She had a personality once. It cost her dearly because it didn’t include baking cookies. It cost her dearly because it didn’t include choosing drapery.
It included being a lawyer, going undercover to investigate racial integration in schools, offering legal aid to those who couldn’t afford it, having a career.
And the 1990s asked us how we could trust her if she wasn’t baking cookies.
So she baked you some fucking cookies in between declaring my rights are human rights, and getting health insurance for 11 million previously uninsured children through S-CHIP.
You don’t remember S-CHIP. You aren’t a child who lived because of it, or who avoided pain because of it. You proclaim her 1990s health care drive a failure.
You don’t remember when women’s rights weren’t human rights, or live where they still aren’t, or suffer because they closed your Planned Parenthood down. You proclaim Hillary Clinton a failure.
Then there are those who need her. There are the marginalized communities who supported her. Latinx voters like myself. Women voters like myself. And Black voters. And LGBTQ voters. And more. We all asked for your help. We all asked for your vote.
Did you give it?
She is the victim of a philandering husband, yet Bill is her fault. From the Right, she couldn’t satisfy him. From the Left, she couldn’t keep him leashed. Why didn’t she divorce him, you ask. Your news feed answers with Angelina Jolie and Amber Heard and Gwyneth Paltrow, a parade of men’s voices screaming hate and vitriol and threats for the simple act of leaving their men.
Now you tell her she has no personality, she’s cold, she can’t be trusted.
Let me tell you something: I have no personality. I am cold. I cannot be trusted.
When I was the best student in class and I was told my grade would be held down unless I sucked my professor’s dick, I took the lesser grade and brought it up to the administration. He kept his job. Nothing changed, except I lost a piece of what makes me a person.
When my passport was held at bay in a foreign country unless I slept with my host, I became warm and gracious and cloying, but that was all a lie. Inside, I was as cold as I have ever been. He didn’t get a thing, but I left behind the warmth of trust.
When I’ve been at a bar, and I’ve lied that I have a boyfriend, or that I’m married, or that I have an STD, or I spilled a hot toddy to get a hand off my arm but called it an accident, I couldn’t be trusted. There are a hundred environments where a woman is prepared to be untrustworthy just to survive, just to be listened to, just to be legitimate.
You contemplated your vote and saw that she has no personality, that she’s cold, that she can’t be trusted.
If your career is under threat, your goals are under threat, your legitimacy is under threat, you look back across your life and see the history that combination covers, the evolution from there to here of self-protection: the loss of personality, of warmth, of trust.
Many turn to us and tell us the act of voting for Hillary Clinton proved how little we know. But we look upon our experiences, and the pieces of us those experiences have wrought: the personality, and warmth, and trust it’s cost.
We wonder what a privilege it is to not recognize these losses in another because you have never lost them. You think these are simply traits of a woman’s personality, instead of badges women earn through time. They are marks of survival. They are deep scars. They are how I understood a warrior who held onto herself through it all; they are how you understood a whore, a nasty woman, a lack of character.
I saw a woman who offered me freedom from the scars I earn; you chanted, “Lock her up.”
The costs for a woman’s place at the table vary, but those costs are asked of us everywhere.
We finally saw a woman who could become president. She had paid some of these costs and refused to pay others, and she threatened to rewrite all of this ugly accounting that asks women to pay in the currency of our personalities, and warmth, and trust.
Your response was to tell us she lacked personality, and warmth, and trust.
How do we reply to you? With anger, with laughter, with tears? Or with a straight face because that is the practice this accounting asks of us? With ledgers in our eyes? With all the numbers in the red that we’ve accrued? With a history of costs and a map of the pieces left behind?
She just wasn’t trustworthy, you’ll explain. In the back of your mind, you’ll wonder why I don’t smile more. Shall I for you, after what you’ve done?
The gall of some little bitch with a bowl cut, son of some proud lineage of death in South Carolina.
The gall of a Chicago cop who treated his trigger finger like that of a Ferguson cop or a Cleveland cop.
The gall of a man in a movie theater with a gun and the anger to use it.
The gall of Roseburg, Oregon. The gall of San Bernardino, California. The gall of Houston, Texas. This is the 355th mass shooting this year.
The gall of a man who once lived in a town called Black Mountain, like a beast from mythology. We best not return him there, in the fog of a cabin lonely in the woods where police will hear a man has hit his wife and shot at dogs and do nothing because that is the purpose of living in the fog of a cabin lonely in the woods.
Dear Colorado Springs,
Here’s my body, dictate it.
“No more baby parts,” he said.
We fight a war of remembrance, the names too many. Across the nation, victims will be remembered for their relation to others, for cruel fates, for last moments spent wanting to be a child again hiding under covers.
I want to hide under the covers. I don’t want to be saddled with memory now.
“No more baby parts,” he said, like a Fiorina or a Cruz. Like a Rubio or a Trump.
We tell the shooters this: I swear to God I will forget you. I swear to God I will forget you. I swear to God I will forget you.
Yet I can’t. We strive to keep terrorists out, but their sponsors hold debates on CNN and say that women bleed too much to ask questions on national TV, that a woman’s body is given too much freedom, that we must be kept, or dangerous if escaped, or shot if dangerous, or forgotten if shot, or meaningless if forgotten, so why spend so much time on women at all?
They are beasts with no leashes, they are footsteps coming closer in the hall outside with the lights off. Hiding under the covers won’t prolong what comes next. I know.
Which is more dangerous, the gun or the camera? The gun points one at a time. The camera points 45 million men with guns in the U.S. alone.
He once lived in a town called Black Mountain, like a beast from mythology, and beasts beget beasts, and to return these beasts to myth is to make them myth, is to beget beasts, is to hide under covers at night with the lights off and footsteps coming closer in the hall.
We are not crafted of hiding under covers. We are not crafted of anticipating our own pain. We are not crafted of covering this over with Star Wars and Christmastime and ‘It will get better: because.’
