The Brave and the Bechdel

Two things happened to me recently: I saw Disney/Pixar's latest offering, Brave, and a friend of mine introduced me to the Bechdel Test.

Very many reviewers have already examined what I noticed about the film - that the story seemed to change style somewhere in the middle. The animation, scenery and general visual effects of the film were all quite breathtaking. However, the apparent shift in storytelling paradigm resulted in a movie that was somewhat less baked than it could have been. The main thematic source of praise for the movie stems from the quite honest and endearing portrayal of the mother-daughter dynamic between the protagonist, Merida, and the queen Elinor.

The film's strength - the relationship between Merida (left) and Queen Elinor (right)

This is where the Bechdel Test comes in.

The Bechdel Test is a simple gender-bias test for movies, born from the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel. To 'pass' the test, a movie is to satisfy three criteria:

1. It has at least two (named) female characters
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man.

At a cursory glance, the test is a very straightforward way to assess the meaningful presence of women in a film. As a statistical tool, it's an uncomfortable yardstick that sees a significant majority falling well short of these criteria (as simple as they may seem). 

Qualitatively, passing the Bechdel Test signifies that there is portrayal of women in the context of something that doesn't center around a male character. This ostensibly means that the movie attempts to address issues for women in a feminist, or at least a non misogynistic manner. (The extent to which this is the case, though, depends on the length of film for which rule 2 is satisfied).

This is where Brave does quite well. It is un-self-consciously about women. And I say 'un-self-consciously' because it addresses a particular issue pertinent to girls and women without the necessary involvement of a man. At it's heart the movie is about two generations of women reaching a better understanding of each other. 

This is in comparison to Disney's Mulan. Although Mulan is film with strong feminist overtones, the film (and indeed the original fable) concentrates on Mulan filling a role traditionally filled by men. This of course puts a strain on Mulan's ability to pass the Bechdel Test - the film's central conflicts are between Mulan and men, or Mulan arguing about men.

Mulan - masquerading in a male dominated world

Although I say that Mulan and other feminist movies like Mulan are self conscious, I do not doubt the meaningfulness with which they portray their female characters. These characters are able to be important role models for young girls and women.

And although I say that Brave is not self conscious, this doesn't necessarily work in its favour. The elephant in the room, that is that a woman should be used as a political bargaining chip, is never directly addressed. Though this issue is resolved in typically cheesy Disney fashion, the essential feminist issue is never looked into.

Merida draws her bow in defiance of her intended role

In a way, examining Disney films for feminism isn't the best way to go about measuring gender bias in modern cinema. Disney represents a particular branch of American mass media intended and manufactured for a very specific demographic. 

This same fact, however, allows Disney to be used as a yardstick of the progression of gender bias in modern cinema. As the tastes of modern Western parenting have become more progressive, so do the production houses that cater to those tastes. If the sample space were more statistically indicative, it would be interesting to see if there were a correlation between children's cinema passing the Bechdel Test, and modern western cinema in general.

Brave is an interesting step forward. Yes, it has a kickass female protagonist. Yes, Merida is strong, independent, believable and relatable.  And yes, the movie focuses on two women and their struggle to identify with each other. That it seems to overlook one or two issues is a problem that can be attributed to the same reason that the movie comes off as slightly a mediocre piece of storytelling. Hanlon's Razor (modified) - the screenplay was just not that good.

PS: For a more in depth treatise of the effectiveness of the Bechdel Test, read The Bechdel Test: What It Is, And Why It Matters by Emily Monaghan on Squarise.com.

Doing Stuff For Free

I've been in a number of situations where I've had to sit down and really question why people would bother volunteering. The most obvious answer to this is purpose and belief - that is, having a firm belief in the mission of the body that you are volunteering for. Falling back on this and this alone, however, has been the downfall of many university based societies that I've witnessed. Not only do you have to put effort into reminding people of this purpose, but you have to put a lot of legwork into making sure that your volunteers are happy campers.

This, then, begs the question - what keeps a person working hard for no pay?

