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[Movie] Happiest Season

Just for shits and giggles I watched Happiest Season last night. It’s a gay Christmas romcom that’s available on Hulu. Abby (Kristen Stewart) normally just stays by herself and pet watches over Christmas since her parents died when she was 19, but this year her girlfriend, Harper (Mckenzie Davis) asks her to come home and meet her family. Except when they’re on their way to the nameless, picturesque New England town full of rich people Harper is from, the drops a bomb: she’s not actually out to her family, and she promises she’ll come out to them after the holidays, but her dad is using this Christmas season to try to impress donors (he’s a local politician) so can Abby please just pretend to be her straight roommate? Hijinks ensue. I laughed a reasonable amount and there were only a few times there was enough embarassment that I wanted to hide under a blanket, which is pretty good for a comedy.

I want to say this is probably the first movie I’ve seen Kristen Stewart in where she’s gotten to act like an actual human being, and I am into it. (Also, her Actual Lesbian costuming throughout the whole movie is *chef kiss.*) Honestly, everyone in the movie turns in a good performance, but I feel like Mary Steenburgen as Harper’s mom, Tipper, and Mary Holland as her slightly weird I’ve-been-working-on-a-second-world-fantasy-novel-for-ten-years-let-me-tell-you-about-it younger sister Jane are both total stand outs as well. And Daniel Levy as John, Abby’s flamingly gay best friend, was my absolute favorite character of the film.

But the big draw of the movie is that it’s presented as a very mainstream Christmas romcom, but it’s about a lesbian couple figuring their shit out, combined with a coming out story for Harper. It’s by no means the first LGBTQ romcom out there–to even imply that would be an insult to all the movies that came before–but it’s definitely in a very small vanguard of what could be considered mainstream along with Love, Simon.

I think what Happiest Season brings to the table (other than putting Kristen Stewart in the lesbian formal uniform of a snazzy jacket with an untied tie and a shirt unbuttoned halfway down her chest out there to make people question their sexuality) is its focus being more on the family comedy aspects than the romantic comedy aspects. For me, the biggest suspension of disbelief lift the movie has was believing the tortured logic of trying to believe Harper had good intentions of inviting Abby into her miserable, closeted homelife and then springing it on her in the car. I honestly still don’t buy the setup situation.

But once you get Harper into her family environment, her being so closeted mostly makes sense. It’s very much a wealthy white family story (for which it can and should rightly be criticised) but you get to see Harper basically regress into a child competing with her sibling Sloane (Alison Brie) for the affection of their parents, while Jane just desperately wants to be included in anything because she’s the family weirdo. It feels well established that their dad, Ted (Victor Garber), is very much the big fish in a little pond, and while it seems ridiculous that him being a city council member and wanting to run for mayor is so all consuming if the town is that small, we’re also apparently talking a town of very rich white people.

In a way, the setup is an interesting construction on why someone might not be out even if they’re not surrounded by overt, violent homophobes. Sloane’s been heaped with praise for getting married and having kids (even as she is disaparaged for having given up her legal career); you get the impression that not being heterosexual isn’t even an option that was presented to Harper until she got out of the house. Risking losing her parents is also a non-option for Harper for most of the movie, because she’s been so programmed by her upbringing to at all times be trying to earn their love. And there are plenty of homophobic dog whistles thrown in as well. The two that stand out to me is Tipper mentioning Riley’s (the town’s token lesbian, played by Aubrey Plaza) previous relationship  as a “lifestyle choice” with dismissive horror. And of course, Harper’s dad makes a country club speech where he makes statements about not letting “depravity” into the town. Theirs is the genteel homophobia of rich conservative people who just see themselves as protecting their “way of life.” On the other hand, I think it’s something that probably could have been–and would have been if this was a family drama instead of a romcom–developed more and explored more, but part of the problem is that you need a happy ending when it’s a romcom. And for this kind of movie, mainstream and presented for viewing by non-queer audiences, the happy ending needs to be Harper’s parents being able to get over it and invite Abby into their family. At the end, you’re left wondering if Ted even really believes all that shit about “depravity” and he’s struggled to reconfigure his understanding of the world in approximately twelve hours or if it’s something he’s just been saying because he’s not nearly as much of a bigot as the donors he’s been trying to woo.

