#keira campbell wingert

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I had the pleasure of speaking with local director Siddharth Jha or the Broad Street Review. Take a look!

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Review: Noir tropes meet modern comedy in A Simple Favor

By KC Wingert

In A Simple Favor, Anna Kendrick stars as Stephanie, a peppy, perfectionistic “helicopter mom” who runs a vlog with tips and tutorials for other moms. While picking her son up from school, she meets the funny, foul-mouthed, and glamorous Emily (Blake Lively), who for some reason takes a liking to Stephanie despite their apparently opposite personalities. The two get together for martinis, swapping secrets and stories of sexual escapades, and quickly become very close, with Emily emboldening Stephanie to explore an identity outside of motherhood. When Emily suddenly disappears, Stephanie steps up to help find her, but her investigation unearths some dark secrets that make her realize she didn’t know Emily at all. 

As Emily, Lively creates a femme fatale for the new generation, evoking the traditionally manipulative sexuality of this film noir archetype while breaking gendered expectations and embracing homoeroticism in her performance. Kendrick, on the other hand, uses her classic awkward humor to play a relatable, modern mom seduced by a more glamorous lifestyle. Her natural wit delivers countless laughs, transforming this otherwise cynical and suspenseful crime drama into a fun and exciting dark comedy. 

A Simple Favor is a standout in the list of successful female-led films from director Paul Feig, known best for goofy comedies like Bridesmaids and Spy. With this mystery full of twists and turns, Feig manages to successfully recreate the drama, suspense, and eroticism of film noir for a 21st century audience; the film doesn’t parody the noir genre but rather embraces the tropes and reinvents them for an ultimately fun story with JUST the right amount of kitsch. Feig has a lot to be proud of in his foray into an entirely new genre—a pleasant surprise from one of the biggest names in comedy.

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“Ultimately, Stan & Ollie is a masterful biopic not only because of its incredibly realistic portrayal of an iconic Hollywood duo, but also because it exemplifies the transgenerational appeal of the comedy of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.”

Check out my review of Jon S. Baird’s Stan & Ollie on the UCL Film Society blog!

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Review: The Spy Who Dumped Me disappoints, but Kate McKinnon shines on

By KC Wingert

After being unceremoniously dumped via text, a jilted Audrey (Mila Kunis) swears to burn every one of her ex Drew’s belongings. But when Drew (Justin Theroux) shows up at Audrey’s place to save his stuff from going up in flames, he unwittingly brings with him a team of angry spies bent on killing him. Secretly a CIA operative all along, Drew puts the fate of the world in Audrey’s hands by asking her to deliver a highly sensitive item to another spy in Austria. Audrey grabs her goofy, over-the-top best friend Morgan (Kate McKinnon) and sets off to Europe to save the world.

It’s an easily digestible premise with the capacity to be a hit—who doesn’t love a good action-comedy?—but The Spy Who Dumped Me doesn’t deliver. With her first foray into the world of would-be summer blockbusters, director Susanna Fogel seems to have been blind to the film’s glaring faults and lets a project with potential drown in an overly ambitious vision. Clocking in at almost 2 hours in duration (YES, REALLY), the film’s plot is lost in its poor pacing, drawn-out dialogue, and bad comic acting. (Just a thought—but maybe, when casting a comedy, one should consider hiring comedians). Its action sequences include an obscene amount of violence that reads more like corporeal horror than comedy. This is not to mention the many schmaltzy, forced “girl power” moments between Kunis and McKinnon’s characters that are so completely devoid of chemistry that they, like so many of the lame running jokes throughout the film, should have been cut out entirely. Everyone who has ever directed so much as a student film knows:  it’s hard to kill your darlings. But Fogel, who also wrote the film with David Iserson, was unable to trim the fat and let the most appealing parts of the film shine.

Luckily for Fogel, Kate McKinnon is such a force of nature that she was able to deliver more than a few genuine belly-laugh moments. Stealing almost every scene, McKinnon takes a complete dud and turns it into something that is alright. The powerhouse comedian’s performance makes it almost possible to ignore the film’s unmistakable downfalls and see the film for all its comedic potential. Unfortunately for the team behind The Spy Who Dumped Me, however, “potential” does not a good movie make.

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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: From Traditional Western Values to Peace and Love

By KC Wingert Originally published on American Icons on 2/18/16 (Temple University)

