#Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

[copperarsenite]

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

Alice Bolin

[selchielesbian]

I did not meet my reading goal this year (and threw my list out the window about a month in) but I think that’s fine because I’ve done more reading in the last six months than I have the last four years, which was the point!!

For my own benefit, and your enjoyment, here’s what I read this year:

Finished:

Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall by James Polchin. Absolutely excellent book about the history and formation of the ‘gay panic’ defense. In depth and well researched.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Very glad I never got around to reading this in college because I would have made it my entire personality.

Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers by Jude Ellison S. Doyle. Essay collection that started out strong but I think lost the plot somewhere around the chapter on motherhood and pregnancy. Since publishing the collection the author has come out as trans so I’d be interested to see them revisit some of their points—there were a few times when they brought trans identity into focus but mostly quoted other trans essayists because they felt they were unqualified to speak on the subject, but wanted to include trans women and nonbinary people when relevant. This book gave me a lot to research, and some film recommendations aside lol.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. I actually received this book from a friend back in 2020, read the first story, and went hmmm. Maybe not for me! I finally picked it back up this year and devoured it in a few days. Really delicious, left me feeling sick and raw for some time. Great stuff.

The Locked Tomb series (GtN, HtN, NtN, As Yet Unsent and Dr. Sex) by Tamsyn Muir. As you all know, it has taken over my life. I think this series has a lot of good and bad qualities and was designed to make me, specifically, insane.

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir. Very fun break down of the ‘princess trapped in a tower’ fairytale. This is one I listened to while driving and doing chores so I’d like to sit down with a print copy some time and dig through it a little more.

Antigonick by Sophocles, translated and reworked by Anne Carson. I love Antigone and Anne Carson so this was just entirely delightful. I really recommend watching the live performance here while you read along with the script!

Did Not Finish:

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid. Really enjoyed the nonlinear storytelling and subject matter but I put the book down for a month and was completely lost when I tried to pick it back up again so it’ll have to carry over into next year’s reading list!

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Just as excellent and unsettling as Her Body, but the narrative hit a little too close to what I went through with my most recent relationship to the point where every chapter made me physically ill so I had to put it down for my own wellbeing. Lol. Someday I’ll return to it. Not this year.

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin. Very disappointing. First few essays were interesting and well written but this is not a cohesive collection and had very little to do with the pitched premise.

This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno. The plot sounded intriguing but I just found the first few chapters a slog. Could be persuaded to give it another shot but it’s not high on my list.

[cailinrogersfinearts]

interesting articles, artists, discussions etc I've found helpful to my practice/discussion

Amalia Ulmans instagram hoax/performance art:

https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/39375/1/amalia-ulman-2014-instagram-hoax-predicted-the-way-we-use-social-media

https://www.ft.com/content/d2cb7650-279b-11ea-9a4f-963f0ec7e134

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/amalia-ulman-instagram-excellences-perfections/index.html

discussion and feminist film debate around the 2022 release of ‘Blonde’ and this years release of ‘The Idol’, both of which I found to be extremely disappointing, poor executions of female trauma. interesting and relevant discussion about violence against women in film in a historical and contemporary context, the male gaze, men telling women trauma stories and the obsession with ‘dead girls’

https://www.thecollegeview.com/2022/10/12/blonde-review-the-film-that-fails-feminism/

dead girls: essays on surviving an american obsession, book by Alice Colin

https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/dont-worry-darling-blonde-feminist-films-debate-nina-menkes-1234773458/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/the-idol-review-the-weeknd-lily-rose-depp-1.6865652

https://theplaylist.net/the-idol-review-sam-levinsons-crude-provocation-with-the-weeknd-lily-rose-depp-is-gross-sexist-cannes-20230523/

https://whynow.co.uk/read/the-bad-feminism-of-sam-levinson

podcasts I’ve found to be extremely telling and interesting in regard to ‘popular feminism’ and ‘white feminism’ particularly when listened to in conjunction with each other. almost shocking when listening to ‘Chloe cherry’ speak on sex work in comparison to Eileen Kelly's episode of “Sex Trade Abolition with Ex-Prostitute Esperanza”

(plus a few other relevant/interesting listens)

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1MlqjBFo2u4gqoLHYqZHY5

https://open.spotify.com/episode/62TklN8ewrURvkr7K9jWGz.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/13IUZecisFJVqMQLnVeIy5

