In Response to: “Will London Fall?”

Letter to the editor

To the Editor:

Sarah Lyall paints a mesmerizing portrait of London in her recent article: a vibrant city, filled with people unconstrained by ethnicity or socioeconomic background. While the portrait is beautiful, I take issue with the frame. Lyall refers to London as, “the metropolis that globalization created” in the article’s description, but London has been a multicultural metropolis for much longer than the recent phenomenon we refer to today as globalization. If Lyall is, in fact, referring to processes that were in motion long before the rise of the internet and free trade agreements, then she should call them what they are: colonialism and imperialism. I agree with Lyall’s claim that London may fall as a result of Brexit and the anti-globalization sentiments that motivated it, but she frames London’s fall with watered-down language and simplifies the issues. She writes that Brexit will be harmful to London as the city changes and immigrants who form integral parts of the community leave or are forced to abandon their cultural heritage. The full implication of these changes, which she never addresses, is that London’s history and the composition of its current population are reflective of the UK’s economy: built and dependent on foreign cultures and markets, and vulnerable when faced with isolationist policies. London is a great city, yes. As Lyall says, when you walk through the financial district, you can “listen to the plumbing system of international capitalism.” But that hum of international capitalism comes at a steep cost, and Lyall does herself and her reader a disservice by pretending otherwise.

Sincerely,

Molly Hoyer

Wellesley, MA

April 22, 2017

In Response to Articles on the Pepsi Commercial

Letter to the editor

“If only Daddy would have known about the power of Pepsi.”

This was a tweet by Bernice King, the daughter of the late Martin Luther King Jr., in response to a commercial promoting Pepsi as a solution to anti-black police brutality. The commercial showed a generic protest that ended with Kendall Jenner handing a Pepsi to a police officer. Within hours, there were calls for a boycott of Pepsi products. As a result, the commercial was taken down and the company issued a formal apology. While Pepsi is the most notable example of faulty corporate activism as of late, they’re not the only company to use social justice to sell more than equality.

A month earlier, Nike revealed that they were releasing a line of athletic hijabs, their first foray into modest sportswear for Muslim women. This action was widely applauded by numerous media outlets and viewed as an act in defiance of Islamophobia worldwide. Many saw this move as a glowing example of corporate activism.

Though the business decisions of Pepsi and Nike seem unrelated, they’re both examples of corporate activism gone awry. Pepsi tried to piggyback on the popularity of social activism among young adults, while Nike waited to make this decision until the potential benefits outweighed the costs. Now that catering to the needs of Muslim consumers is more socially acceptable, Nike can increase profits while marketing itself as “woke.” This is crucial at a time when consumers expect companies to do more than just provide a product – they also expect companies to be socially conscious. It’s important to situate marketing disasters such as the infamous Pepsi commercial within the larger context of corporations coopting social movements for profit.

Worth Every Penny

Op-Ed

In Tessa Spillane’s twelve-year tenure coaching the Wellesley College varsity rowing team, the program has developed from a historic (first women’s collegiate rowing program in the country) but competitively average program, to a national championship-winning team. This shift occurred for several reasons, such as a collective team initiative in 2010 to go to the national championships for the first time, the intensification of the team training plan, and the focus on a healthy team culture. One factor that cannot be dismissed, however, is the amount of additional resources the team has received: a new strength and training coach in the fall of 2013, three new boats donated during the 2014-15 season, and updated equipment like lighter oars and new erg machines. These investments in the program, advocated for by Spillane, have seen significant returns, not just at the national championship, but at regional and conference levels as well. As Wellesley’s team becomes faster, so too do the other Division III teams. The amount of time it takes for a women’s DIII varsity boat to complete a 2,000-meter race, the standard in rowing, is steadily decreasing and approaching times previously thought to be accessible only to Division I or II athletes.

While Wellesley’s rowing team is growing and thriving as a result of these changes, women’s sports, especially team sports, continue to suffer from a lack of investment and support. The US women’s soccer team made headlines in 2016 when their five highest-profile players brought a lawsuit against their governing body for wage discrimination. More recently, the US women’s ice hockey team threatened to boycott the world championships because of inadequate pay and a lack of training and development opportunities. Steph Houghton, the highest-paid female soccer player in the UK, is paid about £65,000 (approx. $80,300) annually, as compared to her male counterpart, Wayne Rooney, who makes £300,000 (approx. $372,500) each year. The tennis star Serena Williams, the highest-ranked player in what is arguably the most equitable sport (tennis, thanks to all four grand-slam events offering the same amount of prize money for both genders), still made less per victory than her male counterpart because of prize money disparities at lower-level competitions.