When one thinks of a Western film, a particular set of images may immediately come to mind:  gallant cowboys, bank robberies, horse chases, high-stakes gunfights, and so on. These elements are present in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but this movie is different from an ordinary Western in that it has a distinctly late-‘60s twist to it. Traditionally, Western movies have contributed to the American Frontier myth of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which the hero, a cowboy, embodies the conservative values of viewers in the United States of America. The qualities a traditional Western hero should have are, according to folklorist Beverly Stoeltje, courage, a connection to nature, and intelligence that lacks for none, as well as “dedication to the Protestant capitalist work ethic and to gentlemanly qualities” (Stoeltje, 249). This version of a cowboy stems from the influence of Theodore Roosevelt, who rebranded the cowboy to embody his reactionary political views during the period of change that came after the Civil War. Thanks to Roosevelt’s reinvention of this Frontier figure, the cowboy went from being, in the eyes of Americans, a “disreputable and rowdy worker” (248) to being an American symbol of heroism, adventure, and conquering previously uninhabited lands. This “new cowboy” was resourceful in the face of the unknown, and his story made western expansion in the U.S. an exciting prospect. Thus, the Frontier myth and the cowboy as a hero reinforced the ideas of Manifest Destiny and Social Darwinism already imbued in the collective white American psyche during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, most Americans are still familiar with Roosevelt’s image of the heroic cowboy, especially due to the wide popularity of Western films.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, however, turns the genre on its head and transforms a once purely heroic and gallant cowboy figure back into a more realistic, modern character. The film itself embodies the “peace and love” type of values held by much of America in the late 1960’s, rather than the values of America during the Frontier myth’s prime. Although the imagery in the film sticks to the traditional Western mold, several themes break from the more traditional and conservative American values commonly depicted in Westerns. For example, Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) are not even true heroes but rather train robbers going against the system who are forced to flee to Bolivia after being tracked all the way through the American West. They are not fearless (as we learn when the Sundance Kid bashfully admits that he cannot swim) and their wit cannot always get them out of a scrape (as we learn when the men pursuing the pair keep catching up with them). The two heroes are humorous characters, uncommon in a Western film, simply stumbling their way through robbing banks, running from the authorities, and adjusting to life in a new country. Even the film’s score eschews the traditional Western audial aesthetic like John Williams’ famous score in The Magnificent Seven for a mellower, more 1960s-reflective vibe.

One pertinent example of the film’s 1960s values is that the film does not write out sexuality as a part of its main love story, as other Westerns might have done previously. Rather, director George Roy Hill chose to introduce the romantic relationship between the Sundance Kid and the beautiful Etta (Katharine Ross) to viewers with a scene in which the Sundance Kid sneaks up on Etta in her home and directs her, at gunpoint, to remove her clothes and take down her hair. Viewers do not realize that the two even had a prior relationship until the end of this scene, when Etta tells the Sundance Kid she wishes he wouldn’t come in so late. This type of eroticism is not shown in the more traditional Western films of the early 20th century; in fact, such a scene would have likely been considered near pornographic during that time. At another point in the film, Etta and Butch discuss their romantic feelings for each other as well, acknowledging the complexities of sex and love in a more comprehensive way than do the one-dimensional, apparently sexless romances depicted in traditional Westerns.

One of the most interesting signs that this Western is not aligned with the values of those made in the genre’s prime but rather to those of the 1960s is the scene toward the end of the film in which Butch and the Kid, who have given up robbing banks in favor of a “straight” lifestyle, are tasked with the paid job of delivering money to their employer to feed the company’s payroll. While they are journeying back from the bank to their employer, they are accosted by a group of Bolivian bandits. The mood is hostile, and Butch and the Kid attempt to diffuse the situation without resorting to violence; however, due to a language barrier, they realize they may have to shoot the bandits, whether they want to or not. Butch, in a moment of hesitation, reveals to the Kid, “I never shot anybody before.” Unfortunately, one of the bandits draws his gun quickly after Butch’s admission, and the pair kills the whole opposing group. They look solemnly at the carnage before them, and the Kid says, “Well, we’ve gone straight. What do we try now?” The characters’ guilt after killing a group of people is an element one would not have seen in a traditional Western, in which the death of any “Other” type is hardly addressed and holds no significance to the heroes. However, the murders of the Bolivian men become a heavy burden on the consciences of Butch and the Kid, reflective of the ideals of peace popular in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Overall, this film has garnered critical acclaim for its new take on the Western genre. The film was even included on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest American films of all time, ranking at number 73 (“AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movies 10th Anniversary Edition”). Its unique take on the Frontier myth adds depth and humanity to the heroic cowboy character initially created by Roosevelt to represent conservative, white American values in the late 1800s. By taking an older genre fueled by the values of white Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and reinventing it to fit the changed values of the late 1960s, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a sense redefines what it is to be American in a new era of peace and love.

Works Cited

“AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies 10th Anniversary Edition.” American Film Institute. American Film Institute, 2007. Web. 16 Feb. 2016.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Dir. George Roy Hill. Perf. Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Katharine Ross. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1969. Film.

Stoeltje, Beverly J. “Making the Frontier Myth:  Folklore Process in a Modern Nation.” Western Folklore 46.4 (1987): 235-253. Web. 16 February 2016

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It’s been a while, Tumblr! Here’s my latest review of Netflix’s The Lovebirds, published by the Broad Street Review. Check it out!

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Have a look at my review of Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency, which showed at the London Film Festival this month!

With her sophomore feature Clemency, writer-director Chinonye Chukwu made history as the first black woman to win the Grand Jury prize at Sundance—and in its turn at the London Film Festival, the film proves to overseas viewers to be more than worthy of its acclaim. A stunning exploration of the American death penalty, Clemency is easily one of the most beautifully-told stories and most socially important films of the last decade.

Alfre Woodard leads the cast as Bernadine Williams, a career-driven prison warden who has overseen 12 executions over the course of her tenure. A harrowing opening sequence portraying the execution of convict Victor Jimenez illustrates for viewers the emotional toll that witnessing a man’s death can have on a person. The tension of the scene is palpable, and we see the effects of this in Bernadine’s personal life. She struggles to sleep at night and drinks heavily to cope. Her marriage to her husband Jonathan (Wendell Pierce) struggles as Bernadine reckons with the horrors to which she bears witness; her husband cannot understand the way her job affects her. While teacher Jonathan educates the next generation and gives them hope of a bright future, Bernadine is complicit in stealing the future away from countless men. She is not a sadist, but she is forced by the nature of her profession to carry out sadistic practices—and in the interest of appearing professional as a black woman in a position of power, she must do so unsentimentally. But her robotic demeanor is not necessarily a reflection of her true feelings toward the practice of execution, and viewers follow Bernadine as she struggles to mask her own humanity with professionalism.

