7

Mirror, Mirror

Fairy Tales of the Feminist Fantastic

Frankenstein’s Monster/Mother

Fantastical history meets historical fantasy meets the history of fantasy meets fantasies of history in the life and work of Mary Shelley. Often called the ‘mother’ of horror, science fiction, dystopian fiction and speculative fiction, Shelley drew her literary experiments from her lived experience. She is the presiding spirit of this chapter, which finds that fantasy is powerfully political. The daughter of political philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Shelley managed to shock her free-thinking father by running away with radical (and married) poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom she lived precariously on the road, travelling through war-torn Europe in a complex relationship that included her stepsister Claire Clairmont. Beatniks and bohemians avant la lettre, both Shelleys transmuted political and emotional upheaval into literary art.

It’s that skill that I seek here, in a rare chapter that testifies to a scarcity at the centre of feminist film, even if there is plenitude at the edge: the fairytale telefilms of Catherine Breillat offer what Hollywood cannot, and it is something we need urgently. Experimental cinema is more able to enter the unconscious, combining economic (relative) low risk with aesthetic high risk. Since Maya Deren’s ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ (1942) experimental feminist cinema has had the enthralling power of undoing thrall by stepping out into the dark. Artists’ film and video such as Wangechi Mutu’s mysterious serpentine ‘Nguva’ (2014) unlatch the mythical feminine from the coercive patterns of dominant narrative, re-presenting them so they can resignify. Similarly, Jennifer Phang animates the apocalyptic dreams of her protagonists in Half Life (2008), so that they are the main markers of the light futurism of the California in whose environmental collapse her characters live.

Abigail Child shot her Shelley biopic A Shape of Error (2012) on 16mm during her residency at the American Academy in Rome, casting her fellow artist-residents. She then remixed it as UNBOUND (2013), in which experimental form meets experimental content. Shelley (Eileen Ryan) comes vividly to life as a political animal thinking through the ethics of public and communal life through her relationships with Percy (Nick Wilding) and Claire (Aurelia d’Antonia). Using historically inflected modern dress for the Shelleys, Child places them in a suspended time between their historical moment and the future that, as radical ­socialists, they envisioned. She asks whether the future they imagined has yet come to be; and if not, whether we can, imaginatively, enter that utopian timespace in solidarity with them.

The fantasy of realism is suspended, but so are the technical tricks and tropes of the cinematic fantastic. Instead, Child alludes to the Surrealist cinema of Man Ray’s Emak Bakia (1927) and its descendant Alain Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), as the events Mary remembers are repeated and rearranged, like a recurring dream. Time and space are both unstable; the piercing presence of Shelley’s voice (often quoted from her letters and diaries) holds the film together, and the audience spellbound.

Curiously, there are two Hollywood biopics of Mary Shelley about to go into production, both helmed by non-American filmmakers making their Hollywood debuts: Saudi-Arabian pioneer Haifaa al-Mansour, who rewrote girlhood with Wadjda, and Coky Giedroyć, director of the Scottish runaway girl film Stella Does Tricks (1997), from a screenplay by A. L. Kennedy. Al-Mansour’s A Storm in the Stars, from a screenplay by Emma Jensen, ‘aims to tell of the tumult of first love of a young woman out of step with her time’, following the contemporary standard of the feminist costume drama/biopic.1 Elle Fanning is attached to al-Mansour’s ­project as Mary, a role that brings together her genre cachet from Maleficent (Robert Stromberg, 2014, from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton), and – although this has gone unnoted in mainstream media coverage – her previous experience of playing a nascent writer as the young poet Ginger in Ginger and Rosa.