^ these three perspective from 3 different sex workers, extremely telling about contemporary understandings and discourse around sex work and how the term ‘empowerment’ feels so exclusionary to privilege 

Emily radakowski’s response to her episode with Chloe cherry:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3w3ZjZeQpd7miutEp03axP

(a few other relevant/interesting listens)

“taking pop culture seriously” : https://open.spotify.com/episode/2kqb0AJoNyAxIIKPwn0gbc

“ethical porn with director Erika lust” :https://open.spotify.com/episode/5FH2YaRuKobCrsb6W4IitT

“women of trans experience” https://open.spotify.com/episode/3F6QKUATKlcjyzoYZOz46u

“neoliberal feminism, AKA the girl boss apocalypse” https://open.spotify.com/episode/0PDkMfVdYz4pqrUvfML4oc

[bigtickhk]

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin https://amzn.to/2OKmfbU

[virgin-martyr]

Just as for the murderers, for the detectives in True Detective and Twin Peaks, the victim's body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.

Alice Bolin, excerpt from Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

[finalgirlfall]

@lissar tagged me to post 10 books i want to read in 2022! these are the books i’m currently planning to read for this year’s storygraph genre challenge. titles and authors follow below:

if beale street could talk, james baldwin

dead girls: essays on surviving an american obsession, alice bolin

parable of the sower, octavia e. butler

pass with care: memoirs, cooper lee bombardier

the ferryman, jez butterworth

braiding sweetgrass: scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants, robin wall kimmerer

arsenic and adobo, mia p. manansala

you all grow up and leave me: a memoir of teenage obsession, piper weiss

the sentence: a novel, louise erdrich

say nothing: a true story of murder and memory in northern ireland, patrick radden keefe

oh! almost forgot to tag people... tagging: @kirstensleepey @savagegoodboy @jubileealbum @engulfes :-)

[cavehags]

You’re anti true crime right? Do you have any good articles about that to recommend?

not a ton, because i find that a lot of pieces on the ethics of true crime are fairly superficial and start from a place of like "listen, i, the writer of this piece, LOVE true crime, but let's put that aside and talk about the issues inherent in it" and i can't get behind that - presenting this as an intellectually interesting counterargument that doesn't quite rise to the level of being enough evidence against the genre is simply not enough.

but anyway, a few pieces do come to mind. this one came out today:

emma berquist writes:

Crime stories are a fundamentally conservative way of looking at the world. Republicans bleat about high crime rates in lawless liberal cities because someone stole a toothbrush from a CVS. Suburban crime paranoia is as old as the suburbs themselves — hell, it’s why they exist to begin with. The reactionary basis of true crime is how you end up with ostensibly liberal podcast hosts defending the death penalty and arguing against double jeopardy protections. It’s easy and correct to condemn Fox News for increasing our grandparents’ blood pressure, keeping them in a perpetual state of fear about roving gangs of MS-13 coming to their gated communities, but we should also consider that other demographics might be susceptible to fear-stoking propaganda. How can we listen to story after story of women being abducted or murdered and expect it to not have an effect on our psyche?

this one i picked because i often think about this case - a true crime podcaster who, in addition to using real people's deaths for entertainment (with a show title that grossly makes light of addiction as if the subject matter wasn't bad enough), also plagiarizes original journalism without citing any of it. this to me begs the question of what the fuck the podcast is supposed to be for

while you're at it, the podcast "running from COPS" is a more zoomed-in and very detailed look at the particular case of the tv show COPS, a shockingly omnipresent tv phenomenon that airs footage humiliating survivors of police encounters every single night

i just picked up alice bolin's book dead girls: essays on surviving an american obsession (literally picked it up this morning, from one of those free birdhouse-style lending libraries) and although i suspect it may fall into the "halfhearted counterargument" category i mentioned at the top of this post, i'll update here if it turns out to be good

[thoughtfulfangirling]

2022 Reads

It’s that time where I start a new list of the books I’m reading this year. I might try again to do blurbs about them as I go and link them but uh... I’ve never kept up with it so no promises. For my 2021 and previous year reads, go here and follow the rabbit hole. For 2023, go here.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive^ by Stephanie Land

How to Lose the Time War* by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar~

Sorcery of Thorns^ by Margaret Rogerson

The Animals in That Country^ by Larua Jean McKay

Gearbreakers by Zoe Hana MIkuta

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: ReVisioning American History by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (novella) by Tamsyn Muir

