Bitch Slapped by Satire

by Guest Contributor Marisol LeBron, originally published at Post Pomo Nuyorican Homo

A friend of mine from college recently sent me a link to an AfterEllen.com article about the movie Bitch Slap coming out in December 2008. She asked me for my thoughts and here they are…

I think I might be the wrong person to ask.

Reason being I love gratuitous sex and violence in movies, within reason of course. I loved Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse movies. A woman with a gun for a leg killing military created zombies – count me in! Sexy ladies exacting revenge on a psychopathic-misogynistic-vehicular-homicide-loving Kurt Russell – more please! I loved these films so much that after returning them to Netflix I promptly ran out and purchased them, and then made all my friends watch the films with me repeatedly.

I know what you’re thinking that I’m a horrible queer feminist of color, right? Well, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. And here’s why…

While I hate the way that closet racist and annoying hipster elitist try to use satire to reinforce their supposed superiority and avoid being called bigoted while doing it, I think satire when it’s done right, or at least when it’s read in a critical way, can be extremely subversive. Smart satire can often effectively challenge concepts of power, race, sex, and gender among other things.

There’s a famous example of effective satire that is brought up in Charles Ramirez Berg’s Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance, known as “stereotypical reversal.” Stereotypical reversal occurs when a movie plays on and invalidates a well-known stereotype by making the viewer confront their own prejudice and bias. The example that Ramirez Berg uses is from the film Flying Down to Rio, when Roger and Belinha are stranded on an island and a bare-chested black man emerges from the surrounding bushes and confronts the couple. Audiences are trained to expect a danger scenario given the location and the fact that the man is black, the viewer might wonder if this “native” is going to kidnap them or harm them in some other way. When the man steps away from the bush it becomes visible that the man is wearing golf slack and shoes, carrying a set of clubs, and when he opens his mouth has a British accent. Turns out they landed in Haiti right next to a country club and the gentleman was looking for a lost ball in the brush when they stumbled upon him. Everyone is made aware of their ignorance and as a result the stereotype is deconstructed.

Satire by its very nature is something that disarms you, most often through comedy or ridicule, and makes you take a hard look at yourself and your fears and biases. The ultimate purpose of satire is to bring about improvement by bringing ones flaws to the surface. So how do B-movies and neo-exploitation films bring about improvement? Well, often they don’t, or at least they don’t at first glance. We’re trained to be passive viewers, but if you’re willing to do the work as a viewer and think critically you’ll see that even the most seemly inane of movies like Death Proof are a comment on systems of power and hierarchy in American culture.

I think a really good recent example is Harold and Kumar. Although on the surface it’s your basic stoner buddy comedy, if you scratch below the surface its actually a very intelligent commentary on masculinity, race, sexuality, and leisure time in American culture. That is not to say that the film doesn’t have its problems, but I think there are moments in the film that are very smart and valuable

While, I can’t conclusively say whether Bitch Slap is a clever neo-exploitation or just stupid and offensive since it hasn’t come out yet, I’ll leave you with what the Co-writers and directors Eric Gruendemann and Rick Jacobson to say. They call Bitch Slap a “feminist, thinking-man’s” exploitation film with a mysterious female narrator who “comments periodically on the folly of humanity, the plight of the human condition and the vagaries of life and love through quoting the likes of Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Sun Tzu and even Buddha.”

Sounds promising.

Check out the trailer and AfterEllen.com article for yourself and let me know what you think.

Bitch Slap – Trailer
by ohmygore

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Comments

DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:

when Roger and Belinha are stranded on an island and a bare-chested black man emerges from the surrounding bushes and confronts the couple. Audiences are trained to expect a danger scenario given the location and the fact that the man is black, the viewer might wonder if this “native” is going to kidnap them or harm them in some other way. When the man steps away from the bush it becomes visible that the man is wearing golf slack and shoes, carrying a set of clubs, and when he opens his mouth has a British accent. Turns out they landed in Haiti right next to a country club and the gentleman was looking for a lost ball in the brush when they stumbled upon him. Everyone is made aware of their ignorance and as a result the stereotype is deconstructed.

EXACTLY!!! That, my friends, is how satire should be done.

Satire is an art that’s not easy to achieve. Most people should not attempt to create satire.

Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 9:48 am ¶
L-K wrote:

I was wondering why the co-producers names sounded so familiar. They were the producers/directors of Xena: the Warrior Princess and Hercules.