Certain clichés in American High School film tend to portray students who put significant efforts into extra-curricular activities as being inherently self-serving. Community Involvement in a lot of literature has been portrayed as way to accrue entries on a resumé leading to favourable scholarship or employment opportunities.

Whilst I certainly know a few cases where this is only motive, this isn't the case for a lot of people who volunteer their time for clubs and societies. Far from being involved in such things for tangible gain, my experience has led me to believe that the drive to volunteer or be involved is deeply psychological. Many of people I have come across actually express their desire to volunteer as fulfilling much the same psychological needs that would make a paid employee happy in the framework of a bigger company.

The Aspiring Pragmatist explains in her post (on Wikipedia as representative of a new marketing paradigm) that in order for an individual to feel happy they must feel fulfillment in three distinct psychological needs: autonomy, competency and relatedness. That is, feeling like you're in control, feeling like you're able to do something, and feeling that by doing something you will impress yourself upon other people or the world. 

By natural selection, corporate evolution or just plain common sense, it is somewhat fascinating to note successful management of volunteering bodies have more or less pinpointed these exact three things.

Let us start with the easiest to digest - relatedness. Volunteering bodies and extra-curricular activities by their very nature fulfill this psychological need without too much fuss. Putting time into aiding the disabled, protecting the wildlife or even putting a satellite into the sky not only obviously makes you feel as if you're contributing toward something, but also draws you to others who want to achieve similar things. Careful encouragement of purpose and cause reminds volunteers that they are contributing in a meaningful way to something significant. Organisation of social events and fostering a community culture makes people feel as though they've found a fulfilling group of friends.

Competency comes about with somewhat more effort. On a very straightforward level, simply gaining experience in doing certain things, be they directing foot traffic, or cooking meals en masse for the homeless, will increase your feeling of mastery of certain skills. You inevitably gain more and more expertise in the area that you chose to pursue in your activity. In addition to this, many programs offer the opportunity to gain training in entirely new skills altogether. Tangibly, this manifests itself as a significant entry on your resumé as well as being something that you can simply be proud of - a reason to keep on volunteering.

Autonomy is the hardest facet to actualise, though the arguably the most fulfilling. The ability to feel as though you're in control of a situation is hard enough in and of itself, let alone trying to make someone else feel like that. Achieving this successfully however, (the methods by which is a complex field of psychology which I don't have the expertise to go into) is confidence building, character building and opens you up in a way that few other things can. The feeling of being able to do achieve something significant by your own means and solving a problem with your own mind makes you feel profoundly useful.

Beyond the altruism of volunteering, there are benefits to doing so. It makes you feel good, it lets you gain experience in things outside of your normal life and it connects you to people who are enthusiastic enough to do stuff for free. And take it from someone who knows these kinds of people quite personally - they're awesome. And most of the time, you grow to love the cause you're working for - it can be a fundamentally eye opening experience.

Try it out, give some of your free time to a good thing.

I see your film conventions, and I raise you Tarantino

Kill Bill Vol. 1 did two things when it came out in 2003. The first is obvious - a collective parental furor that a movie so violent could be accessible to eager teenage boys. The second is slightly less obvious - intense curiosity brought about by the fact that an entire fight sequence in the film had to be turned to black and white in order to pass censorship. 

My fascination, though, was never to do with the violence in the film or the fact that it got censored - it was the way in which Quentin Tarantino went about bypassing said censorship. Plenty of films in the past have been revised to cut out shots or even entire scenes in order to be approved for general distribution. Tarantino could have easily done this, cut out a few shots of dismembered limbs (or several hundred such shots) and have the film eligible for classification. But he didn't, and that is the whole point of what makes Tarantino films so fascinating.

The Crazy 88s - dismembered in original colour

What Tarantino does best is messing around with our expectations. Instead of doing the usual thing when confronted with the Crazy 88s fight scene, he chose to colour it black and white - and it worked. This, I thought, was beautifully representative of how off-kilter and yet commercially successful Tarantino's film making is. He is a director who does not make films that could be considered conventionally entertaining. Yet his films resonate with a breadth of audience normally associated with big blockbuster Hollywood films. How does he do this? Genre.

