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blind-rats · 4 years ago

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The Rise & Fall of Joss Whedon; the Myth of the Hollywood Feminist Hero

By Kelly Faircloth

“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement.

It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to legal equality for women. Though Buffy had been off the air for more than a decade, its legacy still loomed large; Whedon was widely respected as a man with a predilection for making science fiction with strong women for protagonists. Whedon went on to outline why, precisely, he hated the term: “You can’t be born an ‘ist,’” he argued, therefore, “‘feminist’ includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state, that we don’t emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that’s imposed on us.”

The speech was widely praised and helped cement his pop-cultural reputation as a feminist, in an era that was very keen on celebrity feminists. But it was also, in retrospect, perhaps the high water mark for Whedon’s ability to claim the title, and now, almost a decade later, that reputation is finally in tatters, prompting a reevaluation of not just Whedon’s work, but the narrative he sold about himself.

In July 2020, actor Ray Fisher accused Whedon of being “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable” on the Justice League set when Whedon took over for Zach Synder as director to finish the project. Charisma Carpenter then described her own experiences with Whedon in a long post to Twitter, hashtagged #IStandWithRayFisher.

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Carpenter played Cordelia, a popular character who morphed from snob to hero—one of those strong female characters that made Whedon’s feminist reputation—before being unceremoniously written off the show in a plot that saw her thrust into a coma after getting pregnant with a demon. For years, fans have suspected that her disappearance was related to her real-life pregnancy. In her statement, Carpenter appeared to confirm the rumors. “Joss Whedon abused his power on numerous occasions while working on the sets of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel,’” she wrote, describing Fisher’s firing as the last straw that inspired her to go public.

Buffy was a landmark of late 1990s popular culture, beloved by many a burgeoning feminist, grad student, gender studies professor, and television critic for the heroine at the heart of the show, the beautiful blonde girl who balanced monster-killing with high school homework alongside ancillary characters like the shy, geeky Willow. Buffy was very nearly one of a kind, an icon of her era who spawned a generation of leather-pants-wearing urban fantasy badasses and women action heroes.

Buffy was so beloved, in fact, that she earned Whedon a similarly privileged place in fans’ hearts and a broader reputation as a man who championed empowered women characters. In the desert of late ’90s and early 2000s popular culture, Whedon was heralded as that rarest of birds—the feminist Hollywood man. For many, he was an example of what more equitable storytelling might look like, a model for how to create compelling women protagonists who were also very, very fun to watch. But Carpenter’s accusations appear to have finally imploded that particular bit of branding, revealing a different reality behind the scenes and prompting a reevaluation of the entire arc of Whedon’s career: who he was and what he was selling all along.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered March 1997, midseason, on The WB, a two-year-old network targeting teens with shows like 7th Heaven. Its beginnings were not necessarily auspicious; it was a reboot of a not-particularly-blockbuster 1992 movie written by third-generation screenwriter Joss Whedon. (His grandfather wrote for The Donna Reed Show; his father wrote for Golden Girls.) The show followed the trials of a stereotypical teenage California girl who moved to a new town and a new school after her parents’ divorce—only, in a deliberate inversion of horror tropes, the entire town sat on top of the entrance to Hell and hence was overrun with demons. Buffy was a slayer, a young woman with the power and immense responsibility to fight them. After the movie turned out very differently than Whedon had originally envisioned, the show was a chance for a do-over, more of a Valley girl comedy than serious horror.

It was layered, it was campy, it was ironic and self-aware. It looked like it belonged on the WB rather than one of the bigger broadcast networks, unlike the slickly produced prestige TV that would follow a few years later. Buffy didn’t fixate on the gory glory of killing vampires—really, the monsters were metaphors for the entire experience of adolescence, in all its complicated misery. Almost immediately, a broad cross-section of viewers responded enthusiastically. Critics loved it, and it would be hugely influential on Whedon’s colleagues in television; many argue that it broke ground in terms of what you could do with a television show in terms of serialized storytelling, setting the stage for the modern TV era. Academics took it up, with the show attracting a tremendous amount of attention and discussion.

In 2002, the New York Times covered the first academic conference dedicated to the show. The organizer called Buffy “a tremendously rich text,” hence the flood of papers with titles like “Pain as Bright as Steel: The Monomyth and Light in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’” which only gathered speed as the years passed. And while it was never the highest-rated show on television, it attracted an ardent core of fans.

