For the wolfwalkers people

Edit: Sources of my claims and who I mean to be criticizing can be found here:

https://at.tumblr.com/princessnazario29/first-of-all-please-do-not-edit-the-message-of-my/bs1xo2371952

Characters I project my transness on: Shrek's Fiona

GENERAL SPOILER ALERT FOR THE SHREK MOVIE FRANCHISE

A subversion af the damsel in distress trope, Fiona isn't an ordinary princess. She burps, kicks ass and is generally disappointed by actual princes.

In the first movie, she transformed into an ogre by night. She saw this as a curse until she learned to love both another ogre and this side of herself. Even if she hasn't always looked like an ogre, she ends up renouncing to normative beauty and living as one.

Then, she spends the second film trying to convince her parents to love both her husband and her identity, while his father tries to get her to fit into the fairy tale princess role she was meant to have. It turns out her father was just preventing her from risking his own position as human-looking king, since marrying her with a prince was part of the deal he made with a fairy when he was a toad (I can't blame him for wanting to make Julie Andrews his queen, though).

This film has many queer experience parallels, with both Fiona's parents and Far Far Away's elitist society being outraged by her life choices, as well as the father projecting his own anxieties about fitting in this society on to his daughter. I would say that there are a couple of kind of queerphobic jokes, one about the Big Bad Wolf being gender-confused (which is more or less okay since it comes from the main villain) and a really weird one on pinocchio wearing women's underwear (which is not okay since he is a child and they are mockingly confronting him on this to use his elongated nose).

Going back to our favourite ogre princess, the plot of the third movie has her staying back home while Shrek goes to find a heir for the kingdom's throne and overcome his parenthood anxiety. However, the Charming Prince she was supposed to marry on the second movie comes back and takes the kingdom during her baby shower. We get to see her starting a princesses' escape and fight evil goons while being pregnant, but I think se was kind of separated from the main plot so Shrek could come to her rescue again at the end, which is why this is the least interesting movie in the franchise.

The fourth movie does the "Its a Wonderful Life" thing where an unsatisfied Shrek goes to an alternate reality in which he has never been born. The version of Fiona we see there is a warrior, the leader of the ogre resistance to Rumpelstilskin tyrannical rule. She rescued herself from the tower she was locked in in the first film and it's implied she still becomes human by day and does some reconnaisance, but she is fully accepted among the ogres. Although she's got her own revolution going on, her whole arc is learning to trust Shrek so he can learn to not give her for granted once he comes back to his reality, which kind of undermines the whole revolutionary leader thing.

Still, drawing my own transgender parallel, the difference between this two realities in how ogres are treated can be seen as the difference in how real world countries treat the LGBTQ+ community. Main timeline Shrek and Fiona are more or less respected because they had a chance to fight for their rights as well as the privilege given to Fiona for being a princess. Resistance leader Fiona never had a chance to convince her powerful parents to respect her identity as an ogre because they lost their kingdom to Rumpelstilskin, who then started hunting down ogres, forcing them into hiding away from the rest of society. That's the present many queer people around the world have to live, the past those who live free can't forget and the possible future we'll never stop fearing.

This took a pretty dark turn so let's ask ourselves "what if Fiona was actually trans?" Well, if Fiona was a transgender male ogre, the plot would be essentially the same except the pregnancy in the third movie would be replaced by an adoption waiting list and the transformation in the second movie would be a metaphor for detransitioning out of family pressure. Also, male ogre Fiona (Finn?) would wear lumberjack shirts and his alternate reality version would cosplay Braveheart.

If Fiona was a transgender female ogre, though, the plot would be radically different. I think she would still dress as a princess when she was in human male form and there would be jokes similars to those on the Ugly Stepsister (oh, I forgot about her and her deep voice, she's "ugly" because she's got masculine traits, so funny 😒) but with some sort of catharsis once she becomes permanently an ogress. I guess Farquad would be extra rude to her but she would still think she had to marry him to break the curse, then Shrek confesses her love, enter the dragon and I'm a believer. I guess Prince Charming would still try to marry a remasculinized Fiona in the second film (come on, he's a queer coded villain) and, for sure, the king would still try to fool her to do it. The third and fourth movie wouldn't change much, as Fiona's past human form is irrelevant in the third and she never appears in human form in the fourth. Maybe her daylight human male form would be a more obvious parallel of how trans women have to go on boymode to survive.

To finish this already too long tirade, I just want to add that the idea of Fiona's true form seems to be fluid. Had the hero of the story been a human peasant, she would probably still stay a pretty normative princess, even if he accepted her as an ogre, like a gender reversed Beauty and the Beast. I love that they didn't go for that ending.

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The Outsiders First Feelings

So I’ve watched the extended movie, but not the theatrical version or read the book (plan on doing both)

spoilers:

Just want to be clear that there is critique of specifically the extended/director’s cut, but overall I am heartbroken at how powerful this story is. So that’s the TL;DR of it.

1.

First thoughts: Man they did well on this casting. Apparently they did group casting to make sure the ensemble worked (also Ralph Macchio remembers how they had to read for all the parts, but he was very insistent that he was auditioning for Johnny and tbh, if I’d been Coppola I’d’ve taken one look at him and gone “yes”)

Anyway this movie works on the strength of the cast more than anything for me. I care about the greasers (have to confess “Sherri” ended up being a non-entity, but that’s not Diane Lane’s fault, the character doesn’t have depth or connection to the others, since her life isn’t explored) because every one of them cares so much about each other.

2.

Second, I don’t know the context behind Hinton’s dislike of a queer reading of the text, but queer reads exist because queer canon has historically been rare/deliberately pushed into allegory and metaphor. All this to say that - however unknowing - she wrote a text that was absolutely filled with that queer subtext that a queer reader would immediately notice (and from the sounds of it a lot of non-queer readers too). Not knowing you did it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And the movie just adds the visuals that belong to that queer-coding.

And wow was this a story about the closeness and homosocial relationships between boys on the cusp of growing up. That shit is queer even before you get to the found family, the loneliness of being shunned just for existing, and the non-normativity of their status in society (class-based, but depicted through their finicky approach to their appearances, also interesting).

And of course. Ponyboy. And Dally. All of them to be honest. So very queercoded. And Johnny… I would be biased about Johnny even if he wasn’t being played by Ralph Macchio – smaller and more delicate in stature, abused at home, unable to form an identity because of how traumatized he is until he runs away for a week with his best friend and creates a domestic house inside a church with him, where they play poker, cut each other’s hair, read gone with the wind, and quote poetry? Okay. Okay alright. 

(sidenote: think director’s should’ve been knocking down the door trying to get Macchio after this and Karate Kid - crafted two wonderfully different characters that’re both considered iconic performances a year after one another)

I initially wasn’t sure who Dally was as a character to Johnny - wasn’t sure if he’d be the one to fuck things up for him for whatever reason, but actually he genuinely wants what’s best for him and functions as that after-image of what Johnny might*ve become if he goes away for the crime, making his motivation that much clearer. He really needed Johnny to live, to pull through, because Johnny was someone to fight for, to be better for...

Johnny had so many people who loved him....... ...................

3.

ANYWAY without having read the book yet, some critique on the movie: 

I think straight book-to-film adaptations are a bad idea 99% of the time and IMO this movie suffered for it. The pacing was just straight-up weird at times. I had a feeling that someone would die and that it’d likely be Johnny or Dally (oh sweet summer child), but while I could see the beats which likely work very well in the book, they didn’t always (sometimes they did) land at the right moments for a film. When Johnny died I went – oh, okay, that happens now, like this? If it hadn’t been for the acting I’d’ve been really annoyed, because of how it was built up and placed, it felt like it didn’t do the characters’ journeys justice.

Also in the extended edition – I was very confused about the music and read afterwards that Coppola straight up yanked out the original score and replaced it with generic 60s bops and why? Do? That? Whole scenes that would’ve been miles better with something else or entirely without music were disrupted (two big ones that stick with me: when they save the kids in the church and when they meet with Sherri before the rumble, but there were more).

That’s two of the main reasons I’m interested in watching the theatrical cut – third is that apparently he took out three scenes from the church for the extended edition and doubly why??? the church sequence depicts Johnny’s first (and only) taste at life. It’s vital to understanding his tragedy!!! whyyy??? cut it????

4.

I wonder how much of this movie acted as a precursor to Stand By Me (probably lots of people talk about this, but idk), just because of the obvious similarities, but Stand By Me did so much better at keeping it on-point and pushing the narrative forward in the right direction. Easier to adapt a short story (also Brokeback Mountain springs to mind) than a whole book, but that’s why I’m interested in the theatrical cut. Also… the music… (whispers, why).

That sounds really critical, but my feeling is mostly positive (well, sad, because everything hurts) – I get frustrated with movies where I can see how they would work with some more focus, because all the pieces are there: Arguably perfect cast, perfect story already provided, some strong cinematography (and maybe also a good score, can’t say until the theatrical), but then it isn’t brought together properly for whatever reason.