A Winter Haunting^ by Dan Simmons

The Binding: A Novel by Bridget Collins

Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah

The Dark Lord of Derkholm^ By Diana Wynn Jones

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea* by Sarah Pinsker~

Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan

The Song in the Silence* by Elizabeth Kerner

How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self by Nicole LePera, PhD

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell^ by Susanna Clark

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning

Dark Currents: Agent of Hel book 1 by Jacqueline Carey

The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esme´ Weijun Wang

Pride and Prejudice* by Jane Austen

The Lesser Kindred* by Elizabeth Kerner

Lincoln in the Bardo^ by George Saunders

Emma by Jane Austen

Accessing the Future edited by Kathryn Allan and Djibril Al-Ayad

Redeeming the Lost* by Elizabeth Kerner

1984 by George Orwell~

Kushiel's Chosen* by Jacqueline Carey

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

The Secret History by Donna Tart

How we Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins

The Deep by Rivers Solomon (novella)

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler

For the Love of Men: From Toxic to a More Mindful Masculinity by Liz Plank

Contact by Carl Sagan~

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

The Witch's Heart by Genevieve Gornichec

We're Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*

Parable of the Talents by Ocatavia E Butler

Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems by Alexandra Stein

The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West by Jeff Guinn

Circe by Madeline Miller

Autumn Bones: Agent of Hel Book 2 by Jacqueline Carey

Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin

True Irish Ghost Stories compiled by St John D Seymour and Harry L Neligan

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir~

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Penguin Book of Hell edited by Scott G Bruce

The Devil and Harper Lee by Mark Seal

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth

Mostly Void, Partially Stars by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

Carmilla by J. Sheridan Lefanu

Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors* by Sonali Dev

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Thirteen Storeys by Jonathan Sims^

Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie

Dracula by Bram Stoker*~

The Girl in the Green Silk Gown by Seanan McGurie

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Red Azalea by Anchee Min

The November Girl by Lydia Kang

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle^ by Haruki Murakami with Jay Rubin

Poison Fruit: Agent of Hel Book 3 by Jacqueline Carey

Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun

In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende

Make You Mine This Christmas by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

*Re-Reads ^Chosen for me by someone else ~Reads done with spouse

[dead-grrrls]

feminist recommendation week 2:

dead girls: essays on surviving an american obsession by alice bolin

A collection of poignant, perceptive essays that expertly blends the personal and political in an exploration of American culture through the lens of our obsession with dead women. In her debut collection, Alice Bolin turns a critical eye to literature and pop culture, the way media consumption reflects American society, and her own place within it. From essays on Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, Bolin illuminates our widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster a man’s story. From chronicling life in Los Angeles to dissecting the “Dead Girl Show” to analyzing literary witches and werewolves, this collection challenges the narratives we create and tell ourselves, delving into the hazards of toxic masculinity and those of white womanhood. Beginning with the problem of dead women in fiction, it expands to the larger problems of living women—both the persistent injustices they suffer and the oppression that white women help perpetrate. Sharp, incisive, and revelatory, Dead Girls is a much-needed dialogue on women’s role in the media and in our culture.

[books-in-media]

Emma Roberts, (Instagram, July 14, 2018)

—Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession , Alice Bolin (2018)

[bonesache]

When [Nick Dunne's] issues with women do leak through, like when he becomes momentarily furious that a female detective is telling him what to do in his own home, he blames it on being raised by his father and thinks his self-awareness will absolve him. He is the classic male victim. Even his misogyny is something that was done to him.

Alice Bolin, “The Husband Did It,” Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

[snoopysfriendwoodstock]

hello, fabulous scarlett. can you please reccomend me books to read? i really want to try to get my heart into literature again. i've been going back and forth to my faves, but i really want to try exploring others. thank you in advance for this! take care x

hi!! of course, i’d love to! i think i have suggested a lot of these books before but i’m going to divide them up into little categories. also i like to read a lot of books that are not technically “good” but i think they are very FUN!

