Women's Stuff Book and Movie Club - September 2025 - Inaugural month 🎉

Greercase@lemmus.org · edit-2 3 days ago

Women's Stuff Book and Movie Club - September 2025 - Inaugural month 🎉

Vanth@reddthat.com · 3 days ago

Light comment to start: what other media have you read/seen/heard that were inspired by TOWWAFO? It’s one of those stories that once you’ve read it, you start seeing references to it everywhere.

Star Trek has used it multiple times, most recently the Strange New World Series season 1 episode 6 and the boy who is First Servant to his people.

Jordan Peele’s Us also has notes of inspiration from Le Guins to short story.

ZDL@lazysoci.al · 3 days ago

There was a movie about a train in a frozen world. Snowpiercer? That was one of the more direct and visual references to Omelas that I’ve seen.

dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 days ago

just finished KPop Demon Hunters

thoughts

Do you think this work is told from a feminist perspective? Why?

Not particularly, no - though it depends on what we mean by feminism. I think some people might see the girls given swords and fighting demons and think this is breaking gender stereotypes, but the film also re-affirms stereotypes of girls and women, like the bath scene when they are all crying incoherently, or the drooling over abs, etc.

To be honest I would say this film was more commerce than art, and certainly had no particularly serious feminist agenda beyond just wishing to appeal to their target demographic. In that sense the film was not coherent in terms of its gender politics, and you see an attempt to appeal to multiple kinds of audiences for maximum commercial appeal.

Do you think the authors gender or gender identity affected their choice of subject, writing style, or perspective character?

Considering the film was directed by a man and a woman, and the screenplay was written by a group of two women, I do think the women involved in the creative work were intentional in how they wished to portray the characters, e.g. one of the creators, Maggie Kang, talked about the desire to have female superheroes that were less perfectly feminine:

On character design, Kang highlighted wanting to differentiate from “Marvel female superheroes that were just sexy and cool and badass” and instead have “girls who had potbellies and burped and were crass and silly and fun” leading to the creation of “something that encompassed all of those elements”.

from wikipedia.

So yeah, this felt like a film by women for women, in a sense.

Does the narrators gender or gender identity affect the work? If so, how?

In this case the narrator I guess is the protagonist? In that case it clearly impacts the whole story - as a girl, her romance to the boy demon and the love he develops for her becomes his path of salvation in the end. The fact the girl is a demon hunter is also I guess related to this general “feminist” branding that might be applied, since she’s not a traditional female character in the sense that she fights demons (though we’ve had Buffy the Vampire Slayer since the 90s, and the Powerpuff Girls, at some point we wonder if this kind of story is even progressive anymore - sometimes it even feels like it can be hard for female characters to be “feminist” and also not occupying traditionally male associated tropes - like being a warrior, or being tough, etc.; there is a real femme-phobia to this logic, I guess).

Did this work change your opinion on anything? If so, what and why?

I sometimes wonder if I’m the problem or if the artwork is the problem - I feel sorta grumpy about this work, and I guess I want to put a finger on why exactly. There are times I certainly enjoy less-than-perfect or even problematic entertainment, but there is something that really bothers me about this film (and maybe others like it).

Perhaps it is the way the film presents itself as having a big message, but then feeling in the end that the film has nothing for us but platitudes - the attempt to appear rich when it doesn’t deliver on anything more than the same kind of generic story of good overcoming evil through love and fellowship feels like I keep getting the same recycled Disneyfied story over and over.

But then I wonder if I’m the problem, what if I’m failing to fill the gaps the film leaves for me - I saw an article claiming the film was a metaphor for being queer and closeted. Having lived most of my life as a closeted queer, I never once felt the film related to my experiences, and if anything I felt the film was aggressively heteronormative and anti-queer (not only are there no queer characters, but the central plot revolves around a traditional story of heterosexual romance).

I guess it didn’t change my opinion, but it did make me feel ashamed for not being able to enjoy or relate to it the way I assume other people are able to. It makes me feel broken or “problematic” - like I don’t know how to have fun or read the context. Instead, I get all stuck in all the little ways the film bothers me.

