Of the women-in-prison films I’ve seen, I think Women in Cages is, at least on the surface, the least feminist. The main characters are all motivated and manipulated pretty much throughout by men, and the sisterhood which comes at the climax of most of these movies is here thoroughly undercut by paranoia and backstabbing. The main character (Jefferies, I think is her name) is rail-roaded into prison for a crime her boyfriend committed (and she’s completely innocent, not to mention naive, unlike the protagonist in Caged Heat.) And she doesn’t free herself; instead, she has to be rescued by the good guy.

On the other hand, Terminal Island is easily the most feminist film in the genre. Directed by Stephanie Rothman, one of the few female exploitation directors, its set in a near future, when California ships its murderers to an island to save on prison costs. The criminal community thus established is violently hierarchical, with a white man at the top, a black stooge to enforce discipline, and women as slaves/prostitutes who get systematically raped on a schedule. A group of rebels (led by a couple of black men) offer a more communal social model; they free the women, and together overthrow the overlord and establish an egalitarian, back-to-nature society in which all men and women are equal. End of parable.

In fact, both of these movies are quite good in their ways. “Terminal Island” has remarkably steady acting for the genre; Rothman seems to get the best out of everyone. Bobby, the evil white dictator, is a fun part, and the actor conveys his essential looniness and instability without going totally overboard and chewing the scenery. The second in command is good too; you can see him asking himself over and over why he’s listening to this nutcase, without ever quite having the courage or brains to dump him. The women are good too; a political radical shows everyone how to make bombs, but doesn’t ever resort to the kind of speechifying you expect from that stereotypical character; the new arrival to the island (a black woman) is very believably attracted to two of the rebels, and their rivalry over her is handled mostly off-screen, and without too much fuss. All in all, it’s remarkably thoughtful and deftly handled. The version I saw (the only one extant on DVD, I think) had profanity and nudity removed, but even so, you can tell that this movie’s heart wasn’t in the exploitation bits; it’s a remarkably restrained effort.

“Women in Cages” is, on the other hand, deeply seedy, with Pam Grier as Alabama, an over-the-top lesbian matron who enjoys whipping and torturing prisoners. But though it’s not exactly what you’d call subtle, it isn’t exactly dumb either. The chip on Alabama’s shoulders, it turns out, has to do with her miserable life in segregated America (the movie’s set in the Phillippines). Her relationship with one inmate, Theresa, is abusive but not loveless; certainly, we sympathize with the resourceful and caring, if doomed, Theresa as much as with anyone in the movie.

One thing I’ve been thinking about with these movies is whether, or why, a movie gets perceived as feminist. Several reviewers have called Terminal Island feminist (most notably Robin Wood), for reasons I’ve indicated, and I very much doubt anyone’s said that about Women in Cages (for reasons I’ve also pointed out.) But I’m not really sure that the first is actually any more radical than the second. Yes, Terminal Island shows a much more positive outcome, and pushes equality hard. But it seems to me that there’s more to feminism than just utopianism. The part of feminist critiques that I’ve found most engaging and inspirational myself tend to be the *critiques* — the stuff about how power works and how society is organized. Terminal Island is able to posit a utopia because it reduces that stuff to schematics; the society is pretty basic, and the big difference between the bad guys and the good guys is basically just that the good guys are decent people, while the bad guys are lunatic nutters.