I got excited solely on the fact that both Lucy Lawless (Xena) and Renee O’Connor (Gabrielle) are going to be together again. However, I don’t know if they are going to be kicking ass. I would need to see more footage to convince me.

Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 9:59 am ¶
Matt wrote:

I agree almost wholeheartedly, though not necessarily about any specific example. I think we can -and it’s great when we do- discuss different opinions about specific cases. (Does this clip promote the noxious meme that Jews are racists who won’t vote for Obama, moreover with outsized political power, or deconstruct it as a media-driven myth? I may be the only one I know who thinks as I do on that.) In the end, however, I can’t escape a certain elitism that says “satire is good when it’s done by people who know what they’re doing.” That is an elitist position and it’s why I say ‘almost.’

Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 10:12 am ¶
Gothic Guera wrote:

I will have to disagree, but then a again I tend to dislike an excess of violence in movies. I never recall Quentin Tarantino calling his movies satires. Can some one tell me this I noticed that in the adversing it’s mostly women that are killed ,mutilated and half naked ? As for Robert Rodriguez I stopped watching his movies after Spy kids(shudder) an 11 year old Gothic Guera found it stupid. About Tarantino wasn;the accused of being an asiaphile? http://www.angryasianman.com/2007/04/tired-of-tarantino.html

Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 11:09 am ¶
Gothic Guera wrote:

I found this.
http://www.feministing.com/archives/006879.html

Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 11:21 am ¶
RJG wrote:

@Gothic Guera’s “I never recall Quentin Tarantino calling his movies satires.”

I don’t think he calls them satires as much as (like when I heard him talk about movies like Kill Bill), he was pretty much parodying the styles of a lot of older action/violence movies.

A few friends of mine felt that Kill Bill had such wooden and bland dialogue and characters tha weren’t really creative (angry white lady, asian schoolgirl assassin, texan guy, etc), but as far as I know that was kind of the point.

What I believe makes stuff like that so tricky is that it’s not like everyone can just look at it and go “well yeah clearly he’s just spoofing it in a non blatantly comedic way,” along with the fact that just because you’re spoofing something (racial stereotypes, excessive bloodshed in movies, or otherwise), that doesn’t automatically absolve you of still doing those things.

As a non Quentin example, it’s sort of how I’m wondering if Robert Downey Jr’s character in Tropic Thunder is going to just end up just being offensive or actually satirical, even though I’m assuming that they’re aiming for the latter.

Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 2:01 pm ¶
jvansteppes wrote:

I must confess I’ve found Tarantino as an individual to be rather repulsive ever since the whole Pulp Fiction N-word fetishization thing. I don’t loathe everything about his movies but I am skeptical and maybe I need to reevaluate my judgments in regards to his work with Rodriguez…

Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 5:14 pm ¶
Prometheus wrote:

Judging from this trailer, I’m not buying what the directors are saying or thinking. Maybe I’m just not getting it.

Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 7:45 pm ¶
A wrote:

just wanted to point out real quick that the language used (thinking man’s film) is a bit…

Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 10:58 pm ¶
Sam wrote:

“I think satire when it’s done right, or at least when it’s read in a critical way, can be extremely subversive.”

To me, the big issue with satire is not even necessarily how well it’s done, but who its audience is. The caveat about it being read in a critical way is the key to this piece. It’s pretty much guaranteed that your average audience member does not read these films correctly if their satire is based on having a critical, analytical eye. Just like Harold and Kumar was not read as an anti-racist film, Dave Chappelle was treated as an excuse for white kids to say the N-word, and everyother instance of good satire misinterpreted by a mass audience, this film will be attended by sexist bigots.

It’s all about context (as recently proven by a spate of poorly placed “satire,” most notably the New Yorker cover) and the joke’s never funny if the people you’re telling it to don’t (or can’t) get it.

Posted 15 Aug 2008 at 6:20 am ¶
Marla wrote:

With a title like “Bitch Slap” this film must be going straight to DVD. I watched the trailer and my first thought when I saw the 2 round honeydew melons zoomed in on was, “Oh, a Cinemax after dark movie.” It also reminded me of a video game that I may see guys play. Crazy.

Posted 16 Aug 2008 at 9:55 am ¶
lindabeth wrote:

the “thinking man” bit really got me too…it seems that hetero men are overwhelmingly the ones trying to convince me that these kind of films are simply social commentary or satire, and don’t at all reinforce the norm of sexualizing female action heroes.

not buying it.

Posted 20 Aug 2008 at 5:10 pm ¶