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10 F I LM & TELEVISION though, tries to pack everything in, from Corsica to St Helena. Plot is again, one feels, not his forte. There are potentially thrilling scenes. In one, the young Napoleon, outnumbered, calmly executes a rabble-rouser who is stirring up a crowd of angry revolutionaries. In another, set in Egypt, the hero, protected by a phalanx of French troops, chats amiably with the artists and scientists whom he has brought along for the campaign while, only yards away, Mameluke cavalry swarm all around them. But Kubrick is forced to connect these segments with large chunks of omniscient narration, making the screenplay read like a long episode of the History Channel. Kubrick’s notion of casting Jack Nicholson in the lead role is intriguing to imagine. The actor, in his youth, certainly had the magnetism for it. But, like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the idea is more daring than inspired. As anyone who has seen The Terror (1963) knows, Nicholson – one of the most decidedly American actors ever to have appeared on screen – doesn’t fit comfortably into French cuffs and epaulettes. Alhough Kubrick never managed to get Napoleon made, we do have some idea of what the film would have looked like, for we have Barry Lyndon (1975), his adaptation of Thackeray’s novel. Much of the research and planning that had gone into conceptualizing the earlier film was folded into the making of the latter. Among other things, Kubrick chose to shoot Barry Lyndon – as he’d originally planned to shoot Napoleon – almost entirely without the aid of modern electrical lights. This necessitated the use of special f/0.7 Zeiss lenses, designed by NASA for lunar photography, and made continuity a nightmare for the crew, who were forced to monitor the size and position of hundreds of burning candles. The images that resulted, though, are stunningly lovely. Nearly every frame looks as if it was composed by John Constable, George Romney, or Joshua Reynolds. This isn’t always to the film’s benefit. As the critic James Naremore points out, “The film’s painterly feel is intensified by its exceptionally slow, stately pace”. But, by limiting the scope of his story, Kubrick was able to give the film a sense of intimacy that would have been nigh impossible on Napoleon. The scene in which Barry’s son succumbs to injuries from a riding accident is perhaps the most poignant in Kubrick’s oeuvre. It is one of the rare occasions – along with the bar scene at the end of Paths of Glory – when he fully drops his mask of misanthropy. It is easy to see why Kubrick was drawn to the Napoleonic era. His films, unlike his photographs, love to juxtapose order with chaos: the pristine chateau where the generals plan the battle in Paths of Glory versus the cratered wasteland where the infantrymen carry it out; the spotless spaceships in 2001: A Space Odyssey versus the bone yard where the apes brawl at the dawn of man; the tidy boot camp barracks in Full Metal Jacket versus the charred rubble of Huế City. Napoleonic battles, for this reason, enchanted Kubrick, with their neat rows of troops coming together to blow each other to smithereens. “There’s a weird disparity between the sheer visual and organizational beauty of the historical battles sufficiently far in the past, and their human consequences”, he explained. “It’s rather like watching two golden eagles soaring through the sky from a distance; they may be tearing a dove to pieces, but if you are far enough away the scene is still beautiful.” She ain’t no maid Asking questions about women on screen ALICE WADSWORTH J o y P r e s s S T E A L I N G T H E S H OW How women are revolutionizing television 320pp. Faber. Paperback, £14.99. 978 0 571 34244 0 US: Atria Books. $26. 978 1 5011 3771 6 D i a n a A d e s o l a M a f e WHERE N O B L A C K WOMAN H A S G O N E B E F O R E Subversive portrayals in speculative film and TV 184pp. University of Texas Press. Paperback, $27.95. 978 1 4773 1523 1 Hannah Hogarth – the main character in the HBO television series Girls, played by the show’s chief creator, Lena Dunham – is selfish and opinionated. She is also frequently naked. Dunham has argued that Hannah’s nakedness is important, through posing a challenge to the televisual norm of palatably svelte women. And since Hannah’s nakedness has been much written about, it seems that it has had the desired effect. As Dunham tells Joy Press in Stealing the Show, when it comes to television drama, female sexuality is the “last frontier”. There have been many others. From the assertive and successful title character of Diane English’s sitcom Murphy Brown (who openly considers both abortion and single parenthood) to the complicated and often unlikeable characters in Girls, Orange Is the New Black (OITNB) and Broad City, Stealing the Show presents television history of recent times as a series of hurdles overcome. Press sets out to tell the stories behind a handful of “iconic” shows. For the most part, this is an act of celebration, relying on interviews and other forms of media coverage, a tale of “televisionaries” and their success stories; they are generally deemed to be above criticism. Press is perfectly capable of being critical, but she reserves her jabs for predictable foes. When she mentions Christopher