In *Women in Cages*, on the other hand, women are oppressed and manipulated in ways that are more complex and more difficult to overcome. Roberta Collins (an actor who shows up in *all* these movies, it seems like! Every time you go into a cell in the Phillipines, there’s Roberta Collins! Where was I? Oh yeah….) Roberta Collins’ character spends the entire movie trying to kill Jeffries because she’s been promised a fix and a release if she prevents her from testifying against her drug-lord boyfriend; all Collins gets for her considerable trouble is betrayal and misery. Juanita Brown (who’s also in all these things) tries to help Jeffries — but, again, only out of self-interest, since *she’s* been promised she’ll be released if Jeffries does testify. As for Jeffries herself, her best moment in the movie comes at the end; she’s broken out of prison, only to be led by Collins’ character to a floating brothel, where Jeffries’ ex-boyfriend forces her to whore herself. But…the cavalry arrives! The good-guy law enforcer shows up disguised as a sailor, and closets himself with her under the pretext of being a customer. He says earnestly, “Remember me?” to which she replies (more or less), “Oh, yeah, baby, we had a great time. We’ll do it again right now.” It’s a chilling line, since it shows that she’s not only being repeatedly raped, but is forced to pretend to like it, and even connive in it (something which never happens in Terminal Island, where everyone, men and women, know that the rape is rape). The good-guy does manage to remind her who he really is, and that he’s there to rescue her — at which point she, understandably, starts to weep, partially in relief, partially, perhaps, in humiliation. The movie then quickly veers off at a tangent, as good-guy reveals himself to be a super-martial-arts expert and kicks the bad guys’ ass. Throughout this sequence, Jeffries looks on more-or-less nonplussed, as if something’s gone bizarrely wrong, and she’s wandered into the wrong movie. She does manage to escape, and all is well — but the last frame of the movie isn’t of her, but of Roberta Collins’ character, who is still on the ship and, indeed, still being raped. Even the wish-fulfillment good guy doesn’t really care about women, it seems; he just wants to catch the drug-lord; the plight of the women on the ship isn’t really his concern.

That’s certainly a bleak and not-particularly-uplifting message. But I don’t know that it’s less insightful, or less feminist, than Terminal Island. In fact, the movies seem to work well together, one showing a feminist ideal, and one reminding you why getting there is a long, depressing slog.

****************
I found an interesting interview with Rothman. I definitely want to see more of her films — though Netflix doesn’t have the Student Nurses, goddarnit….

Well, I finally found a bad Jack Hill movie. Mondo Keyhole, codirected with John Lamb in 1966, is dreadful enough that I barely managed to sit through the whole thing. It’s about an exec at a porn company who, in his spare time, rapes lots of women in slow motion. Occasionally he refuses to have sex with his wife, also very, very slowly. And every so often a skull appears and waves back and forth while a disembodied voice natters on pompously about reality and fantasy and dark human drives. Then at the end there’s an orgy with a guy in a dracula mask talking about hell in a bad transyvania accent, and we learn that the punishment for rape is S&M play with two bosomy and scantily clad women. I think it was the moralizing/intellectualizing that really got me — most of Hill’s movies are unabashed about their lurid exploitation elements, and so are able to just happily and unapologetically heap other good stuff (interesting characters, snappy dialogue, whatever) on top of the sex and violence — pretty much the best of all worlds as far as I’m concerned. Mondo Keyhole, though, seems trapped in its own oleaginous moralizing and winking, tongue-in-cheek self expiation. It’s so busy congratulating itself for arting up its thoroughly sleazy violence and sex that it forgets to give us a plot. Or characters. Or entertainment.

Ah, well, so it goes. Even when your as good as Jack Hill, they can’t all be gems, I guess.

Pit Stop is probably Jack Hill’s most serious film; in interviews and commentary he often refers to it as his “art film.” It is a racing movie, and has a lot of racing footage (especially of figure 8 races, which Hill thought of as a particularly insane piece of Americana.) But other than that, it’s not very exploitive at all — there’s not a whole lot of gratuitous sex or nudity, for example, and the violence is also pretty minimal. It’s sober and dark, and it seems to be Hill’s favorites of his own work.

It’s not necessarily mine. Hill wanted the film to be about a driver who wins the big race, but loses his soul. The problem is that the driver in question, Rick, never seems to have had much of a soul to begin with. Right from the beginning of the movie, he’s a prickly, emotionally inaccessible ass, driven by ambition and ego. He does become marginally more remote as the movie goes on, but there’s never a moment where we see him being, say, generous, or loving, or funny (the closest is after a race when he gets drunk and tries to convince his love interest to sleep with him.) So the movie doesn’t end up being about a moral choice or a moral failure — it just ends up being about this guy who’s a dick. And since he’s never really likable, I, at least, was never was that invested in him, or in the picture.