Many of the arguments in defense of these lopsided numbers are based on the idea that since women’s sports don’t attract the same amount of attention as men’s sports, women don’t deserve to be paid the same. Either the sporting events are not as competitive, which detracts from the entertainment value, or consumers have simply declared their lack of interest.  The proponents of this defense argue for salary based not on the merit of the quality of play, but on the quality of entertainment. Either way, the governing bodies of these sports are requiring the same amount of work from the female players as from the male players when the cameras aren’t rolling. In order to compete at the level required to even contend for a medal at international events such as the Olympics or World Cups, national athletes must train like the athletes they are: professionals. A professional athlete’s schedule and training plan are as time- and energy-intensive as a full-time job, and they should be compensated accordingly, as the men usually are.

There are, in fact, athletes who have been able to successfully balance a non-athletic profession with high-level athletic performance. They are typically individual athletes, however, like the rower Gevvie Stone or the triathlon competitor Gwen Jorgensen; these athletes have total control over their schedules, their choice of coach, and their training plan. Team sport athletes, on the other hand, have much less flexibility. They are held to a strict practice schedule and, in the case of US women’s soccer, are required to compete in at least twenty games during the season, each of which they have to win in order to earn the same amount that the men would earn even if they lost each game. Their governing bodies, such as the US Soccer Federation, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), and the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), require a level of commitment from their athletes comparable to that of many full-time occupations, and rightly so, but without providing the appropriate compensation to support their employees. These unsustainable standards are particularly problematic for Olympic-level athletes; while individual athletes are selected several months before the Games, team athletes are selected and commit to mandatory training schedules several years ahead of time.

How then do we ensure investment in and support of female athletes in these sports? Notable examples abound, especially outside of the United States. In the United Kingdom, for example, the English women’s cricket team won their first victory in the Ashes competition after a succession of losses, and the England and Wales Cricket Board increased their pay significantly. This investment on the part of the sport’s national governing body enabled the players to be professional cricketers, a change that brought them a larger following. Within the rowing world, one corporate executive, Helen Morrissey of Newton Investment Management, completely shifted the dialogue when she decided to sponsor the Women’s Boat Race, ensuring that it happened on the same day and with the same media coverage as the men’s. A Russian professional basketball team, owned by a billionaire industrialist, paid one of their players, Diana Taurasi, to rest her body and not play for her American team in the WNBA – the difference between what she is paid by the Russian team for a season and what she would have been paid by the WNBA was over a million dollars. In each of these cases, a different investor made the choice to support female athletes by providing capital and resources: a governing body, an external business professional, and a team owner.

Women’s sports are worth the investment, both as jobs for women who deserve to earn a living wage for the remarkable work they do, and as a product that generates consistent returns. Governing bodies and the organizers of competitions hide behind the excuses that female athletes “aren’t as competitive” or that women’s sports are a “vicious cycle” in which there is no interest from the public to drive investment, but interest from the public can only be generated through investment. Demonstrated in sports varying from cricket to basketball to rowing, there are plenty of ways outside of traditional entertainment practices to invest in and support women’s sports, which will generate the consistent, positive return that both athletes and their fans deserve.

A Response To: “Is Russia Testing Trump?”

Letter to the editor

Dear Editor,

I find Morell and Farkas’ judgement that Russia is testing Trump to be too lenient. I agree Putin has tested the boundaries of what the Trump administration will accept in the last few months. Russia is indeed taking advantage of what the authors call his “infatuation” with the Russian leader. It has been clear for a long time that President Putin’s end goal is to have uncontested political control of his surrounding countries as well as to become a main player on the global political stage as one of the great powers.

The article, however, barely mentions the continuously unraveling scandal of Russian hackers and their involvement in the 2016 Presidential Election. This may have less to do with Russia’s support of the Syrian dictator, or their push for control in eastern Ukraine, and more to do with the relationship between the two leaders – the power dynamic that was created when President Putin favored the election of Donald Trump.

