Women, guns, double standards and censorship
About six weeks ago, I was invited by an acquaintance (who is a performance artist/burlesque performer) to participate in a ‘live’ performance about inspirations that have influenced my practice as a film artist. As described by its creator, here is what was posted about the event on Facebook:
The reproductions could include a moment, person or experience that has been pivotal to the practice of this evening’s clever mortals; whether it be but a mere ephemeral occurrence or a colossal download, a trivial introduction or a sudden fascination. While it’s more of a common practice to create visual reproductions, what happens when those who are inclined to perform decide to reproduce? The end result may be a replica, but then again it could be a piece that’s been taken in, chewed, swallowed and hurled up just right… Whatever the result of a reproduction is, is up to one’s own volition.
I met with this young woman — I’ll call her Dawn (not her real name) — to discuss the idea. I told her what I wanted to do was direct actors in scenes ‘reproduced’ from two films that have critically influenced me. Those films are Wanda, directed by Barbara Loden and Vagabond, directed by Agnès Varda. I told her I have always been fascinated by women characters who stray from the cultural norm of ‘womanhood’ — outlaws and outliers, the marginalized and disadvantaged. She was enthusiastic and supportive of the idea (I thought).
Having never directed anything for ‘live’ performance, I went away excited to see what I could do with this challenge. I worked on a script. I cast two actors. We made rehearsal schedules. And I went to great lengths to obtain the exact right props.
One of those props was a gun.
Now some qualifications, lest you think the inclusion of a gun as a prop was some kind of off-the-cuff, reflex decision for me.
First, I deplore weapons of all kinds. I’m a confirmed, unapologetic pacifist. Yes, I once went with a friend to a shooting range. And, yes, I took a couple of shots at a target (and enjoyed the precision needed to hit it). But a gun enthusiast, I definitely am not.
Second, I had previously used a gun only once before as a prop in a film, for a short titled 20/20. This post-apocalyptic tale about a group of survivors seeking refuge from a deadly suicide virus was made in 2010 and screened for a local event called Damnationland.
I wrote a script in which a (prop) gun changes hands several times and is finally used only to save the life of one of the characters.
When it screened, the film was deemed by audience and critics alike as not bloody enough and/or too dramatic to be considered a true horror film. We were confused and, yes, hurt by the response.
Meanwhile, it should be noted that the film from that year’s selections that received effusive critical praise and lots of attention for the performance of its lead actor was one in which his character spends 14 torturous minutes strangling one grotesquely-portrayed female character after another. Now that is horror.
Fast forward to the fall of 2013. We decide to produce a ‘spy story’ script I’d written. In one scene, a character makes a drop of classified materials on the roof of a parking garage where another character lies in wait (with a prop gun) to stop him. A foot chase ensues with one character ‘shooting’ at the other, but no characters are even hit, much less killed by gunfire. The character escapes and the gunman is unsuccessful. And no actual shots were ever intended to be fired during filming— I wouldn’t know how or even want to use an actual gun shooting blanks anyway.
When I went to the city of Portland, Maine to get permission to shoot this scene at a municipal garage, I was refused. Why? Because the manager of the parking garage said it was films like ours which had led to public perception that parking garages aren’t safe.
He had never read the script and knew nothing about the story or context in which the scene was played out.
When I pointed that out and took the matter further, he told me that if our story was ‘nicer’ we could have used the location, but the answer was still no.
In the end, after taking the story to a local paper and making a convincing argument to some city councilors, we were finally given permission, but by the time it came, our window of opportunity had passed and we were forced to shut down production of the film. C’est la vie. I guess.
Cut to: this past Saturday. It’s 5:30 and we show up at the performance venue to do a run-through. When I arrive with my two (female) actors, I pull Dawn aside to mention that we will be using a prop gun and she might want to give a ‘common sense’ warning about its use to the audience that evening (to be on the safe side). As soon as the words leave my mouth, it becomes clear that she is uncomfortable and she tells me she wishes I’d told her about the gun beforehand.