Which isn’t to dismiss the movie altogether. As I said, it’s very well made — outside of Spider-Baby, it probably has the best ensemble acting of any of Hill’s movies I’ve seen. The actor who plays Rick mostly stands around looking soulful and repressed, but he does a good job of that; Beverly Washburn as a pixieish hippie chick named Jolene is believably vulnerable and sexy. Sid Haig as a rival racer named Hawk is (as usual) spectacular — he starts out completely over-the-top, happy-go-lucky and nuts, but over the course of the movie we get to see that this overlay is mostly schtick, and that underneath it is an insecure but intelligent man, who badly wants to win but isn’t always sure about the price.

The movie’s also interesting in that it is the only Hill movie I’ve seen so far which is definitively a male genre picture. A car chase movie is largely meant for guys, and — as is the case with male genres — Rick’s most intense relationships in the movie are with his men: first, an intense rivalry with Hawk, then a rivalry with an older, more experienced racer named Ed, and finally, and foremost, with an untrustworthy father-figure promoter played with dry, business-like malice by Brian Donleavy. As the movie progresses, in fact, it becomes clear that Rick’s damnation is specifically linked to his inability to form attachments with women; with an emotional sterility sprining from his intense focus on men. Rick first appears to become interested in Jolene because she is hanging around with Hawk, and seems to be her girl; later he sleeps with Ed’s frustrated wife. Rick at one point accuses Jolene of only wanting him because he’s a winner, but in fact it seems to be Rick who wants a winner — or, more accurately, Rick wants women who are attached to his current rival/crush-object. At the end of the movie, Rick wins the big race by forcing Ed to crash — inadvertently killing him. In the final scene in the hospital, Rick emotionally detaches himself from both Jolene and Ed’s wife, refusing to comfort either. Instead, he leaves with father-figure Donleavy to prepare for the next race, choosing the fraught, repressed world of masculine bonding over a more straight-forwardly loving relationship. In other words, Hill has made a picture in which the conventions of the male genre are themselves the tragedy.

In contrast, one of Hill’s least acclaimed efforts — The Swinging Cheerleaders — may be my absolute favorite of his movies. Cheerleaders seems like it, too, should be a guy movie; an Animal House, frat house romp, with lots of T&A and fart jokes. In fact, though, though there is a certain amount of T&A, this is really a chick flick. The main character is a college feminist named Katewho goes undercover as a cheerleader to write a stinging exposé of the exploitation the pom-pom girls experience. Instead, she falls for Buck, the star quarterback — and, perhaps more importantly, for the cheerleaders themselves, with whom she quickly becomes close friends. The story, in any case, focuses much more on the girls than the guys, and there’s very little pure male bonding. The two main football players are total sweethearts; the quarterback explicitly turns down a chance to participate in a gang bang, and the receiver is head-over-heels (and no wonder) for the absolutely glowing Rainbeaux Smith…so much so that he waits for a good long time before pressuring her for sex. (Admittedly, avoiding gang-bangs and waiting a short while for sex is a pretty low bar — but for a picture like this (and, alas, often outside of fiction as well) that’s like practically branding the letters SNAG into your forehead.)

In his book At a Theater or A Drive in Near You, Randall Clark claims that Swinging Cheerleaders is a conservative film, and that opinion seems echoed in various other places I’ve looked. I don’t buy it, though. Yes, it’s true that the campus radical is a bad guy. But he’s a bad guy mostly because he’s a sexist, who’s jealous of Kate’s career and of her other friends. To point out that the counterculture was sexist isn’t conservative. It’s not liberal either. It’s just true, and has been discussed by lots of feminists, from Andrea Dworkin on down. Moreover, this equation (bad guys = sexist) is true throughout the film; the good guys (like the football players) treat the women with respect and love; the bad guys (like the alumni association president who hits his daughter, or the lascivious coach) don’t. And the morally ambiguous treat women…somewhere in the middle. The math professor who helps rig the football games but eventually sees the light, for example, is having an affair with his student — one of the cheerleaders. He does seem to care for her, but the age gap is kind of icky, and, of course, he’s cheating on his wife. The wife herself gets to tell her side of the story, in an amazing scene which seems to have strolled in from one of Hill’s blaxploitation features. The cheerleader eventually breaks up with the professor, partly it seems, because she got the wife’s point, and partly because she realizes he’s kind of creepy — a decision and a characterization that he rather ruefully accepts.

