Actual People (Kit Zauhar, 2021).
Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Humiliation is one of humanity’s cruelest jokes, one of its most repugnant punishments. The Latin root of the word, “humus,” translates to “earth,” or “dirt,” the idea that a person loses dignity and returns to something inhuman, crude and trampled on. The fear of being humiliated is a specter persuasive enough to shrink whole personalities, curtail ambitions, end life as someone knew it. Many mainstream filmmakers avoid its narrative possibilities because, maybe, to degrade a character would mean to degrade the film itself. I don’t think that’s the case. To see humiliation depicted onscreen can be like witnessing a corpse flower blooming: compelling, strange, beautiful; yet you’re very glad you’re not in the room during its unfurling.
I’ve always been drawn to films that allow the power of humiliation to overcome a character; my filmmaking in both ambition and practice have been shaped by my yen to explore this unspoken taboo. And I’ve discovered several role models in quest who shared my goals, my ethos, even my gender. When I looked at the debuts of the femme filmmakers I admired, I found that many of them wrote, directed, and starred in the projects that helped launch their careers. So I did it as well. And I did find some validation with my first feature Actual People (2021), in which I play a “faildaughter,” a young and often middle-to-upper-middle-class femme protagonist who is a bit of a virtuoso when it comes to self-humiliation. When confronted with challenges (ones that are notably padded by a level of financial security), the faildaughter will zig when she should zag, have weird and sad sex when she should abstain, and quit like a coward when it’s not even that taxing to persevere (the most popular example is probably Phoebe Waller-Bridge's eponymous Fleabag, whose adventures in incompetence were not only compelling, but relatable).
At the beginning of a filmmaker’s career, there are fewer eyes on their projects and therefore little to no expectations, bringing about the chaotic combination of more creative freedom with few people who want to be involved. This leads to some artists, either brazenly or defiantly, jumping into the role of the “triple threat,” meaning that they write, direct, and star in their own film (I’m co-opting this phrase from theater, in which the term refers to a performer who can act, dance, and sing).
A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971).
On the other much longer end of the spectrum, there were the male triple threats who came in the form of charismatic cowboy legends (Clint Eastwood), neurotic intellectuals (Woody Allen, Nanni Moretti), mumblecorers like Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski, and legends like Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin. The range of the masculine triple threat seems endless; they’ve been heroes, lady wooers, assholes, good-intentioned guys, lovable normies, leeches, losers, sometimes all within one movie. And they continue to be.
This is not true for many, most, of the contemporary woman writer/director/actors. Each of their worlds and their bodies in their worlds tell a more unified story: more often than not, a story of embarrassment, social faux pas, ungraceful but earnest attempts to assert their importance in a world that seems to not want anything to do with them. Particularly, the films that begin a femme triple threat’s oeuvre feel like they were born out of a singular primordial organism, squirming, writhing, already mortified at the prospect of being alive on this earth.
In A New Leaf (1971), pioneer Elaine May’s first film that she writes, directs, and stars in, she plays a bumbling cash cow, easy prey for a narcissistic and soon-to-be-broke buffoon. Issa Rae was first the “Awkward Black Girl,” constantly and gracelessly in distress. In Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), Miranda July’s unnerving portrayal of an aspiring video artist bares her tenderness like an open wound for the world to prod at. Of course, there’s Lena Dunham, first getting fucked in a construction tube in Tiny Furniture (2010) by a guy who is somehow insidiously nonchalant, then in Girls (2012-2017) wading in the tepid bathwater of shame, lingering in it till she shivered with cold.
Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997).
In many of these films, there’s a self-reflexive, almost meta quality to the narratives. The protagonists are seen lurching through life in search of meaning and acceptance, simulating, we assume, similar struggles to those of the real-life filmmaker. At the same time, the artists seem to view the act of filmmaking itself as a means of self-searching and self-definition, a process of translating their lived experiences into something with technical and emotional resonance. Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior (2014) explores a desperate and delusional Brooklynite going to great lengths to win her ex back, playing a woman so embarrassing even her family winces at her antics. Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman (1997) shows a young, aspiring filmmaker invalidated by the faux liberalism of racist academia, navigating a dead-end job, and enduring the cringe-inducing scrutiny of her interracial relationship. Joanna Arnow’s work, including her short film Bad at Dancing (2015), and her recent fiction feature debut The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023), put her deadpan persona front and center of all manners of sexual, social, and even familial debasement in the name of trying to understand where and how she fits into the various communities and relationships she sees as making the mundanity of her life worthwhile. A review in IndieWire by Ryan Lattanzio characteristically cites her “willingness to degrade herself on camera.”
