Actor Helen Hunt, as the Stage Manager in David Cromer’s production currently running at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, Calif., has none of these things. And yet, surprisingly, she, unlike the Norman Rockwell-esque narrators of most productions, has real power.

Set in the early 20th-century fictional New England town of Grover’s Corners, Our Town chronicles the cycle of life–from daily existence to love and marriage to birth and death–in distinctly American terms. That is, if American means small town, Christian, white and middle class. For Grover’s Corners is a place where “Polish Town’s across the tracks” and “women vote indirect.”

Whereas in most productions the narrating Stage Manager, speaking from a position of privilege, takes for granted that the values of Grover’s Corners are the penultimate American values, Hunt, without judgment, gives it to us the way it was. She does not pontificate or eulogize, she presents the town and its inhabitants and allows the audience to form their own opinions about this particular version of Amerca’s past. Her straightforward delivery, combined with the fact she is a woman telling the story, transforms the narrative from a given to a question.

Though unusual, the direct speech and modern dress of this production actually suit the writing. Wilder, with his romantic and yet surprisingly plainspoken text, both valorizes and interrogates traditional American values. The interrogation part is lost in most productions, which make the simple, bygone America of the play into an object of nostalgia. This production, on the other hand, creates genuine distance between the values of Grover’s Corners and those of today, and thereby allows us to wonder whether we really would, if we could, return to those times. The realization that we might rather not mirrors the lesson Emily learns in the final act: “That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance … .”

The great achievement of the production is that even though it successfully avoids nostalgia for a patriarchal past, it doesn’t lose any of its sentiment. In fact, Emily’s tearful realization that “all that was going on and we never noticed” hits even closer to home when she says it in a sweater that I’m pretty sure came from J Crew.

Cromer’s production could have gone further in destabilizing our vision of a perfect American past: Other roles written for men could have been played by women (the professor and the choir director come to mind), and the production could have included actors of color. Storytelling is a way of exercising power–of giving voice to the voiceless, of changing the narrative of history. Casting Helen Hunt as the narrator, importantly, democratizes the role of storyteller. Next time, Cromer should democratize the role of protagonist as well.

Photo of Helen Hunt in David Cromer’s Our Town by Iris Schneider. Our Town runs through February 12 at the Broad Stage.

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It was said that during times of chaos, this female force came down to earth to put things right again. — Roadwoman, New Fire

Before there was intersectionality, there was Cherríe Moraga, playwright and co-editor of the feminist classic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She recently told the Ms. Blog in a phone interview:

The kind of feminism I understood from the late ’70s … is that it’s all interlocking. Every form of oppression is connected. So I always have looked to those in the most marginalized communities … those on the bottom, to really understand what’s happening all the way through the system. And that’s usually poor and black and indigenous women: They’re the canaries in the mine shaft.

According to Moraga, whose play New Fire premieres at The Brava Theater in San Francisco on January 11, things are not looking great for the canaries:

I never thought I would see the day when Mexican immigrants–who are largely indigenous people and immigrants coming from Central America– would become the new slave class. And that people would actually be incarcerated for being brown. These are things that we thought we had fixed in the civil rights movement.

But sometime in the ‘80s, says Moraga, the country lost its way. The hopes and dreams of the anti-war, civil rights, feminist, gay and Chicano movements were not realized. What had been a democratic spirit became a materialistic one, so that “even though it seems superficially that more people have rights, what’s happened is more people have things. Some more people have things.”

Growing concern for immigrant rights led Moraga and her primary collaborator on this production–the designer whom she credits as the central force behind the project, Celia Herrera Rodríguez–to travel the West, participating in and recording indigenous spiritual practices. New Fire, the play that grew out of those literal and metaphysical journeys, is a “ceremonial performance”–an intricate interweaving of documentary video and live performance, of fact and factual fiction, of real ceremony and the performance of myth.

The plot is simple: The central character, a native Chicana named Vero, honors her 52nd birthday–a coming-of-age year for women in the Mesoamerican tradition–with a one-night medicine ceremony in which she attempts to “get well,” to clear herself of the poisonous residue of violence done against her and reunite herself with her primordial past. (Can we take a second to thank Moraga for writing parts for 52-year-old women?)

The play as a whole is not so simple. By interspersing the healing ceremony with realistic flashbacks that provide insight into Vera’s personal past, as well as with video of traditional spiritual practices that are alive and well today, Moraga and Rodríguez have structurally connected the history and suffering of an individual to the history and suffering of her collective people.

While they were at it, they also reconnected the act of performance with its mythic origins:

Why are we artists? We’re artists because we believe on some level that change is … its own kind of spiritual practice. … And it’s a beautiful thing when a person realizes that they can hold that and they’re okay–that [they] can hold those pains for other people and become a conduit for these kinds of expression and they’ll be okay.