It’s a generally fun movie and as a romcom you know how it’s going to end. Abby and Harper make a cute couple, even if watching Harper devolve as one sometimes does around one’s family makes both the viewer and Abby question why the hell they’re in a relationship in the first place. The movie still mostly worked for me, even if I think it could have used a little more establishment of Abby and Harper’s relationship before throwing a wrench into the works. If you like romcoms of this sort, give it a whirl, though I had to do some work at the end to actually want Abby and Harper to stay together.

There’s one other thing I want to talk about, which could be considered a spoiler so I’m going to put it below the fold.

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In the Belly of the Beast

Dark Waters is one hell of a movie. In the film sub-sub-genre of “corporate malfeasance thrillers,” it stands apart as singularly gritty, grinding, and unflinching in its refusal to manufacture drama beyond what’s already waiting in the life and death reality of an entire town being poisoned by a corporate giant. It even makes a point of how banal and drawn out the crime and the cover up is; the timeline of the film covers sixteen years on the same case. There are endless scenes of Mark Ruffalo shuffling through paper as Du Pont tries to bury him in discovery, long shots of the countryside, long moments where the characters are silent and contemplative. It’s a massive compliment to the director and the cast that the film is still gripping and upsetting even as it documents the deliberate, foot-dragging slow walk of Du Pont to the court room.

The movie is based on this massively long and horrifying New York Times article: The Lawyer Who Became Du Pont’s Worst Nightmare

And what it’s about is something that is happening, right now and will continue happening throughout our lives because it involves a chemical that the body doesn’t get rid of recently. My housemate is actually a technician in a lab that does water testing; just a few weeks ago she was telling me that they’re working on procedures for testing for PFOS, which is the killing vector at the heart of Dark Waters.

Incidentally, the EPA just set the safe level of PFOS (or PFOA or C-8 as its called in the movie) at 70 parts per trillion or 0.07 parts per billion, which makes the scene in Dark Waters where a West Virginia government scientist says they’re going to “unveil” a safe level of 150 parts per billion after consulting with Du Pont even more horrifying.

What really struck me about Dark Waters is its inclusion of the absolute cognitive dissonance most working people in America–and probably the rest of the world–live with every day. Anyone who has paid even minor attention to the news, to events around them, knows that large corporations are not to be trusted. That pharmaceutical companies actively push addictive medications that have caused an epidemic of deaths. That oil companies knew for decades that the carbon economy that made them rich was and still is causing global climate change. That chemical companies poison towns. That auto companies cover up their unsafe products. And on, and on. We all know these things. We all know that corporations are not looking out for us, never have, and never will.

Corporations do not care about us, but almost all of us are dependent on them in some way for our livelihood. Corporations do not care about us, but we are also aware that we are each a small part of those corporations. We are good people; corporations are run by people just like us, who make decisions every day just like us, and we don’t want to hurt anyone. Corporations do horrible, destructive, deadly things, and by being dependent on them, employed by them, how much of that sin might roll downhill to rest on our shoulders?

That’s what Dark Waters shows us, again and again. When Mark Ruffalo says, without any irony at all, that he’s sure Du Pont will want to know if they find out someone at the plant is doing things wrong. When a resident of the town says that she’s sure her blood test will show nothing is wrong, because “Du Pont is good people.” When the lawsuit against the company makes someone in town angry enough to try to burn the lead plaintiff’s house down, as if they’re the one that’s hurt people, not the chemical giant that’s letting its chemical waste leach into the wells and streams.

All of those moments rang horribly true to me, because I’ve witnessed similar ones every time I’ve worked in connection with the petroleum industry. Some in the industry are dedicated climate change deniers, and I think that’s in a large part because it’s easier than facing the truth that you’ve made a good living by selling the future of your great-great-grandchildren. Some are sure that the ingenuity of humanity will find an exist from this road to hell, and in the meantime, they have car payments. I’ve witnessed people say, unironically, that of course we could trust self-reported health and safety data from a company, because don’t they want to do things right? Don’t they want to look out for their employees?

(And if the company is looking out for their employees, they certainly don’t need a union. Don’t be silly. Just like the company knows its own business better than the wasteful, ineffective, silly government that just gets in the way of progress. Companies can regulate themselves; they don’t want to hurt people, right?)

