Bright Star tells the story of the tragic romance between poet John Keates and his sometimes-neighbor Fanny Brawne. When the movie opens, Brawne is a seamstress whose success seems to be growing. The bankrupt Keates is staying next door with his friend and fellow poet Charles Brown, struggling to eke out a living writing poetry with little success. Keates and Brawne at first seem to inhabit different worlds, Fanny’s one of the practical and down-to-earth, and Keates’ a much more immaterial world of poetry and words. But as they begin to spend time together, they realize that they connect on a deeper level, and a tentative romance blossoms. Soon they are madly in love. When they are apart, they write long, heartfelt letters, and when tragedy finally strikes and Keates dies, young and yet unknown by the literary world, Fanny’s life is torn asunder.

Now, one might think that after the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, we would have had quite enough of the period film about the spunky heroine who finds herself falling for the man she at first thought she hated. But the romance between Fanny and John is refreshingly un-gimmicky, their progression from mild dislike, to tentative flirtation, to heart-stopping romance surprisingly natural. Throughout the film, the pair seem to be engaging in a just-below-the-surface intellectual debate about the nature of beauty and the importance of poetry in a practical world. But Fanny never loses her practical edge, and Keates never gets his head out of clouds. Instead they learn to balance each other, appreciating, if never entirely understanding, the beauty that each of them brings into the world: Keates through his poetry and Brawne through her sense of design. Somewhat ironically, considering the melodrama usually associated with the Romantics, this romance is refreshingly subtle. Plus, as many reviewers have pointed out, the film is possibly one of the sexiest I’ve seen in quite a while, despite the fact that there is no actual sex in it.

Bright Star is full of complex and fascinating characters, but my favorite, without a doubt, is Fanny. Not much seems to be known about her historically, though letters exist that detail her life and relationship with the famous poet she almost married. She is portrayed as an unselfconscious and independent woman. She is a practical soul who enjoys people and enjoys life. Though a unique and complex character who might have easily been turned into one of those spunky ahead-of-her-time heroines, the film sees no need to trumpet her independence. She is merely Fanny, and that is what makes her feel so real in any time period.

Best of all, Bright Star has one of the most unselfconscious historical settings I have seen in some time. The 19th century England of Bright Star lacks that perfect-Hollywood-period-film sheen common in films like Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. Shot with a stark sort of beauty, it is instead something earthier and messier, something that feels much more real. In my own blog, I have already spoken of the film’s down-to-earth costuming decisions. Not every shot is beautiful and flawless, either. Bright Star contains a scene in a terribly unromantic hospital and any number of harsh winter landscapes. Details like small spaces in which characters sometimes seem to live on top of each other and clothing worn over and over add to the feeling of realistic “historicalness” often missing from period films.

The two best words used to describe Bright Star are two words you usually don’t see together: unselfconscious and Romantic. The film not only paints an image of a faraway era and of a poet who is now a firm member of the poetic canon, but also, succeeds in creating something immediate, real, and emotionally raw that connects the present to the past and the everyday to the poetic. It is, dare I say it, one of the best period films I have seen in a very long time.

-Becca

But there’s one band that rises above all others and gives me everything I could want in music and more, a band that produces songs with narrative, songs that make you want to get out on a scuffed wood floor and dance (and I’m talking real swing-your-partner-until-she’s-dizzy, breathless, stylized partner dancing that fell out of popularity somewhere in the 1950s, not the bump-and-grind of the modern club), song that combine acoustic and electric and old and new seamlessly. And best of all, if you know what to listen for, their lyrics are really, really nerdy.

I’m talking about Flogging Molly.

For the non-folk music (and/or non-punk music) nerds among us, Flogging Molly is an American Celtic punk band founded in Los Angeles, California by Dave King, Ted Hutt, Jeff Peters, and Bridget Regan, who first began fusing traditional Irish music and contemporary punk sounds in the early ’90s playing in a Los Angeles pub, Molly Molone’s. They eventually signed onto a record deal with SideOneDummy Records. To quote the all-knowing source known as Wikipedia, “Flogging Molly has released an independent (26f Records) live album titled Alive Behind the Green Door, as well as four studio albums: Swagger, Drunken Lullabies, Within a Mile of Home, and Float; and an acoustic/live DVD/cd combo Whiskey on a Sunday. They have toured with the Warped Tour, Larry Kirwan’s American Fléadh Festival and contributed to the Rock Against Bush project. They have sold in excess of a million and a half copies of recorded output as of December 6, 2006.”

