IndieGoGo Highlight — “Reasonable Fear”

by Gabriel Valdez

Reasonable Fear is a new Philadelphia short play festival exploring street harassment and rape culture. In the words of producer Alyson Rodriguez Orenstein, the series will feature “survivors’ tales, pieces on street harassers, pieces on the difficulty of reporting crimes like rape, and pieces on the media’s contribution to the sexual objectification of women.”

Orenstein and co-producer Amanda Sylvester are currently running an IndieGoGo campaign to make the show a reality.

Reasonable Fear will be presented at the Luna Theater April 16-25, and Saturdays will feature comedians addressing the subject of harassment and rape culture; the line up includes Rachel Fogletto, Vickie Fernandez, and Hannah Harkness.

Orenstein and Sylvester are putting on my favorite kind of production – being formed as something entirely new from the ground up. These kinds of productions can help theatre respond more swiftly to the social issues we deal with today. It’s also still rare to see theatre that’s produced by women or that features women as the focal point. Money from their fundraising campaign will go toward venue, set design, and promotion, among other things.

I don’t like to donate to anything unless I know where it’s coming from, that who I’m donating to is reliable. It’s why I list fundraising campaigns very rarely and only when I’m familiar with who’s running them. Touch Me Philly Productions is a theatrical production company with a history (you can check out their past shows here) of bringing successful live performances to bear, including hosted horror events, concerts, variety hours, and burlesque shows.

Stop by their IndieGoGo, hear what they have to say for yourself and if you’re in the Philly area or just want to see more shows that cover these topics, consider donating to help put this one up.

If you’re an actor in Philadelphia who’s interested in auditioning, you can also check out the listings, but please be aware you only have until March 7.

Wednesday Collective — Talking About Isla Vista

Ask me about dance or film or anything else, and I can go on for hours right now. Especially right now. Ask me about Isla Vista and…I’ve written pages of reaction and vetted them with a close friend, and they’re just not there yet. I will tell you a quick story about the Pick-Up Artist and Male Rights culture, however.

I lost an old friend in February last year to the Pick Up Artist culture. Let’s call him Bob, though that’s not his real name. I had visited Bob in New Jersey for a weekend, but one untested restaurant later and I was slammed with the worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had. He was very helpful, even going with me to the hospital, but when he had to step out and I needed to ask his roommate for help, it became an issue. Let’s call her Alicia, though that’s not her real name either. You see, to put it in his words, Alicia was his. She had already informed him once that she was very much her own and no one else’s, but this didn’t stop him from exercising some territorial mark to everyone behind her back. As he described to me, one day she’d realize she owed him for his being such a good friend, and everything else would work itself out.

Bob had been spouting Pick Up Artist gibberish for years: “Have you heard about negging?” “What about getting a friend to talk you up?” “Do you have a backstory ready?”

For years, I had joined other friends in laughing off Bob’s PUA obsession as something harmless. We’d argue with him from a philosophical standpoint, but we’d invariably let it go as not something important enough to truly fight over. That was our mistake, because by the time that thinking had festered in him for years, by the time he found himself with his life truly backed up against the wall, women had turned into nothing more for him than a goal his suffering earned. Alicia was to be Bob’s reward for having a tough run of life, and he spouted off the PUA gibberish as if it were religious dogma.

I asked Alicia if she would still be around to let me back in after I hobbled down the street to get a prescription filled for my nausea. It was the end of a friendship. Now, I feared getting locked out for the day in a bad section of New Jersey while I could barely stand upright, but in Bob’s mind, other men in the apartment weren’t allowed to be alone with Alicia, because all men must think like he did. Suddenly, I became privy to the same kind of gender inequality we usually only attach to the most extreme religious fundamentalism. It didn’t matter that I was seeing someone. It didn’t matter that Bob and I had been friends for years. It didn’t matter that I must’ve looked real supersexy puking my guts out Exorcist-style. It certainly didn’t matter that Alicia was a person capable of her own free will. Bob could only understand the world through a reward-system of sex and male dominance. In his mind, every decision in his life had to be oriented around the acquisition and defense of sex.