Though the film explores Bernadine’s character most thoroughly, viewers are also given detailed glimpses of the emotional states of everyone involved in these executions, from the prison officers, to the prison chaplain, to the men on death row themselves. Aldis Hodge gives an incredibly moving performance as Anthony Woods, a prisoner awaiting execution who may be innocent of the murder of which he was convicted fourteen years ago. We see him slip between moments of desolation and glimmers of hope as he navigates the existential dread of being sentenced to death for a crime he maintains he did not commit and as he awaits any news on the painstakingly bureaucratic decision on his appeal, which determines whether he lives or dies. Hodge’s performance is complicated, heartbreaking, and totally affective. When Anthony feels hope, we feel hope; when he despairs, so do we.

Similarly, Richard Schiff gives a nuanced performance as Anthony’s lawyer Marty, a man whose career has been dedicated to appealing the death penalty and to fighting for clemency on behalf of his clients. Marty, having worked on such cases for 30 years, is downtrodden, resigned, and ready to retire. A man who was once passionate about the cause, Marty is tasked with finding hope and keeping spirits high for Anthony despite the almost futile odds of winning. In a visit to his client, he looks thoughtfully on as demonstrators outside the prison shout their support for Anthony, not as a man who is inspired by their words, but as a man who fears their protestations may be in vain. In a glum conversation with Bernadette, Marty poignantly explains the overwhelming stakes of being a death row inmate’s lawyer:  “When I win, my client gets to not die.”

This film is disturbing and horrifying, to be sure, but in the way that 12 Years A Slave is. The doleful tone of Clemency is real—it reflects the experiences of people whose lives are affected by the inhumanity of the death penalty. It does not rely on gore and jump scares to disturb its viewers; rather, it forces viewers to confront the undignified reality of state-sanctioned murder. It is one thing to acknowledge the horrors of the world, to want to learn from tragedy and strive for betterness. But it is another thing entirely—a wholly more affective experience—to witness these horrors brought to life before your eyes. For this reason, Clemency should be required viewing for Americans at least, and for anyone who thinks they have an opinion on the death penalty.

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Take a look at my review of Sasie Sealy’s feature debut Lucky Grandma, part of the 2019 London Film Festival!

With her debut feature Lucky Grandma, a film about an elderly Chinese-American woman with a rebellious streak, writer-director Sasie Sealy contributes equal parts humour and suspense to this year’s London Film Festival. Tsai Chin plays the titular role of Grandma Wong, a gruff, chain-smoking loner whose expressionless indifference and grumpy demeanour has led me to dub her the Clint Eastwood of Grandmas. Grandma Wong lives alone in the small, outdated Chinatown apartment she and her late husband once shared. Though her daily schedule is monotonous—practising tai chi, lighting incense for her in-home Buddhist altar, evading her adult son’s requests that she move in with him and his family—Grandma Wong receives a reinvigorating jolt of excitement while visiting a fortune teller, a sequence which visually references the opening tarot scene of Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7. The fortune teller presents to Grandma Wong a series of cards written in Chinese script and tells the old woman that she will have an incredible amount of luck on October 28th (admittedly a very different fate than the one predicted for Cleo).

With fortune on her side, Grandma Wong empties her bank account on the 28th and hops on a Chinatown bus headed straight to the casino. At first, it seems like the stars really have aligned for her; she beats incredible odds and wins at craps and roulette so many times that her tokens double, then triple, and then quadruple. Her lucky streak comes to an end eventually, though, and she returns to the Chinatown bus downtrodden, having lost all her savings in one bet.

Grandma Wong’s good luck seems to take a different form, however, when money literally falls into her lap on the bus ride home. The man in the seat next to her suddenly dies of a heart attack while everyone else on the bus is asleep. When the bus hits a bump and a duffel bag filled with money falls from the luggage carriers overhead, Grandma Wong realises that her deceased seatmate is in fact a gang member transporting money for the Red Dragon gang. Already panicked about her casino losses, Grandma Wong absconds with the money, inadvertently placing herself at the centre of a violent gang conflict over the cash.

The strength of this film is not necessarily the narrative, which at times feels muddled and confusing amidst its portrayal of New York gang politics and reaches a hasty conclusion in its third act. Rather, Lucky Grandma’s greatest asset is its characters, all fully realized through the little details which make up each person’s unique and entertaining personality. Grandma Wong’s lanky grandson David, for example, may play a relatively small role in the film. However, in the approximately 10 total minutes of screen time he has, viewers learn that he is a one half of a dance duo, making goofy, low-quality hip-hop music videos in his grandmother’s apartment with his chubby, twerk-happy friend Nomi. This small, endearing personality detail raises the emotional stakes later in the film when the Red Dragons demand Grandma Wong pay a ransom to spare David’s life. The same goes for the character Big Pong (Hsiao-Yuan Ha), the man Grandma Wong hires as a bodyguard after dopey Red Dragon gangsters Pock-Mark (Woody Fu) and Little Handsome (Michael Tow) show up at her apartment. Big Pong first appears to be quiet and intimidating, but viewers will find a tender sweetness in his character when he talks about being a vegetarian, describes the girl he loves who still lives in China, and scolds Grandma Wong’s grumpy neighbour for disrespecting an elder.