Giedroyć’s film, Mary Shelley’s Monster, will feature Sophie Turner and Taissa Farmiga, best known for, respectively, Game of Thrones (HBO, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, 2011–) and American Horror Story (20th Century Fox, Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy, 2012–), tapping into cult/genre television fandom.² Both films have been mooted as portraits of the artist as a young woman in love who will go on to write Frankenstein. Fantastic fiction is suggestively entwined with romantic and erotic fantasy in this biopic model. Based on the filmmakers’ previous work, it seems likely that they will overturn the internalized erotics of fantasy, predicated as they are on the objectification of women, albeit often framed as an ‘ironic’ tolerance of past mores in contemporary media. As Laurie Penny infamously wrote, in a piece that ‘caused somewhat of a storm across the SFF blogosphere’,3 ‘Game of Thrones is racist rape-culture Disneyland with Dragons. To say that this series is problematic in its handling of race and gender is a little like saying that Mitt Romney is rich: technically accurate, but an understatement so profound that it obscures more than it reveals’.⁴

Penny’s essay refuses the crumbs, while emphasizing that, as a literature that foregrounds the imaginative (whether called magic or technology) as a political force, the fantastic (science fiction, fantasy and horror) has great potential for representational justice. Feminist literary science fiction and fantasy has an outstanding seven-decade history in fiction, with precursors dating back to Shelley and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673); Deren experimented with writing pulp science fiction short stories in an attempt to earn money. At around the same time as Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston were changing film culture, writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Katherine V. Forrest, Octavia Butler, Pat Cadigan and Joanna Russ were revolutionizing the spaceman-dominated world of science fiction (SF).

Yet their work has had a limited role, either direct or indirect, in genre cinema – with the crucial and powerful exception of Born in Flames, and, to a more limited and controversial extent, Kathryn Bigelow’s millennial dystopian thriller Strange Days (1995). Just as the radical left of the suffragette movement remains too controversial for cinema, so does the untrammelled politically radical imagination of SF female authors, often featuring women (and third-gendered, intersex, transgendered, polygendered, post-gender, non-binary, genderfluid and genderqueer characters) working together (and often sleeping together). As feminist science fiction is generally anti-colonial, these gender-diverse characters may be, or may act in solidarity with, aliens or monsters, rather than seeking to exterminate them.

At the heart of Child’s UNBOUND is a vignetted film-within-a-film of Frankenstein, in which a secret history of feminism is revealed, one in which there is a resonance between the monster and Mary as vulnerable beings, rather than, as is usual, between Mary and the mad scientist as powerful creators. Played by an actor with modern facial piercings rather than the traditional bolts, the monster is suggestively a gender outlaw. His halting movements are a reminder that Frankenstein has been widely adopted within disability studies as well as feminist and queer theory. ‘We do not often think of the monster in Mary Shelley’s work as disabled, but what else is he?’, as Lennard Davis asks.⁵ A counter-cultural creature whose desires, like Shelley’s, are unvoiceable within his historical time and place, the monster is rendered sympathetic in Child’s vision. If the monster is a made creature, then so might the author be, as a woman and a writer, in line with Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum on the social construction of gender, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’.6 Child thus also addresses the persistent myth of the male-made Muse, represented in fantasy and science fiction films that draw on Pygmalion and Galatea, from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927, from a screenplay by Thea von Harbou, adapting her own novel) onwards.

Fig. 19: Frankenstein, UNBOUND

Child shoots the vignette in black and white, pastiching James Whale’s 1931 adaptation (a history queered in Gods and Monsters [Bill Condon, 1998]). Her work has a long-standing fascination with pastiche and quotation of film history, and particularly its dramatization of embodiment, such as the play with silent melodrama in ‘Perils’ (1986) and the reappropriation of a silent lesbian porn film at the end of ‘Mayhem’ (1987), parts four and six respectively of her series Is This What You Were Born For?, a title that clearly tips its hat to de Beauvoir. Her micro-Frankenstein feels like another entry into the series, inquiring into what it means to be born into a society that genders you female, and renders that gendering monstrous. Rather than rocking the vote or campaigning for wage equality (although Child also made B/Side [1996], a documentary in solidarity with urban homeless people in New York), Is This… inhabits Jacqueline Rose’s ‘modern feminism [which] mess[es] with the idea of a cleaned-up politics by bringing sexuality to the table’.⁷ For Rose, the unconscious is political, disrupting conventional politics’ insistence on the rational, visible and recordable.