But what stood out the most was the show’s protagonist: a young woman who stereotypically would have been a monster movie victim, with the script flipped: instead of screaming and swooning, she staked the vampires. This was deliberate, the core conceit of the concept, as Whedon said in many, many interviews. The helpless horror movie girl killed in the dark alley instead walks out victorious. He told Time in 1997 that the concept was born from the thought, “I would love to see a movie in which a blond wanders into a dark alley, takes care of herself and deploys her powers.” In Whedon’s framing, it was particularly important that it was a woman who walked out of that alley. He told another publication in 2002 that “the very first mission statement of the show” was “the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it.”

In 2021, when seemingly every new streaming property with a woman as its central character makes some half-baked claim to feminism, it’s easy to forget just how much Buffy stood out among its against its contemporaries. Action movies—with exceptions like Alien’s Ripley and Terminator 2's Sarah Conner—were ruled by hulking tough guys with macho swagger. When women appeared on screen opposite vampires, their primary job was to expose long, lovely, vulnerable necks. Stories and characters that bucked these larger currents inspired intense devotion, from Angela Chase of My So-Called Life to Dana Scully of The X-Files.

The broader landscape, too, was dismal. It was the conflicted era of girl power, a concept that sprang up in the wake of the successes of the second-wave feminist movement and the backlash that followed. Young women were constantly exposed to you-can-do-it messaging that juxtaposed uneasily with the reality of the world around them. This was the era of shitty, sexist jokes about every woman who came into Bill Clinton’s orbit and the leering response to the arrival of Britney Spears; Rush Limbaugh was a fairly mainstream figure.

At one point, Buffy competed against Ally McBeal, a show that dedicated an entire episode to a dancing computer-generated baby following around its lawyer main character, her biological clock made zanily literal. Consider this line from a New York Times review of the Buffy’s 1997 premiere: “Given to hot pants and boots that should guarantee the close attention of Humbert Humberts all over America, Buffy is just your average teen-ager, poutily obsessed with clothes and boys.”

Against that background, Buffy was a landmark. Besides the simple fact of its woman protagonist, there were unique plots, like the coming-out story for her friend Willow. An ambivalent 1999 piece in Bitch magazine, even as it explored the show’s tank-top heavy marketing, ultimately concluded, “In the end, it’s precisely this contextual conflict that sets Buffy apart from the rest and makes her an appealing icon. Frustrating as her contradictions may be, annoying as her babe quotient may be, Buffy still offers up a prime-time heroine like no other.”

A 2016 Atlantic piece, adapted from a book excerpt, makes the case that Buffy is perhaps best understood as an icon of third-wave feminism: “In its examination of individual and collective empowerment, its ambiguous politics of racial representation and its willing embrace of contradiction, Buffy is a quintessentially third-wave cultural production.” The show was vested with all the era’s longing for something better than what was available, something different, a champion for a conflicted “post-feminist” era—even if she was an imperfect or somewhat incongruous vessel. It wasn’t just Sunnydale that needed a chosen Slayer, it was an entire generation of women. That fact became intricately intertwined with Whedon himself.

Seemingly every interview involved a discussion of his fondness for stories about strong women. “I’ve always found strong women interesting, because they are not overly represented in the cinema,” he told New York for a 1997 piece that notes he studied both film and “gender and feminist issues” at Wesleyan; “I seem to be the guy for strong action women,’’ he told the New York Times in 1997 with an aw-shucks sort of shrug. ‘’A lot of writers are just terrible when it comes to writing female characters. They forget that they are people.’’ He often cited the influence of his strong, “hardcore feminist” mother, and even suggested that his protagonists served feminist ends in and of themselves: “If I can make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of a situation without their knowing that’s what’s happening, it’s better than sitting down and selling them on feminism,” he told Time in 1997.

When he was honored by the organization Equality Now in 2006 for his “outstanding contribution to equality in film and television,” Whedon made his speech an extended riff on the fact that people just kept asking him about it, concluding with the ultimate answer: “Because you’re still asking me that question.” He presented strong women as a simple no-brainer, and he was seemingly always happy to say so, at a time when the entertainment business still seemed ruled by unapologetic misogynists. The internet of the mid-2010s only intensified Whedon’s anointment as a prototypical Hollywood ally, with reporters asking him things like how men could best support the feminist movement.