I ended up driving home on massive medication, and not having eaten in two days, because it was too disturbing to stay in New Jersey. When I got home, there were e-mails from him. There were texts from him. I started getting calls at 2 a.m. just to inform me Alicia was his. I scuttled the friendship. Bob had, over several years, adopted himself into a cult. And make no mistake – PUA and the Male Rights Association are cults, developed with the same purpose in mind as any other cult – to indoctrinate and addict paying believers. Like many cults, they need an enemy who’s visually different from their membership – in this case, women. Like many cults, teachings become more and more aggressive to the point of violence and hatred – the one who offers the best opportunity to blame and hate the enemy makes the most money.

I talked with Alicia some weeks later. She was fine. She had found a way to largely extract herself from the situation. I haven’t talked to Bob since, and I’m thankful for that.

MRAs around the country are cults, pure and simple. They don’t always take the look of cults because they’re compound isn’t brick and mortar, but rather an online, anonymous one. They have extensive online outreach, messaging campaigns, newsletters, forums, advice columns, all driven toward the purpose of indoctrination. Some of the more complex ones have oriented themselves around hacking women’s phones and computers. There’s a cottage industry of revenge porn, often involving photoshopping the ex-girlfriends of members onto the bodies of nude models, and then forwarding the resulting fake to the ex-girlfriend’s employers, friends, and relatives in an effort to make her ostracized and get her fired. Other members may volunteer their time to stalk the ex. If they can’t have her, she doesn’t deserve to have a life – that’s what many of these men feel. That’s what the idiot in Isla Vista felt. These cults have members who form the same kind of cause-driven militias that other cults have, and though these associations may be socially networked, their guns are very real.

I also don’t want to relegate the issue to a couple of dangerous nuts. What makes so many men susceptible to PUA and MRA is a culture that values sex as a reward to be won in our films, our video games, our television, our books. We don’t just need better gender representation in our media, but a reassessment of the value systems that our media reinforces. We have a Star Wars film with one female lead to six male leads. How much do you want to bet she’s a love interest? We have 25 superhero films centered around a man for every one superhero film centered around a woman. That includes the most expensive cinematic franchise ever created, which boasts exactly one female superhero among eight males. That’s bullshit.

Look, I’m only qualified to talk about this from a media and art perspective, maybe something of a political one, though it’s been a few years since I was in that game. Every reader is going to be qualified to talk about this through their own specialties. Figure out what you have to say, make sure it’s something that adds to the conversation, and voice up. We may think our goal is to keep Isla Vista from happening again, but the truth is, Isla Vista happens in the form of assault and rape thousands of times every day because of the way men are raised to view themselves, sex, and their relationship to women in this country. The conservative estimate is that a sexual assault happens once every two minutes in the U.S., but this doesn’t take into account an estimate that 75 to 95% of assaults go unreported. That means that the real number may be as high as once every six seconds.

But I’m not an expert in this. There are people far better equipped than I to talk about what caused this and what might begin the process toward addressing it. Please read their words and consider what they have to say. I’ll post their articles below without the usual Wednesday Collective commentary because, frankly, what they have to say, they say far better than I can:

Stockton Man Reportedly Opens Fire on Women After They Refuse Sex
Isha Aran

Let’s call the Isla Vista killings what they were: misogynist extremism
Laurie Penny

On Elliot Rodger, Isla Vista, Patriarchy
Chris Braak

Elliot Rodger’s California shooting spree: further proof that misogyny kills
Jessica Valenti

Christopher Michael-Martinez’s Father Gets It Right
Adam Gopnik

Seth Rogen Is Not A Victim Of The Santa Barbara Killings
Jessica Goldstein

‘No Way To Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
The Onion staff

Right Where It Belongs — “Under the Skin”

Imagine a wolf making a documentary about rabbits. The little, scurrying things will seem foreign and strange and uselessly busy. Every once in a while, the wolf gets peckish and nabs one of its film subjects for lunch. This is how Under the Skin introduces itself, as a monumental psychological horror movie that reflects the bleak, harsh landscapes of the Scottish cities and countryside in which it takes place.

