Meta: Rebecca and Rowena; Part I: Introduction

Note: I have been working on this post for several months now, and it just keeps getting longer and longer. As such, I’ve decided to break it down into four parts: the introduction, the novel/parody novella, the films, and the television adaptations.

Every now and then I come back to this article in The Toast about The Unified Theory of Ophelia, in which the author half-jokingly claims that they once believed everything there was to know about womanhood could be discovered in the character of Ophelia.

I had a similar revelation last year on reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and watching its assorted film and television adaptations (plus, William Makepeace Thackery’s parody novella). Everything about how female characters are portrayed across media, how fandom responds to them, and even how Love Triangles and Fan-Preferred Couples form in the imaginations of readers/viewers, can arguably be found in media’s collective portrayal of Rowena and Rebecca across the centuries.

Source

I would go so far as to say that the genesis of all fandom’s discourse and harassment and cross-examination and hypersensitivity and preoccupation with female characters and the role they play in any given narrative can be traced back to these two fictional women. Is that too broad a claim? Yes, of course – but as the linked article points out, every now and then certain theories and concepts that interest you can occasionally seem to magically coalesce into a single, shining, straightforward example. It’s like discovering the unifying theory of the universe.

Woman of the Month: Eris

Eris from Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

For this month, I am allowing myself one semi-obscure female villain.

Of course, the goddess Eris is hardly unknown: she’s a major player in Greek mythology and the deity who kicked off the Trojan War when she threw the Golden Apple of Discord into the crowd at Peleus and Thetis’s wedding (and by doing so, making herself the progenitor of the evil fairy that curses Sleeping Beauty at her Christening, for whether she’s called Maleficent, Carabosse or the Fairy of Red, that character also sows discord after not being invited to a party).

But this particular take on Eris might count as obscure, as she’s from an animated movie released in 2003 that bombed badly at the box office. Yet for all that, she is easily its highlight, and reason enough to watch Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas at least once.

Michelle Pfeiffer lent her silky voice to the manipulative, chaos-loving goddess who has an elaborate plan to strew havoc throughout the known world, but what really gets your attention is the stunning animation that brings her to life. She slinks and glides across the screen, shifting in and out of ink-black smoke, with serpentine hair that undulates around her with an underwater fluidity. Sometimes she’s the size of a mortal woman; other times she expands to frighteningly large proportions, with glowing eyes and elongating fingers. You can’t take your eyes off her whenever she’s onscreen

Truly, she’s a marvel of animation; demonstrating that even a not-great movie can be elevated by a truly great villain.

Reading/Watching Log #117

It is the first day of spring in the southern hemisphere, and I reach it like a castaway onto an island full of fresh water and fruit. Damn, that was a gruelling winter. I hate the cold and the dark at the best of times, but there was something in the air this year that made absolutely everyone sick – continuously and relentlessly.

I suspect I caught more than one thing at once, which ended up playing havoc on my immune system, and after five whole weeks of feeling like absolute crap, my doctor finally prescribed me some antibiotics just to help fight whatever the hell was going on in my Petrie dish of a body.

My blog has been so quiet lately because I honestly haven’t had the energy to write anything. By the time I got home from work, I just wanted to crawl into bed and fall unconscious, but now – well, hopefully I can start plumping up these entries again.

And yes, I will eventually post my reading/watching list for July.

This month’s theme: PIRATES!

Woman of the Month

 

Debbie Jellinski from Addams Family Values

It’s time to showcase a comedic villainess.

I was surprised to discover that Addams Family Values was a flop when it was released back in 1993, as in my opinion it’s far better than the first film, and Joan Cusack damn near steals the show as its villain. She plays Debbie Jellinski, a woman engaged in that noble profession of marrying rich guys and then killing them to inherit their fortunes. She’s been doing it for a while, successfully offing her unfortunate string of husbands and evading law enforcement, but what elevates her from being another run-of-the-mill black widow is Cusack’s performance.

There is truly nothing more fun than watching her go from the wide-eyed, earnest, virginal (yet still aggressively sexual) Debbie in the first half of the film to the cruel, materialistic, vindicative monster-bitch (who remains aggressively sexual) in the second. Joan Cusack just oozes malevolence from every pore, her facial expressions and body language so completely predatory and over-the-top.

Her incredulous “you?” when Fester admits he’s a virgin, her wriggling glee when she watches the Nightline exposé on herself, the look of dark intent when she preps the bomb to take out her latest husband – all done in an array of colourful sundresses. Her manipulations even get Wednesday and Pugsley sent to summer camp.

The craziest thing is that if Debbie had just been upfront about her intentions, the Addams family probably would have welcomed her as one of their own (Morticia is cool with her scheming, it’s the pastels she objects to). They even wish her good luck as she’s about to murder them and make her escape.

