Cliffhangers aren't cowardice (but catharsis can be)

James Gandolfini, Edie Falco and Robert Iler in the series finale of HBO's The Sopranos.

A few days ago, historian Andrew Roberts wrote an absolutely confounding piece for the Daily Beast calling for an end to unresolved movie endings. (The piece can be found here, but be warned; there are spoilers for The Grey, Rampart, Footnote and The Italian Job, among others). Roberts begins his article by calling unresolved endings "a curious malaise born of cultural decadence," and ends it by accusing those cavalier, amoral directors who film movies with cliffhanger endings of "sheer directorial moral cowardice" in their apparent quest to deny the good people of the moviegoing public "the catharsis they've paid their $13 to experience."

First of all, who the fuck is charging $13 for movie tickets?! I thought my local theater was gouging me with $11 tickets, but apparently it could actually be worse if I, like Roberts, lived in London. It's enough to make me want to move back to Utah, where ticket prices are hanging out around $8.50 (which, of course, I thought was totally unreasonable when I lived there. Times change.)

More importantly, however, Roberts' claim that directors who choose to end their films without resolving the plot are moral cowards is wrong-headed. He claims that endings that are unresolved are "shortchanging the moviegoing public, which has the perfect right to see good behavior rewarded and bad behavior punished." For good measure, he adds that "all the great filmmakers of the past" understood and respected this supposed audience "right" to a happy ending.

Women are misrepresented in the media: is this really a surprise?

Photo courtesy of sfwire.com

There's been a lot of talk about the representation of women in media, talk that is largely centered around Jennifer Newsom's documentary Miss Representation, which premiered on OWN last night. Everyone from FOX News to The Daily Beast has written about the film, detailing the disheartening influence that portrayals of women on TV, in films and in magazines have on women of all ages. The comments from young girls who are interviewed in the film are certainly heartbreaking; no woman should spend all her time obsessing about her appearance, much less the elementary school-aged girls interviewed for the film. The issue at stake here is certainly an important one; it just isn't as shocking as these news outlets are presenting it.

The article on The Daily Beast, for example, begins with a selection of shocking (and terribly sad) quotes from teen and pre-teen girls about the body image the media has forced on them, and then goes on to describe the way that Newsom "tackles Hollywood, TV news, advertising and politics - all against a backdrop of young women who consume all of it." It isn't until a third of the way through the piece that the author acknowledges that this issue certainly isn't a new one; even then, the many other films, books and articles that have discussed this issue - none of which are even mentioned by name - by saying that these pieces are outdated as a result of increasing media saturation.

This isn't really a problem with the article itself; I actually felt it was generally interesting, well-written and well-researched, which is more than I can say for many other articles found on the site. The problem here seems to be that, no matter how often this issue is brought to the public's attention, it fades out of public consciousness just as quickly. Of course, the very news media doing the reporting on the issue is certainly complicit in its burial; after all, the coverage of Newsom's documentary is found pretty far down on The Daily Beast's entertainment page. What's above it? A list of men Scarlett Johanssen has dated and an article about the many permutations of sexual partners on Jersey Shore.

The Daily Beast, busy correcting the misrepresentation of women in the media.

I think it's great that Newsom's documentary is getting so much attention. As a woman who has moments of absolute, pathetic self-loathing as a result of comparing myself to the women I see in the media, I completely agree that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with. (I've talked about it multiple times before, in fact.) And I'm a smart, confident woman who is generally pretty happy with her physical appearance (except for those aforementioned instances of self-hatred). I'm not an impressionable middle-school girl.

The problem here is the likelihood that Newsom's documentary will have no long-term impact. In 2006, the fashion industry became the center of a women-in-media firestorm when Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston and Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos both died of complications from eating disorders. This led to attempts to create and enforce guidelines, including a Madrid Fashion Week ban on models whose BMI fell below a cutoff number and attempts by various fashion bodies to pass guidelines about model weight. Five years later, runway models are just as skeletal as they were in 2006 while fashion magazines are lauded for featuring "plus-size" models who are two sizes smaller than the average American woman. Is there any indication that the increased awareness of the issues raised in Newsom's film will fare better?

Pointing out these problems doesn't do any good unless it affects change in the media, and the media is nowhere close to the kind of major overhaul that Newsom's film posits as an ideal. The vast majority of high-ranking entertainment executives are men, and the most coveted demographic for advertisers is young men. Until the entertainment industry is no longer geared towards an advertiser's perception of what young men want (which, I should be clear, does not always correspond to what actual men want; most of my male friends care more about a woman's personality than whether she looks like Jessica Alba), the portrayal of women on television isn't going to change, no matter how many documentaries Newsom makes.

The "Game of Thrones" Rape Controversy Revisited

Emilia Clarke and Jason Momoa in Game of Thrones. Photo courtesy of ydoxoewerec.blogspot.com.

