I wrote this as a Tumblr post a while back…but I’m thinking of getting rid of my Tumblr…and this, I think, deserves a bit more than Tumblr.
People say you can do anything you want to. That’s something you tell your kids. But that rarely happens…thing is, if you start with the mindset that you can’t better yourself, if you have no hope, no aspirations, you don’t make plans for anything special. You don’t prepare yourself for that big leap of faith, and suddenly, you’re settling. You’re marrying someone you marginally love…who is probably settling too. Suddenly, you’re not happy…neither is the person you’re with. You’re divorcing. And suddenly you’re stuck with a hungry kid, waiting tables at a diner to pay for their lunch money and school supplies.
If you know you’ll wind up in a trailer, you’re not gonna luck out and end up in a penthouse. Life doesn’t work like that.
Leo Burnett put it a different way: “If you reach for the stars, you might not bring one down, then again, you’re not coming up with a handful of mud either.”
World War I was pretty violent. This was the first major mechanized conflict the world had experienced, and there were really no rules…no standards. No Geneva Convention. Just death. Of course, the world really had no experience with war at this scale…wars between this many countries, and for reasons other than deeply-seated religious beliefs or cultural values.
Well anywho, it’s Christmas Eve in 1914, and German soprano Anna Sorensen has succeeded in convincing the Prussian Prince to join her tenor husband Nikolaus Sprink to sing for the German high command. The whole performance, Sprink looks pained, and feels guilty for leaving his comrades on the front, so Sprink brings Anna back with him to the front to sing for his comrades in the trenches.
On the side of the Allies, the Scotts have brought out their bagpipes, and are singing traditional Christmas songs. Sprink joins them with his voice, and suddenly, Sprink finds himself in no man’s land belting out sweet, sweet Christmas hymns. Super confused with what’s going on, the three commanding officers for the Prussians, the Scotts and the French all meet and call an informal, and unauthorized, truce. The front-line soldiers emerged from their trenches into No Man’s Land and share a pause in the violence and suddenly the enemy gains a human face as the soldiers befriend each other.
Scottish priest Palmer holds a mass for all the soldiers together.
On Christmas Eve of that year, the lonely souls of the front lines abandoned their arms to reach out to their enemies on the battlefield and greet them with not anger or hostility, but with the simple, kindly gesture of a much needed cigarette or a treasured piece of chocolate, and to put their differences aside long enough to wish their brothers a sincere “Merry Christmas!”
The Christmas Eve truce actually happened, although not on quite the scale director Christian Carion suggests in his film. He is accurate, however, in depicting the aftermath: Officers and troops were punished for fraternizing with the enemy in wartime. A priest who celebrated mass in No Man’s Land is savagely criticized by his bishop, who believes the patriotic task of the clergy is to urge the troops into battle and reconcile them to death.
The trench warfare of World War I was a species of hell unlike the agonies of any other war, before or after. The enemies were dug in within earshot of each other, and troops were periodically ordered over the top so that most of them could be mowed down by machinegun fire. They were being ordered to stand up, run forward and be shot to death. And they did it. An additional novelty was the introduction of poison gas.
The next morning, Christmas Day, they play soccer, and share pictures of their loved ones, and bits of chocolate. And they bury their dead, whose bodies have been lying frozen between the trench lines. As these men hang out, they find they have a lot of common with one another. They come from the same homes, they attended the same schools, they have the same religions…really the only difference between them was the language they spoke and the country they hailed from.
Eventually, they will be required to fight, and because of the inane tactics, most of them will be ordered to die. After Christmas, the soldiers share information about plans for artillery attacks, and they share a trench while the other is shelled.
Brings into question why we have wars.
My roommate has an answer: there’s usually about 6 assholes that want more power, and use their money and influence to send poor kids out to die for their power.
Governments warring with each other cannot afford to have their soldiers making friends with each other because when it comes down to it, I’m about to get all waxing poetic, and make some comment about how wars aren’t really about cultural differences…they’re about struggles of power, and it takes a lot more to kill a man you know than just another face in the enemy’s uniform.
