A couple of weeks ago I read a book that someone had recommended to me. It is a collection of excellent poems by the U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Joy Harjo’s poetry blew me away, and I am so glad that this person recommended her works to me. I first heard of Joy Harjo when I was reading this newspaper called World Tribune, which is one of the Soka Gakkai International’s publications, and in one of the issues there was a short news article on Joy Harjo becoming the U.S. poet Laureate. I was so glad to hear this, especially because after doing my senior thesis in college on Indigenous communities and the environmental justice movement, I was interested in reading more works by Indigenous authors. So someone I knew from a virtual book club told me about Joy Harjo because we were talking about works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) authors. They recommended I buy her poetry collection, She Had Some Horses, and her memoir Crazy Brave. I started with She Had Some Horses and wow. All I can say is wow. While I read She Had Some Horses, I felt inspired to get back into writing my own poetry. Reading She Had Some Horses showed me the raw power and vulnerability that goes into writing poetry. I haven’t read many works by Indigenous authors, other than works by the scholar Kyle Powys Whyte, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. She Had Some Horses really inspired me to write my poems from my lived experiences and to not be afraid of vulnerability. I worried for a long time about being vulnerable in my poems because I was worried what people would think, so I didn’t write poetry for a while because I thought it all had to sound like roses are red, violets are blue. But of course that’s far from the truth. Poetry is life, it is lived experiences, it is truth, and Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses showed me that. Every word I read in her poems sat with me for a long time. I found myself slowing down in time to take in every word, every syllable, and to listen, just listen openly, as the words moved on the page. Each word stirred an emotion in me, and I just listened, and absorbed, and listened. At the end I felt as if I had encountered this honest deep dialogue with Joy and listened to her narrative on womanhood, tradition, culture and human nature. Thank you Joy Harjo for inspiring me to write poetry again. You have shown me the importance of writing from the heart, from sharing my narrative so I could have a dialogue with myself and a dialogue with others. Thank you.
A few weeks ago I finished this excellent novel called Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo. I got a gift card to a Black-owned bookstore and was searching through the online catalog, looking for what books I could buy. I came across a memoir by the late congressman John Lewis and this book. I was looking for something new to read, and I didn’t know the plot of Stay with Me so I went with it. I was also looking for something fictional to read. Some friends of mine saw the book when it arrived and told me they loved the book and how deeply it moved them. Within a few pages I was hooked. It got recognized as a New York Times Notable Book and was rated one of the best books of the year, and I can see why, because the author’s writing is absolutely spellbinding. I have read a few works by Nigerian authors: Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (The Thing Around Your Neck, Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Dear Ijeawele), and all the books they wrote were really good. Ayobami Adebayo’s book Stay with Me was published back in 2017, and frankly I don’t know why I waited so long to read it, because it is an amazing novel that left my heart pounding until the last page.
It’s about this young woman named Yejide who finds out that her husband is cheating on her with another woman named Funmi in order to bear children. Yejide has a hard time bearing children, so her husband Akin tries to conceive with another woman, partly to please his parents, who dislike Yejide because she doesn’t have any children. Yejide does everything she can to get pregnant, and she finally goes to some people who put her through a ritual to make her pregnant. She notices all the signs of pregnancy over time; her stomach gets larger, she experiences morning sickness, she feels kicking in her stomach. But what she is experiencing is actually a thing called pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy. Akin warns her that she isn’t really pregnant, but Yejide, who has been stigmatized by her community for far too long for not being able to conceive, can finally have something to hold onto, so she keeps saying she is pregnant. Then Funmi dies and Akin’s world falls apart. Yejide finally gets pregnant, but when she does she deals with a trauma that keeps on happening over and over again each time she has a child.
I’m not a mother myself, but reading about Yejide’s struggle showed me that the path to motherhood is definitely not an easy one, especially if you lose your children and have to deal with the grief and trauma that comes with it. I guess that’s why I read fiction, though, because even if I’ve never gone through what someone has gone through, I get to know what their lived experiences are like, and so I’m having to put myself in this person’s shoes. Of course, at the end of the day, I don’t have to carry the trauma and grief that Yejide did for many years, but reading about what she went through gave me a deeper appreciation for women and mothers because they have to go through a lot, and taught me a lot about cultural attitudes around children and marriage and how these attitudes can have a deep impact on people who either don’t want kids or are having a hard time conceiving kids.
Stay with Me. Ayobami Adebayo. 272 pp. Published July 10, 2018
Ok, now let me preface with a shameful disclaimer: I have not seen one episode of Parks and Recreation. Like many people I only know the American comedian Marietta Sirleaf (aka The Actress Known as Retta) from the episode where her and Aziz Ansari’s characters Donna Meagle and Tom Haverford have a “Treat Yo’Self” year where they treat themselves to fancy things such as mimosas and “fine leather goods.”
Little did I know that Retta is pretty sick and tired of people using that phrase so many times around her. That is, until I read her memoir So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know, in which she chronicles her childhood in the projects of New Jersey to her struggle with employment in Los Angeles and her success later on. I honestly think anyone of any profession can learn from Retta’s memoir, and I found reading this book especially helpful as a musician because like any entertainment field, it is competitive and you have to have a sense of humor even when struggling to be successful in the industry. I normally don’t read non-fiction but as of late I have found reading funny but touching memoirs by female comedians (the last one I read was Bossypants and I snagged a copy of Amy Poehler’s Yes Please from the library shelves) to be my go-to for continuing to persevere in the quest for my dreams.