Okokimup@lemmy.world · 2 days ago

Not sure why you’re being so hard on yourself, no one is required to enjoy any particular piece of media. Your perspective on the so-called queer metaphor is especially valuable.

I didn’t like it either. To be fair, I am not the right audience for it. I don’t care for cartoons in general, because I don’t like frantic motion or loud/irritating voices. This wasn’t the worst movie for those, but not great. I didn’t realize that Golden song was from this movie. I’ve had to skip it multiple times on Spotify because I hate the singer’s voice.

That creator’s comment about girls with pot-bellies is hilarious given how skinny those girls were drawn. I appreciated that they were enthusiastic eaters, but they have ridiculous proportions. There’s nothing wrong with skinny bodies, but there is zero body diversity among the female characters. We got one fat character, a man who was comic relief.

Did no one find it weird that they were singing about how demons deserve to die, and everyone in that world thought “demons” were a metaphor for lousy romantic partners - and they were all ok with this song about murdering people?

dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone · edit-2 1 day ago

That creator’s comment about girls with pot-bellies is hilarious given how skinny those girls were drawn. I appreciated that they were enthusiastic eaters, but they have ridiculous proportions. There’s nothing wrong with skinny bodies, but there is zero body diversity among the female characters. We got one fat character, a man who was comic relief.

YES!! This really bothered me the whole time, too - there were fat people in the fans / audience characters (and maybe Bobby to a lesser extent, he just wasn’t as skinny and was a bit soft), but wow the main characters were extremely thin and the body normativity in this film felt a bit extreme. Not that every film has to be a perfect representation or that we need to glorify fatness, etc. but for a film by women where they are trying to break stereotypes about women, body positivity would have been a really nice addition to the burping and eating.

It reminds me of Gilmore Girls where the main characters (Lorelai and Rory) are constantly talking about food, constantly eating food, and usually eating junk food (pizza, doughnuts, Chinese takeout, etc.) - yet on screen their bodies are almost dangerously skinny, and they never take more than one bite of their food - they talk about food, but we don’t even get to see them actually enjoying it, even fictionally.

Did no one find it weird that they were singing about how demons deserve to die, and everyone in that world thought “demons” were a metaphor for lousy romantic partners - and they were all ok with this song about murdering people?

I also felt a bit uncomfortable with the dehumanization of the demons, and I expected more from the new Honmoon as being a revolution and a new way of handling demons so that eternal torture wasn’t on the table - but instead all we get is the cute boy’s soul being given to the protagonist … :-/ I mean, it was cute - but it wasn’t even as consistent with the “good triumphs over evil” narrative … maybe in that way it’s less Christian and Western, leaving an aspect of Eastern dualism in place.

But it also bothered me the way that dualism was so present in the film, and the strange ways the dualism was inverted from typical - in Taoism and Confuscianism for example the yang and yin representing light and dark, sky and earth - usually the dark earth elements are associated with women, while the light and sky elements are associated with men. In the movie, it was flipped - and the men and masculine were the dark demons, and the light demon hunters were women.

In that sense it was a bit like the Barbie movie, where the patriarchy is shown in a flipped fashion, but this feels particularly awful to me as a feminist since the goal isn’t to have women on top, but to empower men and women by eliminating patriarchy and working towards gender egalitarianism … this movie just didn’t feel consistent with that, it felt anti-feminist in a way.

Anyway, sorry - lots of rambling.

As to why I’m hard on myself - I just want to be nice and pleasant and to not always be the grumpy, critical person who can’t enjoy anything. Especially with mainstream media, it can sometimes feel like everyone but me can enjoy things, and that adds to that sense of defectiveness - why can’t I enjoy it? Everyone else enjoys it, so why can’t I? It must be something wrong with me.

I’m trying to find more ways to enjoy things, and to find ways to remain positive, nice, and supportive even when something is otherwise bothering me.

Okokimup@lemmy.world · 2 days ago

That’s a great goal for yourself. I’ve been trying to do something similar. I keep reminding myself of the Ted Lasso philosophy: be curious, not judgemental. Dont forget to be positive and supportive toward yourself, too.

Thanks for the added perspective on eastern philosophy. I don’t know much about those but it adds a lot of dimension to your critique.

