“Without a language for it, there is a gaping silence, and in that silence is the real horror”, narrates Autje (Kate Hallet) and one of the youngest victims of the harrowing sexual violence perpetutated on the women, young and old alike, in the colony of which Women Talking takes place. They are led to believe they are being processed by demons for not praying enough or being following the duties said to be ordained by God in their community. The realization that it is not demons or possessions, but instead their male relatives and friends who have been tranquilizing them at night and viololating them strikes a harsh dissonant chord, the film cuts to the after effects of the attacks, blood curdling screams from the victims as they wake up with blood on their nightgowns, sheets, one even having a miscarriage and terrified as she believes shes bleeding to death, and shaking the very foundation of the beliefs of the colony. These despicable acts of violation upend everything the women and many of the men have thought to be the divine truth ordained by God and coming to terms with the fallout crafts the bulk of the narrative, which finds the Women conversing and voting on whether to leave the colony and all they have known For the first quarter of the film, the audience is then drawn to reality when a truck driver passes the colony playing a contemporary song, the creeping horror sets in for the audience that this act is not a part of a long forgotten beastly part of the past, but a part of the modern present.
The titular Women, with the main group consisting of Ona, Salome, Mariche (Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, and Jessie Buckley) are forced to choose whether to forgiven their rapists and be guaranteed a pathway into the kingdom of Heaven, or to refuse and be banished from the colony for life with the gateway to Heaven closed. Tension is spun into the narrative as the men of the colony have gone to the town where the assailants are locked up to post bail and will be back in a day or two. Only that short amount of time is granted the women to decide if they will leave all they know to settle into a new life to obtain safety for themselves and their children. The note taker August (Ben Whishaw) is the notable exception to the colonies’ male population, being portrayed as sensitive and never trying to talk over the women. His presence provides an excellent counter balance to the true toxic men of the colony, and provides hope to the women as he grew up as part of the outside world of the colony.
The book upon which the film was adapted is based in the harrowing true case of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, but Polley wisely chooses not to name the colony as part of the Mennonite faith so that the audience will not ascribe a certain religious belief system as being inherently sexist or capable of producing monsters upon hapless women. Every society whether, advanced or not, is capable of producing men who indulge in toxic masculinity, drawn towards perpetuating horrific acts against the innocent female, male, trans and cis, because if they are taught to dismiss their feelings, its much easier then to dismiss the feelings of others. Instead of leaving the audience feeling despair about the human condition, Polley gives the audience hope in the communal friendship and families that come together to comfort each other in the face of the evils of the world. Grade: A-. See it.
The Quiet Girl (2022) is an emotionally life affirming social drama that harkens to the works of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh in its evocation of social realism, and it is remarkable that this is the first theatrical film directed by Colm Bairéad. Bairéad masterfully directs first time actress Catherine Clinch (Cait) in a devastatingly heart wrenching performance that will tug at your heart strings. I found myself wanting to leap from my seat to hug the poor girl and affirm to her that everything will be okay. Thankfully, salvation comes in the form of her cousins who take the young girl in for the summer of 1981 Ireland, Eibhlín and Seán Cinnsealach (Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennet). They pamper her, teach her how to work their farm, dress her, and give her the childhood she could never receive in her home a striking contrast that is conveyed with the color grading, as Cait’s rural Ireland home is shot in tones of gray, while the countryside of Ireland is awash in striking hues of yellow and orange, reflecting a rebirth for Cait . Another striking contrast is also the choice of language spoken, as Eibhlín and Seán always speak to Cait in her native Gaelic while her neglectful and brutish father Athair (Michael Patric) refuses to speak in the native Gaelic, always speaking in English, the language of the colonizers and Thatcher sympathizers. These minute details may be lost too many American viewers, but are there to enrich the experience and breathe life into this affirming story and combine together to make one of the most exceptional films of the year. A Quiet Girl was one of the winners of this year’s Audience award at the 919 Film Festival and a well deserved win overall. Grade: A-. See it.
The 919 Film Festival opened with what many would consider a surefire crowd pleaser that did very little for me once the layers of saccharine sentimentality and sanitized war scenes were unmasked to reveal a very poorly crafted propaganda piece for the US Navy corps masquerading as a feel good bromance. The script falls into the trappings of trying to be so politically correct to modern sensibilities that the film wants you to believe the Marines were almost a bastion of racial tolerance in the 1950s except for a few microagressions. Jonathen Majors is the stand out of the film as Jesse Brown, the first Black man in the aviator program in the Navy, while Glen Powell is unfortunately sidelined in the woefully underwritten role of Tom Hudner. This is a film that depends on viewers to believe a fanciful notion that a proxy war is necessary and that joining the Navy will be a benefit instead of a form of being sacrificed for the military industrial complex. A fallacious propaganda piece that is destined to be used as a recruitment tool for future recruits, especially for young disenfranchised Black youth who will come to falsely believe that dying for their the United States (which continues to slide further back to Jim Crow era politics in present day) is a great honor and not the egregious tragedy it clearly is. Grade: D. Skip it.
“You were making music at the same time as Dolly (Parton) so to me, you are just as important to music as Dolly”, Brandi Carlile tells her inspiration Tanya Tucker in a heartwarmingly bolstering scene that rejuvenates Tucker in the recording studio for her first album in a decade leading to her singing “Bring My Flowers Now” the song that would win Tucker her elusive first Grammy, after decades of singing. The documentary The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile(2022), is replete in these genuine moments that emotionally resonate, as we become just as much of a fan of Tanya Tucker as singer Brandi Carlile is, as just like Brandi, we revel in Tuckers’ long overdue success as the documentary conveys.
Tanya Tucker may not have the same world renown of her contemporaries Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Loretta Lynn, and this documentary seeks to rectify it. Director and producer Kathlyn Horan wants the audience to emotionally resonate with Tucker’s comeback, spearheaded by American Singer-Songwriter Brandi Carlile, who single handedly created the music and lyrics for Tanya’s album, wishing just as much as the audience to see this indelible icon step up to the mic. The documentary barely touches upon the more sordid details of Tanya Tucker’s life, especially her scandalous relationship with Glen Campbell, a man two decades her senior when she was just barely out of her teens, and it becomes an understandable decision as the documentary wants to posit the good in Tucker’s life, from the encouragement and protection granted to her from father when she was a burgeoning country star, to Carlile’s own pep talks about Tucker’s inherent talent in the studio and the documentary mostly succeeds on this aspect of the film. The film does not wish to dwell too long on the unsavory aspects of Tucker’s career, only the facets of Tucker’s life that enrich the film, a frustration for some, but a crowd pleasing measure nevertheless. Is it any wonder the film won the audience award at South by Southwest?