So let’s get something established: I’ll be talking in this post about two distinctly different and completely valid models of worldview: emotional and rational. More specifically, I want to talk about how people in either camp views the other.
So someone who has a tendency to view the world emotionally looks at the quality of the experience…how did an experience affect them on a qualitative level.
A rational person approaches every situation with logic, they’re more interested in factual information…tangible things. When they experience something, they want to know what happened on a quantitative level. You could say they are more concerned with the outcomes, and emotional thinkers are more concerned with the experience.
These two groups also happen to hold each other in a bit of contempt. Emotional people see rational types as rigid, stiff, having a lack of interest. Rational types view emotional thinking and creative building time (play) as a waste. Their analysis of the world is strictly what is and isn’t…if something is not immediately tangible, they do not take it seriously.
Because a person is doing something other than immediately obvious work does not mean they are being idle. A part of creative process is play, finding things to mix together in unexpected ways.
This would explain why Archie wasn’t the most successful doctor…his thoughts were more geared towards feeling, and exploring emotional motivation. Victoria, with her scientific background was concerned with fact. She had a lack of empathy in her letter that was very clear, and she held a special contempt for Archie. I think this was a misunderstanding of the fact that Archie was an artist at heart. This also explains her dismissing of Archie’s books.
“When they joined the society of other boys in Glasgow High School…they grew ashamed of their idle, dreamy, fantastical father and emulated their practical, busy-in-the-world mother.”
The rational Victoria simply didn’t understand where the emotional Archie was coming from. Because Victoria was so concerned with what did or didn’t happen, it never occurred to her that that Archie could have actually been using events in his life as scaffolding for a fictional exploration of a relationship between a fictional Archie, Baxter, & Belle.
Poor things was really, really strange…the level of magical realism was a little tough to handle at first…I was having a really hard time understanding what actually happened, but that’s not what Gray was going for. The real power of Poor Things comes from Gray’s exploration of perspectives. Perspectives, and how the way you were raised shapes the way you see the world, how much your emotions play into how you react to situations, how the way you were brought up reflects on your views on God.
It’s also interesting to note that Gray inserted a fictional version of himself into the book. Just like MacNeil in Stornoway Way, Gray used the introduction as another area to further the idea of perspectives:
“I fear Michael Donnelly and I disagree about this book. He thinks it a blackly humorous fiction into which some real experiences and historical facts have been cunningly woven, a book like Scott’s Old Mortality and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I think it like Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson; a loving portrait of an astonishingly good, stout, intelligent, eccentric man recorded by a friend with a memory for dialogue.”
Gray paints himself as a very rational historian (concerned with facts) and his friend Donnelly as an empathetic editor. You see where I’m going with this.
Joy Stone…27 years old, drama teacher, lost her way. After losing her lover/colleague to a drowning accident on a vacation, Joy completely loses it. Because she wasn’t officially attached to Michael, she really can’t properly mourn for him, and with all of her pent-up emotion, she completely loses herself as she tries to cope. She also refuses to accept where her problems stem from…she refuses to believe they’re from trouble at work or from Michael’s death…she thinks the problem is with her. A little dangerous.
The book itself, ironically, completely breaks convention and routine with its formatting. Margins are irregular, sometimes trailing off the page, fonts and font-sizes are chosen at random. Sentences are left hanging quite often…the whole book’s a mess but it works because Joy herself is an absolute mess. I’ve had some pretty down-and-out bouts with my head before, but jesus, Joy’s character takes things to a completely new level.
As Joy tries to cope…not admitting she’s depressed about her problems, she turns to routines…she says routines are a way of pretending things are normal when they’re really not.
“I like routines. You can get cosy in a rut. You can pretend things are the same when they’re not. Knowing I need to live with lies makes me more anxious, depressed and guilty. This way I need the routines more.”
Going back to my military post, drills and routines are a fallback for when your mind can’t think rationally fast enough. When things are shit, at least you have some sense of normalcy in a routine.
But it’s interesting, because at the end of the book there’s this:
“I read an article about depression that said buying yourself presents is a good thing…break the routine and spoil yourself a little”
I think by nature routines and drills are a coping mechanism when we can’t handle the situation we’re in…refusal to leave a rut means tyou can’t handle uncertainty.