In New Fire, Moraga provides a conduit for a spiritual, feminist and environmentalist vision of the world. Though written to confront the literally earth-shattering consequences of the Mayan 2012, the play actually offers hope that in pursuing our spiritual drive for change, we can heal not only ourselves but also our world:

This is what we’re talking about–it’s not only a shift in consciousness but [also] the consciousness creates a sort of activism, where you really begin to believe that people that are not represented by the interests of the ruling classes really do have the power and the right to be able to create acts of solidarity with each other in order to improve … their local world, the intimate world from their family to their neighborhood [to] their nation and then internationally.

New Fire runs January 11-29 at San Francisco’s Brava Theater. Photos by Gregory Manalo from TOP: “Tzitzime,” “La Cantante” (Charlene O’Rourke) and “Coyote” (Adelina Anthony) in Cherríe Moraga’s New Fire.

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Perhaps the recent critical and financial success of The Kids has encouraged distributors to take a chance. Or perhaps, as I prefer to think, lesbians are just interesting. As we know about other minority populations who live within subcultures, frequently on the margins of the mainstream, their lives (our lives) can produce innovative aesthetics and compelling real-life drama.

The most low-budget and indie of the three new films, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks the Same, has emerged as a cult favorite at  Sundance, Rio de Janeiro, Sarasota, Newfest and other film festivals. Starring the affable Lisa Haas as an unconventional heroine who bikes to her job in a stationery supply store, Codependent is an entertaining mashup of 1950′s sci-fi spoof and romantic comedy. It cleverly plays  on lesbians’ outsider status by featuring three extraterrestrials from a fictitious planet who are sent on a mission to rid themselves of romantic emotions. But one of the aliens falls in love with the earthling Haas–thus blurring the line between alien and lesbian. To be a lesbian, after all, is often to be–or at least to feel like–an alien. A subplot featuring two government agents tracking the aliens offers another metaphor for lesbian experience, which can range from feeling invisible to being hounded.

Like another cult lesbian favorite, Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994), Codependent is shot in black and white, partly as homage to the genre and probably out of financial need. The effect is to sharpen the viewer’s focus and highlight entering a different world. And what a different world it is! Even alien lovemaking–which falls outside the dominant heterosexual paradigm–is accomplished by rubbing heads. When I had the pleasure of seeing the film at a rooftop outdoor screening in New York City last summer, a predominantly LGBT audience roared at the awkward sight and its sly coding for sexual variance.

But you don’t have to be a lesbian to relate to a culture that makes you feel alien. And that’s the brilliance of films like Olnek’s, Garcia’s and Rees’. I am hopeful that the arrival of exciting new filmmakers like Olnek and Rees (Garcia is already well established–and isn’t a lesbian) will mean many more films with lesbian content that offer alternatives to the dominant white heterosexual narrative. And that’s good news for anyone who wants to see a wider breadth of stories about our lives, about human lives. There is a moral to this story, though: If we want to see this kind of work, we need to support it. Get thee to the movies. Popcorn optional.

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same is playing in Brooklyn, N.Y., at reRun Gastropub Theater through Thursday, Jan.12. It screens in Baltimore on Jan. 20 at the Creative Alliance Charm City LGBT Film Festival. Check back here for more screenings.

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In particular, I dreaded sitting through another graphic rape scene like the one in Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev‘s 2009 version of the film–a scene I described in my review as disquieting, intense and vicious. Hollywood being Hollywood, I expected the American version  to take the disturbing material to a new extreme. But when my editor asked me to review it, my curiosity overpowered my dread. In the theater I waited for the scene tensely, but when it came, I found I was able to stay in my seat throughout (unlike during Oplev’s)–though I did cover my eyes at points, because there are some things that we just don’t need to see.

From what I did see, it was graphic. But not as graphic nor as disturbing as in the Swedish film. And in the end the scene was, remarkably, the least remarkable aspect of the movie.

More noteworthy was the film’s interpretation of Lisbeth Salander, the famously feminist protagonist of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling novels. Many moviegoers, myself included, believed Noomi Rapace’s sharp interpretation of the seething, cunning Salander in the Swedish adaptation left little room for improvement. Her Salandar was pitiable and strong by turns, and always unapproachably cool. However, director David Fincher, writer Steven Zaillian and–especially–actor Rooney Mara created a much fuller version of Salander, one more complex and truer (I’m told) to the character in Larsson’s novels.

In fact, many of Fincher’s characters feel more developed than Niels Arden Oplev’s cut-and-dry versions. In Oplev’s hands, protagonist Mikael Blomkvist was stern and in charge, Salander confident and determined, while Salander’s sadistic guardian Nils Bjurman exuded villainy throughout.

[SPOILER ALERT: Some details of early events in the film are revealed below. TRIGGER ALERT: Descriptions of rape and violence.]