The main figures in any film are only as strong as the actors who play them, and the cast of Lucky Grandma brings these characters to life with quirk and charm. As the socially isolated Grandma Wong, Tsai Chin is often the only actor onscreen. The character requires an actor who can subtly convey large emotions with her facial expressions and body language, and Tsai Chin is more than fit for the challenge. She brings laughs just by widening her eyes, furrowing her brow, or turning her head—no dialogue required. As gangster hitman Little Handsome, actor Michael Tow somehow manages to be simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, sending chills down one’s spine with his threatening stare one moment and highlighting his character’s sheer absurdity with a goofy smile in the next. The talent in this cast alone could dispel any excuses Hollywood may make for whitewashing Asian or Asian-American roles (I’m looking at you, Scarlett Johansson).

Though it is not a life-changing or particularly profound film, Lucky Grandma is sure to make viewers chuckle heartily, scoot to the edge of their seats in suspense, and stare in wonderment at each creatively-framed shot. The plot leaves room for confusion and questions, but the dramatic achievements of the cast alone are enough to make this film a success among audiences. The film deftly combines humorous and whimsical moments with darker undertones. Considering the film centres on the identity crisis of an elderly Chinese-American woman—a demographic I can safely say is sorely underrepresented in American film—Lucky Grandma is a breath of fresh air and a new perspective in the comedy genre.

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My review of director Peter Strickland’s latest horror film, which will premiere at the BFI London Film Festival this Friday, has just been published on the UCL Film Society website--check it out!

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Review: Eighth Grade balances universal experiences and the unique position of being a teenager in 2018

By KC Wingert

Embarrassing crushes, burgeoning sexuality, bullying, and mall hangs: Eighth Grade covers all the universal experiences that come with being a middle-schooler. But writer and director Bo Burnham’s first feature-length film offers viewers an in-depth exploration of the complicated nature of being a middle-schooler specifically in today’s hyperconnected society.

“Being in eighth grade is weird, and being alive right now is weird,” comedian Burnham explained to the audience at a screening held in the auditorium of Joseph le Conte Middle School in Hollywood last night. The audience, an eclectic mix of creators, industry tastemakers, and actual eighth graders, murmured in agreement. In an age where social media rules and every kid has an iPhone, it has become harder for older generations to relate to the issues kids today face. Eighth Grade calls on older viewers to look on younger generations with compassion as they grapple with both the painful awkwardness of growing up and the additional toxicity that social media can add to their lives. At the same time, the film offers a hopeful message to its younger viewers along the lines of, “You’re going to be okay.”

Eighth Grade is the story of Kayla’s (Elsie Fisher) last week of middle school. Deemed “Most Quiet” in her school’s superlative vote, Kayla actually has a lot to say, and she documents most of it on her YouTube channel. She offers advice to her viewers through daily segments on topics like “How to Be Confident” and “How to Put Yourself Out There.” She tries really hard to apply her advice to her own life, too, by posting sticky notes with encouraging messages near her mirror and making lists of goals (“Be more confident”) and how to meet them (“Don’t slouch”). In her videos, she spends a lot of talking about how she used to lack confidence, but now she’s doing great. However, this is not entirely truthful: although she definitely puts herself out there a lot by trying to befriend the cool girls and talk to cute boys, doing these things doesn’t always wield the results Kayla wants. Downtrodden, she blames herself and continues on her perpetual journey toward self-improvement.

This is where the pernicious influence of social media plays in: Kayla spends a lot of her free time scrolling through her Instagram feed and posting pictures of her heavily made-up face to Snapchat with captions like, “I woke up like this.” The omnipresence of social media in her and her classmates’ lives pressures Kayla to perform happiness. All of this is a ruse to impress the cool kids at her school, like the deliciously bitchy Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), a rich girl who hates Kayla for seemingly no reason, and the tooootal heartthrob Aiden (Luke Prael), Kayla’s bad-boy crush who only perks up when she lies to him about taking naughty pictures.

Kayla looks at the images of her classmates on social media and compares them to her real-life, awkward self, prompting her to strive for self-improvement at all costs. If she were to look around her, though, Kayla would see that all of her peers are just as weird and awkward as she thinks she is. Unflattering close-ups of kids popping rubber bands onto their braces, flipping their eyelids inside-out, and pushing chewed-up bubble gum through their lips are peppered throughout the film.

By focusing so much on impressing the people who don’t like her, Kayla isolates herself from the people who truly love her and want to spend time with her. Finally, after a series of missteps including a harrowing conversation with a high school boy who pressures her to do something she doesn’t want to do, Kayla decides to open up to her father and let him in on her struggle. “It’s so easy to love you,” Kayla’s father, played by Josh Hamilton, assures his daughter in the most inspirational Dad Monologue to grace the big screen since Call Me By Your Name.

Eighth Grade joins other recent dramas with young protagonists like The Florida Project (dir. Sean Baker) and Spanish film Summer 1993 (dir. Carla Simón) in successfully portraying pain through the eyes of a child. Under Burnham’s masterful direction, 15-year-old Elsie Fisher’s powerful portrayal of the character, with her stumbling speech and nervous quietness, perfectly captures the essence of an anxiety-ridden teenage girl. Directing children is an admirable feat, and Burnham has done so with aplomb by choosing to highlight the fun quirks of the children he cast in his breakout film. The hilariously eccentric character Gabe, for example, could not have been brought to fruition had Burnham not taken care to embrace and highlight actor Jake Ryan’s real-life idiosyncratic personality on film.