Which brings me to my point: Russia is not simply testing Trump and his administration by pushing the limits of what is acceptable, they are taking advantage of a puppet.

The article discusses the lack of action on the part of the US government in the face of Russian expansionism. The authors mention strong wording from multiple members of the Trump administration condemning Russia’s actions that never spark any real movement to stop it.

Trump owes Putin. He owes him his post as commander in chief. Putin has come to collect on that debt.

Julia Tazartes

Wellesley, MA

April 11th, 2017

In Response to: “We Might Soon Resurrect Extinct Species. Is It Worth The Cost?”

Letter to the editor

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/science/revive-restore-extinct-species-dna-mammoth-passenger-pigeon.html?_r=1&mtrref=undefined&gwh=17EB1E6F90C17FB4504AC325AEE9118E&gwt=pay

To the Editor:

I agree that we shouldn’t resurrect extinct species as money is better spent on the conservation of existing species. I also believe that extinctions are not always our responsibility or the “past wrongs” of human history since they can occur naturally.

Species’ extinction can be an expected and possible consequence of the survival of the fittest. We may feel responsible for the disappearance of the dodo bird or the woolly mammoth because we have become the most dominant species on Earth. But in truth, species extinction has been occurring for thousands of years, long before humans took over the world. One of the main causes is climate change, the gradual warming and cooling of the Earth, which has already naturally occurred at least four times in history. Many species die out as they cannot adapt fast enough or at all to survive their changing environments.

However, we are responsible for the acceleration of climate change and hence, a more rapid rate of species’ extinction. Our money is better spent alleviating the effects of climate change on existing species, rather than funding de-extinction, especially since the Trump administration has cut back on environmental funds. We should continue to invest in he development of novel ecosystems, where features of the old, pre-human habitats are combined with the new and current human-altered habitats. This allows us to work with the effects of climate change while protecting the greatest number of species possible.

Just as we cannot stop climate change, we cannot stop extinctions. We have to let go of the past and understand that species’ extinctions are not always the responsibility of humans. This way, we can progress and focus on the conservation of existing species and our futures.

Amy Tso
Wellesley, MA
April 18, 2017

The Other Yellow Fever

Op-Ed

“Amy, he has yellow fever!” said my friend, with her hands up in the air.

“Yellow fever? He looks fine to me.” I said.

“No, I mean the Asian fetish kind!” she said.

Before coming to the U.S., I had never heard of yellow fever. It was one of the most unexpected things I learned in my first few months in college.

The expression “yellow fever,” or Asian fetish, is used to describe people, usually white males, who have a predilection for East Asian women due to the stereotypes of the hypersexualized East Asian female. Those with yellow fever believe that all East Asian women are shy, submissive, exotic and sexually open-minded. Where did this inaccurate notion come from?

In the 19th century, the first East Asian women to immigrate to the U.S. were Chinese prostitutes. The Chinese men who came before them provided cheap labour for the American railroad companies on the West Coast, and were not allowed to bring their wives. Anti-Chinese sentiment was high:  Americans did not want Chinese men to start families and permanently settle in the U.S. During the period that Anti-East Asian immigration laws were in place, only kidnapped or bribed Chinese women were allowed into the country to work as prostitutes for white American men. As time went on, the stereotype permeated beyond the West Coast as the media continued to disseminate images of Chinese women as prostitutes.

During and after World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, increasing numbers of East Asian women were brought to the West Coast as war brides for American soldiers. This further perpetuated stereotypes of East Asian women as sex objects or women whose only objective in life is to serve men.

Like many of my East Asian friends, I have at times wondered whether it’s because of my ethnicity and the assumption that I am sexually subservient that I am attractive to a white guy, especially one who serially dates East Asian women.

A white male friend, to whom I was explaining yellow fever, asked whether it was the same as finding East Asian women attractive. I was appalled at his ignorance and inability to see from my perspective. This is why yellow fever persists; people, mostly white men, do not understand the difference. Finding someone attractive because of their physical appearance is dissimilar to finding that same someone attractive because of the ethnic stereotypes they are associated with.