The predator we follow, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a human-looking alien preying upon the damaged and homeless in Scotland. We’re told she’s an alien in a very esoteric way, but you’ll probably have it figured out by the time she’s seducing and digesting men.

Species this isn’t, however. There are no sex scenes in these seductions – plenty of equal-opportunity nudity, but no sex scenes. Instead, the seduction takes place in a sort of nothingness. It’s haunting and beautiful and visually very clever. And the digestion? It’s one of the great moments of horror filmmaking.

The visuals here can utterly command your attention. The first half, as Johansson’s predator is on the hunt, is dominated by bright figures centered in dark surroundings. It’s a binary relationship – predator, prey, nothing more. When she’s on the prowl, Under the Skin reflects Scotland’s surging visual art movement – one which recycles liberally from other popular media. Our predator is selective – no one with a family or loved one will suffer, only loners no one will miss. As she trawls the streets of Edinburgh for potential victims, we spy on her conversations as if following Dominic Monaghan or Jeremy Wade seeking out interviews from aboriginal locals, or we watch from the back of her nondescript white van as if we’re the turret camera atop a jeep waiting for some stalking creature to give chase to the herd.

The second half of the film is altogether different, and concerns our predator’s growing empathy and identification with humans. She begins to learn the limits and capacities of her body. Images now brim at their edges with light and color, yet are anchored in the middle by dark, underlit figures. It redirects our focus toward the edges of the frame, toward the possibility of what’s just out of sight, the unknown still obscured. Where we once cut relatively quickly from one shot to the next – while Johansson’s alien was on the prowl – we now linger even after characters leave the shot so we can appreciate the sound of the wind or the complex geometry of crisscrossing branches. The wolf goes native, starts wanting to play with the rabbits.

There’s also a spooky moment of inverting rape culture here. Scarlett Johansson’s nameless alien gets very unnerving theme music early on, whenever she preys upon a man. When it hits, you straighten up, your fingers grip the armrests. The score by Mica Levi is superb – the best of the year so far. As the predator identifies more and more with humans, she adopts our rhythms, our weaknesses. These moments are without music, but that unnerving theme does return once more. It becomes someone else’s theme later on, when roles of predator and prey are reversed. It’s a shocking auditory moment, a double-take for the ears that sends a lump straight to your throat.

It’s vicious, but played as academic and unfeeling as her own earlier predations. It makes you realize you’ve spent ninety minutes trying to inhabit the altogether alien sociopathy of a sexual predator. It gives you a window into a psyche it ought to be utterly impossible to give us access to. In that single achievement, this may be one of the most challenging and important films I’ve seen in my life. It’s terrifying on a whole different scale. I can’t recall having seen a piece of art do what Under the Skin does.

As an adaptation of the Michel Faber novel of the same name, this is…altogether something else. I love the Faber novel, but gone are the corporate politics and alien foodie-isms. This is a sleeker beast with a different cross to bear, yet there’s a consciousness to the rhythm of each sequence, an offhand attitude to narrative, and a lingering in the most evocative moments of its cinematography that feels just like Faber’s guarded and relentless concision of speech.

It’s worth noting I saw Under the Skin with two friends – an actor who enjoys classic cinema and a filmmaker whose bread and butter are action-comedies. Two ends of the spectrum, and neither one enjoyed it much, criticizing its lack of storytelling fundamentals and the molasses-pace of its second half. I was taken aback by how much they didn’t like it, but their criticisms are accurate. As a cogent story, Under the Skin requires a lot of work on the part of the audience. It’s that work on our part, that Pavlovian training we have as viewers to try as hard as we can to identify with our protagonist, that gives the story’s later inversion its power, however.

Under the Skin is not just a weird film or an art horror piece, it’s downright, unabashed experimental filmmaking, and that’s divisive. It’s absolutely not for everyone. For the right someone, though, it’s as brutal a shock to the system as storytelling in any form can achieve.