Here are just a few things I learned from reading Retta’s book:
Ask not, you get not. In her next to last chapter “The Year I Went Lin-Sane,” Retta talks about how her friend got her hooked on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical Hamilton but that it was hard to get tickets since they were all sold out. So Retta asked her publicist, which led her publicist to connect with someone who could get her the tickets. She finally got them and, when there were subsequent showings of Hamilton she kept persisting in asking the person who gave her the tickets before if she could see it again with her friends. Retta not only got to meet the entire cast of Hamilton, but also Lin-Manuel Miranda himself, and even got to see him in the last show he would be in. Just goes to prove that when you really need help, you just need to ask because the worst someone can say is “no.” Also, Lin is a sweetie. Never met him, but from how Retta describes him, he seems like a genuinely sweet person.
Love yourself so you can genuinely respect others. Retta has faced a lot of size-based discrimination while in the entertainment industry. In her chapter “Membership Has Privileges” she describes the surreal glamour of being at the Emmys and the Golden Globes and getting to dance, drink, and socialize with the hottest stars (and exchange awkward moments with a few of them, such as when Retta mistakes Julia Stiles for another actress and Julia gives her a deer-in-the-headlights look and tells her coldly she is mistaking her for the wrong person. That moment had me shooketh, like “Wow, Julia Stiles. Just wow.”) One of the photographers at the Golden Globes refuses to take a photo with Retta because she doesn’t like the way Retta looks, and so a bunch of photographers start photographing Retta, and when the photographer lady proceeds to catch up with her peers and finally take one of Retta, Retta holds up a finger and basically tells her “No, you’re good. Everyone else was fine taking my photo, and you didn’t want to, so why bother?” It takes courage to love yourself after all the tears and struggle, but as Retta says in her chapter “Stretch Marks Fo Life!” you have to accept who you are and embrace your own beauty rather than feel pressured to conform to other people’s standards of beauty. She says that exercising and eating right are great, but you also need to splurge sometimes.
Imposter syndrome comes with a nasty price tag. Spend your money and time on bouncing back from rejection, not on imposter syndrome. In the very first chapter “Eff You Effie!” Retta says that her manager called her out of the blue about fourteen years ago to tell her he booked her an audition to play Effie White in the film Dreamgirls. Even though Retta at first thought it was her dream to star in this film, she started doubting herself and her qualifications even though she had been working as an actor for ten years. Retta says that “the fear of rejection is real, my friends. When you’ve had your fair share of soul-crushing, self-esteem-destroying experiences, it’ll do a serious number on your psyche.” She experienced rejection after rejection many times during her acting career, and it can be hard to bounce back after rejection so many times, so she didn’t put herself out there for the longest time until the Dreamgirls opportunity came along. She also injured her ankle one time while dancing and thus thought her sprained ankle would ruin her acting career, and also worried that the costume department wouldn’t find a dress for Retta’s size. More importantly, though, Retta didn’t feel she deserved to be acting alongside Jamie Foxx, Beyonce and Eddie Murphy because she felt she wasn’t what they wanted in Effie White. According to Retta:
“I never said no. I was way more chickenshit than that. I just kept avoiding it, putting it off. For about three months I never made myself available, and it got to the point where they had a movie to cast and so they did. They went with the seventh-place finalist of season three of American Idol. They cast Jennifer Hudson. She had no credits. But you know what she did have? The balls to show up to the audition.” (So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know, page 11)
Now, to be fair, and Retta does acknowledge this of course: Jennifer Hudson kicked serious ass in that movie and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Hell, her performance throughout the film gave me chills and all I could think was “Woah. She is hella talented.” I then saw her in the film Chi-raq, in which she plays an incredibly gut-wrenching role as a mom who daughter got killed in gun violence. Jennifer Hudson is truly an incredible actress, and her approach to the audition was that simple: Just perform. Don’t try and craft a perfect image of Effie White. Just play the role and be confident even when you feel that you aren’t the right person for the role. Or, as Retta says,
“I did not win an Oscar but I learned a valuable lesson that stays with me to this day and plays a loop in my head anytime I have a big audition. It goes a little something like this: Bitch stop wasting time fearing the worst. Living through the worst is never as hard as fearing it. Fight the fear and go do what you gotta do. That’s what you came here for.” (So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know, p. 13)
Honestly I think this quote will stick with me for the rest of my classical music career. In classical music the focus is on mastery and perfection, so it’s no surprise that people in conservatories spend their whole lives working at their craft (with some time to have fun and enjoy life, of course). However, we live in an age where anyone anywhere, regardless of of whether or not they think they have enough expertise, can record themselves performing with their phones. There are people out there who create video blogs and even if they talk about things such as what so and so said to me or what I had for lunch today, they make millions off of it. I’m not saying that get-rich-quick stories are applicable to everyone (ya girl is one example). The work doesn’t have to be perfect because someone will tell you whether or not they like your work and you just need to keep creating and pitching yourself until you find someone who does like your work and wants to offer you an opportunity better than you ever thought possible. I get that classical music auditions are competitive, but at what point does perfection become an illusion? Because a lot of times we can’t afford to stay at home and work on something until it’s perfect; we’ve got mouths to feed, jobs to work, errands to run. Yes it’s important to practice, but you still need to get your work out there so that the experts can see it and help you fine-tune your technique. And if you don’t end up making the orchestra audition? Don’t beat yourself up; do other things besides just music because people want a well-rounded person nowadays. If you’re going to be a successful artist you need to learn to promote your work using other mediums, such as writing and other things.