It’s also our media that allows for the persistence of the hypersexualized portrayal of East Asian women. Hollywood films reveal us as sexy China dolls or Geishas who seduce white men. These women are depicted as cunning, sexually voracious, and eager to feed the men’s fantasies. There are dating websites are created specifically for white males to find an East Asian girlfriend or wife. The advertisements for these dating sites often show East Asian women with large breasts, little or no clothing and posed seductively. Little surprise then that the stereotype that East Asian women in general are hypersexual beings.

I had never heard of yellow fever before coming to the US. But didn’t the influence of American culture bring the hypersexualized image of East Asian women to Canada? Well, the first East Asians who came to Canada were not prostitutes but were either wealthy business people or middle-class individuals who brought their families over for a better life. And the war brides who came to marry Canadian soldiers during the war were all white Europeans.

I grew up in Vancouver, one of the most multicultural cities in the world with a large population of East Asians. Perhaps in cities with a significant number of East Asians, such stereotypes are broken down or never developed because of the daily opportunities to interact with East Asians. Cynthia Berryman-Fink, a Professor of Communications at the University of Cincinnati, found that increasing interpersonal contact between races in three mid-western colleges led to a decline in both general and specific prejudice. She also found that the more students from different backgrounds interacted, the more they cultivated a positive attitude toward one another. Thus, intercultural education and travelling can lead to greater understanding of different cultures and ethnicities.

As our world becomes more globalized and an increasing number of people become aware of the dangers of stereotyping, perhaps we will reach a time when we no longer associate any ethnicity with stereotypes and eradicate yellow fever.

Distorted Reflections

Op-Ed

Jordan Peele’s popular horror film about racial anxieties and anti-black racism in the United States, Get Out, made over $100 million in its first three weeks, making Peele the first black writer-director to earn that much on a debut film. The success of Get Out reflects the high demand for quality visual media about the lives of people of color by people of color. Even though the United States is becoming more racially diverse, Hollywood still tends to create and recognize content with majority-white casts. This trend is so persistent that even when Hollywood creates adaptations based on source material about people of color, it’s often altered to showcase white characters.

One of the most egregious cases of whitewashing occurs in the new Netflix film based on the popular Japanese franchise Death Note. The main character in the original series is a college student who finds a notebook lying in the street. Upon further investigation, he discovers that anyone whose name is written in the book (a “death note”)  will die. He decides to kill all criminals, including people who try to stop him, by writing their names in the death note because he believes that killing criminals extrajudicially is the only way to create a more just society. The original manga series has spawned an anime, several live-action movies, and a recent live-action drama, all in Japanese. The show draws on themes of good and evil, which is evident even in the main character’s name. In Japanese, his name is Light Yagami (夜神月). His first name (月) is pronounced “Raito” (the Japanese pronunciation of the English word “light”) and spelled using the character for “moon.” His surname, Yagami (夜神), uses the characters for “night” and “god” in place of the traditional characters used to spell this name. Light Yagami is literally a god of night, a role consistent with the show’s overarching themes. However, in the majority-white American version, Light’s last name is “Turner;” his new name is meaningless. It doesn’t convey any of the themes of the original source material, which makes me wonder if the people behind this adaptation can even see the depth of the original series or if they’re merely blinded by dollar signs.

This is one of the largest issues with whitewashing – people who whitewash these creative works typically show a lack of understanding of the depth of the very shows and films they are hired to create. For instance, the popular animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender is remarkably diverse. Though the creators are white, the show’s characters represent different Asian ethnicities. All of the writing that is seen throughout the series is in Chinese (though the characters speak English), and many of the fighting styles seen in the show are based on Asian martial arts. In contrast, in the M. Night Shyamalan adaptation The Last Airbender, all of these characters are white except for the Japanese antagonist, Zuko, who is portrayed by an actor of Indian descent. Casting choices like these aren’t just superficial issues – they reveal a deep lack of understanding of both the series and its target audience, a telltale sign of poor commercial decision. (Did the film executives behind The Last Airbender really think that such a dedicated fanbase wouldn’t notice that they had substituted white characters for every single person of color – the entire cast – except for one?)