Part of our brain’s self-protection mechanisms, so as to avoid complete sensory input overload is to slowly ignore something that is repeatedly happening in a pattern. Routines numb you. Maybe that’s what Joy needed right after Michael’s death…numbness…because she simply couldn’t deal with all of the emotions she felt…and she refused to express those emotions properly:
“Screaming would be good,” she writes to herself at one point. “But I never scream. I can write it down but never do it.”
Joy’s refusal to confront her problems, her retreat into her routines, and the fact that she refuses to express her feelings caused her depression to linger much longer than if she had properly grieved in the first place.
The Black Watch regiment is based in Fife and the Tayside region in Scotland, and the army has been a part of their lives for generations. Their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers, have been soldiers in the regiment – a regiment that has been involved in virtually every major conflict since it was formed as the Gallant Forty Twa in 1739. “It’s in the blood. It’s part of who we are.”
Military heritage. I’m not sure I get it.
Well I do, but I don’t like it. There’s a lot to be said about how the environment in which you were brought up affects the way in which you inhabit the world when you grow up. The military is all about drills…drilling you into a default mode of behavior in a given situation when collected thought would be too slow. A side effect of that last bit is that trainees are essentially brainwashed…bootcamp is about quashing individuality, promoting camaraderie within the ranks, and ensuring that a soldier will remain loyal. I’m not gonna go into what I think about this because it would only serve to make me angry, and this post would become a length that not even I would want to read.
But back to the military heritage thing: defaults…military people run on default modes of behavior…routines. And they bring that need for routines into their homes, into their marriages, and into the way they raise their children. Military kids are also brought up with a glorified sense of the military…the military is this glorious establishment, and the kids’ heroes, aka dads served in it. Just like religion, which is more often than not essentially incubant in your life from birth, the sense that the Golden Thread of military service should be perpetuated through you.
It’s a dangerous thought model to have, and is something I have a problem with. Just because those than came before did things a certain way doesn’t mean you have to follow suit. It leads to situations like the scenes we see in Black Watch where men are fighting in a war they neither believe in nor really understand rather than applying themselves to something productive for their fellow community mates back home.
It leads to pointless emotional scarring that’s oh, so evident with the short-tempered nature of some of the men in the interview with the playwright.
It leads to a group of men that are so affected by what they did and what they saw, they are essentially rendered useless to normal society upon their return.
It leads to the death of really nascent young men.
And for what? Those boys that died didn’t believe in whatever we’re fighting for in Iraq. They ‘fought for their mates.’ They fought for their mates because they were duped by their country into believing that they loved their country enough to risk taking a bullet for it.
It’s a dangerous road to travel to do things the way they’ve been done before simply because that’s how they’ve always been done. So while I respect those that serve in the military for what they do, I can’t say I respect the choice to join up simply because it’s a matter of course.
Oh, to be in an ultra-conservative intolerant religious family who completely misunderstands the culture of younger generations.
I can relate. My parents are the same way…they’re hurt when I don’t open up to them, but at the same time, they continually display an intolerance and ignorance to the views of my generation.
That’s really what makes Aye Fond Kiss resonate with me. I mean here we are, with a young man out of a conservative muslim home, betrothed to marry a woman he doesn’t know to perpetuate an old tradition: that of marriage for family-stature-building over marriage for love. Not that I’ve got a marriage set up for me back home or anything, but I definitely can feel for the guy. Pre-arranged marriage is definitely a major part of traditional Pakistani culture, and to break that out of that traditional mold can be painful…and it takes a lot of courage. And that’s what I want to talk about.
It’s really easy to say you support progressiveness and interracial/inter-religious relationships, and it’s another thing entirely to live that progressiveness. I mean I’ve got some of the most conservative parents you could imagine…dad hails from the reddest, most country-christian neck of Texas you can imagine, and my mom’s from small-town, backwoods Michigan. Super conservative, traditional Christians the both of them. They’re not racist, but I really don’t know how they would react if I were to bring home a black girlfriend…or a muslim girlfriend…or boyfriend for that matter. I’m sure there’d be some issues. The relationship between Roisin & Casim directly challenges deep-seated traditions in both catholicism and islam. To directly challenge those traditions takes a lot of courage…or a certain level of naïve-ness.