Previously, I wrote an article dealing with accusations that Game of Thrones was glorifying rape through the portrayal of Daenerys' relationship with Khal Drogo, a man who rapes her on her wedding night and with whom she subsequently falls in love. However, people are talking again about the role of rape on Game of Thrones, but this time they're complaining for the opposite reason.

The Daily Beast recently featured an article by Jace Lacob that accuses the series of lessening the amount of rape present in George R.R. Martin's books, while simultaneously upping the amount of sex and female nudity visible on screen. Lacob quotes various other critics, such as AOLtv's Maureen Ryan and the New York Times' Laura Miller, who complained about the "sexposition" utilized in the series' seventh episode, "You Win or You Die." That episode features a scene in which Aiden Gillen's Petyr Baelish presents a good deal of expository material while instructing two female prostitutes in how to show their pleasure.

According to Lacob, "while frank sex in HBO shows is common, Game of Thrones appears to be placing it front and center, as though the only way to make exposition-heavy bits like these interesting was to couch them in terms of sexuality." I disagree with this assertion for two reasons: one, while there is a not-insignificant amount of sex in Game of Thrones, there is nowhere close to as much gratuitous sex and nudity as there is in any given episode of True Blood, and two, there are plenty of expository scenes in Game of Thrones that involve no sex whatsoever. While I'll admit that the scene with Baelish and the two prostitutes was slightly gratuitous - as was the scene in episode eight in which the audience is treated to some full-frontal nudity by Hodor - I didn't have an active problem with it.

I'm more intrigued, however, by the other question that Lacob poses: is Game of Thrones the TV series really cutting down on the amount of rape present in the novels? As someone who has not read A Song of Ice and Fire, I can't really speak to the amount of rape present in the books, and my ignorance is compounded by the contradictory reports I get about the prevalence of rape in the original novels. A friend of mind who recently started reading the novels was shocked by the amount of rape present on the page, while my boyfriend, who read the series a few years ago, doesn't think that the amount of rape in the books is different from the amount present in the HBO series.

The TV series, in my opinion, hasn't shied away from representing rape onscreen. In my aforementioned article about possible trivialization of rape in Game of Thrones - which, judging by the sheer number of page views it gets, continues to fascinate readers - I discussed the outrage some commentators felt about the way Daenerys's relationship with Khal Drogo moved quickly from sexual assault to love. Indeed, Daenerys and Drogo now share one of the most stable, equitable romantic relationships on the show. In the first two episodes, the audience sees Dany raped by Drogo at least twice, which hardly seems like lessening the prevalence of rape to me.

The major scene that Lacob describes, however, is not Daenerys' rape - which, he does concede, is similar to the book, despite the fact that Daenerys' character on the show is older - but the scene, featured at the beginning of episode eight, in which Daenerys saves a group of conquered women from being raped by the Dothraki. According to Lacob, the scene as it is presented in the book is a "nightmarish one, as Dothraki invaders rape multiple women before Daenerys puts a stop to their abhorrent behavior," while the scene in the TV show declines to show the actual rape, instead holding the "intangible threat of rape" over the heads of the women in the scene.

After giving voice to these opinions, Lacob ultimately comes to the conclusion that the lessened role of rape in Game of Thrones is a good thing, saying that this creative decision "enables [the show] to be much less harrowing, keeping the horror restricted to the supernatural realm." I don't really understand this argument. After all, the horror in Game of Thrones is hardly restricted to the supernatural realm, as Sansa's direwolf Lady and a dead butcher's boy would certainly tell you. I also don't see why the show needs to be made less harrowing - after all, the series is dealing with a society similar to that of medieval Europe, where rape was fairly common and marital rape wasn't even a concept.

Personally, I think that a better argument for lessening the role of rape in the Game of Thrones TV series can be found in a recent New York Times article in which A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis discussed the recent spate of films featuring violent women. Scott in particular focused on the Swedish films of Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy (a trailer for the David Fincher-directed American version can be found here), and the imagery of violence against women that accompanies the theme of violence perpetrated by women, generally in self-defense. Scott points out that sexual violence onscreen is a different matter entirely from the same violence on the page, pointing out that "it is in the nature of the moving image to give pleasure, and the nature of film audiences - consciously or not, admittedly or not - to find pleasure in what they see."

When this principle is applied to depictions of sexual violence against women filmmakers, no matter how good their intentions, "run the risk of aestheticizing, glamorizing, and eroticizing" rape. While George R.R. Martin is telling the truth when he says that rapists in A Song of Ice and Fire are depicted as neither noble or good (although he leaves out Khal Drogo, a seemingly good character who rapes Daenerys repeatedly), when sexual violence is put up on screen it becomes completely different. Perhaps in choosing not to depict rape on the show (if, indeed, there is less rape on the series than in the books) the creators of Game of Thrones are recognizing the pitfalls inherent in seeing sexual violence onscreen, and want to avoid glamorizing or eroticizing this heinous crime.