Keep in touch with the people you work with. Retta and her Parks and Recreation co-stars communicate via group text even to this day because they were with each other through thick and thin during all of the seasons.
Have an attitude of gratitude and keep an open mind. Retta got to attend several hockey games, meet famous hockey players and present at the National Hockey League awards. Before, she thought she would have no interest in hockey. But after communicating with the LA Kings hockey team through Twitter, Retta came to the games and thoroughly savored every moment she was at the games, even trying to get past a security guard to go directly towards the glass to see the players in full action. She got to attend several incredible ceremonies (and meet her dream bae, Michael Fassbender. Although I will say I had a hard time thinking of him as a dream bae after seeing him play a beyond-hostile slave owner in Twelve Years a Slave. But that’s just my opinion.) After growing up in such difficult circumstances and struggling even when she moved to LA for her acting career, achieving success was truly a life changing thing for her, so she was able to appreciate gaining so much access to Hollywood and getting so many amazing acting opportunities along the way. She says that as an actor, what is most important is not getting smug and complacent with your success and quitting your work, and that as long as she is alive, she will keep being a working actor because it brings her joy. I remember the personal finance expert Suze Orman saying something similar: keep working, even if you have all this money, always keep learning new things and always keep doing work that you love.
This blog post is by no means a comprehensive review of the book because I literally love it so much I couldn’t stop guffawing in the library while reading it. But it gives a snapshot as to why I think you should drop everything you’re doing and treat yo’self to this epic book (gosh why did I make such a bad joke about that meme? Please forgive me Retta and don’t tweet this. I promise to not stop you in a store one day and have you say it in my camera-pone like that one fool did. I pinky-promise.)
I am plunging into the deep
my body tingling with the summer air
i submerge myself into the ocean of my heart.
as i snorkel and swim
i dance rhythmically, mystically, blissfully
with dolphins who look at me curiously
as if I was an extraterrestrial
My pulse pumps life blood
into my body
as the oxygen leaves my lungs
and i slowly fall into a deep, deep unconsciousness
i feel a humanness
rescue me from the depths of the deep blue
it is alas you
and you came to rescue me
from that abyss.
i want to thank you
but my heart is full of grief
as i plunged into the ocean blue
the air on land
liberates me
from the shackles of shame
serenity
serendipity
a blessing not a curse
pulls me from the dark dungeon
of my heart.
i retch.
my breath heavy
i struggle to breathe
the saltwater overwhelms my struggling lungs
then a torrent of saltwater and other contents
plunges from the depth of my being
my body convulses
rebels against the bitter sharp taste of vomit
that coats my entire mouth
in one grand gesture of bitter sweetness.
your hands warm my convulsing back
as i give up all the thrills, the ecstasy,
the laughs, the dances i shared with those dolphins and
the rest of the marine life.
I sit alone at the kitchen table
And watch as the lonely waves crash
outside my window
I peel the sweet pulpy fruit
listening to the crisp squish of its flesh
as it peels back against the sour bitter
flesh
i admire the curled strips of fruity flesh
hanging off the succulent sphere
in my sticky hands collects the sweet and sour juice
i take my fingers
and grasp onto a crescent moon
and peel the moon gently from its friends
goodbye, it says, my loves it was nice knowing you
i detach the lonely moon as it gives one last longing kiss
to the other crescent moons that nestle alongside it
that try to latch themselves to it
like a magnet on a refrigerator
i embrace the pulpy mass with my fingers
honey running down my hand
the orange makes its slow descent
into the abyss of my stomach
i chew that flesh with the relish
of a food aficionado
sparks fly on the surface of my ridged tongue
sweet, salty, bitter, all of my lost memories
of picking oranges in the summer Texas sun
with my ex.
they no longer pick oranges with me
but they pick oranges with me in spirit
they enjoy the scrumptious sumptuous moment
of dining on this exquisite fruit with me.
The peels sit on the table
untouched.
I let them have a moment of deep contemplative silence and dry out for a few days
in the sun so that i could make essential oils out of them
they sit, feeling used, torn apart by the violence
of my delicate yet impatient hands.
mangled by the hunger and passion of my taste in fruits
i tip-toe my fingers
to the middle of the table
and caress those delicate remains
of a round ripe healthy body
with a sticker certifying its livelihood
imported from Nicaragua.
We sit together
Eating hot dogs
Full of crunchy fresh pickle relish
Spicy ocher mustard
And crimson ketchup
on that Brooklyn bench
After wandering round Central Park.
He looks at me for the longest time and just smiles.
A simple smile, no more, no less.
His long sandy hair breezing in the wind.