Best of all, even within the history-heavy Irish music genre, Flogging Molly this ability to invoke historical images and historical narrative better than any other band or musical group I have ever heard. More than the Dropkick Murpheys, or the Pogues (yes, even more than the Pogues), or even more traditional-sounding bands like Great Big Sea and Gaelic Storm, they are attuned not only to the celtic folk musical tradition they are following in, but to the complicated, muddy history of Ireland itself.

And let’s face it, guys. That’s my kind of nerdy.

One of my favorite songs, for its style as well as its content, is the underrated “Tobacco Island,” which appears buried in the middle of their third CD, Within a Mile of Home. With their usual punk-folk flair, they sing:

‘Twas 1659, forgotten now for sure
They dragged us from our homeland
With the musket and their gun
Cromwell and his roundheads
Battered all we know
Shackled hopes of freedom
We’re now but stolen goods
Darken the horizon
Blackened from the sun
This rotten cage of Bridgetown
Is where I now belong

There, smack in the middle of contemporary pop song, is a short, emotional history lesson of that dreaded Irish side of the English Civil War. To fill things out a bit, here are the sordid historical details: Once Oliver Cromwell had taken control of Parliament, executed Charles I, and named himself Lord Protector, he set to conquering Ireland. After three years of some of the bloodiest fighting of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s army defeated the sometimes equally violent and largely Catholic Irish insurgents, stripped Irish-Catholic nobles of their land, and sent Irish prisoners of war and their families into forced indentured servitude in the West Indies – and thus effectively set the stage for the history of Ireland for the next three hundred years.* The song is chock full of historical vocabulary: it refers to “roundheads” (Cromwell’s political supporters in Parliament), “the Butcher”** (a Cromwellian nickname), and “redlegs” (nickname for the Barbadian descendants of those Irish indentured servants and other poor whites). Though the song’s lyrics do not make the direct link, it is about an event that came to define the worst of Irish politics and turmoil until very recently.

That’s not the only historical event to which the band directly refers, either. “Far Away Boys,” takes on the topic of the building of America’s trans-continental railroad, which famously used and abused Irish immigrant labor to create the railway that, for the first time connected the United States from East to West.*** Likewise, the opening verse of “To Youth” speaks of the Great Migration to America after the potato famine ravaged the Irish countryside:

Tell me why are our fields filled with hunger
And fruitless the crop bitter soil
So I say my farewell to a nation
As the leaf waves goodbye to it’s son

It’s not all praise for Ireland’s obsession with its tragic and bloody narrative, either. This ain’t your grandmother’s “Skibereen.” Though “Screaming at the Wailing Wall” directly addresses the madness of religious war in the context of the Middle East conflict, with pennywhistle wailing in the background it’s difficult not to make the connection to Ireland’s own religious conflict (and even the United States’ own often poorly thought out place in it). When a very Irish band says, “With the bombed out cars/ Come the falling stars/ From a heaven we’ll never know,” you have to wonder if they are criticizing a country a little closer to home.

There’s a mood and a tone to Flogging Molly’s lyrics and style that remind me, whether it was meant to or not, of some of the most noted Irish scholarship. The sense of loss and uncertainty in “Black Friday Rule,” is the heartfelt musicians’ answer to Kerby Miller’s seminal Emigrants and Exiles, one of the most detailed pieces of historical scholarship in existence about Irish emigration to America. “Drunken Lullabies” speaks with a cynicism and despair at Ireland’s obsession with its bloody past in a way that reflects the unhappy portentousness of no less a person than Conor Cruise O’Brian, Irish scholar, sage, and doomsday proclaimer, “Those who hear the ancestral voices [of history] only faintly,” he darkly declares, “are in the thrall of those who hear them loud and clear, calling for vengeance.” “Must we starve on crumbs from long ago?” Dave King asks in a similar tone.

