Nov 12, 2019
Disney Plus launched today and with it, the new streaming series, The Mandalorian. As a member of Generation X’s Star Wars fan corps, I had to watch. My first impressions are mostly positive and I’m feeling mostly optimistic about future episodes. Like Rogue One and The Clone Wars, The Mandalorian seems to be a real Star Wars effort.
The Mandalorian is slower moving than Star Wars fans are used to, but there’s a pulse of Star Wars life here. After the lousy The Last Jedi and so-so Solo, I wondered what would become of my favorite imaginative universe. Well, The Mandalorian is an excellent start. The series evokes a galactic spaghetti Western, complete with dusty frontier towns and the unsteady truce of lawless characters. Some may or may not know, but A New Hope had deeps roots in the American Western. Han Solo was designed after a gunslinger (complete with holster and cowboy vest); Tatooine was a desert frontier planet, and the Cantina was a nod to the rowdy saloons, where the music only stops for shootouts or barfights. In my opinion, zeroing in on the Western was a good idea by Jon Favreau.
Secondly, the use of Star Wars aliens, droids, and backgrounds played well here too. I particularly enjoyed the effective use of carbon freezing as a means for transporting captured bounties. It made sense and looked damn good on screen. The Mandalorian, himself, has a significant screen presence, but the show made it clear that the helmet is supposed to stay on. Hopefully, the writers won’t follow this rule because Pablo Pascal’s star power would give the show the “human” touch that’s lacking so far.
The dialogue was passable, but a bit tame. Carl Weathers was a welcome face to the Star Wars universe, and he looked very comfortable in his role. However, there weren’t any notable female characters in episode 1, but I assume that will change soon. Plot points were a bit thin, but the show has the capital to allow for a slow pace in the early goings. I’ll want more character development in episode 2.
The high budget art direction and set designs are excellent. I loved the shots of space travel with 4K planets nestled amongst the powdery starfield. I look forward to more spacefaring among a post-Galactic Empire universe.
The soundtrack stood out as particularly good. New sounds and compelling melodies made for an extra level of mood and feel to The Mandalorian. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the album on iTunes for further comment, but I plan on downloading a couple of tracks when available.
As far as a first start, episode 1 of The Mandalorian played it safe. The show served as more of a glimpse of what is to come—it showcased characters, showed respect to the Star Wars universe, and will no doubt keep the launch of Disney Plus in the happy column.
There seem to be two factions over at LucasFilm. One, the elitist Empire led by Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson, who don’t like the Star Wars franchise, reject criticism, and attack fans—and then there’s the Rebel Alliance of worldwide fans who recognize the leadership of Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau, and Gareth Edwards to name a few. The Mandalorian appears to be in the tradition of Star Wars. I think the show will succeed because the right people are at the helm, and the first episode plays to the strength of Star Wars as well as the fan base.
It’s a good start. Let’s keep it going.
Nov 1, 2019
The face of the Terminator franchise has been Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I get it. Arnie is one of the big charismatic icons of Hollywood and the Terminator role was one of his best. However, after watching Terminator: Dark Fate, and after seeing Sarah Connor again, I couldn’t help but think that Linda Hamilton is the real face of Terminator.
Sarah Connor has been what’s missing from these movies.
Here we have one of the greatest heroines of all time returning to the big screen to reprise her role as Sarah Connor. Even at age 63, Linda Hamilton’s presence and star power as Sarah Connor are amazing. The bad news? Her presence and performance in the film were the only things that sustained my interest despite surprisingly boring action, mottled plots, and bizarre character arcs.
Dark Fate isn’t a great movie. Indeed, it’s a mess and I’m predicting initial box office success from Arnie & Linda star power, but poor reviews from fans will probably catch up to this one.
At one point, Sarah Connor says she saved the lives of three billion people by stopping an apocalyptic future. One of the new heroines, named Grace (played by Mackenzie Davis), stares back with a blank face. “You’re welcome,” says Sarah, as if cueing her counterpart that a “thank you” would be nice. But is it? Because well, as far as Grace can tell, nothing changed. A new Terminator is after them, so…thanks?