We are made of voices, all. Support what they hate. Support feminism with a fury. Support freedom of religion for Muslims and Christians and everyone else. Accept and offer asylum for refugees, whether victimized by ISIS across oceans or a man with a fist who lives in your own town. Ban guns and fucking mean it. Get the KKK out of our police departments. Haul everyone you know to vote.
We can ignore them endlessly, we can hide under covers endlessly until the day it’s not our problem anymore, and the young look up and see us hiding under covers and think it must be a good example to follow. Or we can make them obsolete. And we can make them obsolete.
“No more baby parts,” the gunman said. Just body parts.
WARNING: This post contains graphic, documented footage of police and military brutality.
by Vanessa Tottle
What is there to say about being black? I held a weeping friend last night. She had clawed scratches in her deep black face. I thought that only happened in the movies.
What is there to say about being a woman? I wish I weren’t. That is what you’ve made of us: I wish I was a white man with a gun and the badge to give me freedom to exorcise my demons on the body of another.
What is there to say to you, America? You have taken all my freedoms to give to new Middle Eastern despots who do not want them, who in 20 years will turn around and need fresh wars to overthrow their horrors.
And you will send in our black babies and brown babies and red babies and yellow babies who are by then old enough to go to college but won’t, because college will be a luxury and useless in the service economy that serves white men with guns and the badge to give them freedom to exorcise their demons on my body. On the body of the daughter I may one day have. On her daughter’s body. As tradition dictates.
Ask not what you can give for your country, it was never handed out. You have to give a life in service behind a counter at minimum wage, or a life in service behind a rifle at even less.
Women have to give our bodies, which were never fully ours. They are rentals, waiting for the day their mark is called and we submit ourselves to what we’re often told is duty. The mistake was thinking we were never built on bodies, swaddled in the blisters of smallpox blankets. The mistake was thinking we were never built on bodies, on the backs of bent black slaves. The mistake was thinking we were never built on bodies, on a Mexico that stretched to Washington State. On the Iroquois and Mohawk, on Comanche, on Aztlan and Navajo and Inuit, on Puerto Ricans and Spaniards and Filipinos, on the corpses of Latin America, on Cubans, Guatemalans, on Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Egyptians, Libyans, Afghans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians, and how many dead little kids making shoes and jeans in pan-Pacific firetrap workshops.
The mistake was thinking democracy made us better than dictatorships and communists. The mistake was thinking democracy was anything but brand loyalty. The mistake was thinking a serial killer deserves to be the world’s police.
And now we are the world’s police. And look how they act. They shoot the black and poor in store aisles, at gas stations, outside convenience stores. We shoot Muslims in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan. We are the country with a gun and the badge that gives us freedom to exorcise our demons on the bodies of others.
I am terrified to be a woman in America.
I am terrified to be a human in America.
I am terrified to step out of my home when in America.
I am not the only one.
If I could cut this uterus from me and lay it in Congress’ chambers as their prize, I would. If I could bleach my skin a blinding white, I would. That is what you’ve made of us. You could have it all, America, and I could go about my life free from all your terror.
Thank you to Amanda Smith for verifying all video is real footage.
I wanted to make lists. Gabe’s against lists. Why make lists? I’m a PhD. Half my life is lists. We took a vote. 5-to-1, we’re making lists.
Our very first is based on a meme that recently made the rounds. It asked readers to list the 10 books that have stayed with them. Not the best books. Not the books everyone else will recognize. The books that stay with you.
I only need to list one book. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. How else to deter tsunamis and earthquakes but to avoid the negative thought wavelengths that naturally attract them? Why am I even bothering with this PhD?
OK, no. For real, here are the 10 books that have stayed with me:
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The mother of all fantasy worlds and the most innocent. This meant a lot to me very early. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read it. It has never lost its power to help me escape, or turn a drab, muddy weekend into one full of possibility.
Harry Potter series
by J.K. Rowling
Looking back, I see in Harry’s being an orphan a choice I would one day face when severing ties with much of my family. Harry’s not in a book. Not really. That’s how you first meet him, but he’s a child I grew up alongside, who helped me understand the very difficult reality that not every child experiences life the way it’s sold on TV and in commercials. I was strong enough to know it was OK to be different and to survive a destructive background. Harry made me realize it isn’t just OK. He taught me it’s heroic.
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
It’s not the best book, but it is very important. It was reviewed well until religious men got hold of it, and then they manufactured a controversy over Kate Chopin’s portrayal of a woman’s strength in dismissing her family and place in society.
All these years later, her critics are dead. So is Chopin. But The Awakening survives because of that controversy, and some shy, gawky girl read it a decade ago. She became captivated by those “dangerous” ideas and how they were met. I had to learn more. I wonder how many young women have felt the same in the century since The Awakening was published. I wonder how many feminists Chopin has created, and how many more her detractors have inspired with their backwards reactions.
The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin is an anthropological storyteller. In The Dispossessed, she imagines an anarchical society that doesn’t use the possessive in their language. Nobody owns anything; everyone shares. She finds a scientist in that world. As their functional anarchy is challenged, this scientist seeks to reconnect with his people’s homeworld. The obstacles he faces aren’t violent; they’re obstacles of language, misunderstanding, and acceptance. They’re the obstacles we face every day, but Le Guin rests whole societies on them. At a point, you realize that’s not the science-fiction element. It’s the most real part of the novel.
The Beauty Myth
by Naomi Wolf
I don’t agree with everything in it, but Wolf opened a window that helped me understand so much about how expectations are created and enforced for both women and men. I had thoughts around the themes she spells out. She helped me solidify those thoughts into ideas for the first time.
No Logo
by Naomi Klein
How is our post-modern world constructed through ads and branding? How do we develop loyalty to identities we had no hand in shaping? Naomis Klein and Wolf together lent me a scary view of how the world is organized to benefit those already in power, and how identities are constructed with faith and confidence in that power, identities that are created to be helpless before it.
American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
There is psychology, and there is satire. The latter helps you understand the former all the better. There is no better, more dangerous satirist today than Ellis. He helped me understand control and how losing it brings panic. He helped me understand how the modern world shapes us, how violence can be mistaken for the foundations of an identity, and why the most violent are sometimes the most helpless among us.
Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville
Obsession. This is the book that scares me so much about all the parts I inherited from my parents. Anger and vengeance and single-mindedness. I can be ruthless and manipulative. I can hurt people. I have never found a way to eliminate these parts of me. Fear of what I can be at my worst keeps it at bay, like it’s locked in a cage. Moby-Dick is like visiting that cage and poking what’s inside. It is a connection to all the parts of me I am scared I will never reclaim.
Analogue: A Hate Story
by Christine Love
Analogue is a visual novel. Some people call it a computer game. I think it is something new. There is much more reading than playing. As you read, you uncover information about how a generation ship cast adrift in space falls into a patriarchal society dominated by misogyny. What happens when a society based around misogyny is allowed to develop in isolation, and is then visited by a woman from a more progressive age? What’s the endgame of so much hate? What happens if the misogynists win?
Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
Oryx and Crake is what happens if the misogynists win. It is what happens when patriarchy and abuse are so accepted, so ingrained in young boys’ lives, that they’re the ones who doom the world and shape the next one. Margaret Atwood’s weird, wild, wonderland post-apocalypse is captivating in its bleakness. In describing what happened to make the world this way in the first place, she draws the plot out slow like torture. It is an unbearable book to read; I could never take my eyes from it. It requires you take a cold shower and a hard look in the mirror afterward. It requires that you cry and talk to someone else about it and make them read it so you have someone to share fresh scars with.
Art shapes us. These are the books that made me what I am, that gave me hope and took it away, and frightened me and emboldened me. It’s easy to pick 10 books. It is unsettling to figure out why these 10 exactly.
How do you introduce a writer? Gabe wants us all to write something about ourselves, and I told him that was stupid. You get to know your writers by what they write, not by who they’ve been. I don’t choose any book by its author description. I wouldn’t choose a critic by her bio. If you’ve been following here, you know I’m getting my PhD in vertebrate paleontology with a special focus in geochemistry. What does that tell you about my ability to review movies, aside from I’m really annoying to watch Jurassic Park with?
I put a lot of myself into what I write. I think we all do. It’s what this site demands. It’s the one thing that sets us apart from every other film site I have read. We want criticism based on empathy, not judgment. And empathy is not always the easiest thing for me.
I can’t empathize with bullies because I lived in fear for my life in my own house. I can’t empathize with the poor because I never wanted for anything material. I can’t empathize with the wealthy because my family treated us like boxes on an estate checklist, things to forget when not presenting us glimmering at parties between the art and name-dropping the private chef. I can’t empathize with the strong because of their power and I can’t empathize with the weak because they’re so powerless. I’m 25, the child left alive because the one lesson I learned early in life is to remain.
I’m a funny person to take over as creative director, yet I wasn’t asked. I created the job until it was there for me to take. That’s how I know the world. I’m not often a nice person. I try very hard to be, but there’s an inescapable foundation built inside of me – I will always value hardness and isolation as my greatest strengths.
Why do I write about feminism? Because I want it to be OK to be full of edges, to have “unwomanly” traits, to possess instead of need, to be a woman who can be cold and arrogant and difficult like a man because – who cares why? Because I have the right to be.
As I’ve gotten to know the writers here, there appears to be a common thread. We are people who have each bounced off the world in our own way. We keep on coming back because we don’t look at this as a fault in ourselves. We look at this as a fault in the world.
One of the things I take the most pride in is my Portuguese heritage, even though I was exposed to none of it as a child. Perhaps because I was exposed to none of it as a child. I cosplay because it allows me to live out the only cultural heritage I really do know – video games, movies, books. I don’t do cosplay as often as I used to because I’ve found other outlets – climbing, krav maga, belly dancing – but that media heritage was the only resource I had from which to draw strength, and I needed strength because the one lesson I learned early in life is to remain.
I’ve been accused of having an agenda because I write about women on film and I want to see MORE women on film, but what’s an agenda? I’m the only one in class who can turn new cladistics in my head faster than the computer models them, but I’m still asked out by the professor. I can be the best Aerith at the con and my dedication and artistry gets me groped that much faster. I can detour up a V, 5.8 and the most strenuous task is informing male climbers, “No, I don’t need any help,” as I pass them. I don’t go to krav maga to be asked out on dates but because I want to learn, and I don’t belly dance for you to stuff a dollar bill in my clothes.
If I’m to write something about myself, it is this: I was raised in a physically abusive family, from which I was thankfully taken away by a kinder relative. My brother was not removed, in part because he had learned to dole out abuse. Taking him would have put me at risk again. He did not get the psychiatric assistance he needed and he later killed himself. The few things I do in life to cope with this, to try to be human, to do anything other than just remain, are often treated by others as opportunities to sleep with me. Yet by saying no and slapping hands away and informing deans, I’m the one who’s rude. I’m the one “with an agenda.”
Saying there’s a problem with representation in film, or video games, or music, isn’t having an agenda. It’s loving something enough to be honest about it. It’s looking at the things that made me strong and saying, “I can return the favor. I can make them stronger.” Having high expectations of art isn’t hating something. It’s not a fault in me, or Anita Sarkeesian, or Laurie Penny. It’s giving back to the art that shaped us, that gave each of us strength to remain in big, dramatic ways and small, everyday ways.
I’ll repeat that: It’s not an agenda. It’s giving back.
It’s also doing our jobs. For those who can’t handle a few women doing their jobs and having an opinion, then gird your overrated loins because the world’s changing, and I’m just one of many more women looking forward to doing her job.
I created this position – creative director – not to have an agenda, but because this is one of the few places where I feel free of needing one; not because I’m very good at empathy, but because the writers I work with here have no limit of it; not because I always believe the world can be changed, but because these five people relentlessly do:
Staff Writer S.L. Fevre
Editor Eden O’Nuallain
Staff Writer Cleopatra Parnell
Research Lead Amanda Smith
Lead Writer Gabriel Valdez
(And because they’re all hopeless at organizing themselves.)