In the American version, everyone is a little more human and a little more flawed. Blomkvist, as played by Daniel Craig, can be a bit bumbling and passive, letting the women in his life steer its course. It makes sense that this Blomkvist, in a bungled effort to solve the mystery he’s been working on, sends himself into into the villain’s clutches and requires rescue. Bjurman, the guardian who beats and rapes Salander (in the scene I dreaded watching), seems mild-mannered and harmless in some contexts and sadistic in others, like many real-life villains. He viciously assaults Salander, but does so with an entitled nonchalance, and afterwards acts gentle, almost apologetic. This is the reality of abusers: They are pathetic, vacillating between violence and tenderness in an ugly cycle that can confound and entrap their victims.

Salander’s character is by far the most developed, not least because Fincher gives her more on-screen time than Oplev and makes a point of explaining her history. At the film’s outset, she’s a nervous, insecure young woman with a rage problem. Shoulders hunched, she avoids eye contact and accidental touch, and when she knows that she’ll have to interact with someone—say, at work—she carefully crafts her appearance to intimidate and distance. When a man in the subway steals her backpack, she doesn’t react immediately, seemingly afraid of confrontation. When she does decide to go after him, hitting and kicking him on an escalator and snatching her bag, she then runs away—fast—into a train car. Rather than relishing the violence, she appears upset and frightened by it.

She changes after she gets her revenge on Bjurman, the guardian. (She sodomizes him with a dildo and tattoos “I am a rapist pig” on his chest and stomach.) After this, her aversion to eye contact slowly diminishes and her appearance thaws. When she once relied exclusively on computers and other technology to do her research, she now opts for face-to-face interviews.

I won’t argue, as some might, that she is empowered by raping her attacker. Rather, I imagine that her increasing confidence derives from the realization that, if the men in her society can so easily get away with victimizing women, women can just as easily get away with punishing those men. In a sick way, the playing field is leveled.

This lends all the more poignancy to Blomkvist’s first request of her: “I want you to help me catch a killer of women,” he says. Judging from Salander’s expression, it’s a “click” moment.

As their relationship develops, Salander grows increasingly self-assured and confident. By the end of the film, she acknowledges, herself, that she’s a different person than she was in the beginning—even as Blomkvist remains the charmingly clumsy man he’s always been. This is perhaps the biggest difference between the Swedish and American adaptions. In the former, Oplev paints Salander as a sort of superhero figure—an enigma with a mysterious, checkered past who has finally found an outlet for her rage. Fincher, by contrast, gives us a Salander in transformation—a woman whose personal tragedies and retaliations have set her on a road to realizing her human potential. Like many real-world feminists, she’s still figuring out how to translate her rage into constructive change and, as she does so, she begins to understand herself.

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They had us at “Girl Power.”

That was the title of their opening song, which told the story of the women’s movement from the suffragists to the present day. Unabashed enthusiasm, combined with serious research, is characteristic of the work of the Collective. Their willingness to tackle complicated material makes their earnestness all the more impressive. In a half-hour performance of material written entirely by the Girls–including skits, spoken word, song and dance–the Collective brought their audience face-to-face with the issues that young women face everyday: body image, sexuality, how to compete in sports,  even the lack of good roles for women in the performing arts. Their full-length performances also take on rape in the Congo and human trafficking.

Started by Ashley Marinaccio and run by Marinaccio and her partner, Executive Director and Producer Jessica Greer Morris, Project Girl Performance Collective is on an urgent mission to empower girls and raise the status of women by creating a safe space for girls to write and perform their own work. The group currently has 90 members who, through workshops and performances, learn to create positive change in their communities and their own lives. They perform in theaters, colleges, high schools and middle schools around the country. When the group left our office, they were on their way to a United Nations Foundation event to perform a cutting-edge show about forced child marriage in the Ethiopia, Liberia Guatemala and Malawi event. They have even performed at the White House.

A talk-back after the performance gave an eager audience of feminists the chance to thank the Girls for breaking up our work day with a glimpse of something that reminded us of why we do what we do. Deanna (18), Karen (20), Dominique (20), Emily (22) and Monica (16) spoke articulately about the goals of their Collective and what it has meant to them. The answers they gave when we asked what they meant when they used the word “empowerment” (which they did often and emphatically) provide a glimpse into their maturity and devotion to the cause:

Karen: What’s empowerment? It’s finding something deep down inside yourself that makes you want to wake up.

Deanna: Empowerment is being inspired and inspiring others.

Dominique: My mother. My education. Knowing more.

Emily: Empowerment is also a movement. We spark something–we ignite it–and it runs through us to you and you pass it on.

Although feminism is implicit in everything the Girls do, they don’t always use the word (don’t worry–the Ms./FMF staff did some schooling!) But we couldn’t help but enjoy Monica’s answer to the question, “Do you call yourselves feminists?”

I call myself a Shero.

Read more about them, sign your daughter up for an audition, give to their cause or book them for a performance now. They will ignite your spirit, and you will want to pass it on.