classics!:

emma & pride and predjudice by jane austen

othello & macbeth by shakespeare

the awakening by kate chopin

their eyes were watching god by zora neale hurston

rebecca by daphne du maurier 

little women by louisa may alcott

modern gothic favs:

beloved by toni morrison

sharp objects by gillian flynn

mexican gothic by silvia moreno-garcia

historical fiction!:

daisy jones and the six & the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid

restless by william boyd

code name verity by elizabeth wein

megan abbott books <3

dare me

the fever

non fiction that is all drastically different

i’ll be gone in the dark by michelle mcnamara

dead girls: essays on surviving an american obsession by alice bolin

accidental saints: finding god in all the wrong people by nadia bolz-weber

the 57 bus by dashka slater

i’m not with the band: a writer’s life lost in music by sylvia patterson

books that are all different but left a big impression on me in the last year

the poet x by elizabeth acevedo

home fire by kamila shamsie

little weirds by jenny slate

long way down by jason reynolds

the girl in the tangerine scarf by mohja kahf

[bigtickhk]

Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin https://amzn.to/2OKmfbU 

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms by Michelle Tea https://amzn.to/2NzdnIk

[pynkhues]

I’m sure you’ve already gotten a bunch of asks since Manny’s Crime King interview! I’m just like confused about him saying he’s enamored by her world but honestly like how is his different (besides his obvious commitment to the game) he lives in a nice loft, takes his kid to baseball, drives a fancy car, and plays tennis at the club. It’s not like he’s living the life of a thug. I guess I’m not getting the exact contrast of their worlds.

(Rest of my ask) I’m probably missing some obvious point here which is why I’m asking you lol helllppp

I do think Rio’s enamoured with Beth’s world, yes! I think that really boils down to the fact that while on paper Beth and Rio aren’t living dissimilar lives in terms of their roles as parents, and while they obviously now share parts of the criminal world, I do think the show is actually pretty specific in how it represents those worlds, particularly in terms of the masculine / feminine, and how a part of the curiosity around each other is in viewing one another as a key that both compliments their own world, while also unlocking the other’s one for them.

The gendering of spaces in storytelling – but particularly films and TV is, hilariously, a topic that I’m incredibly passionate about and have both written it a lot in my original work, and written about it a lot for magazines, journals and media sites (I’m actually writing an essay at the moment for a literary journal about LGBTQI cinema and how lesbian romances are highly domesticised [i.e. Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Handmaiden, The Favourite, The Kids are Alright] while gay romances are usually very pointedly about keeping away from domestic spaces, moving and traveling [i.e. Brokeback Mountain, The Talented Mr Ripley, Moonlight, Midnight Cowboy, even Call Me By Your Name is heavily focused on being Americans abroad aka away from home] but that all feels like a different story, haha).

Luckily for me, Good Girls is actually about as obsessed with the gendering of spaces as I am. It’s a major, major throughline throughout the show for many of the characters, but particularly Beth and Rio, and their intrigue with the other’s spaces – her interest in his powerful, highly masculine one, and his with her deceptively innocent, strongly feminine one – is really central to their intrigue with each other more broadly.

So to talk about this, we probably need a little bit of context.

(Under a cut because this is literally 4,000 words)

Gendering Spaces in Cinema

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone here, but places and spaces in stories are about as gendered – if not more gendered – as they are in daily life. In particular, cinema’s visual and textual language has historically been very clear:

The inside is female. The outside is male.

This concept has really been around since the beginning of cinema but became very popularised through Westerns in the late 1920s onwards, and really underlined by war films particularly during propaganda cinema in WWII. Men are outside, battling the elements and other men, claiming land, building outwards, while women are at home – either literally or figuratively (if they’re actually out at war, like in the utterly fabulous So Proudly We Hail!, they’re at the ‘home base’ as nurses) – building inwards. Men protect the home while women create it.

Westerns feature these images very potently and very literally. Almost every single western dating back to the 1910s will have some combination of these two shots:

a)       Woman at home, looking out into the wild:

b)      Man leaving home, stepping out into the wild:

(These two stills are from John Ford’s The Searchers which is generally regarded as one of the greatest Westerns of all time. It’s………very racist and misogynistic, as many were and still are, but in terms of technicality and visual language, it’s a very well-made film, albeit not one I enjoyed).

The purpose at the time, of course, was steeped in historic sexism and invested in maintaining that culture, particularly westerns and war films which are heavily devoted to ‘macho’ narratives. Women were passive, men were active, but these images really set the stage for how the ideas of ‘space’ continues to exist in cinema. A fact that’s bolstered by broader social discourses that still exist today – schools, grocery stores, laundromats are inherently ‘female’ spaces because they are seen as an extension of the home, while police stations, car dealerships, warehouses, are inherently ‘male’ spaces because they’re about work, protecting and providing for a home, and being pointedly outside of that domestic space aka ‘the wild’. It’s not an accident that the girls are robbing grocery stores and day spas, but I’ll get back to that, haha.