It can be super frustrating to see nothing but praise for something you thought was flawed. Every time I finish a work I don’t like, I immediately go to Storygraph or reviewers on YouTube, trying to find someone who has called out its problems, or already put into beautiful words what i didnt like about it. I don’t think I’ve ever questioned whether something’s wrong with me - only wondered what’s wrong with everyone else.

ZDL@lazysoci.al · 3 days ago

Addressing the main questions

First I’ll address the questions of the original post.

Do you think this work is told from a feminist perspective? Why?

It is definitely told from a feminist perspective, yes. Ursula K. Le Guin is a female writer with unabashed beliefs that include Daoism, anarchism, and, yes, feminism. All three of these philosophical and political stances thread through all her works (with varying emphasis, naturally) and can be sniffed out by the attentive reader.

That being said, while it is told from a feminist perspective, I would argue its core concerns are not exclusively or even primarily feminist. Its project is broader and more fundamental. I’ll go into my thoughts on why in the guardrailed section below in which I address broader meaning of the work, but the short form is this:

Omelas is a land in which feminism is no longer necessary (in the same sense that socialism is no longer necessary when communism finally takes hold in Marxist thought).

But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas – at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.

Free love, in all the glorious '60s and early '70s style, but without guilt, without shame, and, critically, with purveyors of it being equally men and women. With the burdens of the outcomes, usually attached solely to women, a society-wide endeavour. That is definitely the future I envisioned when I first saw the future of men and women being equal stakeholders in society.

Do you think the authors gender or gender identity affected their choice of subject, writing style, or perspective character?

Perhaps peripherally? In that someone who is a victim of an unjust system is more likely to portray said injustices than someone who benefits for it. '70s SF, even when “politically aware” rarely addressed systemic issues with the laser focus Le Guin brings to Omelas. So you had Brunner and others addressing environmentalism, while casually assuming patriarchy, for example.

Le Guin doesn’t do this. She instead lays a trap (which I will get into in the guardrailed section) from which there is no escape. And that trap snares everybody in the system, giving nobody a pass. In that regard Omelas is more the creation of a committed Daoist than an anarchist or feminist.

Does the narrators gender or gender identity affect the work? If so, how?

I’ve read over the story a dozen times since this was announced, picking at every word. And I find no sign of gender in the narrator. Le Guin is not giving us that easy out.

Did this work change your opinion on anything? If so, what and why?

I first read this in an old, ratty pocket book I’d picked up from a used book store while I was sipping an overpriced latte in Second Cup (a Canadian coffee chain like Starbucks, only it sucks ever so slightly less).

That coffee turned to the taste of ashes in my mouth once I figured out what Le Guin was saying. That would be a “yes”, in other words. Because Le Guin, with her laser scalpel, cut open the assumptions at the basis of all our social orders and laid bare the truth: suffering, exploitation, othering, and straight up fundamental torture are at the heart of everything we do.

Yes, including feminists fighting patriarchy.

And there’s simply no escape from the moral trap Le Guin set for us. She distilled everything about us into Omelas and wrote a story in under 3000 words based upon it that hits us straight between the eyes with our complicity in the real-world Omelas around us. And, as I will expand upon behind the guard rails, leaves us with no simple answer.

The guard rail

Here's where I stray from strictly women's issues, though I circle back around to them here and there...

Omelas is not a feminist story, though it is written by a feminist. It is not an anarchist story, though it is written by an anarchist. It is instead, at its core, a profoundly Daoist story. And Le Guin was very much a committed Daoist. (So much so that she wrote her own translation of one of the central texts of Daoism: Laozi a.k.a. Dao De Jing. And it’s one of the better translations in that it shows comprehension of the underlying thoughts and principles instead of being a simple-minded literal translation or a reductive academic one.)