I think people also tend to see the movie as conservative because Kate doesn’t follow through on her cheerleader expose, and she even eventually strongly condemns her own project. But, again, she basically condemns it because she starts to perceive it as anti-feminist; it’s not very sisterly to write an article in which you condemn your friends as brainless victims of false-consciousness. Again, this isn’t exactly an unfeminist insight; third-wave feminism is ready to defend sex-workers these days on similar grounds, much less cheerleaders. And it isn’t like Kate abandons her writing or her feminism; on the contrary, towards the end of the movie we see her getting ready to write an expose about the gambling ring. Nor is her relationship with Buck subservient in any way; in fact, when he’s in trouble, he calls her for help, and, at the climax, she organizes the posse which rescues him.

One of the movie’s most striking scenes, and one which I think may also be misinterpreted, involves Rainbeaux Smith’s character and the campus radical. Smith has been having trouble losing her virginity with her football boyfriend — she just can’t quite go through with it. Kate helpfully suggests that she should just fuck some random guy to take the pressure off — guys, Kate points out, use girls like that all the time. So Smith decides to screw the first guy who offers, and that turns out to be the campus radical. So they do the deed and afterwards Smith declares that she wants to try everything (“let’s do something you’ve never done before” I think she says). The radical looks a bit harried as Smith bounces around the couch. But he gamely gets the phone, calls a friend, and asks said friend to call together a bunch of guys to “gang bang a cheerleader.” Smith looks on with winsome, slightly nervous eagerness…and in the next scene we see her being carried into her apartment by her football boyfriend, bruised and apparently completely out of it. Her boyfriend, to defend her honor, goes and beats up the campus radical. End of parable.

So what’s happened here? When I first saw it, I thought Smith had been gang-raped, and that the movie was treating it with shocking casualness — Kate and the other cheerleaders eagerly quiz her about her experience in a girly “you have to tell us!” which seems entirely inappropriate. But viewing it a second time, and hearing Hill’s commentary, I don’t think that’s what happened at all. Smith isn’t tied down when the radical calls his buddies; she hears what he says, and she’s not restrained. When her friends quiz her later, she tells them, “I don’t think I can possibly talk about it,” but her tone is both shy and over-dramatic, and a minute later she seems about to tell all. I don’t think there’s any way to read it except that she was into the gang bang, agreed to the gang bang, enjoyed the gang bang, and then just kind of let her boyfriend think she didn’t.

On the one hand, this could be seen as really problematic — the whole, “she really wanted to be raped” thing. But usually in that narrative the girl pretends she was raped to get back at the guy, or to get the guy; its vengeance or spite or whatever. Here, though, Smith’s character doesn’t care about the guy at all; she’s just using him for sexual experience, basically, and as a good story to tell her friends. She’s acting the way guys do, and moreover, she’s getting away with it — she gets to be the bad girl while keeping both her reputation and the (good) guy. And even the radical doesn’t come off too badly; he just gets knocked around a little, and then he’s back spreading mischief, with, presumably, some happy memories to offset the cuts and bruises.

Cheerleaders is about female bonding just as Pit Stop is about male bonding. The difference, though is that in Cheerleaders, female bonding makes the women stronger — by supporting each other, they’re more able to enter into good relationships with men, while, in Pit Stop, the bonding between men makes loving women impossible. Part of the trouble for men is, it seems to me, homosexual panic — the specter of gayness turns love between men into violence and emotional frigidity. There are lesbian overtones in Cheerleaders of course — one scene in which Kate and another cheerleader encourage a topless and enormously breasted Rainbeaux Smith (who was pregnant at the time) to go braless for her upcoming date certainly seems suggestive, at least. But lesbianism just isn’t as threatening, for a whole host of reasons — sisterhood, even when it borders on the physical, simply doesn’t call into question ones femininity the way male bonding does. Though even male bonding isn’t always a disaster — in fact, the two star football players in Cheerleaders actually seem to like and support each other without a whole lot of fuss. Maybe men can love each other as long as they’re participating in team sports? In any case, Cheerleaders really does seem like one of the more hopeful, happier takes on gender relations I’ve seen on the screen

The blogosphere is more or less abuzz with the news that the Siegel family regained some rights to Action Comics #1, and therefore to the character of Superman.