Sleeping Beauties (and Beasts)

Child’s witty, disturbing short ‘Subtalk’ (2002) exactly takes on Rose’s ‘task… of exposing everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle for the better political futures we want’.⁸ In Child’s words, the short ‘documents the heavy post-9/11 police presence in New York’s subway system and imagines the [Metropolitan Transit Authority]’s “Subtalk” PSAs supplanted by Gertrude Stein’s [memoir of living in Occupied France] “Wars I Have Seen” ’.9 Her gesture is an uncanny precursor of Jane Campion’s use of the MTA’s ‘Poetry in Transit’ placards to give voice to Franny’s post-9/11 unconscious in In the Cut. In Child’s work, as in Campion’s, ‘confronting dark with dark might be the more creative path’.¹⁰ Just as Child shows Shelley bringing her nightmare into her waking life and making art from it, Campion’s film is about waking up but not forgetting the dark.

In the opening scenes, as Franny is half-sleeping, a petal shower in the garden outside her window prompts a recurrence of her dream about how her parents met. This romantic fantasy, in which her father proposed to her mother while skating on a pond, is repeated throughout the film, varying as Franny comes to understand the disturbing implications of his behaviour: dumping his fiancée for a woman he had just met; coercing her into marriage on his whim; abandoning her. Unlike her father, who repeats his behaviour endlessly with other women, Franny is able to perform what Luce Irigaray calls mimesis, or repetition with a difference, to work through and wake up from the nightmare of patriarchy that she had thought was a blissful dream.¹¹ While Sue Gillett has expertly unpacked many of the interconnected mythic and fairy tale female personae who appear throughout the film, she leaves aside the film’s references to Sleeping Beauty.¹² Franny may fall into a dazed sleep beneath the killer’s dead body, but she awakens herself, and then goes to wake her lover Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) with a kiss.

While Maleficent may be the first mainstream post-feminist cinematic take on the story, both Catherine Breillat (La belle endormie, 2010) and Julia Leigh (2011) released Sleeping Beauties this decade. Breillat’s was a follow-up to her Barbe bleue (Bluebeard, 2009); her fairy tale telefilms are, like her other work, moral dramas with a mordant twist. She is fascinated by the strict logic of the fairy tale and the messy implications of the desiring unconscious it attempts to contain. For her, fairy tales are patriarchal texts that can be re-read by girls; literally, in Bluebeard, as two young sisters, Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites) and Marie-Anne (Lola Giovanetti), read the story to each other in a barn, each daring the other to be afraid of this cautionary tale of adult female sexual curiosity and excess.

As Manohla Dargis observes, ‘Breillat puts a child at the center of The Sleeping Beauty, almost as if she wanted to get her hands on the girl (who can be seen as a stand-in for all girls) before the fairy tale has its way with her’.¹³ Yet the girl Breillat foregrounds is not an innocent; she is a sexual being, full of agency fuelled by desire. Feral, scandalous, bad, for real: standing outside the social contract to which adults are resigned, the girl can more easily embody the rebellious feminisms I cited in chapter one. More easily, but also more transgressively.

In ‘Snow Canon’ (2011), a short clearly influenced by Breillat, Mati Diop daringly explores the boundaries of permission. Vanina (Nilaya Bal) is a pre-teen Salome, testing her American babysitter Mary Jane (Nour Mobarak) as she experiences the power of her first crush. The ‘canon’ of the title is suggestive of repetition with a difference; time almost stands still in the snowed-in Alpine chalet where Vanina plays her games again and again, exploring her power in a way that is never sanitized, but also never spectacularized. Diop’s other films are quasi-documentary, but she attests that Vanina is a semi-autobiographical character, a form of subjective or imaginative documentation of the artist in the process of becoming through desire. ‘ “Snow Canon” is quite autobiographical. It is a film about the representation of the imaginary and the invention of the self during the lost hours of adolescence. As a child I could spend hours travelling in my head, making up stories, lives, characters’.14

In The Sleeping Beauty, Breillat’s heroine finds herself ‘travelling in [her] head’. Her self-willed finger-pricking – inspired by hearing the classic Charles Perrault tale – leads not to a coma, but to an adventure, which could be read as her fever-dream. Breillat meshes the Perrault story with that of a questing female protagonist, Gerda from Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ (1845), also the source text for Frozen. Within her adventure/dream, Anastasia’s (Julia Artamonov) stepbrother is taken by the Snow Queen, and on her way to find him, she is befriended by a gypsy girl Véroutchka (Diana Rudychenko). Breillat hides a tale of female agency within the classic story of female passivity, displacing heteronormative love as a basis for female heroism. The territory of fantasy, with its risky encounters and uncontrollable forces, is a source of feminist power for Breillat, as for Rose in Women in Dark Times; both of them worry that feminism has ceded this territory in its urgent quest for legislative power and rational authority.