As fresh and diverse faces, the two new heroines do a decent job and hold their own besides the big stars. But Dani and Grace’s storyline have to make room for the presence of an undisputed heroine, Sarah Connor, who has her own agenda. Instead of the old stars grooming the new stars, it felt more like two movies crashed into each other with two sets of stars competing for relevance. The heroines don’t exactly work well together and cooperate only begrudgingly. Each heroine didn’t exactly see the need for the other.
By the end of Dark Fate, the patchwork of movie themes finally fell apart. Despite a solid effort, the two new heroines probably won’t leave a lasting impression, which is a shame. The terminator saga wasn’t really their story after all. The film, itself, didn’t seem to know that until the end when Sarah Connor carried the film on her shoulders.
Terminator: Dark Fate showcases two problems in Hollywood regarding heroines: one, the general lack of follow-through when a great heroine emerges. And two, a true phobia in portraying any weaknesses in younger heroines, focusing more on convincing action over character development.
Why did we ever abandon Sarah Connor in the first place? I nearly forgot that the terminator universe is actually a heroine-centric story, and Sarah was the unquestionable heroine of that universe. The franchise instead followed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terminator and abandoned Sarah Connor. Silence of the Lambs did the same thing, opting to focus on Hannibal Lecter and abandoning Clarice Starling. Bad writing swamped Ripley in follow up films in the Aliens franchise. And then, when Elizabeth Shaw emerged as a solid heroine in Prometheus, the franchise killed her off and instead focused on Michael Fassbender’s android character, David.
Dumb. The follow-up movies were bad, and I feel like we squandered serious opportunities to elevate our favorite heroines.
I realize that in some cases, the actresses refused to reprise their role. But I have a feeling that the actresses also had little faith in Hollywood writers. As a result, we lost touch with great heroine archetypes. Could you imagine if Luke Skywalker disappeared after A New Hope and the films focused on mindless action with just Han Solo? Serious cultural loss. Why wouldn’t the studios hire the best writers out there and keep these heroines going? Linda Hamilton was more than capable of pulling off the big trilogy for Sarah Connor and the terminator.
Heroic women are powerful figures in culture. We need to see more of them, but we also need to get it right. This brings me to my second point. Dark Fate does deliver tough women in major action sequences. That alone might satisfy some people who like seeing women pummeling the world into submission with kicks and punches. But I don’t need to be convinced that women are tough. I don’t need to be sold on the idea that women are leaders and fully sovereign individuals. I mean, do you? What about the relatable woman behind the heroine? I want to connect with her emotionally. I want to know that she often doubts herself as I do. I want to know she can be beaten as I can. And then I want to follow her every step of the way as she stands up against the most formidable villains anyway.
As I hope I can.
Dark Fate presents two new heroines and neither gets a chance to fail or grow. Grace actually models the virtues of individualism above parenthood and rejects the notion that children, particularly sons, are important human beings worthy of protecting. An odd position for a heroic figure to take. And ultimately, this seems to be the opposite message of the terminator saga. That said, Grace was a convincing action star but she’s left vulnerable to merely being a symbolic “tough woman.”
The other heroine, Dani, has far more potential since she’s relatable. She’s a real person from Mexico who cares about her family and feels overwhelmed by the unfolding events. The people around her are more capable than she is and Dani must grow if she’s to face the challenges ahead. Her story, though, gets lost in the film, so she never really gets a chance to convince us that she’ll become a revolutionary warrior.
Neither of these new heroines were challenged beyond the physical chase from a terminator. None failed in a way that required growth or change. And neither will likely stand the test of time.
I care about heroines very much. I believe our society and culture benefits from having great heroes and equally great heroines. I believe that heroines might have some answers for overcoming conflicts in the 21st Century and beyond. So, my message to Hollywood after seeing Sarah Connor again?
Don’t abandon our great heroines when they emerge.
And don’t dumb down our new heroines.
Despite the below-average film, I think Sarah Connor’s legacy has been preserved. In a recent poll I conducted on my Facebook page, Sarah Connor edged out Ripley in a head to head matchup, She’s big. I wish we had more of her. And I realize only too late that it was Sarah all along, not the menacing terminator, who actually carried my interest in the franchise.