He is, as a friend significantly more intelligent than myself put it, "a master of genre".  When we watch movies of a particular genre we know what to expect.  'Revenge Thrillers' we know will fall out in a particular way, and similarly 'sci-fi epics' and 'buddy cop movies' have standard characters and plot devices that we are all familiar with. What Tarantino does, however, is use our knowledge of a particular genre to two particular ends: to skip unnecessary steps in storytelling and then to subvert our expectations from that genre.

 

Reservoir Dogs is an example of Tarantino messing around with plot. The movie is a heist movie where no details about the heist are ever shown. The movie's focus is the personal stories of each of the characters. This fact becomes effective beyond cliché, though, when Tarantino treats the heist as assumed knowledge in order to get on with it. No film making effort is wasted on portraying the planning or the execution of the crime - Tarantino puts all his effort into creating tension and unwrapping the psyche of each of his characters.

Reservoir Dogs - The men, not the crime

Pulp Fiction manages to take a handful of known characters and spin a completely new light on them. In this movie we see armed robbers, gangsters, a mob boss, and a host of other characters that we see in other films and expect to do certain things. Much of the movie, though, acts as a 'what happens when...' for these particular tropes. What happens after an armed robbery when the two thieves decide to stop off in breakfast for a diner? What happens in the car with two gangsters on the way to a job? What do they talk about?

In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino has quite a lot of fun portraying these characters in situations that would never be shown on camera. You would expect to see two gangster hitmen receiving a job, preparing their guns and taking out their targets. Instead you see them talking about holidays in Europe, gossiping about bosses' wives and having to clean up after a non-chalant but very messy mistake with a handgun.

Films that are this unconventional don't generally find the following that Tarantino's films do. Not to say that other indie films haven't found cult followings. But few have been as big commercial successes as Pulp Fiction or Inglorious Basterds, films that made back their budget almost as many times as you can comfortably fold a piece of paper. And he achieves this by essentially exploiting our knowledge of genre conventions and surprising us in the process.

The second big reason he's able to do this (the first being that he is generally quite insane) is that he spent a great deal of his life watching everything. He spent a significant portion of time as a video store clerk, where all he did was watch films, talk about films and observe what other people liked in films. Tarantino as the ultimate consumer has a profound insight into what his audience knows. He uses this with gay abandon to generally bugger about and have lots of fun. We're fortunate that in this process he's turned himself into a successful film maker with lots of films we can enjoy.

I quite like Quentin Tarantino. He's a man who very un-self-consciously took what makes him feel like a little boy and not only turn it into career, but something that he can exhibit and make the rest of us feel like kids, discovering new things and having lots of fun.

Popra

When I walked into uni this morning, I was accosted by a good friend of mine with "Dude, I went on Youtube and looked up Kimbra and it was all girly pop stuff". 

Well, yes.

I would be lying if I said that I had no shame about my love for Kimbra. I'm young, and therefore I have a deep seated desire to be alternative. As wonderfully interesting as her music is, Kimbra is not alternative. This fact was made abundantly clear to me by the demographic of the attendees of her concerts and by the weird looks that my colleagues gave me as I was blaring her music from open-back headphones.

If one were to scroll down and read other articles I have written, you'd see that my music taste is borne from the 'alternative', or rather, music that is not 'pop'. Although Muse, the Arctic Monkeys, Oasis and Led Zeppelin were always hugely popular, they've never been labelled as true 'pop'. Aficionados of this music tend to look with some slight disdain at the throes of young girls flocking to see artists like, well, Kimbra.

As much as I do have a desire to be alternative, I enjoy Kimbra immensely. I even listen to Amy Winehouse, Duffy and even some of Adele - all music that is 'pop'. The very nature of this fact, though, inspires a prejudice against musical integrity that is somewhat unwarranted. And more to the point - pop seems to be dragging itself out of the blandness and back into something a little more interesting.