Hitchens taking the “women aren’t funny” line and claiming that men prefer women to be their audience rather than their rivals, Press says this merely suggests women can be funny, and that some men find this idea threatening enough to make them subscribe to the hackneyed line. Growing visibility and agency, meanwhile, have led women to “revolutionize” television, overturning the era of the all-male writers’ room and the corresponding dramatic stereotypes. The testimony of showrunners such as Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Ilana Glazer and Amy Schumer, as well as other screenwriters, their assistants, producers and directors, would appear to prove Press’s point. These success stories are appealing and certain interviews – Kaling’s, in particular – are revealing. As with many overviews, though, Stealing the Show does not give us the full picture. Representations of women on screen have dipped since the turn of the Nichelle Nichols as Uhura in Star Trek, 1968 millennium, with women comprising only 37 per cent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films of 2017 (14 per cent of these women were black). Writers’ rooms remain predominantly male, as do network executives. Behind the cameras, 94 per cent of women in Hollywood have said that they have experienced sexual harassment or assault. Focusing on domestic questions such as how certain writers, producers and actors have worked around motherhood, Press tends to relate characters’ and showrunners’ experiences to her own. This tendency may explain her unwillingness to criticize them. Unfortunately, it also prevents her from addressing other issues, such as intersectionality, in greater depth. The shows Press uses as examples challenge a range of female stereotypes, but the preoccupations of some of them – such as “tweepulsive” Jess (Zooey Deschanel, New Girl), a craft-obsessed primary school teacher looking for love, or Liz Lemon (Tina Fey, 30 Rock) who “hoards cheese” and worries about being a “bespectacled loser” – can seem trivial and stuck in the domain of “white feminism”. Press points out that the hypocrisy of Lemon’s “white feminism” becomes one of 30 Rock’s running jokes, but she fails to investigate the concept fully. White feminism focuses on the concerns of more privileged women and excludes those of women of colour, trans women, genderqueer individuals, sex workers and working-class women. Aside from The Mindy Project (which shares a chapter with 30 Rock and New Girl) and OITNB (produced by, and based on a book by, wealthy white women), shows starring women of colour are generally absent in Stealing the Show. This cannot be because they don’t exist – Dear White People, Insecure, Chewing Gum and Jane the Virgin, to name a few, all feature complex women of colour as protagonists in non-stereotypical roles. When Press invokes the alt-right’s hatred of the “cancerous” feminism of Schumer and Dunham, she misses an opportunity to address the qualms of the intersectional feminist community against both of these paragons of white feminism. Girls has been criticized from the start for its lack of characters of colour, and Dunham had to apologize after casting doubt on claims that one of her writers had sexually assaulted a mixed-race actor. Dunham has supported white women’s #MeToo stories. Schumer is approvingly quoted by Press as having honed the “feminist rape joke” – one sketch on Inside Amy Schumer shows her playing a Call of Duty-style video game in which her avatar is raped, then put through a military trial (a “level” that her boyfriend had never seen). Yet Schumer’s provocative humour doesn’t always punch upwards – “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual”, she said during one stand-up show – and she has not cast men or women of colour in leading roles in her films. Press is selective; she applauds Schumer’s feminized take on toilet humour in her “Milk Milk Lemonade” spoof video while ignoring its uncomfortable context. (Schumer chose to send up a Beyoncé song, from an album lauded for its feminist message, rather than, for example, the objectification of women in videos by her male contemporaries.) Schumer and Dunham may well be the “antiheroes of the middle-American imagination” at the same time as they are high-profile examples of a certain brand of modern feminism: one that sidelines women whose experiences differ from its proponents. On a related note, Press spends more time discussing the childhood, family life and career arc of OITNB’s (white) producer Jenji Kohan than the controversial content of the TLS AUGUST 1 7 2 0 1 8
page 11