The level of historical amnesia that can strike anyone when it comes to pursuing their livelihood is breathtaking. It’s frustrating. And perhaps it’s horrifyingly necessary for mental integrity in the modern world. Yes, we know that company cut corners and caused an explosion that killed people, but that was an isolated incident; that was bad people who made mistakes; we’re all good people here, aren’t we?

The greatest horror of all of it is that we don’t have a choice when it comes to participating. The corporation that poisons your water might be the only employer in town. What do you do then? Do you believe the news and still find the strength to go to work, because the kids need to be fed, even knowing that what you’re doing in some way might be killing yourself, killing them, killing your neighbor? And if you quit your job, what then? You still need to eat, and someone else will take your place because they need to eat, too, and the machine will grind on, belching poison into the sky and leaking it into the soil because the primacy of profit is far more reliable in the corporate world than taxes.

Dark Waters is framed as a thriller, but in its heart I read it as a story of existential horror. We all live in the belly of that beast. We all depend on what is killing us in the long term to survive in the short term. The one glimmer of light we’re offered is the fact that we have each other–and maybe that can be enough. That the system is rigged but the fight can succeed, as we stagger over the finish line half dead, the bodies of our friends left where they’ve fallen.

Maybe the greatest lie we’ve ever been told is that there is no escape from the monster that has swallowed us whole. But pretending that escape is easy or painless would be a lie almost as great; we’re not goats trapped in the stomach of the Big Bad Wolf, waiting for a hero to cut him open and release us. The path to freedom will be much more bloody and difficult, and all we have are our hands and each other.

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[Movie] Jojo Rabbit

I don’t think there are a whole lot of directors I’d trust to make a funny movie that involves Nazis, but Taika Waititi has earned it. Though now I keep wondering: a) Has Mel Brooks seen this movie? and b) Did he love it as much as I hope he did? Because Jojo Rabbit is fucking hilarious, and there are a few scenes that are just straight out of the Mel Brooks playbook. But it’s also incredibly uncomfortable to watch at times, and heartbreaking. Which is how it should be, I think.

Jojo Rabbit is about a ten-year-old German boy named Johannes in the waning days of World War II. Johannes is part of the Hitler Youth, wants to be a good Nazi, and has Adolph Hitler (played by Taika Waititi himself) as his imaginary friend. After accidentally blowing himself with a grenade at what’s effectively Nazi Boy Scout Camp, Jojo despairingly concludes he’ll never get to go to war and die gloriously for Germany, so he’ll have to do what he can for the cause at home. But then he discovers that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl named Elsa in the walls of their house, and he has to make some tough decisions.

I’ve already said that this movie is funny, so I don’t need to go on and on about it. Explaining all the jokes is not something we need to do–though I think it’s worth noting that some of the best moments of humor are ones I also found deeply uncomfortable because there is, obviously, so much Nazi imagery in this movie. Taika Waititi playing a ten-year-old’s mental vision of Hitler, going from cheerful and puppyish to deeply threatening and angry when Jojo starts to lose his faith is something to behold. There is so much in this movie about the indoctrination of children that took place, the absolutely ridiculous propoganda that props up authoritarian figures, and the death cult of fascism. While it treats the subjects with humor, it also never lets you forget that this shit actually happened and is still happening, that it’s both ridiculous from the outside view and deeply destructive and terrible. It’s a movie that asks via Elsa and Jojo’s mother Rosie how someone can be saved from this indoctrination, when there are only a few tentative voices to speak out against the collective removal from reality. Rosie is afraid to tell her son anything, though she does her best to remind him of who he was before the Nazi’s started to take him away from her. At one point, Elsa tells Jojo that he’s not really a Nazi; he’s a young boy that wants to put on a costume and be part of a club. She’s both mocking him and offering him a bridge out of the ideological tar pit he’s mired in, if he can bring himself to take it.

So particularly in that aspect, Jojo Rabbit is a social commentary that is relevant to the modern world.

