The Problems with The Vampire Diaries: More Than Irksome

I am a self-professed fan of The Vampire Diaries. Yes. I am. It’s endearing, funny – at times slick and witty – action-packed and I am obsessed with the love triangles it portrays. I will try not to bring any ship-war fandom into this post.

…

STELENA FTW!

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

But truly, this isn’t a Stefan versus Damon, Stelena versus Delena piece, this is about how while I tune in to the show every week and have been for the past 3 years, there are fundamental issues with TVD and they’re beginning to more than irk me.

            

Let’s start with the witch, Bonnie Bennett.

           

TVD has been running for four seasons now so the pattern concerning witches is well established: they have all been Black. The only exception to this pattern is Esther, the “Original Witch” who created vampires, and even she learned her craft from the Black witch who serves her family i.e. a woman enslaved to the family (The Vampire Diaries also glosses over enslavement while feeling self-satisfied with its subtle hints toward its presence in American history). I bring this up because most characters of colour have died on The Vampire Diaries – Anna, Connor, Luka and his father, Pearl, Bree – and if they haven’t died, they are there to serve the purpose of either helping or destroying the predominately white vampires. Nothing else.

           

Bonnie is the only character-of-colour who is in the forefront and even she is an incidental character. Indeed, she is integral in all of the supernatural creatures’ plots to either save Elena or themselves but she is not a character beyond her witchiness. They do not show her for anything else.  She is there to be used for her powers and nothing else and when she is so traumatized by an event that she can’t use them anymore, she’s told that she is not valuable (“The witch who has lost her powers is left out of the important conversations”).  It can be said that Bonnie’s character revolves around loyalty to her family, to her friends, and to, in a sense, morality and yet the only way she’s given to express that is through her magic. Caroline, Elena, Rebekah and Katherine are all given complexities and arcs that make them fuller characters. Caroline went from a neurotic, deeply insecure and seemingly shallow teenage girl to a fierce, loyal, mature and grounded vampire woman; Elena, driven by compassion and empathy is not a saint, she is selfish a lot of the time and victimizes herself to an irritating degree; conversely, Katherine who appears to be purely selfish and cold-hearted is also driven by love and loyalty; and finally, Rebekah, also deeply insecure, lonely, desperate and loyal channels her frustration through intense-vampire-bullying. Bonnie, however, lacks any of these interesting dynamics. It is not that she is a witch first, she’s a witch only; she is the contemporary Magical Negro there to serve at the pleasure of those around her. Magic is her only identity and she is the least protected character in the entire show – most characters have lost at least one family member throughout the course of the series – but Bonnie sacrifices, she and her family are the collateral damage 99 times out of 100 and she isn’t given the support of her friends.

           

This sort of segues into my next issue with The Vampire Diaries, which truthfully hasn’t been brewing as long as my Bonnie Bennett problem. As I mentioned earlier, The Vampire Diaries prides itself on giving its characters interesting dynamics so as to avoid creating stock characters (with the exception of Bonnie) and that is especially true for the two leading men: Stefan and Damon Salvatore. I will be focusing on Damon and particularly his relationship with Caroline.

Damon comes into the series as basically a psychopath who takes advantage of insecure girls, feeds on them, sleeps with them, compels them (erases their memory) and repeats – Caroline being his most prominent victim.  He also kills civilians to prove a point to his righteous, straight-laced little brother, Stefan, and tries to tempt Stefan’s girlfriend, Elena, into cheating on Stefan with him. Further, he tried to kill Caroline by draining her blood (Stefan saw to it that that didn’t happen) and he also tries to kill Bonnie and, again, Stefan saves her life.  It’s then revealed that Damon is pathologically lonely, fiercely in love with a woman (Katherine) who has led him on for over a century, ridden with suppressed guilt for the pain he has caused, and actually falls completely in love with Elena as she is someone who saw good in him and took a chance on him.

As the seasons progress, he becomes less and less psychopathic (even though his promiscuous and homicidal tendencies appear every once in a while) and allows his caring nature to shine through, mostly with Elena and with his brother, although with secondary characters too, such as with Caroline’s mother, Sheriff Forbes. In this season, Damon appears to be completely reformed and as a vampire, Elena has transformed into a different, more impulsive, “darker” woman. The two are finally together – yay for Delena fans, ehh for Stelena fans. However, Caroline reserves judgment on their relationship and takes jabs at Damon every chance she gets, which culminates into Elena vehemently defending Damon and paying no attention to his track record, criticizing Caroline for falling into bed with him in an instant and then ends with Caroline apologizing for her judgment.