Oct 29, 2019
Cutting open a human being is always a big deal, especially when the subject’s not dead, but undead. The patient, codenamed Zach Crowley, is one of thousands of human beings that were contained during the Baltimore quarantine last month. Like all the other infected subjects, Zach’s vital signs are nonexistent, his brain activity nearly zero, except for his primal functions—his reptile brain—and with an irreversible loss of all cognitive functions. His body seems trapped in the algor mortis stage of decomposition, a patient in agonizing pain, a corpse in decay, a biological contradiction of life and death, side by side, within a single human host. If left to his own autonomy, Zach would use nightmarish brute force to bludgeon and then cannibalize anyone he encountered.
I’ve been working with Zach for two weeks now, prepping, but only from behind two feet of fortified aluminum oxynitride, the kind of armored glass capable of stopping fifty caliber bullets. Now that we have an actual vaccine and a certified procedure, I must come into contact with Zach. But I’m not a surgeon or even a doctor. I’m an embalmer. Without a beating heart, the vaccine can’t circulate through his system from a simple injection. Zach’s blood just sits there like water in a Ziploc bag. But me? I know how to drain such standing blood and how to pump chemicals through a dead body.
“Well, David?” I hear the familiar voice of Dr. Kendra Hersch inside my hazmat suit. “How do you feel?”
I turn to face her. “Like a human burrito,” I say.
“Well, you look like one.”
Her bedside manner soothes me. Calm. Humored. Just what I need right now, given the task ahead.
Most people see hazmat suits in the movies, you know, big lemon-yellow sumo suits with spaceman-like masks and respirators. Now that I’ve had a crash course, I’ve learned that not all suits are equal. I’m wearing a Level 4 suit, the highest protective suit they make. The damn thing smells like the freshest out-of-the-toy-store vinyl and takes over thirty minutes to put on. It’s capable of blocking anything from chemical splashes to microscopic particles that may or may not be a lethal virus.
You see, I’m standing in a fortress of artificial sterility known as the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Otherwise known as USAMRIID. I definitely don’t want to be here. It’s not my usual workspace. I’m used to sterile environments, but the kind with white cinder block walls, acoustic ceiling tiles with brown water stains, and Gustav Mahler playing from my iPhone. Such is the charm of a funeral home basement, my natural workspace.
“Okay,” says Dr. Hersch, “Let’s pressurize.”
I reach up and grab a long yellow tube that hangs down from the ceiling, just like we practiced. I press the end of the tube into a silver disc on my suit, twist it, and then hear a loud rush of air. My suit puffs up like a blowfish. I suck in lungfuls of sanitized air. My breathing stutters in and out. How strange that for the first few seconds, I feel like I’m drowning in oxygen.
“Take it easy,” says Dr. Hersch. “Your heart rate is starting to climb.”
I force down a swallow and I hear myself grunt in the process. “I watched more of the news last night. They showed clips of all sorts of things. Downtown. Suburbs. Even in the countryside. I saw what the infecs are doing to people.”
“You need to slow your breathing, David. Come on. Focus on our procedural.”
She’s not listening.
“Live feed after live feed,” I say. “They’re calling it an extinction pandemic. Some scientists give us six months. They said even if a few of us have natural immunity, none could survive against the physical threat. There’d be billions.”
Dr. Hersch draws back. “I know, David. But you and I are the counterattack. We need to find out if we can kill the virus. Right now. Today.”
Her comments slow my rising panic. She and I stare at each other for a moment and the realization comes back. The military will battle the infecs in the streets, barricade them off, gun them down, surveil them, but if we’re to beat them, we have to beat the virus, host by host, cell by cell, until it’s eradicated. I really don’t have a choice because there’s nowhere else to go. So, I have to do this.
I watch the doctor’s coffee-colored eyes flit over different parts of my suit. She tugs on this and brushes over that until she looks satisfied. I check her suit in return. Then she detaches the yellow tubes from our suits and sends them retracting into the ceiling. But the momentary calm is capsized by a flood of fresh anxiety when she shifts her gaze over to the door on the far side of the room. “Open the vault,” she says in a commanding voice.
Refrigerated air mists out along the metal seams of a massive, four-foot silver door on the far wall, the kind you see in Swiss banks. Right away, I know that the final barrier between me and the worst Level 4 hot agent in human history just went away. Zach is in the room beyond. I force down a swallow.
“David,” she says, “Look at me.”
I look at her.
“Focus on the procedure. There’s nothing else in the world right now.”