Here’s a grand, sweeping statement sure to make any professional scholar of Irish culture or history cringe: Flogging Molly is the modern answer to the intimidatingly grand and deeply rooted tradition of Irish music as Roddy Doyle is to the equally intimidating tradition of Irish literature. Both are rooted in an Irish tradition that has been romanticized on both sides of the Atlantic, both speak to modern cynicism ad wryness, and both inject irreverence where it is most needed. Both are well aware of the complicated water into which they wade. In its own pop culture-laden sort of way, Flogging Molly brings the long tradition of Irish folk music into the new millennium not by watering it down in the awful tradition of greet St. Patrick’s Day beer, but by providing a new perspective, relevant to Irish history and to the world.

Must it take a life
For hateful eyes
to glisten once again?
’cause we find ourselves in the same old mess
Singing drunken lullabies.

Flogging Molly is now in the middle of its North American tour. Check your local venues! Don’t be dumb like me and forget to check until after they’ve gone through your town.

- Becca

*In the interest of full disclosure, I have no idea where the song gets the date 1659. Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland took place 1649-51.

** If this vocabulary is looking at all familiar to fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, it isn’t a coincidence, by the way. Pratchett’s knowledge of history and satire is just that awesome.

*** “Far Away Boys” only tells half of the story, keep in mind. While the story of the Irish laboring on the railroad is well-known to the history books, the story of the even worse-treated Chinese laborers is less often spoken of. Famously, the photograph taken in 1869 at the “Golden Spike” ceremony when they railroad was finished includes a number of Irish workers, but not a single Chinese worker.

For those of us with a passion for history, fiction and cinema can be both a joy and a horror. We watch in frustration as facts are thrown by the wayside in order to provide us with what the writers or directors think is a good story. We are caught squealing with glee at small yet perfectly-realised details. There are often highs and lows in each piece and no one is more critical of anything set in the past than those who’ve studied the era.

Historically based novels and movies has seen something of a renaissance in the past half-dozen years. As with any such genre explosion, a good portion of what gets produced can no more claim to be historical than some of Shakespeare’s histories. “Are they set in the past?” Yes. “Do they use the names of once famous and powerful persons? Yes. Do they adhere to the facts?” That’s where things get interesting.

For the purpose of this ramble, I thought it best to make a distinction between period and historical. I define them thus:

Period: Based in a historical setting (though it may have been contemporary when written), these works focus on fictional characters and events, the historical setting merely acting as a backdrop to their lives. Sarah Waters’ or Jane Austen’s works are excellent examples of period pieces.

Historical: Inspired by and focused upon the lives of actual people and/or actual events, but the interpretation of these people and events may be loose. The purpose of these works is to tell the story of someone who once lived and of whom there exists extant factual record.

In many ways the period piece is easier to produce. It’s power is in the details, but the details – not necessarily more easily researched – are difficult to refute. Think of Atonement. The description of Briony on the nursing ward in World War II England was so evocative that it was easy to overlook just how detailed the recounting of it was. What escaped no one was the the stringency of the nurses, the relative primitiveness of their equipment and the stresses on the staff because of it, and the efficacy of the matrons who ran the wards. In all of it an image was created: an image that most could be convinced was not that far off the reality of such a place.

Sarah Waters is another author who excels at the period novel. She manages to capture her historical periods amazingly, all in the details. Her research shows, both in her books set in the 19th century, and in those set during wartime twentieth. It is easy to believe that these people could easily have existed, whilst at the same time imparting a bit more knowledge about that period onto the reader. Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet were both translated onto the small screen, and wonderfully so. They may have lost a bit of the story, they lost none of what made them period.

Is it harder, then to write a historical novel or pen such a movie? That is a question that seems to be too rarely asked. I’m not considering the number of books written of legends, such as Robin Hood or Camelot. Those stand in a world of their own, to be dealt with at another time.

Most recently the fashion seems to be to write about Henry VIII and his wives. If you need to ask who Henry and his wives are, perhaps this is not the article for you. The Other Boleyn Girl. The Tudors. Both in books and on the screen, Tudor and late medieval history seems to be the vogue. What I’ve read and have seen often makes me want to weep.