5.

Ponyboy and Johnny sure do stand outside and watch the dawn while quoting poetry and Johnny was gold even if he never saw it himself, he really was, urgh that hit my heart. The acting and images are gonna sit with me for awhile – and the tragedy of it all lingered because of the strength of the story and the acting, even if the handling of it onscreen was ultimately a bit clumsy.

Final thoughts:

There’s a deleted scene/rehearsal scene idk, but Ponyboy reads the letter Johnny wrote before he died and it’s just the VO, no visuals other than Ponyboy reading, no music. Just the stillness of that moment. 

So. Much. More. Powerful. I cried watching that. I’m very sad thinking about it.

Johnny is a gender.

Book Club: Tallstar’s Revenge, chpt. 37-45 overview.

Two highly professional gravediggers observe the job ahead of them:

“I'd like to congratulate us both on finishing this godawful book! A whole super edition in five weeks. They said it couldn't be done, but we showed them. “ - S

“Yes! It's truly miraculous that our brains are intact still.” - K

“So glad it's over, though.” - S

“Should I grab the shovel?” - K

“Yes, it's time. Let's bury this corpse.” - S

In this final week of reading Tallstar’s Revenge, we will be thinking about these final nine questions. Well done for making it this far! We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. 

When you’re ready, consider sharing your thoughts with #ailuronymy book club and see what other readers are thinking!

1. First impressions?

K: It's bad! It's bad. It's all bad and I'm not surprised by any of it. K: I was actually expecting there to be more bullshit in the end, but I was almost... let down? By how underwhelming it was? S: Some moments surprised me a little but like... these did not spark joy. K: It was so boring. S: I have that same note: huge anticlimactic fuckery at the end. K:  If you're going to torture me, you might as well make it interesting, Erin. K: Throw in a wild plot twist or something. K: Get me going. K: Make me feel alive.

2. How did you feel reading this section? K:  Mind numb, head empty. For like, at least three chapters I read them and then failed to register anything important for the notes. It just dragged on. S:  More bored than I expected to be! I thought it'd at least ramp up a little, but it very much did not in any meaningful way and really petered out with a sad little "wuh-wuh."

3. What chapter did you find most interesting/moving/effective, and why? K: Chapter Forty, seeing all of the clanmates that I'd been missing for half the book felt so satisfying. I missed Dawnstripe, Heatherstar, Barkface, and Hopkit all so much. The only good bit. S:  I feel that. S:  For me, I think in terms of sheer pleasure, it has to be the echoes I saw from turn to dust all that I adore in Talltail swimming in a time of crisis. K: Yes! S: It made that passage I wrote feel retroactively so much more intense and significant, which I love.

4. What chapter did you find least interesting/effective/most frustrating, and why?

K:  The final chapter, Chapter Forty-Seven. That leader ceremony was so bad and I hated all of it. K: The Shadowclan battle was also mind-numbing. S: I think it's got to be the jump from first apprentice to leader ceremony. That's so much life we don't see, which given how goddamn long the book took for the rest of his very boring life is a travesty. S:  I tend to take some umbrage with Starclan whenever it shows up in canon, but in this particular case, the way that his leader ceremony is handled--especially by Palebird and Sandgorse--is horrific. S:  I also think it's appalling that Sandgorse offers a life of forgiveness, but never once asks for it from Talltail, unless I'm mistaken? S: He thinks he can embody forgiveness, but doesn't have the humility to admit to the things that he had done wrong by Talltail. Egregious.

5. Is there a passage that stuck in your mind–for good, or not-so-good reasons? What is it, and why did it stand out? S:  I think for me, this is Sandgorse's everything in the leader ceremony. I think I'll just [my whole rant just now + thoughts on forgiveness]. K:  I had two specific quotes from this go that fit I think. K:  First was: "I guess Clan cats aren’t used to leaving home.” Jake sounded amused. “I know the feeling you’re having. The nagging pain, the tug in my pelt and paws? I get that whenever I’m away from my home too long.” “Really?” Talltail blinked. “Why?” “Every creature needs to belong somewhere,” Jake told him. “Your paws know where that is, even if you don’t.” K:  Just the phrase of "Every creature needs to belong somewhere" felt so genuine and sweet coming from Jake, and I think could have felt so much more impactful if the themes we've recognized were more evident in the story. K:  The second was: “Talltail!” Dawnstripe leaped from the Meeting Hollow. “You came back!” Delight lit up her eyes. Talltail stood still as she raced to meet him. “I couldn’t stay away.” She stopped in front of him and gazed warmly into his eyes. “Then my training wasn’t wasted.” “It was never wasted,” he meowed softly. “Not once.

S: YES K: Partially because I will always be soft for Dawnstripe, but also, the genuine tenderness between her and Talltail in this moment felt so real and so earned. K: This is what I wanted from Bluestar and Stonepelt. S: I've said it before, I'll say it again: mentor+apprentice relationships For Life. K: Talltail saying that his training with Dawnstripe was never wasted, and then immediately transitioning into him encouraging and being a positive role model for Deadkit? K:  Ugh. It's so good. S: Loved it.

6. What other non-Warriors (or Erin Hunter affiliated) books does this one remind you of? Are there themes, symbolism, or storybeats in this novel that made you think of other stories as you read it?

K:  Oh, great question. K:  Oh shit, you know what. S: Hit me. K: We've got a Book Club classic coming at you. K: The Knife of Never Letting Go, by our mutual bastard Patrick Ness. S: You know, I was thinking about More Than This. But mostly because of how much I hated it. K: TKNLG's big theme revolves around like, what murder does to you and what it feels like to do an unspeakable act that you can't retract or replace. Revenge and anger become a part of you and you've got to deal with that. K:  And it's been ages since I read it, but I feel like that makes a lot of sense for this book. Todd and Talltail both spend a book with things being taken from them and wrongs being done to them, and it makes them so angry and hurt and desperate that eventually they go "Okay, yeah, murder would be a solution here." And when it comes down to it they both get to make that choice, of what they want to put out into the world and what kind of man they want to be. S:  I like that. I haven't read it myself, but I can definitely see how those themes talk to one another. S: I don't think there's a particular story I can pinpoint that is similar to this one, but I can think of stories that echo what I'd like this story to have leaned into more. S: Being about forgiveness and family trauma, it reminds me both of The Goblin Emperor and also the How To Train Your Dragon films? Especially the first film, I think. That whole undercurrent of absent mother, disdainful and frustrated father, queer-coded and different kid feels very present in Tallstar's Revenge. S: However, I think HTTYD does that a lot better than this book, by a considerable length.

7. Did this novel (or the experience of reading it) change your perspective on anything, either within the world of Warriors or outside it? What do you think about differently now?

 K: Hm. I think it's certainly limited my excitement on reading any future Super Editions books. They all seem to be just the same garbage plot wrapped with slightly different bows, and that's both disappointing and relieving. S: I feel you on that. S: I think for me, the single biggest shift is that it's changed how I think of Tallstar. For me, he was probably my favourite leader--or one of my favourites--growing up reading the books, and he came across often as wise and relaxed, and then made that final defining mistake. S: Having come back and read this, I feel that the book stripped a lot from the character in a way that wasn't constructive. I don't feel like I know him better, but I do feel like I respect him less. And I think that's a monumental failure of a prequel. K: Tallstar had such a specific presence in the original series, and this book just really takes a lot of that away and replaces it with something worse. S: It does. And that's disheartening to me. S:  Of course I can and will kill the author myself and take my place on the throne of canon, but you can't unknow details of a character. So that does change things. I don't have the same fondness for Talltail, now that I know he spent so much time being unadmirable and stupid and boring. S:  I recognise that your twenties is like that for most people, but like. Doesn't mean it's worthy of a narrative. S:  Kind of makes me think of Albus Dumbledore, to swing back around to Joke Rowling? S: Like, despite and sometimes because of how phenomenally jank and flawed that magnificent man is, I love Albus Dumbledore. I always have, ever since I was first listening to the tapes. And part of that is knowing his past--knowing that he struggled figuring out what was right, knowing that he fell in love very young with someone whose ideology became incompatible with his core beliefs and virtues. But I think you can allude to past mistakes and show growth without having to delve into it, if that makes sense. S: If I read about teen Dumbledore being like "hmm maybe wizard supremacy is good" for several chapters, there's a strong possibility that would stain all my readings of him into the future. I can know he did something, without needing a front-row seat. K: Yeah. S: And I feel like the crux failure of Erin Hunter's super editions is they don't have the delicacy or sense needed to know what needs to be told and what needs to be shown. S: Because sometimes, showing is worse. K: Being shown like, all of this, was worse than not. S: Nearly all of this book could have been summary.