I close my eyes. Only the procedure. Only the procedure.
Dr. Hersch and I walk side by side through an airlock and enter a room with pristine stainless-steel walls, a grill-like ceiling, blocks of halogen lights, and industrial wall fans. Those fans comfort me the way air support comforts ground troops. If my suit tears, the wall fans will flush the hot morg of all infected oxygen in two seconds flat. But contaminated air isn’t what frightens me.
I fix my gaze on the decomposed cadaver strapped to the gurney in the center of the room. Zach is perfectly still. Beside him is the embalming equipment. I’m to perform a simple RCI, a restricted cervical injection so that I can get the precious vaccine into his body tissues.
“Approaching the subject,” says Dr. Hersch into her commlink.
At the sound of her voice, Zach jerks. He suddenly flails his head and body violently, as if in the throes of sustained electrocution. Dr. Hersch and I both take one step back. Zach’s raw and animalistic strength is absolutely unsettling, triggering an awareness that the gurney straps have only been used on regular people, but they’ve never been seriously tested on an undead subject. Zach belches out a long, hoarse wail.
I feel the words bubbling up…we need to get the hell out of here. Right now. Even if this stupid procedure is successful, there’s no way to produce enough serum in time to save everyone. This is a joke. The vaccine is a blow dart against a battleship…
As if reading my thoughts, Dr. Hersch grabs my arm. “They’ll figure out a way to weaponize the vaccine. Come on.”
But Zach settles. And when his glistening, decomposing torso finally flattens on the gurney, I watch his head slowly pan in our direction. His eyes, yellow-white—boiled eggs with opalescent corneas—fix on Dr. Hersch and me. Zach gives us his full attention, entranced, the vacant stare of the psychotically obsessed. I noticed that his nose had come off since last I saw him. Now I see only two elongated holes in the center of his face. His skeletal fingers open and close in an almost rhythmic cycle. And his chin moves side to side as his teeth snap down repeatedly with an awful clack. He sees us, and we see him.
I look back as the vault door shuts and hermetically seals with a high-pitched hiss. No going back now.
“The subject is secure,” says Dr. Hersch to break the horror-film lull. “Proceeding to the embalming station.”
“Just watch those straps,” I say and step toward Zach. “Any sign that he’s about to break free and we call it off.”
“Obviously.”
I accept her assurance, though we both know perfectly well that if Zach breaks free, that vault door’s not budging.
Zach continues to stare and even goes still, a serpent’s steady patience as a field mouse strays near its venomous mouth.
No need for an antiseptic on the operating field, I remind myself, because it’s not an operation. For this procedure, I skip all the cosmetic steps of embalming. No disinfecting. No shaving body hair. No setting the jaw with wire.
Now I hear a lot of my own breathing, in and out, in and out, like a nervous astronaut. I need my music, my Mahler. Embalming was a ritual after all and rituals must mask the unpleasant with art and repetition. “Can I get my music please?”
Through the speaker in my suit, I hear the opening of Mahler’s Symphony number one. Strings in unison. An alien wail from far away, coming closer in a combined seven octaves. Yes. I draw in a deep breath. This is familiar. The symphony progresses and rich music soon transforms the hot morg into a palace of mesmerizing and complex sound, a symphony hall in a death chamber.
“Prepare the patient,” I say, taking my position behind Zach’s head. His eyes roll up to follow my every movement. I reach for the metal trocar, a syringe-like device attached to a thick tube. Then, holding the trocar between my fingers, like a conductor with a wand, I lower my hand, slowly, lightly, at the same pulse of the descending woodwinds of the symphony, settling into position above the navel. Then I press the device into Zach’s soft flesh.
Zach twitches like a sleeping dog poked in the hindquarters. He spasms wildly and screams out like a wounded animal. His loose skin frays where the straps hold him firmly in place and I hold my breath. He tries to lift his head up to face me. Cold, predatory hatred shows on his face, but the head restraint prevents the full range of motion. The gurney straps hold. When he realizes the futility of his struggle, Zach settles on panting rapidly and snapping his yellow and fractured teeth.
I ignore him this time and focus on the music, just as I would at the funeral home. Only the music. I have to drain all the infected fluids from his chest, abdominal, and pelvic cavity to make way for our vaccine. Dr. Hersch and I exchange an uneasy glance. So far, so good. “Prepare for drainage,” I say.