There are things that I understand. I understand that sex sells and there is a level of glamour that is needed to make something seem appealing. I do have to say that anyone who’s studied the period can tell you that the reality is far more interesting and intriguing than the dumbed down versions we get today. The political intrigue, the power of the Lords, the power of the Church, the fact England was broke, the influence of France, the infighting in the court: it makes for a marvellous story without the abridgements that the fiction seems to give us. But that is why it’s fiction, is it not? It isn’t the truth, but it is using the backdrop of reality. Actual events and people are what we’re taking liberties with for the purpose of entertainment.

Sadly, I would love to leave it there, but I cannot, mostly due to the fact I have heard a number of people I quite like and respect say things like the Tudors, but ‘why did they kill Anne’? These are well educated people, and people I consider my friends. It makes me wonder if those stories of the Titanic test audiences who said the movie would be much better if the ship hadn’t sunk were a joke or actually a reality.

Over and over I find people who’ve read historifiction or seen the movies and suddenly proclaim themselves near-experts on that period. It’s frustrating and infuriating for those of us who have spent countless hours reading into such things and acknowledge that we’ll never become experts. Even if we were to have a massive lottery win and access to every primary document still out there we’d be quite a way off. A little knowledge, however, can be a dangerous thing. To be fair, the historical world isn’t exactly without its own flaws. Bias, assumptions, mad-cap theories and poor research are just some of the factors that can make a non-fiction work as spurious as fiction.

This genre can also inspire a real interest in the past. People go from watching a movie or two or reading a few books on an area and from there pick up histories and documentaries: they take classes or start going to museums. I know that much of my own love of history was inspired by watching these exact sorts of things as a child and teen.

The balance between entertainment and history is a fine line. There is something romantic about historical figures, and as such, they are easy to romanticise. After all, no matter how many extant documents we might have, we will never know what Henry VIII was like personally. Neither will we have concrete evidence about Darwin, nor Robespierre, nor Anthony Blunt. We don’t know what they thought or why they made the decisions they made. Fiction, in many cases, is the only way to fill in the blanks. But fiction is never history, and more and more the line between the two is being blurred.

- Deense

The Cambridge Spy Ring – or the Cambridge Five, as it is sometimes called – is one of those strange and fascinating footnotes of history. Its details are not particularly well known – I have spoken to British historians and historians of Communism that have never heard of them. But if you start digging into the history of the early CIA, or MI5, of the network of spies that criss-crossed Europe and America during the Cold War, five names begin to emerge: Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Carincross. All five men attended Cambridge University in the 1930s, when fear about Hitler and the possibility of approaching war consumed Britain, the Soviet Union was still displaying a mask of power of benevolence, and intellectuals in the American, European, and British Left were enthralled by the promises of Communism. All, save for Carincross, were from wealthy, well-connected families of the British establishment. All went on to take key positions in British intelligence and government. And all, from the 1930s to the 1950s, acted as agents for the KGB and passed British and American secrets to the sometimes-ally, sometimes-enemy Soviet Union.

There’s something we love about spies. From James Bond, to Spooks, to crime show dramas, they fill our popular culture and our imagination. Tales of spies like the Cambridge Five are even more difficult to resist. Not only do they have the appeal of that sneaking, underhand quest for information, but they pose tantalizing questions: what made these men betray their country? How did they go so long unnoticed and undetected? Will we ever know how much they really did, or what they really thought?

It’s the last question that interests me today. In the years since the Soviet Union collapsed and classified Cold War files on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to be released, new information has emerged about the many spies who worked during the Cold War, including the Cambridge Five. But spies lie. They are trained to hide the truth. Double agents and traitors have all the more reason to do so. Even when the spies no longer have fear of being caught – or already have been – what reason do they have to spill secrets they have kept close for decades?

In my mind, this is what makes spy fiction, even about real spies, so intriguing. The tantalizing personalities of the Cambridge Five make fictionalizing their lives and thoughts even more tempting. Burgess’ flamboyance and Blunt’s academic reticence, Philby’s cold-blooded charm and Maclean’s schizophrenic loyalty, even Cairncross’ (poor, forgotten Cairncross) own personal class struggle. The more you know about these men, the more you realize you will never know.