Whedon’s response: “A guy who goes around saying ‘I’m a feminist’ usually has an agenda that is not feminist. A guy who behaves like one, who actually becomes involved in the movement, generally speaking, you can trust that. And it doesn’t just apply to the action that is activist. It applies to the way they treat the women they work with and they live with and they see on the street.” This remark takes on a great deal of irony in light of Carpenter’s statement.

In recent years, Whedon’s reputation as an ally began to wane. Partly, it was because of the work itself, which revealed more and more cracks as Buffy receded in the rearview mirror. Maybe it all started to sour with Dollhouse, a TV show that imagined Eliza Dushku as a young woman rented out to the rich and powerful, her mind wiped after every assignment, a concept that sat poorly with fans. (Though Whedon, while he was publicly unhappy with how the show had turned out after much push-and-pull with the corporate bosses at Fox, still argued the conceit was “the most pure feminist and empowering statement I’d ever made—somebody building themselves from nothing,” in a 2012 interview with Wired.)

After years of loud disappointment with the TV bosses at Fox on Firefly and Dollhouse, Whedon moved into big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. He helped birth the Marvel-dominated era of movies with his work as director of The Avengers. But his second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, was heavily criticized for a moment in which Black Widow laid out her personal reproductive history for the Hulk, suggesting her sterilization somehow made her a “monster.” In June 2017, his un-filmed script for a Wonder Woman adaptation leaked, to widespread mockery. The script’s introduction of Diana was almost leering: “To say she is beautiful is almost to miss the point. She is elemental, as natural and wild as the luminous flora surrounding. Her dark hair waterfalls to her shoulders in soft arcs and curls. Her body is curvaceous, but taut as a drawn bow.”

But Whedon’s real fall from grace began in 2017, right before MeToo spurred a cultural reckoning. His ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a piece in The Wrap accusing him of cheating off and on throughout their relationship and calling him a hypocrite:

“Despite understanding, on some level, that what he was doing was wrong, he never conceded the hypocrisy of being out in the world preaching feminist ideals, while at the same time, taking away my right to make choices for my life and my body based on the truth. He deceived me for 15 years, so he could have everything he wanted. I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.”

But his reputation was just too strong; the accusation that he didn’t practice what he preached didn’t quite stick. A spokesperson for Whedon told the Wrap: “While this account includes inaccuracies and misrepresentations which can be harmful to their family, Joss is not commenting, out of concern for his children and out of respect for his ex-wife. Many minimized the essay on the basis that adultery doesn’t necessarily make you a bad feminist or erase a legacy. Whedon similarly seemed to shrug off Ray Fisher’s accusations of creating a toxic workplace; instead, Warner Media fired Fisher.

But Carpenter’s statement—which struck right at the heart of his Buffy-based legacy for progressivism—may finally change things. Even at the time, the plotline in which Charisma Carpenter was written off Angel—carrying a demon child that turned her into “Evil Cordelia,” ending the season in a coma, and quite simply never reappearing—was unpopular. Asked about what had happened in a 2009 panel at DragonCon, she said that “my relationship with Joss became strained,” continuing: “We all go through our stuff in general [behind the scenes], and I was going through my stuff, and then I became pregnant. And I guess in his mind, he had a different way of seeing the season go… in the fourth season.”

“I think Joss was, honestly, mad. I think he was mad at me and I say that in a loving way, which is—it’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years, and expectations, and also being on a show for eight years, you gotta live your life. And sometimes living your life gets in the way of maybe the creator’s vision for the future. And that becomes conflict, and that was my experience.”