If Breillat’s and Campion’s films are structured around recurrent wake-up calls, Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (mentored by Campion) depends for its effect on one final, shocking awakening, in which Lucy (Emily Browning) realizes that she has been exploited, as the feminist viewer – alas for the film – has been all too aware from the offset. Leigh’s brave but frustrating film exemplifies the princess problem: like Frozen, it wants to tell us ‘that perfect girl is gone’, but that necessitates the normative representation of a perfect girl. Lucy’s whiteness is almost startling; she is dressed fetishistically in white underwear when she begins her career as a sex worker, contrasting with the more elaborate Gothic black underwear of the other female sex workers, some of them also darker-skinned.

Like Margarethe von Trotta’s thinking women, Lucy is resolutely alone, untouched even by the fraught, often eroticized sisterhood experienced by Breillat’s girls. Blank-faced Lucy is a sister to post-feminist erotic adventurers (predominantly straight, white, cisgendered and able-bodied) such as Hannah (Lena Dunham) in Girls, whom Erika Price advocates for as ‘neurotic, selfish female characters’ in contrast to SFCs.15 In a generous reading, we could consider these female characters as ‘sleeper agents’ whose violent awakening to their own internalization of patriarchy will wreak vengeance. Leigh’s film suggests that this adventure in submission is a rite of passage, but the stark ending leaves Lucy’s future up for grabs, with nowhere to go.

Red Riding Hoods and Wolves

Leigh won Best Director at the Sitges International Festival of Fantastic Film in 2011, following in the feminist fantasy footsteps of Best Film awards for female-centric films The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) and Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005), as well as Orlando. Sitges’ definition of the fantastic is impressively broad, attentive to what could be called the ‘everyday fantastic’ of feminist cinema. Due to a combination of economics and politics, the feminist fantastic is generally set in the present, in a spare Brechtian evocation of a past, or in a low-budget near-future. It tends not to focus on spectacular technological innovation, either in the diegesis or in the filmmaking, instead obtaining its effects through mood and costume.

Sometimes, as in Leigh’s film, it is a mood that infuses a seemingly realist story, as in Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), a beguiling and haunting tale of a questing daughter, a missing mother, a capricious father, land politics, dreams of 1960s counter-culture, fire, water and the limits of love, which draws on the mood of the folk ballads that influenced the artists on its soundtrack. The Company of Wolves, adapted from Angela Carter’s short stories and radio play, is more like classic fantasy on the surface: predominantly located in the all-white, ahistorical neverland of the Northern European forest, the film features a set of nested variations on Red Riding Hood. While its special effects are limited, its commitment to the imaginary is complete.

The fairy tales take place within a frame narrative, in which a modern teenage girl Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) has fallen asleep in her family’s rambling, isolated house, dreaming herself back into the forest. Even in 1984, atavistic fantasies of meeting the wolf remained the necessary substrate of the modern EuroWestern female adolescent imagination, the film implies, as we have few other available images for the powerful curiosity of emergent female sexuality. So powerful, in fact, that a veritable Red Riding Hood cycle emerged between Susan Faludi’s Backlash (1991) and her Terror Dream, offering cautionary tales about women alone in public space.16 Both Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996) and Hard Candy have been hailed as offering post-feminist Red Riding Hoods, played by Reese Witherspoon and Ellen Page respectively, who turn the tables on their respective wolves, predatory paedophiles in both cases.

The bulk of each film, however, works to inculcate dread in the female viewer, constantly implying the traditional narrative of gendered violence; conversely, each ends with an ambivalence towards its protagonist, asking the viewer whether she has gone too far in committing violence, effectively presenting a double bind in which neither of the protagonist’s options – victim or hero – are permitted. Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000, from a screenplay by Karen Walton) seems more encouraging for women in dark times, with its wicked and funny werewolf sisters Ginger and Brigitte (Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins), who start the film by chanting ‘out by 16 or dead on the scene, but together forever’. It is certainly more vivid and compelling than Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood (2011), part of a cycle of amped-up young adult genre films that predominantly thrill/thrall to dominatrix-lite bad mothers. Hardwicke’s film, with Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) caught between a rich boy and a poor boy, is Twilight redux, in which Red primarily serves – frisson of threat again – as potential wolf-food.