Elsa is a great character; she’s someone fighting to survive at all costs, and manages Jojo by threatening him rather than trying to appeal to humanity it’s not immediately apparent he has. Her moments of conversation with Rosie, when they both are quietly at their most hopeless, show two women figuring out how to make it through another day. Rosie is also wonderful; she’s trying to save her son and also keep him safe from her own decisions, and also be a single mom. She and Jojo claim his father is off fighting for Germany, while Jojo’s fellow Nazis claim he’s a traitor.

I think the main complaint to have about Jojo Rabbit is that it doesn’t really touch on the true horror of war or the Holocaust; the closest we get is at one point Elsa tells Jojo that the last she ever saw of her parents, they were being put on a train; they were sent to a place that no one ever returns from. It’s a weirdly shy and bloodless way to refer to mass murder, and I’m still not sure why that decision was made. Maybe it’s because we’re really seeing most of the movie through Jojo’s eyes (which might be why the color story is so picture-book-like); in the sea of propoganda that Jojo and his fellows are swimming in, going to war is an abstract goal and Germany is Totally Winning. Which is why the few scenes of any kind of brutality or dirtiness–when the other Hitler Youth try to get Jojo to kill a rabbit, when Jojo sees the people who have been hanged, when there’s a truckload of wounded soldiers coming back from the war who are dirty and bloody–seem almost out of place. They’re not something Jojo can really process.

That might be why I wasn’t actually expecting the emotional gut-punch that the film ultimately delivers. Beneath the brightly-colored production design (which is at times almost cartoonish), it asks what good people should do in times like these. There’s a moment early on in the film when Rosie and Jojo are walking through the town together and they see other Germans who have been publicly hanged, flagged with pronouncements that they are traitors.

Jojo: What did they do, mama?

Rosie: What they could.

I won’t go into spoiler territory, but Jojo Rabbit offers that acts of heroism are not big, or flashy, or particularly glorious.  That small acts of resistance have meaning.

I really liked the movie and am going to be thinking about it for quite some time to come, but I definitely don’t think it’s going to work for everyone. I’ll also note that there’s a lot of ableist language in it (Jojo becomes disabled after the aforementioned “blowing himself up with a grenade” thing and living in a society that obviously hates physical imperfection) and a lot of racist and anti-Semitic slurs. Par for the course when the topic is Nazis, but also not stuff I expect everyone to be fine with going into their ear-holes.

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The Importance of [Scary] Stories

I grew up on Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I didn’t find the stories that scary (though some of them were very gross), but the pictures that went with the original editions absolutely haunted me. I ultimately decided that seeing this movie might not actually kill me because after watching the TV spots, the glimpses of the monsters we got didn’t scare the bejeesus out of me like the old pictures did.

Now, from the other side of the movie theater, I’m pleased to report that as expected, I am still alive.  Which is not to say that this movie isn’t scary. It depends mostly on the combination of jump scare/dread of knowing that a jump scare is coming. Which it uses very effectively. It had me scrunching down into my seat and on a couple occasions covering my eyes (because yes, I’m still ten years old), and at one point I wanted to just scream at the movie to get it over with, we know the ghost is coming. Kudos to director André Øvredal for knowing just how long to hold a scare and then holding it even longer. There’s also a couple of pretty gross bits. Yet it also all still feels in keeping with the audience for the book; there’s something juvenile about it, and I don’t mean that as an insult. Like if you took the old Goosebumps TV series and ratcheted it up to a PG-13 with a good effects budget.

Part of that is the visual feel of the movie. Guillermo del Toro was a third of the screenwriting crew and produced the movie, but you can see some of his aesthetic sensibility in there. It’s a movie that’s not afraid of saturated, warm colors, or the grotesque that leans toward the ridiculous, or solid and intricate props. Watching it, there are times when everything is a little too clean, or the cobwebs are a little too artfully placed, and you see the artifice of it while knowing simultaneously that the movie intends for you to understand it’s the fantasy of a small town in Pennsylvania. It’s like someone scrubbed away the little bit of dirt Stranger Things calls its own and subtracted a couple of decades off the year it’s supposed to be taking place in.

