In Silver Linings Playbook, the menace is all in in the mind – it’s a film about mental illness. It is presumably for this reason that director David O. Russell has chosen to reproduce that shower scene in it – though, represented via a series of individual flashbacks, he’s added some more visceral cuts into it, as well as a middle-aged professor who’s having an affair with this Norman Bates’s wife.

The film follows Pat (Bradley Cooper), who is bipolar, and his quest to get his marriage back together after returning home from a psychiatric hospital. We learn that his most recent breakdown was precipitated on discovering his wife Nikki in the aforementioned shower with a colleague; he attacked the man, which brought him up against assault charges and eventually landed him in the institution. Back home at the beginning of the film, Pat wants to get Nikki, and his marriage, back – despite his continuing mood swings, refusal to take medication and restraining order.

Then he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a young woman whose husband has recently died in traumatic circumstances. She is similarly Troubled (she’s been fired for sleeping with all her co-workers) and they hit it off, in a vague way. She agrees to take a letter to Nikki if Pat will partner her in a dance competition.

The inevitable happens.

If you listen to Hollywood, there are dance competitions happening in every small town, every three minutes, just waiting for someone to do some self-actualisation through dance – as in dance movie stalwarts such as Strictly Ballroom, Flashdance or, its British equivalent, the Arts Council-funded Billy Elliot. This one brings plenty of opportunities for personal development, which – though not so pronounced as the ur-dance movies – is actually why Pat agrees to do it: he wants to prove to Nikki that he has changed, and grown, since the shower incident. Cinematic history tells him this is the way to do it.

But nonetheless, in Silver Linings Playbook, development through dance is not really the point: the dancing pops up towards the second half of the film, and while the rehearsals do force the characters to spend a lot of time doing semi-erotic stuff together, it’s not the primary impetus behind their falling in love.

Indeed, if you accept that dance in golden-era Hollywood is usually implied sex¹, often in the context of romantic relationships between show-people who dance as part of their job (here, Fred Astaire tries to win Ann Miller back as his g/f by getting her to do the dance they perform on stage), you could say that Silver Linings is less about sex than it is about Feelings.

Feelings (that’s a capital F), are by contrast the preserve of the classic romcom, which – a true product of the Eighties – features extended, over-analytical examinations of the Self. It’s Hugh Grant and Woody Allen being neurotic and too self-aware; it’s realising you’re in love just in time to run down an aeroplane. It’s the power of the mind – its hopes, fears and wants – to overcome practical obstacles. And in Silver Linings Playbook, as I say, it’s all about the mind. It’s a romcom for the post-Hugh Grant generation, if you will.

Now, personally, I didn’t find the treatment of mental health as offensive as I know some did – David O. Russell has commented in interviews that he drew a lot from the experience of having a son with bipolar disorder, which does help. One thing that did bug me, though, was its pairing of a bipolar man with longstanding mental health issues with a hypersexual woman recovering from a traumatic bereavement. Pat’s problems are longstanding, but Tiffany’s troubles clearly have their origin in grief, and they happen to manifest themselves in a pattern of sexual behaviour that, as recounted, elicits visible salivation from her male companion. We might say, in fact, that in this film, there is Serious Mental Illness, and there is Sexy Mental Illness. That Pat’s initial crime puts him in the cinematic shoes of Norman Bates, whose murder is at root sexually motivated – though it is repeated here as a grotesque husband-on-lover attack – underscores this, though admittedly at one remove.

This is why the Psycho crib, for me, was a key moment – and partly because its appearance in the film is so downright weird. It parallels the dance competition trope as an interjection of popular film history, but I suppose it also draws together some of the film’s key themes: notably, though arguably ironically, psychosis (Hitchcock’s film played a major part in popularising the slang word psycho) and what you might very crudely call Hollywood ‘monster-cam’.