In her statement on Twitter, Carpenter alleged that after Whedon was informed of her pregnancy, he called her into a closed-door meeting and “asked me if I was ‘going to keep it,’ and manipulatively weaponized my womanhood and faith against me.” She added that “he proceeded to attack my character, mock my religious beliefs, accuse me of sabotaging the show, and then unceremoniously fired me following the season once I gave birth.” Carpenter said that he called her fat while she was four months pregnant and scheduled her to work at 1 a.m. while six months pregnant after her doctor had recommended shortening her hours, a move she describes as retaliatory. What Carpenter describes, in other words, is an absolutely textbook case of pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, the type of bullshit the feminist movement exists to fight—at the hands of the man who was for years lauded as a Hollywood feminist for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Many of Carpenter’s colleagues from Buffy and Angel spoke out in support, including Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. “While I am proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summers, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon,” she said in a statement. Just shy of a decade after that 2013 speech, many of the cast members on the show that put him on that stage are cutting ties.

Whedon garnered a reputation as pop culture’s ultimate feminist man because Buffy did stand out so much, an oasis in a wasteland. But in 2021, the idea of a lone man being responsible for creating women’s stories—one who told the New York Times, “I seem to be the guy for strong action women”—seems like a relic. It’s depressing to consider how many years Hollywood’s first instinct for “strong action women” wasn’t a woman, and to think about what other people could have done with those resources. When Wonder Woman finally reached the screen, to great acclaim, it was with a woman as director.

Besides, Whedon didn’t make Buffy all by himself—many, many women contributed, from the actresses to the writers to the stunt workers, and his reputation grew so large it eclipsed their part in the show’s creation. Even as he preached feminism, Whedon benefitted from one of the oldest, most sexist stereotypes: the man who’s a benevolent, creative genius. And Buffy, too, overshadowed all the other contributors who redefined who could be a hero on television and in speculative fiction, from individual actors like Gillian Anderson to the determined, creative women who wrote science fiction and fantasy over the last several decades to—perhaps most of all—the fans who craved different, better stories. Buffy helped change what you could put on TV, but it didn’t create the desire to see a character like her. It was that desire, as much as Whedon himself, that gave Buffy the Vampire Slayer her power.

#Joss Whedon #Buffy The Vampire Slayer #Ray Fisher #Charisma Carpenter #Feminist

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fandomregressing · 3 years ago

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Wait what fandoms do you do??

You can request for pretty much anything as long as it isn't nsfw/18+! If I can't do it I'll post it with an invitation for any other agere blogs who know the source to fill the request. Here are some of my favorites, though

Hunter x Hunter

A3!

Mystic Messenger

Ouran High School Host Club

My Hero Academia

Kingdom Hearts

Aaaand here are some more that I'm familiar with but haven't posted anything for yet

Obey Me!

Supernatural

Black Butler (both anime and manga)

Fruits Basket

Seven Deadly Sins

Final Fantasy (primarily VII and XV)

Tokyo Ghoul

Free!

Haikyu!!

Yuri!!! On Ice

This is by no means a complete list! These are just the ones I could list off the top of my head. So if you have something you wanna request and it isn't on there, feel free send it in anyway! If I can't do it, someone else might.

#ask response

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s3cr3tjuic3 · 11 months ago

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tidus after he got thrown off the boat on the way to kilika and he had to fight the euchilles with wakka and involuntarily regressed during the fight and he's laying his head on yuna's lap crying and she fixes his hair and fusses over him trying to calm him down while he chews on his fingers

idk if thats readable

#salli screeches #age regression #sfw agere #agere #sfw age regression #fandom agere #ffx #ffx wakka #ffx tidus #ffx yuna #final fantasy x wakka #final fantasy x tidus #final fantasy x yuna #final fantasy x #🫐

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babyjakes · 3 years ago

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〈 disclaimer: this blog posts content not suitable for individuals under the age of 18. minors are strictly prohibited from viewing, sharing, or interacting with this blog. for more information on this blog's commitment to protecting minors, read our full statement here. 〉

nav | masterlist | intros | rules | library

fics.

always safe with me | h/c | boyfriend!chris evans x reader | on your first night over at chris’s house, an unexpected thunderstorm hits, sending you into a complete panic. luckily, you’ve got the world’s softest boyfriend in the bed beside you to help you through make it through the night.

better than the books | s | ceo!chris evans x assistant!reader | after finding out his favorite assistant has been writing filthy smut about him for years, your boss, chris evans, decides to make your dirtiest fantasies come true.

don't make me watch | h/c | boyfriend!chris evans x reader | when a simple incident in the kitchen throws you into a fit of flashbacks, chris is right there by your side to help you come back down from the panic.