Kimbra's first album, Vows, is unambiguously a pop record. The production quality, synth tracks, layered vocals, abundance of sounds (that would be hard to recreate live) and general fun air about the music betray it as such. The music has an undeniable flavour about it that appeals to the majority of young people - she came to prominence within the US after one of her tracks was featured on Grey's Anatomy and The Sims.  It's fun and emotionally is accessible enough to quite a lot of people. Such is pop.

There is a stigma, though, that detracts from the fun you can take away from this music. Pop is called pop because it is exactly that - popular. Ergo this music is always a sure money maker for your clichéd record executive who cares not for musical integrity. Two very negative conclusions about pop music are drawn from this fact: 1 - that the music is produced primarily for the purpose of money making and 2 - that it is therefore exploitative of its captive audience.

The alleged malice of 'the corporate machine' aside, the essential gist of the issue that hipsters have with pop music is that musical interestingness is cast aside for a focus on crude and catchy tunes. This point has varying levels of truth with the different examples you choose to examine.

Take your Americana country pop-rock - Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus et al. I don't believe for a minute that these artists set out to be intentionally bland. In fact there's a quiet tragedy to their misguided belief in the idea that their music is powerful, poignant and/or mind-blowing. If anything, though, these artists maintain integrity because for the most part they create music which they truly enjoy. That they are not pushed to be more creative than their peers is the fault of us, our culture and what we choose to accept and pour money into.

The trashier artists, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha and Britney Spears are somewhat exploitative. The lyrics and the beat of the music are meant to appeal to a very visceral and basic part of our minds. The music of large parties and dance floors where you don't want to think, you just want to move. The ability to create this effect is a musical skill in its own right. Again, it's not that it's terrible, it's just never appealed to anything inside of me.

In a nutshell, pop music for the most part represents music that has gone far enough for us to accept it. It's only unfortunate to people with particular tastes that this is either not far enough, or is an entirely different place for them to enjoy the music.

So why my love for Kimbra?

I have a weakness

It becomes apparent in live performances how much of a musical tour-de-force this young kiwi girl is. Her contemporaries, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and others, for all their vocal talent, are never able to actualise that individuality of voice or performance in any musical way. Lady Gaga is very much a performer who relies upon the visual spectacle of her shows and her person. She is someone who must be in costume everywhere she goes. This, ultimately, is why many people are attracted to her and listen to her music.

On the other hand, Kimbra's musical offerings are laced with genuinely quite amazing vocal acrobatics and personal flair. Yes, her music like all other pop music is laced with back-up vocal tracks and effects. But those vocal tracks are all her - and they're amazing. Her vocal control and range aside, what she is able to sing, the varying texture of her voice and the energy that she very obviously puts into every performance is similarly amazing. 

Prominence and uniqueness in vocal ability is seemingly making something of a comeback in pop. The late Amy Winehouse being the prime example, and the somewhat mixed Duffy and Adele following in her wake. These artists, like Kimbra and unlike the others I've mentioned, place a strong emphasis on being able to sing in a unique and ultimately very pleasing way. Such that Amy Winehouse recorded a live cover of the motown classic "I Heard it On The Grapevine" and Adele regularly performs soul legend Sam Cooke's "That's it, I Quit, I'm moving on". These are classic, blues and soul pieces relying on their singers' command of the scale to make the song interesting.

What set's Kimbra apart, though, is that she can compose. A quick examination of the CD jacket from Vows (which, yes, I own), reveals that she is the chief songwriter for almost all her songs. This, from a 22 year old singing her debut album is quite impressive. Considering the quality and variation of the music on the record, it speaks of a musical creativity to be reckoned with. Vows is a collection of the most diverse and varied songs I've ever seen on a single CD for a fairly long time.

Yes, Kimbra is pop music. But pop music can be good, and this is it.

PS - Yes. It's been a while. Dw I'm back. Weekly.