by Ariel Dougherty
The treatment of abortion in the movie as a casual, easily accessible procedure is cavalier, and I think it’s insulting to all the women who had one before Roe v. Wade.
— Terri Thal, Film Review - Dave Van Ronk’s Ex-Wife Takes Us Inside INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS , The Village Voice, December 13, 2013 (1)
I doubt I was even 16 years old when my older brother took me to hear Dave Von Ronk at the Gaslight. Already my young ears had a pretty good sense of how distinction his deep raunchy voice was. I’d thumb through the issues of Sing Out that my brother got and listen to the various Folkways records on the family turntable.
So, to read all these decades later a striking critique of the new Coen brothers film INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS by a woman who knew Van Ronk well, is something to sit-up and think about.
I am only too well aware of the cultural distortion by Hollywood, male-dominated filmmaking. Women directed movies were only 9% of the top 250 grossing films in 2012. New research from Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media shows that in “family films” only 28.3% of the characters are female. So, much for momhood! Persistent hypersexualing of ever younger and younger girls from so many forms of corporate media severely impacts girl’s self-esteem. This flood of imagery causes young boys to have stultified views of female peers, considering girls primarily their sex objects. The objectification hampers many boys’ ability to have positive, healthy relationships with girls simply as friends. (3) Witness incidents of rape.
So, each time a “cavalier” expression is made mis-representing facts about half of humanity, women’s real -lived experiences are belittled, distorted and or denied. In the case of the new Coen brother’s film, the misconstrued picture of abortion—even from a historic look—puts that necessary procedure at risk.
In her film review of the Coen brother’s new movie, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, Terri Thal, who lived with/was married to Dave Van Ronk, 1957-1968 is especially condemning of the film’s failure to show any desire from the actors in the film had even for their music:
There’s no suggestion that these people love the music they play, none that they play music for fun or have jam sessions, not a smidgen of the collegiality that marked that period.
But she goes on to state:
The sequence that bothers me the most is when Llewyn Davis arranges an abortion for the Jean character.
What Thal underscores is despite the lack of authenticity about the music making—the core focus of the film—she is far more irked by how the feature-length bio-pic trivializes the harrowing complications of abortion in the pre-Roe v. Wade world portrayed in the film.
Enter, independent filmmaker Gillian Robespierre. She is just finishing up a feature dramatic comedy, OBVIOUS CHILD. It’s about what happens when a stand-up comic “Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) gets dumped, fired and pregnant just in time for the worst/best Valentine’s Day of her life.” Her “one-night stand [while it] leads to a difficult decision [it] does and does not define the rest of her life.”
In her Kickstarter campaign Robespierre describes why she made this film:
We were frustrated by the limited representations of young women’s experience with pregnancy, let alone growing up. We were waiting to see a more honest film, or at least, a story that was closer to many of the stories we knew. We weren’t sure how long that wait was going to be, so we decided to tell the story ourselves.
Shot throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan during this past Spring, with her team she edited all Summer. Now, Robespierre is headed to Sundance with OBVIOUS CHILD. But she still needs to raise $3,000 of a $35,000 goal to get the film through post-production.
Well oiled by the Hollywood money spigot, the Coen brothers didn’t have to use crowd funding for their production. They had such companies as Scott Rudin Productions (CAPTAIN PHILLIPS; THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL; etc) behind them. Robespierre has a long producer list of dedicated individuals (with small pockets) who like her believe in her film. We should believe in it too!
Ariel Dougherty writes about the intersection of feminist media, women’s rights and their funding. (see writings @ scribd.com/ariel_dougherty) She is just embarking a book on community based feminist filmmaking and creating ways to bring those films to more communities via the Women’s Silverscreen Roadshow. I Tweet @MediaEquity