His green apple eyes bear through
my every thought
telling me i'm hiding something
even though i don't want to say what's on my mind
he holds my hand, with its tarnished wedding ring
stained with blood
a ring i no longer care to think about
a ring of a love long gone
a divorce that still bears the scar of our rocky marriage
i let the tears flow calmly
i feel my body give little quakes off
as he continues to hold my hand
this gentle friend of mine
tells me that it's ok to not be ok
that everything is going to be fine
that i don't have to live with the hurt of divorce
this friend tells me in a whisper,
that i no longer need to wait on someone to please me
romantically
and i no longer have to please anyone but myself
that i can be free of the fetters of loneliness
and enjoy the placid silence that comes with solitude
solitude = juventudjuventud = youth in Spanish.
i let the hurt wash over me
and then i inhale, my lungs taking in the crisp fall air
and i let out a long sigh that shakes
letting go of years of pain, pleasure, destruction, emotional detachment
i let this friend curl his turtle-necked arms around my neck.
a neck that bears the burning flesh wound of emotional abuse
a wound that will take many months to heal from
a gash that bears my name, my namesake, his name, his namesake
i jokingly rub the tears into the wound at the back of my neck.
the tears are magical healing water
they are an elixir of salty and sweet
they gently kiss my broken wounds as i rub them gently on the scars
these tear kisses gently caress these screaming wounds
and calm them so their flames don't continue to lick my neck
even as this moment of sweet, sweet bliss
only lasts for some time
before i am once again back to tasting the sweet and salty
of fresh flowing tears.
i wake up in my own bed
the friend has gone home
i sit and look up at the ceiling
my mind is no longer racing
and even though the demons of doubt will
in any second rear their ugly demonic heads of doom
my body dragged down
by the weight of emotional depletion.
the tears are dried like
a charcoal mask after it's done sitting on your face
on my puffy face my eyes tired
from all the tears, the crying worked
my face muscles, my eye muscles,
every muscle that waged a war in my body, worn and dragged
beat and bruised
body.
Inspired by: Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin (1898-1937) and the beautiful city of Chicago. I envisioned myself dancing through the city of Chicago to Rhapsody in Blue one day . The daydream was burning in my mind, so I wrote it down. This is from Fantasia 2000 and it inspired me to write the poem:
Like everyone else, I am walking
Not walking, actually, but meandering.
I am getting lost in this big American Dream forest
Letting its skyscrapers swallow me whole
Like vultures leaning down to inspect
Examine, lick and devour the lone furry mouse before them.
When I hear the clarinetist warm up the Rhapsody in Blue
With his soaring introduction of seductive syncopations
Drunk with his own wonder and wine
I spin in a little circle
On the sidewalk, outside The Picasso
Its broad forehead curved into a long snout.
Like that of an anteater.
I stop before the statue as the clarinetist
Continues to slowly heat up the rhapsody
Toast it to a nice crispy golden brown
With its back-in-the-swing-of-things conclusion
And then I resume my choreography.
The sudden booms, tumbles and clashes of the percussion and
The rest of the orchestra startles my whole body
Into a passionate frenzy.
I jerk my head
I twist my body
I spin in a pirouette
My Converses hitting the pavement with each move
As apathetic pigeons look on and search for breadcrumbs.
After thousands upon thousands of booms, ebbs and crashes
The piece settles into the sweet quiet
Lullaby of the pianist.
I drop quietly to the ground
Tumbling, falling, dancing down to Mother Earth
My body loosens and I loosen it
I stretch out, let the cold slab of concrete take me in
I let it force me to reflect on the calm clouds
That pose placidly in the sky, looking down on us mortals.
They are not busy like us city folk
They are just there to let us dreamers imagine
A more peaceful world, one of less hustle and bustle.
Then the orchestra soaks me with its honey of a love melody.
The piano soars in its harmonies
My shoulders roll and I slowly rise
Struggling to get up
Oh, the quiet moment of reflection has taken its toll
Putting me in a dormant state
I don't want to leave the ground
But alas, I rise to absorb myself
In the thick juicy love theme vat
Never let it die, this moment of reflection!
My face contorts
As my eyes wide shut enjoy
The soaking of the sun's rays upon my grateful eyelids.
I open my eyes
And admire the old
Deep-dish pizza parlor
As the solo piano delicately dances in a
Romantic scintillating monologue
Of long-lost memories, of lovers who stay in the heart
Of those who remember
I admire The Chicago Theatre
Unlit, dormant until the night falls
And its dazzling lights scintillate in the pools
Of fresh rain.
I see busy people rushing past me
On their way to work
I only work the night shift at Sally's Beer and Wine
So my day is free to wander and muse.
In rhythm with the busy ones
In rhythm with the rising crescendo of
the flurried orchestra
in rhythm with the pounding piano keys
in the key of e flat
rhythms trample me flat like an E key elephant
then the elephant stops its trampling and
makes way for a grand parade of triumph and pride.
in living color, the Technicolor scheme asserts
itself boldly, I spread my arms in one fell swoop
as the orchestra and the pianist crescendo
and then end with a sharp bang.
my face muscles spread
in a smile
of love for my city.
There is a song by singer Britney Spears called “Lucky,” and in the song Spears sings about a young woman who has achieved celebrity fame and has everything she could ever want, and yet cries on the inside because she is incredibly lonely. In other words, no one knows the real person behind the celebrity’s image.