Thank you and enjoy,
Vanessa Tottle
Creative Director
Gabe here: As Creative Director, Vanessa Tottle will be shaping the regular features and overall direction of this site. She will also write Silent All These Years – a feature about women in film – every other Thursday, as well as contribute standalone articles about movies and music videos. In addition to collaborative articles, she has previously written the following on this site.
I recently came across my aborted article, and you know what? Days after the release of female celebrities’ naked photos across the internet, endearingly nicknamed “The Fappening” cause 4Chan and Reddit can go fuck themselves (I’m sure they already know how), I finally figured out why I want to see Scarlett Johansson play Hannibal Lecter.
Power.
Gabe’s been pushing for more women in protagonist roles, and he gets a little confused when something like Guardians of the Galaxy comes out. For all its awesomeness, it has a green-skinned Zoe Saldana kicking a few aliens before the guy from Parks and Rec has to save her twice. Congratulations, we got 20% of the protagonist share. That’s half what the movie gave to anthropomorphized wildlife found in your backyard at midnight.
There’s a common misconception when we talk about more movies with better parts for women. We’re not saying that this should be a requirement for EVERY SINGLE movie. Neither are we saying that there need be a quota or regulation placed on the entertainment industry. All we’re talking about is raised expectations and the changes a more aware audience can effect.
Lawrence of Arabia is implicitly about T.E. Lawrence’s homosexuality. It was made in 1962 for approximately a bazillion dollars, so it couldn’t really be about Lawrence’s sexuality in any explicit way. It had to be intimated to the audience. It achieves this in part through its all-male speaking cast.
John Carpenter’s The Thing is the best horror movie ever filmed and it doesn’t have any women in it. Since the horror in it is a fleshy Freudian conceit for men’s fear of possessing and being possessed through sex, full of snapping extendo-vagina monsters, phallic emasculations, and male pregnancy metaphors, it wouldn’t work as well if it wasn’t full of bearded, 80s uberdudes drinking, gambling, and watching porn. Besides, Mary Elizabeth Winstead came along in a prequel and proved a woman could blow shit up just as well as Kurt Russell.
The point is we aren’t saying that all movies lacking or minimizing women are terrible. We’re saying there are simply far too many of them. We are never saying that we want old ways of making movies to go away. We only want those old styles to be better balanced with new ways of writing, casting, and making movies that have thus far been resisted by a backwards entertainment industry.
I even like – hell, love – Guardians of the Galaxy. But there’s no denying they missed a big opportunity with Saldana’s character Gamora. While the men are away killing nameless henchmen by the thousands and getting a crack at the big bad, Gamora is cordoned into a one-on-one against the only other woman in a lead.
Others have written about needing more female leaders portrayed in movies, and I agree. But you know what else I want to see? I want to see women playing all those powerful character roles we reserve exclusively for men. Which brings me back to Scarlett Johansson and Hannibal Lecter. I want to be terrified by a woman in the same way movies tell me I should be terrified by a man. That’s the real power on-screen.
I want to see Cate Blanchett in Training Day telling Kerry Washington that King Kong ain’t got shit on her. I want the evil general in however many Avatar sequels they’re filming to be played by Sigourney Weaver (they’re bringing her back as a new character anyway, why not the bad guy). I’m not scared of a shouty, musclebound crew cut who looks like he soaked up too much California sun, but if Sigourney lowered her voice in anger, I wouldn’t be able to look elsewhere. I want the new Star Wars villain, the inheritor of Darth Vader himself, to be a woman. And you know who could put Daniel Craig’s James Bond in his place? A terrorist mastermind Helen Mirren.
The real staying power on screen belongs to the iconic villain. Do you see kids borrowing their parents’ bathrobes to dress up as Luke Skywalker every Halloween? No, you see them spending time and money buying and making costumes so they can be Darth Vader for a day. They understand the villain represents power, and icons of power last the test of time.
Marvel’s making a Black Widow movie with Johansson. That’s a great step, and I applaud them for having it scheduled to launch shortly after their 10th movie centered on a white guy named Chris. Way to get on that.
Now make a movie where a female villain is something other than a male villain’s henchman with daddy issues. You just got wallpaper performances out of Guy Pearce, Chris Eccleston, and Lee Pace, and they’re all great actors. Meanwhile, Karen Gillan killed it in Guardians despite limited screen time.
Change up the formula. Write more heroic women, but while you’re at it, write more powerful women who want to rule the galaxy, too. That’s why I want to see Scarlett Johansson as Hannibal Lecter one day.
“Can you hear them, Jesse Eisenberg? Can you hear the silence of the lambs?”
And Jennifer Lawrence can make you put the lotion in the basket while she dances in the skins of dead men.
by S.L. Fevre, Cleopatra Parnell, Vanessa Tottle, & Gabe Valdez
Last week, we ran a four-part reveal of the best music videos of the year (so far). Below, find the recap of every music video we chose. Want to watch them? Click on the title of each one to view it on YouTube. Enjoy!
I went out and asked various writers a loaded question: Who is the next Jackie Chan? It’s tricky because, like Charlie Chaplin, Gene Kelly, or the Highlander, there can be only one. His skills are too unique to duplicate. I was just as interested in what Jackie Chan means to different viewers, and who might best embody those meanings going forward. Without further ado:
STEPHEN CHOW by Simon Scher
Who is the next Jackie Chan? To answer this we must first ask, who was the last Jackie Chan? When he first burst onto the international stage, his high-flying kung fu action and peerless speed were instantly compared to the father of international martial arts media, Bruce Lee. Chan did not hit the big time until after the death of Lee. So it would be hard to identify the next Jackie Chan until he too passes on or stops making amazing martial arts movies.
It has been said that Jet Li or Jason Scott Lee would fill the role, but though they are amazing martial artists with comparable skill and speed to both Chan and Bruce Lee, Jackie is still holding his spot while Jet and Jason are moving past their prime. I do not doubt that there will be another in the succession of Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan, but I do not believe he has yet made an appearance on the silver screen.