These ideas of gendered spaces underpin everything we watch, no matter the genre.

Sure, these ideas can be subverted to varying degrees of effectiveness (often it’s steeped in my least favourite trope – the ‘not like other girls’ heroine), but you can’t subvert a trope without actually acknowledging it exists. Sometimes these subversions are done brilliantly too – like in Legally Blonde which was not just about Elle existing in a space that was quintessentially coded as male, but embracing her femininity and womanhood within that space; and often brutally too in films like Winter’s Bone, Room and The Nightingale which all brutalise women in ‘male spaces’ while simultaneously weaponizing female spaces against them – usually the home. The lead character of Winter’s Bone is going to lose her house unless her absent father shows up in court, the lead character of Room creates a home that is simultaneously a sanctuary and a mockery of a sanctuary to try and protect her son from reality and survive, the lead character of The Nightingale has her home invaded, her husband and baby murdered, and is horrifically raped within that home.

Hometown Horror: a divergence

This is a slight aside to where I’m going with this overall, but please indulge me, haha. I’m a big fan of horrors and thrillers, which explore this in a really stark way. In that, the invasion of a home or a domestic space – whether by ghost, demon or serial killer, is, generally speaking, synonymous with the invasion of a woman’s body and the violation of her as a person.

Films that focus on a female survivor or a ‘final girl’ are very generally focused on the invasion of her home as much as it’s focused on the invasion of her body. Think The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Scream, The Babadook, Hereditary, The Conjuring, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Panic Room. The violation of a woman’s home is the invasion of her, because cinema relies on over 100 years of movies telling us that a house and the woman who lives in it are symbolically the same thing.

Horror films that focus on men are very rarely centred in the home. It’s men travelling, or men visiting a woman’s home, or men who’ve been taken. Think of the first Saw movie which takes place in a mysterious basement, Hostel which is at a hostel, Dawn of the Dead at a shopping mall, An American Werewolf in London while two men are on holiday, The Evil Dead is in a cabin, Get Out is at his girlfriend’s family home.

There are exceptions, of course! Family home invasion films like The Purge, Funny Games and The Strangers are rooted in the violation of that home, but still. You’ll generally find that it manifests differently narratively speaking for men and women. Rear Window too takes place entirely in a man’s apartment – but it’s interesting to note that most of the ‘horror’ comes from him spying on somebody else’s home – notably a woman’s, The Descent too is very much about women and is set during cave diving. Still! These are all exceptions, not the rule.

Good Girls and Gendered Spaces

Every single space in Good Girls is gendered. It’s actually one of the things I seriously love about the show because it’s thoughtfully done, and it is deliberate. We know it is, because they tell us explicitly in the writing multiple times. I mean – hell, think of Ruby telling us (well, telling Rio, haha) way back at the end of 1.04 when they’re selling him on the idea of washing cash through Cloud 9 – “Nobody thinks twice about a woman buying her husband a TV or new tires for the minivan.” A store like that is gendered, and Ruby’s reinforcing it by saying it’s a place women go to build a home. It hasn’t been weaponized yet - - but our girls know how to weaponize it. They’re playing on the fact that people think women’s spaces are effectively impotent, and they’re telling Rio – and us as an audience – that they’re going to exploit it.

This is an idea the show revisits frequently. Women’s spaces are – both in life and in storytelling – spaces that are viewed as passive because they are representative of women, and what the show is – I believe – very invested in, is showing how those spaces are fundamentally active. If you want a house to represent a woman – well, okay. Then you get to see what’s under the rug, y’know?

I’m going to come back to the home thread – because I really do think it’s very important, and I think the way the show depicts people in those spaces (and invading those spaces) is significant – but it’s not just homes that are looked at in this way. The show is very specific about having feminine spaces and masculine spaces, with only a few in between (and usually those in-between spaces are very specifically for Stan and Ruby, showing just how in-sync they are with each other and how much they operate within a shared space). Beyond the women’s homes, there are the kids’ schools, Fine & Frugal (very important here to note that Annie emasculates Boomer in what is an associated female space and that he retaliates by attempting to rape her in her own home aka not only another female space, but a space that is symbolically Annie, something he repeats later with Mary Pat – a violation on essentially every character, narrative and symbolic level, again), the waxing salon, Nancy’s day spa, Jane’s dance recital (and actually the physical object of the dubby – being a highly feminine object lost in a very masculine space), and already what we know of s3, with Ruby being at a nail salon and Beth being at a paper / card store.