This song should have been included in the soundtrack of My Week with Marilyn, a 2011 film starring Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe and Eddie Redmayne as Colin Clark, who was one of the assistants to Marilyn and Laurence Olivier’s film The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956. Even though the film shooting only lasted a week, it meant a lot for Colin, who falls in love with Marilyn even though the other men at the production company tell him to be careful since she will break his heart and leave him (also, she was newly married to author Arthur Miller, in a quite toxic partnership.) Colin starts off watching a lot of films as a kid and so he wants to go into the film industry, but his parents disapprove and tell him he won’t get a job there, but Colin is desperate to pursue his dreams, so he goes to a production company and keeps coming back for employment opportunities. Finally, the production head says yes, and Colin ends up being an assistant on the film. When Marilyn first arrives in England, she is constantly pursued by paparazzi and has high hopes for her film shooting with Laurence. However, things quickly go sour when Marilyn shows up late for the shoot several times and then forgets her lines in the middle of filming, forcing the directors to start over and over again. In one scene, it becomes so bad that she leaves the room several times, saying that she can’t act and having the people around her, namely her acting coach Paula, persuade her that she is a great actress. Paula, unlike Laurence, is incredibly patient and has a great sensitivity to the art of acting. When Laurence screams at Marilyn, Paula (Professor Hooch in Harry Potter, aka Zoe Wanamaker) and Sybil (played beautifully by Dame Judi Dench) defend Marilyn, arguing that she is in a different part of the world and not used to Laurence’s old-fashioned acting methods. Paula tells him that Marilyn needs time to prepare her role and develop the character she is playing, rather than simply acting to “be sexy” as Laurence wants her to do.
This film made me think a lot about the film A Star is Born (the one with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in it) and how there is so much pressure for female actresses to maintain a certain image for the public eye. In A Star is Born, Ally has to keep up with the image her record label manager imposes on her or else she loses her big opportunity. However, this pressure destroys her and she burns out. This is why Marilyn’s affair with Colin is so important to the film, because Colin doesn’t see her as just a sex symbol like the other men do, and he doesn’t want anything sexual from her. His innocence allows Marilyn to be freer in expressing her sexuality in a way that the public really cannot appreciate. The media capitalized heavily on Marilyn Monroe’s image as this platinum blonde with hourglass figure and smoky eyes, but this film really delves into the psychological toll that fame had on Monroe. We see alcohol in her room at all times, she takes pills every night before bed. Even with all her fame, Monroe was extremely lonely and miserable because people were always projecting their ideas of how they should be on her, and she wanted someone to just love her for who she is, and Colin and Paula were the only two people in the film who really genuinely cared about her humanity. In one scene, Marilyn is in a library with Colin and is admiring a dollhouse. While peering inside at the house’s girl dolls, she says that all little girls should know how pretty they are. This reminded me yet again of all the pressures that the media places on young women to be a certain size and to look a certain way, and while people are more woke and having campaigns that celebrate curves, thinness, pimples, dimples and other normal facial features that have historically not been celebrated much, there is still this lingering pressure to fit in with Hollywood’s idea of a beautiful woman. Most women still think they are not pretty even though people tell them that, and so Marilyn saying this in that scene was very important. In the #MeToo era, this film is especially important because it shows the impact of sexism on the self-esteem of young women like Marilyn (of course, I feel like a hypocrite for saying that in light of the sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, whose company The Weinstein Company produced My Week with Marilyn.)
The film also shows that while training and experience are helpful, acting through pure human instinct is an art in and of itself that is actually quite hard to do for a lot of people. Even though Laurence had a lot of experience and formal training, he didn’t know how to be a good mentor and really didn’t have the level of patience that it took to finish the film shooting. In one scene, he looks in the mirror in his dressing room and tells Colin that he actually does admire Marilyn even though he never really showed it because she has the grit to turn everything Hollywood threw at her into an opportunity to work even harder in her career, and she never gave up. As Marilyn tells Colin in the film, she grew up in several foster homes and had a tough early life, but she pushed through it and eventually became successful. However, the film shows that fame doesn’t always guarantee lasting happiness. Marilyn achieved a lot of fame, but she died of a drug overdose and suffered with severe depression for much of her acting career, mainly due to the pressure of always being in the spotlight, always having her image on display for the public. People always overvalued her youth, and this also impacted her self-esteem and older actresses’ self-esteem as well. Vivian Leigh achieved success as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, but as she got older, Laurence started thinking she was too old to play younger women, so he replaced her with Marilyn. Marilyn is smart and understands how messed up this is that this veteran actress isn’t seemingly pretty enough in the eyes of a male director to keep taking on fresh opportunities. It reminded me so much of a sketch that comedian Amy Schumer did called “Last F**kable Day,” in which famous actresses Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette tell Schumer that when female entertainers get older, Hollywood doesn’t think they are sexy anymore, so they stop giving them more opportunities and often replace them with younger stars, even though these older actresses are incredibly attractive. They have this day to celebrate the “last chance” they get at being attractive to the public eye before they quit their acting careers and fade from the public consciousness (which, in real life, as long as these three gifted ladies are alive and killin’ it in their careers like they always do, is most likely not going to happen.) Here’s the hilarious and clever sketch below (warning: contains strong language.)