No wonder so many authors, filmmakers, and playwrights have fallen prey to the temptation to flesh out the lives of these somewhat obscure historical figures. The first to be produced that I know of was Blunt. Produced only a few short years after Blunt was revealed as a spy, it includes a surprisingly sympathetic performance by Anthony Hopkins as Guy Burgess, but otherwise lacks the insight of later attempts. No one seems sure what anyone’s motivations were, even in fictional form. Then there is Alan Bennet’s Single Spies: A Question of Attribution and An Englishman Abroad, a pair of wonderfully subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) character sketches of Blunt and Burgess. Bennet takes them on their own terms and presents two men, once idealists, who have found their ideals to be wrong.

Due to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the opening up of East and West, and Miranda Carter’s excellent biography of Anthony Blunt, the 1990s saw an explosion of fictional adaptations of their lives. John Banville’s The Untouchable is a thinly disguised fictionalization of the Cambridge Spies’ exploits, A Friendship of Convenience a less thinly disguised novella about Blunt struggling to keep his spying days a secret during the McCarthy era. And then there’s Cambridge Spies, a startlingly good BBC miniseries about Blunt, Burgess, Maclean, and Philby that follows their story from recruitment to the defection of Maclean and Burgess.

All versions stretch and bend the truth of fit their needs. To one degree or another they simplify loyalties, muddy timelines, and create people and events. Almost all (especially Cambridge Spies) exaggerate the personal relationship between the men. But all try to answer that question: why?

There have been no new fictional attempts to tackle the question recently, but some new information about the real spies has come to light, and amateurs and academics alike are already scrambling to see if they can find answers to that elusive why.

The BBC has recently made available online a collection of information they possess about the Cambridge Spy ring, with especial focus on Burgess, who was once a radio producer there. The documents they present provide a window into the professional and personal life of the man who has become known as “the loudest spy in history.” They show a man who insisted on taking a taxi to work every day and expensing the cost, whose flamboyance, drunkenness, and sexuality was barely tolerated, but who seemed to have charmed everyone he met. Interestingly, the letters of recommendation are especially telling, like this one from a Cambridge don who recommended him to the BBC:

“He is a first rate man, and I advise you if you can to try him. He has passed through the communist measles that so many of our clever young men go through, and is well out of it. There is nothing second rate about him and I think he would prove a great addition to your staff.”

So was he only fooling them all the whole time, or was there something genuine in that brilliance and charm of his?

Even more interesting is the revelation late last month that the British Library has made Anthony Blunt’s memoir available to the public, announced by the BBC News in late July. Scholars are scrambling to discover the “real” Blunt hidden in this supposed tell-all, according to the news report, Blunt says in his memoir, “The atmosphere at Cambridge was so intense, the enthusiasm for any anti-fascist activity was so great, that I made the biggest mistake of my life.” But that only hints at why he had made that mistake.

Even with this new information available to all, we can’t get to the heart of our question. We can’t quite reach the why. Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt’s biographer, says it best. Noting Blunt’s notorious ability to compartmentalize his life and lie even himself, she says, “I think that self-scrutiny was so limited within his character and that he closed himself off from that period of his life so completely that he was just unable to excavate himself.”

Maybe that’s why fiction about the Cambridge Spy Ring appeals to us so much. Even as we are able to piece together what they did, the why will never be answered. We need fiction to answer that tantalizing question for us.

And so we are left with the strange truth about spies that makes them different from almost any other sort of historical figure: as you learn more about men like the Cambridge Five, you discover that the reality of their lives was more unbelievable than you could ever imagine. But you also realize that thanks to the secrets and the lies, the fiction inside an author’s head might be the closest we can ever get to their reality.

- Becca

I have a secret.  Not a particularly  juicy one along the lines of an illicit love child, it is simply that I love fashion.  To set the record straight, I am not what most would call a fashionista.  My style is functional, heavy on the black.  Comfort trumps couture, and the size of my paycheque means that there is no Prada living in my closet.  That’s not to say that I haven’t scrimped and saved to purchase that bag or a pair of designer shoes.  Sadly, like so many, these items then tend to collect dust in my closet, as I find myself afraid to actually wear these rare treasures. 

Like millions of women, my interest in fashion is purely aspirational.  It was fostered at a young age by the Toronto Star’s weekly fashion pages, magazines like Jane and Seventeen, and Canada’s own weekly half hour tv segment Fashion Television brought to us by Jeanne Beker.  An older sister certainly helped, and my taste grew and changed as I would start reading her copies of Glamour and Vogue.  To be honest, my size 16 form won’t fit into most designer lines.  But I can dream, and I do.  Gorgeous shoots, edgy clothes, the excitement of finding runway pictures online.  There’s a mix of horror and awe as the pictures are trawled through for both inspiration and admiration.