8. Last week, we talked about predicted endings for the novel. In light of that, how do you feel about the ending? Was your prediction correct–and do you feel that reflects well on the narrative, or poorly? (i.e., is it good that you could guess, or are you disappointed by the result?) How important is it for an ending to be “unguessable”?

K:  We hit the nail on the head and I am not surprised at all. S:  I would say we were basically correct, but it brought me no joy. K:  Yeah, it felt bad to read and go "I already knew this but sure, disappoint me with what you have to say." S: That's not to say I would have been overjoyed if there had been some bizarre twist, because I don't think twists or shock endings are inherently good storytelling. K:  They're not. They've gotta be handled well to make me feel like, "Fuck yes, this is wack and I want more" K:  And like, you can predict an ending and still have it be satisfying! K:  That's just called successful foreshadowing. K:  But what we did was like. Just have the sad, knowledgable wherewithal to know exactly what kind of inane and soulless bullshit Erin would pull. It's not foreshadowing if it's just "you're a bad writer and you're going to reach for the easiest tropes to tie up your story without any thought about what makes it good" S: As a general rule, I think you should be able to predict endings based on the tone and emotional themes of the story. For instance, a story that starts with someone getting thrown out of their house by their unloving family should, ideally, rectify that by ending with that person having either found a new loving family and/or revenging on the previous bad family. Sometimes both! S: If you're going to start an arc, you should finish it in a satisfying place. If you start with a murder being discovered, you should have a denouement at the end. S: So... I guess Erin Hunter's ending is... fine, in that light? S: Their narrative is honestly very muddled, so it's not super easy to actually see what the through-line of the story is. The story starts with a prophecy about Talltail leaving, so really it should end with his triumphant, enlightened return... but then it keeps going. K: It just drags on and so much of it feels weightless. S:  It feels like they're juggling a lot of themes and ideas, but they're not really doing any of it well enough to be impressive. While I'm reading, there's always this deep uncomfortable sense of anything could be dropped at any minute. A good performer of any kind makes you feel safe in their hands, not lowkey on edge. S: It's like watching amateur stand-up.

9. In your opinion, what is the most important moment or event in this final chunk of story, and why?

 K:  I guess the cliche answer would be to say "Tallstar choosing to return to Windclan", but like. I think that really is the most important part of all this. S:  I think it's actually choosing not to kill Sparrow. K:  Oh, I mean. Okay that's fair lmao S:  Because I think he probably could have gone back after he killed Sparrow and everyone still would have been basically fine about it. It didn't seem like anyone cared enough to try to stop him leaving, and frankly the clans as Erin Hunter writes them are mad blasé about murder. S:  But I think in order for Talltail to retain like, some moral worth as a character, it was vital (if super inevitable) for him to not kill Sparrow. K:  Absolutely. K:  Can you imagine if he had, though. K:  Like, if he'd pushed Sparrow off the ledge and went "sick" and then Sandgorse's ghost showed up to razz him with airhorns like 'YOU IDIOT SON, THAT WAS THE WRONG CHOICE, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU WOULD DISAPPOINT ME AGAIN' S: Om.  S:  [that one video of the guy screaming above the mountains] S:  That's Starclan whenever the living make a bad decision.

Bonus question: choose a different character from Tallstar’s Revenge and briefly imagine what this story would be if they were the protagonist instead.

K: Hm. I'm torn. Barkface, or maybe Reena, would be interesting to me. S:  I think Reena's experience would be super interesting. K:  I think you could tell a really interesting narrative with her. S:  I'm sort of thinking Shrewclaw? Like, he's such a dick and there's very little about him that's redeemable, but like. This is also true of Talltail for a lot of the book. S: And I guess an external clan perspective of Talltail from someone who actively dislikes him could be kind of interesting! It'd definitely be a totally new counterpoint. K:  Yeah! Especially given that they end up kind of being... foils? A little? I think it could be super neat to like, see Shrewclaw reprimand Talltail for being so focused on revenge, and then suddenly becoming revenge-minded himself and then having to grapple with that hypocrisy. K:  Either by going "My feelings are different, I'm not like you," or going "oh shit oh fuck we're the same and now i feel all sorts of ways about it" S:  I think the low-hanging fruit for why Shrewclaw is such a prick to Talltail is just plain homophobia, you know? But that's so boring, so I'd definitely want to tap into like, the inner world of Shrewclaw and swing it a different way. S: See Talltail through his eyes, emphasising everything Shrewclaw doesn't like about himself. Which becomes so tasty when you later think about Mudclaw doing something similar. S:  Shrewclaw has to grow from hate and jealousy to grudging respect and kinship within the clan, and then Mudclaw grows from outright respect to total adoration. It's an interesting intergenerational trajectory.

Final notes.

S: God, can we rewind a moment to the whole Sparrow bullshit. K:  Oh 100%. S:  Talltail obsesses over this for like, at least twenty chapters. And then two lines of dialogue and he's like, "I'm cured, my dad was a hero the whole time." S:  “It’s what Sandgorse would do.” Now that the rage had gone, Talltail wondered how he could ever have thought of killing Sparrow. Had grief taken away all his faith in the warrior code?” MY rage is still right here. K:  Literally one of my notes is: K:  Talltail straight up telling him he’s here to kill him like a coward. Like not that I WANT him to be a murderer, but god damn, just do it! K:  If you're gonna spend an entire fucking book yelling about how badly you wanna kill a guy then just! Don't make me wait this goddamn long! Do it!! K:  And yeah, just. Redeeming Sandgorse. BLeughghelfuf

S:  Okay, another point of rage: Talltail literally dissolves the goodwill between the travellers and the clan. K:  Y E A H S:  Like, years of peaceful gathering, destroyed. S:  Note: "This dude literally just ended years of peace over his petty revenge quest" K:  I do find it hilarious though that Talltail goes "Hey we should leave," Reena goes "Hm?? No you dont?" and then Sparrow comes in with the most uncomfortable, exhausted expression saying "No He's Right They Really Should Be Going And Should Never Come Back Thanks," S: I'm also so pissed that when Talltail showed up, the travellers were like, “Warriors and kittypets don’t belong with rogues” AND YET you stay for a whole month or more in clan territory? What ripe fuckery is this. K: YEAH IT MADE NO SENSE S: Everyone's just ambiguously racist enough to use it as an excuse whenever they don't want to do something.

S: Also: we called it re: Reena, although the story was actually less obnoxious than I was expecting. S: “There was sympathy in the she-cat’s mew, and Talltail suddenly wondered if Reena had been hoping that Talltail would be her mate: that they’d have kits and travel together. Had she started to imagine a whole new life ahead of them?” Ew.  K:  i was gonna say K:  We really did call it. S: Way to project, Talltail. S: "I guess she's in love with me and I'm breaking her heart by leaving because of the elaborate future she's imagined of our strong, brave kits and--" calm down, boy, she didn't say any of that. K: Yeah, like. Keep it inside, buddy.   K:  There was a lot of very wild Jake/Talltail shit going on but I'm going to drop this from my notes first before dipping into the bits I did like: K: Jake saying “oh that drive to kill wasn’t REALLY you” is VERY “what if I date this unhinged maniac man so I can change him and make him better because I know who he is deep down” and that is VERY unsexy of you, Erins, K:  Jake... my boy.... S: Yeah.  S:  I'm just going to keep pointing at the advice I gave him in previous Book Clubs. Respect yourself, king. K:  I did briefly look at the disastrous mini-comic at the end of the PDF and I do love that he's canonically a chubby king, though. S:  We do love that. A cuddly boy. K:  He's shaped like a friend! S:  But yeah, if these cats were people, Talltail is some skinny closeted runaway with some serious esteem issues and a kind of volatile and disrespectful pattern of behaviour. S:  And Jake is the cute bi boy next door with a supportive dad with apparently a solid sense of self and value, and I find that kind of a jank combination? It feels like it'll either lend itself to basically "adopt a stray" style "fixing" someone else, which isn't a great relationship dynamic, or Talltail dragging Jake into his mess and drama. And it's just difficult for me to imagine what Jake sees in Talltail. S:  If the relationship was just a bit more balanced--Talltail bringing something of value to Jake beyond "adventure"--I could believe it more. K:  Meanwhile, if Talltail retained his "soft, shy poet boy who's just looking for a place to be accepted and flourish" attitude... S: YES 

S:  I got so mad when Talltail's like, "I'm going to kill a guy," and Jake was like, "you can't!" and Talltail's like, "if I was back home, I would have probably already killed by someone by now," and Jake's like, "yeah but that's different, warriors killing each other for Survival is fine." K:  IT ISN'T S: And I'm like, whoa, slow down, I want to talk philosophy right here right now. S: It's a genuinely fascinating conversation that I want canon to have a lot more, but they just... glance over it.