As I mentioned, we had already met, discussed my idea, and she’d even gone home and watched Wanda (the film in which a gun plays a part), but I hadn’t mentioned the gun prop because its use came into play later in the process of script development and frankly, it never crossed my mind that, given the context, it would be a problem.
So, I was shocked. Was she implying that I should have gotten her OK on my script? If that had been the case, I wouldn’t have been interested in doing the performance in the first place.
And it never even occurred to me because, after all, in her own words: Whatever the result of a reproduction is, is up to one’s own volition.
Unless. Not.
At that point, I asked her if we could at least do the run-thru with the prop so she could see that what we were doing had nothing to do with gun violence. She reluctantly agreed, but I could feel a doomed sense of déjà vu.
Let me interject that I was quite sensitive to the fact that the shootings at UCSB had just happened and was trying my damnedest to be conscientious about what we were doing. In fact, I immediately assumed that this latest tragic incident of gun violence was the source of her discomfort. But I was also (stupidly) certain that once she saw how we were using the gun, all would become clear and whatever problem she was having about it would disappear.
So we do the run-thru with the prop gun. And that was the end of that. She pulled me aside and said we couldn’t use it. Most significantly, she said her objection wasn’t so much to the gun itself, but really to the line of dialogue that preceded it and the fact that one woman hands the other the gun, saying it implied that she was trying to get the other to commit suicide. (Not even close. Yet obviously I can’t control how any one individual will interpret a piece of reproduced drama.)
I reminded her that she’d seen the film/scenes that we were ‘reproducing,’ and that the gun had nothing to do with suicide, that the character puts down the gun, refusing to use it — that, in fact, it was the character’s repudiation of violence that we were portraying.
She said she understood but that, in the film, ‘there is a build up of 20 minutes of narrative to the use of the gun,’ and she was nevertheless opposed. (We were given a 5-7 minute limit for our performance.)
So the gun prop was out. She said that she (I assume as a burlesque performer) was used to offering trigger warnings about sexual content, but this was a whole different thing.
Do I really need to list the titles of films currently (or previously) in wide theatrical release that portray mayhem and gun violence without any trace of social responsibility or equivocation? Do I need to point out that many of the most popular shows on TV are filled with violence (perpetrated particularly against women) using a full range of weaponry? Do I need to remind anybody that, despite the prevalence of actual gun violence in this country, enacting effective gun control is out of the question for most politicians as they bow to pressure from gun interests?
Well, at that point, we had committed a lot of time and effort to the piece. After talking it over, though upset about what we all immediately experienced as unfair and blatant censorship, my actors were willing to improvise alternative actions, so we went forward without the prop gun.
Since we left directly after our own run-through to discuss our alternatives in private, we didn’t see what the other performers had in store, but once the program began that evening and as it went on, it became evident (at least to me) that our piece didn’t fit, that we were (once again) out of sync with everybody else.
And irony piled upon irony: Dawn’s opening performance piece was a monologue in which a character (dressed in sexually provocative clothing) uses a guitar as a club to kill a young man and a sorority girl and threatens to kill her parents with it.
Huh?
So a sexy, guitar murderess is OK, but a disadvantaged woman who’s been exploited by a desperate man into a life of crime is not.
As I try (not altogether successfully) to make sense of this experience, to place it into the general context of some of the sexism I’ve endured as a woman filmmaker for the past 20 years, it is clear to me that something is going on here.
When I make a film about people killing themselves, it’s not ‘horrible’ enough.
When I write a film in which a man uses a gun incompetently, it’s too ‘violent.’
When I write a performance piece, recreating scenes from films made in 1970 and 1984, in which a woman hands another woman a gun, it’s too ‘disturbing.’
If these examples don’t indicate the application of a double standard, censorship, and sexism, what would?
Are women artists held to standards that are simultaneously shifting and impossible to meet no matter the situation or gender of those setting the standards?
All I know is that I don’t know the answer. But I wish I did.