It’s a nice idea, to fight for a love that crosses all of those old boundaries…until that love starts tearing your current life apart. I mean shit got real for Casim really fast. When he called off his wedding with his cousin, his family was shamed in their community, his older sister’s wedding was called off, and his parents were stuck with an extension on their house that would probably go unoccupied…their livelihood within their traditional islamic neighborhood basically went down the pooper.
And let’s not forget about Roisin, a Catholic school teacher living with a man out of wedlock. A man who was most decidedly not Catholic (I dobelievethereareseveralinstances in history when the catholics have taken issue with muslims). She doesn’t necessarliy have to defy her family to make her relationship with Casim last, but her private life comes into question when her parish preist refuses to sign a letter of approval because of her living arrangements. True to Catholic form, a school teacher in a Catholic scholl must have Catholic approval from a Catholic priest. Catholic.
To the credit of Casim’s family, as immigrants from Pakistan to Glasgow, their reception into Scotland hasn’t been totally hospitable. We see scenes where Glasgowian kids chase Casim’s younger sister, Tahara, and spit on her, and Glasgowian residents using the sign for the family shop as a dog-pissing station. During the partition of India, Casim’s father saw a lof really horrible acts by the hindus and the Catholic British, so to the credit of Casim’s family, they had just cause for their hesitance to trust Western philosophy…much less Western people.
It’s a rough business changing religious paradigms. Religion and dogma don’t exactly go hand in hand with challenged beliefs and change.
“What on earth could make you think we’d want to share a flat like this with someone like you?”
Well how the hell do you do?
While Alex, Juliet & David seem like they’re a band of arrogant, self-absorbed pricks (it could go deeper than that…but back to the point), I think the trio was looking for an answer as to why they were sharing a flat with themselves. I think a lot of the reviews I’ve found online underestimate what Danny Boyle was doing with his characters. They call the characters a bunch of yuppie, empty, shallow plot-implementation tools. I think that was intentional, what’s more, I think this was actually done so as to not distract from an exploration of the relationship between Alex, Juliet, and David.
Think about it: we’ve got Alex, this disorganized, anti-routine, anti-convention arty journalist; David, his polar opposite with his obsession with punctuality, logic and accounting work; and Juliet, who sits right in the middle playing both sides.
Alone, each of these characters would be super shallow and uninteresting. Alex would never do anything but revel in his smug self-importance. David would be lost to the accounting cave, and Juliet would just…exist. Together, they create a really complex interdependent relationship.
Alex gets a sense of discipline from David, and a need to apply himself to please Juliet. David is reminded to loosen up at home after working in the accounting library all day from Alex, and has a sense of companionship from Juliet. Juliet has her fun with Alex, but gets her emotional support from David. The three balance themselves out nicely. They’re not really the greatest of friends though…not on an emotional level at least. They work as roommates each provides something the others lack. See 0:24 below.
Beyond the emotional compliments each character plays for the others, there’s a lot of sexual tension…that’s not displayed. Juliet is a buffer between Alex & David, who by themselves would completely destroy each other, but she also acts as a catalyst for competition between Alex and David as they vie for her affection.
I think the flatmates saw adding a fourth as a mistake that would throw their stasis off-center, but when they meet Hugo, a diffident big-idea’d liberal willing to pay the rent for the fourth room, Alex, David and Juliet overcome their misgivings and ask Hugo to move in.
Just as the three roommates feared (subconsciously of course), everything changes with the addition of Hugo, or rather Hugo’s giant suitcase of money after he’s found dead in his room.
The most common analyses I’ve seen argue that the money drives the characters out of their stasis and into this conflict, but I don’t think that’s what caused such an unravelling. Sure, the money initiated a lot of inner turmoil within our characters, and drove them to the point of drawing lots in the woods to cut up a body, but I think there’s a lot to be said about the scene when David is forced to completely destroy Hugo’s face in the woods. Something inside of David snapped that night, and he couldn’t cope. Don’t get me wrong…I probably wouldn’t be able to come back from a place where I disfigured a person’s body so I could take their money, but that’s beside the point.