S:  Pivot for a moment to the gay part of Jake/Talltail: I was surprised by exactly how heavily they implied it. K:  Me too!!! S:  I thought it'd be a lot less than there was, and a lot more oblique. So that was a pleasant (? is any part of this pleasant?) surprise. K:  And in the final comic they say that Tallstar sees Firestar like the son he would have had (with Jake).  Which. Is gay. S:  Mad huge gay, for sure. K:  Their final "oh, what if I stay with you!" parting scene was wild to read. And on Tallstar specifying that Jake is someone he loves at the very end. Like hot damn S:  But I Lost My Whole Mind. Because of one line. I read it and involuntarily galaxy-brained with the power of song. I can't find the full quote right now BUT it was basically Talltail and Jake talking right before Talltail leaves to return to the clan. S: And Jake's like, "you know what you have to do. Listen to your heart.” K: YES S: And I was HIT BY A TRUCK S: by this song S: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCC_b5WHLX0 K:  OH FUCK YES S:  Which honestly is so good, and also hilarious, because I have fond gay memories of this song from my teen years. S:  So I know we were saying the very long slow lame end was boring and anticlimactic, but there were a few things that did in fact spark joy.  One was--despite his name and the rampant ableism--Deadkit. K:  YES K:  I have in my notes: K: "I would die for Deadkit." and then "Apparently Deadkit would die for me" S: Hopkit sat up straight, quivering with effort. “Still as a stone, right you are!” he mewed. “Barkface, carry on!” Bless. S: MY SON S: MY BOY K;  And Talltail finally being like? Not an asshole, and treating him well and encouraging him.  He really did feel like he was emulating Dawnstripe in a wholesome way. S:  I KNOW. S:  It honestly made me feel so good about the story I've planned out, but I can talk about that after. S: I also loved that Talltail swam. <3 K: Yes.  S: I was there just elated, thinking about Mudclaw's final moments. And how this story actually ties in so well with that one. That's nothing really to do with Erin Hunter, but it was nice for me. It made the two feel resonant and in conversation with each other in a way I truly hadn't expected. K:  Oh fuck also, two extra from the notes K:  "Talltail’s heart began to race. “I can’t go home!” He stared in panic at Jake. “They won’t want me! I broke the warrior code when I left my Clan. They’ll drive me away again!” — On the one hand: I understand that his fear of being driven away/not being accepted stems from like, 90% of the interactions in this book. But also: THEY LET YOU LEAVE, everyone agreed! Nobody drove you out!" S: Talltail: "I'll go if I must, I understand, you need me to leave--" The rest of the clan: "uhh dude you said you wanted to go." S: Makes me think of people who get really pissed when they're like "I said I'm fine, why didn't you ask me more about how I was feeling because I was clearly Not Fine and Lying to you." S:  And it's like... I trusted you to tell me the truth. Don't play stupid games. K: Yeah! Like, if you want to be consoled or helped, be honest! I can't read your mind!

S: Palebird is just a full on mess in this book, huh? And it's really unsatisfactorily handled.  S: Sandgorse gets obsessed over for... the entire book. Palebird, equally bad parent, doesn't really get any kind of meaningful resolution with Talltail. K:  I misread when Talltail first brings the kids into camp, and fully thought that Palebird recognized Talltail and chose to ignore him in favour of her kits. That sadly isn't actually far off from what happens when she does recognize him. K:   He just goes "oh she died and in my leader ceremony she makes me feel like she always loved me and i never should have doubted her" S: I was so furious that her bit was like "a mother's love for her kits" and he's like, oh I can't believe how stupid I was for doubting her. S: She abused you, dude. S:  Being like, "lol jk" after she's dead counts for Nothing. K: It’s awful.  S: "I always loved you," said Palebird. "I just never wanted to interact with you at all when I was alive and I attached all my grief and trauma to your existence, which made it impossible to enjoy time around you, and I never even bothered to get help for myself or you, and I was happiest when you weren't in my life and I could focus on my other family. So I guess I didn't actually love you. I just felt like I probably should have, but oh well." S: I am as angry about her as I am about Sandgorse. K:   Yeah, she just somehow gets a free pass because "that's just how moms are!" -Erin S:  "Mums can say they love you and you have to believe them." K:  What kind of mother did you have/are you to your kids, @the Erins collective. I want to know. S: I KNOW K: Like, please answer for science. K:  I KNOW WE'VE ROASTED SANDGORSE THIS ENTIRE TIME BUT K:  THE NOTES S:  GET HIM S:  GET HIS ARSE K:  “I give you this life for forgiveness. No death need ever be avenged. Forgiveness brings peace far more surely than vengeance.” Talltail felt his ruffled fur smooth, his claws retract into his pads, his breath come steadily. Mercy was his, and always would be. “I’m sorry you had to learn the hard way, Tallstar,” Sandgorse meowed. — HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO MURDER A FICTIONAL CAT S:  YES YES YES YES S:  I was literally about to grab the same note. K:  "im sorry you had to learn the hard way" WHOSE FUCKING FAULT WAS THAT S:  “I give you this life for forgiveness. No death need ever be avenged. Forgiveness brings peace far more surely than vengeance.” It is a fatal mistake to conflate forgiveness with pacifism. K:  It's just. K:  Like I knew it was going to be awful, I knew this moment was going to happen, but just to see it and see the phrasing. K:  "I'm sorry you had to learn the hard way" is just the ultimate slap in the face. You abused and abandoned and neglected this kid. You did this. You were a ghost for 70% of the book and could have told your son that you "died a hero" and stopped him from being an absolute asshole. YOU DID THIS. S:  What peeves me is that I personally believe forgiveness is something you have to do for yourself, and not for other people. A lot of the time, bad people in your life won't ask for your forgiveness and don't deserve it. K: Yes!  Forgivesness isn't earned, forgivesness is given. K:  It's up to you to give people that forgiveness on your own terms, whenever and however you choose. And if you go "I'm not giving this to you" you don't have to! It's for you! It's your choice! S: But all your anger and hate and misery inside will burn you out like acid, so sometimes you need to go, "you're never going to earn my forgiveness, but I am choosing to forgive what you did so I can move on with my life and grow." S: It's why "forgive but don't forget" is a good thing to remember. You can let go of self-harmful anger without ever losing the lesson that person taught you, which was stay the hell away from people like that. S: That's the conversation I want to see happen around forgiveness in this story. K:  Talltail deserves so much better than any of the story we were given. K:  And like. Forgiveness through that specific lens is so compelling. S:  I know. It's something I'm deeply invested and interested in.  K:  It's so engaging, and relatable! It's messy and nuanced and full of a lot of good shit. S:  Yeah, like, and what happens when the person you resent or distrust tries to make efforts to atone, but they always fall a little short, or don't grow the way you need them to?  How do you forgive that, but still choose to walk away, knowing that in their narrative, you're the bad guy? K:  It's hard.  Knowing that they see you as the bad guy is like, the fucking toughest.  s:  It's extremely hard and I think there's so much space in this story for that exploration. K:  It makes it so easy to want to go back in for seconds and explain yourself to try and get them to understand you, even when you know that like, they're not going to and never will.  And it'll just hurt you more to try than to move on and be a better you for it. S: And being able to forgive yourself is I think a massive underrated lesson. K: Yes! It's beyond hard to try and be gentle with yourself and have compassion for yourself sometimes, especially regarding a messy scenario like these. S: I mean, all of this is way out of Erin Hunter's range, but like, ugh. What could have been. K: Yeah, absolutely. K:  Also I'm always here for young upset queer kids growing up to become Better & Cooler & Sexier than you, so don't try any shit dad, S: Anyway! That's it! We did it! K:  Yeah! S:  Honestly this is such a dumb book but it always feels like an accomplishment to get through another Book Club with you. K:  I agree. K: <3 S: <3

About poison and love. Noah the Gorgon and Harper Sayles (and Dean, Cas, Jack, Michael)

Jack, I’m already writing. Isn’t that crazy? I’m not crazy. But our love is so vivid. I can’t wait to find you. You are the first man to ever get me to leave McCook. Now I’m in the world. I’m sorry I have to kill you for what you did to Vance but then I can bring you back so that we can be together again. It’s gonna be perfect. See you soon. Love, Harper

I have already talked about how Harper Sayles is a dark mirror for Dean: he thinks his love for people has the same effect on the people he loves as Harper does. Dean believes that his attachment to people in harmful to them, that he “kills” the people he loves in the sense that he destroys their chance to be their own selves and pursue their own paths, and that there’s something toxic in the way he clings to people instead of letting them go (remember when Sam explicitly directed these accusations to Dean after the Gadreel incident? That was the textualization of a long-living fear of Dean’s, that he destroys people because he cannot bear to be without them).