There are a number of young, talented Chinese Wushu stars simmering in the Hong Kong cinematic forge just waiting to make their way into Western cinema – perhaps it will be one of them. A strong but doubtful case can be made for Tony Jaa, but I don’t think he has the range or mass appeal to fill the slot. It will have to be a martial artist with range, language skills, and something innovative that takes the genre to a new level and in a different direction as both Bruce and Jackie did. If I had to pick somebody to pin my hopes on I would name Stephen Chow for his innovative approach to martial arts cinema, his amazing skills, and his sense of comedic and dramatic timing.
Simon Scher runs Northampton Martial Arts in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is a regular contributor to Black Belt Magazine, the biggest martial arts movie buff I know, and holds a sixth-degree black belt in Taekwondo.
JEEJA YANIN by Himura Sachiko
Having already shot one of the best martial arts sequences in recent history, Jeeja Yanin is my pick. I enjoy her work because her background is in Taekwondo, very close to my training, but she is choreographed in Muay Thai films. As a technician, she is perfect. Her kicks are some of the most complete I have ever seen. She over-rotates every one of them, which adds power, but she does so without losing control, balance, or speed.
Her style is a controlled lack of control, which speaks of true mastery and reminds me of Jackie Chan’s abilities. He was so perfect he could afford to be imperfect. Yanin also has Chan’s streak for the kooky, striking poses and involving dance in some of her roles. Ever since I first saw her in Chocolate, she has been my idol in my own training. She is also no stranger to insane stunt scenes.
My single worry is that she’s taking time off to have a baby. It is a wonderful decision and I congratulate her on starting a family, but time off has never helped a martial arts star grow. The man who laid the groundwork for her in Thai cinema, Tony Jaa, took time away and came back a shade of his former self, making films to cash in on his name but without the remaining skills to match.
Himura Sachiko is a business owner living in Osaka, Japan. She has a black belt in Shotokan Karate.
IKO UWAIS by Justine Baron
Jackie Chan is a martial arts legend who has graced the screen for over 50 years. Chan has managed to stand out from other martial artists by adopting his own style of light hearted comedy mixed with martial arts. He took roles like that of Wong Fei-Hung in Drunken Master, Dragon Ma in Project A, and Chan Ka Kui in the Police Story movies, to name a few of my personal favorites. He was, and still is, the quintessential example of an entertainer.
His first really successful English-speaking role was that of Keung in Rumble in the Bronx, which was a Hong Kong-made movie that was filmed in the U.S. with the intent of introducing him to Western audiences. This is where a lot of Americans, including myself, became familiarized with the man who would become a huge star outside of his home country, China. Rumble in the Bronx is actually the first movie of Chan’s that I’ve ever seen.
Not only that, but Jackie Chan was the first martial artist I’ve ever seen period. I was only about 7-years-old at the time and didn’t know who other martial artists like Bruce Lee were and, to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have cared at that age. Jackie Chan was fun to watch. He was funny, talented, and charismatic – all the qualities that would appeal to a younger, as well as older, generation. I further enjoyed watching him in other Hollywood movies like Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon. Now that I’m older, though, I prefer a lot of his Hong Kong films to his American ones. He has made over 100 films in his career. As I continue to discover more and more of his movies, I just become more impressed with his performances and the stunts that he can pull off. Jackie Chan was the man who introduced me to martial arts and, because of him, I have loved martial arts movies of all kinds ever since.
I think it goes without saying that there will never be another like Jackie Chan, and maybe that’s a good thing. However, there is one other martial artist who has really caught my eye in the past few years, and that is the up-and-coming Indonesian actor Iko Uwais from The Raid movies. This guy has impressed me so much with his abilities to not only choreograph amazing fight scenes and perform his own stunts, but also to execute the choreography so perfectly, I oftentimes find myself rewinding scenes and watching them again because I can’t believe what I’m seeing. This guy has been practicing Pencak Silat since he was 10-years-old, competing in tournaments and winning titles. No doubt the intensity of his fight scenes is partly due to the amazing style of the director who discovered him back in 2007, Gareth Evans. Together, they make movies with some of the most skillful, hard hitting action I’ve ever seen. They have managed to completely alter my taste in action movies.
That’s not to say there aren’t other martial artists and martial arts movies that I absolutely love, but it’s the work of Iko Uwais that has really stuck with me in recent years. Even after the success of movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – which I did enjoy – that shows how wire fu can be used beautifully, artistically, and performed almost like a ballet, I still prefer the wireless, raw, bloody, bone-crunching action given to us by Uwais. Call me weird, it’s OK. In my opinion, there’s already a ton of violence in movies in general, so if you’re going to watch a blood bath, why not enjoy a talented guy who can turn that into a well-choreographed blood bath? I am hoping that he will continue to make amazing martial arts movies for years to come, and be able to keep taking martial arts films to the next level.
He may not have the same kind of appeal as Jackie Chan, and that’s OK. In my opinion, he’s great at what he does, and that’s enough for me to wish that he has a long-lived, successful career.
Justine Baron sometimes works as a freelance production assistant on films and commercials. She has a passion for movies, and she puts her B.A. in English and Film to use by writing about movies in her free time at Justine’s Movie Blog.
YAYAN RUHIAN by Vanessa Tottle
Leave it to me to pick the bad guy, but Yayan Ruhian is my favorite martial artist to watch. I’ve seen three of his films now, including the two Raid movies, all Indonesian movies directed by Gareth Huw Evans. It’s not odd to work with the same director over and over again; most martial arts stars stick with one until they have the cachet to control their image working in unfamiliar environments.
Yayan also choreographed those films, with Iko Uwais. In The Raid, Yayan plays the enforcer Mad Dog. He fights as if killing someone is a religious experience, an addiction of the soul. He is powerful. In The Raid 2, he plays the assassin Prakoso. He may as well be called Stray Dog. Murder is the only trade he knows, the only thing he’s good at. He is desperate and sad. In both, he brings an animal quality I’ve never seen before. He throws himself into fights with reckless abandon. He sometimes feels a step away from losing all control.