first touch [part one] [part two] | s | boyfriend!chris evans x innocent!reader | despite having dated for some time, you and chris haven’t gotten any further than kissing. when he finally decides to step things up a notch, he knows this is your first time with pretty much everything and does his best to make it extra special.

gotta have you, all of you | s, ddlg | boyfriend!chris evans x reader | when you finally give chris permission to take you in any way he wants, you’re in for a new world of experiences, along with a new mandatory title for your lover.

i'll always come find you | h/c | boyfriend!chris evans x reader | chris helps you through a flashback during sex.

it's only ever you | a | cheater!chris evans x reader | after chris does the unthinkable and cheats on you, your deepest insecurities of not being good enough for him bubble over as the two of you try to mend your broken relationship

just wanted to help | h/c, agere | daddy!chris evans x little!reader | chris finds out you’re worried he’s upset with you after you cut your hand doing the dishes to try to please him.

must be fate [part one] [part two] | a, h/c | chris evans x internet friend!reader | after unexpectedly connecting online with chris evans, you experience an even greater miracle by running into him at your favorite local cafe. though your life has been difficult lately, chris seems to know all the right things to say to get you feeling (at least a little bit) better.

something different, something new | s | boyfriend!chris evans x reader | chris (gladly) helps you squirt for the first time.

tear-jerker | a, f, h/c | whumptember 2022 | boyfriend!chris evans x reader | prompt: sad movie

to pull you out of the darkness | h/c | boyfriend!chris x reader | after being violently mugged, you call your boyfriend chris, but the trauma you endured makes it hard to trust him once he’s shown up. knowing that more than anything you just need to be held and comforted, chris takes his time with you, determined to prove to you that it’s really, truly him.

wake up so i can love you right | a | ex!chris evans x reader | when a tragic car accident puts you in a coma shortly after chris breaks up with you, he finds himself crying at your bedside, telling you all the things he wishes he would have before your life was put on the line.

blurbs.

a dark fantasy | s | boyfriend!chris evans x reader | chris helps you play out a darker scene than usual in the bedroom.

come let me hold you | h/c | dom!chris evans x sub!reader | after a particularly intense bedroom session, chris has a lot of comforting to do to get you back to feeling safe and happy with him.

hiding from the sting | h/c, agere | daddy!chris evans x little!reader | chris patches you up after you hide your owwy from him.

in, and out | h/c, agere | daddy!chris evans x little!reader | chris helps you calm down during a panic attack.

no itching | h/c, agere | daddy!chris evans x little!reader | chris helps you keep your mind off a nagging rash.

one step at a time | h/c | friend!chris evans x reader | chris helps you calm down when you get anxious at a party.

perfect little things | f | boyfriend!chris evans x reader | you’re embarrassed to share with chris that you were planning on (once again) watching through all the harry potter movies. luckily, he’s more than happy to join you, as well as remind you how absolutely adorable your love for the series makes you.

ruined innocence | s, ddlg, n | dark!daddy!chris evans x innocent!little!reader | chris forces you to have your first orgasm.

scratchy | f, ddlg | mustache!daddy!chris evans x little!reader | when your daddy has to shave his beloved beard for a new role, you and your favorite stuffed friend have a little too much fun with his new look.

sweetest girl in the world | h/c | boyfriend!chris evans x reader | when chris told you guests would be coming over for dinner, you did your best to hide your anxiety. but when the time comes for them to actually arrive, you can’t help but let your nervousness bubble over.

the morning after | h/c | boyfriend!chris x reader | you’re sore after your first time with chris.

too many to name | f, agere | daddy!chris evans x little!reader | chris loves cheering you on in everything you do, even just sitting on his lap and playing your favorite game while he watches.

wantin' this all day | h/c | boyfriend!chris x college student!reader | after a long day of studying, chris decides it’s time for you to take a break and unwind, and there couldn’t be a better place to do that than right in his arms.

headcanons.

whumptember 2022 | scraped knee | yelling | afraid of flying

kinktober 2022 | anal play

other | tummy ache

#chris evans #chris evans fanfiction #chris evans fanfic #chris evans x reader #chris evans x y/n #chris evans x you #chris evans smut #chris evans angst #chris evans fluff #chris evans one shot #chris evans headcanon #chris evans blurb #chris evans drabble #chris evans au #chris evans imagine