Another aspect of the film worth appreciating is the tireless efforts of producer and co-star Brandi Carlile, whose promotion to the the producer’s chair in only her second outing as a music producer in an inherently male dominated field is a marvel to behold. Carlile is as dispositionally ecstatic to work with her idol as we are to see them work together, and her calm and even temperament infuses the documentary with a calming, yet joyful tone that permeates from the frame. Carlile is conveying a form of musical artistry that does not need to be regulated to bombastic insults or furious screaming to convey the beauty of making music.
This film can almost function as the antithesis of The Beatles: Get Back (2020) in terms of temperament. The sweetness of bursting creativity and collaboration serves as a suitable dichotomy of the bitterness of the music documentaries conveying artistic disillusionment. This is a film that will make you want to believe in the beauty of music, and in the power of a long awaited return of musical legends.
While reading reviews for Tom Doyles’ newest biography on Kate Bush, Running Up that Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush (2022), I stumbled across a review that piqued my interest, and not in the way the critic intended. The excerpt in question:
I needed a moment to process the leaps in logic this critic had to go through to make this vastly incorrect take. Proclaiming all avant-garde art that sounds disjointed/experimental as “Dada” is so wrong and I wanted to take the time to explore the album that would be considered the most avant-garde in Kate Bush’s laudable discography The Dreaming (1982), and in brief summation, convey why this masterpiece of an album turned out the way it did, and also what the original critic gets wrong about Dadaism in general. So fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
First off, what is Dada? Dada was a collective art movement established post WWI to represent “nothingness” as the collective trauma of the world made art seem facile in retrospect and it’s a direct attack on bourgeois society aesthetic preferences. Kate was directly attacking an aesthetic, just not that one in particular. Not directly a bourgeois aesthetic. She was rebuking the labels of being a sex symbol, pretty faux-intellectual girl who was in actuality not as intelligent as her music made her seem. Cause a woman wearing a leotard for movement was obviously only meant to appeal to men apparently..
This was the prevailing image of her, a girl who only uses her intellect to appeal to horny men/dumb girls, not a serious artist. These were things said about her when she started at just 19. Sound familiar? A similar thing happened with Lady Gaga when she began too. Never mind that Lady Gaga was accepted to attend Juillard, was already a world renowned pianist with an indelible singing voice, who co-wrote every single one of her songs, but who cares, she wore a meat dress.
This image of Kate pervaded into the cultural zeitgeist of the late 1970s-early 1980s, in fact Rowan Atkinson’s Show Not the Nine O’Clock News (1979-1982) pariodied her in a sexist sketch that can only tastefully be called “subtle” in the mildest sense. (Apparently Kate was entertained by it enough that she would perform with Rowan for a comic relief sketch called “Do Bears….”)
Many did not take her seriously as a result of this interpretation of her work, even after co-producing her album Never for Ever, and writing every single one of her songs, so Kate basically said, “Enough, I’m tired of being labeled this way. I’m going to dive further into the madness.” And with her first solo produced album she could get away with it.
In a similar more modern perspective in viewing this, This was Kate Bush’s version of Taylor Swift’s divisive album Reputation(2017). Much like Swift proclaimed in “Look What You Made Me Do”, Kate was proclaiming the leotard wearing sex symbol is dead, demanding to be treated as a real artist. Unlike Swift, (Reputation is one of her weakest albums, and barely changed much from the hyper pop stylisation of her previous album 1989. Swift is not what one would call avant-garde/experimental, nor challenging, which is perfect for what her fanbase wants, but too milquetoast for my taste). Kate succeeded maybe too well for her fans to handle.
The UK hated it. She was using world music unfamiliar to her pre-established brand ,she was singing lyrics while drinking milk to produce mucus/deepen her voice to sing the sobbing Mrs. Houdini watching her husband drown before her eyes, singing from the perspective of a viet-cong soldier, letting the weirdness in, affecting cockney and later an Australian accent, harsh percussions, oscillating musical tones, and literally braying like a mule to scare away an intruder ingressing himself into her house. Bat for Lashes expressed her fear listening to the album in a BBC documentary, the palpable dread she felt, listening to Kate’s braying “Hee-Haw!!” as she figuratively turned into a mule in the final song “Get Out of My House” which conveyed the violation of the house as if Kate herself was the literal body of the house herself (and inspired by Stephen King’s book The Shining (1977) no less). “It was weird” is probably the briefest summation you could use to characterise the album, and has become my favorite Kate Bush album.
It was written off as if she’d gone mad, which she might agree with in some ways. But it found an audience in the US and many parts of Europe and even reached Number 3 in the UK album charts (a number Kate herself found worth celebrating, but the executives at EMI were discouraged by). It’s one of Bjork’s favorite albums, same with Big Boi. Ann Powers from NPR wrote about how it unleashed the monster within the feminine in this fantastic article I highly recommend reading.
Dada is meant to signify nothing and is meant to infuriate the audience or make them laugh at the absurdity. There is no narrative to Dada. Kate weaved narratives into her songs from the perspectives of different characters. Not all off-putting uncanny avant-garde art is Dada and to construe all avant-garde art like that to fit the purest definition of Dada is lazy shorthand.
The Urinal Dadaist piece entitled, The Fountain, that hilariously drives conservative art pundits insane.
So in summation, Kate Bush is not Dada, she is too normal to be Dada since there is a narrative structure, and cohesive themes to her many songs and albums. Dada signifies the “nothingness” of life itself. Kate Bush’s music signifies the way we can begin to comprehend ourselves from a myriad of perspectives to gain a deeper understanding of the world. I highly recommend listening to this hauntingly beautiful album and just in time for Halloween and I hope this helped with understanding what Dada is and why Kate Bush does not fit into that mold.