F I LM & TELEVISION 11 show itself. It is as if she is deaf to the various debates that have surrounded its representation of working-class women and women of colour – set as it is in a women’s prison. The reader is treated instead to an anecdote about Kohan’s time working on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and how the writer’s room grew “dysfunctional and frustrating” as “racial tensions” arose in the wake of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Invoking this situation to show how Kohan was made to feel uncomfortable behind the scenes weirdly mirrors OITNB’s focus on white female victimhood, as it follows a wealthy white woman’s fortunes on entering the predominantly black environment of the prison. For Press, there were only a few “alarm bells” in response to OITNB’s treatment of race, among fans on Twitter; she does not seem to consider it possible that the alarms were responding to an actual fire. In one controversial episode, a black female character, Poussey Washington, dies at the hands of a prison guard, while echoing Eric Garner’s last words: “I can’t breathe”. According to Press, Kohan chose to kill Poussey off precisely because the character had “potential” and a “future” (being both middle-class and well educated). The viewer might wonder if less privileged characters had less valuable lives; Kohan’s statement would appear to confirm that view. OITNB faced further criticism when the subsequent action centred on the grieving of Poussey’s on-screen girlfriend and the troubles facing the officer who killed her, two white characters in a predominantly black cast. This raises the question, aren’t there wider implications to consider even if Kohan primarily means to merely emphasize some kind of dramatic value she sees in Poussey? To her credit, Press acknowledges that there was a backlash. However, there is still something disquieting about Kohan’s pride in being part of this “consciousness-raising moment”. The programmes discussed in Stealing the Show all have a realist bent. Sci-fi and speculative television are notably absent, perhaps because these fields have long been associated with men (only 4 per cent of the top 100 grossing sci-fi films in 2017 featured female protagonists). Diana Adesola Mafe’s Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before explores this association and shows the promise that speculative plots can hold for traditionally marginalized characters. Zoe Saldana, who has played a green-skinned alien in Guardians of the Galaxy and a blue-skinned one in Avatar, has said that sci-fi makes her feel “superhuman” because it doesn’t focus on “the color of my skin or my gender or my cultural background”. When the genre does focus on identity – as in Black Panther (TLS, March 2, 2018) – plot can be separated from unequal social reality, all kinds of promising possibilities open up. Mafe begins and ends with Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura. Originally played by Nichelle Nichols, Uhura represented hope for many young girls, including Whoopi Goldberg, who told Nichols that Star Trek caused her to run through the house screaming “there’s a black lady on TV and she ain’t no maid”. “Hers was the first and sometimes only name people mentioned when they learned I was writing this book”, Mafe adds. Yet alongside Uhura’s cultural importance as a “cinematic pioneer”, this book acknowledges her limitations as a supporting character in a predominantly white cast who is outranked by her male counterparts. Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of black women in speculative film and television, as Mafe makes clear, but it is the first book-length study of black femininity in this area. It concentrates on what she deems to be the most “compelling and critically complex” examples, such as Selena (28 Days Later), Zoë (Firefly), Kee (Children of Men) and Martha (Doctor Who). And whereas past studies of “blackness” on screen have erred on the side of social studies – “communication, sociology, and anthropology” – Mafe takes a “textual and semiotic” approach, drawing on Hegel and Foucault. Like Press, however, she is also concerned with the wider context of actresses’ careers, which “ultimately showcases the limitations for black women in Hollywood”. She quotes Rachel Handler’s findings, including the fact that “16.7 per cent of lead roles” go to non-white actors, and only one Best Actress Oscar has been given to a black woman (Halle Berry for Monster’s Ball). Mafe praises characters such as Firefly’s Zoë, who is presented as a partner in crime to Mal, the show’s white male protagonist, rather than his subordinate, while denigrating Children of Men’s Kee – a white woman in P. D. James’s novel, on which the film was based – as a “stand-in” for the entire African continent. A symbolic, fetishized black female body, “silenced, spoken for and fought over”, Kee is ultimately more a plot device than a character. Press writes as a fan of the shows she covers; Mafe takes a more distanced stance. By attending to the visual and linguistic coding of black and female characters, Mafe exposes biases less explicit than plain exclusion. For one thing, Hollywood still has a serious fear of fertility. The “monstrous feminine”, in the form of uncontrollable and continuous reproduction, looms large in films such as 28 Days Later and the Alien franchise; Mafe invokes the Reaganite horror of “welfare queens” – conceived as workingclass black women having children for the welfare cheques – to show how parasitic representations of the monstrous feminine are also coded as black and working class. In this respect, Mafe even finds valid cultural criticisms in Alien vs Predator. Some readers will be satisfied with the camaraderie and collated insights of Stealing the Show. Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before is the bolder work, though, with the wider literary and sociological scope. The differences between them speak to a wider divide in modern feminism over intersectional representation. TLS AUGUST 1 7 2 0 1 8