Where reality deliberately intrudes is in the background, in grainy television images and by the radio. The Vietnam War is going on, somewhere out there. Richard Nixon is getting elected while claiming that he definitely doesn’t want to bomb anyone. (The first you see of Nixon in the movie are posters of him where the “x” in his name has been drawn into a swastika.) Boys with similar hair cuts and cookie-cutter letterman jackets are signing up to go to war as soon as school is done. Against that backdrop, Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti) and her two friends Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Chuck (Austin Zajur) are taking their last shot at Halloween revenge against the town juvenile asshole, Tommy (Austin Abrams). Their trick backfires and leads them to meeting Ramón (Michael Garza), a young Latino just passing through town and claiming that he’s a farm worker following the harvest. After escaping Tommy, the four decide to go to the town’s haunted house, where a girl named Sarah Bellows was locked in the basement by her family and killed other children by telling them scary stories through the wall. They find a book that belonged to Sarah and Stella takes it home–and that’s where the scary stuff really gets started. Stories write themselves into the book, picking off Stella’s friends one by one.

It’s a fun movie. It’s also got a lot more meat on its bones than you’d think, considering the source material. Which is honestly what I’d expect from something Guillermo del Toro is involved with; his greatest skill is in telling brutal fairy tales that have layers of meaning to them. Consider just the character of Ramón; he’s the outsider to the town, the only non-white person in the main cast. The movie doesn’t shy away from his fear of the police (which has multiple levels), the slurs that get hurled his way, or the assumptions made about him because of his skin color (relevant plot point: Ramón is plainly an American citizen); it’s all immensely relevant to the current political climate. As the town gets more and more concerned about the disappearances of its children, throwing itself into superficial activities such as searches that don’t actually address the problem, the adults a pointedly unconcerned with listening to the fears of Stella or Ramón. (Generational divide, anyone?)

I want to dig in a little more here, which is going to involve LOTS OF SPOILERS. Continue below the fold at your own risk.

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[Movie] Crawl

This is going to be a challenge to myself: I want to talk about a movie that I enjoyed, but it’s not some kind of screaming glee of OMG THIS IS THE BEST EVER. It’s way easier to talk about things when you really love them, and easiest of all to brutally ice pick a movie that you loathe. But Crawl was just kind of fun, you know? It was one of those movies that knows exactly what kind of move it is, leans into it, has a good time, and then wings away into the night, satisfied at a job well done.

What’s it about? It’s a downright claustrophobic story with only two real characters (the other humans are mostly there to be reptile chow). Kaya Scodelario plays Haley, a young woman on the college swim team who’s starting to doubt herself, and Barry Pepper plays her dad Dave. The two have been a bit estranged since Dave and Haley’s mom got divorced. But Haley, prompted by her older sister Beth, drives down to check on their dad in the middle of a hurricane, because he’s not answering his phone. She finds him in the world’s most ridiculous crawlspace, unconscious because he’s been savagely attacked by an alligator–which is after Haley now, too. It’s up to Haley to save the day with guts, determination, and her plot-relevant swimming skills.

Crawl is very much a monster movie in the classic sense. You start off with the monster (in this case, extremely hungry alligators plus a hurricane) as a distant threat that gets ever closer, and worse, and then there’s an epic, cathartic battle to be had. I think what helps up the tension in Crawl is that it’s so. damn. claustrophobic. Even when the monsters are at their furthest (and fewest), you can still feel them breathing down the back of your neck. Most of the movie takes place in the house’s labyrinthine crawlspace that looks like it should be home to the world’s shortest serial killer. Haley and Dave have to thread themselves around pipes, avoid the monsters in the maze, and do all of this while crouching in a space that’s filling with water at an accelerating rate–did I mention the hurricane? They sneak, they run, they hide, they go through multiple try-fail cycles where the failure is more urgent and devestating with each iteration. Oh yeah, and they have a dog (who is super cute and named Sugar) in the movie too, so be ready to have constant anxiety about that. The only break in the claustrophobic tension of the crawlspace is the occasional view outside, where we see potential human rescuers get gloriously nommed by ever-increasing swarms (packs? whatever.) of alligators.