Superb Directing is Wasted on a Lackluster Script in the Film “Beast”
Written by Margaret “Molly” Rasberry on August 17th, 2022
*Light spoilers*
Beast from the beginning is plagued with narrative difficulties. The second scene opens with a nuisance dream sequence in a point of view shot, the audience is not privy yet to whose pov we are seeing, of a tunnel of indistinct Black woman dressed in Gomesi garb seemingly leading us to an end, before the screen turns black, and we hear Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) speaks a few nondescript words. An issue with this scene was that the film wants the audience to believe that these women are South African natives, wearing the clothing ascribed to their culture, while also wearing clothing native to East Africa, not South Africa and not relating to any particular tribe’s culture. This may seem like a nitpick or farcical issue to focus on, but seeing how the screenwriters (Ryan Engle, and Jaime Primak Sullivan) and director (Balthasar Komakur) have little to no connection to the South African diaspora, the neglect to finite detail such as this seems deliberate, and it is this neglect to these details that plague the film and overshadows the very impressive cinematography of Philippe Rousselot and, equally impressive blocking and direction from Komakur.
Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) has just lost his estranged wife to a nondescript sickness. We know it’s cancer, as the film clumsily exposits through Nate to his daughters in clunky exposition that feels like a conversation that was felt unwarranted and only written because the screenwriter feels the audience is not introspective enough to figure it out themselves. Wishing to reconnect with his daughters, eldest Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries), he takes them to his wife’s home in South Africa to visit the family friend Martin (Sharleto Copley). We can tell the family unit is strained by the way the eldest daughter posits that Samuels neglects to praise her photography skills, a hobby she took up from her deceased mother. The youngest daughter seemingly has no hobby to speak up besides gripping about the lack of Wifi and the heat in South Africa. The film does not inform the daughters nor the audience which part of South Africa they are in, but considering the landscape and lack of cities, and jeeps the characters drive, it is safe to surmise this is near or part of the Kruger National Park which is famous for its safaris excursions and gorgeous wildlife including lions. The film takes a darker turn during a safari when a rogue lion becomes a remorseless killing machine after poachers killed his pride, and as a result, this beast has started to hunt all humans. If this seems to thematically evoke films such as Jurassic Park(1993) and Jaws(1975), and copying the same shots in several pivotal scenes with the lion, this is an accurate summation for the viewer to make, as the film has the youngest daughter wear a Jurassic Park tank top in one short scene as a sly nod to the viewer. However, Spielberg had the benefit of a well written script and fine attention to details to make his monster movies where the patriarch needs to regain his pride by hunting the beast or saving his children narratives work, which this film lacks.
The film loves having characters state the obvious as the youngest daughter Norah, conveys after a lion attack, “That lion smashed up that window!” after we have already seen the lion do that exact action a few moments prior. The fantastic acting of the leads is the only thing that salvages the poor script and even then it’s a limiting consolation.
A laudable facet of the film is the impressive tracking shots and long takes by Rousselot and direction and the extensive blocking from Komakur is exceptional to behold. You almost wish the film was shot entirely during daylight because during the night sequences, a pernicious issue occurs with lighting where you can barely make out Elba, Halley, and Jeffries in these sometimes somber and tense moments. If it was to obscure the lion overall that would be a clever deliberate choice, but since this pernicious issue is also seen in quiet introspective moments it becomes jarring. Hollywood historically has had many issues lighting Black faces, especially at night, and after just recently having the film Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022) gorgeously capture all the facial features of both the lighter and darker skin tones of its two main leads Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer during the night scenes, this neglect is more jarring to witness in a theater. I cannot imagine how hard it would be to see designer Idris Elba’s face during the night scenes on someone’s own television screen if I struggled at times to see him in a movie theater.
Elba, Copley, Halley, Jeffries’ give their all for a film that does not have the decency to do the same; which the pernicious issues of lack of attention to detail from the clothing choices, clunky exposition, to the bad lighting in night scenes all leading back to a lackluster script trying to make a Spielberg monster film in Africa, without giving the same amount of attention to detail the auteur himself gives to all of his films. Spielberg works in tandem with his screenwriter and cinematographer to make his pictures the stunning masterpieces they are, while Komakur has yet to reach that level in his craft, though still shows promise at times. Beast lacks the bite to be a truly thrilling film overall.
Rating: C-
Universal Pictures will release Beast in theaters August 19th.
“I was trying to say really that a man and a woman can’t understand each other because..we are a man and a woman and if we could actually swap each other’s roles we could actually be in each other’s place. I think we both would be very surprised and I think it would lead to a greater understanding..
-Kate Bush, April 1992 Radio Documentary
Note: In this essay, I will be referring to Kate Bush’s dance partner, Misha Hervieu, in the “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) music video with She/Her pronouns but her appearance in the video was pre-transition and the screenshots will reflect this.
It is no secret that Kate Bush is an indelible Queer icon. Numerous articles and her own discography, including songs such as “Moving” from her debut album The Kick Inside, which she wrote to honor her dance mentor Lindsay Kemp, who was a former lover/mentor of David Bowie, singing about anal sex between men in her song “Wow” from her sophmore album Lionheart and “Kashka from Baghdad” from the same album, singing about the all encompassing joy of seeing two men expressing their love for each other under the moonlight. Bush has always written her songs around imaginaged personas from the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw haunting the moors of Wuthering Heights in her first single, “Wuthering Heights”, to becoming a young Peter Reich, the son of renowned Organon Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in “Cloudbusting” to a literal inanimate object in her song “Kite”, and her ability to metamorph into various personas and confer unique perspectives for so many characters and otherworldly scenarios gives her music a wholly unique transcendent jouissance that no other artist has been able to fully replicate, though not for a lack of trying. These crafted fantasies is an articulation of the possible in Bush’s own imagination, and all correlated to how Bush evokes Queer and aesthetic without being a part of the LGBTQIA + community personally. Queer theory can be utilized as verbage, as a form of action, as posited by noted Queer scholar Nikki Sullivan, “queer can be used as a verb, that is to describe a process, a movement between viewer, text, and world that reinscribes (or queers) each and the relations between them”. “Queering” in this way, becomes a deconstruction of hegemonic patriarchal heteronormative practices, as Bush has conveyed through performativity such as performing different characters beyond her own identity. “Any study of musical meaning and cultural significance taken from the musical text must be counterbalanced by consideration of the avowed intentions of the artists themselves (Moy, 2007), and with these queer texts in her repetorie, her propesentity towards queer themes in her work is most likely deliberate, her musically prodigious nature has allowed her to succeed beyond queer cult circuits and has garnered well deserved praise for decades. I do not need to elucidate on her status as a queer icon, but it is worth edifying on why she has obtained this status while also being an anti-diva in the queer music scene and the most pertinent reasoning behind her ardent fandom with the LGBTQIA+ community is that her core aesthetic exudes pure unadulterated deliberately sincere camp.