Female power – that which, as Carter and Jordan argue in their final sequence, seduces the wolf of patriarchy and transforms him – retains its depiction as revenant and uncanny even in the modern era, in which some women hold political and economic power. Films such as The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996) score cult classic status because they offer the thrill of such world-making power, often from a loosely post-feminist perspective. Female friendship once again generates the fear of a monstrous regiment that has to be brutally contained. Most female viewers approach these films (Maleficent, Freeway, The Craft) with a version of bell hooks’ ‘oppositional gaze’.¹⁷ We may be exhilarated by the set-up and then cauterize the ending, just as Willow (Alyson Hannigan) in Buffy ‘always turns off the Moulin Rouge! [Baz Luhrmann, 2001] DVD at ­chapter 32 so it has a happy ending’ (Fox, David Solomon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ‘The Killer in Me’, 7/13, 2003).

In The Company of Wolves, adapted as it is from Carter, the transformation is more thorough-going than an elective happy ending that ignores the economic and social situation of the female protagonist and the narrative tropes stacked against her. For Carter, the tale is altered by, and alters, its teller: male violence takes many forms, as Granny (Angela Lansbury) warns. Equally, uncanny, powerful female characters abound, including Granny and eventually Rosaleen herself, who transforms into a wolf.

If too few Red Riding Hoods get to undertake that transformation in contemporary cinema, there is another fairy tale political animal who speaks to gender fluidity and desire: the merperson. In particular, s/he speaks to queer, trans* and intersex desires and identities, to the erasure of the borderlines between human and animal, male and female, land and water. Before she left the film Sofia Coppola cast model Andreja Pejíc, who shifted in 2014 from identifying as genderfluid to transfemale, in her live action The Little Mermaid (2015).18 Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies, a love (/hate) story set among synchronized swimmers ‘recalls numerous images of nymphs and naiads’, as Emma Wilson writes.¹⁹ As in Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) and La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008) and Lucia Puenzo’s XXY (2007) the transformation narrated tragically by Andersen is both reversed and reversible: girls become merfolk, but they do not go under.

Puenzo’s Alex (Inés Efron, who also plays the languid lesbian swimmer Candita in The Headless Woman) exemplifies this fairy tale fluidity’s real-world resonance. Alex, born intersex, raised female, is facing parental pressure to conform surgically to femininity. In hir bedroom, zhe has created a confident, fantastical visual idiolect of merfolk, amphibious creatures and modified doll bodies that reflect and shape hir identity. Zhe literally lives liminally, spending hir time on the beach near hir family’s home; but when zhe claims it as a public space, zhe is met with violence by local teenage boys, a violence that the film explicitly reveals as suppressed desire.

Alex responds by becoming more hirself, as does Marie (Pauline Acquart) in Water Lilies, who defies the emotionally violent put-downs of her mean girl crush Floriane (Adèle Handel), captain of the synchronized swimming team, by taking to the water. Swimming belongs to and signals a girlhood aslant in Sciamma’s Tomboy and Martel’s Holy Girl too. The pool is a space charged with heteronormative conformity via the body fascism and hyper-visibility inherent in swimsuits, yet it also offers a suspension in the water that distorts and transforms the body/image.

While Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s experimental short ‘Sinalela’ (2001) refers in a Samoan accent to what the filmmaker calls ‘the Euro-Afro-Asian Cinderella story’, it sends its fa’afafine (Samoan Two Spirit) protagonist out of the house and onto the shore, where she meets a handsome sailor with traditional Polynesian tattoos. Water suggestively analogizes the cinema screen; these queer bodies disrupt it. When Rosaleen becomes a wolf, she bursts through the narrative frame from the fairy tale woods into the house where her modern self still lies sleeping. It is merqueer films that are living up to this ferocious, unsettling and deeply feminist conclusion, in which Red Riding Hood transforms herself into a political animal: so political, in fact, that she can shatter the boundary between the imaginary and the real.