            

Um, WHY SHOULD CAROLINE APOLOGIZE? The notion astounds me.

         

Indeed, Damon has changed. Elena and Stefan have both directly and indirectly turned him into a better man. However, the present doesn’t outweigh or erase the past. When Caroline transitioned into a vampire in season 2, all of her erased memories came back, which included Damon’s murder attempt and his emotional and physical abuse. While the show doesn’t directly acknowledge how Caroline feels about these memories or shows any real hostility in the Caroline/Damon relationship, Caroline is incredibly wary of Damon’s character and constantly pushes Elena to stay with Stefan who, does have a very bloody past, but who meaningfully atones for his past crimes and who has never tried to kill any of Elena’s friends. Caroline’s mistrust of Damon is well-founded and yet the show doesn’t appear to think so and constantly tries to counter her doubts so as to show Damon as a truly honorable person while forgetting or trying to make the audience forget that she has experienced a serious trauma with this person. It ventures into the Stephanie Meyer land of irresponsibility and is more than irritating and astounding.

Alas, I think I will end my post because if I go any further it will become a piece about how and why Stefan is better for Elena than Damon and that is not why I sat down and wrote this this afternoon. I am not completely writing-off The Vampire Diaries, it is a show I am completely obsessed with (probably a bit unhealthily so) but that isn’t to say that it’s not without some deep-rooted, real issues because it is, and they need to be acknowledged.

They're both Black ... So What's The Issue?

There have been many debates surrounding the choice to cast Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic “Nina”. On the one hand, there are arguments for the casting choice, which essentially say Saldana is an excellent actress and a woman of African ancestry so what’s the issue? On the other hand, there’s an argument against the choice and it specifically takes issue with Saldana’s light skin and with the Hollywood tendency to “whitewash and lightwash a lot of stories, particularly when black actresses are concerned.”

            I agree with the latter argument.

            

This isn’t an attack on Saldana or on her acting abilities (although to be honest, the movies I’ve seen her in haven’t given her the capacity to exercise her acting skills for me to judge whether or not she is a good actress). However, I do take issue with the fact that rather than finding a dark-skinned actress who looks more like Nina Simone, the writers/producers/director have chosen to cast a light-skinned woman, fix her with a prosthetic nose, afro wig and – wait for it – darken her with makeup.

             

Sure. Actors and actresses have physically altered themselves to look like the characters they play; they dye their hair, gain weight, grow a beard, put on accents. However, none of those practices are rooted in racism and carry the emotional and historical and colonial baggage that blackface does. Yes. I do consider Saldana darkening her skin to look more like Nina Simone – who incidentally wrote “Four Women” a song about the histories and skin tones of four Black women – an act of blackface. Further, I find the choice an insult to Nina Simone’s legacy in that she did not adhere to what show business at that time deemed acceptable aesthetics and celebrated her dark skin and wide nose when she was told that those features did not embody beauty.

For more context surrounding the aforementioned Hollywood tendency, one just needs to take a look at Thandie Newton and the controversy surrounding her role in the film based on Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”, which deals with the Nigerian Civil War; there is also the fact that Jacqueline Fleming, who is biracial, was cast as Harriet Tubman in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

            

As Tiffani Jones, founder of the blog Coffee Rhetoric, says: “When is it going to be O.K. to not be the delicate looking ideal of what the media considers blackness to be?”

Ship Of Souls: A Novel of Revolutionary Nature

The best way for me to describe Zetta Elliott's novel is to say that it is revolutionary but not necessarily because it makes any overt political statements (although there are a few), but because it is a rarity; Ship of Souls is a Young Adult fantasy novel and all three of the protagonists are Black teens. In my experience, it is difficult to find a YA novel about Black teens much less a fantasy YA novel. As a writer, it is my goal to achieve what Elliott has -- and that is to write a story about human relationships wherein the characters happen to be people of colour. This leads me to discuss the book itself.

For those who don't know what the novel is about, the summary is as follows: a mysterious and supernatural bird takes three unlikely friends, D, Hakeem or "Keem", and Nyla on a "perilous journey that will take them from Brooklyn to the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan, and into the very realm of the dead" (from the back of the book). Not only is the fantastical element of the novel both chilling and intriguing, Elliott masterfully balances the otherworldly with the banalities of adolescence. While D is coming to grips with the fact that he can speak to a bird, he also worries about impressing the beautiful Nyla, fitting in at school, and whether or not he's "Black enough"; issues that concern Black teenage boys as well as teenage boys of other racial backgrounds. Thus, Elliott succeeds in exploring themes that reach a specific (and often overlooked) target audience without excluding other readers.