Kate Bush, Camp, and Ontological Strangeness with Performativity:
What do I mean by deliberate camp? And what do I mean by sincere camp? Camp is what Susan Sontag famously ascribed as “ a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of the artifice, or stylization” (Sontag, 1966).Many people can only encompass camp as falling into “bad arts”, which Sontag posits is not the case, and some art that can be approached as Camp merits its own serious admiration and study. Bush falls into that ‘camp’, and is codified by
sensationalized performativity. Deliberate Camp is camp that knows it is “camping”, which Sontag postulates as usually less satisfying, which is why I want to posit that sincere deliberate camp is the satisfying alternative to being a less satisfying form of deliberate camp. Music and, by extension musicals, are given more room to evoke camp sensibilities that other forms of artistry are restricted by, but Bush developed her own sincere form of camp that is wholly unique to her, a pure auteur of her creative outlet in her vast career. The overarching control Kate Bush exudes throughout her musical output has led to frequent delays in album releases, an anomaly in the hyper produced yearly albums released by musical artists in the 1980s, leading to sporadic releases after The Red Shoes in 1993, taking twelve years to release Aerial in 2005. Renowned cultural theorist Mark Fisher noted this in his personal blog K-Punk, “On the face of it, for this, her return after twelve years, Kate Bush could either make a showing of pursuing relevance a la Bowie, or Madonna, or else recline into a session-musician airbrushed “timelessness” like Bryan Ferry. In the event, she tacks closer to the second option, but with considerably more success than Ferry has mustard in any of his solo albums of the last twenty years.” There is only one Kate Bush, and will most likely never be another in our lifetime.
Bush and her performative sincere camp is distinct in that she wholly maintains sincerity for every subject she imagines and sings about, whether it is interrupting the titular song “Hounds of Love” to sing about saving a fox from a pack of dogs, to singing from the perspective of an unborn fetus dying from nuclear annihilation, to her latest album, 50 Words for Snow (2011) in which she encompases a woman who falls in love with a snowman and is distraught to realize after a night of passionate love making, that her snowy partner has melted during the night in her song “Misty”. Every ludicrous scenario Bush envisions is given the utmost sincerity and is why I posit her version of camp resonates with so many listeners, especially ones who fall outside the norm; queer fans such as myself and so many others. Bush has always confessed to the importance of dreams and many real life characters that have visited her in her sleep, and these influences continually contrast with the more normative pop narratives that usually take from real world scenarios. In addition, her work evokes pure unfiltered sensuality, not in a raw overtly sexual manner heard in many pop songs, but almost a pure childlike innocence as well that is truly entrancing to listen too, which adds credence as to why Bush has been able to get away with singing about homosexual relationships or swapping genders in public spaces with little to no pushback from more conservative outlets in the western world, except in America.
Bush, in a costume based on the fantasy art of Chris Achilleos, in particular his cover for the book, Raven-Swordmistress of Chaos (1978), while wielding a sword in her iconic music video for Babooshka from her third album Never for Ever (1980)
Bush’s music and her subsequent videos are exaggerated to the point of encompassing an ontological strangeness in her performativity. From the mime like swaying of her first hit single “Wuthering Heights” to the hyperactive waving of her arms in her music video for her song “Sat on Your Lap” to the disting widening of her eyes in several of her videos, she contorts her body undulates her vocals in hyper stylized fashion at the risk of ostracizing potential fans. Movement has played such an essential aspect to her artistry that her first and only concert tour The Tour of Life, led to pioneering the creation of the wireless headset microphone, rudimentarily made with a wire clothes hanger, so that Bush could dance unencumbered and feel less restricted in her interpretive movements while performing. A wholly new concept at the time that has now become the relative norm for many musical artists.
Kate Bush performing the Tour of Life (1979).
The undulating vocal effect can be gleaned from many notable singles, including affecting a cockney accent for “There Goes a Tenner” to personify a cockney robber, singing in an Australian accent for her song “The Dreaming” a protest song that evokes Indeginous Aboriginie Australian mythology to the current plight faced by the disenfranchised aborigine population, to her over excessive usage of the Fairlight CMI to otherworldly effect.
Bush was always more dedicated to making a great album than following a trend, or trying to evoke other mainstream artists. I remember discussing the song “Wuthering Heights” to fellow classmates in undergrad and it was quite a surprise from my peers to hear that I ardently praised the song and music videos as a work of a musical prodigy that indelibly transformed the music landscape. The facets of the song and subsequent video that entranced me, as well as many like minded listeners, are the same facets that alienated Kate Bush from others enjoyment of her music. This sound, this uniqueness appealed to many queer listeners including myself, while at the same time ostracised audiences unfamiliar with this exaggerated style, a similar reaction towards her work during the peak of her career in America.
Kate Bush encompassing that ontological strangeness of being in her unique expressive performativity alienated American audiences during much of her earlier work in the late 70s to mid 80s. This epoch was defined by conservative entertainment, dubbed by film critic Robin Wood as “Reaganite Entertainment” and posits that his entertainment, “diminish, defuse and render safe all the major radical movements that gained so much impetus, became so threatening, in the 70s: radical feminism, black militancy, gay liberation, the assualt on patriarchy”. (Wood, 2003). Everything, not just films, that deviated from the heternormative cisgendered norms were diminished, or outright banned from appearing stateside, a fate that befell the original iconic music video for “Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God)” which was never shown on MTV stateside, replaced instead by a live performance of the song from The Wogan Show in 1985. Kate’s collaborator and older brother Paddy Bush, who has worked with his sister on every single one of her albums, postulated that MTV was not interested in a music video without lip syncronization to the song, however it is easy to conjecture that the interpretive dance and queer undertones in the video played an essential part in the MTVs’ refusal to air the indelible video, which this article postulated as well. This most likely played a part in why the song Running up that Hill (A Deal with God) charted up to 30 in the US Billboard Top 100, but also why it was quickly swept under the rug of the cultural zeitgeist in America in 1985…until now.