And now we have a new mirror for Dean that presents interesting parallels to Harper. Noah the Gorgon and Harper Sayles both play a sort of game where they flirt with a man, or let him flirt with them, and then they get the men killed. There’s emphasis on the fact that they kill men: “she's lost people--not people, men” the waitress says, then echoed by other patrons who also say “men”. The conversation between the Gorgon and his latest victim also emphasizes how Noah’s most recent victims are all men - in fact “a pretty biased sample at this point, really”.

They both rely on a cute attractiveness (Harper’s charming attitude, Noah’s campy appearance) to appear harmless, although not everyone falls for it - several women and one guy affirm that Harper is “bad luck”, and apparently Noah has been having a hard time getting close to women because they wouldn’t trust a stranger. Basically, they both have a specific kind of victim: men who are looking for romantic or sexual connections.

Obviously, Harper is living a typical heterosexual romance, while Noah’s field is queer, and this brings us to the next point. We have been talking about how Harper basically lives her life like it were a story from a book, but the wrong genre: she mistakes horror for romance. I’d say that the main difference between Harper and Noah is that Noah appears to be more aware than Harper of the genre he lives in, although he does seem to be trying to live in a different genre. I’d say that, while Harper acts like she’s in a typical romance novel, Noah acts like he’s in a NBC Hannibal-esque show, which is a fascinating choice from Steve Yockey and Amyn Kaderali. The initial scene of the episode is obviously filmed to be reminiscent of Hannibal, with just that more Supernatural-like flavor in the aesthetic - not the high-end classy style of Hannibal Lecter, but something campier. There are similarities between Hannibal and Noah, including their unconventional (feminine-coded) styles in physical fighting (see also the connotations of poison as a weapon) and a tendency to get into your head with speeches about metaphors...

But now let’s get back to Harper and Noah. As I was saying, unlike Harper, Noah is aware that the genre he’s living in is not a romance; and maybe there’s something here about the fact that straight people will interpret anything where there’s a man and a woman as a romance (including violence and abuse), while queer people will always find themselves in tragic narratives... Maybe Harper and Noah do represent the stereotypical genres women and queer men are stuck into - romance and tragic narratives of isolation and death. Obviously, they both bring twists to those roles, because Harper is a necromancer that killed and turned her boyfriend into a zombie, and Noah a demigod that eats human flesh and will snack on your eyes. Stereotypes are too narrow, Supernatural says, as it gleefully gets its little horror hands on everything.

Anyway, Noah does seem to be more aware of the reality of his existence: when hunters come, unlike Harper who just substitutes Jack as the hero of her romance novel, Noah warns Dean to stay away from him. And here we get to a very interesting point: Noah also writes a letter to Dean, like Harper did to Jack.

Dean, I see you standing alone by the truck reading this note. I see you and the tall man and the red-headed witch chasing me. I will always see you. Stop, or I will make you stop. Regards, Noah.

Noah’s message to Dean is coded as a love letter of sorts, too. Dean himself points out - a little awkwardly, kind of like he also gets the vibe - that there’s something strangely intimate in how the letter places them in a first-name basis towards each other (Sam and Rowena, on the other hand, are not mentioned by name - which is bizarre since Noah knows Dean’s name, but is less bizarre if you consider the subtext). When Cas wonders why the letter doesn’t mention him (in an exchange where neither Jack, Sam or Rowena are mentioned), Dean suggests that’s because he’s not Noah’s type - implying that Dean is.

Noah is doing what he’d rather do as “a lover, not a fighter”: send Dean away from him, rather than fight him. Noah is aware of what he does to people, unlike Harper who consider her zombie-ification of her boyfriend as an act of love.

Honestly, it’s not like I enjoy eating people. It’s a lonely way to live, and there’s only so many ways you can cook human. But sometimes fate is cruel and boring.

In his own twisted, murderous human-eating demigod way, the Gorgon laments his condition. It’s a lonely way to live, being unable to connect with people because you’ll poison them and will eat them... which brings us to the initial point of this post.

Come on, man. Can’t you see? I’m... I’m poison, Sam. People get close to me, they get killed... or worse. You know, I tell myself that I... I help more people than I hurt. And I tell myself that I’m... I’m doing it all for the right reasons, and I... I believe that. But I can’t – I won’t... drag anybody through the muck with me. Not anymore.

Dean believes he’s poison to the people around him, and while he obviously isn’t in the same mindset he was in 9x10 when he said the above line, he has always carried this fear within himself, that he drags people down. And that counts especially with Castiel, a literal angel that literally fell because of Dean. While Cas considers getting close to humanity (insert double meaning here) an act of elevation for a non-human creature, Dean - while he has no delusions about how bad heaven and angels can be - sees Cas’ descent into the pain and suffering that comes from getting close to humanity (to him, really) in negative terms. Awful, Jack calls the experience of loving something that will die. Living, Cas calls it. Remember his words when they gave the demon cure to Dean: only humans can feel real joy, but also such profound pain... Now we can add, a non-human creature can feel real joy and profound pain by loving humans. And while avoiding that is “easier”, it is no real living.

Cas’ speech is the opposite of the speech Michael gave Jack in the hotel in Kansas City:

My uncle's in the cage. And you -- you’re not family. Well, not literally, no. Our connection, our relation is more a matter of scale... of power. Haven’t you learned yet? In this reality, monsters, humans, even angels -- they are insects, atoms compared to us. But you -- you’re just a child, a mere infant. For you, the past two years -- the entirety of your existence -- feel like eons. You don’t even know what time is. But you will. Real time, the time that makes mountains, that wipes out species. You’ll see it all... with me. No. Year by year, century by century, and as your power returns and grows, we’ll only become more alike. Oh, I know. Your loyalty to Castiel, the Winchesters, the rest of humanity? It will fade. And so will the minor differences -- angel armies versus monster armies, this Kansas City or that Kansas City, one world from another -- they'll fade, too.

And that’s the deeper meaning of Jack yelling to Michael, before killing him, that he’s not a child. He reiterates his loyalty to humanity and to the Winchesters.

Michael is a parallel to Noah too - makes sense, both dark mirrors for Dean (plus Jack, of course). He also basically lamented an existence without connections, too powerful, too alien from everything else to be able to connect to them. Michael probably never enjoyed his version of “eating people” - cleansing the worlds, destroying everything - either, but he felt like it was his nature to do so, because he saw no meaning in getting attached to something ephemeral and fleeting.

As Noah says, it’s a cruel fate one that forces you to live a lonely life with no connections. And Cas tells Jack that, no matter how much it hurts, it’ll always be better to have loved a human and lost them, than not having gotten close to them at all.

Now, I sincerely doubt that Cas’ story will develop the way he expects it to - no one’s really living in the exact genre they act like they were in, are they? - so we’ll see who’s really going to lose whom now... and which kind of ending this genre entails.

On queer spinsters

Queer spinsterdom is a state I think a lot about: as someone who identifies as queer, as a woman (ish), as demisexual (ish), and who is generally happier single than partnered, I feel invested in it as a personal identity and state of being and as a mode of representation. The thing is, though, that like lots of queer representation, like lots of representation of women, like lots of representation of single women, the representation around queer spinsters is pretty fucking shitty. 

The impetus for this post, right now, is that yesterday afternoon I went to see Their Finest. I had been intrigued by it, because I do love a British WW2 home front drama, and become doubly interested when this photoset of Rachael Stirling looking very dapper in her role as Phyl Moore went around. I love Rachael Stirling! I love ‘40s dapper costuming! I love Rachael Stirling playing queer/queer-coded characters in period pieces! And, in Their Finest, it’s not just coding - there are three separate moments that affirm Moore’s queerness. Great!

I went in with anticipation; I came out feeling absolutely gutted.

Part of this, to be fair, is that for all that the movie seems light, it’s actually pretty intense, with lots of complicated and sometimes contradictory human emotions. [Spoilers ahoy]

But it’s also that it offers up a queer female side character, something ever so popular for one’s WW2 media these days, gives her steely resolve and ambition, moments of levity and bonding with the other main female character, and absolutely no internal life beyond what she can offer to the main heterosexual pairing. The other side characters get to have mentions of family - one of the other writers has a sick or disabled wife that he takes care of, one of the main actors in their film has a developed friendship with his agent and then a budding romance with his agent’s sister (and oh, yeah, even the agent gets to mention his worries about how his sister is doing), another actor mentions getting in touch with his mom. After the two main characters, played by Sam Claflin and Gemma Arterton, and the leading secondary character, played by Bill Nighy, Stirling has the next most screen time and lines.

And yet, the only mention of any life outside of her job we get -- the only time she talks about the impact of the war on her own psyche, or makes a human connection with another character from her own impetus (rather than responding to a connection offered) -- is when she’s talking about her landlady’s death and hearing her landlady’s husband crying through the walls of her flat. There is literally a wall between her and the nearest available expression of human emotion. She only accesses grief through someone else’s (straight, married) mourning. And the whole point of her telling that story is to encourage Arterton’s character to tell Claflin’s she loves him, thus operating essentially as the catalyst for the culmination of the hetero love story. When that culmination is thwarted, too, she gets to help our straight female lead figure out a more independent life - a storyline that on its own I applaud, but in the context reads like yet another queer sidekick who only exists for the enrichment of her straight friends. 