The show also has very masculinized places – I’d argue Boland Motors is one of the biggest ones – very much about ‘boys and their toys’, which is why Beth pointedly feminising it when she takes over is so significant and symbolically indicative of Beth’s claiming of that space; but also spaces like the police station, the drug dealer’s house in 2.07, the hotel suite Boomer briefly occupies, even to an extent the church. When the girls are in these spaces, there’s a distinct feeling of encroaching on territory that isn’t theirs, or being in spaces that they don’t belong in. This is often done as a two-hander too – the police station and the church Ruby doesn’t belong in anymore, not necessarily as a woman, but as a criminal.

Nothing though, from a technical standpoint, is more masculine than the spaces that are shown to be Rio’s. From the warehouse spaces to the bar to his loft to his car, Rio’s ‘places’ are distinctly masculine and generally placed in direct contrast with Beth’s femininity. But I’ll come back to that point too.

Home, Identity and Invasion

Almost every female character on this show has a very defined domestic space, from Beth, Ruby and Annie, to Mary Pat, Marion and Nancy. These spaces are representative of not just who they are, but who they are as women, and really comes to routinely represent the interior lives of these characters. This is probably the clearest in 2.09 when Beth is uncharacteristically messy following Dean taking their kids, and in 2.06, when Beth and Dean switch roles, and Dean is incapable of maintaining that domestic space because it’s not his. But let’s not start there.

Let’s start with Annie.

Annie’s apartment is fun, feminine (but not overly so), youthful, sweet, and generally a bit of organized chaos. It’s often underequipped – there are several mentions of the pantry being understocked – but it’ll always do in a pinch. More than anything though, Annie’s apartment comes to life when her son is in it. She’s happiest when he’s there, and when he’s not, her loneliness drives her to pulling people into the space with her, whether that’s the electronics guy, Greg, or Noah.

This is particularly significant when Annie’s forming bonds with people. The show has symbolically relied very heavily on Annie’s moments of vulnerability and connection being grounded in her apartment or an extension of it – usually her car. There was her reconnecting with Greg over YouTube videos in s1, there was Nancy and her talking about pregnancy in 2.02, and there was Noah settling in across season 2. These are all substantial moments in terms of Annie’s interior life that are represented through her home – she lets them all in. Which is why it’s significant what people do when they are in. Particularly the show marrying Noah getting to know Annie while simultaneously rifling through her belongings, trying to know specific things about her.

This is only reiterated by Noah’s scenes with Sadie later in the season – always at home, reiterating just how much Noah’s invaded Annie’s life, how much he’s inside her, how much he’s using everything and everyone who’s important to her, and how much he’s a threat to all of that too.

Ruby and Stan are a little different. Ruby’s house is the only one that’s genuinely shared with somebody, and the show represents this across the board – Ruby and Stan wear similar colours, the house feels like theirs, and the parts of their worlds that are separate are still frequently pretty defined by each other (even when Ruby’s acting away form Stan, the show makes it clear that Stan’s at the forefront of her mind, and vice versa). This indicates their partnership, but the house really still is symbolically tied to Ruby. This is particularly represented by the effect of having Turner in the house, but, more than that, it’s underlined symbolically by Turner arresting Stan at home. If the home symbolically carries the meaning of the woman, Turner arresting Stan there is starkly about Turner taking Stan away from Ruby. That image would not hold the same weight if he was arrested at, say, the park or the police station, because the locations don’t hold the same meaning.

It’s also why there’s significance in Stan and Turner’s showdown narratively speaking happening at the police station. It needs to, because symbolically it should occupy a masculine-coded space, because that showdown isn’t just about who they are as people, but who they are as men.

Beth and Beth’s house is very, very different to Annie and Ruby’s, and holds a more substantial narrative and symbolic function. From the very first episode, the potential of losing her house is key to her arc, and key to her identity as a character.