Overall, Bo Burnham’s feature directing debut is an outstanding success featuring all the hilarity and heartbreak of being an average, everyday, middle-school girl. With stellar performances, gut-wrenching emotion, and an ultimate message of optimism, Eighth Grade is a film that people of all ages can enjoy.

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“The Wig Is Off My Head”:  Critiques of Consumerism in Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama

By KC Wingert

As any film history enthusiast knows, the invention of cinema has contributed to a racist tradition of white supremacy and dehumanization of people of color almost from its inception. Typical characterizations of people of color in American cinema range from barbarically violent (such as portrayals of Black people in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation), to conniving and malicious (such as the “Fu Manchu” Asian archetype that first appeared on film in the 1920s), to foolish and lazy (such as the minstrel show characters actor Al Jolson typically portrayed in blackface in the 1920s). From the late 1960s through the late 1980s, the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, or the “L.A. Rebellion,” arose as a response to the lack of adequate and fair representation of people of color in American cinema, particularly of Black Americans. Emerging from the University of California at Los Angeles, the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers sought to explore and create authentic Black American cinema in an era rife with appropriative, stereotype-ridden, studio-mandated blaxploitation films among other racist portrayals (Diawara 111). 

Ethiopian-American director Haile Gerima was an influential original member of this movement, and his 1975 UCLA thesis film Bush Mama combines documentary and drama to provide overt critiques of white supremacy, unchecked police power, and the systematic disenfranchisement of impoverished Black Americans (Brody 10). More subtly, however, the film examines Black America’s relationship to consumer culture and capitalist society. At the time of filming, Gerima was beginning to draw inspiration from the Third World Cinema, a 1960s Latin American movement which celebrated Marxist ideals in its Social Realism portrayals. The young filmmaker therefore chose to focus his thesis film on the lives of ordinary Black citizens of Watts, “the kinds who didn’t play sports or sing disco tunes, and therefore not the type that Hollywood and the larger entertainment industry valued — or even cared to mention” (Cassell 7). The film is set in the poor, largely Black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, a hotbed of racial tension following the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and an outlier in the otherwise consumer-driven city of glamor and celebrity. When examined closely, Gerima’s landmark film explores the way that capitalism, as upheld by state violence and cyclical poverty, contributes to systematic disenfranchisement and further oppresses the impoverished Black citizens of Watts. 

In the first scene of Bush Mama, monetary wealth is presented as a main point of tension in Watts when Gerima shows a defeated Dorothy, played by Barbara O. Jones, struggling to apply for welfare to no avail. The poetically edited first scene of the film shows images of the Watts neighborhood, as a disembodied narrator—presumably a welfare office worker—lists the impossibly complicated questions that welfare recipients must answer in order to gain an income:  “…Do you and your spouse reside together? Have you ever received non-cash gifts in the form of free rent, or free housing, free food....” Dorothy finds herself frustrated with the process of applying for welfare, and she laments her confusion later in the film. The welfare worker’s impossible questions are layered with the sounds of police sirens and helicopters, strongly suggesting a link between poverty and criminal activity. 

In this film, the link between poverty and criminal behavior is reinforced when a pregnant Dorothy, left to provide for herself and her daughter, makes her way home from the welfare office by foot, only to have a young boy suddenly rip her purse from her hands and run away with it. This altercation shows that the unfortunate financial situation Dorothy has found herself in is not uncommon in her neighborhood; rather, many people, even children, are left desperate and unable to make ends meet without resorting to crime. The commonality of indigence among the Black residents of Watts as shown in this film denotes poverty as one of the most glaringly ugly side effects of the capitalist system in which these characters are forced to live. 

The lack of resources available to the characters in Bush Mama makes it nearly impossible for them to advocate for themselves when dealing with the state employees who have the power to make decisions for the Black community. We see this most apparently when Dorothy’s social worker gives her the ultimatum of either terminating her pregnancy or losing her benefits altogether. A filmic glimpse into Dorothy’s mind shows her viciously attacking the social worker with a bottle, which tells us that she has been left with no options and feels that the only thing she can do at this point is resort to violence. The welfare worker’s threat to Dorothy’s agency is reflective of the predominant views of Black women benefitting from welfare in America; many white Americans see welfare recipients as lazy cheats and threats to the wellbeing of the state, incapable of making informed choices about their own reproductive health. This attitude toward Black women’s reproductive rights stems from the days of slavery, when Black children belonged to the slaveowner at conception; this control over Black reproduction became a long-standing part of white America’s subjugation of Black bodies (Roberts 23). Through the era of Jim Crow, the only way that Black women were allowed to express any maternal value in the eyes of many white people was as the “Mammy” figure, a Black female slave or servant who essentially raised her master’s children. A Mammy was the white ideal of what a Black woman should be: she was passive, loved her white “family,” and maintained no true authority over the white children she raised or even the children she herself bore (13). In the 1960s, when the Mammy figure was no longer a prominent archetype and Black women increasingly had their own families to care for, Black mothers were demonized in the collective white American psyche as the myth of Black matriarchal family structures became a popular scapegoat for any problems within Black American communities. Because matriarchy was so out of line with the rest of America’s social structure (that is, white, patriarchal, capitalist structure), many white people blamed Black mothers, especially Black single mothers, for impeding the progress of Black people as a whole and perpetuating intergenerational poverty and antisocial behavior (16). Such views of Black motherhood went on to be reinforced through negative portrayals of so-called “welfare queens” and made their way into the larger American narrative as a perceived truth. 