Less and less often are audiences supporting films and television shows that blatantly whitewash characters. The 2016 film The Great Wall, which is set in China and stars Matt Damon as a white savior, was highly unsuccessful domestically and overseas; according to The Hollywood Reporter, it’s slated to lose nearly $75 million. Its score on the film review site Rotten Tomatoes is only 35 percent (compared to Get Out’s 100 percent). The Netflix series Iron Fist, which has a whitewashed main character, has similarly poor reviews. The film Ghost in the Shell, controversial because of its whitewashed main character, made only $19 million in its opening weekend with a production budget of $110 million.

Audiences refuse to see these films and television series not just because they are whitewashed, but because this whitewashing represents poor storytelling. In the cases of film adaptations, the source material is wrung of its meaning. In the case of new remakes of old, problematic stories such as Iron Fist, there is an obvious refusal to update these stories for modern-day fans who are tired of seeing the same faces, stories, and races over and over again. These adaptations are also highly unoriginal. For instance, the new Death Note adaptation didn’t have to be related to the plot of the original series at all. Why not follow the story of a low-income black teenager  living in an urban American setting to see what would happen if he obtained a death note? Because these adaptations are afraid to take creative risks, film executives cast white actors and make superficial changes to the plot, resulting in lazy storytelling.   

Times have changed. Audience members want diverse movies and television shows, and we won’t be appeased by content that has one or two characters of color or erases the diversity of existing characters. To appeal to an increasingly diverse audience, film and television executives must hire more casts and crews who reflect the diversity of the country. In addition, existing creators should go out of their way to educate themselves on the ways in which negative portrayals of people of color and members of other minority groups are perpetuated. Without this awareness, they are bound to recreate the same tropes repeatedly. The Netflix series Orange is the New Black has come under fire in the past year for killing one of their only black queer female characters in an act of police brutality. While the show has been heralded for its diverse cast, the writers’ room is mostly white. Without adequate training in the media representation of marginalized groups, it’s inevitable that writers will recreate and sustain harmful tropes and stereotypes.

Thankfully, there are now alternative routes such as web series and diversity fellowships that people from marginalized backgrounds can take to enter the entertainment industry, though more must be done. In addition, audience members have more control over their response to a lack of diversity. We can refuse to give money to productions that whitewash roles. We can boycott films that rely on lazy stereotypes. We can work hard to enter the film and television industry and create the stories that we were unable to see as children. We can actively support (with our money or viewership) films and television programs that, like Get Out, bring distorted reflections to light.

History Is Written By Diplomacy

Op-Ed

The saying “history is written by the victors” is commonly attributed to Winston Churchill. However, its true origin is unknown. What we can say without a doubt is that the expression has been applicable to the many ups and downs of human history. Whoever emerges on top in a struggle controls the narrative.

Sometimes the losing side’s story turns into one of the war casualties: the losers are portrayed as unprepared, insurgents, the wrongdoers in every way. We forget that in times of war each side can be guilty of inflicting cruelty and both are prone to the same bloodlust.

Nowadays, however, winning and loosing have become relative terms. There are even times when history is not simply rewritten: sometimes it is entirely forgotten. Sometimes a historical event is never spoken of again because doing so is better for all involved: it is too embarrassing, too damaging to the reputations of entire countries. At other times the event is lost in the general confusion, when there is so much history being made, good and bad, that keeping track of it all is simply impossible and some falls through the cracks.

In the increasingly globalized world we live in, one in which we can no longer afford large-scale wars, the divide is no longer as black and white as victor and vanquished. Instead, we have mediators and negotiations. There are back room deals, treaties and agreements: diplomacy at work.

From the last months of the second World War, and well into the period of peace treaties that followed, this precise phenomenon occurred. Something happened, and it was swiftly forgotten: what the Italians call “Massacri delle Foibe,” the Foibe  Massacres.

The term “foiba” was attached to the massacres because of its meaning in Italian: a deep karst sinkhole. As the image above illustrates, these sinkholes were the natural weapon used to commit the massacre.

As Tito took control of the government in what was then Yugoslavia and his troops took over the country by force, these encroached on territories that had been in both Italian and Yugoslavian hands since the first World War. The future dictator and tyrant wanted to reclaim the territory he saw as rightfully Yugoslavian. In their revolutionary spirit, their bloodlust, and reflecting the heavy prejudice that many Balkan states had against Italians, the troops murdered thousands of the inhabitants of Northeastern Italy by throwing them into the many sinkholes that are characteristic of the mountainous area. Italy was in disarray because of the recent collapse of the Fascist government: troops had no one to report to, resources could not be allocated, and the victims were left to fend for themselves.