TOP: Photo of Project Girl Performance Collective in front of the Ms. office. From left to right: founder and artistic director Ashley Marinaccio and performers Monica Furman, Deanna Alexandra, Karen Vigo, Emily Rupp and Dominique Fishback. BOTTOM: Jessica Greer Morris and Ashley Marinaccio.

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But as this year’s Top 10 lists started to roll out, I saw the same old problems: more lists skewed heavily male than vice versa, and very few publications bold enough to put a female artist in the #1 slot. So I decided to come up with a list of my own.

The following list of 10 great albums put out by female artists and all-female bands is not meant to be definitive or objective: Think of it as a guided stroll through one person’s experience listening to music in 2011. In presenting these albums this way, I don’t want to suggest that they’re similar because they were all made by women; instead, I’d like it to be a testament to the very different and very awesome sounds that women in music are making right now.

Julianna Barwick—The Magic Place. Ambient pioneer Brian Eno once said he strives to make music that “tints the air” around him; Julianna Barwick makes music that tints the soul. Using little more than layered vocal loops and a whole lot of reverb, Barwick’s soundscapes are things of misty and evocative beauty. (Some have gone so far to crown her The New Enya, a title she’s laughed off in interviews.) Like the best ambient compositions or a fresh coat of paint, her music has a way of transforming a room. I spent the summer of 2011 listening to Barwick’s music constantly, but also in a state of transience, moving between friends’ couches, hotel rooms and a half-empty apartment. When I needed to write, or feel grounded, or when everything just started to feel unfamiliar, I unfurled The Magic Place like an old rug. It still has a way of making the place I am, wherever it happens to be, sound like home.

Coasting—You’re Never Going Back. Coasting, the Brooklyn duo of Madison Farmer and current Vivian Girls drummer Fiona Campbell, make largehearted, stomp-and-holler-along indie pop that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the early 90s K Records roster. I love the gleefully noisy sound of tracks like “Kids” and “Starts and Stays.” You’re Never Going Back has the messy energy of a live performance, with Farmer and Campbell playing off each other as the songs’ dynamism escalates.

EMA—Past Life Martyred Saints. Earlier in the year I wrote about how Erika M. Anderson’s first solo album, Past Life Martyred Saints, sounded like Dante singing along to an early Cat Power record: a personal, private, poetic remaining of Hell. That might sound bleak, but what makes Martyred Saints so compelling is the light that glints through the murk: “Breakfast” begins sounding wounded but builds into some kind of devotional (“You feel just like a priest to me,” Anderson sings; in the background someone musters the strength to clap along), “Butterfly Knife” finds something universal — and even compassionate — in self-destructive impulses (“I’ve been inside your bedroom/I’ve got the same scars, you see”) and the finale “Red Star” rejects the whole heartbreak-as-the-end-of-the-world thing. During the song’s smoldering climax, she’s defiant: “If you don’t love me/Someone will.”

Eleanor Friedberger—Last Summer. This debut solo album from Eleanor Friedberger is a scrapbook of sorts: a lyrical pastiche of the everyday banalities that shaped her experience when she first moved to New York in her early twenties, backed by the kind of retro-tinged piano-pop that a Peanuts character might dance to. I happen to love Friedberger’s other band, the zany, neo-prog duo the Fiery Furnaces, but I recognize their divisiveness; the band’s more experimental impulses can sometimes feel impenetrable and off-putting. So the great surprise of Last Summer is how breezy, inviting and relatable it is. Listening to Last Summer feels like reading a page from Friedberger’s diary, and sometimes (“Watch Footloose with the biggest bottle of vodka in the world”; look me in the eyes and tell me you haven’t been there) your own.

Julia Holter—Tragedy. L.A.-based experimental composer Julia Holter’s first album Tragedy sounds like the lost soundtrack to an old, decaying film. Holter’s said the piece is a reimagining of the myth of Hippolytus, but it’s got a definite Laurie Anderson vibe too (see: “Goddess Eyes”). Tragedy is a compelling listen that unites all sorts of disparate sounds and reference points into something that feels incredibly unique—definitely a rare feat these days. I can’t wait to hear what she comes up with next.

Household—Items. Googling Brooklyn trio Household’s debut album Items is a bit of a pain, but those who wade through the deluge of ironing board advertisements and Febreeze fan testimonials are in for a treat. Clocking in at a taut 18 minutes, Items is a post-punk throwback with some cheeky pop sensibility thrown in for good measure: tracks like “Why Baby” and “Never After” sound like Wire meets the Waitresses. My personal favorite, “Go Away” finds the common ground between the appliances conjured by the band’s namesake and a robotic and passionless relationship: “Defective/Defective!”