In one powerful scene in the movie Marilyn is going shopping with Colin and the rest of the film’s team, when all of a sudden people see her walking down the street and race at her, bullying her for autographs. When the film team gets Marilyn safely into the car, one of the guys jokes that she’s famous and no one can resist her, but we see Marilyn silently sit in the back car seat, trying to recover from the invasion of privacy and wearing a look of pain and misery and exhaustion all rolled into one. This yet again shows the emotional labor associated with being a famous person, this struggle to take off the fake persona we put on for people and just get real with people about who you are. It really taught me yet again to value the humanity of celebrities, because frankly, even with all their success, stars are human, too, and want to live normal lives and just do their work and have genuine relationships with others.
Overall, excellent film. Highly recommend it. And Michelle Williams as Marilyn…all I can say is, what a force. She acted the hell out of that role.
My Week with Marilyn. 2011. Rated R for some language.
I just got done watching the 2017 film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, and I must say, it gave me ALL the feels. It is a biopic about William (“Bill”) Moulton Marston, a Boston-based psychology professor who teaches his mostly-female class about DISC theory, which means that every social situation, every interaction between individual, could be broken down into four categories of emotion: dominance, inducement, submission and compliance. He catches the eye of Olive, one of his students who appears to be a quite innocent girl, and falls for her. But his wife, Elizabeth, is jealous of Olive and dismisses her at first. However, after taking a lie detector test, the two women find out they love both each other and Bill, and the three have a polyamorous relationship with each other. However the university that Bill and Elizabeth teach at finds out they were in a relationship and fire them, forcing Bill and Elizabeth into unemployment. Then, when all three are at a burlesque store in Greenwich Village, Olive tries on a Wonder Woman costume, sparking the inspiration for Bill’s comic book character, Suprema the Wonder Woman. At first, when Bill takes his manuscript to get published, Mr. Gaines, the publisher, tells him female superheroes failed too many times before, but after convincing him Gaines finally publishes it and the comic book takes off, selling millions of copies. However, the Wonder Woman comic books receive backlash for their explicit depictions of submission and bondage; however, Bill calls for the publishers to fight back against the backlash by publishing more explicit scenes in the comic. Unfortunately, when a neighbor finds out about Bill, Olive and Elizabeth’s relationship, it takes a deep and nasty toll on not just the success of Wonder Woman but the beautiful relationship that has unfolded for all this time between the three people.
Honestly, this movie made me cry not just because of its incredible score (thank you to Tom Howe) but because it is a story that is missing from a lot of standard Hollywood period films. Many of the period films I have seen (except for Carol and a few other films) have depicted monogamous relationships between a man and a woman, but this film takes it up a notch because it features a love triangle that actually is fully developed throughout the film. Bill, Olive and Elizabeth raise kids who grow up really chill about having two moms and a dad. But like any LGBTQ+ relationship depicted in movies, some homophobic, transphobic, or biphobic person finds out and then the supposedly innocent young woman (or man) involved in the relationship has to leave or deal with the older person getting married to someone of the opposite sex. I only say this because during the film I thought about Call Me By your Name, and how Elio had to deal with Oliver getting married and settling into a heterosexual marriage. Today, of course, things have gotten slightly better in terms of accepting kids who grew up with various expressions of parenthood: two moms, two dads, two moms and a dad, two dads and a mom, and so on. I would be surprised if anyone in 2019 still batted an eyelash if they saw a perfectly normal family of two moms and a dad playing with their kids in the park like every other American family.
I also really like how the director, Angela Robinson, wrestles with Bill’s motivation for publishing Wonder Woman. In the special feature after the movie, Robinson says that while extensively researching the film and directing it (it took her eight long years to get this project off the ground) she wanted to wrestle with the question of whether Bill created Wonder Woman to satisfy his own sexual pleasure or whether he created it because he actually was a feminist who supported the suffrage movement. Indeed, when I first saw the trailer I sort of rolled my eyes (little did I know how amazing the film was) and thought “Why is this film centered around a dude and his flings with women? Sounds pretty sexist to me.” However, after seeing the film I understood that Bill’s life was complicated and that no one can really give a one-or-the-other answer to this question. Honestly, I think it was both. In a comparative literature course I once took, we read about the concept of the male gaze and how it impacted people’s perceptions of women, as well as women’s perceptions of themselves. It seems that during the film, Bill was trying to manipulate both Olive and Elizabeth, even though it turns out that the two actually did genuinely love each other. While watching Olive and Elizabeth kiss, Bill is turned on and just watches for the longest time. When he proceeds to have Olive get in a submissive position in the burlesque shop, Elizabeth asks him when he is ever going to stop using science as an excuse for satisfying his own sexual whims; she also tells him earlier in the film that the three of them can’t be together because it’s a mere fantasy and they have to understand that their lives are essentially in danger if they openly express their polyamorous relationship with each other. Robinson doesn’t aim for us to deify Marston but rather think about the role that this man, one of many individuals, played in discussions about feminism and female sexuality.
When I first heard of polyamory, it was in college. I wasn’t sure who I loved yet, and some classmates of mine and I ended up talking about different expressions of love, and one of these expressions happened to be polyamorous love. I haven’t seen many movies or much media about polyamorous relationships; I have seen bisexuality depicted of course, but not so much polyamorous relationships. The media that depict polyamory often make a joke out of it, such as The Lonely Island’s “Three Way (The Golden Rule)” song. At first, I laughed at this sketch but watching Professor Marston and the Wonder Women gave a different, more mature perspective on polyamorous relationships.