What was a pretty clichéd villain is elevated entirely by Joan Cusack’s deliciously evil performance. She practically slithers her way through the role, and is the larger-than-life villain that the previous film lacked; the perfect dark foil not only to the Addams family, but also the obnoxiously chipper camp leaders. Not everyone can paraphrase the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’ll get you, and your little hand too!”) and own it.

Reading/Watching Log #116

Okay, I suppose you’re wondering: where’s the Reading/Watching Log for June? Between work, annual leave, and then a flu bug that’s still dragging on, I just couldn’t get around to finishing it – but it’s on its way. My two weeks off coincided with terrible weather, and so I made it my mission to catch up on every bit of franchise fluff that I’d deliberate skipped in the last five or so years.

But then it got a little out of hand, when I decided to watch something from every big-budget franchise, from The Matrix to The Muppets, under the proviso that I’d never seen it before. There was simply no way in hell I can write a full review for everything that I binged in those two weeks – but limiting myself to just a couple of sentences also takes quite a while when you watched as much as I did in a fortnight.

It'll turn up eventually. For now, July saw a return to the Tudors and murder-mysteries, which were linked by the Lady Grace Mysteries, a series of mysteries set in Tudor England (I mean, duh).

Watching another batch of Tudor-related programming just makes me realize just how extraordinary those times were. If you tried putting even half of it in a fictional story, you’d be slapped by your editor. The story of Anne Boleyn alone is incredible: that Henry the Eighth would go to such lengths in order to marry her, only to cast her away when she became an inconvenience. And that their child would end up as one of the most famous monarchs of all time is just… I mean, what word would you even use to describe that?

Xena Warrior Princess: Fallen Angel, Chakram, Succession

After a long hiatus, I’m back with the Xena Warrior Princess reviews.

Ah, season five. Shit gets weird. I’ve talked before about the grab-bag of world religions that get thrown into this show, and now it’s Christianity’s turn to get ticked off the list. I supposed it’s handled a modicum better than Hinduism, but not by much.

Woman of the Month: The Velociraptors

The Velociraptors from Jurassic Park

All the villainesses I’ve featured in these posts so far have been reasonably complex figures, with equally complex motivation – but not these girls. The velociraptors of Jurassic Park (specifically Jurassic Park; I never saw the sequels and I’m definitely not counting the raptors who respond to Chris Pratt’s commands in Jurassic World) don’t want anything beyond hunting people down and eating them.

But the way in which they do so makes them the key antagonists of the film, and the lead-up to their first onscreen appearance is a masterclass in building a sense of dread. The opening sequence involves a team of men transferring an unseen creature from a crate into a walled facility, and the apprehension on their faces (along with the weapons they wield) speaks for itself. Before the scene is over, an unfortunate worker is pulled to his death by whatever’s in the crate – we don’t get the slightest glimpse; we can only hear its unholy shrieks and screams.

With just a fossilized claw, Alan Grant scares the crap out of an obnoxious kid by explaining the hunting techniques of the raptors (“you’re alive when they start to eat you”) and much later, he holds a baby one in his bare hands, realizing what it is: “raptors… you’ve bred raptors?” Right now it’s harmless, but already the audience is trying to imagine what this little thing of teeth and claws might look like when it’s fully grown.

They’re taken to the velociraptor enclosure, where the gamekeeper delivers an ominous backstory: “we bred eight originally, but when she came in, she took over the pride and killed all but two of the others. That one – when she looks at you, you can see she’s working things out.” After explaining how the raptors were attacking different parts of the fence during feeding time, looking for weaknesses, he turns to them with a half-grim, half-admiring look on his face: “they remember.”

At this point we’re about twenty-five minutes in and we still haven’t actually seen them. It’s not until the last half-hour of the film in its entirety that we finally get a good look, after they’ve taken out the gamekeeper (arguably the most capable human on the island) by tricking him into looking one way while they sneak up on him from another – just as Alan described at the start of the film.

Now that they’re Unseen No More, the hits just keep on coming. Nobody can forget Ellie escaping the maintenance shed by the skin of her teeth, or the terrifying cat-and-mouse hunt in the kitchen, or Lex falling through the roof and nearly getting her leg chomped, or my personal favourite: Ellie stating “[we’re safe] unless they’ve learned how to open doors.” The film then cuts immediately to a raptor doing exactly that.

Whereas the other dinosaurs are portrayed as animals, who simply act according to their natures, the velociraptors veer a little closer to genuine, deliberate monsters. There is a malevolence in their design that sets them apart from the rest of the creatures in the park, and their combination of intelligence, speed and cooperative hunting tactics makes them absolutely terrifying. Like the gamekeeper says, there’s something in the way they look at their prey that taps into our primal fear of being hunted, cornered – of there being no escape from a bloody and violent death.

It's no surprise that they ended up being the go-to villain for the franchise, even as their impact is diluted with each passing sequel. But in Jurassic Park at least, the threat they pose looms large over the entire film, and it’s not for nothing their leader has since been immortalized as “clever girl.”