It was a tragedy in every sense of the word, yet anyone reading this piece will be surprised to hear this ever even happened.

With the second World War still in the rearview mirror, and the Cold War quickly approaching on the horizon, the context of time weighed heavily upon the two countries. Whether dealing with (or facing) another genocide was too much to bear for European morale, or governments didn’t want to exacerbate tensions in the area from the long-standing dispute over the region, or even because of sheer embarrassment, these events occurred without creating any sort of turmoil, and for a long time without consequence.

Today Italians have the “Day of Remembrance” in honor of the victims lost to the sinkholes of their landscape, yet most of the world is still unaware of these events.

So, was history once written by the victors? Absolutely. However, in more modern times, there seems to be a new phenomenon emerging. As disputes and tragedies are no longer solved via war, diplomacy takes the reins. In the case of the decision to not react to the Foibe Massacres, there were many factors in play that contributed to the Italian state’s silence: the separation between Tito and Stalin after Yugoslavia refused to become a Soviet satellite state; the problem of fascist war criminals the state did not want to be forced to deliver to Yugoslavia if they went public with the massacres; the fact that by the 1960s tensions had eased between the two countries. So the government remained mum until the 1990s, when scholarly books and tales of survivors emerged and became increasingly available to the public. With a new government in place and the memory of Fascist times behind it, Italy chose a day out of the year and dedicated it to the massacres.

History used to be written by the victors, now diplomacy steers and determines the narrative of History.

There is always a larger plan at play, a bigger picture to think about, small-scale sacrifices in the name of the greater good. The world of international relations is no longer one of straightforward ‘attack and defend.’ It is a game of chess. One move can be deceptive; three moves can decide the fate of the entire game. It is easy to sit in our safe, millennial bubble looking back on the mistakes of the past, in this case judging the hypocrisy that comes with diplomacy: the constant compromises between humanitarian issues and the long-term needs of a country.  I could continue this piece and lament, “the Italian government sold out its own people to avoid dealing with an infuriated Yugoslavia!” However, kicking and screaming won’t change the events of the past, nor will it prevent anything like this from happening again.

Instead, we must strive to remember. Once something is uncovered, we should not waste time on blaming those from a time that is past. Rather, it must be our priority to preserve those memories, no matter how belatedly we find them.

Less is More

Film Review: "Ida" (2014)

The 2013 Polish film Ida, directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and set in 1962, is both a coming-of-age story and a retrospective look at Poland’s complicated history.  The main character, Anna, is an adolescent girl about to take her vows to become a nun.  She is sent to visit her only living relative, Aunt Wanda, before committing to life at the convent.  Almost immediately we learn that Anna is Jewish and that her given name is actually Ida.  From Wanda’s home she and Ida, strangers to each other, travel together across the Polish countryside to unravel their shared past.  The story includes moments of anti-Semitism and weaves together the historical consequences of both Nazi and Soviet rule.  These larger themes are present throughout all aspects of the story, but for most of the film they take a back seat to the emotional transformation of the characters.  The film is a study of subtlety, in overall message as well as in its visual and auditory effects.

Ida and Wanda go back to the family farm to discover what happened to Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son.  Once there, they meet the farm’s current tenant, Feliks.  Wanda tries but is unable to obtain any specific information about why her sister died and where the family was laid to rest.  It becomes clear that while Ida is piecing together her identity by learning about a family she never knew she had, Wanda is seeking closure by learning about the family she lost.  As the two women travel on, they meet Lis, a young musician who takes a liking to Ida; his presence magnifies the differences between them.  Ida is constrained by her reticent personality and the routines she practiced while at the convent.  Her steadiness and rigidity is offset by Wanda’s recklessness, emotional transparency, and copious drinking.  Agata Kulesza, who plays Wanda, portrays strength and vulnerability from one shot to the next, from threatening police officers and verbally assaulting Feliks to lying naked in bed after a night of drinking and meaningless sex.  Wanda is free in many ways that Ida is not and yet unlike Ida, is weighed down by her past, specifically the death of her son and sister.  The director does not need to include inner monologues or flashbacks to explain the characters, but allows the audience to read between the lines.