Beth is a lot of things, but a recurring image with her as a character is that she is invested in projecting a dated idea of ‘perfect womanhood’, and, within that, actually pretty perfectly creates parts of it for herself. For Beth – as somebody who was a housewife for roughly twenty years – her house really is her in every sense of the word. Every threat to that house, every disruption, every wrinkle, every intrusion, every theft, every invitation is personal. Dean might have at least two rooms in the Boland House, but that space is Beth’s on almost every symbolic level. When people pop into it, it’s a direct invasion of her.

This is something that the show has revisited time and time again, particularly when it comes to Beth’s bedroom. When people want to be close to Beth, that’s where they go. Annie slept there across season one when she was vulnerable and lonely, despite Beth telling her to go home, Jane broke into Beth’s closet there when she felt she was being neglected, Dean’s constantly trying to sidle into it (and – pointedly – only really in it when they’re fighting and Beth is revealing something / letting him in on something – that they’re out of money, that she has Rio’s money, that she knows about his affairs). When Beth has been at her most vulnerable, she lets Ruby and Annie into it. That said, the only character who’s been explicitly invited into it has been Rio – significantly both in fantasy, and in the show’s reality.

It’s not just about inviting people in though – when she kicks somebody out of it, the act is loaded.

She’s not just pushing somebody out of a space, she’s pushing them out of her.

It’s not just her bedroom of course (although I do think that’s the most significant space on perhaps the whole show). Rio and Turner between them have regularly invaded Beth’s living room, dining room, her kitchen, her yard. These are often distinctly tied with her doing something domestic and / or distinctly feminine. She’s bringing groceries home, she’s baking, she’s trying on jewellery, she’s mothering her children. Symbolically, this is often when Rio and Turner both are at their most masculine and their most threatening, which just serves to underline the invasion of Beth’s space.

It’s not just the girls though, as I said above. Female domestic spaces on this show are significantly coded as belonging to women, even if they share those spaces. Think about Nancy and Greg’s house – which is Nancy’s space, not Greg’s, and throughout season 1, Annie was pitted as the outsider to that. She’s a smear of hair oil on Nancy’s perfect couch. It’s made all the starker when Nancy kicks Greg out, and when Annie helps Nancy give birth in that house – a distinctly female, intimate act, that not only operates as a significant feminization of that space, but also about Annie fighting for Nancy to let her in again.

These spaces all keep secrets for the women they belong to too – Mary Pat’s husband’s dead body, Boomer’s very much alive one – because, again, symbolically, they are these women.

Rio’s loft is a really interesting one to look at in this context, because not only is it hyper masculine, but the show underlines that it does not hold the same significance that the girls’ places have for them. Beth does not learn Rio by being inside him – something made stark through their game of twenty questions. In fact, being in Rio’s loft, in his space, only serves to point out how much Beth doesn’t know him. Not only that, but Beth’s inability to lose her house (which is really central to her arc) is paralleled exactly with how easily Rio can separate from his.

The domestic space is not male.

Rio exists outside of it.

Beth x Rio and the Feminine x Masculine

Rio and Beth are basically at polar opposites of the masculine / feminine spectrum, and it’s something that this show often casts in a really stark light through dialogue, visual language, character coding and symbolism.

Beth epitomizes the old archetype of femininity and the female world in a way that I don’t think Annie and Ruby do (although I do think Ruby does in some respects). This is coded into almost every part of her character – from her long history of domestic servitude and marital submission (letting Dean control their finances, not working, keeping the house, etc.) to her fertility (four children!) to the way she dresses in floral, bakes, to certain traits, namely her nurturing tendencies, overt empathy and guilt (not being able to kill Boomer). Even in terms of the casting – Christina is somebody who has a very distinctly feminine body.  

On the other hand, Rio, in many ways, epitomizes the old idea of masculinity and the masculine world. He’s coded that way almost as much as Beth is coded as feminine – he’s physically strong (beating up Dean, holding Beth up while they were having sex), assertive, dominant, capable and collected. That’s not even touching on the fact that the golden gun is incredibly phallic, haha.

The show loves to place Beth’s femininity in direct contrast with Rio’s masculinity in a way that it doesn’t do with the other girls or – in fact perhaps more notably – with Beth and Dean (if anything, Dean’s frequently emasculated around Beth, but that feels like a whole other thing, haha), and it does this frequently, and often even in the same shot.