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10

F I LM & TELEVISION

though, tries to pack everything in, from Corsica to St Helena. Plot is again, one feels, not his forte.

There are potentially thrilling scenes. In one, the young Napoleon, outnumbered, calmly executes a rabble-rouser who is stirring up a crowd of angry revolutionaries. In another, set in Egypt, the hero, protected by a phalanx of French troops, chats amiably with the artists and scientists whom he has brought along for the campaign while, only yards away, Mameluke cavalry swarm all around them. But Kubrick is forced to connect these segments with large chunks of omniscient narration, making the screenplay read like a long episode of the History Channel. Kubrick’s notion of casting Jack Nicholson in the lead role is intriguing to imagine. The actor, in his youth, certainly had the magnetism for it. But, like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the idea is more daring than inspired. As anyone who has seen The Terror (1963) knows, Nicholson – one of the most decidedly American actors ever to have appeared on screen – doesn’t fit comfortably into French cuffs and epaulettes.

Alhough Kubrick never managed to get Napoleon made, we do have some idea of what the film would have looked like, for we have Barry Lyndon (1975), his adaptation of Thackeray’s novel. Much of the research and planning that had gone into conceptualizing the earlier film was folded into the making of the latter. Among other things, Kubrick chose to shoot Barry Lyndon – as he’d originally planned to shoot Napoleon – almost entirely without the aid of modern electrical lights. This necessitated the use of special f/0.7 Zeiss lenses, designed by NASA for lunar photography, and made continuity a nightmare for the crew, who were forced to monitor the size and position of hundreds of burning candles. The images that resulted, though, are stunningly lovely. Nearly every frame looks as if it was composed by John Constable, George Romney, or Joshua Reynolds. This isn’t always to the film’s benefit. As the critic James Naremore points out, “The film’s painterly feel is intensified by its exceptionally slow, stately pace”. But, by limiting the scope of his story, Kubrick was able to give the film a sense of intimacy that would have been nigh impossible on Napoleon. The scene in which Barry’s son succumbs to injuries from a riding accident is perhaps the most poignant in Kubrick’s oeuvre. It is one of the rare occasions – along with the bar scene at the end of Paths of Glory – when he fully drops his mask of misanthropy.

It is easy to see why Kubrick was drawn to the Napoleonic era. His films, unlike his photographs, love to juxtapose order with chaos: the pristine chateau where the generals plan the battle in Paths of Glory versus the cratered wasteland where the infantrymen carry it out; the spotless spaceships in 2001: A Space Odyssey versus the bone yard where the apes brawl at the dawn of man; the tidy boot camp barracks in Full Metal Jacket versus the charred rubble of Huế City. Napoleonic battles, for this reason, enchanted Kubrick, with their neat rows of troops coming together to blow each other to smithereens. “There’s a weird disparity between the sheer visual and organizational beauty of the historical battles sufficiently far in the past, and their human consequences”, he explained. “It’s rather like watching two golden eagles soaring through the sky from a distance; they may be tearing a dove to pieces, but if you are far enough away the scene is still beautiful.”

She ain’t no maid Asking questions about women on screen

ALICE WADSWORTH

J o y P r e s s S T E A L I N G T H E S H OW How women are revolutionizing television

320pp. Faber. Paperback, £14.99.

978 0 571 34244 0 US: Atria Books. $26. 978 1 5011 3771 6

D i a n a A d e s o l a M a f e WHERE N O B L A C K WOMAN H A S

G O N E B E F O R E

Subversive portrayals in speculative film and TV

184pp. University of Texas Press. Paperback,

$27.95. 978 1 4773 1523 1

Hannah Hogarth – the main character in the HBO television series Girls, played by the show’s chief creator, Lena Dunham – is selfish and opinionated. She is also frequently naked. Dunham has argued that Hannah’s nakedness is important, through posing a challenge to the televisual norm of palatably svelte women. And since Hannah’s nakedness has been much written about, it seems that it has had the desired effect. As Dunham tells Joy Press in Stealing the Show, when it comes to television drama, female sexuality is the “last frontier”.