Beyonce—4. The working title of my forthcoming memoir is Better Living Through Beyonce. There is a chapter that contains an email, plucked from the inbox of a few of your favorite Canonball contributors, in which I responded to the question “How was your night?” with a link to the video for “Best Thing I Never Had” and maybe a few choice lines quoted in capital letters (“You showed your ass and then I saw the real you” = pure pop poetry). There is an enclosed DVD of me and Ryan Gosling dancing to our wedding song “1+1″ (Hey girl, I don’t know much about guns, but I’ve been shot by you.) There is a full chapter detailing why I left him a few months later, when he demanded that I be all up in the kitchen in my heels (annulment time). There is a ten-page reverie about how much I love the part in “I Care” when she gets all Artist Formerly Known as Beyonce and sings along with the guitar solo. What we are talking about here is a woman with a voice powerful enough to make me reevaluate my stance on the song “Sex on Fire.” Disrespect her? No you won’t.

Laura Marling—A Creature I Don’t Know. British folk singer Laura Marling’s voice gets under my skin. It’s got this world-weariness that always makes me gasp a little bit when I remember that she was born the same year as my little sister (1990!); she sounds so much wiser than me. A Creature I Don’t Know is her third album; the songs sound like shanties and they move like the sea: crashing fury in some moments (“The Beast”) that lurch into peaceful calm (“All My Rage”). She’s got Joni Mitchell’s nimble fingers on the single “Sophia,” easily one of my favorite songs of the year.

tUnE-yArDs—w h o k i l l. “I haven’t tried to find a compromise between myself and others,” the filmmaker Chantal Akerman once said in an interview. “I have thought that the more particular I am, the more I address the general.” I kept coming back to this quote while listening to w h o k i l l, multi-instrumentalist Merrill Garbus’s eccentric and masterful second album. w h o k i l l is a pointed examination of self (Garbus’s undauntedly intimate lyrics focus on sex, violence, politics, and body image), but the chords it strikes are universal. With its gaze fixed on social divisions and economic inequality, w h o k i l l seemed by year’s end like one of pop music’s only honest statements on what it felt like to be an American in 2011. My favorite record of the year by a mile.

Wild Flag—Wild Flag. “I felt like I was standing beneath an airplane right after take-off,” I wrote the night I saw Wild Flag live for the first time in April 2011–back before the release of their debut album. Everyone left their early performances wondering whether they’d be able to replicate the turbine whoosh of their live show on a record, but somehow, they found a way. Wild Flag is more than just the best rock record of the year, it’s a document of music as a life force. “We sing to free ourselves from the room,” they proclaim on “Romance,” while former Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein documents her enduring urge to rock out on “Future Crimes:” “I can’t turn it down/Or make it quiet.” Though Brownstein, Rebecca Cole, Mary Timony, and Janet Weiss could easily rest on the stellar reputation of their previous bands, their first record together was a testament to the power of punk rock in the present tense. Of so many great, inspiring and all too rare things, Wild Flag are living proof.

This list was excerpted from Cannonball’s list of “20 Best 2011 Albums (That Happened to Be Made by Women)”. Click here to see the rest.

 Photo of Wild Flag from Flickr user henofthewood under Creative Commons 2.0

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Terrence Malick’s visually exquisite The Tree of Life–depicting both the creation and destruction of the world– is already topping many critics’ lists for best film of the year, and it joins such illustrious films as Lars von Triers’ nihilistic Melancholia and Jeff Nichols’ paranoid psychodrama Take Shelter. All retell stories of the Apocalypse through psychic, metaphysical and emotional landscapes instead of through the usual shock-and-awe big-screen explosions. No nuclear clouds or buildings collapsing here; instead, we witness the sheer loneliness of humanity when it’s up against a mysterious, jaw-droppingly immense and indifferent universe.  Somewhere in these imaginings, I gather, is a real fear–not so much of death, but of the loss of meaning and value.

While I could meditate on the visual metaphors and breathtaking beauty of nature rendered in these three films, what really strikes me about these end-time dramas is less the destruction of our planet and more the end of our worldview and the way in which our relationships function. These films seem most anxious about the failure of patriarchy and, thereby, the end of its influence on the way we do marriage, family, community and society.

How much of this anxiety is the artistic manifestation of the impending doom felt around the world, from the global economic crisis to a black president in the White House (Armageddon to some!) to the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to strange weather to various natural disasters? For those of us who view time as a linear narrative, there seems to be a forward march to the precipice.  But what exactly are we envisioning as “the end”?  The end to what?

Malick’s celebrated yet divisive film offers a clue. In many ways, The Tree of Life is an ode, or requiem, for a lost brother who committed suicide. It begins with an epitaph from Job 38:4–

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?… When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Malick invokes the almost divaesque, unsympathetic voice of God, who just can’t be bothered with our human frailties and our limited questioning about what we deserve or don’t deserve.  After all, She–and from the many images of ethereal white womanhood set against the natural environment and the expansive universe, in which there is no visual distinction between womb and deep space, I suspect our filmmaker is more enamored with a westernized Goddess than with a Judeo-Christian God–is too busy keeping planets afloat and galaxies colliding and volcanoes erupting and rushing waters flowing onto the shores of Eternity.