Dr. Hersch prepares the equipment, her eyes nervously glancing at Zach every few seconds. We both watch as black blood fills the tube, chunky with partial clots and bits of organic matter.
Afterward, I repeat the process in the stomach region. I press another trocar between two ribs. Infected gas hisses out, and brown liquid speckles my mask before spilling out as sludge to pool at my feet. After a while, I move on and drain the pelvic area. Even without any body fluids, Zach stays in a restless rhythm of movement, random twitching or deliberate struggling. But as time passes, Zach seems more and more accepting of the activity upon his body.
When it comes time to pump the vaccine into his decayed veins, Zach watches with an unsettling serenity, like the calm zebra as lions feed upon its flesh. This was the moment we’d been awaiting. Dr. Hersch and I watch intently as the dark blue vaccine travels up the tubes and vanishes into Zach’s body.
Only Mahler passes the time with us. Fourth Movement. Brass horns, light fanfare. Descending pattern in D major. The music fading now. Fading. Fading…
Like Zach.
I watch Zach blink slowly, like an infant about to dream. He opens his eyes wide in a final bout of alertness, the last pulse of a deadly killer. Then his attention quickly wanes and he sinks further and further toward a wary stillness.
“He’s dying,” says Dr. Hersch.
And I see that he is. Zach’s hands droop as if frozen. His mouth ceases its phantom chewing. His chest takes in no breath. Then, with certainty, I see that Zach is motionless.
I wait.
“Note the time,” says Dr. Hersch, her surgeon’s instincts taking over.
I glance over at the clock and then back at Zach. “7:17 a.m.”
I look at him, at Zach. His opalescent eyes fade back to a pale blue. I try to remember that this monster’s face had been someone else once, a father or friend, a human with memories like mine. Zach’s one of us, even if he’s in some ways the opposite of us, the side of us beneath our shared humanity; life for the sake of life, sight for the sake of sight, hunger for the sake of hunger, equipped only with an electric impulse to live on, but nothing else. He’s our animal existence, a rudimentary form of life in rebellion against death, but here, at last, we’ve restored a precious order.
When I look up at Dr. Hersch, I feel unsettled. For perhaps we are the doctors of a new dark age. Our gift will be freedom from blind consciousness. Freedom from existence. Freedom of a kind.
And our cure will be not life, but death.
“Okay, flush the room,” said Dr. Hersch. “We’re coming out.”
“Amen,” I say.
There’s a long pause over the commlink. “Hang tight in there. We have a problem at the east barricade, Kendra.”
“Problem?” she says.
I feel my blood rising. “What kind of problem?”
“The worse kind there is,” comes the answer. “Stay put. Right now, you two are in the safest place in the building.”
“But we have the cure,” says Dr. Hersch. “It worked, and we have it. Open the vault door.”
Her voice is strong and assertive.
“We’re being ordered to evacuate,” says the commlink. “Stay put. Someone will come back for you.”
“No! Get us out of here!” I shout, running to the sealed doorway, and pounding with an open palm. I hear muffled sounds over the commlink, and an awkward thump, like the headset had been pulled off and tossed aside. Distant gunfire. Shouting. A loud, high-pitched ringing.
Sudden silence.
When I look at Dr. Hersch, I can see she’s scared. Her eyes are wide. “They’re not coming back,” she says.
“But you said it yourself. We have the cure,” I say. “They have to come back.”
“You and I both know. No one’s ever taken back an area once it’s overrun.”
“We have to get out of here.”
Without water, Dr. Hersch and I will be dead in a week, entombed inside the vault with Zach. Dying of thirst is a terrible, agonizing way to go.
Dr. Hersch glances over at the dead monster on the gurney. At that moment, I sense her thoughts. A primal, nightmare logic fills the room as my own reptile brain awakens. Don’t die of thirst. Better to take off the mask and suck in the infected air. Better to die as the predator rather than prey.
I look at her…stunned, not believing. Horrified. “They’ll be back,” I say. “We just need to hold out.”
Dr. Hersch swallows and in a calm but eerie voice, she says, “That sounds very good, David. Please step away from the patient.”
Her sudden distrust in me triggers a dangerous tension. Now it feels like survivalism, and my reptile brain screams at me. She’s going to beat me to it.