There have been many others. From the assertive and successful title character of Diane English’s sitcom Murphy Brown (who openly considers both abortion and single parenthood) to the complicated and often unlikeable characters in Girls, Orange Is the New Black (OITNB) and Broad City, Stealing the Show presents television history of recent times as a series of hurdles overcome. Press sets out to tell the stories behind a handful of “iconic” shows. For the most part, this is an act of celebration, relying on interviews and other forms of media coverage, a tale of “televisionaries” and their success stories; they are generally deemed to be above criticism.

Press is perfectly capable of being critical, but she reserves her jabs for predictable foes. When she mentions Christopher Hitchens taking the “women aren’t funny” line and claiming that men prefer women to be their audience rather than their rivals, Press says this merely suggests women can be funny, and that some men find this idea threatening enough to make them subscribe to the hackneyed line. Growing visibility and agency, meanwhile, have led women to “revolutionize” television, overturning the era of the all-male writers’ room and the corresponding dramatic stereotypes. The testimony of showrunners such as Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Ilana Glazer and Amy Schumer, as well as other screenwriters, their assistants, producers and directors, would appear to prove Press’s point.

These success stories are appealing and certain interviews – Kaling’s, in particular – are revealing. As with many overviews, though, Stealing the Show does not give us the full picture. Representations of women on screen have dipped since the turn of the

Nichelle Nichols as Uhura in Star Trek, 1968

millennium, with women comprising only 37 per cent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films of 2017 (14 per cent of these women were black). Writers’ rooms remain predominantly male, as do network executives. Behind the cameras, 94 per cent of women in Hollywood have said that they have experienced sexual harassment or assault.

Focusing on domestic questions such as how certain writers, producers and actors have worked around motherhood, Press tends to relate characters’ and showrunners’ experiences to her own. This tendency may explain her unwillingness to criticize them. Unfortunately, it also prevents her from addressing other issues, such as intersectionality, in greater depth. The shows Press uses as examples challenge a range of female stereotypes, but the preoccupations of some of them – such as “tweepulsive” Jess (Zooey Deschanel, New Girl), a craft-obsessed primary school teacher looking for love, or Liz Lemon (Tina Fey, 30 Rock) who “hoards cheese” and worries about being a “bespectacled loser” – can seem trivial and stuck in the domain of “white feminism”. Press points out that the hypocrisy of Lemon’s “white feminism” becomes one of 30 Rock’s running jokes, but she fails to investigate the concept fully.

White feminism focuses on the concerns of more privileged women and excludes those of women of colour, trans women, genderqueer individuals, sex workers and working-class women. Aside from The Mindy Project (which shares a chapter with 30 Rock and New Girl) and OITNB (produced by, and based on a book by, wealthy white women), shows starring women of colour are generally absent in Stealing the Show. This cannot be because they don’t exist – Dear White People, Insecure, Chewing Gum and Jane the Virgin, to name a few, all feature complex women of colour as

protagonists in non-stereotypical roles.

When Press invokes the alt-right’s hatred of the “cancerous” feminism of Schumer and Dunham, she misses an opportunity to address the qualms of the intersectional feminist community against both of these paragons of white feminism. Girls has been criticized from the start for its lack of characters of colour, and Dunham had to apologize after casting doubt on claims that one of her writers had sexually assaulted a mixed-race actor. Dunham has supported white women’s #MeToo stories.

Schumer is approvingly quoted by Press as having honed the “feminist rape joke” – one sketch on Inside Amy Schumer shows her playing a Call of Duty-style video game in which her avatar is raped, then put through a military trial (a “level” that her boyfriend had never seen). Yet Schumer’s provocative humour doesn’t always punch upwards – “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual”, she said during one stand-up show – and she has not cast men or women of colour in leading roles in her films. Press is selective; she applauds Schumer’s feminized take on toilet humour in her “Milk Milk Lemonade” spoof video while ignoring its uncomfortable context. (Schumer chose to send up a Beyoncé song, from an album lauded for its feminist message, rather than, for example, the objectification of women in videos by her male contemporaries.) Schumer and Dunham may well be the “antiheroes of the middle-American imagination” at the same time as they are high-profile examples of a certain brand of modern feminism: one that sidelines women whose experiences differ from its proponents.

On a related note, Press spends more time discussing the childhood, family life and career arc of OITNB’s (white) producer Jenji Kohan than the controversial content of the

TLS AUGUST 1 7 2 0 1 8

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