The Big Hit:
“The only way I could think it could be done was, you know a deal with the devil, and then I thought well no, what about a deal with God? In a way it’s so much more powerful asking God to make a deal with you”
-Kate Bush, April, 1992 Radio Documentary
On May 28th, Kate Bush began to trend on Twitter, tiktok, while Running up that Hill (A Deal with God) was soaring up the spotify and Apple Music charts. The source? The release of Season 4 of the cultural phenomenon Stranger Things (2016-present) had main character Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) enraptured with Kate Bush, in particular her fifth studio album Hounds of Love (1985) and the hit single “Running up that Hill (A Deal with God), with the song playing in two episodes of the series. “Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God)” has been very popular for shows that wish to evoke the 1980s such as in Pose (2018-2021), It’s a Sin (2021), and Glow(2017-2019) in the past few years, and it is not a coincidence that the song had been used to convey the queer history these shows generated, with all of these examples having the song being played with the queer characters. In that regard, it’s inclusion in Stranger Things is an outlier in that regard because Stranger Things is an homage to Reaganite entertainment the Duffer brothers are overwhelmingly nostalgic towards, with only the third season introducing a queer character in Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke), who was originally envisioned as being set up as a potential love interest to the jock main character Steven Harrington, until Hawke and Harrington expressed an interest in having Robin being a gay character. The inclusion of the song in the series led to the song eclipsing the original US 100 Billboard Global record at number 30 in 1985 to number 3 in the Billboard Global, the highest any classic song has ever charted, surpassing Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” when it charted at number 12. How did a song, that was composed in 1985, capture the cultural zeitgeist of the early 2020s America in such an astoundingly grandiose fashion? “Running up that Hill (A Deal with God) is not only a liberating evocation of the desire to develop a stronger rapport with a significant romantic partner, it is also an ardent desire to experience gender fluidity and the pure sensuality of obliterating that thin binary line, a theme that heavily resonates with younger generations that are more queer, inclusive, and receptive to unfamilar experiences. Although Bush has never given the avowed intentions of this interpretation to her opus, the lyrics and music video are so equivocal in intent, that the meaning Bush originally intended can be construed as a celebration of gender fluidity and transgender desires.
The Dreaming
Before we begin to unravel how Kate Bush’s seminal work Hounds of Love continues to bring her unbridled success, we must first take a look at how she first hit the billboard top 100 at number 30 prior to 2022. For a while, EMI America, her record company in charge of distrubution, saw failures in returns for her first two albums, The Kick Inside (1978) and Lionheart (1979) from the United States, not even her singles such as “Wuthering Heights” and “Wow” were charting in America, they declined to issue her third album Never for Ever to the states as a result. It seemed to be a stroke of luck that her fourth album, and argued by many to be her true magnum opus, The Dreaming (1982) was released in the states to greater acclaim than her native United Kingdom and was the first album of hers to chart in the Billboard 200 at number 157 in 1982.
Her fourth album, The Dreaming, was her first self produced album and certainly not the last and it made a resounding impact. Her self proclaimed “mad” album was meant to shed the image in the public’s mind of that waif like little girl strutting around in fabolous leotards or billowing dresses, she vigorously practiced her vocals to a lower pitch in her own words to give her voice “Some balls” (Thomson, 2010), not only shedding the original voice of Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost in “Wuthering Heights” the flighty high pitched tones that had defined her, but also signifying a new Kate Bush, wholly in control of her own image and sexuality. It was a difficult album to produce, and for many of her fans, a difficult album to listen to with its cacophonous rhythms and harsh vocals in many songs alienating her audience. Bush wanted it to be an album that the audience would grow on through subsequent listens, but many fans lacked the patience, finding themselves disenchanted with the album as a result. Her record company EMI even came close to rejecting the album, the only time in its history it came close to doing so (Thomson, 2010) and only sold 60,000 units, a disastrous fall in sales compared to Bush’s previous albums which mostly sold close one million. But it was also Kate Bush’s first album to chart in the United States and with that, EMI America decided based on America’s higher appreciation and reception of the divisive The Dreaming (1982) to finally release her third album Never for Ever (1980) to the states and signed off to release any future albums of hers in the states, a wise decision that paved the way for her most successful album Hounds of Love (1985) and the subsequent first single “Running up that Hill (A Deal with God).
Hounds of Love
Kate Bush, though battered by the negative criticism and lack of sales for her most personal album, was still determined to push her artistry further on her own terms, and took a needed sabbatical to rejuvenate her artistic spirit. Shedding the darker browns and black hues of The Dreaming (1982) Bush was determined to draw towards a sunnier disposition of herself for her next self-produced album Hounds of Love (1985), and in her own auteur way, was able to produce the album exactly how she wanted it produced, through copious amounts of writing, tinkering away with keys on her piano to a nebulous to create the perfect sounds that it seemed only she could hear, to create the jouissance she wanted to convey. The only fight she lost was in the naming of her first chosen single “Running up that Hill (A Deal with God), which she originally entitled “A Deal with God”, but fearing pushback from very conservative religious countries the executives at EMI demanded a change, to which Kate Bush eventually aquised to, but was able to have her preferred title “A Deal with God” in brackets in the title. Her recent interview during BBC Sounds Woman’s Hour revealed that she still referred to “Running up that Hill” under the original title “A Deal with God”, subtly conveying a pertinent message that the original deal was not a shameful act, but instead a plea to discover what truly separates a man and a woman beyond the gender binary that seemingly restricts humanity from deeper understanding.