I suppose one reason for including the scene (something I spent a long time puzzling over) was that, by putting the audience in the eye-view of a man mid-breakdown unleashing his rage upon two people who happen to be naked (and one of them a woman) shows the terrible power of the mental threats the film explores: we see their vulnerability, and we are invited to consider the gender issues the attack brings to the surface. Within the context of the plot, it makes sense of Nikki’s need for a restraining order and perhaps even makes an ironic comment on the thigh-rubbing Hitchcock is widely accepted to have been doing throughout his own shower scene. It certainly makes you think back to the portrayal of mental illness in the deeply exploitative Psycho. In that sense, Silver Linings Playbook actually comes out reasonably well.

So, should you go and see it? I’d imagine if you were going to, you’ll have done so by now. But I think it’s worth seeing – despite those dodgy gender politics, it certainly makes you think.

1. Considerably less ‘implied’ in the 1980s, as with the eponymous moves of Dirty Dancing.

She’s just a hungry girl,
In a post-apocalyptic wooooorld…

When The Hunger Games came out, we were faced with possibly the most ludicrous and yet most predictable controversy in recent film history: was Katniss Everdeen too fat? More specifically, was Jennifer Lawrence the wrong body-shape to play the protagonist of these phenomenally successful novels, as a number of critics and fans said? One quotation from the New York Times can stand in for a lot of others:

A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.

I’m not going to answer the question, because, y’know. But I do want to talk about why the question matters, because it’s not something so ludicrous we can dismiss it.¹

Cover design for an early UK release of the Hunger Games, by Jason Chan

Essentially, these readers were arguing the case for realism. Katniss has access to limited calories (though more than some other people, due to her own skills) – this is part of the plot, theme and indeed title of the novel – so an actor of a certain body type might be less able to inhabit the role convincingly onscreen. Just as Renee Zellweger visibly put on some weight to play Bridget Jones², Jennifer Lawrence was expected to appear strikingly underweight to embody the theme of the narrative. It’s a simple biological fact.

Except, of course, that fact assumes that the Hunger Games trilogy, beloved of teenage girls in particular, is taking place in a cultural vacuum. That it just happens to involve a young woman with a fraught relationship to food, who is contrasted to the decadence and self-indulgence of the inhabits of the Capitol and other characters. I’m absolutely not arguing that these are harmful books, or that they’re written thoughtlessly. Nor is it my place to tell young women how they should interact with art. But I am pointing out that novels don’t become popular for no reason, particularly YA novels with strong female leads.

The cultural factors which bear on the novels increase drastically when it comes to putting Katniss on screen. Again, there is an argument that the fictional situation happens to involve a character who would have a particular physical appearance. But that discourse of realism and “accuracy” totally ignores the hundreds of images which young women are bombarded with every day. It assumes that young women are never told they’re too fat or too skinny, that they lack self control or a sense of proportion, that their success in life is directly related to their dress size. It assumes that when actors like Jennifer Lawrence relax in between film-shoots, there aren’t packs of photographers with zoom-lenses feeding the websites which police their bodies and point out how they’ve “let themselves go”. Talk about “accuracy” is deeply naive because it ignores the way actors’ public personas are constructed, how their lifestyle is carefully confused with the roles they choose and how their bodies are used in advertising. It also ignores the power of performance to draw us into a fictional world and convince us of its reality, surely one of the main reasons anyone films a book in the first place.

So much for the hungry girl, but I don’t think we can ignore the post-apocalyptic world and its relevance to this controversy. Katniss isn’t just a young woman who finds herself short on nosh after the shops have shut, she’s the central figure in a futuristic wasteland. “Post-apocalyptic” has also come in for a bit of controversy recently, with Mark Kermode demanding with typically entertaining zeal that if the apocalypse is the end of the world, then how can a film be post-apocalyptic? If the apocalypse has happened, and there’s anything left to have a film about, then that my friend is a shoddy apocalypse and you want to demand another one, that works like it says on the packet. Highly pleasing as this is, and far be it from me to out-pedant the worshipful Doctor, but apocalypse does not mean the end of the world.