Dr. Hersch raises a hand.
I rip off my mask in a panic and cold air rushes my face. My lungs fill with foul, acid air as Dr. Hersch screams.
Violas in F minor. Then brass in D major. Conclude with fanfare.
Happy Halloween!
Sep 11, 2019
For the first time in history, we’re getting a glimpse of a heroine-centric world view in our cultural stories. In the long history of humanity, the vast majority of literary storytellers and historians have been men. But I believe there is a historic shift occurring and the art of storytelling, itself, may be changing.
When I sat down to write a novel about Byzantine Empress Theodora, I followed the prevailing model for story structure and character development known as the Hero’s Journey. For decades now, the Hero’s Journey has been one of the most dominant models for storytelling out there and for good reason. It works. However, the Hero’s Journey has been criticized at times for being a little, well, male-centric. I never understood the criticism until recently. While writing my historical fiction novel, which features a strong heroine, I realized that I didn’t understand heroines as much as I thought. At times, I veered away from the Hero’s Journey and found myself following my heroine’s unique journey.
But I needed help.
What I really needed were the insights and perspectives of other women. With a genuine desire to get my lead heroine right, I opened myself up in full, and I listened to the feedback of multiple women beta readers. I knew about Theodora from the history books but I never knew Theodora as a woman. There were small things. For example, some of the most common questions from beta readers were:
“What’s she wearing?”
“What’s she eating?”
I didn’t realize that so many women readers really liked knowing about Theodora’s clothing and delicious Byzantine cuisines. Oddly, answering those simple questions brought Theodora just a little more to life.
But then there were big things. More intense questions were:
“But what about her daughter? You never mention her.”
“Isn’t she nervous in this situation?”
And when Theodora had conversations in certain scenes, the most common question of all: “How does Theodora feel when that person said that? I want to know how she took that.”
I blew by certain moments that the beta readers didn’t. By simply answering the questions thrown at me, I began to see my heroine in ways I never before imagined. I felt as though I was picking up a special frequency that I never paid attention to previously. I dare say that my attitudes toward women in real life also changed. Unexpectedly, I started to see my heroine’s problems in a woman at the grocery store. I wondered “how she felt” during my own conversations. I noticed my heroine’s social frustrations sprouting up even with my wife.
As a writer, I began to recognize the same problems and themes our heroines face in movies and literature. I now watched films with an added focus and a new set of eyes. A pattern emerged that I never noticed before, even when watching movies I’d seen a hundred times. With so many heroines to watch now, from Game of Thrones to Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, I saw something more pronounced, more vivid, more powerful than mere fictional characters.
A heroine.
Her storyline differs from my boyhood heroes. She faces different threats. She’s brave in different ways, goes to different places, and often solves different problems. And surprisingly, I noticed that our heroines face villains who are not far away but close by—members of her own native culture. She encounters what I have labeled a “cult of deception,” which is a systematic way of being misled or misdirected, even by those she trusts. Unlike my male-oriented heroes, she’s not trying to embrace the cultural traditions of her father’s (or mother’s) past but instead trying to break away from them. The past is the problem.
Folks, these themes are not the Hero’s Journey. When I thought about my lead character, my wife, my mother, my female friends and acquaintances, and now these cultural heroines, I realized that I had changed. Some big questions hit me.
What if the Hero’s Journey is the result of an aggregate world view that has been mostly male up until now. What if the aggregate world view of our heroines is creating a different monomyth? What if the very nature of the conflicts that heroines face, the villains they defeat, and the way they save the world all bear notable distinctions? What if the woman as the cultural figurehead of civilization has powerful messages that society has never experienced before on this scale?
That’s cultural change.
If our stories reflect recurrent themes about the male or female experiences in life, then perhaps stories are a starting point. Maybe we can better hear each other more clearly through our stories.
I’m going to write a series of blogs introducing the principles of heroine-centric storytelling. I hope you’re excited to read and discuss it. To see a brief overview of the core concepts of a heroine-centric story model, click here or you can follow me on Facebook to stay updated.
So, what are your thoughts? Do you think that heroines, in general, might have some distinctive qualities that have gone unrecognized? Do you think there is such a thing as a heroine-centric story structure?