After David’s episode in the woods with the hammer and Hugo’s face, we see David unravelling…he’s not focused at work, then he’s late…then he just stops going to work outright. He resented Alex and Juliet for forcing him to disfigure Hugo on his own, so he withdraws. He removed his part of the group dynamic that made the relationship between Alex, Juliet and himself work in the first place: his discipline and organization. As soon as that happens, the whole group starts tumbling down. Juliet’s lost her emotional support, and as such becomes less-attractive to Alex. Alex has no discipline model, and no desire to please Juliet.
In David’s emotional absence, Alex and Juliet attempt to emulate the traits they depended on in him, but they can’t, and they begin to fall back into their normal modes. We see this in the scene where they get drunk and spend a bunch of the Hugo Money. Naturally, they didn’t think about how it would look on income:expenditure ratios or to people that knew them. David freaks out when this happens, and soon after moves to the attic where he can keep an eye on his roommates, who clearly can’t be trusted with free access to the money.
Basically my argument is this: David’s emotional withdrawal from Alex and Juliet, not the want of money that drove the group to attack each other with knives in the end.
Nobodyistalkingaboutthis: Is R Stornoway based upon a real person that collabbed with Kevin MacNeil, or did MacNeal create this infrastructure below the fiction of the book?
This whole thing confuses me a bit…I’ll admit, I started this story, like all other stories, without reading the author’s note at the beginning…I’ve found that the author’s words on the book are much better digested after I’ve caught myself up on the thing that they spent years creating and crafting.
But in this case, I feel I should have read the author’s note first.
The line between fiction and non-fiction here was very clear to me on the outset: I understood this as a fictional story told in the first person of a scottish artist with a pretty sizable alcohol problem. I read, derping along happily…until I reached the “Interruption by Kevin McNeil” bit. It struck me as odd that he was so cavalierly injecting himself into the story.
I thought, “Meh…whatever, I’m sure this will play out.”
Then there was the bit with Eva…Stornoway drops a little tidbit about how he’s writing a book. It was a little confusing, at no point did it seem like Stornoway had any intent of writing anything…I just thought it was a line he was using to get a lil somethin somethin if you know what I mean.
So then I get to the end of the book…the letter…that beautiful letter…that mentioned a manuscript…adressed to, you guessed it: Kevin McNeil. There’s two sides to this coin: Either Kevin MacNeil collabbed with a self-loathing alcoholic Scottish artist with one of the most amazing flairs for words I’ve ever read, or MacNeil completely, BRILLIANTLY, played the uninitiated reader from the start…even using the Author’s note, a sacred place where an author is expected to share a bit of his soul with the reader.
If it’s fiction, then why toy with the reader? If the reader perceives the work as a memoir over a work of fiction, the reader emphasizes with the characters? Does it humanize fictional suicide if the reader is seeing the suicide as a first-person account?
A guy wrote this book telling a story about drugs and addiction and alcohol. It was a wonderful story about this guy’s downward spiral into drugs and alcohol, and how he picked up his life, and made something of himself…and sold it as a memoir. The book landed him on Oprah’s book club…he got on Oprah’s reading list…went all over the world to appear on shows and interviews and self-help groups…then the world found out that James Frey fabricated a majority of the critical parts of the book.
But the book has truth to it. Truth in factual events, but even more so, truth in that people can relate to what Frey the character was experiencing, the emotions he was dealing with, the stress of having his life fall apart around him. I mean look at the comments on this page.
A million little pieces gives a glimmer of hope to people at rock bottom.
It reminds them that just because their situation right now is crappy doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way forever. You can overcome your demons.
So here’s the issue:
If a story is fabricated in some way, do the lessons, or the impact it had on the viewer have less significance? If a person doesn’t give up on life because they read A Million Little Pieces, does it matter at that point that significant plot elements were altered from reality?