In both, he possesses a dramatic quality not always seen in action movies. This is what martial arts stars will need to display in the future. It’s not enough to just be a Jackie Chan anymore (except for Jackie Chan, of course). Or, for that matter, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. Those days of rooting for actors and never knowing the characters’ name are over. You must be able to play a character inside a story now. While many martial artists can impress us in their action scenes, we will only remember those who impress us in quiet, emotional scenes as well.
It’s fitting that our next Jackie Chan might be an expert at playing villains, like a Silat master Gary Oldman. We live in a time of villains, of religious addict mad dogs and sad, stray dogs under thumb who know nothing else. The next Jackie Chan will speak to his time the way Chan did to his, and Yayan Ruhian speaks to this time in a way that terrifies and intrigues me.
Vanessa Tottle is earning her Ph.D. in vertebrate paleontology. She writes often for this site, and holds a black belt in Krav Maga.
NO ONE by Chris Braak
Jackie Chan sat at the crossroads of a very particular combination of cultural factors – as a direct successor to Bruce Lee, whose influence helped change Hong Kong cinema from one that relied on elaborate special effects to one that focused much more on physical virtuosity; as an actor he sort of “broke through” in the U.S. in the 80s and 90s, when the kind of star-powered action vehicle was still going strong; and as a product of the Beijing Opera School, which taught a very performance-focused form of kung fu. And I’m not sure that this combination exists right now; American cinema is bifurcated between low-budget, very “acting” films and high-budget, elaborate-effects heavy movies, neither of which are geared to showcase (nor do they particularly require) the kind of virtuosity that Jackie Chan brought to his movies.
The star-powered vehicles are largely a thing of the past as well. It seems like Tom Cruise is maybe the last Hollywood star trying to work this way, and his movies aren’t doing so well; even the lower-budget martial arts stars are either abandoning that kind of movie (Jason Statham, for example, just doesn’t seem interested in them right now) or never quite made it with American audiences (David Belle is in his forties, now, and past his prime; Tony Jaa never seemed to catch on, and seriously I did my part, I saw Ong Bak in the theaters; who else? Stephen Chow seems to have abandoned the martial-arts-star movie.)
The kinds of actors who are working now as martial arts stars in the U.S. are either second-string, low profile guys (like Scott Adkins) or they’re old.
So where would the new crop of actors come from? Well, the thing is that there is nothing like the Beijing Opera School in the U.S. or any of the Anglophone nations where we get our actors (England, Australia, Canada). Nothing. And while that doesn’t mean we couldn’t get Asian actors with the kind of background in both performance and spinning flip-kicks if we wanted, it does govern the kind of movies that actors are drawn to, and thus the kind of movies that get made, and I think this is going to crowd out the virtuoso-martial artist movie, and therefore crowd out the virtuoso martial artists.
Furthermore, we’ve got to accept that American movies don’t select for virtuosity. “Martial arts” provides the background for a lot of actors’ workout routines, sure, but those are exactly what they sound like: workout routines. They’re about building big muscles and washboard abs, not developing that kind of grace and agility that only being sold to the Beijing Opera when you’re 12 years old and spending your formative years leaping over tables and whacked with bamboo sticks can provide. This is both limiting, in terms of what those actors are going to do onscreen, and also antithetical to the essential nature of kung fu: “cosmetic” kung fu is not kung fu at all.
In my opinion, we’re not in a place right now in American cinema that’s got room for a new Jackie Chan. I think we might be ripe for it, definitely I would be in favor of a new wave of popular, virtuoso martial arts movies; I expect they’re going to have to come from somewhere other than the U.S., though, and I don’t see anything quite like that on the horizon.
Many people name martial artists like Jet Li, to which I respond NOOOOO! You are missing the point if you consider actors like him. Jackie Chan is comedic, his predecessors were Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, not Bruce Lee. One of his contemporaries was Chris Farley. People are so blown away with Jackie Chan’s agility and physicality that they don’t make the connection that he is doing slapstick comedy. The Question becomes who is doing advanced slapstick these days, and I can’t think of anyone on this side of the pond. That’s my two cents.
[After asking Carter if there was anyone popularizing martial arts films the way Jackie Chan did as a director, she did add the following. -Gabe]
How about the Wachowskis? Sci-fi/kung fu crossovers weren’t common until after The Matrix.
Carter Churchfield is a tour guide/jack of all trades/international mercenary who is a horror aficionado/famed pigeon wrestler/diamond smuggler. She doesn’t know it, but it’s a high school performance of hers that got me interested in theatre and filmmaking in the first place.
GINA CARANO by S. L. Fevre
12-1-1 record in professional Muay Thai. 7-1 record in MMA (undefeated against fighters who didn’t get suspended for steroids). Here’s her debut. All 38 seconds of it. Arguably the best stand-up fighter MMA’s had, man or woman. One of the only actors who began her career as a competitive fighter. When she was filming a fight scene for Haywire, Michael Fassbender slammed her head into a wall too hard. She retaliated by breaking a vase over his million dollar face. (He told MTV he could tell it was coming a second before it happened, and that’s when he knew it would be a great fight scene.)
Cause I’ve met cats who hit harder than actors like Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana and there’s a plague of mainstream actors who think a few weeks of training make them look like secret agents. Carano’s knocked people out and she’s been knocked out. When she kicks someone in the head, I can believe she just gave them a concussion.
S. L. Fevre is an actress, model, and martial arts movie fan who lives in California. She kickboxes for fitness.
MICHAEL JAI WHITE by Kyle Price-Livingston
With the concurrent rise of superhero movies and Mixed Martial Arts, audience expectations for martial arts films have changed. Where once we looked for grace, speed, and agility, we now seek bone-shattering strength and brutality. The Jackie Chan of the future will need to demonstrate a mean uppercut, a working knowledge of submission holds and the self-confidence necessary to wear tights without embarrassment.
There is, to my mind, only one actor who can currently pull that off: Michael Jai White. At 46, White is perhaps a bit old to be considered “the next” anything, but he works consistently, looks the part, and even plays the Jackie Chan role in Skin Trade, an upcoming film which is basically a photo-negative of Rush Hour. He is, at the very least, the prototype for the next generation of martial arts stars.