Apocalypse means “revelation” or the “lifting of the veil”. The book we get most of our apocalyptic imagery from – four horsemen, 666, Whore of Babylon riding on a seven-headed beast, you know the drill – is referred to as both the Apocalypse of St. John and the Book of Revelation. The fact that the most famous one is most frequently framed as a vision of the end of the world means that we tend to assume that they’re the same thing (if we’re not massive pedants and unhealthily obsessed with etymology – oh no, wait…). But the crucial aspect is the “lifting of the veil”, the revealing of a deeper reality which is obscured by the world around us.³

I’m not bringing this up for the sake of sheer quibble (though that would be reason enough), but because I think a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction still has this original meaning embedded in it. So many post-apocalyptic films and novels have this sense of being not only “after the disaster” but also “after the revelation”, trying to strip back the complexities and confusions of modern life to get to what is basic and essential about us. In The Road, that’s the emotional bond between father and son, in Mad Max the depravity of humans as pack animals, in Escape From New York it’s a macho code of integrity.⁴

And in The Hunger Games it’s a famished young woman. If a deeper reality is being revealed in this apocalypse, a profound truth about humanity which lies beneath the surface of modern life, then it’s one which looks very similar to the line peddled by fashion magazines, diet books and vast swathes of Hollywood’s output. That young women should look as if they’re slightly undernourished. The tendencies of post-apocalyptic fiction mean that this film risks holding that image up as not only an ideal to aspire to, but as the most “natural” and “essential” state for them to be in.

Again, this doesn’t make The Hunger Games a bad book or a bad film, but it means that the way Katniss Everdeen is portrayed onscreen cannot be reduced to a question of “accuracy” to a description in the book. A film which presents a teenage girl as the prototypical member of humanity is a wonderful idea – not least because she’s active, intelligent and fighting on behalf of her people – but this one sits at the intersection of some very powerful cultural influences which we can’t ignore.

• Jem Bloomfield is an academic who works on theatre and performance. A longtime BadRep reader, he’s very excited to be on the other side of the line, and the references to gin and tea in the other team bios make him feel very at home. Four years working on The Duchess of Malfi has given him a taste for writing about other things, so he blogs on culture, politics and gender at Quite Irregular.

1. Though it is ludicrous. Let no doubt be left about that.
2. No, I know. It’s not like I don’t have a problem with that too, but it’s awful in a slightly different way…
3. The titles of The Vision of Ezra and the Sibylline Oracles – both around during the first centuries of Christianity though neither made it into the Bible(s) – underline this point.
4. And with more time we could read right back from Snake Plissken’s tattoo to the Man With No Name, and wonder how much the classic Western is also driven by a desire to get its characters out into the oddly moonscapey deserts, to strip away the civilization. Or look at the fistfight between two astronauts which starts Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, suggesting that getting to the moon called earth morality into question…

A few points before we go any further:

• This is us revisiting Suzanne Collins’s books, mainly, and looking at the characters we like, and how the books – for us – jigsaw with other franchises out there. Back in the mists of time, Team BadRep’s Jenni also talked about the books on here in a more spoiler-free, introductory way.
• SPOILER WARNINGS are all over this. Do not read this post if you want to read the books unspoilered.
• Sarah’s been interviewing the cast of the movie over on Den of Geek, and you can read those posts here, here, and here.
• As Bucky and I haven’t seen the press screenings, we’ll maybe be back to talk about the movie later.

On Those Triangular Twilight Comparisons

Miranda: I made a blog post the other week elsewhere on the internets about how the movie franchise is being merched, as far as I can tell, in a way which visually dovetails with a lot of Twilight merch, and the disappointment I feel around that. Nonetheless, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling trilogy is, I think, using the love triangle motif in an effective, nuanced way. So while the Twilight comparisons might be short-sighted, they’re not unreasonable. But what do my friends think?

Bucky: OK, so here’s my big confession: I sort of love Twilight. It’s the reading equivalent of eating popcorn, plus I’m a sucker for romance, which should be apparent in the fact that even the most depressing things I write are always thinly-veiled love stories. My beef with Twilight was the general mormon-propaganda shittiness. I could totally have gone for a general horror-lite romance WITHOUT the abominable gender politics and chastity stuff.