For those who are not Daoists and have a very hazy grasp of what it might even mean, let this proto-Daoist who understands perhaps 0.001% of Laozi after six readings (which puts her literally infinitely ahead of where she was after her first reading of it!) provide a quick little guide map. Daoism is a religion or a philosophical system. Which you think came first depends on whether you agree with the Confucians or not. The Confucians say that philosophical Daoism came first and was corrupted into religious Daoism. I’m not a Confucian; I agree with the people who claim that philosophical Daoism was an attempt to sneak religious Daoist thought into a Confucian-dominated world by giving it a patina of philosophical respectability. (There is strong evidence for this case!) Either way, however, the central point doesn’t change. Daoism is a philosophy centered on the dynamic, cyclical balance of opposites, known as 阴阳 (yīn yáng). It rejects rigid binaries (齐物, qí wù) in favor of a flowing, cyclical view of nature (反, fǎn), advocating for action through non-force (无为, wú wéi) and harmony with the spontaneous way of the universe (自然, zì rán).

And it is from this well that Le Guin dips for a devastating attack on our very being.

For in Omelas she portrays a utopia. All good. Men and women are, as I outlined above, equal in all meaningful ways. Yet at the heart of this perfect society lies an imperfection. And true to her Daoist nature, she illustrates this imperfection, this gross, nay nauseating injustice in which a child is, in effect tortured and somehow, by the rules of the fiction, it is this grotesque evil that gives Omelas all its goods.

But Le Guin is a Daoist. Take a very close look at the symbol at the core of Daoism: ☯. The black is defined by the white and incorporates a piece of it even, as the white is defined by the black, incorporating a piece. This is the very core of 阴阳 (yīn yáng) and the heart of Le Guin’s piece here. The evil is defined by the good … and vice versa. One cannot exist without the other. She’s not going to give you an easy out. She’s facing you with an ugly truth. WE ARE OMELAS. We live in a society that is not perfect, like Omelas is portrayed, but is far closer to Omelas than, say, to the brutality of past ages. Women are better off than they used to be, an overwhelming majority of the population (even those who are struggling!) live better than did the kings of medieval Europe, and in general we are on the line from the barbaric past to the shining future of Omelas.

And yet Omelas is built on violence. On abuse. On torture. On injustice. Because Omelas is a figurative rendering of us. Of our world.

And while she sings the praises (sort of) of those who leave, there is even there a quiet, almost unheard (and often-missed) criticism of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: they’ve left the injustice behind.

Read that slowly until it sinks in. They’ve left it. Behind. Intact and still ongoing. No, Le Guin is not praising those who leave. She’s subtly critiquing those who think this is the answer.

This is such a Daoist moral trap it makes me shiver when I read it. This is the kind of moral paradox that the entirety of Laozi is based upon. She’s not offering a solution. SHE IS TELLING US WHAT THE PROBLEM IS … and all the while closing the doors to the easy answers. There are no answers in Omelas, only questions. Profound questions she is asking with a sympathetic, but wickedly sharp scalpel as she lays bare the flesh and bones of the very system we are part of, supporters of, and benificiaries of.

Well, beneficiaries except for those of us who are, in some way or another, the child at the heart of Omelas.

LadyButterfly she/her@piefed.blahaj.zone · 4 days ago

This is so exciting! When do we need to read/watch by?

Greercase@lemmus.org · 4 days ago

I figure people can read/watch/comment at their leisure through the month of September. Ideally responding to other comments that are there already, then hopefully revisit this thread at the end of September once everyone has posted just to see conversations that might not have been there when you posted. I will link this thread in next months thread and encourage people to revisit it and see if any new comments have been added since they last checked. Hopefully it’s mostly wrapped up by the end of September, but there’s nothing stopping people from visiting this far after that. I will try to respond to all top level comments so people know someone is engaging with their ideas, even if they respond after the designated month. I imagine the earlier comments will get more traction, but I’ll at least read them all regardless.

LadyButterfly she/her@piefed.blahaj.zone · 3 days ago

Good plan

DaniNatrix@leminal.space · 3 days ago

I’ve been meaning to revisit LeGuin for awhile now, I’m excited to dig in, thanks for organizing everything!

Greercase@lemmus.org · 3 days ago

Glad to see it’s making peoples to read list shorter rather than longer lol. Excited to read your thoughts on it!

klemptor@startrek.website · 3 days ago

Oh good! I’ve had The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas in my kindle library for a while but kept getting sidetracked. I’m excited for this - thank you for taking the initiative!

Greercase@lemmus.org · 3 days ago

So glad to hear it’s helping you cross something off your list! Excited to read your thoughts!

