Female Trouble

Books: Dietland, The Girl on the Train

Sarai Walker's Dietland and Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train feature difficult heroines who start off weak and gradually gain strength throughout their respective stories.

In Dietland we follow Plum Kettle, a woman of about 30 who weighs 300 pounds. Plum has been overweight her whole life and copes by ignoring the stares and rude comments of strangers, obsessively dieting, and fixing her hopes on the life she will have after she undergoes gastric bypass surgery and becomes the "real", thin version of herself. After circumstances throw her into the path of Verena Baptist, the daughter of Eulayla Baptist, a woman famed for creating the "Baptist diet plan", Plum stars to rethink her entire approach to life. Verena, who rejected her mother's fraudulent and unsafe diet empire, promises to give Plum a check for $20,000--to use on the surgery, or anything else--if Plum follows Verena's "new Baptist plan", which includes standing up to strangers who stare at her and buying attractive clothes that fit her.

This description of Dietland probably makes the book sound like it's a feel-good beach read about accepting one's body. It's not. The last thing it is is touch-y, feel-y. There is a secondary plot that involves what can only be described as a feminist terrorist group that goes by the name "Jennifer" (because the name is so common--it could be "any woman in your life"). This group does things like kidnap rapists, torture them for months, and then drop their bodies out of airplanes. They blackmail British tabloids into replacing images of nude or scantily-clad women with images nude, aroused men. They kidnap an imam and, on television, force him to tell the men of his religion to pour acid into their eyes rather than force women to cover their heads and bodies. You get the picture.

 As "Jennifer's" antics escalate, Plum is taken under the wing of a group of women (including Verena) who make up Calliope House--a feminist collective dedicated to creativity and helping other women. Plum gets angrier and more aggressive as the story progresses. She gets herself in dangerous confrontations with men who call her a "fat bitch". She starts stealing.

While the story is about Plum's transformation from beaten-down fat girl who loathes herself to a freer woman who can walk the streets unashamed, there is still a heavy note of sadness weighing down this novel. Plum finds her chosen family in the women of Calliope House, but she doesn't find acceptance in the world at large. In fact, Plum's self-acceptance does not arise in spite of the world's hatred of her body, but because of it. By being 300 pounds, Plum figures that she gets to see people's true selves: if she were skinny, people who treat her decently while treating fat women like the scum of the earth. Plum finds that she would rather be fat and hated that well-liked by the very people who get their jollies by humiliating fat people. It's a dark--if very truthful--thesis to a difficult, entertaining, complicated book. Also of note: men barely exist in Dietland except to humiliate or reject Plum. While she finds her band of sisters, there are no men who also reach enlightenment. It's a very separatist perspective, and one I don't entirely buy into.

Likewise, The Girl on the Train features an absolute mess of a heroine. Rachel is in her early-thirties, divorced, overweight, alcoholic, and just incredibly sad and lacking in personal direction. As she rides the train every morning and evening, she makes up a story about the lives of a beautiful couple whose house she can see from the train--she dubs them "Jess" and "Jason". But then one day she sees an indiscretion that explodes her perfect view of the couple and she begins an obsessive--and dangerous--investigation to find out what's really going on. Her sleuthing is complicated by the fact that she has a tendency to black out for hours at a time when she's drinking.


The Girl on the Train has been compared to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl for obvious reasons: they both tell the same story from multiple perspectives, they both have unreliable (and "unlikeable" protagonists), they both involve themes of betrayal, violence, and the dark side of marriage. I personally think Gone Girl is the better book--it's sharper, better written. The Girl on the Train gets a bit repetitive after a while, and Rachel is bland and gray compared to the acidic glow of Gone Girl's Amy Dunne. But The Girl on the Train is highly entertaining and genuinely keeps you guessing. It doesn't reveal all the cards until the very end. It's also very realistic in its portrayal of alcoholism. Author Hawkins isn't afraid to have Rachel vomit, piss herself, cry, fuck up over and over. You never hate her, but you seriously pity her--which is worse, in some ways. Hawkins has big, brass ovaries for never turning Rachel's alcohol problem into something sexy and glamorous. Unlike other hard-boiled fiction with detectives or PIs who keep a bottle of rye along with a handgun on them at all times, this amateur investigator's antics are very sad and unsexy to read about.