Throughout the first book, it was apparent that this wasn’t just going to be a vapid romance, which was fine and the nature of pitting them against each other sort of insisted that the romance be downplayed, but across the three books I was disappointed by the things that didn’t happen – when the action/adventure/1984 stuff took over the romantic hook was still what kept me reading!

Sarah: I think comparisons to Twilight are kind of irrelevant here, because they’re completely different stories in completely different genres. Twilight is a romance, and The Hunger Games is… well, anything but that. It’s an action/thriller/horror with strong anti-war sentiments, and I think reading The Hunger Games for the romance is doing it a massive disservice.

In particular, getting overly invested in the love triangle element is missing the point, because Gale and Peeta aren’t really individuals, they’re metaphors.

Bucky: OK, I’ll give you that it’s an unfair comparison, but there’s no escaping the Love Triangle parallels, Collins just uses it as a device to much greater effect, rather than pinning an entire series of books on it.

On the Boys

Sarah: Like I say, I think the boys are, in part, metaphors – Gale in particular, which is why the idea that anyone would declare themselves “Team Gale” utterly baffles me. Because what does Gale stand for? Anger. Revenge. He’s a hunter; he’s kind of Old Testament-y. He’s very black and white, and not very interested in forgiveness. He’s initially presented as having the most in common with Katniss: they have the same background, they live in the same area, they look like each other, they’re very close friends and their lives seem very similar. But even right at the beginning, she’s restraining him. He’s shouting about rebellion in the woods while she tries to calm him down and keep him safe. He just gets more violent as the books go on, and it’s his bombs that kill a bunch of innocent children. Gale is basically a terrorist, and his is no way to build a future.

Bucky: I do like what you’re saying about Gale. I think all the main characters are realised brilliantly, because they’re people, compromised and damaged people with their own agendas, not pin-ups like they would be in Twilight. But I don’t feel like Collins had such a good handle on Gale’s character in the first book – I think his anger was hinted at but I don’t think she’d made the leap towards thinking that he’d become Anger, Vengeance etc – early on he still has the potential to be a romantic lead and not a product of his society. Peeta is pretty great, in retrospect. He’s a well created character.

Sarah: Yeah, Peeta is great. Peeta is so great. It’s not Gale that Katniss seeks out when she wants to feel safe, it’s Peeta. It’s easy to forget how strong he is, because he’s so warm and protective. But Collins makes sure – over and over again, especially in Mockingjay – that he needs to be protected, too. I don’t think I can quite forgive Gale for that line where he says Katniss will choose whichever of them she can’t survive without, because he’s wrong – she’ll pick whoever can’t survive without her, which is clearly Peeta. Peeta is preternaturally calm, loving, and forgiving (until the Capitol breaks him). I think it’s super important for them to be together at the end, because they’re the only ones who understand one another – and they make one another better. They’re different, but their differences make them better equipped to work towards a world that’s better than either the world they grew up in, or the one that Gale and President Coin want.

I think maybe the way Peeta gets broken in Mockingjay is the first time we really appreciate him for who he is. I dunno. I’m still thinking about this.

Miranda: What d’you reckon about this piece over on Bitch, about masculinity in the trilogy? I’m digging it.

Sarah: I like it too. I’m not keen on the view that Katniss isn’t a feminist heroine because she “ends up weak” at the end of the trilogy. YEAH ALRIGHT LET’S SEE YOU GO THROUGH WHAT SHE DOES AND SEE HOW BLOODY XENA-LIKE YOU ARE – I might love Katniss a bit too much. Hmm.

Miranda: I thought it was interesting that they picked up on the “does she need to end up alone? How do feminists find romance in books now?” thing.

Sarah: Yeah – I mean, surely we’re not gonna claim that women can’t be in relationships with men and still be feminist? I think the happy ending, with all of its caveats, was necessary.