As Professor Marston depicts, polyamorous love can be sweet and beautiful as long as the people in the relationship are consenting adults. Robinson explores the theme of consent in the film because I thought at first that Bill and Elizabeth both tricked Olive into falling for both of them, but as I saw later in the film, I realized that Olive genuinely loves Bill and Elizabeth and doesn’t mind falling in love with them. Olive isn’t all that happy about being married to her husband and so she calls off the marriage between them because she actually does love Bill and Elizabeth more than she does her husband. It reminded me of the film Carol, when Therese and Carol both fall in love but then the men in their lives find out and they feel constrained by these heterosexual marriages they are in.
When I first saw the film Wonder Woman with Gal Gadot, I was incredibly thrilled, especially because Wonder Woman was raised on an island where all these strong women raise each other and support one another (a friend of mine wondered what the film would be like if they just depicted all the women warriors just living their average lives on Themyscira. It would be cool if they did that.) And I think it is important to know the history of Wonder Woman in order to appreciate her creation. Again, I’m not hailing William Marston as the sole saint behind the creation of Wonder Woman (in fact, Elizabeth is actually the one who suggested he create a female superhero.) Robinson’s purpose for this biopic was to show the role that Elizabeth and Olive, two incredibly brilliant women, played in Marston’s life. After Marston’s death, editors took out the sexually explicit scenes of bondage in the Wonder Woman comics in order to make it more accessible to kids (in one depressing scene we see a bunch of kids throwing Wonder Woman comics in a fire and cheering while Bill just watches them burn the comics in silence.) However, feminist Gloria Steinem, in 1972, put Wonder Woman on the cover of Ms. Magazine’s first issue and thus Wonder Woman’s superpowers made it back to the comics. Before seeing this movie I literally had no idea that Bill published Wonder Woman as a way to integrate his psychological research into an accessible form of entertainment. And I also had no prior knowledge of the comic’s sexual history. This is why I needed to see this film, though, because I didn’t know much about the history of Wonder Woman. I guess there is a reason that it is called Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (plural) and not Professor Marston and the Wonder Woman (singular.)
In the scene where Josette Frank, a child development expert, questions Bill’s motives for including sexual imagery in Wonder Woman, he explains that he wants boys to see these images so that they learn to respect women and embrace their power. When he said this I thought about two ads, an Ad Council commercial titled “Wrong Way Around” and a Gillette commercial called “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be.” In the former, a few boys walk up to men and ask if they can teach them how to treat women since these men haven’t taught their sons how to treat women. The commercial, at its core, tells adult men to teach their sons that violence against women is wrong and they should speak out when they witness it rather than be passive bystanders. The Gillette commercial, which came out just a couple of months ago, features a bunch of boys enacting traditionally masculine behaviors such as fighting each other and saying things such as “You play like a girl” to other boys, but then depicts scenes of men challenging these behaviors by correcting their male friends when they do those things, such as telling them to stop catcalling women who walk by, as well as news footage of Terry Crews calling for men to hold themselves accountable and news reporters talking about the #metoo movement. After seeing Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, I think it would be a good film to discuss in the wake of the #metoo movement because then viewers can discuss the ways in which the images of Wonder Woman in the film may be both empowering and disempowering in their depictions of women.
Also, side note, I was literally just waiting for a movie to use Nina Simone’s song “Feeling Good,” and I can now say I finally chanced upon a film that uses this song. While Olive, Bill and Elizabeth get it on, Nina’s song plays to give the scene its steamy character. In this scene it’s a song celebrating Bill, Olive and Elizabeth’s freedom at that moment to love each other without judgment (I think it’s pretty cool that the openly gay actor Luke Evans, who plays William Marston, got a chance to star in this LGBTQ+ film.) Also, I love the acting of Rebecca Hall (Elizabeth) and Bella Heathcote (Olive); Hall’s simmering gaze, with her dark eyes, wraps you in and never lets you go. Bella Heathcote, in the special feature after the film, said that at first she was apprehensive about starring in the movie because of its sexuality and the emotional heaviness of Olive’s relationship with Bill and Elizabeth, but she said she is glad to have played Olive because she really felt deeply for her.
Overall, I think this film is a must-see.
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. 1 hr 48 minutes. Rated R for strong sexual content including brief graphic images, and language.
A month ago, the day before the Academy Awards, I watched BlacKkKlansman, a film directed by Spike Lee and produced by Jordan Peele. The only Blumhouse Productions film I had seen before that was Get Out because I am normally squeamish about horror films (although to be fair, even though Blumhouse mostly produces scary films, it has also produced dramas, such as Whiplash). Even though it’s not a supernatural horror film, BlacKkKlansman depicts a real-life horror that has traumatized Black people for centuries: white supremacy.