What makes the movie really work is the extreme closeness of the emotional story. It’s a pretty small, simple one–Haley and Dave need to sort out the tangled mess between them, caused by Dave pushing Haley too hard to compete when she was a child, and Haley blaming Dave for the family falling apart. They’re shoved into a small space together and threatened with toothy death on every side, so as they try to come up with new ideas to save themselves, they also try to come to peace with each other in case it doesn’t work. Perhaps shockingly for a monster movie that takes itself with a deliberate slice of narrative cheese, the emotional story really works and really resonates. I cared about Haley and Dave, who are actually smart and competent people in a shitty situation; they never made me root for their bloody demise. All credit goes to the actors on this one; in the hands of others, it could have become downright cringey instead of heartfelt.

So see this one if you like monster movies. And like with many monster movies that don’t use supernatural monsters, you just have to come in with a willing suspension of disbelief. Sure, that’s not normal alligator behavior. Sure, category five hurricanes don’t work like that. Sure, it makes no architectural sense to have an elaborate crawlspace in a flood-prone state with a notoriously high water table. I’m still personally trying to make sense of the scene involving the drain, where the house seems to be attached to a boundless void that alligators can hang out and raise their families in. All of that stuff is really beside the fucking point, though, and I think it’s another factor in Crawl‘s favor that I’m happy to grant its alternate reality because it sets up such a fun, self-contained movie.

Long live the apex predator.

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[Movie] Detective Pikachu

And lo, I saw the Detective Pikachu movie even though I don’t really go here. My exposure to the Pokémon canon basically starts and stops with Pokémon Go! because I’ll take any excuse I can get to do some extra walking. (I used to play Ingress, actually, but the Go players are way less intense and scary and I count there not being a chat feature as a serious bonus.) I mostly went because my housemate has been playing Pokémon since forever, and her enthusiasm’s pretty infectious.

It’s cute, y’all. It’s really, really cute. I am particularly susceptible to uncanny valley CGI, and Detective Pikachu actually managed to skirt around that totally. The only pokémon I found particularly creepy were Mr. Mime and Lickitung, and… I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be creepy. The film is also gorgeously shot; it was done in 35mm instead of digital, and the colors are just rich and wonderful. Apparently the cinematographer wanted it to look like Blade Runner and I cannot tell you how much I love the juxtaposition of the two films in my head now.

The plot’s pretty simple: Tim Goodman (played excellently by Justice Smith) has been long estranged from his police detective father–and has also given up his childhood dream of being a pokémon trainer to become an insurance adjuster. Then he’s brought to Ryme City, where pokémon and humans coexist as equal partners, by news that his father has died. When he goes to clear out his dad’s apartment, he discovers a mysterious substance… and a dear-stalker-wearing pikachu who can talk like a human (Ryan Reynolds, in particular) and insists they need to work together to investigate the disappearance of Tim’s dad. Along the way, he meets news intern Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton), who is looking for story to break.

Like I said, it’s cute. The plot isn’t particularly twisty, and it doesn’t have to be. It’s there to get us from pokémon to pokémon, and it works. What I was really impressed by was how well and succinctly the film handled world-building and information dumps that really didn’t feel like information dumps. As someone who wasn’t really into the games, I know I definitely missed some in-jokes. But at no point was I ever lost about what was going on. I’ve been reliably told there’s one sort of pokémon versus pokémon fight that didn’t quite work mechanically, but who knows, maybe that was even a thing in there to give the nitpickers something to have fun with.

So yeah. Fun, kids safe, still amusing for adults. Not much more I could ask for. Well, except for one thing, which I will put behind the cut because IT’S A SPOILER.

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[Movie] Avengers: Endgame

This post is nothing but atomic spoilers for Avengers: Endgame. 

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A Place for Spoilery Us Screaming

I’m going to put all my screaming about this movie in the comments of this post, because it contains ATOMIC SPOILERS. If you want to read my non-spoilery short thoughts, I made a public post on Patreon about it here.

(Comment moderation has been temporarily turned off so people can talk more freely. Please no one make me regret it!)

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The Feminism of Captain Marvel

Surprising no one, I fucking loved Captain Marvel. I’m tentatively saying it’s my third favorite MCU movie after Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther, but I’ll need to see it a few times to be sure. It’s kind of arm wrestling with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Which it honestly has a lot in common with, in the sense that it has an incredibly strong emotional arc for the main character, and in Captain Marvel’s case, it’s not your typical someone struggling with becoming a hero and the responsibilities of their newfound power thing that happens in most first movies for a superhero character.