The leading lady we've been waiting for? Katniss Everdeen takes aim

“Like Joan of Arc”

Sarah: Katniss’s attitude to sex is worth thinking about, too. She’s almost completely sexless (unless we read between the lines a bit with all the many nights she spends sleeping in Peeta’s arms?) and just not really that interested in romance… but she explains that quite early on, I think, because it’s not a safe enough world that she’s ever really thinking beyond her next meal. I bloody love her, in exactly the same way I love Buffy and Starbuck and all those other tough-because-they-have-to-be women out there in sci-fi/fantasy.

Bucky: I think it’s pretty awesome. I know I wanted romance, but it’s still cool that she just doesn’t have time in her life to care about “petty” stuff like that.

Miranda: This whole area fascinates me. I think Katniss’s story engages with the issue of ‘sexless action heroines’ really well. A lot of my early engagement with feminism came from a place where, sick of all the sexualising/objectifying/insert buzzword here, you know what I’m talking about – I constructed a sort of mental checklist for movies. It involved asking questions like “is the heroine SENSIBLY DRESSED?!” and “is she defined by her romantic attachments (usually to men)?” It was like Bechdel Plus.

I think these remain pertinent questions to ask, and I still ask them. But I also think I spent years mistrusting any heroine who dared to fall in love or wear a V-neck, just in case she was being somehow undermined from somewhere. It’s only recently I’ve begun to engage with heroines like Emma Frost, and also to confront the fact that ‘sexless heroines’ can also feel quite limited in their own way, depending on how they’re written. Often I think we cite a heroine’s lack of sexual desires as evidence for her liberated awesomeness, but this can feel for me like a bit of a red herring, and one that’s still being driven, in a sense, by the same set of patriarchal restrictions. The question about how to write “feminist romance” is therefore an interesting one.

Katniss directly faces off with these questions. The novels show her wrestling a load of societal pressure to live out a romantic narrative and define herself against one – her survival may depend on it. Uunderneath all that, she does struggle with genuine desires for Peeta and Gale, played out against a hugely traumatic backdrop.

I thought it was fascinating – she does find love, but it’s a struggle to get there in fair, real terms. I think Katniss – though Jennifer Lawrence describes her as a Joan of Arc figure in your interview – goes a lot further than many heroines in TVTropes’s Jeanne D’Archetype section because we get to see that struggle played out, with all the paranoia over who’s controlling the narrative that that entails. She moves through a sexless phase, in the process taking on an entire system of oppression in order to discover how she really wants to express her desires, and how to be able to do that safely rather than it being a capitulation of any kind. These are books about struggle, personal and political.

Illustration from the initial range of UK print covers for the books - by Jason Chan

Revolution!

Bucky: I almost like the books more now that you’ve both pointed out the media and propaganda themes that I took for granted – they are, in hindsight, pretty strong ideas to sell to a teenage audience. I like to think that I’m quite media-savvy, but I guess that if I encountered this at a time in my life when I wasn’t then it might have raised some interesting questions.

Sarah: I do super-love that tension Miranda pointed out in her blog post, re: merchandising this franchise when it’s all about the evils of capitalism and in particular the way we exploit people in other countries. I think they should’ve gone with more Mockingjay “symbol of the rebellion” stuff, but in a way Capitol-themed makeup ranges are perfectly apposite.

Bucky: Yeah, the merchandising is insane, especially because propaganda is insanely merchandisable (by its very definition) so to ignore that angle and create “straight” merchandise like a Katniss barbie instead of “in-character” merchandise is just batshit.

In Conclusion…

Bucky: The more I talk to you guys, the more I feel like it’s cool I enjoyed these books and all, but I’m not the person whose life this might make a difference to. I don’t need any more role models, but younger readers might benefit from Katniss and will almost certainly benefit from the way that she isn’t sexualised or defined by her relationships. So that’s pretty cool.

Sarah: I’ve just got back from a press screening of the film. I think Gary Ross really really gets the political aspects of the book, and he’s really explicit about it, and there were at least two new bits he’d put in that made my jaw drop. My review’s over here.

Miranda: ONE DAY TO GO!