Aug 28, 2019
In 1991, when Silence of the Lambs dominated the Oscars, I was a 15-year old boy just starting high school. By that time, all my big boyhood heroes were firmly entrenched, from Luke Skywalker to Ferris Bueller. I had plenty of male role models in fiction. Today, we behold the age of the heroine. It’s an epic cultural shift, and I believe one heroine quietly led the way. Looking back, I see that Clarice Starling forever changed my views on heroic figures in general and heroic women in particular.
Clarice Starling not only modeled a different form of heroism, she also showed me how a woman’s day-to-day might differ from my own. And her experiences have stayed with me through the years.
In the opening credits, Clarice ignores every male who turns to check her out as she passes them on the FBI training course. When she gets into an elevator, she’s surrounded by a crowd of much taller men, and the physical contrast adds extra tension to an otherwise unremarkable daily moment. But I never forgot the images of Clarice in a male-dominated world. I always relate more to the men who give Clarice harmless attention. And yet, as the film proceeds, the “harmlessness” of male attention upon women takes darker turns.
When Clarice confronts the chilling intellect of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, she’s put on the spot by a question involving Multiple Miggs and her genitalia. Hannibal further asks, “Do you know why he’s called ‘Buffalo Bill?’ Clarice reveals that the nickname was the result of a department-wide joke. “This one likes to skin his humps,” she answers, unamused. Nevermind that women are being stalked, abducted, and mutilated, the homicide division found something funny about it all. Clarice had a hell of a time getting through the demeaning attitudes of the people she met. That includes Dr. Chilton and one of the bug experts, Pilcher, both of whom hit on Clarice first before granting her professional respect.
There is another sequence in the film that stands out as well. Clarice is assigned to inspect the corpse of a woman who has the hallmark mutilations of Buffalo Bill. Clarice notices the glitter on the girl’s nails and says, “looks like town to me, sir.” The observation might have gone unnoticed by a man back then. The heroine’s knowledge shined a light into the blind spots of the existing group. The importance of the heroine’s perspective is echoed again when she’s standing in the bedroom of the murder victim, Frederica Bimmel. Allowing for intuition to guide her, Clarice finds personal photographs hidden in a music box. The object had been in that room unnoticed by Frederica’s father and the spate of FBI agents, all of whom had searched the room many times over. But Clarice knew where to look and what the photos meant.
Lastly, one scene has grown on me and become ever more poignant over the years. On a long car ride, Clarice’s boss casually apologizes for portraying her as too sensitive to handle the truth of a murder case. He said he only did that to drive off the local cops. No big deal. But Clarice responds with “It matters, sir.” And she repeats this phrase when she finishes her thought. “It matters.” Those quiet words opened my eyes to other small things that mattered, even if I hadn’t noticed before.
I didn’t know it at the time, but these subtle moments chipped away at my perception of the world. I never quite saw heroic women the same again. Here’s someone who isn’t physically intimidating. Clarice battled real insecurities. She suffered deep-seated doubts and dealt with people who didn’t take her seriously. She had to work overtime to establish credibility and had to learn to push back at manipulative behavior meant to diminish her. She wasn’t just hunting down a serial killer; she was teaching the world how to deal with and accept heroines into their world. In short, Clarice Starling opened the door for a new model of heroic action.
And to me, it’s bigger than feminism. You see, I’m a small guy. Life taught me that I’m not the one sitting in the captain’s chair like Captain Kirk. I wasn’t the one winning fistfights like Indiana Jones, and I rarely scared away bullies like Superman. So, before Clarice, heroines were either masculinized, like Ripley or Sarah Conner, or they were unrelatable like Scarlet O’Hara or Dorothy Gale. But Clarice changed the landscape for me. She showed me the everyday challenges that women face, she taught me the incredible value of diverse perspectives, and she taught me new ways a person could be heroic without being a physical champion. She’s a universal heroic figure, and she’s different from my boyhood role models.
So, although the lambs may have stopped screaming almost 30 years ago, the actions and messages of Clarice Starling are anything but silent.
Douglas Burton is currently working on a comprehensive study of heroines in fiction. Such work is fast becoming his passion. He believes that heroines have distinctive strategies and archetypal themes that add dynamism to literature, film, and culture. To see more of his work, check out douglasaburton.com.