Cinderellas

Fairy tales have crossed over from the realm of the fantasy genre, particularly when it comes to post-feminist romantic narratives: Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007) is only the most obvious example. It’s a fairy tale of New York, which provides a location for ­surprisingly similar fantasies in Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012, from a screenplay by Greta Gerwig), in which dancer/choreographer Frances (Gerwig) leaps through Manhattan in a single tracking shot, to David Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’, a homage to Leos Carax’s dystopian science fiction romance Mauvais sang (The Night is Young, 1986). Later on, as if emphasizing the fairy tale quality of the film, she spends her time at her alma mater Vassar walking the wooded grounds. Both the wander in the woods and the daring run through traffic typify the character, who is searching headlong for… something. Satisfyingly, it is not her prince; it may be herself. The film’s climax is the first public performance of Frances’ choreography, attended (as in a wish-fulfilment dream) by her ex-roommate/boyfriend, her former employer and her much-missed best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner), with whom she reconnects.

It’s a more hopeful moment than the end of Miranda July’s The Future (2011), which forms a mirror to Frances Ha. July plays (another) Sophie, an under-employed choreographer who begins a dance-a-day YouTube project to deal with her feelings of frustration after adopting a cat with her partner Jason (Hamish Linklater). Yet this intriguing project is dropped in favour of unrelated games with cinematic time and narration. July’s film explores multiple senses of fantasy, including monologues by the cat, Paw-Paw (voiced by July), and Sophie’s liaison with another man. More worryingly, it suggests that both creativity and collective ecological action are fantasies with the same status and the same problematics as our erotic lives; all three are projects doomed to failure.

Both The Future and Frances Ha pay homage to the centrality of choreography and dance in the history of feminist film, and the dancer/choreographer as a figure of the feminist filmmaker. In particular, the New York setting of the latter summons Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers (1972) and, in its concern with gentrification and housing, The Man Who Envied Women (1985). Baumbach’s film, like Lena Dunham’s work, forms a bathetic contrast with the spiky re-visioning of New York in Madeline Olnek’s strange, vibrant lo-fi B-movies Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (2011) and The Foxy Merkins (2014), the former an ‘everyday fantastic’ comedy in which monochrome, monotone aliens dance their way through the oddities of New York’s lesbian dating scene. It’s hard not to feel that Rainer’s rigorous aesthetics and politics have been dislocated and appropriated as hipster reference points by a new, more privileged generation of critically lauded straight filmmakers, while filmmakers such as Olnek, who pay loving homage to no-wave, punk and New Queer Cinema, are pushed under the radar. Like Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, The Future and Frances Ha both feel like they end where they should begin, with the question of what comes next, once the princess has been awakened and is questioning the price of her privilege.

They form an instructive comparison with Claire Denis’ 35 rhums (35 Shots of Rum, 2008), in which Joséphine (Diop), like Frances, is moving towards independence in the big city; in this case, Paris. As Denis commented to Adam Nayman, Paris has been returned to the possibility of a realism, however sensuous and imaginative, that New York now lacks: ‘When I go to New York, I’m not in the real New York: I’m in an imaginary place from photos and films’.20 Post 9/11, New York has been objectified and re-romanticized in the very ways that Campion tries to undo in In the Cut, and as Denis does for Paris in 35 Shots and her erotic fairy tale Vendredi soir (2002), which, like Campion’s film, ends with a passionate woman walking through the dawn.

As so often in Denis’ films, there is a scene of social dance in 35 Shots that uses the filmmaker’s ‘rhythms of relationality’, in Laura McMahon’s words.²¹ These rhythms tell wordless stories about the characters and emotions, coming to embody the power of film, and the particularity of place. The dance metaphorizes the patriarchal exchange of women: Jo initially dances with her father Lionel (Alex Descas); when the Commodores’ song ‘Nightshift’ begins, their rich landlord Noe (Denis stalwart Grégoire Colin) cuts in, and Lionel takes up with the café owner (Adèle Ado) who has let them shelter from the rain. For McMahon, ‘the intimate logic of the same upon which the relation between father and daughter is tenderly built opens to encounters with others’.²²