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lizzywu · 7 years ago

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Reflections on Replicating Charlie M. Russell Paintings

For the final project I created four oil pastel paintings on 10 x 7 inch multimedia paper, to explore the way that Charlie M. Russell’s paintings of Montana life in the 19th century often use Native people to symbolize the allure of the West. Two of the paintings recreated Russell’s paintings “Horse of the Hunter” and “Fireboat” which featured a lone Indian hunting buffalo and Indians confronting a steamboat respectively. The other two paintings were of a popular Seattle viewpoint in the Magnolia neighborhood and a photo taken at the UW of Marita Growing Thunder when she visited in October. Together these four paintings looked at what it meant for Russell to include Native people in paintings of Western America, and the importance of creating art that doesn’t rely on stereotypes of American Indians.

In the first painting of Russell’s that I recreated, “Horse of the Hunter”, the page was entirely dominated by either the vast blue sky or the wide yellow grasses. I kept drawing the Indian man on a horse between two buffalo too large because even though they were the focus of the action the majority of the painting was the open landscape. These two components of the painting seem to fit with what was most important about the West to Russell; excitement and untouched landscapes. In reading about Russell’s life in Montana it seems like he lived out an adventure-fantasy as a cowboy, and often extended that fantasy when he pretended to be an Indian in his stories and letters.

It is notable that Russell grew up as part of a wealthy family in Missouri. After years of hearing stories from travelers and books recounting the adventure, drama, and undiscovered land out West, at 16 years old he up and left for Montana (McCracken, 1957). In reading about Russell’s motivations to continue to live in Montana, there are similarities between him and the Philadelphia Tammany Society and Red Men groups described in “Playing Indian”. In reality all of these men were wealthy and white but they liked to imagine themselves to be part of the “nostalgic past”, as either Indians or cowboys in Russell’s case. The white Indian groups were mechanics or artisans during the day and Indians over group dinners (Deloria, 1998). Russell took it a step further, living as a cowboy but always ready to think of himself as an Indian.

In “Recollections of Charley Russell”, the author, who was also Russell’s friend, writes how Russell had two different Indian names and he had three names from different tribes (Linderman, 1963). Immediately after that passage, Linderman recounts how he and Russell gained special access to a Cree Sun Dance while they were living among the Blackfeet. This boasting on Linderman’s part matches Deloria’s description of how the Red Men group was appealing as “one could demonstrate a special identity as a Red Man…celebrating one’s secret privileged rites” (Deloria, 1998). For Russell, coming from wealth in Missouri, he viewed being a cowboy and an Indian as special parts of his adventurous Western identity and reflected the significance of these titles in his artwork.

In his painting “Horse of the Hunter” the Indian man on the horse is a small portion of the canvas but all attention is drawn to him. Everything about the man is mysterious to Russell’s audience; his clothing, his hair dress, his horse’s dress, his weapon. Even what he is trying to do with the buffalo is a mystery but he looks purposeful, strong, and admirable. While it is possible that Russell watched neighboring tribes hunt buffalo and based his painting off what he saw, Russell and his friends often dressed up as Indians to create their own poses and stories for paintings (McCracken, 1957). It is therefore more likely that Russell purposefully painted the image of the Indian man to be mysterious yet clearly important. In doing so he reflected his own feelings about his “special identity” as an Indian and connected these “secret privileges” to the Montana landscape to exalt his depiction of life out West.

In another of Russell’s paintings, “The Fireboat”, the image of the four Indians presented again reinforces the mystic of Russell’s Indian identity. The painting is also representative of another reoccurring theme in Russell’s work, where the image of Indians meeting whites is used to symbolize the loss of “the West”. The four men in the image stare and discuss what is happening with the white steamboat in the corner of the painting. Throughout the background are a variety of beautiful landscapes; mountains, hills, a river, a rocky face with trees. Together the image of the Indians and the natural landscapes reflected Russell’s desire to be away from the city life that threatened his cowboy fantasy.