So what? She’s ambitious, she’s steely, she’s humorous, she’s stylish - I love all of those things! But she’s basically nothing beyond that: a queer spinster, so alone that she can only experience emotion through a fucking wall or by encouraging the coupling off of the straight leads. She’s queer, and she’s alone, and the only happy endings she gets are the ones they write for their films. 

This hit me hard because I’m ever in the middle of negotiating a life with essentially no representation, no image of what it might be to be a queer woman who’s single but not lonely, who’s ambitious but not heartless, whose relationships with her friends and family are full and fruitful in both directions. 

It hit hard because it came on the heels of another lonely queer spinster representation that I saw recently: that of Alex Bornstein’s character in the pilot of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (which was pretty funny otherwise!), who is so alone that she literally cannot invite another human being into her home if her murphy bed is out, because the door won’t open. Who also acts as a (mostly unwilling) conduit for the happiness of the main hetero relationship, and, as in Their Finest, acts to help the straight female lead figure out a more independent life after her straight happy ending is disrupted. 

And the thing is, being queer is often lonely. Being single is often lonely. But loneliness is not the essence of either of these states of being. Newsflash: single people can and do have a lot of relationships outside of romantic ones. They have rich internal lives that don’t focus on their alone-ness. They have yearnings and ambitions that don’t relate to romance at all, and they have reasons for being in friendships that aren’t just about bolstering the romantic endings of their friends.

Honestly, this is why reading another of Rachael Stirling’s characters, Millie in The Bletchley Circle, as queer is so fucking important: it’s never directly stated, but she doesn’t have any romantic partners, male or female, she wears trousers sometimes, and she’s got a mean strut. But more importantly, she has deep, abiding, intense, passionate, meaningful relationships with her friends; she has brains and ambition but also a deeply caring heart; she has secrets and plays things close to the chest, but she also accepts help when she needs it. She’s the most well-rounded representation of a queer spinster I can think of, and she’s only barely coded queer. 

One of the biggest projects of my adult life has been to push at the boundaries of what women, queer women, queer single women, queer single ambitious women are allowed to be. It’s why I make myself so visible over on my fashion blog and other social media sites; it’s why I talk about what fashion means to me, what my career means to me, what spinsterdom means to me, what fatness means to me. I, like so many other people in so many marginalized identities and states of being, am striving for a representation that doesn’t exist. A representation that, when it comes close, is either monstrous or sad. And honestly, I’m fucking exhausted.

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EPISODE 3: THE LEGACY OF DOROTHY ARZNER

LISTEN: SOUNDCLOUD / ITUNES / GOOGLE PLAY

NOTES: Guess who finally typed up their script before recording? ME! No more note shuffling!

SOURCES: listed at end of transcript

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I'm Jack, and this is Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. I know I mentioned that this week, we were going to talk about the sapphic Holy Trinity of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn, but I made a new discovery while I was digging through Pride posts on tumblr, and I thought that maybe instead of talking about some big names that everyone is already familiar with, I might put off talking about actresses to focus on someone behind the camera. There isn't a whole lot of information about Golden Age lesbians and bisexual women, and I heard this name that I had never even seen before and I thought, what the heck? Let's talk about more lesbians.

So today, I'm going to introduce you to a woman named Dorothy Arzner. Maybe you've heard the name, and maybe you haven't, but she's an important woman. Here's a woman who directed sixteen movies – a run comparable to the men of the time, and twenty more than contemporary female director Kathryn Bigelow – over a career spanning from 1927 to 1943. This is the woman – the person – who invented the boom mic while directing Paramount's first talkie, launched Katharine Hepburn and Lucille Ball, and did it all while whispers of affairs with the likes of Joan Crawford floated around. In short, Dorothy Arzner was a fucking badass, but that's not even half the story.

Dorothy Arzner was born on January 3, 1897 in San Francisco. Her family moved to LA and her dad opened up a restaurant that attracted a lot of Hollywood elite – and that comes into play a little later. Arzner wanted to be a doctor – dead set on it so much that she went to the University of Southern California for it, and when World War I broke out, she went overseas to drive ambulances. I guess the experience was kind of intense, because she came back and said, “Maybe being a doctor isn't for me.” Let's pause here for a second and bask in the complete badassery. This is World War I. This is 1914, or thereabouts, and this woman is like, “Oh, I want to be a doctor and you're not gonna sway me into nursing.” This is a woman saying, “Fuck you, fuck this, I'm gonna go drive fucking ambulances at the front during a major world conflict.” I can't blame her for coming home and not wanting to be in medicine anymore, but what does she decide to do?

Be a director.

She wasn't a director at first, of course. She wanted to become a director because, in her own words, “If one was going to be in the movie business, one should be a director because he was the one who told everyone else what to do.”

Her father got into contact with William C. deMille, older brother of Cecil B., who got her a job at the Players-Lasky Corporation, which we would all come to know as Paramount Pictures. She started out as a stenographer, typing up scripts – but she was a terrible typist, so they got her out of there pretty quick. Imagine being so bad at a job that they promote you just to stop you from pecking at a typewriter – that's the life I want to live. They had her writing scripts for a little while, and then they got her into an editing room, and this is where she really starts to shine.

She edited a film called Blood and Sand in 1922, which starred our friend Rudolph Valentino. While she's working on this film, she has the brilliant idea to use stock footage of bullfighters to make the movie more believable and entertaining, and the director – a guy named James Cruze – is so impressed with her that he basically pulls her onto his permanent team, and she goes on to edit over fifty films.

So Arzner is trucking along with this editing career, but she's also starting to realize that she doesn't want to edit forever. She wants to direct, so she goes up to the heads of Paramount and she lays out her demands: let her direct a film, or she's going to leave and take her talents to Columbia, basically their direct competitor. They were like, “Uh, okay. Sure.” At this point, I've found some reports that she was already writing scripts for independent movie outfits and they were causing a lot of buzz, so I'm sure Paramount was a little nervous that they could be losing out on a lot of money. This was still the time that studios were cranking out movies left and right, turning over footage at a really crazy rate. Movies were basically turned over weekly, so they came up with stuff that was long and short, and they needed a lot of people to do it.

In 1927, Paramount hands Arzner the script for a movie called Fashions For Women. It's a silent film, kind of a comedic love story, about a cigarette girl who falls in love with a count and becomes a model. This movie does so well that they put her in charge of another movie: The Wild Party, starring Clara Bow. It's Paramount's first talkie, and it's a remake of a silent film that she had edited. Again, I want to pause and bask. Paramount Pictures gave their first talkie – a thing that could make or break a studio back in those days – to a woman who had gotten her job by demanding she be given it.

The thing about the first talkies is that the actors couldn't really move around too much because they had to stand still in front of their microphones for the sound to be captured. It was really obvious to Arzner that shooting this way was making Clara Bow act awkwardly, so Arzner gets a hold of her sound guys and helps them rig up a microphone attached to a fishing rod so that they could hold the mic up over Bow's head, out of the shot, and follow her around so that she could move and act without having to worry about being stuck in one place. If that concept sounds familiar, it's because Dorothy Arzner invented the fucking boom mic. She didn't patent the idea, but everyone is pretty much in agreement that it's her invention and give her credit for it. Another cool thing about Arzner directing the studio's first talkie is that all the male directors were like, “Woah, the post-production work on these things is way too intense – let's just sit back and let the lady deal with all the bullshit while we keep making silent movies.” So Arzner took a job that no one wanted and invented the fucking boom mic while she was at it. Could this lady get any more badass?

Of course she can.

The Wild Party is a pre-Code film, and it's a little raunchy and it's racy and it's set at a girl's college. This becomes a theme with Arzner's films – she does this wild woman thing with girls misbehaving, even after the Hays Code comes along and ruins everything. Clara Bow's star and her particular style started to fade with the coming of the 30's, so Paramount nudged Arzner into directing melodramas. So she did it – and did it really, really well. In 1930, she directs a movie called Sarah and Son, and it gets actress Ruth Chatterton an Academy Award nomination.

In 1931, we get Honor Among Lovers, and it has some big names in it: Fredric March, Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers. Arzner isn't messing around here. The plot is kind of hard to follow, but basically it's what would have happened if Pepper Potts went to work for Justin Hammer and then tried to go back to Tony Stark after she realized she was in love with him – but it's set during the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The movie basically puts men on blast for their greed – all these guys running around trying to collect money and women and that's their downfall.