This is because when we first see her, Carol Danvers is already a hero. She’s already powerful. And she knows it. It’s not about her trying to slot newfound power into an identity she already has, but rather her fighting bare-fisted to establish her own identity around what everyone else wants her to be.

I’m not here to talk about the cinematography of the film or the fight scenes or the rest of it. If you’ve seen an MCU film before, you already know what you’re getting in that regard. What I want to talk about is how feminist the movie is. And I mean REALLY feminist, and not in the superficial way we’re used to seeing “feminism” and female “strength” depicted in action properties that more often than not involves a male director and a male writer deciding that the best way for a woman to be strong is to put on leather pants and commit a lot of violence, unsubtly rejecting femininity as a whole.

This is not to say that Carol Danvers is particularly girly as a character. In fact, she’s depicted as being quite a tomboy. But the point in Captain Marvel is that her being a tomboy who grew up with dirt in her hair isn’t what makes her powerful. It’s just part of who she is, and there’s no judgment on it either way, from the character or through the lens of the film. Her ability to commit violence and the raw power she has access to, while useful, is also very much not the point.

But what I really want to dig into means SPOILERS. So continue at your own risk. Or go see the movie and come back, I’ll still be here.

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I have a lot of feelings about Dumplin’

I saw Dumplin’ on Netflix last weekend thanks to Sarah Gailey, and I’m glad since I might never have gotten around to it otherwise.

If you don’t know about Dumplin’, it’s about a fat girl named Willowdean (Danielle MacDonald) who is the daughter of a former beauty queen (Rosie, played by Jennifer Aniston) who is still deeply embedded in the pageant circuit and culture. As you can imagine, mother and daughter have some conflicting interests. Willowdean was much closer to her Aunt Lucy (Hilliary Begley), a beautiful and vivacious fat woman who instilled in her an absolute love of Dolly Parton… and who had recently died. In an act of grief and defiance, Willowdean decides to enter this year’s beauty pageant, along with her best friend Ellen (Odeya Rush), and two girls who also definitely don’t fit the pageant scene: defiantly queer Hannah (Bex Taylor-Klaus), and Millie (Maddie Baillio) who is extremely earnest about everything and also a fat girl.

So basically I’m going to spoil everything about this movie, so just go and watch it because it’s really fucking good.

Any movie that involves fat characters, especially fat female characters, is one I approach with caution. I’ve been burned way too many times by narratives that hinge on a girl “becoming” beautiful by losing weight. Or by the fat girl being the thin girl’s accessory. Or by the fat girl being the butt of the jokes instead of the one who makes them. Add that the whole thing centers around a beauty pageant and I would have been wary about picking it up on my own.

But the thing about Dumplin’ is that it’s one of those movies that constantly defies the expectations that have been drilled into us as an audience. For example, I spent the whole movie expecting Willowdean’s love interest Bo (Luke Benward), who is a traditional white teen guy hottie, to turn on her and be using her to score points, or because he expects her to be easy, or any of the horrible stuff that normally happens to fat girl characters. And it never happens. Bo’s earnest, and good, and… well, getting in to my own feelings as a fat person, there’s an amazing scene where Willowdean asks him why the hell he would want to be with her considering how she looks. Which is one of those moments where the movie got just too fucking real. I’ve had that conversation before. I’ve felt the disbelief that even when someone says they like you for your whole self, you think that can’t possibly be true. Willowdean’s someone that’s grown up in the same fat-hating culture as the rest of us (and it’s on display in the movie in horrible, familiar ways), with the added fun of having an image-conscious, incredibly thin mother.

(A mother who eagerly blames Aunt Lucy’s death on the fact that she was fat in an argument I felt like a punch in the gut.)

The movie does that with a lot of choices, taking the unexpected route that steps around cheap inter-character drama rather than following the familiar tropes. It’s also a massive meditation on friendship, and the strength of bonds between girls. We see Willowdean and her friend Ellen grow up together, solid friends into their teens. Ellen decides to participate in the pageant earnestly, and not as a way to try to destroy it. She and Willowdean get in a pretty nasty argument about things, where Willowdean basically calls out Ellen for being thing and says that people who look like Ellen (beautiful in a conventional sense) don’t have a place in the revolution.