Fashion has changed drastically over the past two decades.  Couture has been written off by more and more to be impractical and unnecessary, with ready to wear collections becoming ever more popular.  The cult of celebrity has emerged, its impact on the cult of fashion not to be understated.  While once we would dream of wearing gorgeous dresses, we now dream of being movie stars who just happen to wear those gorgeous dresses.  Designers are creating collections for brands like target and top shop; affordable and yet still representing their runway vision.  Shows like Project Runway and Top Model make us feel that every person could somehow have a chance to be involved in the industry; whether as a model or someone who shows at Bryant Park.  Suddenly, more than ever, everyone has an opinion on fashion.

At the forefront of the fashion world is Vogue.  The bible for many, it bridges the gap between designer and consumer and has become the voice in fashion for so many.  Boasting a circulation of 1.65 million per issue (figures per month 2008) it has long been the magazine to read and to be seen in.  Advertising costs are astronomical, but designers and retailers take multi-page spreads without fail.   Designers featured in Vogue know that they have done something right.  To be shunned by Vogue is never a good thing, and the power that one magazine has on designers might surprise many.

Will the real White Queen please stand up?

At the head of this empire stands one woman, Anna Wintour.  Often referred to as callous, an ice-queen, or even simply a bitch, she has the unenviable task of guiding the magazine month after month, year after year.  In a time when fashion is beset on all sides by cheap knockoffs and imitations, it is her job to see her own brand through.  To have a vision and maintain it; to preserve the integrity of Vogue and by extension, the integrity of the fashion world.

I can tell that there are many out there who think I’m giving one woman too much credit, or exaggerating the influence a magazine can have.  I’m sure that I’m not.  While not a designer herself, as editor of vogue (and a very hands on one at that) her opinion can make or break a designer or a collection.  There’s a reason she gets those prime front row seats at every single Fashion Week.  There ‘s a reason she has private previews with so many of them as well.   She has both the commercial pull and the knowledge of the industry to make her an extremely formidable woman.   I’m not saying that she hasn’t made some poor decisions, or that she’s infallible.  That would be as much of an injustice as pigeonholing her as fashion’s ice queen.

Formidable – adjective

1. Arousing fear, dread, or alarm

2. Inspiring awe, admiration, or wonder

3. Difficult to undertake, surmount, or defeat

It is rare, in our world, to see a woman with this degree of power.  Having the ability to make or break someone is something that has traditionally belonged to men.  Often called uncaring, or unfriendly, often referred to as not being warm or approachable, I need to wonder why.  Is it because as a woman, she is expected to exhibit these traits?  Traits that we somehow innately identify with stereotypical female?  I cannot imagine a single person saying that the CEO of AT&T is cold or unfeeling or that the Managing Director of Woolworths is unapproachable.  I’ve worked for and met both of these people, and I can tell you for certain, that those descriptions never once crossed my mind.  Perhaps because they are men, and expected to be businesslike and efficient.  They aren’t expected to nurture those below them, but to deal with their work in a professional fashion.   

Books like the Devil Wears Prada (ostensibly about Wintour and Vogue) portray her as an unforgiving harridan.  Frankly, I can say that there is little room in the corporate world for mistakes and error.  In an industry such as fashion, where so much is subjective, I would think there would be less.  It is precisely her job to drive this media powerhouse and to keep in on track.  That likely doesn’t involve a lot of time for hand-holding and coddling.  Yes, she has a precise image in her mind of what an editor should be and has stated she’d never hire a fat person in that role.  Yes, she has had personal issues over the years.  But neither of those things are any less tasteless than the things many other male CEOs get up to on a fairly regular basis.    Anyone who has worked as an EA for a high-powered executive knows how stressful the job can be.  Interns often bear the brunt of things, as well.  The bottom rung, they’re there to learn in a hands-on manner.  That means starting with what are often perceived to be the worst jobs and working one’s way up.  What does matter is that each and every month, she and her team produce the be all and end all of fashion publications. 