This cosmic view then shapes the more humane story of Malick’s childhood memories of growing up with his brothers in 1950s’ Waco, Texas, and of the almost godlike view children hold of their parents before they fall from the Grace of the rigid order, rules and domination of the Father (played by Brad Pitt) and the soft, playful, pure and righteous virtue of the Mother (played by an almost Pre-Raphaelite-looking Jessica Chastain). While Malick eventually reveals the shortcomings and failings of the Father, his view of his ageless Mother remains enigmatic. Too bad he didn’t have a sister to make womanhood more human.

While Malick suggests that there is no answer to death, or even to the meaning of life, his final end-times resurrection scene–in which Sean Penn’s character reunites with his dead brother, mother, father and a host of other people who have brushed up against him in life–reminds us that our connections to each other and the memory of those connections is all we have. “Love. Hope. Wonder,” his Mother teaches him. “No one who loves the way of Grace will come to a bad end,” she also says (that’s what the nuns taught her). And thus we find the dilemma of either living life through “Nature” or through “Grace.” Yet the way Malick films nature, it’s never quite distinctive which is which. After all, he visually suggests, is there anything more “full of Grace” than the violent lava flow of a volcano or the inevitable hurling of a comet onto planet Earth, which destroys the dinosaurs?

Perhaps the real dance between grace and nature resides in a child’s worldview as he experiences the awe and wonder of the natural environment even as he glimpses moments of class and racial inequalities or witnesses male rage against women and children behind closed doors. Through these sights and sounds, he senses the unfairness of the social order of things.  Of course he later learns from the Father that power and domination matter more than justice. And yet, the Mother teaches him that compassion and love, not power and domination, must prevail. Are we witnessing God’s view or a child’s view of the failure of patriarchy? And is this failure inevitable in an apocalyptic tale?

[SPOILER ALERT--The following contains spoilers for the films Melancholia and Take Shelter.]

Speaking of the inevitable, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia really hits home the banality and ineffectuality of patriarchy and our capitalist system. In an impressive portrayal as Justine, a depressed bride on her wedding day, Kirsten Dunst functions as a Cassandra-like prophet within a world of mundane elitism, soon to end with the impending collision between planet Melancholia and planet Earth. While von Trier fetishizes Dunst through even more Pre-Raphaelite allusions (think John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia”) and the more erotic rendering of her nude body lit by Melancholia’s light, it is to Dunst’s credit that she imbues her character Justine with a realism determined to shatter the romance of society and its impending doom. First is her disastrous wedding, planned meticulously by her fussy and overly anxious sister Claire (played to quiet hysteria by Charlotte Gainsbourg) and financed by her tight-fisted brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland). At every turn, Justine passive-aggressively resists the rituals of the day–wandering off more than once from the wedding reception, refusing her handsome bridegroom (played by a rather patient Alexander Skarsgard) on their wedding night and engaging in random sex with one of the wedding guests on the same grounds where she had earlier urinated in her lovely bridal gown.

Perhaps von Trier’s comment on these social niceties is less Book of Revelation and more Ecclesiastes (“Vanity of vanities.  All is vanity”), but while all others immediately panic with the oncoming planet, Justine fully embraces it with a calm and cool cynicism: “The earth is evil.  No one will miss it.” And so she goes about preparing for the end times by making a game of it with her young nephew. They build “magic sticks” as a pretense of building a “safe shelter.”

If one views the film like an optimist who believes in salvation, one can choose to interpret the end in this way: It’s all Claire’s fault. After all, it is Claire, who breaks the magic circle–they had joined hands and closed their eyes underneath the magic sticks as if to ward off the spell of the oncoming planet–as she loses her resolve and lets go of the hands of her sister and son to cover her ears from the sound of the approaching planet. One could argue, as did I, the perpetual optimist, that had Claire maintained enough faith as her young son they might have been spared.

Of course von Trier is no optimist, and we are left with this message: There is no safe space. There is no shelter. There is no magic. Just our inevitable doom.

Finally, Nichols’ Take Shelter certainly plays with the theme of “no shelter.” Michael Shannon magnificently portrays Curtis, a man plagued by recurring nightmares of an approaching storm. Like a Noah building an ark, much to the dismay of his neighbors he begins to build a storm shelter in the hopes of protecting his wife (played by the ubiquitous and capable Jessica Chastain) and his young hearing-impaired daughter.  The movie keeps us guessing if Curtis is indeed a prophet or a raving lunatic who needs to treat his oncoming schizophrenia (perhaps inherited from his mentally ill mother), as in a scene at a church social when he lets loose like a Jeremiah hurling curses and warnings to an unbelieving community. In the process, he loses his job, his friends, his benefits and almost his family.  However, a woman saves the day: His wife stands by her man, gets him the help he needs and still manages to help the family save enough money to go on vacation.