This is apparent in Russell’s letters to his friend Frank Linderman who moved to a cabin on Flathead Lake to purposefully live away from the city (Russell, 1993). When Russell visited with Linderman he stayed in a teepee that Linderman had put up near the cabin, not only living out in nature but using Native American items to further make that distinction. In “White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men” white people also used Native American objects and practices to connect to Nature and reject Western ideas. The non-Indian New Agers created sweat lodges, spirit journeys, paintings, and rituals inspired by Native American cultures (Macy & Hart, 1996). They often took their creations to not only symbolize their distance from white culture, but to justify their feeling that they were Indian.

For Russell his desire to be surrounded by nature also resulted in him appropriating Native American culture which, like the New Agers, allowed him to further think of himself as an Indian. In his letters he often refers to himself as “Ah-wah-cous” or Antelope, and would draw an Indian version of himself welcoming friends to his tepee (Russell, 1993). While Russell allegedly lived among a Canadian Blackfeet tribe for six months, it is clear that he knew he was not actually one of them as in an illustrated letter to a friend he mocks the Native women who he might have married in the tribe (Russell, 1993). Therefore in “The Fireboat” while Russell painted the steamboat invading the mountains while the Indians watched from above, the underlying message is not advocating for Native rights or landownership. Russell saw himself as Indian, not in a literal sense but enough that he claimed objects and images of Native American cultures. He took the image of the Indians in “The Fireboat” to represent himself and his own strife with the West he had fantasized becoming more like the cities he had tried to leave behind.

When I created my own two paintings I wanted to look at what subjects Russell could have chosen to paint that would follow his Western themes without appropriating Native American imagery. In recreating “Horse of the Hunter” and “The Fireboat” I pulled out several common images in the paintings that did not use Native people or objects. Both paintings were wide-shots; the blue sky took up over half the page and a mix of landscapes like mountains, hills, and plants took up the other half. Everything had color, even if it was just rolling hills or one plant there could be green, yellow, and red colors all mixed together. These components alone were the real bulk of his paintings that depicted “the West”.

For my painting of the boulevard I focused on the dark grey clouds and water I saw from a viewpoint on the bluff. These two features define the Seattle landscape and when I look at them compared to Russell’s big blue Montana skies I know the grey clouds are from the Pacific Northwest. For the other half of the boulevard painting I included the grass and the trees and the plants that I saw. I added some orange bushes on the right and green-brown brush along the bottom in the spirit of Russell’s style. The painting overall is spacious and big which I think is the feeling of the West that Russell wanted to give people.

At the same time when I look at the landmarks I’ve actually painted I see West Seattle and islands in the Puget Sound. The film “Princess Angeline” makes the point that all of that land was home to the Duwamish before it was taken from them. In one scene they showed a photograph of Duwamish people living in makeshift tents by the Ballard Locks during its early construction. (Osawa & Rasmussen, 2010). The people in the photograph look underfed and poorly dressed. It was haunting to hear that the film didn’t even show how bad the situation got as the Duwamish were continually pushed off their land. The Locks are just around the corner from the Magnolia Boulevard and at both places I never grew up hearing about the Duwamish.

I think this is the biggest mistake in trying to paint “the West”. In general the West is seen as land that hasn’t been changed by humans since the dawn of time, and that slowly becomes inhabited by people. In depicting wide open landscapes that highlight mountains or fields or oceans; this very basic concept of the West is perfectly expressed even without cowboys or Indians. The issue is that the idea of the West itself asks audiences to ignore the millions of Native people who have lived across the land. It asks audiences to pretend that even if land was inhabited by Native people that their interactions with the land were not meaningful or purposeful enough that the land had been changed by their living there.

The same idea came up in “The Place of the Falling Waters” documentary series, when Salish and Kootenai people described how certain nutritious plants used to be picked at different points across the vast Western Montana landscape (Smith & Roy, 1991). In 1917 Charlie Russell’s friend Frank Linderman bought land on the Flathead reservation and who built a cabin with a teepee nearby (McCracken, 1957). Russell and Linderman spent time at that cabin for the single purpose of getting away from the city, to be where no one had been before. But Salish and Kootenai people had lived around the lake where Russell and Linderman lived, and they had harvested food from the land. As Andrea Smith puts it “non-Natives tend to selectively and opportunistically draw knowledge about what they think is Indian” (Smith A. , 2005). Though the tribes had a strong connection to the land; Russell and Linderman ignored that so they could continue to fantasize the West.