The racist, hateful, and unsympathetic concept of a “welfare queen” was quickly propagated through popular media as the new image of Black motherhood; prominent New York radio host of the 1970s Bob Grant compared reproduction in the Black community to reproduction of “maggots on a hot day; you look one minute and there are so many there, and you look again and wow, they’ve tripled!” (18). Grant even went so far as to propose a mandatory sterilization of Black recipients of welfare, a popular view at the time. This type of bigoted portrayal of the “welfare queen” made its way into the mainstream white American mindset; according to a 1990 survey, 78% of white Americans believed that Black people actually prefer to be on welfare, procreating purposefully to have many children and leech more money from taxpayers (17). The common conception of Black female welfare recipients as being parasites is an example of white America’s continued need to strip Black people of their agency and exert control over them. Rather than viewing impoverished Black people as being in need of help, the popular narrative of the era when Bush Mama was made presented Black mothers on welfare as calculating and parasitic. Wahneema Lubiano, a Princeton University English professor, aptly described the prevailing white attitude toward Black mothers: 

She is the agent of destruction, the creator of the pathological, black, urban, poor family from which all ills flow; a monster creating crack dealers, addicts, muggers, and rapists—men who become those things because of being immersed in her culture of poverty. (18)

This unsympathetic view of Black motherhood leads to the demonization of Black children as well, bolstering the “crack baby” or “welfare baby” stereotype which, as law and sociology professor Dorothy Roberts speculates, has only worked to create a self-fulfilling prophesy as “adoptive parents are afraid to take home a crack baby, teachers expect the children to be incapable of learning, and legislators believe it is pointless to waste money on children who cannot possibly achieve” (20). In Bush Mama, Gerima takes a significantly more sympathetic approach to representing Black women who are dependent on welfare. The film shows that Dorothy and her family are dependent on welfare for reasons that are beyond their control when Dorothy’s partner T.C., a Vietnam veteran played by Johnny Weathers, is falsely arrested and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit while on his way to start a new job. Coupled with her pregnancy, this conundrum leaves Dorothy with the choice of either aborting her child and conceding to her welfare worker’s eugenics-inspired request or going off welfare only to join the unemployment line in search of a job that she may never get. 

T.C.’s horrifically dehumanizing experience with the law is actually a tamer example of the civil rights violations depicted in Bush Mama:  at one point in the film, Dorothy looks on horrifically as a Black man is shot dead by police directly outside her home, sentenced to death as an assumed criminal without being given a trial. Perhaps in his most poignant effort to underline this pattern of racial profiling and harassment, Gerima includes in the beginning of his film real footage of himself being stopped and searched by police while in production on Bush Mama simply for looking suspicious and holding an expensive camera. 

In a 1966 interview with 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace, non-violent civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., famously discussed the cause of violence in subjugated communities, noting that “a riot is the language of the unheard” (King). In Gerima’s depiction of the Black community of Watts, one finds a clear link between poverty and the subjugation of Black communities targeted by racist systems of state-sponsored violence. In Bush Mama, Gerima shows a community of people pushed to the edge by poverty and police brutality, left hopeless and voiceless by a state that labels them as either criminals or “welfare queens.” The systems in place, therefore, work directly to oppress Black communities in America and entrap them in the cycle of poverty. When left without other options, many Black Americans in impoverished communities must resort to crime, thus providing police with an excuse to target Black people unfairly.

In addition to examining poverty and police violence’s role in the suppression of Black Americans’ freedoms, Gerima emphasizes the way that American consumer culture works to oppress Black citizens both financially and emotionally. One of the most overt symbols of consumer culture’s grip on the community of Watts, especially on the women in the community, is the cultural fixation on wigs found throughout the film. Wigs are not a necessity by any means and could even be considered a waste of money—especially to people who have little money to spare. Nonetheless, wigs are represented as an important part of the culture of Watts, and the word is repeated many times throughout the film. We see images of wig stores advertising their goods several times in the first scene of the film as Dorothy walks home. She herself wears a wig as she walks, which we do not see her take off once—even in her own home—until the very end of the film. Toward the end of the film, a neighborhood friend of Dorothy’s laughs about snatching the wig off of another woman’s head and jeers at how ugly the woman looks without it. 

The European ideals that dictate beauty standards in America include having fair skin and straight hair. When reinforced by family, peers, and media, these Eurocentric ideals have been shown to have detrimental effects on Black women’s self-worth, resulting in internalized and intergenerational self-hate. The equation of wigs to a black woman’s beauty and worth as represented in Bush Mama is an example of how pernicious consumerism has found its way into the Watts community. The fact that the women in this film seem to feel that they need to buy and wear wigs to look presentable and be seen in the public sphere exemplifies the entrapments of consumerism and capitalism; these women are being sold something that they do not need under the guise that without it, they are ugly and worthless. The repeated wig imagery used in Bush Mama emphasizes the seemingly omnipresent white standards of beauty and the way they affect the women of Watts. By showcasing the belief within the Watts community that Black women’s natural hair texture is inferior to the texture of wigs, or “white” hair, Gerima suggests that the whitewashed beauty ideals reinforcing these women’s belief that they need wigs to look beautiful reinforce the capitalism-driven subjugation of impoverished groups.