Neither Dietland nor The Girl on the Train hit the sweet spot 100% of the time for me, but they're both really good, solid reads. Dietland is especially fascinating in its uncompromising anger at a society that treats women's bodies like public property, to be jeered at, or jacked off to, depending on how "hot" said body is. It was a cathartic book, if nothing else. The Girl on the Train is the perfect read for, well, a train ride (or plane or car ride). It sucks you in and leaves you turning pages for hours. So although neither book is perfect, they're both worth your time.

Dietland: B+

The Girl on the Train: B

Dirty Dancing

Movies: Magic Mike XXL

Something happens when something out there in popular culture excites women en masse --particularly if that something is related to sex. People sit up and pay attention. They write articles. They start discussions at the water cooler at work (or the Starbucks). They ask, "Is this what women want?" And, a lot of the time, they laugh at whatever *it* is.

Take the infamous Fifty Shades of Grey. A book that sold millions of copies. What happened when it went viral? Katie Rophie wrote an article in Newsweek about how the popularity of the novel proved that women--particularly modern, empowered women--wanted to be ravished by a strong, stern man at the end of the day. Articles and blog posts trumpeted how the book "saved marriages" by giving couples the fuel to "spice things up" in the bedroom (I always thought it was weird how few of these articles mention the big M--masturbation. Surely more women just read the book in private and did their thing than actually incorporate the acts described between its covers to their life under the covers). And, more than anything else, people laughed at it. They laughed at it on the Internet, on late night talk shows, in daily life.

Now, I'm not saying that Fifty Shades doesn't deserved to be laughed at (it does, as it's a piece of shit). But I think it's interesting that a book that certainly got a lot of women hot and bothered so quickly became the butt of everyone's joke.

Steven Soderbergh's singular film, Magic Mike, was released six months after the final book in the Fifty Shades triology was released. Another pop culture phenomenon that seemed ripe for mockery, Magic Mike upended everyone's expectations by actually being a good movie. It was one of my favorites of 2012, and I'm gonna defend that goddamn movie until my dying day--it's a great fucking film, made even better by the rock bottom expectations most people had going into it.

But even though Magic Mike got critical accolades, people still treated it like a joke and a silly thing for women to enjoy. Even though the movie is about male friendship, first and foremost. I think people are incapable of taking a movie about male strippers (or, if we're being honest, strippers of any gender) seriously. People see Channing Tatum humping a woman's face to the strains of Ginuwine's "Pony" and they can't think of anything more ridiculous. Though, if given truth serum, I think most heterosexual women would admit that being dry-humped by whatever perfect male they have in their mind is a more than appealing thought.

All of this brings us to Magic Mike XXL, the sequel to Magic Mike that is exactly what people thought the original film should have been. Under the guidance of a new director (Gregory Jacobs), the plot has been stripped down (HAR HAR HAR) and the deeper emotions of the original buffed (GET IT?) out, leaving nothing but oiled up hunks grinding on a parade of women of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages.

Not that I'm complaining.

Magic Mike XXL is a fantastically entertaining sequel, although it's certainly nowhere near as "good" as its predecessor. XXL takes place three years after the events of the original film. Mike Lane (Tat-yum) owns his own furniture design start up just as he dreamed of in the first movie, and he has left stripping to work on his business full time. When the boys--Ken (Matt Bomer), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), Tarzan (Kevin Nash), and--my personal favorite--Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello, who takes a much-deserved center role in this film)--contact Mike about performing at a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, the man can't help but take the opportunity to try out some of his magic moves again.

The movie explains the absence of emcee Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), fellow stripper The Kid (Alex Pettyfer), and Mike's love interest, Brooke (Cody Horn), in a couple throwaway lines of exposition. Who cares about those losers? Onwards and upwards!

Magic Mike XXL is a typical road trip movie. People try to get to a destination and stop and have adventures along the way. There are a lot of memorable scenes that wouldn't be out of place in a porno: the guys stop at a private club in Savannah called "Domina" run by HBIC Rome (Jada Pinkett Smith); the guys end up at the house of a middle-aged, divorced woman (Andie MacDowell) and a group of her friends as they get plastered on expensive wine; Big Dick Richie has a great scene cheering up a lonely gas station clerk. Etc, etc. And then they finally get to the stripper convention and create the act of a lifetime--all new dance numbers to represent the real men underneath all those abs and bedroom eyes.