If The Tree of Life and Melancholia highlight the banalities of patriarchy and society, Take Shelter asks us to put our faith back into our intuition (usually associated with women), to accept our maternal gifts (even as they veer off from patriarchal rationality), to listen to our inner voices when all others call us crazy and, most of us all, to surround ourselves with love.

So, what are the “end times” about in these movies?  They seem to be telling us to stop worrying, stop fretting, stop residing in rational thinking and just embrace death and doom as eagerly as we embrace love. The Tree of Life reassures us that nothing ever ends on the “shore of Eternity,” Melancholia tells us to create our own magic and Take Shelter urges us to trust our dreams. Much like Xicana feminist Cherrie Moraga, whose play New Fire: To Put Things Right Again re-imagines the Mayan 2012 prophecy not through end-time destruction but through new beginnings, I tend to view the Apocalypse as the dismantling of one worldview and the beginning of a new one. Any film that dares to dismantle the way we organize family, community and society, and to rebuild with love as a foundation, is certainly sending a message that my feminist heart can embrace.

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In her private moments, young-adult-fiction writer Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a deflated sad sack holding off failure with booze and memories. On top of that, she is an ethical mess, hellbent on stealing her ex-boyfriend away from his happy home and newborn child.

Cody (writer of Juno) knew exactly what she was risking with such a lead, as she told feminist blog Women and Hollywood:

The conventional knowledge in Hollywood is that an unsympathetic female character can tank a movie. I’m hoping that’s not true. I’m knocking on wood really emphatically right now but honestly I have a lot of theories sometimes I wonder if it comes down to mommy issues. The idea of a cold, unlikeable woman or a woman who is not in control of herself is genuinely frightening to people because it threatens civilization itself or threatens the American family. But I don’t know why people are always willing to accept and even like flawed male characters.We’ve seen so many lovable anti-heroes who are curmudgeons or addicts or bad fathers and a lot of those characters have become beloved icons and I don’t see women allowed to play the same parts. So it was really important to me to try and turn that around.

In one way, Mavis is a pre-packaged trope, ready for film: the rich, popular bitch. But her character is expanded well beyond the flatness of many filmic female roles. Mavis’s life is full of extremely recognizable clutter and delusion. Her web browser is stuffed with open tabs about avoided emails and undone work. Relatable, too, is the complexity of her beautiful mask. Great pains are taken to catalogue the immense effort she puts into her appearance; we see piles of wigs, loads of cosmetics and plenty of dissatisfaction. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more violent portrayal of a manicure.

Throughout, the film serves as a brilliant indictment of pop culture narratives of success and consumption, underscored by its reality TV soundtrack. The films opens with the sobs of real-life reality star Kendra Wilkinson–weeping about not feeling beautiful–played in the background as Mavis lies passed out in her mildly luxurious and severely dirty apartment. Everything in Mavis’s world is covered with a patina of filth. In a wonderful touch, even the mouse pad of her white laptop is smudged, as are her car stereo buttons. The emphasis on physical disarray marries nicely with all those Kardashians. Reality TV sells luxury, and yet the homes it portrays are as cluttered with fast-food cups and loose mail as anyone else’s. The movie revels in pointing out, again and again, the lack of glamor in the lives of those selling us their own glamorous narratives.

The film is full of abject images, especially body fluids: spit, oozing wounds, breast milk, clipped cuticles. And the mundanity of those fluids grounds Mavis, saving her from man-stealer cliches like Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction (though the two share similar goals, if different means). The women who appear as “ideal” in Young Adult aren’t fembots, accomplished at the feminine tricks that Mavis is drowning in. Instead, they are comfortable in their lives and bodies, however unfashionable those might be.

There are some other refreshing inversions in the movie: The babysitter is a man; the rock band is a group of moms; disability is treated with a wild disregard for sentimentality; the one sex scene has (gasp!) unflattering lighting.

Young Adult is about the tension between performance and reality in American life. While Mavis is victim to her own myth-making, it is a great relief to see a film like Young Adult pick that cultural wound without making our protagonist into a heroine or a monster. She is a mess. Hallelujah.

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The seamless fusion of sound and poetry that has captivated fans of for colored girls for over 30 years is historicized in the slim collection. To be sure, some readers may find the book’s free-floating form and structure less than inviting. The three-part division by theme–into drama, poetry, and lyricism; then movement; and finally, feeling–would benefit from dates or other contextual markers to anchor the accounts.