The Music
“Running up that Hill (A Deal with God)” was the first Kate Bush song I discovered at the tender age of eighteen, a time in which I was preparing to graduate from high school, and feeling the heavy burdens and expectations that came with being a queer teenager from the south, where I had to act, even in my fairly liberal household, under strict gender roles and eventual expectaction of fullfing my purpose of bearing the future generation left me feeling a sense of general ennui that many queer people experience, especially in the american south, compounded by puberty and teenage anxiety. The power of this one single irrevocably changed the trajectory of my line from the first long note that opens the song, then the drum riff kicks in, that polyrhythmic sound coalescing with the Fairlight CMI notes creating the infectious beat sets the tone of the music, placing us in an experimental terrain that is unfolding the further we delve into the song, the c minor chord overlapping the 4/4 time signature of the percussions creating a raptiourly infectious sound that is further amplified by its endearing lyrics that speak of a desire to exchange sexes to better understand the other, a message that highly resonated with my burgeoning queer and feminst sensabilities.
The Lyrics
The opening of the song begins, “It doesn’t hurt me, yeah yeah yo, do you wanna feel how it feels? Do you want to know, know that it doesn’t hurt me? Do you want to hear about the deal that I’m making? (Ye-yeah, ye-yeah yo). The continual “Ye-yeah, Yeah, Yo’s” that proliferate in the song never fail to generate “a personal moment of jouissance” (Moy, 2007), that same sensual and yet innocent excitement Bush writes into her music. A rudimentary and often quoted analysis of the song is Bush’s own desire to exchange sexs with her partner as a way to be able to know what it felt like to penetrate (with her own penis), her male partners vagina, which the first line seems to give credence too (Or more humorously, it could be Bush trying to convince her male partner to try pegging). And although Bush has given crude sensibilities to her lyrics before (“L’amour Looks Something Like This” from her album The Kick Inside (1978) contains the line “With that feeling of sticky love inside”), but this interpretation is very limited, overtly freudian and furthermore heternormative in desire, but nevertheless impossible to wholly dismiss considering how many people have postulated this message. I believe the true meaning of the lyric, “It doesn’t hurt me” is not the act of being penetrated, it’s encompassing the body of a woman, of embodying femininity does not hurt her, and would it not be interesting for her male partner to experience that for himself.
Bush herself stated that she saw it as the common miscommunications male and females face as a couple and how being able to inhabit the other gender would lead to that greater understanding. On the other hand, Bush recently postulated on BBC Sounds interview with Emma Barnett, “I really like people to hear a song and take from it what they want”, so the freudian interpretation is just a valid to Bush as my interpretation of the song representing the queer desire to overcome the boundaries of gender as in the songs lyrics she seemingly gives numerous subtext to wanting to absolve the gender norms of what we define as “Masculine” and “Feminine”. Susan Sontag posited on how camp draws on going against the grain of one’s sex, “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminie; what is most beautiful in feminie women is something masculine..” an essential facet of why Running up that Hill (A Deal with God) contiuanally ressonates with cultural and queer sensibilities.
Bush always defines her ostensibly male lover under the diminutive, semantically feminie words, “Baby, Darling, Angel,” opening up her male partner to exchanging genders. The lyrics continued the theme of her oeuvre to escape into another persona, shedding her own and why she never felt comfortable with the labels media put opon her, the labels of being a sex symbol or being a flightly young musical prodigy, a desire to shed these labels highly resonates with the queer preference to not be pushed into labels that do not truly define us. “She (Bush) has sung as a child, a ghost, a man, a woman, a donkey..She is eternally seeking to ‘swap places’ because she desperately wants to cover all angles of available experience” (Thomoson, 2010). Susan Sontag also posited on how camp draws on going against the grain of one’s sex, “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminie; what is most beautiful in feminie women is something masculine..” an essential facet of why Running up that Hill (A Deal with God) contiuanally ressonates with culturally queer sensibilities. Bush, through her lyrics in “Running up that Hill” conveys the belief that humanity is not restricted by the labels and that overcoming that gender boundary is not a terrifying or painful experience, and questions why we hate the ones we love, or more obliquely why do men hate the women they love just for being identified as women, and likewise why do women hate men for identifying as men, when we are more than just our gender? As she sang in her song “Them Heavy People” from The Kick Inside almost a decade ago, “Every one of us has a heaven inside ”. The lyrics are penetrating in their pondering of human nature defined by gender and the overarching desire to escape these labels, whether defined by femininity or masculinity.
The Video
(As previously stated, Misha Heriviues’ pronouns and name have been changed to reflect her transition, and the video was made before her transition).
The first image the viewer sees is the medium close-up of Bush’s hand, with the camera tracking her outstretched hand to grasp her partner Misha Heriviues’ (pre-transition) neck. Misha’s face is turned from away from the camera as she begins to sway to the percussion polyrhythmic beat. Gray, blue, and purple colors awash the screen, and with the soft lighting on the subjects, the video is evoking a sensation of being enveloped in a dreamlike state for the viewer. The colors here arguable evoke the famous “Bisexual lighting” that has become a prominant feature in many films in the late 2010s, and this could be considered a proto form of the lighting. The dancing is an interpretive one, choreographed by Martha Graham acolyte and African-American Detroit based choreographer Dyanne Gray-Cullert, who taught Bush to take advantage of the whole body, not the quick jerky head bobbing, slight feet movements that proliferated other pop music videos of that epoch that is meant to titillate or express excitement following the rhythm. The point of the Martha Graham interpretative dance is centered on the pelvis and began as a female only form of dance until men were allowed inclusion. According to feminist dance scholar Dee Reynolds, “This was a way to redefine femininity as powerful and autonomous” (Reynolds,2013). In choreographing Bush and Heriviues’ in Martha Graham’s stylized intrepative choreography, Gray-Cullert and Bush were crafting an androgenous dance that gave equal power to both dance partners, regardless of gender. And the dancing itself, which is powerfully evocative conveying an almost powerful sensuality without titillation. Bush is also leading the dance instead of her partner, further conveying the powerful evocation of femininity as powerful, but with Heiviues always one step behind her copying her powerful moveset almost beat for beat. Bush is drawing Heiviues towards her as a form of suggestion to make the deal with her, and that being a woman, exerting femininity is powerful, and that swapping places would be a life altering experience.