Magic Mike XXL works because it completely, unashamedly owns its corniness...and it's horniness. This is a film that makes some noise about how women should be worshiped as the goddesses they are and how all women are beautiful--while also exacting a strict standard for how the men in the film look. I kind of like that. It's the reversal of all those comedies where a homely Kevin James-type ends up with Rosario Dawson--because he has inner beauty, dammit! In Magic Mike XXL women get to have the inner beauty and men are all but required to have the outer beauty. It's not fair, it's not right...but it's titillating in its unserious subversiveness.

Eh, I'm probably trying too hard to find the deeper meaning in a film that has very limited depth. Magic Mike XXL is pure spectacle: it's fun, it's funny, it's campy, it's sexy. And it also makes me want to go back and watch the original, which was all of the above adjectives plus quality. The two Magic Mike's work in perfect symbiosis: when taken together, they have the body, the brains, and the heart.

Grade: B

All Thumbs

Movies: Life Itself

When I was in 10th grade, my career goal was to be an "entertainment journalist". A fervent reader of Entertainment Weekly since the late 1990's, my dream job was to watch and review movies and get paid for it.

Well, the world has changed a lot since I was 16. With the advent of the Internet, blogs, and social media, everyone has the ability to critique everything, from films and television shows, to vaccines and the right for gay people to adopt children. Everyone has a voice and an opinion--and we all know that this is both a blessing and a curse.

But society has changed in another way: the idea of "expertise" has changed. With Wikipedia, the average Joe or Jane on the street has the right and ability to add their expert knowledge to the flowing stream of publicly available information. Again, this is a blessing and curse: on the one hand, we have more access to information than ever, AND we aren't bound by old-fashioned (and racist, sexist) notions of who qualifies as an expert. But on the other hand, the idea that everyone and no one is an expert leads some to lose faith in the actual experts and professionals. For example: losing faith in doctors and evidence-based medicine has led to measles, mumps, and whooping cough outbreaks.

All this is to say that there was a time not too long ago when a few individuals could achieve fame and (relative) fortune simply by giving their opinion about the movies. Roger Ebert was one of those individuals, and boy did he deserve his fame and (relative) fortune. If you've ever read Ebert's reviews (they're all archived here, along with current reviews from writers carrying on Ebert's torch), you'll find that they are, to a one, thoughtful and funny. Reading his reviews is like listening to your clever, irreverent friend describe a movie he just saw. In fact, when I started this blog, I modeled it after the way Ebert wrote his reviews: he went beyond basic description and tied films to the realities of our culture (for example, his review of Raging Bull opens with a meditation on the "Madonna-whore" complex some men have). This makes sense, as cinema is not just entertainment, but art. And the purpose of art is not simply to be beautiful or ugly, but to reflect beautiful and ugly things in our culture. Ebert understood this, and his deep, passionate, unquenchable love for the movies--and, indeed, life itself--shines through his reviews in a way you don't see too often.



Life Itself is a documentary about Ebert based on his autobiography of the same title. Though it covers all the highlights and achievements in Ebert's life (his Pulitzer win in 1975, his decades-long partnership with film critic Gene Siskel [and their 'frenemies'-style relationship], his late in life marriage to Chaz Hammelsmith), Life Itself is notable for its lengthy scenes set in the hospital near the end of Ebert's life. Throughout the early 2000's, Ebert underwent multiple surgeries to remove cancerous tissue in his neck and jaw. By 2006, most of his lower jaw had been removed and he could no longer speak or eat without the assistance of a tube. This documentary is, in my opinion, incredibly brave (as is, obviously, Ebert) to show the full extent of Ebert's physical appearance and daily challenges near the end of his life. Sensitive viewers should be warned: it's not pretty. Ebert's jaw is gone, leaving behind the skin that would have covered the absent jawbone. It's gruesome to watch at first, but as the documentary progresses, you realize that there's still a twinkle in Ebert's eyes, and he's still quick to smile and make a joke (albeit with the use of a computer) and that he is still complete, still whole, despite his many health setbacks. It's a wonderful--and heartbreaking--thing to see. Especially since Life Itself takes us right to the brink of Ebert's final days.

Even if you're not very familiar with Ebert's work (and to be honest, I haven't read as much of his writing as some of my more gung-ho movie friends), Life Itself is a fascinating, heart-wrenching, and joyous documentary that celebrates the life of an imperfect, unusual, whip-smart man who, with a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", had the ability to make or break a movie. Or at the very least, convince you to go see it. He influenced multiple generations of film lovers, including myself, with his writing. Life Itself pays him a well-deserved tribute.

Grade: B+