After discovering that it was Feliks who murdered Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son, but who spared Ida because she could pass as a non-Jew, the two women retrieve their relatives’ remains and take them to a family burial plot.  At this point the two women come together in mourning.  After paying their respects the two women part ways; they go back to their respective homes and attempt to readjust to their former lives.  Wanda fails to achieve closure and ends up committing suicide.  Ida likewise cannot go back to her old life; having experienced the outside world she finds the routines of the convent ludicrous rather than reassuring.  She postpones taking her vows and once again leaves the convent, this time to go to Wanda’s funeral.  In Wanda’s home, Ida tries drinking, smoking, and dressing up for the first time.  She even sleeps with Lis.  Her actions pay tribute to her aunt’s lifestyle and show that she is interested in sampling a different life.  The symbolic weight of these mundane activities show once again how the film is capable of speaking volumes with simple scenes.

The entire film, shot in black and white, gives a melancholy feel and invites the viewer to take on a meditative state.  The absence of color reflects Ida’s simple lifestyle in the convent and the bleak political climate. The somber mood is made clear by the large sections of film with no dialogue.  Ida communicates largely through her dark expressive eyes and spends most of the film silently absorbing information and experience.   Although this could make Ida seem naïve, the actress, Agata Trzebuchowska, successfully appears reserved, making Ida’s character more nuanced.  The choice to minimize stimuli makes every instance of dialogue and every visual cue more poignant.  It allows the film to strike a careful balance between subtle changes and raw emotion.  Even though the material in the film is dark and heavy, nothing the characters do is overwrought.

This minimalist style holds true for plot.  The film lacks explicit explanations.  Instead, the director opts for understatements.  Any triggering action in the film, whether it be suicide, murder, or sex,  is alleviated by music and the absence of explicit visuals.  Instead of an action-packed film the director chooses to focus on introspection.  The shot of Feliks in the grave of those he killed, face in hands, is more powerful than any words. Even in this moment of revelation the film fails to explain every detail, instead focusing on the mood.  Why exactly Feliks kills Ida’s parents is unclear: was it to take over the farm or for fear that the Nazis would discover and punish his father’s actions?  This and other ambiguities make the film more powerful.  The narrative is more realistic in that it lacks tidy resolutions.  After a night of living like Wanda, Ida gets up and leaves Lis, still asleep in her aunt’s bed.  As she walks away from Lis, and any future she might have had with him, she also walks away from Wanda and rejects the kind of life her aunt led.  Ida dons her habit and walks towards the unknown along a plain dirt road.  Ida is, in many ways, just as alone at the end as when the film began but with many more lived experiences.  This final shot captures the disillusion of post-war Poland and the uncertainties faced by its people: life goes on no matter what.

 

 

Magic in the Orchard

Film Review: "Women without Men" (2009)

Adapted from the Iranian magical realist novel of the same name, Women without Men is a beautiful piece of cinematography and storytelling. The film is visually stunning, and director Shirin Neshat elegantly weaves together the personal stories of four women surrounded by wider political and cultural conflict.

The film begins on a rooftop. The house below is white, contrasted sharply against the blue sky and the black of the chador and hair of the woman standing there. She wanders around the rooftop, occasionally peering over the side while the call to prayer echoes around her. Each time, we see her face and then a shot of the sidewalk below. Finally, the woman leans forward, and her hair floats back towards the camera. Her chador hits the ground, and she soars through the sky as we hear her voice say, “Now I’ll have silence… silence… and nothing.” The sound of running water breaks the silence of several shots of clouds; a small stream appears. The camera pans along the stream while the woman’s voiceover resumes, saying, “And I thought, the only freedom from pain is to be free from the world.” Once she finishes speaking, the camera centers around a small opening in a wall through which the stream continues. The camera advances along the stream and through the opening into a mystical orchard during a two-minute continuous shot, until the title of the movie appears on the screen.

The detail of this opening scene is important because the sequence introduces several key aspects of the film: the cultural context of the story, indicated by the call to prayer and the chador; the centrality of women; the magical realism of certain sequences; and the context of the orchard as an escape from the world and its pain. Neshat successfully introduces and expands upon these themes throughout the film in a concise but artistic way that puts Women without Men in a class of its own within the first ten minutes.

