pat them on the back. Some scream at them to stop crying. Some go turn on the TV and drink a beer. The world ends.

The Awakening

A balding, middle-aged man wakes up in his studio in Queens. He rides the train to work. He eats a BLT. He catches up on House of Cards. A horrific, three-hour tour-de-force.

Illustrations by Katie Tandy

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