Poking around a little, there seems to be a fair bit of enthusiasm on the Siegels’ behalf; a sense that, after 70 years, they’ve finally been restored their rights. Personally, though, I don’t really see it. The man who created the character is Siegel, and he is dead. His heirs didn’t do diddly — why exactly should they get the rights to the character or to Siegel’s work?

Of course, the folks currently helming DC didn’t create the character, and there’s no reason they should have ownership either. The truth is, having this sort of litigation about a character as entrenched in the popular consciousness as Superman decades and decades after his creation is insane. Or, to put it another way, copyright lasts too, too, too long. At this point whatever injustice has been done is done. Enriching the man’s grandchildren isn’t going to make up for it. Action Comics #1 should be in the public domain; anybody should be able to use that character — which would, coincidentally, and happily, put an end to the endless process of self-cannibalism “powering” the increasingly irrelevant, oddly flatulent wendigo that is DC comics today.

I’m still obsessed with Jack Hill’s movies — most recently I’ve seen “Spider Baby” and “Switchblade Sisters”. Both of these feature what I’ll refer to as conversion rape scenes: you know, boy rapes girl, girl is converted and discovers she likes it. Obviously, this is pretty offensive (Hill acknowledges his own concern about the conversion rape in “Switchblade Sisters.”) Still, I actually think both are, in many ways, fairly thoughtful scenes, and a lot less offensive than the initial description indicates. So here’s me trying to explain why.

The ur-conversion rape, to me, is James Bond’s rape of the improbably named Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. In the movie (and I believe in the book as well), Pussy Galore is a lesbian pilot, very independent and tough, who works for Goldfinger, presumably because he’s paying her a ton. But Bond (Sean Connery, here), is, of course, tougher, and he holds her down and rapes her, which is such a transformative experience that she eschews lesbianism and becomes his ally in the fight for good, betraying Goldfinger. She is so inspired, indeed, that, if I remember correctly, she convinces her entire lesbian posse to go along with her, though what they think of these developments is never very clearly articulated.

Anyway, what’s especially offensive about this whole scenario is the extent to which Ms. Galore is so completely beside the point. The rape and transformation is never about her; in fact, we don’t ever get a sense of her as a character except that she’s tough and independent, and then, suddenly, not so much. She falls for Bond because he’s just so darn overwhelmingly attractive, and she abandons her (never quite stated) lesbianism as if she were doffing a hat. There’s no actual psychological progression attempted; it’s just, insert phallus, hello enlightenment. The whole point of the encounter is, in fact, to annihilate her as a character; in entering her, Bond replaces her will with his own, and she becomes simply his catspaw. It’s the crudest kind of male power fantasy, and one which is more than a little pitiable, suggesting as it does a desire to fuck a mannequin, rather than a real person.

Hill’s variations on the themes are quite a bit different than this. In the horror-comedy Spider Baby, for example, the victim is Aunt Emily (played by Carol Ohmart). Emily is attempting to seize control of the Merrye fortune, currently controlled by her two nieces and one nephew, all of whom suffer from a degenerative hereditary brain disease, accentuated by in-breeding. At the beginning of the movie, Emily is presented as being the antithesis to her drooling, animalistic relatives — she’s buttoned up, proper, and willing to take no nonsense. Yet, there are several moments when she comes undone: first when she’s frightened by her nephew, Ralph; later when she’s confronted with a revolting meal of insects and dead kitten, and suddenly reaches into her purse to violently tear open a snack (attracting Ralph’s interest), and last when she discovers a stash of sexy lingerie in her bedroom, puts it on, and starts to dance in front of a mirror. Ralph discovers her, which precipitates a lengthy chase, at the end of which Ralph leaps upon her and performs the conversion rape in question.