The theme of androgyny continues in the video with the clothing that Kate, Misha, and the others all wear the same Japanese Hakama gray pants, and gray shirt, with an indent in the back, further blurring the gender lines. Gray in its color scheme lacks the traditional gender signifiers many colors evoke. A muted color that is balancing, further propelling the interpretation, and as Bush would storyboard and draw the costumes for her music videos starting with her album The Dreaming as she would discuss in this interview, even before she began directing them herself. The most jarring and crucial moments of the video occur when a barrage of androgenous figures, wearing a mask of Bush and Heriviues’ faces separate the partners from each other, and the scene dissolves into a long corridor. The figures of all of indeterminate gender, except for brief glimpses of breasts and chest hair. The video ends with Bush mimicking the moments of shooting a bow and arrow, with the camera panning to Heriviues copying the same movement, then panning to Bush doing the same moment, then panning to Heriviues doing the same until the shot lands on Bush mimicking the bow and arrow movement, almost evoking the goddess Artemis, the greek goddess of the Hunt, with her partner in turn representing Apollo, twin brother of Artemis, and recognized as the greek god of archery. Greek gods evoke queer aesthetic as many themes in classical mythology were representative of the full spectrum of gender and sexuality, a point of reference we can only speculate that Bush was conveying in this final shot. All of these elements connect to the queer atmosphere and narrative the song and video evoke throughout. Once all these pieces are anaylzed as the sincere queer spectacle it is, then it is quite apparent as to why a conservative atmosphere framed by nuclear family values propagated by the Regan epoch would find it distasteful, but to our modern American sensibilities, we can resonate with the queer themes of the song and the video much more than as a result of our progressing of acceptance of queer values, not in the mocking camp of excess but one crafted with sincerity.
Conclusion
Returning to “Running up That Hill (A Deal with God) after it has been launched into uncharted popular terrain by Gen-Z and Millennials who had only hear the song by its various covers, it is gratifying to see these generations, and one I am a part of, discover this song and its renowned music video just I had at nineteen, and connecting to the intrinsically queer themes in the sincere camp fashion Bush consistently evokes throughout her music and videos. Their world has become irrevocably changed for the better, as Bush was able to connect with the desire every queer and feminist individual has had; the desire to be truly understood by others.
The success of Loren Bouchard’s Bob’s Burgers is a miraculous occurrence. Premiering during a time where animated sitcoms that were rooted firmly in reality, such as King of the Hill, were quietly being shuffled around to undesirable slots or outright canceled in favor of cartoons that revel in the ludicrously absurdist scenarios such as South Park, Family Guy, and The Simpsons. Bob’s Burgers was quite an anomaly, filling in the void that King of the Hill paved, but unlike Hill presented a more left wing antithesis as the idiosyncratic Belchers slowly but surely warmed their way into millions of hearts including mine. Catching the show on Sunday night became a calming ritual to end the long and arduous weeks we all faced. Watching the patriarch Bob(H. Jon Benjamin) works tirelessly to make his unappealing restaurant flourish through new burgers of the day that are more of a hindrance to being successful, but his passion for his burgers is more important than any financial incentive. Linda (John Roberts) Bob’s wife and most ardent supporter is the consistent optimist to Bob’s pessimism, working with him to raise his kids and run the restaurant. The three Belcher children Tina (Dan Mintz), Gene (Eugene Mirmen), and Louise (Kristen Schaal) are less enthused about working in the restaurant, and in many episodes, will often find ways to sneak out of work to have their own little adventures. Each Belcher child has unique idiosyncrasies that resonate with the viewer, as Tina is obsessed with boys, in particular their rear ends, Gene wants to be a musician, and Louise is the fledgling leader, whose burgeoning sociopathy belies her devotion to her Dad and his dreams. The Belchers, in all their idiosyncrasies, are all presented as loving each other, regardless of their actions, which is quite a breath of fresh air compared to the overt cynicism of many other animated sitcoms, and the film offers up much of the same helping as an individual episode, just in a larger portion.
Much like the show, the film stays firmly grounded in reality as the cast does not face nefarius forces such as Satan or a Dome encasing the town like South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut and The Simpsons Movie respectively but the film raises the stakes higher than they have ever been raised regardless. The Belcher’s face the biggest challenge of their lives, the business loan is due, a water pipe has created a large crater in front of their failing restaurant, a dead body is found in the crater, delaying the filling of the hole, and their eccentric millionaire landlord Calvin Fishoeder (Kevin Kline) has been arrested for murder, and their rent is due in a month! An overhead sorrowful speech from Bob propels the daddys girl Louise to solve the case to exonerate Mr. Fishoeder and save the restaurant.
The show has never shied away from awkwardly staged musical numbers that still manage to charm the viewer and the movie takes it up a notch by crafting animated choreographed numbers. The endearing humor is also a warm balm to the often dark humor that permeates many animated sitcoms today, and is never overdone and dry. The main flaw of the film is entrenched in the narrative of the show, in that the scenario that plays out, no matter how silly it may become, must also be grounded enough in reality that the film falls into the trap of feeling more like a two-parter episode than a feature length film. In fact the Belchers had already faced a similar scenario before in the eponymous show, but that same groundedness the show exemplifies is also what is so familiar and endearing to its audience. The Bob’s Burgers Movie is a soothing balm we can all settle down with and enjoy, much like a juicy burger, once in a while.
Alex Garland Proves that Third Time is Not the Charm in the Tediously Gruesome “Men”
Written by Margaret “Molly” Rasberry May 26th, 2022
I went into this film expecting to enjoy it. I never walked into a cinema intending to disengage with the flickering screen, especially when the movie is made by the credible auteur who created one of the most absorbing AI films Ex Machina and redefined the environmental horror genre with his adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer’s surreal science fiction novel Annihilation. Alex Garlands’ propensity for surreal beautiful imagery constantly juxtaposed with pulsating body horror has become a staple of his oeuvre, and Men is no exception. All of Garlands’ films use these images metaphorically to elucidate on the human condition. For Ex Machina its that one should not play God, especially if you treat your (female) creations as slaves for your own self-intrinsic desires, Annihilation is about humanity and cells propensity for self-destruction and how the environment will reclaim the Earth as a result. With these deeply phenomenological core themes, it comes as quite a tonal shift, with the main metaphorical religious imagery of Men, that Garland wants to elucidate is all men are terrible with little to no nuance in this thinly written plot that dives
Jessie Buckly plays Harper, a recently widowed Londoner, grappling with guilt from the untimely death of her husband James Marlowe (Paapa Essiedu). Harper takes refuge in the Manor house older than the founding of the United States, with rooms bathed in red evoking danger or wanton lust juxtaposed with rooms of white and natural lighting evoking calm and harmony. The Groundskeeper Geoffry(Rory Kinnear)is the quintessential ‘nice guy’ as he is introduced calling Harper her maiden name Mrs. Marlowe, eventually settling to Miss Marlowe for most of the run time with her prodding, and after she has introduced herself as Harper.