In the future, I’d like to hear less about her being an ice-queen.  I’d like to hear less about her being hard to work for or with.  It is, in the end, Anna’s magazine and Anna’s vision that has carried it through.  I’d love to hear about her being a formidable leader; about her choices in editorial staff or pages; about the content versus the scandal.  Sadly, in this media and gossip hungry world we live in, I doubt that I’ll get my wish.

- Deense

The Post was horrified, declaring in a headline, ” ‘Gay’ Sherlock Holmes Could Backfire for Ritchie.” Quoting a former Post movie critic, the page six article declares, “They know that making Holmes and Watson homosexual will take away two-thirds of their box office. Who is going to want to see Downey Jr. and Law make out?”

Putting aside the rampant homophobia in such a statement, the Post seems to have missed Downey Jr.’s point. They probably haven’t been watching very many period films, either. Here’s the truth of the matter that the good people at the New York Post seem to have missed: even without Guy Ritchie at the helm, there are a lot of homosocial shenanigans in your average buddy movie, especially if the movie has a historical setting.

‘Homosocial’ describes settings and relationships in which relations between people of the same gender – sexual or otherwise – play a central part. Think of the housewives gathered in the kitchen in Mad Men, or the camaraderie among the exclusively male characters of Master and Commander. In such settings, (heterosexual) romance seems to take a secondary role and friendships in gender-defined spaces guide the story. These friendships are often as intense and meaningful as the relationships in a more traditional romance.

Though often ignored (or mocked) today, such relationships have historically played an important part in the lives of men and women. A simple historical fact that is often overlooked by the general public is that for much of history, men and women spent a lot of time apart. For most of history and in most societies across the world, men and women had different social roles, different expectations, and different rights.

As one might expect, such gender-segregated relationships and setting appear frequently in historical films, a fact that becomes odder and more, well, quaint as gender and sexuality become more malleable in modern times. Rarely do filmmakers admit to the importance – or the sometimes sexual undertone – of these relationships between men (or between women) as Ritchie, Downey Jr., and Law seem to be, but time and time again, a homosocial ‘society’ stands at the center of historical films. In an attempt to prove that Downey Jr.’s admission about his own historical film is hardly new, here are a few of my favorite examples of such films.

‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’

There’s a certain sort of story that is very popular in our culture. A group of people (often men, especially in historical settings) with varying personalities and backgrounds come together to accomplish from grand and noble goal. In period films, the setting is usually wartime and the characters soldiers, though that is not always the case. Often gender-segregated, these characters bond through hardship and struggle, and they always win in the end. Even if they lose the battle, or the race, or the game, they have become a family.

Band of Brothers is the perfect title for Tom Hanks’ sweeping miniseries about the World War II Easy Company of the 101st Airborne and the real-life men who served in it. It’s a great film, and a perfect representation of this sort of period film: a group of men, many strangers at the beginning, band together and risk their lives for the greater good. When the men emerge from their struggles on the battlefield, they have not only accomplished great things, but have grown closer to each other – closer than real brothers, closer even than than they are to their (barely mentioned in the full 705 minutes) wives and girlfriends back home.

The settings of such films aren’t always quite so serious. In its own fluffy, family-friendly sort of way, Disney’s Newsies is exactly this kind of ‘Band of Brothers’ film as well. For those of you who don’t remember the 1992 film starring a singing and dancing Christian Bale, the story is based on the events of a real 1899 New York newsboys strike. From the dramatic opening number, showing the newsboys awaking in their boarding house, the female characters are clearly marginal. And though they are present (in the form of a sympathetic vaudeville star, a questionable love interest, and a few extras), the story could exist exactly as it is without them. This is a historical David-and-Goliath fairy tale, and as both form and history dictate, the story is about the boys’ lives, and the boys’ triumph, and most of all, the boys’ friendships.

‘Better Than a Wife’

At one point in C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels, the title character muses that William Bush, his first lieutenant, is ‘better than a wife.’ Contemporary eyebrow-raising such a statement invokes aside, it’s a perfect description of another sort of period film: the buddy movie. How often have you seen a film, ostensibly a traditional adventure story that ends with the hero getting the girl (or, on occasion, losing the girl), and have come away thinking that the hero and his loyal sidekick seem to care more about each other than the hero and his supposed leading lady do?