The characters were also very enjoyable to read; D, Nyla and Keem made a wonderful dynamic since all three of their personalities were wildly different. I found myself drawn to Nyla's tough and independent nature and her sassy wit made me laugh on more than one occasion. While D is the main character, Nyla is the most active out of the three, and I was immensely pleased to read about a female character who was not passive in any sense and who didn't apologize for her personality or her beauty but who did not exploit her appearance either.

This is all to say that I read Ship of Souls in one sitting and while I deeply enjoyed the novel as a reader, I also deeply respected it as a writer. Zetta Elliott is a master of balance and nuance; she is able to use specificity to achieve universal appeal and I would highly recommend this novel for any young adult.

I've Been Gone For A While ... Only To Reappear With A Little Self-Indulgence

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadawrites/2011/11/writer-to-watch-zalika-reid-benta.html

Invisible Women in Invisible City: The Issue That Isn't Acknowledged In Hubert Davis' Documentary

After hearing all of the hype surrounding Hubert Davis’ Invisible City, yesterday I decided to go and watch it for myself. While I found it a little slow-paced, I enjoyed the cinematography and thought the film did an excellent job in illustrating instances of systemic racism. A specific instance is when Mikey visits his guidance counselor and asks to be transferred from applied math to academic. Despite his B average in math, the guidance counselor questions whether or not he would be able to handle the workload in an academic class and keeps him in applied. Invisible City also provides an excellent example of stereotyping when interviewing Kendell’s basketball coach. The coach essentially said that he likes to bring boys from Regent Park onto the team for their inherent toughness and aggression. His comment reminded me of an article I had to read in my Grade 12 English Class that basically stated that while Black players have an inbuilt talent and “flow” for basketball white players are more strategic and tactical in their game. I remember being the only student offended by the notion and shut down by my teacher when I raised my contentions. But anyway, even with these necessary and illuminating scenes, Invisible City is fundamentally problematic for two interrelated reasons:

(Lack of) women and the portrayal of motherhood.

Granted, Invisible City follows the lives of two Black teenage boys: Kendell and Mikey. But there is hardly any representation or acknowledgement of Black teenage girls or Black women in the entire documentary. From what I remember, there are two instances in which the camera focuses on Black girls. One instance is when Kendell is playing basketball and a girl, presumably his girlfriend, is watching him play; the other is when Mikey’s sisters are studying and Mikey’s VO states that his mother doesn’t understand that his sisters don’t have to deal with what he deals with: racially prejudiced teachers, racist cops, and the temptation to follow his friends into trouble.

Both instances are loaded with issues. Mikey’s VO is his opinion but the documentary implicitly takes on the view that Black girls simply don’t face as many problems as Black boys. While it is true that Black girls aren’t confronted with all of the same problems as Black boys, there are plenty of racially-inspired hurdles that both genders face. For instance, Black women face just as many stereotypes as Black men. To name a few, we are stereotyped as being promiscuous, as being “baby-mamas”, as being loud-mouthed, and as being difficult and aggressive. Speaking from experience, teachers and authority figures do in fact label Black girls just as much as Black boys, their stigmatization predicated on the aforementioned stereotypes. Furthermore, Black women must deal with Western standards of beauty and must contend with the fact that we are represented as ugly in comparison to white women. A shocking example of this is the online article Psychology Today posted then deleted, arguing that, scientifically, Black women are less attractive because we have more masculine features compared to women of other races. Growing up with these notions of beauty and ugliness most definitely makes teenagehood for Black girls difficult and cruel and it is plainly wrong to suggest or imply that Black girls have it easy compared to Black boys. Our issues are merely different.

The shot of the girl watching Kendall play basketball bothered me because I found it to be a manifestation of a running theme in the documentary: that Black women are passive and bystanders to men’s lives. The portrayal of the mothers reiterates that theme, for the documentary doesn’t portray them as having active roles in their sons’ lives. Indeed, Davis illustrates that they love their boys and that they work extremely hard to provide for them but when it comes to their sons’ constant run-ins with the law and their inattention at school, the mothers’ vocabulary are filled with phrases such as “I wish”, “I hope” and “I pray.”