Most notably, think of her pearls on the warehouse door handle:

Their cars parked side-by-side:

Her necklace, his gun:

Her light, his darkness:

Her floral, his solid colours:

Interestingly though, these things are very rarely in competition or combative (although occasionally they are – Rio trying to use her femaleness and his maleness / their sexuality to literally bend her over a table in 2.06 being the clearest example of that). Generally speaking, the show’s visual language though shows us how these things compliment each other. They occupy different gendered spaces, so they can ‘crime’ in different ways – Beth using the big box stores, the secret shoppers, robbing the day spa, are all things that are highly feminised, and give Rio by proxy access to a world he ordinarily wouldn’t (albeit it’s not always a world he’s interested in – like it wasn’t with the botox), and the reverse of that is that Rio gives Beth access to spaces that are highly masculinised and that she ordinarily wouldn’t have access to (again, not always a world she’s interested in either). It’s why when they’re working together, and acknowledging they have different departments, they actually become something really whole, comprehensive and effective.

It’s the exploration of this that I find really intriguing generally, and particularly a thread that I think is reiterated where Beth’s usually at her worst and her most ineffective when she’s trying to emulate Rio’s masculinity. We saw that at the end of 1.10 and the start of 2.01, and I think we saw it at the tail end of season 2 too. When Beth’s succeeding, she’s typically doing something that revels in the strength and power and the underestimation of femininity and female spaces, and turns places that are typically viewed as passive into active ones.

The Secret Shoppers (which worked briefly! And fell apart because she couldn’t handle Mary Pat. Notably almost every scene with them was inside Beth’s house):

The day spa heist:

The Boland Motors takeover / reclamation that focused on feminising the place:

Pretending to be somebody’s mum to get into the kids’ space (which would’ve worked if Beth and Ruby hadn’t started fighting):

Breaking into Rio’s loft:

Again, this is something that seems to be being teased out already in s3 with the paper store and the nail salon, and I’m sure we’ll see it coming up again and again beyond that.

But yes! Your question, haha. I think Rio is enamoured with the strong, feminine space and the untapped female world that Beth exists in, and the ways that she is actively capable of utilising her femininity and her womanness in a way that is completely impossible for him. She can manipulate these spaces – either those already female, or those she makes female aka Boland Motors – in ways that he can’t, and in a way that, at the end of the day, lines his pocket, in the same way that giving her access to his powerful, masculine world lines hers. It’s market development, y’know? But it’s also something that could be a true and successful partnership if they could stop, y’know, playing games and trying to kill each other, haha.

I think it’s worth noting here too that the show has shown us explicitly that Beth absolutely gets off on Rio being highly masculine, and while I think Rio absolutely gets off on Beth being a boss bitch too, it’s also important to note how he responds to her when she’s displaying vulnerability in a way often defined as very feminine – namely crying – and how that display of femininity not only affects him, but often makes him want to touch her (and more and more, follow through on touching her).

Basically I think they’re as obsessed with the contrast between the two of them as we are, haha.  

[virgin-martyr]

The Dead Girl Show's notable themes are its two odd, contradictory messages for women. The first is that girls are wild, vulnerable creatures who need to be protected from the power of their own sexualities... The other message of the Dead Girl Show has for women is simpler: trust no dad. Father figures and male authorities hold a sinister interest in controlling girl bodies, and therefore in harming them.

Alice Bolin, excerpt from Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

[onpyre]

tagged by @deadendtracks (thanks !)

Rules: Tag 9 people that you would like to get to know/catch up with

Last Song: the same—alex g (cuz i only ever listen to mr. giannascoli)... i’ve also been listening to the over the garden wall soundtrack 🎃🍂

Last Movie: finally watched hagazussa. i really liked it! folk horror similar to the vvitch, but waaaay more bleak. a plague movie for a plague year

Currently Watching: halt and catch fire and lovecraft country. i also *just* finished dark and raised by wolves (loved’em both)

Currently Reading: the book of disquiet by fernando pessoa, the new jim crow by michelle alexander, fool on the hill by matt ruff, and dead girls: essays on surviving an american obsession by alice bolin (clearly i am not a fan of finishing things or efficiency)

Currently Craving: actual fall in the mountains! la is fine but gimme an aspen grove!

tagging: @aquiilegia , @cosmicblame , @ifindmyselfoncorners , @moneytoad , @keatonianlogic , @sifflet , & @plushworm