The point here is that, despite her squicky conversion, Emily does not become a different person, or simply a vessel for Ralph’s desires. Instead, Emily’s conversion is about her; as I’ve noted, the movie takes some pains to suggest that beneath her buttoned up demeanor there’s something else going on. She’s also, of course, related to Ralph; the Merrye’s atavistic curse is her curse too. She’s attracted by the degenerate madness — which, indeed, throughout the film is presented as entertaining, charismatic, charming — as good fun, in other words. Moreover, embracing that madness doesn’t make her Ralph’s dupe or pawn. On the contrary, when she discovers Ralph embracing another woman, she becomes vengeful and violent, wounding him badly before (if I remember correctly) she is dragged down into the cellar with the other degenerate Merrye aunts and uncles. Where Galore’s conversion seems like a negation of her self, Emily’s is figured as a release from repression. Despite being different, she’s still herself, bad attitude and all.

The conversion rape in Switchblade Sisters moves even farther away from rote misogyny. The woman here is Maggie, a tough girl who has recently moved into the neighborhood. She’s become friends with Lace, who runs a gang called the Dagger Debs. The Debs are associated with the Daggers, led by Dominic. Maggie takes a letter from Lace (who’s in prison) to Dominic. Dominic is an asshole, which Maggie realizes — but she’s also attracted to him. Dominic figures this out, follows Maggie home, pushes her into her room, and rapes her.

Or does he? It’s pretty unclear what exactly is going on. Maggie never tells him he can have sex with her — but after he tears open her shirt, she tears open his. And she doesn’t put up much resistance…and this is a woman who, throughout the rest of the movie, is able to kick the shit out of practically everybody. After they’re done, Dominic tells her she was asking for it — fighting words for feminists, obviously, but Maggie doesn’t really dispute it. In fact, it seems that Maggie is deeply conflicted about having sex with Dominic; she doesn’t want to betray Lace, and the quasi-rape is a way to have him without doing that. Later in the film, he suggests to her that he might rape her again — and she tells him in no uncertain terms that if he does she’ll kick his ass… suggesting once more that she could have kicked his ass the first time if she wanted to. Certainly, whatever the extent of Maggie’s resistance or lack thereof, the fact that she enjoyed the sexual encounter doesn’t fundamentally change who she is. She never has sex with Dominic again, and she isn’t any less tough or independent — she helps him out and joins his gang, but her primary loyalty is to Lace, not to him.

I guess I just feel like there’s misogyny and there’s misogyny. Jack HIll’s movies have a lot of violence against women, and women are clearly and repeatedly on display for male pleasure. But he also cares about his female characters — they have independent inner lives, they make moral choices, they’re complicated and human and vulnerable and tough. There’s just no comparison with the Bond films — or even, for that matter, with a supposedly girl-power but actually basically empty romp like Charlie’s Angels (a movie I liked quite a bit, by the by).

Not that anyone’s actually reading this, but, on the off chance — anyone know of any books about Hill? I haven’t been able to find one, though I’ve looked in a couple of places. He’s well known enough that I was certain there would be, but maybe not….

I’ve been thinking a bit about poetry comics because of Bill Randall’s musings. Bill seems to be looking for comics that have a poetic feel for language and manage to use images in a way that respect or add to that feel, rather than ignoring it or detracting from it. (I may be doing violence to his argument, but that’s what I’ve taken away at the moment.) From that definition, I’d think that things like Krazy Kat and Peanuts would qualify, and maybe some of Alan Moore’s efforts. Certainly a lot of shoujo would, I think. And definitely the genius that is Edie Fake.

Anyway, in a former life, before I was a failed comics critic, I was a failed poet, so I figured as long as I was thinking about it I’d give the poetry comic thing a go. Below is my effort. To read it right you need to flip the page over halfway through, which obviously doesn’t quite work on the screen…but, I don’t know, you could always print it out or stand on your head if it seems worth it, I suppose….