Now, I could write an essay on the historical silliness of the latest King Arthur movie, or it’s complete and utter lack of connection to King Arthur mythology, but there is one thing that the Antoine Fugua film carries over from the Arthur tradition, purposefully or not: the greatest British love triangle of all time has less to do with Arthur and Guinevere, or Guinevere and Lancelot, than it has to do with Lancelot and Arthur. The lack of chemistry between Keira Knightley’s Guinevere and Clive Owen’s Arthur is painfully apparent, especially in comparison to the sometimes harsh but unquestionably passionate friendship between Arthur and Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd). While it pains me to give the movie the credit of calling it “historical,” it is at least presuming to be historical and falls prey to this common historical trope: in a world where gender roles are sharply defined and men and women separated, friendships forged between men (often in battle and strengthened over years) seem undoubtedly stronger than the romantic relationship that is meant to be the center of the story.

There is no time and place more suited to exploring homosocial settings than eighteenth century England, a fact made clear by the wonderfully historically-aware Amazing Grace. Though the relationship between abolitionist William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) and his wife, Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai) creates an important subplot and their marriage is presented as deeply loving and mutually supportive, the story’s true romance is between Wilberforce and his best friend, William Pitt. Though the movie exaggerates the personal relationship between the two historical figures, Amazing Grace does an excellent job of contrasting the personalities of two very different men. In his fight to outlaw the slave trade, the idealistic Wilberforce comes into conflict with his more practical, politically astute friend. But even when they disagree on the floor of Parliament, in private they continue to be dear to each other until the very end.

The Forgotten History

Tragically, few historical films center on relationships between women. When these relationships appear at all, they are usually marginal to the rest of the story. Examples of deep, heartfelt, emotional friendships between women overwhelm history, but rarely have they mad their way into fiction. Films based on Jane Austen novels – surely the biggest source of period films about women – almost universally focus on relationships between men and women. Movies based on the works of authors such as Sarah Waters and Emma Donoghue are just beginning to fill this gap, but the genre still isn’t very well defined.

But a single example stands above the rest as both a delightful film and an excellent portrayal of relationships between women in the recent past. A League of their Own tells the fictional story of a real event, the creation of the All American Girl’s Baseball League. It’s about the love sports, and it’s about the strange in-between place that women held during World War II, when they were expected to man the factories in the absence of men, only to return to the kitchen once the war was over. But most of all, it’s about sisterhood and female friendship, and banding together against all odds. It is surely no coincidence that the setting of A League of their Own is one in which men have been taken away by circumstances. As tragic as it was, World War II allowed women to fill gaps left behind by men – in the workplace, in sports, and even in fiction.

Today

The homosocial setting hasn’t disappeared, of course – far from it. Popular culture reminds us all the time that divides still exist between men and women, in cable networks like Spike and Lifetime, in movies like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and I Love You, Man, and in the very labels ‘chick flick’ and ‘bromance’. But there’s a new need to define, name, and justify relationships between men or between women in a way that I think would have surprised people two hundred years ago. Political and economic divides between men and women are shrinking, sexuality becoming more fluid, and the idea of gender itself being questioned. The importance of homosocial relationships is, if not disappearing, at least diminishing dramatically.

There’s no place that this is more obvious than in contemporary science fiction. Television shows like the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Firefly, and the later Star Trek series all present military-like settings and tell stories of Band of Brothers-like camaraderie, friendship, and sacrifice. But unlike their historical counterparts, the characters are not exclusively men. Instead, they are a mix of (theoretically) equal men and women. Now, these settings don’t really present worlds of perfect gender equality, as much as they might try to, but they are using homosocial tropes in a setting that is no longer homosocial.

Are these portrayals of the future in any way accurate? We have no way of knowing. But one thing is for certain: at least according to popular culture, exclusively gendered friendships are becoming a thing of the past. Maybe that’s the real reason for the eyebrows raised over Robert Downey Jr.’s comment: we’re not used to actors and directors actually acknowledging the complexity of homosocial relationships in media. I have no idea if Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes will be a good movie or a good adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, but I applaud him and his stars for not shying away from this rarely observed part of popular culture and of history.

- Becca