Furthermore, the mothers are put in stark contrast with Ainsworth Morgan, former pro-athlete and a local role model, who does actively participate in Mikey and Kendell’s lives, who talks to them “on the real” about how they’re screwing up their lives. He is essentially the father-figure to both boys and to other boys in the community – and he is the one who can put the boys in line. Now, I do think it is extremely important and absolutely necessary for Black men to take up their responsibility and parent their children – sons and daughters – but to suggest, like Invisible City (in my view) does, that Black boys absolutely need their fathers to teach them right from wrong, to keep them in line, to “be a man” essentially, is not only misogynistic, but a Western way of thinking.

But Davis isn’t the only director who takes this approach. John Singleton and Spike Lee treat Black women in very much the same way. While Boyz N The Hood and Do The Right Thing are fictional films, they still make commentary on the social conditions of Black boys and the Black community. In Boyz, Tre moves in with his father because his mother admits she can’t teach him to be a man. When talking about his other, fatherless friends, Tre’s father states that they have no one to teach them responsibility. The women in the film are either drug addicts, neglectful and cruel mothers, or they easily navigate the education system and experience no hardships or issues in their advancement. In Do The Right Thing, the women have a muted presence and are generally portrayed as passive.

Films like Boyz N The Hood, Do The Right Thing and The Invisible City are a good commentary on the social conditions of the Black community in North America, and they are good snapshots of what Black boys have to experience on the day-to-day. But they are incomplete in their commentary on the social conditions because they hardly acknowledge how Black girls deal with the conditions. All in all, there needs to be more films and more books (fictional and nonfictional) that deal with the experiences of Black teenage girls and the struggles and issues we must contend with growing up.

The Lovely Bones: Garishly Sentimental and Blatantly Stereotypical

With the exception of Inception, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and the Harry Potter series, I like to think I don’t watch movies because of the hype that surrounds them. Or I at least don’t watch them when the hype is still fresh. So I felt safe watching The Lovely Bones the other day considering that it has been about a year since the movie has been released. While I certainly did not like the movie, I can’t say I absolutely hated it. It is more appropriate to say that the film frustrated me.

Before I begin my rant I suppose it’s necessary to provide a brief synopsis of the film. Essentially, Susie Salmon, a fourteen-year-old girl, is murdered by her neighbour George Harvey. Instead of “moving on” to heaven, Susie stays in the “In-Between” world and watches as her family and murderer deals with and tries to move on from her death. When her murderer is brought to justice, when her family is no longer fragmented and when she fulfils her dream of kissing her crush (which she does in a very Ghost-like moment wherein she inhabits the body of another girl) Susie is able to leave the In- Between and go to heaven. The end.

Now, I haven’t read the novel and there is a good chance that I won’t enjoy it if I do decide to read it, but even so, I can still tell that the film is a bastardization of the book. The characters are one-dimensional, failing to portray the complexity of grief and of losing a child/sibling (VERY disappointed in Mark Wahlberg who I generally enjoy watching onscreen), the motives of the murder are nonexistent, making George Harvey a crude villain (although I do admit that Stanley Tucci does a great job considering the limitations of his character), the in-between world itself is garish and cartoonish, and the overtly sentimental tone of the overall film (exacerbated by the unnecessary narration and maudlin script) either forced me to change the channel for a few seconds or yell “PUH-LEASE” or “COME ON” at the TV. However, none of these aspects irritated me as much as the stereotypical character Denise Le Ang a.ka. Holly Golightly, a girl Susie meets in the In-Between.

I was upset by the fact that Denise Le Ang, an East Asian girl, is a type of “Magical Minority” character in that she just appears to Susie with knowledge of the In-Between and subsequently serves as Susie’s guide through this ethereal world, which is characteristic of Magical Minority characters, such as Bagger Vance (Will Smith) in The Legend of Bagger Vance and Cash (Don Cheadle) in The Family Man. In relation, I was irked by the fact that Denise was allotted the minority best-friend role. Although it is revealed by the end of the film that she was also a victim of George Harvey’s, throughout the narrative, she is given no back story, no desires, no wishes – her only goal is to help Susie move on from the In-Between and into Heaven. She has absolutely no personality or character. Even when the film reveals that Denise died at the hands of George Harvey, Susie finds out for herself and through her narration, tells the audience. Denise isn’t even given enough agency to tell her own story – a robbery that reminded me of Edward Said’s Orientalism in which he summarizes the maxim of imperialism as being “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” I do not think such a reading of Denise’s character is too much of a stretch or too heavy-handed, for film does perpetuate these types of sentiments, perhaps unconsciously, but they’re still present and prevalent and they still come through.