But those looking for a window into Shange will find much to rivet them. In addition to recounting the origins of her famous choreopoem-turned-stage play, Shange considers black aesthetics more broadly. She challenges the long-held dictum that black artists must first be propagandists:

we assume a musical solo is a personal statement/ we think the poet is speakin for the world/ there’s something wrong there, a writer’s first commitment is to the piece itself. how the words fall & leap/ or if they dawdle & sit down fannin themselves. writers are dealing with language, not politics. that comes later.

And politics do come into Shange’s reveries, such as the arresting prose poem, “my pen is a machete.” In it, Shange recalls her impulse to “deform n maim” the English language, “the language that I waz taught to hate myself in/ the language that perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as s/he learns to speak of the world and the ‘self.’” Indeed, Shange’s entire oeuvre has used unique script and turns of phrase as weapons against a sexist and racist literary tradition. Her pen has served her well as an instrument for exorcising anger and grief, among other emotions.

Shange lays bare these politicized emotions in the last section of her memoir, where she takes on her bouts of depression, stints in therapy, the loss of her father, the memory of her mother’s laughter, the “allure of silk” and the sting and pleasure of heterosexual love. The final section is perhaps the most potent in this schizophrenic assemblage of song, rant and cry, as it offers rare insight into the feelings of an artist who has shielded her inner workings from the public eye. “It’s not that I’m a recluse, it’s that my intimates are words & notes,” write Shange in the prologue. Given that, this memoir of language and sound is truly a sharing of intimacies.

The new issue of Ms. contains an exclusive first look at “letter to a young poet,” an original poem from Lost in Language and Sound. Pick up the issue on newsstands, or join Ms. to have it delivered to your door!

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This holiday weekend, I took my three daughters, ranging from age 2 through age 8, to Puss In Boots. The animation was beautiful. The music was fabulous. But the stars were the boys. The movie centered on Puss’s quest; it was his adventure. Like so many kids’ movies, Puss In Boots is a male buddy movie, in this case about Puss’s relationship with Humpty Dumpty. Kitty Softpaws is a great female character, but the movie clearly belongs to Puss and Humpty.

A couple days later I took my kids to see Happy Feet 2. (It was a long, rainy weekend.) In that film, girls fared even worse. Happy Feet 2 is–surprise, surprise–centered on male relationships; it’s a father-son saga about the penguin Mumble, and his kid Eric. But the movie also features no fewer than three subplots, all three about male relationships. As in Puss In Boots, there is a strong female character, Bo the penguin, but her part was so small that I had trouble even catching her name.

Other choices for kids movies this holiday season? Hugo; Adventures of Tintin; Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked; Arthur Christmas. Notice anything about the gender of the characters in those titles? Where are the female leads? Last year, Disney actually switched the title of Rapunzel to Tangled specifically to avoid highlighting the female star. Disney did this with no shame at all, giving interviews to media outlets about their decision, and received practically no protest. What message does this blatant sexism send to kids?

As the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media has found, the more media a girl views, the fewer options she thinks she has in life. The more boys watch, the more sexist their views become.

Keep in mind, we’re not just talking about movies. These film characters go on to appear in toys, clothing, food products and video games. When male stars in kids movies are ubiquitous and girls go missing, the gender programming spreads into every aspect of their lives. That’s bad for all kids and the adults they will become. It’s like First Lady training–smile, cheer, be loyal on the sidelines to the male star.

My blog, Reel Girl, rates movies on how appropriate they are for kids. Movies get from one to three “S”s for “stereotyping” and from one to three “G”s for “girlpower.” Here are the criteria I use:

1. Is the movie titled for a male star?
2. Is the movie centered around the quest of a male?
3. Are the females in the movie helping the male achieve his goal?
4. Which character goes through a transition?
5. What is the ratio of males to females? Main roles? Crowd scenes?
6. What are the females wearing? Does their clothing expose belly buttons and other body parts?
7. How many lines do the female characters have?
8. How many of the females’ lines have to do with what they’re wearing, what they look like, romantic relationships, or shopping?
9. How many of the males refer to the females only in reference to romance and how they look?
10. How do the females in the movie interact with each other? Do they interact at all?
11. How are female friendships depicted in the movie? Are there any?
12. Is a female character rescued by a male character?
13. Does a female character make a rescue?
14. What heroic acts or acts of bravery do the female characters perform?

So what can you do if these questions yield many “S”s and very few “G”s? Mostly, I don’t suggest forbidding your kids from watching films. There are some I will not show my kids, and there are many I won’t pay for, but kids live in the world just like we all do. Most of their friends will have seen them, be talking about them, and acting out the characters on playdates. Even if you don’t take them to the movies, they’ll see the characters as toys, or on diapers or cereal boxes. So my advice is to teach kids not to be passive receptacles of media. Studies have shown that discussing sexist media with kids can help inoculate them against its effects. The questions on this list aren’t for young kids but for their parents. When you talk to your kids, bring up these issues, and talk about why this matters.

Re-printed from Reel Girl

Photo by flickr user hoyasmeg under Creative Commons 2.0

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