The end of the film, in which Jo uses Noe’s crush on her as a way to set herself and her father free from their co-dependent stasis, is less cutesy than that of Frances Ha, in which Frances folds up the nametag for her new apartment’s mailbox, thus renaming herself from Halladay or Haliday to Ha. Imdb gives both, but I read it as Halflady, a joke on her (and the film’s) incompleteness. That’s partially because of the economic rationale behind Jo’s choice; her father is a just-retired train driver, and, unlike Frances, she doesn’t have the luxury of playing at being poor. In Denis’ film, Cinderella meets new versions of the harsh economic realities out of which Marina Warner argues surviving versions of fairy tales arose.²³

Amazons

If Cinderella has yet to be fully employed as a story about austerity in mainstream cinema (and Kenneth Branagh’s 2015 lavish live action version is the exact opposite), then it’s perhaps no wonder that the pacifist Wonder Woman has been recast as a warrior in her most recent incarnation, to be played by Gal Gadot as a third wheel in Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016). So far, Snyder’s interpretation of the character is primarily a costume, images of which were released shortly after Gadot uploaded a pro-IDF image to Facebook (receiving over 200,000 likes) during Operation Protective Edge.24 There is a sour resonance between the new hardbody suit of armour worn by the princess of peace and Gadot’s militant views. For Melissa Silverstein, the follow-up Wonder Woman feature will be ‘a high-stakes gig… one the highest-profile, if not THE highest-profile, gig[s] a woman director has ever gotten’.²⁵

What Patty Jenkins, succeeding Michelle MacLaren who left in April 2015 over ‘creative differences’, will be able to do in Wonder Woman (2017) with the character as (re)conceived by Snyder remains to be seen. She will probably not be able to answer Crunk Feminist Collective’s call for a film that honours the feminist origins of the character and her meaning for women of colour, where the Amazons are ‘women of all races, ethnicities, abilities, ages and sizes… who appear out of the sky to support their sister and wreck shit, because the evil dwellers messed with the wrong Amazon’.²⁶

In the meantime, there are two US documentaries that reveal the ‘real’ Wonder Woman. Jeannie Epper, Lynda Carter’s stunt double for Wonder Woman (Warner Bros., Stanley Ralph Ross, 1975–79), is the co-star of Amanda Micheli’s Double Dare (2004), along with Zoë Bell, Lucy Lawless’ stunt double for Xena Warrior Princess (MCA, John Schulian and Robert G. Tapert, 1995–2001). Bell moved to LA and, under Epper’s mentorship, was hired for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003). Micheli’s film is a wonderful meditation on the strength, discipline and carefulness of Bell and Epper. Behind the thrilling fight scenes, it’s revealed, are highly-trained, physically adept performers who avoid damaging contact at all costs. Double Dare turns the action genre inside out, allowing us to appreciate the skills of the performers while deconstructing the violent fantasies they portray.

Wonder Woman also appears in the foundational feminist film Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1974), in which a stage production of Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 play about the Amazon queen is followed by a flick through a 1970s issue of the comic in which the cartoon Amazon fights street harassment. Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2014) captures the character’s 1970s heyday, when she appeared on the front of the first issue of Ms. magazine, but it also considers her meaning to multiple generations of American women of diverse ethnicities, embodiments and sexualities. Wonder Women! also follows independent comic book stores who use Women of Wonder Day to raise awareness and funds around domestic violence.27 The Kickstarter backing for the film testifies, likewise, to the feedback cycle between the comics/genre fan community and diversity activism, which is starting to produce films as well as fundraising. Maya Glick’s ‘Rain’, a short fan film about X Men character Storm, not only reached its fundraising goal, but drew such support from keen fans that it was able to reach its ‘stretch goal’, an extension that allows more work on a project, such as more special effects.²⁸

Fig. 20: Stretch Goal Reached! Storm art for ‘Rain’, Maya Glick

Storm is notable as a rare woman of colour in the superhero universe. Documentaries such as American Outrage (Beth and George Gage, 2008), about sisters Carrie and Mary Dann, Western Shoshone women fighting for their ranch against the US government, and Kim Longinotto’s Pink Saris (2010), about the Gulabi Gang, anti-sexual violence vigilantes based in Uttar Pradesh (also the subject of Nishtha Jain’s Gulabi Gang [2012]), and their extraordinary leader Sampat Pal, are striking reminders of the absence of women of colour in Amazonian narratives. This is contrary to the reality often unaddressed by both feminist and anti-racist activists; as Kimberlé Crenshaw notes, women of colour remain at the greatest risk of state and personal violence.29