Her movies were pretty popular – The Wild Party was the third top grossing film of 1919 – and they usually had strong female characters in them. Arzner had a way of directing women in films that showed them as real, complex people – and the studios decided to capitalize on that. She left Paramount in 1932 to freelance, and she really starts to take off from here. Since this was still the 30's and 40's, the women in her movies usually ended up happily married by the end of the film, but they were still an anomaly in Golden Age cinema. She liked to point out the unfairness of sexism and gender discrimination, and people, not too surprisingly, loved it.

She directed Katharine Hepburn in her second movie in 1933 – a film called Christopher Strong. This is the movie we get all those great images of Hepburn in pilot gear from, I'm sure you've seen it. She plays a pilot who fall in love with a married politician, and apparently she and Arzner got into it on the set quite a few times. I've seen some quotes talking about how Arzner was basically trolling around RKO and saw Hepburn up a tree in a leopard skin – I'm not even kidding – and basically just got heart eyes because Hepburn was so beautiful and Arzner didn't want to see her making Tarzan movies her whole career. Can you imagine that? Arzner is the reason we have the Katharine Hepburn we all know and love today. There isn't really any evidence that the two had an affair – but knowing what I know about Hepburn today, I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

In 1936, she launches the career of Rosalind Russel in Craig's Wife. If you're not familiar with Rosalind Russel, I highly suggest watching her in His Girl Friday, opposite Cary Grant – it's a really funny screwball comedy, and Russel is such a fast talker and she's super slick – it's great. And we have Arzner to thank for having Russel at all. Not only that, but Arzner took a script that was kinda sleazy and gross, all about a husband going fighting with his cold wife, into a movie that's begging women to become their own people.

In the 1930's we have a lot of talk about Arzner's sexuality come up. She wore trousers and suspenders – and I'm not gonna lie, she looked pretty good doing it, if I do say so – and she apparently had an affair with Joan Crawford on the sets of The Bride Wore Red and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. It's been described as a 'fiery affair', but there apparently wasn't any ill will because in the 60's and70's, Arzner directed a bunch of Pepsi commercials with Crawford as a special favor. In 1936, she became the first female director to join the Directors Guild of America.

Then in 1940, she directs Dance Girl Dance, which is Lucille Ball's first on-screen performance. It's a screwball comedy about two burlesque dancers that end up fighting each other over a man, giving up their dreams to try and get with this guy. Maureen O'Hara plays the other burlesque dancer, and she gives the audience a dressing down about gaping at her. And this is a character who has to perform to make her way in the world, and she's not ashamed of it. There's a lot of lesbian subtext in the movie – like in all of Arzner's movies – some sly glances and the fact that Ball and O'Hara's characters really obviously want to be together but they misplace that affection onto a man.

Arzner directed her last film, First Comes Courage, in 1943. It's a pretty typical war-time story, except it's totally about a lesbian spy who runs away with a nurse after her husband dies. It wasn't nearly as commercially successful as her older films, and Arzner was dealing with a pretty serious case of pneumonia at the time – and these are all kind of agreed upon reasons why she didn't continue directing. She made a few training films for the Women's Army Corp, but after that, she was kind of done with feature films. Like I mentioned, she made some commercials with Joan Crawford, and she did some other commercials. She also went on to teach film at UCLA, where she taught – get this – Francis Ford fucking Coppola. In the 70's, she told a reporter that Louis B Mayer had killed her career by spreading the word that she was “difficult”, which is – as far as I'm concerned – Louis B Mayer's code for “very, very gay”.

Arzner lived with her partner Marion Morgan for forty years. I've found conflicting reports on whether or not Arzner was out, but I think it's pretty agreed upon that she was openly with Morgan but not necessarily publicly out. Morgan was a dancer and choreographer – she had a dance troupe called the Marion Morgan Dancers, which was mostly made up of women. They did a lot of Vaudeville work and then they were hired to do dance sequences in Hollywood films, and Morgan did a lot of choreography for Arzner. They actually met on the set of Fashions for Women which as you will remember was Arzner's first movie, and they moved in together in 1930. Again, I'm gonna pause and let that sink in. These two met and fell in love and decided to move in together – in 19-fucking-30. They lived together until Morgan died in 1971. Arzner was apparently a gardener and gushed about the roses she grew in their garden. They had beautiful parties and invited Marlene Dietrich. Arzner might have had affairs with people like Billie Burke and Alla Nazimova, but she went home every night to Marion.

Dorothy Arzner died in 1979 at the age of 82. She left behind a legacy for the women that came after her – she was a prolific director and she refused to live life on anyone else's terms. And you know, not only that, but she was a great director – not just a great female director, but a great director. You know, Dorothy Arzner gave us quality. And I think that if she was alive today to see Patty Jenkins direct Wonder Woman, and if she was alive to see that movie today, I think she would be very proud.

Thank you for listening to Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This episode was written, recorded and researched by me, Jack Segreto. You can find a transcript of this episode and all of our episodes, along with some fun facts and photos, on our tumblr, tuckinpodcast.tumblr.com. You can also give us a like on Facebook at facebook.com/tuckinpodcast. We accept messages on both of those platforms, so feel free to shoot us any suggestions for show topics or comments you might have. We put out new episodes every Wednesday, and you can listen to us on SoundCloud, iTunes and Google Play, so don't forget to rate and subscribe to us! I read all the comments that you leave me and it makes me really happy. Special shout out this week to my buddy Ricci for listening and offering to come onto the show – I haven't forgotten about that, man, I'm coming for you. Happy Pride month, everyone! Stay safe, have fun, and remember that Pride started when two trans women of color threw bricks at cops! Thanks for listening, we'll see you next week!

SOURCES:

Dorothy Arzner: Queen of Hollywood

Why Was One of Hollywood’s First Female Film Directors, Dorothy Arzner, Forgotten?

Dorothy Arzner, First Female Director in Hollywood Studio System

Women Who Paved The Way: Dorothy Arzner

A Life Shared: Marion Morgan and Dorothy Arzner

The Making of We Bare Bears: The Movie

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This We Bare Bears: The Movie interview contains spoilers.

We Bare Bears: The Movie is the perfect send off to the loveable Grizz, Panda, and Ice Bear that have been warming hearts on Cartoon Network since 2015. Their last adventure sees them going up against their own right to simply exist in the world as the government tries to capture them. The story is not only relevant to our times (where racism continues to show its ugly face) but also contains the melancholy that made We Bare Bears such a warm show alongside its trademark humor. It’s truly a special film that does the herculean task of wrapping up a long running series, commenting on the world, and just being the fun we need while going through dark times.

We spoke with show creator Daniel Chong for an in-depth discussion about the making of the film from its original conception to what Chong hopes fans take away from it. He also reveals how the film was reworked, adding a more serious tone to a mostly wacky series, and YouTube culture.

DEN OF GEEK: Let’s go all the way back and let’s talk about the initial process of how the movie came together two years ago. Did you pitch the story to Cartoon Network? Did they ask for a film? How did it go?

DANIEL CHONG: Yeah, they wanted a movie. They basically brought me into a room and they just said, “Would you be interested in making one?” And honestly, it was a call that I’ve been wanting for a while, because coming from Feature Animation, that’s where most of my career was. I felt very confident. I knew it was going to be difficult, no question, but I knew a little bit better what to expect making a movie.

I also felt that we had characters that could exist in a movie. They had enough emotional depth in them or capabilities that I knew that we could sustain them for a long period of time in a movie. So (Cartoon Network) suggested it and we were like, “Sure, we’ll do it.” But we had to write it while we were finishing episodes too. I think we wrote it over the course of a couple months, but at the same time, we were writing 11 minute episodes, and we were finishing episodes (in production).

A lot of it was just stacked for a while. It was a little stressful, but our two main writers, Mikey Heller and Kris Mukai, they really buckled down and were able to multitask and that’s how it got done.

What was the inspiration, the spark, for the initial story? What made you want to do the film that we are now getting to watch?

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The first thing that we needed was a sense of scale. We needed a really big idea. One of the big ideas in the movie is there’s a forest fire. Around that time, there were tons of forest fires happening in California and there were images that were floating around in articles of bears that had their paws bandaged up. It was a really sad scene but I think when I saw that, I immediately sent it to our writers and was like, “I think this is what our movie is about. I think this is the big climactic thing that’s going to happen in our movie. Something that involves fire and these bears dealing with a forest fire.”

I immediately knew that that’s something we’d never be able to do on a regular show, it’s just too complicated, it’s too expensive and too busy. But I knew if we had a movie, we should just go for it and do something ambitious. It definitely was also very high on the ambition scale. So I think that felt right. 

The second thing that I knew that started to coalesce was that we were basically going to use all the big themes that we’ve used in the show and put it into the movie. And almost, we were going to make fun of the show in the movie.