Interestingly enough, much of the propagation of white standards of beauty comes from the glamorization of white features through cinema and other media coming out of Los Angeles itself, which is largely considered to be the media capital of the world. Around the same time that Gerima created Bush Mama, blaxploitation cinema was gaining popularity, and in prevalent female-led blaxploitation films like Foxy Brown (1974) and Cleopatra Jones (1973), the Black, female main characters are undoubtedly oversexualized. Haile Gerima’s choice to set Bush Mama in the Watts section of Los Angeles is a conscious critique of the way that Hollywood itself reinforces European beauty standards, as well as of the racist oversexualization of black women in media; the women portrayed in this film live in the heart of a city whose main industry consistently supports the message that women’s worth—and in particular Black women’s worth—comes from their attractiveness. In one study, psychologist Maya K. Gordon found that Black girls most strongly identified with media that represented their demographic—which, in the case of Black women, largely consists of hypersexualized depictions. Gordon suggests that such identification with sexually objectifying portrayals of Black women could exacerbate the emphasis that Black girls and women put on their appearance; in the course of this study, Gordon found that upon being asked to describe the media they consume, many of the study’s participants specifically noted the hair texture and skin tone of the Black women portrayed (Gordon 254). A 2010 psychological study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly found a positive relationship between stereotypical black female portrayals in media, risky sexual behavior such as having unprotected sex, and Black women’s perceptions of beauty regarding light versus dark skin tones (Townsend et al. 283). Social worker Susan L. Bryant posits that as a result of the skin tone-based perceptions of sexual attractiveness reinforced in Black women’s consumption of media, darker-skinned Black women may internalize negative media messages about attractiveness and Blackness at a higher rate, thus leading to longer-term risky behavior (Bryant 83-84). This media-driven message adds to the pressure for the Bush Mama’s cast of Black women to conform to European beauty standards and thus willingly participate in capitalist society by buying products like wigs to change their appearance. 

The oft reinforced message that lighter skin is more attractive than dark skin has a severe impact on Black communities, and in particular Black women, in more than just a psychological sense; studies show that darker-skinned Black women entering adulthood are more likely to face barriers in seeking employment than their lighter-skinned counterparts, and Black women who do not meet the established white beauty standards are more likely to be unemployed than Black women who have more European features (Robinson-Moore 72). A 1975 study of Black families in Chicago—Haile Gerima’s home after immigrating from Ethiopia—found that poor women were more likely to be dark-skinned than women of higher economic status were (Aschenbrenner 56). The link between perceived attractiveness per Eurocentric standards and employment, income, and sexuality leads Black women, and in particular dark-skinned Black women, to experience self-hate and a distorted self-image; additionally, they are more likely to feel angry, pained, and confused toward their physical traits like skin color and hair (Hall 133). This type of negative self-worth can of course lead to depression and even addiction issues, and in Bush Mama, we see that Dorothy is a depressive alcoholic who seems to move through Watts as if in a daze most of the time.

Overall, Gerima depicts many bleak and apparently hopeless situations in Bush Mama that come as a result of cyclical poverty, violence, and intergenerational self-hate. At many times, it seems as Dorothy will never find a way to escape her troubles, hence her reliance on self-medication. She is compliant with the rules and has accepted her role in society. Conversely, viewers see that Dorothy’s partner T.C. uses his time while incarcerated to read fervently, educating himself and becoming more mobilized against the system that led to his unjust arrest. He writes about his new political empowerment in a letter to Dorothy, who still silently struggles in Watts, unable to find the power within herself that T.C. has started to find. Unlike the popular rhetoric against Black mothers of the time, T.C. embraces and celebrates the notion of a Black woman at the center of the family, stating in his letter that without Black women, there would be no Black race. Angi, a precocious friend of Dorothy’s daughter, brings protest posters into Dorothy’s home, covering the walls with them and openly discussing the Civil Rights Movement. The posters depict a Black man shot by the police twenty-five times as well as an image of a woman fighting for liberation in Angola. Both T.C. and Angi offer some inspiration to the seemingly hopeless situation Dorothy has found herself in; they both directly and indirectly encourage her to stand up for herself against the white supremacist, capitalist structure that causes her so much suffering. Up to this point Dorothy has taken little action to remove herself from the situation she’s in because she feels she has no choice; rather, much of the film itself depicts Dorothy in a reflective state, listening to conversations, observing the horrific acts of violence happening around her, and quietly processing the traumas of being a poor, Black citizen of Watts (Brody 8). 

At the end of the film, Dorothy is finally pushed to reject the capitalist system that has left her in anguish and is forced out of passivity and into action. Returning late one night, Dorothy walks into her home to catch a policeman in the act of raping her daughter Luann. In an outburst of motherly protection and rage, she quickly reacts to the horror she is witnessing and violently kills the police officer. The act of brutally murdering an authority figure, her first act of agency after repeatedly being stripped of her freedoms by the system, is representative of Dorothy’s newfound noncompliance with a political and socioeconomic structure that has held her in complacency and suppressed her for too long. The film launches into a sequence of symbolic images that further explore her moment of self-actualization. We hear her voiceover in the form of a letter written to T.C., in which she speaks with a sense of serenity and tells him, “The wig is off my head.” This voiceover plays over a shot of Dorothy, who has removed her wig for the first time in the duration of the film to reveal her natural hair, eschewing her “veil of complacency” (Fard 8) and reveling in the vulnerability and power of rejecting the confines placed upon her by racist, Eurocentric beauty standards. She stands in front of the protest posters from Angi, focusing on the African woman fighting for Angolan liberation with her baby in one arm and a machine gun in the other. 