The film is based on the eponymous memoir by Ron Stallworth, a Black man living during the 1970s who applies for a job at the Colorado Springs Police Department and ends up becoming a record clerk there. (John David Washington, who plays Ron, was excellent in this role. He brought so much rawness to it.) His coworkers don’t see his potential to move up in his role, but after persuading them that he has credentials, they have him go undercover as a detective to investigate a Black Power movement meeting, during which the president of the Black Student Alliance calls upon Black students to celebrate having natural hair, Black-owned businesses and, first and foremost, community. Ron, while undercover, meets a young woman named Patrice who falls in love with him. However, Ron gets into another sticky situation by calling the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, the notorious terrorist group known for its explicit discrimination of minorities, and pretending he is a racist white man who wants to join the organization. Ron has his white Jewish partner-in-crime, Phillip “Flip” Zimmerman (played by the incredibly talented Adam Driver), go undercover since, obviously, if he was to go himself, he could get killed. Zimmerman starts to act like a member of the KKK while undercover, but Lee doesn’t shy away form the fact that the KKK is suspicious of Zimmerman and even has him take a lie detector test to prove he isn’t Jewish.
Indeed, Lee’s film says as much about the social construct of whiteness as much as it does about blackness. Ron constantly reminds Flip that he is Jewish, but Flip reminds Ron that most of his life, he didn’t feel Jewish because he blended in with the other white kids in his community and didn’t grow up celebrating Jewish traditions, such as having a bar mitzvah. However, as Flip infiltrates the KKK more and more, he becomes more hyper-aware of his identity as a Jewish person. This reminds me of the shooting that occurred in 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and how Jewish writers for op-ed pieces about the shooting and other anti-Semitic hate crimes were saying that the shooting caused them to question whether they really benefited from white privilege if Jewish people have had to endure so much oppression for centuries. It showed me how complicated the conversations around white privilege are, and that these conversations are not so two-dimensional once we listen to and read about individuals’ differing experiences with whiteness, particularly the experiences of Jews of color. Again, it’s a hard conversation to just put in a box, and I’m not Jewish so I can’t say anything from personal experience on the topic, but this is just something I thought was really important about the film.
(Also, side note: I saw Adam Driver in While We’re Young, What If, Frances Ha, and The Last Jedi, but seeing his performance in BlacKkKlansman was something else. The whole time I watched the film, I had to remind myself he was just acting. His performance was that good.)
Another issue that Spike Lee addresses is the complicity of white women in the KKK’s activities. In a disturbingly brilliant scene, Lee switches back and forth between the KKK induction and the Black Power meeting where Harry Belafonte is talking about the lynching of a young Black man. When all of the members of the KKK are inducted, all of their white wives rush in and congratulate them. It seems so innocent, like they’re at a high school graduation ceremony, but you realize quickly after the scene switches to everyone at the KKK ceremony watching Birth of a Nation, a racist 1919 film by D.W. Griffith that depicted white people enacting racist caricatures of Black people and performing other acts of racist violence. The wife of one of the KKK members in particular is very complicit in a lot of the KKK’s acts of terrorism. When she tries to get involved with the KKK’s activities at first, her husband Felix dismisses her, but then she quickly tells him that one day he will ask her for a favor and regret ever dismissing her like that. During the filming of Birth of a Nation, she is especially loud in cheering on the KKK’s horrific violence, and throughout BlacKkKlansman she actively participates in the KKK’s affairs.
The film also shows actual footage of the Charlottesville white nationalist rally and pays tribute to Heather Heyer, a young woman killed after a white nationalist protester rammed his car into several people, killing Heyer and injuring many others. Seeing this footage gave me chills, but it taught me that is why we need to keep having these difficult conversations about activism and oppression.
The mere words in this post simply cannot convey how powerful this film was. The score lost to Black Panther, another excellent film with excellent music, but it was still incredible how well the music production team put the music together for the film. This is one of the songs included in the film that I really love:
But then again, I’m not surprised that the film left me with a lot to think about long after the credits rolled. Spike Lee’s films are well known for talking about topics that aren’t light and fluffy. Bamboozled, for instance, is a film about how a Black man tries to get back at his racist boss by producing a show in which two light-skinned Black men don blackface and enact racist caricatures of African-American people. At first, the audience is extremely uncomfortable while watching the show, but as time goes on they start to wear blackface themselves and enjoy it. My professor held a showing of the film in the evening for his class to watch, and after watching the movie my friend and I both walked in silence, completely speechless, because the film left us with a lot on our minds. I couldn’t sleep that night. A year later I saw Do the Right Thing with a friend, and man, am I glad this friend showed me the movie because most people I knew had seen it already and I was missing out. Then I saw Chi-Raq, his 2015 musical drama in which he depicts the emotional, psychological and social toll that gun violence has taken on Black communities in Chicago and adapts an ancient poetic Greek play, Lysistrata by Aristophanes, to fit a grim 21st century reality of weapons, bloodshed and hurt. In the film, women withhold intimacy from their men so that they stop promoting gun violence in their communities. Again, not an easy film to watch before bed, but it addresses a key issue. And before seeing all three of these films I watched Lee’s film adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X after reading the book for a summer English class assignment. It still boggles me why Denzel Washington never won the Oscar for that movie even though he got nominated for it, or why Spike never won an Oscar for the movie. It was incredibly powerful.
Which is why, when Spike Lee won for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars this year for BlacKkKlansman, I couldn’t stop squealing. Although his films have received numerous Oscar nominations, none of them actually won. And seeing his reaction at winning the Oscar (as well as his purple Prince-themed suit and pants) was everything. His speech was also incredible.
Overall, it is an incredibly brilliant film worth seeing.
BlacKkKlansman. 2018. Rated R for language throughout, including racial epithets, and for disturbing/ violent material and some sexual references.
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