All you need to know about Kyle Price-Livingston is that he’s the sort of guy who – when he posts about giving a chipmunk CPR – you think about it for a second, consider to whom it happened, and figure, “Yeah, that’s reasonable.”
ZHANG ZIYI by Gabe Valdez
Insofar as his unique physical performance and comedic presence, there is no next Jackie Chan. It’s a ludicrous question, which is why all these fantastic writers have been so game in answering it. To me, the next Jackie Chan is someone with demonstrated box office appeal who uses his extent of unique training to bridge cultural gaps, to make social commentary on his own culture, and to further popularize martial arts films by making people look at them in a way they never have before. Having been baptized in fight choreography against the icons of the previous generation only helps his credibility.
There is only one answer for me: Zhang Ziyi. Proven box office, name appeal in the East and West. Like Jackie Chan, she was trained from youth in a separate field from martial arts (dance) that lends her a quality that’s unique from every other martial arts actor on film. As anyone who’s seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; House of Flying Daggers; or The Grandmaster can attest, she has a dramatic ability most actors – martial arts or otherwise – can only dream of. She’s worked with directors Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee, and Wong Kar Wai in films that have revolutionized the operatic approach to kung fu cinema, and are simultaneously very popular in China and yet incredibly subversive in their themes.
And you can’t beat her resume – fight scenes opposite Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Chow Yun Fat, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, and alongside Takeshi Kaneshiro. She’s also starred in a movie with Jackie Chan (and if you ask me, Brett Ratner’s biggest mistake as a director has nothing to do with X-Men 3 and everything to do with giving us a Zhang Ziyi-Chris Tucker fight scene instead of a Zhang Ziyi-Jackie Chan fight scene in Rush Hour 2).
Most importantly, she can communicate a scene dramatically through her movement quality in a way no other actor has demonstrated. This has made directors change how kung fu is filmed.
Gabe Valdez writes the movie blog you’re currently reading. It’s read in over 90 countries and has featured more than 20 different writers. I hold a black belt in Taekwondo and analyze fight choreography regularly. I’ve most recently written on zen philosophy in Jackie Chan’s choreography and the mythical choreography in Troy and Serenity.
When I was growing up, I had a lot of games. I think my parents gave me them because it kept me distracted and away from them for long periods of time. I loved the ones where I could play as women. Instead of watching someone else with perfect hair on a California sound stage kick the shit out of supernatural creatures, I could do it myself.
In Lara Croft, I found a woman who did everything the men did in action movies, but I got to shoot the guns, climb the ancient ruins, and drive the motorcycles myself. I do what I do now (paleontology) in part because I got to be a woman in short shorts and climbing shoes when I was just a kid who thought the world ended at the edges of my hazy town and couldn’t always be sure it would start again the next morning. Yes, Core Design expanded her tits in every sequel until Crystal Dynamics took over the series, but games were the one experience I had in having agency over anything, and Tomb Raider gave me the best games in which I had that agency as a woman. That opened up what I thought I could do in the world.
I have only been watching E3 for a few years, but Ubisoft blew the doors off this one like no other company before: their lineup included Assassin’s Creed Unity (AssU for short), Far Cry 4, The Division, Rainbow Six: Siege, The Crew, and Valiant Hearts: The Great War. Then they were asked why AssU and Far Cry 4 lacked playable women in the multiplayer. An innocent enough question. Ubisoft could have said female playables didn’t fit their vision or that they wanted to focus on some male-driven theme. Not perfect answers, but at least it would mean they had considered the possibility. Instead, they insisted animating female characters would have doubled their development time. Which is bullshit. Which their former animation lead came out and said was bullshit. Which, for a game being developed by nine studios, like AssU is, is especially bullshit.
So forget them. Why?
I’ve got an H.R. Giger Alien to face off against using only a motion sensor and a crème brulee torch. Alien: Isolation looks like everything I want in a horror game: dark and moody, a focus on sneaking around an overpowered opponent, survival against a constant threat instead of victory-by-shooting gallery. All set against a late 70s vision of our technological future and the vast emptiness of space. Its protagonist? Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen. Good thing, too. Like in Aliens, I don’t know that your average man with 20 guns could hack it. A woman with a blowtorch and a schematic? The Alien doesn’t stand a chance.
Why else? Because Faith is my Batman. The heroine of the first Mirror’s Edge returns in the second, which for a very long time looked like it wouldn’t get made. Faith slows down when she picks up a gun. It’s extra weight, and she has to use her hands to aim. In a first-person parkour game, that means death. She’s much better at navigating the architecture of a level to beat someone up, avoid combat altogether, or bypass conflict. Imagine playing a game that lets you be Jackie Chan. This is it.
And finally, Rise of the Tomb Raider. When Crystal Dynamics rebooted the franchise in 2013 with Tomb Raider, it kept the supernatural elements of the series and grounded everything else. When you fire a gun, it feels powerful. When you jam a pick into someone’s skull, it takes effort and feels revolting. It was more survival game than shooter or platformer. Lara’s world was no longer glamour and ritz, it was dirt and grime. She’s a woman who gets beat up by her opponents and her environment, but who gets back up again and again, always in the service of helping someone, discovering something new, or solving a mystery. If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, you know why that speaks to me.
So go back to the 18th century, Ubisoft. The rest of us have fucking games to play.
Vanessa is getting her PhD in vertebrate paleontology, with a special focus in geochemistry. She has participated in digs on four different continents. Eat your heart our, Lara Croft. You can read more of her work here.
The gall of them. The gall of one young shit in Isla Vista. He used a Sig-Sauer P226, which is what James Bond used in Bolivia after getting a woman killed because he fucked her like a prize.
He also had a Glock 34. Denzel Washington used that once in Man on Fire. He looked very good in slow-motion gunfights. He needed to. There was a white, blonde, baby Dakota Fanning to save from endless Mexicans.
I was owned once. It was not in the way that Elliot Rodger would have liked. It was in the way that an abusive family owns you, like a vase they don’t know where to put, so they stick you out of sight and out of mind, but still you’re owned, and your chief quality is your quietness, and sometimes that is reinforced.