By utilizing imagery from African liberation movements, Gerima explicitly links the Black American class and civil rights struggle to European colonialism and imperialism in Africa, labeling Black Americans’ situation as a form of “internal colonialism comparable to Third World oppression” (Diawara 114). The “Bush Mama” shown in the poster is a symbol of the type of mother Dorothy has been driven to become; she is no longer passive and will fight to protect her daughter from the systematic violence that capitalist, white supremacist culture has imbued on her while expressing solidarity with Black women across the globe who have experienced similar subjugation at the hands of oppressive forces. This final sequence also shows Dorothy posed as a Madonna-esque figure, lovingly holding and nurturing the boy who stole her purse at the beginning of the film as if she is his mother. This embrace is a recognition of this child’s innocence; Dorothy knows that he is a product of his environment, so to speak, who is forced to act with desperation due to his status in white American society. With this act of compassion, Dorothy makes the most poignant point of the film regarding consumer culture and greed:  her biggest problem is that she was born into an unvalued place in society, and that people with money are protected by capitalist society where those without it are unprotected and even considered enemies to the state. At the end of the film, viewers see Dorothy jailed for killing the officer who raped Luann and learn that she has miscarried her pregnancy after being badly beaten by the police. By acting with agency once in the entire film, Dorothy finds herself still at the mercy of the state, this time literally incarcerated rather than symbolically imprisoned by her status in American society. In this final scene, Gerima exemplifies the lack of options available to many Black Americans and underlines the true purpose of the racist systems of power that affect them:  they are never meant to escape. 

Overall, Haile Gerima’s critique of consumer culture in Bush Mama is a tool to drive home a more important point within the filmic discourse:  while it may not always present any immediate physical harm, systematic oppression as a result of a white supremacist, capitalist society is a tool used to further oppress Black Americans and a form of violence in and of itself. Because capitalism at its core requires that there be different classes, it is in the best financial interest of those in power to ensure that the lower class has no means of moving upward. In taking off her wig and proudly declaring her identity as a Black woman, Dorothy casts aside her previous passivity toward this system of violence. She rejects the white supremacist ideals perpetuated in a capitalist society whose greed led to the enslavement and brutalization of her people in the past and continues to oppress and wrongfully strip away her people’s freedoms in the name of greed.

Without money, this woman from Watts is unable to move freely through American society in the way that someone from, for example, Beverly Hills could. As a non-white person, her appearance is admonished by mainstream society and she is expected to conform to white beauty practices and standards. As a woman, she is looked on as a leech for seeking help, and her bodily autonomy is threatened by her social worker, an agent of the system who tries to force her into giving up her right of choice. However, in her final realization in this film, Dorothy rejects the racism, classism, and sexism that disenfranchise her on a daily basis and chooses not to remain passive. Rather, she chooses to become the “Bush Mama” pictured in the poster in her home by protecting herself fiercely and proudly—even if it means imprisonment. With Dorothy as an example, Haile Gerima calls viewers to action and aims to open the eyes of those blinded by the glamour of consumer culture and capitalist greed. He exposes the dark underpinnings on which America’s white, patriarchal, capitalist society functions by showing a poetic, almost stream-of-consciousness account of life in the poorest neighborhood of one of the richest cities in America.

Works Cited Aschenbrenner, Joyce. Lifelines: Black Families in Chicago. Waveland Press, 1983. Brody, Richard. “‘Bush Mama’: A Landmark Film, and a Reminder of Cinema's Exclusionary History.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 19 June 2017, www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/bush-mama-a-landmark-film-and-a-reminder-of-cinemas-exclusionary-history. Bryant, Susan L. “The Beauty Ideal: The Effects of European Standards of Beauty on Black Women.” Columbia Social Work Review, IV, 2013, pp. 80–91. Cassell, Dessane. “‘The Wig Is Off:" A Look Back at Haile Gerima's ‘Bush Mama.’” MoMA, MoMA, 17 Apr. 2017, stories.moma.org/the-wig-is-off-a-look-back-at-haile-gerimas-bush-mama-c24ad88e3630. Diawara, Manthia. Black American Cinema. Routledge, 1993. Fard, Cyrus. “The Wig Is Off: 'Bush Mama' as a Deconstructive Narrative.” PopMatters, PopMatters, 25 Feb. 2018, www.popmatters.com/119414-the-wig-is-off-bush-mama-as-a-deconstructive-narrative-2496154369.html. Gerima, Haile, director. Bush Mama. Tricontinental Film Center, 1975. Gordon, Maya K. “Media Contributions to African American Girls' Focus on Beauty and Appearance: Exploring the Consequences of Sexual Objectification.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 3, 2008, pp. 245–256., doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.2008.00433.x. Hall, Christine C. Iijima. “Beauty Is in the Soul of the Beholder: Psychological Implications of Beauty and African American Women.” Cultural Diversity & Mental Health, vol. 1, no. 2, 1995, pp. 125–138., doi:10.1037//1099-9809.1.2.125. Hill, Jack. Foxy Brown. American International Pictures, 1974. Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Vintage Books, 2017. Robinson-Moore, C.L. “Beauty Standards Reflect Eurocentric Paradigms—So What? Skin Color, Identity, and Black Female Beauty.” Journal of Race and Policy, vol. 4, no. 1, 2008, pp. 66–85. Starrett, Jack, director. Cleopatra Jones. Warner Home Video, 2004. Wallace, Mike, and Martin Luther King. “60 Minutes.” 60 Minutes, CBS, 27 Sept. 1966.