There’s a a scene where the villain is talking about all the reasons bears shouldn’t exist and walk around humans. In a way, it’s almost like we’re making fun of the show. It’s like, why are bears talking? We’re basically making fun of the cartoon concept that we’ve created and using it to give us a story, because then everybody’s like, yeah, why haven’t we questioned that? That is weird. Why are they walking among us?

And so it was a way to kind of make fun and point at our show and expose it, I guess, and then use that to really set the movie into motion. So I think those were two of the really big ideas that helped motivate where we were going.

You have a lot of serious things going on and you have a lot of comedy. Bagel Rat shows up in this movie! How do you achieve that balance when you’re telling a more serious story? 

It was a trial and error thing. I mean, honestly, we already had the show so we knew what a Bears episode looked like. But there were some moments when the emotions weren’t working because we had never gone there before and we didn’t know how to handle a certain levels of emotion.

There was one scene that was a pivotal, emotional scene that was happening before the end of the second act. I remember one of the characters was just in agony. The first time it was pitched, the whole room laughed, and it wasn’t because it wasn’t boarded well, it wasn’t because the scene was written wrong, it’s just that we had never experienced that emotion with our characters and almost was like, “what are we doing? Is this right?”

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How Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts Codes Blackness

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It was almost a defense mechanism in some ways. It’s like, this is too heavy, but that’s what you need to do in a movie. Once we put all the pieces together, it’s really just about managing tone and music can help a lot with that. It’s a balancing act, kind of like you said. It’s about finding where does comedy need to exist to lighten it and where do we need to just commit straight to the emotion and the drama? It’s really a trial and error and you just kind of figure out as you go.

But the nice thing is I’ve had this team that worked on this movie for quite a long time. We worked together, we had a really strong workflow, and we just could read each other’s minds. I trusted them, they trusted me and we just all held hands together and really just made a very long episode, essentially. It was a lot of business as usual in some ways where we just were kind of just doing it the way we’ve always done it.

I loved the focus on Grizz in this film. His dream sequence especially was very, very powerful. Talk a little bit about the focus on him and how he really finally has to take responsibility for some of his wacky antiques.

Yeah. I think it’s great that you pointed that out because it was kind of like a late decision to steer it more in his direction. The nightmare never used to really be centralized on him. It was a decision kind of a little later as we started seeing the movie a little better. It made sense because he is the one that’s carrying the burden of his brothers. He is the one that cares for them the most, he always comes up with the ideas, he’s the first one we meet in the movie, and he’s the one that basically has the most responsibility for this family staying together. It just made sense as we were making it. It’s like, no, I think he’s the one that has to lead the charge and bring everyone back together because he’s also the most flawed. 

He’s the one that makes the most mistakes and also pushes for things when people don’t want them because he just needs to be a leader. It was fun to find out how important he was going to be to the whole overall arc of the story. But it felt right, I think once we did it, that the older brother is the one that carries that burden.

Was it the nightmare scene originally focused on all three bears then?

The nightmare scene never existed before; it used to be something completely different. When Grizz remembers that flashback with him as a kid, that scene actually used to have all three bears remembering it. But as we got into the writing, we realized, no, I think Grizz is the most important person here. He’s the one that had the nightmare that exposed his vulnerabilities of how much he was concerned about the wellbeing of everyone. He’s the one that can make the most change and bring everyone together. 

I love that bit where he’s locked up and he meets all the other bears and they don’t speak human, for lack of a better term. That was so striking to me that, even though he doesn’t understand his own kind, he’s still willing to help them out. That’s just Grizz, that’s just what he would do.

Yeah, totally. Having bears is a big rule breaker for our show. I never wanted to have other bears on our show because it would make our main characters less interesting, but this felt like the right time to do it.

For me, it almost related a lot to being Asian American because I don’t speak my own native tongue either. So I know what it’s like to go back to my country and realize that there are people who have my same heritage but I don’t speak their language. We talked a lot about that experience when we went into that scene and how we would play the miscommunication or the recognizing each other, but at the same time, not being able to communicate.

It’s just so much of your own experience and I’m sure the experience of a lot of people who worked on the film as well. I’m sure it’s just countless experience but feels like it all filtered into the film and made it like the best episodes of the show. They’re very funny but also very, very personal.

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I think that is the key to what our show is. It’s the personal touch. Knowing that this story had a very personal message that I really cared about and experienced deeply is something that helps. But we try to give a voice to not just the writers or our directors, but even the story artists. We make it in a way that they also get to be participants in the writing and in the brainstorming so that they can put their contributions in. It becomes this amazing hive mind of, how can we make this as authentic of a feeling and experience as possible? I do think a lot of that is just getting the right team that gets along and just cares enough about the show or the movie. That even extends to the art team and the production.

It really makes a difference when they care about what’s being said and what the message is. I think everyone really understood what we were trying to say and really got behind it and really valued it. It really helped the production just move a lot better.

On the more fun side of the film, and the show set the precedent for this, but We Bare Bears gets YouTube and video culture more than any other kid show out there. Since the Bears were so obsessed with it in the show did that mean it had to become a plot in the film as well? 

It was always in the DNA of the pitch of the show. I think it’s a risky thing and not a lot of shows want to do it because it can verge on the cringy side. It can also get outdated really quickly and become too topical or too in that moment. So you really always will run the risk of those things when you introduce internet things. 

But we just went for it. I hadn’t quite seen it done a certain way so I just said, “I’ll put my own spin on it and I’ll find a way to make it so it doesn’t get outdated too quickly.” And so our first episode was called ‘Viral Video’ and it was about the Bears trying to make a viral video. It was always embedded in the DNA that internet culture and those things were going to be inherent in the film.

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We Bare Bears The Movie Reminds Us Of The Series’ True Message

By Shamus Kelley

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As we started bringing in different story artists and different writers, they were all very young, in their twenties and they all were internet cultured kids and it was a big part of their lives. So  I just said, “Let’s just go for it. You guys should just write what you guys know and push the things that are funny to you on the Internet and let’s put it in the show.” 

I still have to sit through it and if I don’t get the reference enough, I’ll probably have to tell them not to do it. But that’s just kind of the balance that we do. In the movie we just exploited it to the 10th degree. I mean, they did the most cringy viral video you could have imagined, and it almost worked that they were all outdated memes because it had to fail. Then we go into this animal commune and we basically get to expose all these new internet animals, which was really fun to do. We just used the movie to go all out on everything.

Is this film the last time that we’re going to see the adult bears? Is this their final adventure?

My belief is that We Bare Bears hopefully will be a show that can continue on in different ways, not just in spinoffs. I think to me, it’s the perfect vessel for something that could be reinterpreted or carry on for a long time, hopefully, and re-envisioned. I’d like to think that there will be a future where we’ll continue to see Bears for a while, as long as we can keep it interesting.

Note: This interview was conducted before Daniel Chong publicly announced that the film was the finale of the series and that he’d be departing Cartoon Network to work on a unnamed project. He did provide us with a quote reflecting this, which can be read below.

It’s been an incredible journey making We Bare Bears with a crew that I absolutely adore. I’m heartened to know that the response to the show has been so positive, and that I can leave knowing that we brought something good into the world.

After this film comes out, what are you hoping that people take away from it?

It’s funny because I think when we made it, we definitely had a very pointed message that we were very aware of and were thinking would be very relevant. That is one aspect of it but if the movie is not entertaining and not bringing people joy, it fails. It can’t just be a piece of a film that just has a message. So to me, especially when the pandemic hit, I think it became very real to me that maybe a bigger purpose for this show might just be to make people happy and to just bring joy to them. More and more, especially after a pandemic and honestly, to some degree, even now with everything else happening, I do get a lot of messages from people just saying how We Bare Bear’s has been able to be something that’s just made them happy in spite of how horrible things are in the world.

They enjoy seeing the bears and it kind of de-stresses them or makes them feel hopeful. I think that more than anything, if the show can aspire to attain those things? That is good enough. That is a goal that is already exceeding expectations. The message is there if people want it or people want to receive it, it’ll always be there and they can read into it however they want.

But I think for me, if people just like the film enjoy it and it brings them hope and joy? I think that is good enough for me. That’s kind of where my head space is at right now. Maybe it changes in a week, but that’s how I feel right now.

Do you have any other messages to share with either the fans of the show or just any other things that you want to put out into the world?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what making Bears has accomplished, and how I was able to use it to represent my culture and normalize things in episodse that would otherwise be considered so foreign. With everything going on now- I think it’s even more obvious the value of having more diverse animated shows, particularly with African American creators and what that could contribute to pop culture and the way we see the black community. Especially since so many kids watch animation, it would be so formative. My hope is that studios are making a concerted effort to fix that. And I hope I can help contribute to that change with the resources I have.

Stay tuned to Den of Geek for more about We Bare Bears: The Movie as Chong discusses the more serious side of the film and how it tied into the core message of the series.

The post The Making of We Bare Bears: The Movie appeared first on Den of Geek.

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