Particularly in American Outrage there is a reminder that the classic conception of Wonder Woman is not only as a physical warrior, but on a spiritual path. Films that emphasize spiritual power tend, like ‘A Red Girl’s Reasoning’, to emerge from and/or be embedded in, or draw on, non-Euro western imaginaries. Baksy (Native Dancer, 2008) is the second feature by Kazakh director Gulshat (Guka) Omarova, who was the Assistant Director on her co-writer Sergey Bodrov’s prestige historical epic Mongol (2007), tasked with overseeing the epic horseback battle at his film’s climax. The baksy (healer) of her film is grandmother Aidai-Apa (Nesipkul Omarbekova), who dies early on, after the corrupt police remove her from her land, which is taken over a local mafioso. After her death, the film fractures into temporal discontinuity, with the flow of time only returning when Aidai-Apa is found, having played dead and returned to her home town.

Aidai-Apa is, like Maleficent, both a witch and a warrior, fighting with magic and with a big stick. The similarities end there; Native Dancer is not concerned with moral judgements on women’s power, but with its actualization as, and at, a political hotspot. Most importantly, the film believes in her power. Rather than depicting it through showy CGI, it makes it the optic of the film. We enter the healer’s visionary point of view on several occasions when she performs rituals. Cinema is recast as shamanic, in contrast to the thriller/western subplot that Omarova uses in order to discard. Aidai-Apa is a rare powerful female protagonist in the fantasy genre who is not young, slender, able-bodied, straight, cisgendered and white.

That’s why Maja Borg’s 2030-set short ‘We the Others’ (2014) prominently features a princess; fantasy tropes persist in the science fictional imagination. Part of Dazed & Confused’s Visionaries project, Borg’s film shares its name with Noi.Gli Altri, the European festival of disability cinema, and its protagonist is played by Tove Boström who, like all members of the cast, has Down syndrome. In a statement that resonates with feminist/queer merfolk and werewolves, Borg says of the film’s cast, ‘Feared by all as the “others”, “they” are in fact most of us’.³⁰ Reshaping the fantasy genre towards representational justice began with Borg’s questions about reproductive justice, when she was required to have an amniocentesis during her pregnancy. She imagined a future in which people with Down had been almost wiped out. Thus her film is the ultimate in the ‘everyday fantastic’, starting, as Shelley’s did, in the lived experience of pregnancy.

Boström’s unnamed protagonist embodies many fairy tale archetypes, first appearing in a sunlit wood dressed in a long gown, with a traditional, conical ‘princess’ hat whose gauzy veil floats aloft as she dances. In subsequent scenes, Boström puts on make-up and takes her wig on and off, solving the princess problem by revealing that ‘princess’ is performative, a metaphor that can be taken up by anyone. It is a symbol of self-worth and self-definition, rather than of external hierarchies. Borg shot on distressed black and white 16mm in order to rewrite the history of cinema to include Boström’s embodiment of the princess: this is cinema as becoming-girl, and becoming-girl as cinema, as in Child’s UNBOUND. Dominant cinema strives to control the unconscious and the fantastic because they are ripe for radical re-visioning.

Focusing on a female-helmed Wonder Woman studio movie risks limiting our imaginations. We need to look at experimental cinemas that reconceive the genre as well as the narratives. We need to heed Ava DuVernay, tweeting a photograph of Bree Newsome, the activist who removed the South Carolina statehouse’s Confederate flag, with the words: ‘Yes. I hope I get the call to direct the motion picture about a black superhero I admire. Her name is Bree Newsome’.31 We need more films like Frances Bodomo’s ‘Afronauts’ (2014), about 17-year-old albino Matha (Diandra Forrest), sent to the moon by the Zambian Space Programme in 1969 to form a post-colonial alliance with (other) aliens. We need to attend more to projects where ‘groups of unrelated people are suddenly coming together everywhere’, connected by their identification with ‘bare life’, as in Melanie Gilligan’s post-apocalyptic online video series and gallery installation Popular Unrest (2010).³² Through the transformative magic of film, Boström’s closing dance – like Shelley’s kinship with the monster – becomes the cinematic fantasy we have always had, the becoming we have always dreamed.