The second part of Charlie Russell’s fantasy about the West that I wanted to address through art was the way he basically thought he was an Indian. He thought life in Montana was exciting and he expressed that by including dramatic images of Indians in Montana landscapes like in “Horse of the Hunter”. He thought Montana was losing natural landscapes to cities and he expressed that by painting Indians seeing white people for the first time. Russell was not actually part of any tribe, but from his minimal interactions with local tribes he felt entitled to represent himself as an Indian. “To fully understand, to “know”, Native peoples is the way the dominant society gains a sense of mastery and control over them” (Smith A. , 2005). Smith’s statement illustrates the way that Russell’s entitlement to Native American cultures was more about empowering himself and the depictions of Native people in his art reflects that.

Initially in my own art for this project I did not want to depict any Native people, because I think it can be difficult as a non-Indian person to not pull from stereotypical depictions when painting Native Americans. I think that Charlie Russell had this same issue which is described in a Wicazo Sa Review’s introduction; that someone who is trying document Native people is motivated by “personal aesthetics, professional advancement and recognition, and a sense of accomplishment as an artist” as opposed to their responsibility to the community (Ross & Hart, 2001). Russell especially failed to feel any responsibility to his Indian neighbors who he often wrote letters to, modeled, and traded with (Russell, 1993). He ignored the reality of who the Native Americans around him were and for my last painting I wanted to feature a Native person working in the Seattle area.

The first person that came to mind was Marita Growing Thunder whose dresses were displayed at the University of Washington in October when she visited and spoke during a talk on violence towards Native Women. I painted a photograph taken of her and another audience member holding hands, her handmade dresses surrounding her, and the backdrop of the Intellectual House walls. I wanted to create a painting of Marita Growing Thunder that showed how much her work meant to other women both alive and gone. Every dress and every time she wore the dress was meant for a woman who had been killed or gone missing. Her dresses were personal, sometimes even requested by family members.

The positioning of the photograph alone reflects the significance of Growing Thunder’s work, so I used the oil pastels to emphasize the dresses in the image. Each dress is on a black chair and the colors of the dress stand out next to the black. The background of the walls is yellow but it’s light enough that what really stands out are the black chairs and dresses at the bottom. When I look at the painting I see an empowered young woman who reaches out to others who are hurting. I think it’s important to not erase this image of a Native American woman from being represented. As Stephanie Fryberg states: “The only way to reduce the negative impact of these constraining American Indian mascot representations is to either eliminate them or to create, distribute, and institutionalize a broader array of social representations of American Indians” (Fryberg, Markus, Oyserman, & Stone, 2008). Images of Native people should not be used to represent non-Native goals or experiences, the images should represent the actual Native people.

In all, Charlie Russell’s artwork is beautiful to look at as it captures exciting moments and breathtaking landscapes. Replicating two of his pieces and having to create my own allowed me to compare my artistic decisions to his. I thought a lot about what role Native people played in his life and how that affected his paintings of them. Charlie Russell is a talented artist who I think was genuinely in love with this idea of the West, but he used Native people in his artwork to represent his own feelings and opinions. He played pretend cowboys and Indians to such an extent that he did not stop and question how much of his art was about the subjects and how much was about his fantasy.

Bibliography

Deloria, P. (1998). Playing Indian. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Fryberg, S., Markus, H., Oyserman, D., & Stone, J. (2008). Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots. Psychology Press, 208-218.

Linderman, F. B. (1963). Recollections of Charley Russell. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Macy, T., & Hart, D. (Directors). (1996). White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men [Motion Picture].

McCracken, H. (1957). The Charles M. Russell Book. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Osawa, S. S., & Rasmussen, J. (Directors). (2010). Princess Angeline [Motion Picture].

Ross, L., & Hart, D. (2001, Fall). Editor's Introduction. Wicazo Sa Review, pp. 5-11.

Russell, C. M. (1993). Charles M. Russell, Word Painter: Letters 1887-1926. Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum.

Smith, A. (2005, Spring). Spiritual Appropriation as Sexual Violence. Wicazo Sa Review, pp. 97-111.

Smith, T., & Roy, B. (Directors). (1991). The Place of the Falling Waters [Motion Picture].

#charlie russell #oil pastel #art criticism

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