Meek's Cutoff

KATARZYNA PASZKIEWICZ GENRE, AUTHORSHIP AND CONTEMPORARY WOMEN FILMMAKERS Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. GENRE, AUTHORSHIP AND CONTEMPORARY WOMEN FILMMAKERS Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. GENRE, AUTHORSHIP AND CONTEMPORARY WOMEN FILMMAKERS Katarzyna Paszkiewicz Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12.5pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2526 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2527 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2528 5 (epub) The right of Katarzyna Paszkiewicz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. CONTENTS List of Figures vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction: Impossible Liaisons? Genre and Feminist Film Criticism 1 1. Subversive Auteur, Subversive Genre 34 2. Repeat to Remake: Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body 60 3. Hollywood Transvestite: Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker 100 4. Genre in the Margins: Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff 134 5. Genre on the Surface: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette 173 6. What a Woman Wants? Nancy Meyers’s The Intern 209 Afterword: Desperately Seeking Wonder Women 254 Bibliography 264 Index 286 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. FIGURES 2.1 Jennifer’s jaw as vagina dentata 79 2.2 Jennifer as a popular girl 85 2.3 Needy’s gaze 86 2.4 Postfeminist regime exposed 89 2.5 The brutalised Final Girl 91 2.6 Becoming-monstrous: Needy at the hotel 93 3.1 Eye and vision come under critical scrutiny in The Hurt Locker 109 3.2 James as the heroic figure in the untamed landscape who asserts mastery over the environment 113 3.3 All eyes are on James 116 3.4 The violence of the gaze 120 3.5 Dilated temporality: the Western trope made eerie 122 3.6 Guns as metaphor for cameras: meta-cinematic reflection on the war film 123 4.1 The gendered organisation of space: men withdraw to deliberate over the course, while women look on from a distance 146 4.2 The duel of the gazes 149 4.3 Sheer duration: superimposed images in Meek’s Cutoff 153 4.4 Flat affect and underperformed emotions 161 4.5 Haptic inhospitability of the land(scape) 166 5.1 Luxurious footwear in Marie Antoinette 180 5.2 The abundance of shoes and accessories in The Bling Ring 180 5.3 Orlando as a frosted blue cake 189 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. FIGURES 5.4 Marie Antoinette blends and disappears into the ornate floral- patterned wallpaper 190 5.5 Marie Antoinette’s direct mode of address 191 5.6 The palace is destroyed, but Marie Antoinette (temporarily) escapes punishment 197 6.1 The Intern’s central couple: Jules and Ben 222 6.2 What men want: bromantic protagonists in The Intern 224 6.3 Jules’s eyes track up to the top of the skyscraper in front of her, she then looks to Ben, communicating her unease about the forthcoming interview 234 6.4 Ben invades the feminised space of ‘pink girlhood’ 243 6.5 Happy to be lost in another world: Ben shedding a tear over Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds’s performance of ‘You Were Meant For Me’ 246 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all those who have supported me during the long research and writing process. I wish to thank my friends and colleagues at the University of Barcelona, whose approaches have helped me shape my own and who have supported me in many ways, especially my superb research mentors, Helena González and Marta Segarra. Without their encouragement and guid- ance, this book might never have existed. For various forms of support over the years it took to complete this book, I thank Elena Losada, who continues to inspire me in all sorts of ways. I am also grateful to Cristina Alsina, Rodrigo Andrés, Francesco Ardolino, Isabel Clúa and Joana Sabadell, who helped at different stages and in different ways. Thank you for your kindness and friendship. Along the way I have been honoured by the generous suggestions of people I respect and admire, which have certainly propelled the project forwards. I benefited especially from my research visits to the University of Melbourne and the University of Pennsylvania. I thank Barbara Creed, Karen Beckman and Timothy Corrigan for this opportunity and for a warm welcome. Many colleagues have shared feedback on my work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Doing Women’s Film History and Television conferences, as well as other meetings over the years. I sincerely thank my friend Dawn Hall, who helped with ideas and encouragement. I am also grateful to Christine Gledhill and Christina Lane for inspiration and support, and to Patricia White, who generously shared her manuscript, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, with me, and from whom I learnt so much. viii Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research builds on my earlier study on women filmmakers and genre, developed as my PhD thesis (Rehacer los géneros: mujeres cineastas dentro y fuera de Hollywood, Icaria, 2017), and has evolved in dialogue with the contributors to my co-edited book collection Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Harrod and Paszkiewicz eds, Routledge, 2017). My heartfelt thanks to Mary Harrod, my collaborator in the latter and long-time interlocu- tor, who has read and graciously commented on each of the chapters of the present volume. This book is much better than it would have been without her input and suggestions. I am also grateful to Deborah Jermyn for her generous feedback on Chapter 6 and my research on Nancy Meyers in general. I am also indebted to Linda Badley and the anonymous peer reviewers for their excellent and enormously helpful feedback on my proposal, and I wish to sincerely thank them. Many thanks as well to Eloise McInerney for her help with and invaluable comments on Chapter 1. I also want to thank my editors Gillian Leslie and Richard Strachan, as well as Eddie Clark and the whole team at EUP, and the copy-editor Elizabeth Welsh, for their interest and suggestions, for their professionalism, efficiency and understanding. My special thanks to my dear friend, Andrea Ruthven, who proofread my manuscript and provided invaluable insights to this project. Thank you for asking the right questions and supporting me in many ways during the long process of writing. You were a frequent sounding board who kept my spirits high. My friends have provided me with great support. Among them, I especially thank Marta Font, Julia Lewandowska, Laura López, Aleksandra Malicka, Eva París-Huesca, Maribel Rams, Lola Resano and María Teresa Vera Rojas. Finally, I would like to express my wholehearted gratitude to my parents, Jola and Zbyszek, and to Gaspar for their unfailing love throughout the years. Gaspar, who happens to be an astute critic and splendid editor, made suggestions on earlier drafts of this book – for this, I am truly thankful. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. ix Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. INTRODUCTION: IMPOSSIBLE LIAISONS? GENRE AND FEMINIST FILM CRITICISM I don’t think I’ve read the words women and film and feminism in the same sentence as much in the last few months since Thelma and Louise rocked the culture nearly two decades ago. (Dargis 2010a) Kathryn Bigelow’s success at the 2010 Academy Awards, when she became the first woman to receive an Oscar for Best Director for The Hurt Locker (2008), has renewed scholarly and critical interest in women’s filmmaking and the position of female directors within Hollywood, as illustrated by The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis’s comment above. The controversies surrounding Bigelow’s historical win, as Dargis suggests, can be compared to those that emerged from the critical reception of Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), a generic amalgam of the Western, the buddy film and the road movie – three genres traditionally codified as male – and which significantly features two female leads. At the time of its release, Scott’s film sparked considerable debate regarding its political value for feminism, often being read as a radical revision of Hollywood’s conventional representation of woman’s place in the domestic sphere (Tasker 1993: 134–9). In spite of Dargis’s enthusiastic response, The Hurt Locker, a war film about an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team deployed in Baghdad, centred on the representation of US soldiers (of which all are male in the film), has not generated similar consensus on its significance in relation to feminist politics. While many commentators in the mainstream press celebrated the filmmaker’s Not for distribution or resale.

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