The thinness of the plot begins to reveal itself even from the beginning with the circumstances of Harper’s husband’s death. James’ first line is threatening to kill himself if Harper divorces him, in their london flat shrouded in red, which the film eventually reveals he most likely did after she refused to accept his apology for striking her and summarily kicking him out of their apartment for the heinous action. The audience is not privy to much else of Harper’s life in London besides her best friend she consistently facetimes with Riley (Gayle Rankin), so we know very little of James’ personality beyond his toxically abusive nature and on the other side of the spectrum we know very little about Harper beyond her trauma, and it is a credit to Buckley’s performance that the audience still sympathizes with her plight, but it is an oversight against the films merits to have tout itself as a feminist film, while having all the men of the setting overshadow the heroine. Rory Kinnear pulls off many roles in the film providing (almost) all the main metaphorical men who harass, stalk, sexually proposition, gaslight, and attack our haunted heroine throughout the runtime and is allowed to shine throughout all these roles as he continually abuses the heroine throughtout the many forms the men take.
It must be pointed out that even though Paapa Essiedu gave a serviceable performance as Harper’s abusive ex-husband, the fact that the film represents the image of an abuse Black man haunting an innocent white heroine evokes harmful racist connotations which was pointed out by Angelica Jade Bastien in her review for Vulture, and in a world where Black men are still consistently demonized by mass media and the looming specter of racist iconography of Black men wanting to possess white women still lingers in the subconscious of our collective culture, this is a flagrant oversight to say the least. A recasting would have mitigated this issue but as such it is too late to rectify.
Not to spoil anything but Garland crafts some gnarly imagery, which culminates in some of the most gruesome imagery of his career in a scene that seems to harken to Stan Brakhage’s experimental short Window Water Baby Moving times a hundred, but the more Garland wants to overwhelm his audience, the shock value begins to lessen, even to the point that Harper herself becomes bored with the gory spectacle by the end just waiting for the bloody carnage to end. Beautiful cinematography and a fantastic score that lingers with the audience can only do so much when the script cannot keep up with the images onscreen, and thus the film becomes tedious by the end that we end up much like the heroine, just sitting down and waiting for it all to end.
The Daniels Have Crafted a Postmodern Feminist Spectacle for the Ages in “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once”
Written by Margaret “Molly” Rasberry March 21st, 2022
This review contains light spoilers.
There is a moment where the neurotic protagonist Evelyn Wang(Michelle Yeoh) is forced to relive moments of her past through the universe, beginning with her birth, in which her despondent father (played by perennial favorite James Hong) is informed by the doctor, “I’m sorry, but it’s a girl” to his continual disheartenment as China’s One Child Policy and patriarchal norms would inevitably deem the birth of a daughter as not much of a blessing but a continual disappointment. This form of cultural abuse and irrational disappointment plagues Evelyn, as she herself unconsciously continues the same cycle of abuse her own father inflicted on her with her henpecked husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) and her diasporic daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), whose queer sense of expression and her girlfriend Becky, causes Evelyn the same cultural shame and disappointment her father instilled in her.
Michelle Yeoh performs the part of Evelyn as a conflicted individual, a woman who ran away from home to escape the oppressive patriarchal nature of her father, while also striving to keep her family together regardless of the feelings of the other members. She is unhappy with her life in America but strives to assimilate in the culture by having her be a joint business owner at a laundromat, and wanting to celebrate the Chinese New Year with her American clientele. She is discomforted with the reminder that her daughter is gay but refuses to disinherit her child like her own father did. The film also conveys this delicate balance by frequently switching from Cantonese, Mandarin, and English in hilarious dialogues with her husband Waymond that provides many of the film’s numerous moments of pathos. This delicate dichotomy that causes Evelyn constant consternation is upended when an alternative universe version of Waymond informs her during a simple tax appointment with the steely IRS agent Deidre (Jaime Lee Curtis) that her world is in danger, and that the only way to save her world and the universe itself is to learn how to jump between universes and instantly gain her alternative selves requisite skills, or else someone from this alpha universe will destroy everything in an existential breakdown; shit really hits the fan to say the least.
The Daniels’ main approach to parallel universes allow a mind boggling amount of creativity to take place to the consistent delight and engagement of the viewer. In one moment Evelyn is in the IRS janitors closet, the next she is a universe where she has the career of the real life actress Michelle Yeoh and the requisite martial arts training to take out any opponents, the next she is in a universe akin to a Shaw Brothers film, the next she’s in a universe where humans evolved to develop hot dogs for hands. The possibilities are limitless and contain multitudes of layers that the filmmaking duo inundated the spectator with hilarity while also finding ground for genuine emotional catharsis grounded in a coming of age narrative of Evelyn moving beyond Chinese patriarchal values to become her own person with agency.
Michelle Yeoh has finally been given the English language starring role she has rightly deserved for decades as she plays many versions of Evelyn with the aptitude she has brought to many of her indelible roles, while also getting to showcase a rare dramatic and comedic turn too few English viewers get to see in her iconic career. Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu, and James Hong are also allowed to shine in their roles and showcase their abilities to humanising results that American viewers rarely get to see with Asian roles in Hollywood, and with the success of this film, would allow these talented actors a chance to play in more nuanced roles in future Hollywood films.
The Daniels’ have always been proficient in striking this delicate balance between the comforting and the discomforting as seen with their previous feature “Swiss Army Man” and their characters, much like the universe, contain multitudes waiting to be unraveled by their idiosyncratic narratives. “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” is a science fiction epic, a martial arts extravaganza, a heartfelt coming of age narrative, a diasporic story, a slapstick bombastic comedy, and more. It is everything all at once and it is glorious.
Mollywood Reviews 