It is true that overall The Lovely Bones is a one-dimensional and, despite the heavy subject matter, almost frivolous film that contains a variety of stock characters from the father, Jack Salmon, to the murderer, George Harvey, to Susie herself. However, none of these characters are stereotypical and therefore none of these characters are complicit in perpetuating typecasts and imperial limitations in relation to racial minorities. I cannot say the same for Denise "Holly" Le Ang.

Sex and the City 2: Superficial, Racist, and just overall Bad

So this post was a long time coming. I meant to write it right after I saw the movie but I was sidetracked with school, work, exams etc. Anyway, here it is now. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find certain things about this sequel humorous, but, I felt a strong sense of guilt and dirtiness whenever I laughed at a joke because, at least for the last half of the movie, a joke was made at the expense of another culture.

Before I get into this post, I suppose it’s important to quickly summarize what the movie is about or at least the part I will be focusing on.

The sequel takes place two years after the prequel. Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte are all leading lives that are (supposedly) more stressful than before: Samantha, now 52, tries to keep her libido alive by using hormones and at the same time she must deal with menopause; Miranda chooses to quit her job because her chauvinist boss constantly shuts her down; Charlotte’s two daughters are a handful – the eldest is needy and the youngest constantly cries – and she’s worried Harry may have an affair with the stay-at-home nanny; and Carrie’s marriage to Mr. Big is in a rut as she wants to go out but he merely wants to stay at home, watch TV, and eat takeout.

Maybe half-an-hour into the film, Samantha is approached by an Arab sheikh to devise a PR campaign for his business, and he offers to fly her and her friends on an all-expenses-paid luxury vacation to Abu Dhabi where they are given attractive man-servants amongst many other ridiculously excessive “perks.” While in Abu Dhabi, many things take place: Carrie runs into her ex-fiancé Aidan; and Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda run up against a culture clash in the Middle East, as their style and attitudes contrast with Muslim society but none more than Samantha.

My issue is with the way the culture clash was depicted because, really, Sex and the City portrays Western views as progressive and liberating while the Islamic society is illustrated as primitive and oppressive. When the four friends discuss Western men and Western society, they all agree that while men in the States like to think they’re progressive, they really want “us [women] to wear burqas around our face.” Thus the film is stating that Western men are not progressive thinkers because they secretly harbour a desire to conform to Middle Eastern customs.

How ignorant, arrogant and completely vile is that sentiment?

Near the end of the film, when the four friends rush to make their flight, Samantha’s purse drops and a bunch of condoms fall onto the ground in the middle of a marketplace. At seeing the condoms on the ground, a group of local men begin to aggressively berate her to which Samantha yells “YES. I LIKE SEX.” A group of local women, dressed in burqas, help the four friends escape the angry mob by pulling them all into a room in which they commend Samantha for her outburst. After which, they take off their burqas and reveal they are wearing Western designer clothes beneath their traditional dress. This was supposed to be an emotional, touching and empowering moment for women but really, it was incredibly offensive. The Arabic women are only considered empowered because they’re wearing Western fashion and conform – to what the movie portrays – as Western beliefs, because we all know it’s impossible for Middle Eastern women or men to be progressive in their own cultural context.

Furthermore, the film illustrates the Islamic culture as something that is meant to be gawked at and ripped a part. When Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte first arrive at their hotel in Abu Dhabi, they go to the pool and make commentary on the burquinis (a burquini is a head-to-toe swimsuit that enables women to adhere to the Islamic dress code). If the commentary was merely informative then there wouldn’t be a problem but the commentary was meant to illustrate the swimsuit as ridiculous and oppressive and the audience was meant to laugh at the sheer ludicrousness of it. I honestly don’t understand how there has been no outcry over this movie!

And moving away from the blatant stereotyping, I don’t even understand how this movie is supposed to be empowering to women in general. Is it because the four protagonists are women? Is it because these women are sexual? Is that all it takes for a movie to be considered empowering to a female audience? None of these women have real problems to overcome! Charlotte has two daughters that cry a lot. What child doesn’t? She has a husband, a stay-at-home nanny, and she’s wealthy, and her problem is that she doesn’t have any time to herself? Puh-lease. As a child of a single mother, I was extremely insulted.

It really disheartens and angers me that the movies studios are making for female audiences consist of movies like Sex and the City 2 and the Twilight “saga”, for they are fundamentally problematic in more ways than one. That studios are also making racially prejudicial and offensive movies like Sex and the City 2 and Avatar merely prove the lack of progress we, as a society, have made in regards to race and other cultures, for film, like literature, is a mirror of the issues, prejudices, and concerns of the time and society in which it is made.