ZDL@lazysoci.al · 4 days ago

Wow. You’re jumping STRAIGHT into the hard stuff!

Greercase@lemmus.org · 4 days ago

Right? It’s relatively short and in my opinion unfortunately eternally relevant, so I hope it’ll encourage more participation! Excited to see people’s takes.

ZDL@lazysoci.al · 4 days ago

So when do we start talking? I have THOUGHTS on that work. For such a short work there is so much buried beneath it. LeGuin is rivalling Laozi for encoding philosophies here.

Greercase@lemmus.org · 4 days ago

The thread is open to conversations as soon as it’s posted! You can comment whenever you’re ready. I’d suggest making it a top level comments though to ensure the most visibility/engagement. Excited to read your thoughts!

ZDL@lazysoci.al · 3 days ago

I just re-read it to kickstart the memory and I’ll do a detailed read later. Then … THOUGHTS will leak out. This is a complicated work with no good answers to anything.

ZDL@lazysoci.al · 4 days ago

It’s good you put a trigger warning on that. That’s the short story equivalent of Black Kirin’s “Nanjing Massacre” video: intensely artistic, introspective, and shocking in equal parts.

Greercase@lemmus.org · 4 days ago

Yes, definitely! I hope you’ll consider providing some suggestions for future months. I think you posted a song on a different thread and I had not heard it before but it was great and lead me down a rabbit hole of melodic folk metal. You seem to be able to provide lots of novel references, and I really appreciate that! I don’t have a broad base to draw from, so any additional perspectives are always welcome.

ZDL@lazysoci.al · 3 days ago

Well, I think I attached a pretty novel reference to the missive I just dropped. :D

HaphazardGuess@sh.itjust.works · 3 days ago

Will there be a discord for us to talk throughout the month and maybe do a scheduled hang out/meeting-esque? That could be fun

dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone · edit-2 3 days ago

small note on formatting: your list failed because you are missing a space after the -, so this is how you wrote it:

**Some things to think about while watching:**
-Do you think this work is told from a feminist perspective? Why?
-Do you think the authors gender or gender identity affected their choice of subject, writing style, or perspective character?
-Does the narrators gender or gender identity affect the work? If so, how?
-Did this work change your opinion on anything? If so, what and why?

and this is what you need for the list to render correctly:

**Some things to think about while watching:**

- Do you think this work is told from a feminist perspective? Why?
- Do you think the authors gender or gender identity affected their choice of subject, writing style, or perspective character?
- Does the narrators gender or gender identity affect the work? If so, how?
- Did this work change your opinion on anything? If so, what and why?

which should look like this

Some things to think about while watching:

Do you think this work is told from a feminist perspective? Why?
Do you think the authors gender or gender identity affected their choice of subject, writing style, or perspective character?
Does the narrators gender or gender identity affect the work? If so, how?
Did this work change your opinion on anything? If so, what and why?

Thanks for organizing this!! 😊

Greercase@lemmus.org · 3 days ago

Coming in clutch with formatting help again. Thank you! For what it’s worth I didn’t even think about trying to format it as a list, I just used the dashes for clarity, but I will edit it now since actually appearing as a list would be more helpful! Thank you for the information.

Greercase@lemmus.org · 4 days ago

Please comment suggestions for next month here. One suggestion per comment. You can comment multiple times. Please include any details you might find relevant (not mandatory but helpful). Please vote on other suggestions as well. Thank you!

dandelion (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone · edit-2 6 hours ago

for October’s book, maybe Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

for October’s movie, maybe In Fabric?

Okokimup@lemmy.world · 2 days ago

Im going to make some fiction book recommendations. I have no idea how readily available they are. I have found all of these at some libraries, but ymmv.

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

Connie Ramos, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been declared insane. But Connie is overwhelmingly sane, merely tuned to the future, and able to communicate with the year 2137. As her doctors persuade her to agree to an operation, Connie struggles to force herself to listen to the future and its lessons for today…

This was published in 1976, and the abuse the MC suffers in the present-day asylum is a tough read. But the utopian visits are very interesting.

The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk

An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression.

This one has the utopia situated next to the distopia and character perspectives move back and forth between them. I never finished this one, due to circumstances at the time, nothing against the book.

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore

Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination.