R Stornoway never existed, if this tale of one man’s spiral to suicide is actually fiction, does it matter less? Even though the character we connected with, saw in him a bit of ourselves, felt pity for…if he didn’t exist, but his character committed suicide, does that make the suicide any less important?
No. It still matters. For real or fake, the character we saw in RS represents the plight of so many others. It wasn’t just R Stornoway that gave up on his life because he was disappointed in the outcome (or himself…I’ll get to that later maybe)…R Stornoway represented everyone with high hopes for life, but fell short. RS represented the ones that expected the best outcome from everything, and never gave thought to a lesser alternative.
Reminds me of this quote from V for Vendetta:
“…artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
Context below…but beware, thar be SPOILERS…
It’s not what’s true or fake, it’s what you perceive, what you learn from an experience. If an experience is real enough to you, and you come away a different person, it doesn’t matter how “genuine” that experience was. That’s the power of successful stories from the get…they’re bigger than one person. It’s ludicrous to think one person’s wholly factual account could speak for the masses.
It’s even more ludicrous to think that someone is going to be able to pull out a story involving themself that is both true and mildly interesting because frankly life is boring and long and mundane. Storytelling, like photography, is the art of omission. What you leave out, what you change, how you frame your story is just as important as what did or didn’t happen.
Of course, this isn’t a catch-all rule…as with pretty much anything, there’s a vast ocean of gray between when it is and isn’t ok (in this case) to fabricate a story, and by how much. There’s a lot to be said about intent and outcomes…whether the piece is intended to persuade, to incite action, to serve as a record of events, to sell a book.
In a strictly humanistic sense, both Stornoway Way and A Million Little Pieces tell a story a lot of people can relate to. They embue a little piece into us, and perhaps change the way we see the people around us.
It changes things to even entertain the thought that the characters you’re following in a story could be real. It puts a human face on something like substance abuse or suicide that fiction read as complete fiction would ever be able to.
So yeah, MacNeil framed his whole story as a memoir and used every last page to troll his readers. But because of that lens-as-memoir, the story took on a completely different meaning, and after reading, I have a different world-view, and that’s the point. And that’s why it’s ok.
So my typography teacher just sent this article around to the class.
It’s worrisome that design professionals are still proliferating this thought model: that of a dogmatic design. Rand had a contempt for clients (of which I speak in the general sense) that questioned and tested design decisions. He saw it as a sign of weakness and insecurity:
…[it’s] the insecure client who depends on informal office surveys and pseudo-scientific research to deal with questions that are unanswerable and answers that are questionable.
Rands head was in the right place with references to inexpert testing and inquiry, but the way in which this article frames the quote implies that a designer should intuitively know which of her designs is the best without seeking outside opinion.
God forbid you ask someone that hasn’t been looking at a design for 2 weeks whether or not it makes sense. Rand always had a contempt for left-brained people…those that think in terms of fact and data and reason. They don’t get design. Given leeway or input, they ruin any good thing.
Doesn’t it make sense to test something like a brand identity, which could potentially represent a company to millions of people? Millions of those left-brained squares that consume that company’s products? The same people for which this article clearly holds contempt?
Here’s the thing: design is art, not science. There is not a right or a wrong based on principle and fundamentals alone. Branding design is performed to achieve a goal. In this case, that goal is to represent a company to a select audience. If an audience of left-brained people finds a design that might not hold up to the “laws” (if there are any…I mean we’re dealing with an industry that breaks rules as much as it follows them) more appealing, that’s still correct. It’s called subjectivity.
Now I do agree, people that don’t get art can be a little ignorant sometimes…they’ll ask to see a change that could potentially ruin a design. I agree, NO is the most powerful tool a creative has. But that no should be backed up with concrete evidence and explanation. Educate your client as to why your design works…don’t just cattle prod them into submission.
And a design should be tested. But in a carefully constructed way: with goals and explicit questions and from an accurate sampling of one’s target audience.