Women without Men follows the story of four women: Munis, the woman from the opening sequence; her naive and conservative friend Faezeh; a young prostitute named Zarin; and a worldly woman of the Iranian bourgeoisie, Fakhri. After the opening sequence, the movie flashes back to an afternoon when Munis is trying to listen to the radio in order to participate in the life and conflicts taking place just outside her door, and her brother, Amir Khan, rips the cord from the radio to force her to make dinner and prepare for a suitor’s visit; Faezeh seeks to marry him and share his conservative lifestyle. Her purity makes no difference, however, as he is set to marry a woman who is rumored to not be a virgin. Zarin’s storyline, in contrast to Faezeh and Munis’s lives of domesticity, begins in a brothel where she lives a monotonous, yet draining, life that is interrupted one day by the traumatic hallucination of faceless men. Each man that she sees, starting with one of her own clients, has no face. She runs to the baths and scrubs herself till she bleeds, trying to cleanse herself of the impurity that is causing the hallucination. When neither bathing nor prayer works, she leaves the city and the pain of the world, and begins walking down a long road under a blue sky.

Meanwhile, Fakhri faces demons of her own within the elite and privileged circles from which the other three women are excluded. A former lover returns from America, and her disillusionment and disappointment with her husband, an army general, reaches such an intensity that she decides to leave. She retreats from the pain to a secluded orchard managed by a quiet, unobtrusive male gardener, down the long road under a blue sky, and begins an independent life there.

The story finally returns to the opening sequence when Faezeh and Amir Khan find Munis dead on the sidewalk. To save his and his family’s reputation, Amir Khan buries her in the garden while Faezeh looks on. She is traumatized, but life goes on for Faezeh until the day of Amir Khan’s wedding; in the midst of a celebration of his success and happiness, Munis comes back to life and leaves his house for good to pursue her own interests and goals. But when the shame that she feels becomes too much for Faezeh after she is raped, Munis is able to guide her down the long road under the blue sky because Munis has already been to the orchard. Munis reenters life after a retreat from the world, a future that we are then able to envision for Faezeh and Fakhri. Zarin, however, is not strong enough for the world outside the orchard and eventually dies from exposure to it. The film ends with Munis’s reflection on why all four women wanted to escape: they wanted to find “a new form, a new way. Release.”

From an aesthetic perspective, I noticed that Neshat and the film’s director of cinematography, Martin Gschlacht, manipulate light and color (especially blue and white) to create an ethereal effect. The characters of Zarin and Munis are the two centers of magical realism in the story, with extraordinarily surreal experiences like hallucinating men without faces and coming back to life, and they are also the centers of Gschlacht’s manipulation of blue and white. Each camera shot is so precise and a piece of art in its own right that while watching the film, I felt I was seeing the world in an entirely new way.

The film makes certain changes to the original story written by Shahrnush Parsipur on which the film is based that are worth highlighting. For example, the role of the gardener is never explained and minimally explored in the film, despite the fact that he plays a central role in the book. The environmental symbolism of the novel, culminating in plot points such as one character’s eventual transformation into a tree, is barely touched upon in the film. The film only lightly alludes to this storyline when Fakhri finds Zarin partially submerged in a pool in the orchard, almost as though she and the orchard were one. Most notably, the film spends a significant amount of time depicting the Iranian Revolution, which is much less of a focal point in the novel. Neshat is an expatriate of Iran, and uses the film as an opportunity to add a political dimension to the story that the author never makes explicit in the book. Although some may see these changes as a loss to the story, I believe that they simplify and streamline the plot, which allows the film to more effectively communicate the parallel between the women’s search for a new way and a new form of being, and Iran’s struggle for independence and autonomy. Fakhri is disappointed by both her proud Iranian husband and her Westernized lover, while Iran is left broken by competing ideologies and world powers. Faezeh is learning how to reconcile her conservative past and beliefs with respect for herself and faith in her own strength, just as Iran is trying to balance elements of conservatism and modernism in its society. Above all, Zarin reminds us that unless women are prioritized and nurtured, unless they are given the space to be women without men, Iran’s progress is unsustainable.