The easy and expected route would be for them to be at odds for the rest of the movie. Instead, Willowdean apologizes and says she misses Ellen. And Ellen accepts the apology but says she’s still too mad to talk immediately… and Willowdean respects it. Then later, they’re back to being arm and arm, facing the world together. Like holy fucking shit, give me some more friendship like that. Give me teen girls having each other’s backs, because it’s them against the world. Give me teen girls that know they have different experiences of the world and use that difference to be even closer. I’m tearing up just thinking about it, because it was beautiful.

The sort of open heart that the film has about teen girls/young women being complex people with deep inner lives really does extend outside of Ellen and Willowdean. Millie is an actual precious cinnamon roll in human form, yet she is also without a doubt the most absolutely determined and implacable character on screen. Hannah’s a fucking adorable baby queer trapped in a small town, who goes from doing everything with full, angry irony to finding her own balance of earnest participation and still absolutely being herself. Watching Hannah and Millie become friends in the background is a fucking amazing story on its own. (And I would also totally ship it.)

And even the rest of the girls in the pageant aren’t reduced to caricature even if we don’t know their stories. It’s another moment where the film could have taken the expected route, making a bunch of teenage pageant participants into raging, catty bitches, and sidesteps that. They’re welcoming, and they believe in what they’re doing. Hell, there’s a scene where Willowdean shows her talent (a magic trick) in front of everyone and I wanted to die of transmitted embarrassment because she does so badly… which is the point because at that point, she’s not taking things seriously and hasn’t practiced. But the scene is actually a thousand times more uncomfortable not because the girls in the audience are being nasty, but because they convey that they really want her to do better, and that’s so much worse.

The movie does critique pageant culture for the way it excludes fat girls and is often used to make them feel worse about themselves. The scene where Willowdean signs up for the pageant, where the women in charge make it very clear that she does not belong here with tone and expression, is exactly what you’d expect. Yet the critique comes from a place of love rather than misogyny, which is where a lot of criticism of pageants loses its way. It’s possible to criticize fat-shaming and promotion of eating disorders without denigrating the idea that some people might find embracing that branch of femininity, with its sparkling dresses, empowering.

Ultimately, Dumplin’ embraces the beauty pageant as a place that allows Millie particularly to realize her potential by singing her heart out and looking goddamn fabulous in a dress. It touches on how important events like that can be in fairly small towns–so big in a girl’s life that even twenty-some years later, it’s the biggest accomplishment that Rosie’s ever had and it’s made her dedicate herself to shepherding other girls that way. And it presents its own vision of the world as it should be, with Millie placing in the pageant to thunderous applause because she goddamn well deserves it.

Which curiously, circles back around to Aunt Lucy, whose presence never leaves the film. Rosie has hit the stage of grief where she wants to get rid of Lucy’s old possessions; Willowdean isn’t quite there yet, which is another point of friction. And she wants to find a broach of Lucy’s that looks like a bee, something she always wore. Willowdean joins the pageant on a half-formed whim when she finds some paperwork among the boxes that shows Aunt Lucy was going to do the pageant the same year Rosie did… and mysteriously dropped out. The natural assumption in that moment is that Lucy didn’t make it into the pageant because of her weight… and so Willowdean decides to do it herself, to complete her lost aunt’s dream and to also get a kind of revenge, since Willowdean believes the pageant is bullshit and wants to prove it.

What we eventually come to find is that Lucy dropped out of the pageant not because she was forced out, but because the family couldn’t afford even one suitable dress, and so she dropped out and made one for Rosie herself–the one Rosie still wears every year. And in the end, Willowdean finds her own meaning in the pageant by embracing it to the point that she gets herself disqualified by doing an unapproved and incredible magic performance. Which sure seems like something that would have made Lucy proud, while still being very Willowdean. And Rosie finds she can no longer fit into her teen pageant dress… but she goes on stage (in a borrowed dress) wearing Lucy’s broach. Both of them are letting go, and changing, and still keeping the person they loved in their life in a positive way.

All this, and you get Dolly Parton drag queens too. And a ton of great Dolly Parton songs. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier. I just have a lot of feelings, okay?