I’m disappointed this film wasn’t given more acclaim…Rob Roy has so many great attributes that are lost on a great majority of American film these days. The costumes, casting, and writing is all very respectful of Scottish history, the character development isn’t pandering and in your face (Rob’s respect for men, his honor, and his self-confidence was demonstrated. The directors didn’t force some cheesy bullshit where Rob somehow respects a man’s honor in a scene…no, Rob’s moral fiber is just demonstrated in the way he talks to his friends & people that would oppose him and in how he chooses to handle tough situations.), and most significantly, the film shows some goddamn respect for women.
If we’re getting into gender roles, we’ve gotta talk about the way in which modern cinemaliteraturetelevisionnews…hell, media in general, portrays women.
And not female sideshows in films starring men where the hunk saves the princess from the evil ugly troll of a man holding her hostage (I call it the Mario model…think about it) either. I have issue with films where they focus on this horribly objectified image of a strong female character. I say: Fuck Wonderwoman, to hell with Mikaela Banes, Arwen can go calculate the last digit of pie, Leia can hop in a sewer, whatever to Vivian Ward, Kay Matheson can go back to her non-existant parents, Erin Andrews? meh…these weren’t strong female characters, they were just Mary Sues created for and by dudes that don’t understand that portraying a perfect woman with hundreds of fantastically sexy traits doesn’t make a woman any stronger…just more objectified and brain boner inducing.
Characters like that are just the collective wet dream of white, socially awkward, nerdy dudes in North Dakota who don’t actually know that many women, so they’re intimidated by anything other than the overused Mario model of a babe damsel in distress, or some super sexy badass supermodel, who just happens to be a top scientist, that fights baddies on the weekends, in nothing but a horribly inefficient leather skinsuit, with a knack for marksmanship.
Quoting almost ver batem from Overthinking It, we don’t need more [Strong Female] Characters, we need us some [Strong Character], Females. God, I want more Ginny Weasley’s, more Lucille Ball’s, more Dorey’s…more Mary MacGregor’s.
Yeah…the best part about Rob Roy wasn’t the realism, the nuanced character development, the dialogue, the under-sensationalized fight scenes…it was the portrayal of the main woman in the film. From the start, Mary is different. Strong. Smart. Vivacious. We’re introduced to her in a scene in which Rob Roy is just returning from an unknown amount of time on the road. We’re to assume she hasn’t seen him in ages. Guess what she’s doing when we’re introduced?
Cooking? No
Doing some early morning laundry? No
Makin a sandwich? Hell no
Giving the lads hair cuts? No
Milking the cows? Eff that
Managing like 8 kids running around the house like they’re caged the rest of the day? No, she’s a better mother than that.
Mary’s sleeping…and she’s sleeping in a practical night gown…not naked, half covered in sheets. She’s got pillow hair, and she’s visibly without makeup. And when Rob wakes her, she’s witty, but in that groggy, still-half-asleep way that’s clear that she’s just another mother who’s enjoying the fact that her kids aren’t up at like 4am. That’s how to introduce a mother.
And from the dialogue, it’s clear that Mary is one that can talk with the big boys. She doesn’t need some sugar-coated bullshit pandering lipservice…and she makes Rob pay for mental slipups with some rock-solid snark. She’s feisty.
Here’s the great part though. Mary isn’t one to fall apart the second an atrocity happens to her. Archibald Cunningham, in an attempt to provoke Rob, kills her livestock, burns her house down, and rapes her.
It’s unfortunate that the rape scene had to be so graphic, but it stood out to me that Mary kept her dignity…she didn’t scream and cry for help…she didn’t beg for mercy…she kept her resolve, and carried on. Immediately after the rape, and as her home is burning around her, she makes sure to compose herself before emerging to face the battalion of British marines outside.
Because she knew the knowledge of the rape would indeed provoke Rob into unadvisable action, Mary remained silent, and swore her body guard to do the same. She didn’t need a shoulder to cry on, she didn’t need some foil character to explain to her why she should keep her rape a secret. She’s smart, intelligent, strong, and has emotional resolve.
Those are the characteristics I’d hope to be displayed in women in film…and Rob Roy nailed it. Now let’s talk about how the British baddies were all queer and the Scots were all rugged and hetero…