I weigh 105 pounds. I am a 105 pound vase. I crack myself because my quality is quietness. I have a black belt in krav maga. It has cost me three cracked ribs and a broken jaw. Try getting the flu with a broken jaw.
I lead paleontology digs now. I have taken assistant leadership roles in Canada, the United States, China, and South America. I almost have my Ph.D. It has cost me a broken ankle, a concussion, and cool-looking parasites. Once, I stood looking at a bear while friends climbed up river banks to safety, and I was all that was between my friends and the bear. The bear didn’t move. Maybe it saw a vase whose quality was quietness, with too many cracks to give a shit about one more. Maybe it was disinterested.
The gall of one young shit in Isla Vista, to think I can be owned, to think I would go back to that, to think I would move aside for him, to think that Bond and Denzel gave him strength enough to move a woman. I was thin as ragged bones until I left my parents’ house and learned I was crafted out of more than quietness.
What has he to show for pain? Disappointed misogyny? Three guns and nowhere to use them? Pain is real. You don’t come back from it. You feel it all the time. I don’t doubt that he felt pain. I doubt that he had ever earned it.
Pain can be taught. I’m a Harry Potter fan, I think every abused kid is, so let me describe it like this: pain can be cast like a charm over you. Pain can be offered as an excuse by people who want to master you. You think it’s real. You think you won’t come back from it. You think you feel it all the time. But it isn’t real. You are bewitched. You are the victim of an illusion.
Believe in any pain for long enough, and you become a thing, owned by whoever made you believe in it. The boy in Isla Vista belonged to someone else. He belonged to the Male Rights Association. He belonged to a philosophy. He had found a family who taught him the pain he should believe in, and who taught him being owned by their philosophy was the only outlet for that pain. He became a vase they didn’t know where to put, but one they crafted out of violence.
If you want to temper a human being, you give her hope. You tell her that her enemies are behind her, that they cannot hurt her anymore. You teach her cracking can be beautiful. You teach her to look at herself as a leader.
If you want to temper a weapon, you give him hate. You tell him that his enemies are all around him, that they only think of hurting him. You teach him cracking isn’t acceptable. You teach him to follow you.
I was a vase, stuck out of sight and out of mind. So was he. To pretend we started any different is a lie. To call him evil is to isolate the repercussions to a dead man. I hate him, but I won’t ease my mind with excuses. He was shaped this way by others. He was tempered through a process. He was taught who to blame and who to hate. His life was not a war, he was just a weapon made by others. He was an amateur. The professionals don’t get their hands dirty. The ones who teach young men to think this way are waging the war. The politicians who seek to control our rights to our bodies are waging the war. They teach men to be mastered. They teach women to be tired. Before we see what other weapons that philosophy can make, we need to treat this like a war as well. Our weapons are leadership, creativity, knowledge, communication, and relentlessness.
They try to take away our leadership by destroying Head Start and Acorn and unions across North America. They reinforce the idea that one president’s too black to lead and the next president is too much of a woman to lead. They try to take away our creativity by stealing from PBS and NPR, by foisting us with Common Core education and standardized testing. They try to take away our knowledge by making higher education unaffordable. They consolidate media into a handful of channels, and these channels interrupt discussions of hate crimes and government deadlock with breaking Justin Bieber news. They try to take away our communication by bankrupting the postal service and making plans to sell the internet chunk by chunk like parcels of land. They replace these with false alternatives, hoping we don’t notice. They try to take away our relentlessness by making us re-fight the battles we have already won – abortion, voting rights, fair pay, social security, veteran care. Women are exhausted from fighting for our bodies. Minorities are exhausted from working harder for the right to vote. The poor are exhausted from working more to make the same. The elderly are exhausted from a broken promise they worked all their lives to earn. Soldiers are exhausted from physical and emotional scars that go untreated.
This isn’t by conspiracy, not entirely. It’s by mentality, but when a mentality is so deeply and overwhelmingly ingrained in us, it exhibits the same traits as the conspiracies we make up to distract ourselves. But why do they fight so desperately? Why do they take away so much? Because our fate is progress, and theirs is to dwindle.
When you’re in a corner, your training takes over. You don’t think. You react from years of being taught what to do. When I broke my jaw, I was sparring two men who are twice my size and ranked above me. One was my instructor. Krav Maga is never fair. You’re not meant to win fights. You’re meant to learn to keep on going despite being broken. I believe that’s why I take to it. I remained sparring for five minutes after my jaw cracked. I could barely see or hear through the pain. Breath came and went. My body took over as my mind receded. All I could think of was not being cornered. Don’t get cornered, don’t get cornered. I had been cornered years of my life; I would not go back to that. I was given the option to stop. I would not stop. Classmates told me I became vicious. I had no chance to begin with, and then my jaw broke. I lost the match, that was always the point. But I understood then: I was tempered through a process.
Theirs is a different process: Right to rape. Oppression by exhaustion. Destroying the middle class. Imprisoning minorities. Ownership via hatred. They have been tempered by an ugly mentality. But their desperation is no different. We can recognize it if we stop to think and consider their ridiculousness. They have the option to stop, but they react from years of being taught what to do. They are still mastered by their mentality and those who preach it. It is because they will lose that they have become so vicious on its behalf.
I have overheard friends say there’s nothing we can do. I have been told change is a process that takes place over decades. No shit. What number decade is this in that process? My right to vote was established in 1920. The Civil Rights Act happened in 1964. Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.
Change doesn’t happen for people out of sight and out of mind. It doesn’t happen for the quiet. It certainly doesn’t happen for those afraid of being cracked. I think we’re all done with that. I hope we’re all done with that. They have brandished their weapons. Now let us brandish ours: Let us lead. Let us create. Let us teach. Let us communicate. Let us be relentless. Ours are not the backs against the wall anymore, so let us refuse to act the part.
Long ago, our chief quality was quietness. We are crafted out of so much more than that.
Gabriel Diego Valdez 