Maybe all the more interesting because of how dated it is.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

Aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn’t agree, they may need to be saved by force.

Most of the world is still distopic, but our heroes live in a socialist community that feels like it could really work. They have a very interesting dynamic with the aliens.

Last Woman Standing by Winona LaDuke

A powerful and poignant novel tracing the lives of seven generations of Anishinaabe (O)bwe/Chippewa).'…an impressive fiction debut…skillfully intertwines social history. oral myth and character study…"

It’s been so long, I don’t remember the storyline to this one. Just that the very beginning read like traditional folklore, but the main part of the book was like a normal novel; and that I really enjoyed it at the time.

klemptor@startrek.website · 3 days ago

For a movie, how about Thelma and Louise?

ZDL@lazysoci.al · 3 days ago

If Omelas feels like a deeply philosophical, scalpel-precise bludgeoning to the feels, unsettling in its profound moral ambiguity and its unflinching stare at US and our culpability in a system we are an intrinsic part of, my suggestion for the next book will instead be a sledgehammer to the face wielded by a laughing maniac shouting “SEE WHAT I DID THERE?!”. Because I propose The Power by Naomi Alderman as the follow-up work. Let’s not just discuss a feminist text. Let’s strap in and explore a world gone mad with it and see what breaks.

The premise is deceptively simple. It’s the literalization of thousands of “what ifs” crammed into one: What if, overnight, women and girls worldwide develop the sudden biological ability to generate and wield electrical jolts from their bodies. They can electrocute people at will, in short. The power dynamic of the entire planet, from geopolitical stage to bedroom, is inverted overnight.

Alderman, however, being a protege of Atwood, is not interested in simple revenge fantasy. This is not utopia she presents. It’s a brutal, but gripping (and profoundly uncomfortable!) exploration of a single question: What happens when the powerless suddenly become the powerful? Do they build a better world, or do they just become The Who’s “new bosses”?

This is an unflinching allegory for how power corrupts. Full. Stop. It viciously dissects gender, violence, and hierarchy, but doesn’t do it with Le Guin’s razor-sharp scalpel. It does so with a live wire connected to the mains. Are the horrors of life intrinsic to something inherent in men … or something inherent in the very nature of power itself?

This is a book that will make you cheer one moment, then recoil in horror the next. Often this happens on the same page. Sometimes in the same sentence. This is no subtle Daoist trap, a scintillating intellectual jewel that cuts you open with its sharp edges to reveal what was inside you all along. This is a visceral, adrenalized thought experiment and yet, for that—perhaps because of that—it may be the most honest and challenging books about systemic power ever written.

If we go with this book, here are some questions we could discuss:

Alderman inverts the world. Does she recreate patriarchy with a different face (“meet the new boss, same as the old boss”) or does she reveal something new about its architecture?
There is a lot of violence in the book. Is it justified as a correction, or is she indicting human nature?
The book is framed intriguingly as a “historical novel” written by a male author thousands of years into the future. Does this metafictional twist reframe anything in the rest of the book?
Is this book hopeful or despairing?

ZDL@lazysoci.al · 3 days ago

Talk about the polar opposite to the film I suggest! 🤭

ZDL@lazysoci.al · edit-2 3 days ago

I’d like to suggest something most people have never heard of for the next movie: Certain Women, directed by Kelly Reichardt. It’s a vignette film of interlocked women’s lives. The stories are the kinds of stories that are not deemed sufficiently dramatic for film by most, yet Reichardt creates a compelling feminist tapestry through realism and empathy.

This lacks the bombast of the usual suspects for feminist film, but for that it is probably the most weirdly engaging (possibly because of the lack of bombast).

Edited to add:

https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/certain-women

A list of places to watch it. And of course there’s always the 🏴‍☠️ way.

Some questions I’d suggest for this one, if it’s picked, are:

Everybody knows about the “male gaze” in cinema. What is the gaze in this film?
How is the theme of quiet desperation and isolation communicated across the three different primary characters of the film? How is it resolved (or is it even resolved)?
Is the atmosphere of the film oppressive … or is it perhaps more a full-blown character in the film with its own arc?
The ending of this film is (in)famously enigmatic. What does it mean to you?