This all seems counterintuitive if you want to establish yourself as an auteur worth investing in. This promise of a big future has unfortunately become the primary marker of a successful debut: not necessarily what has been accomplished but how quickly your larger and more expensive follow-up is announced. If that’s the case, why would a femme triple threat not position themselves as some kind of glamorous maneater, a very “strong and powerful” lady, or at least some pensive ingenue who the camera always seems to catch in the most soft and flattering lighting? We know that actors are not their characters, but the boundaries of identity become blurrier when the actor is writing the part for herself (and oftentimes there is a level of auto-fictitiousness to the plot). And unfortunately, I don’t think the world is ready for a woman triple threat who makes films about how amazing her onscreen personas are. I think, actually, that woman would receive a record-breaking number of death threats. But women still need to make movies, and they still need to be seen.
When I considered the emotional scaffolding of my character in Actual People, I knew that the foundation would be forged from embarrassment, exploring a character who was flailing and failing, self-absorbed while lacking self-awareness, wanting so openly and grotesquely that her desire felt like an infection other people didn’t want to catch. This was, perhaps paradoxically, the easiest way for me to get what I wanted for my career: a premiere, an audience, streaming, the next project. It had to be through the tactics of self-degradation.
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow, 2023).
I often received the question of why did I want to act in my own project, especially as an overstretched, struggling indie filmmaker on a dismal (or, in industry parlance, “micro”) budget? I have a lot of answers I give, about liking to act and the justification of my theater background, the scarcity of roles for racially ambiguous actors, et cetera. But if I’m considering the conception of femme triple threats as a whole, I wonder if my multi-part participation is a declaration of an artist’s complete and total competence. Not only can this woman write and direct, the triple-threat suggests, but she can carry a film with her presence.
This notion of self-sufficiency is crucial. If you are making your first film without the privilege of being a nepo baby or a pre-established industry darling via connections, previous jobs, or dating the right person at the right time, you are casting “no-name” actors (a phrase I believe should be banished from the casting glossary, but I know I have no sway). Without access to more established performers who oftentimes don’t want to take a chance on a first-time filmmaker, casting prospects can become quite bleak. The alternative to hiring known actors is a widespread process like an online casting call, which could attract upwards of hundreds of eager actors, most of whom are far from qualified for the available role. So, the filmmaker decides she’ll just do it herself. And the femme triple threat is born.
There is also some comfort in knowing that if the film is poorly received, as so many independent endeavors threaten to be at some stage of production, you’re not putting another young woman’s image in jeopardy. Onscreen nudity was and continues to be a serious consideration with my films. I thought, If I’m not willing to get naked for my own story, why should another actress? Especially for a young woman who is “unknown” as a performer, nudity in an indie film can feel exploitative, risqué for the sake of it, a film school formula to show some level of seriousness for the project (for example: black-and-white, grainy film + naked waifish woman = something French-looking and therefore “art”). But this sense of an auteur bearing all for her own project, emotionally or physically or both, has the impression of a riskier gamble. She’s putting herself, her dignity, on the line. At least if the gamble doesn’t pay off, she only has herself to pick back up.
Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham, 2010).
In a New Yorker article about two seminal pieces of vulnerable and all-bearing woman-made works, Girls and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010), Anna Holmes writes, “The passions provoked by the show—among both critics and admirers—suggest something both refreshing and a little startling: that a pop-culture product that focuses mostly on women and intimate, sometimes gruesome details of their lives, is still considered a provocation.”
The provocation comes from a general audience being shocked that they are meant to take the minutiae of a woman's worldview seriously because of the attention and seriousness the material is shown by the artist herself. Let’s say that a film or show chronicles female friendship on a microscopic level, we see how these characters interact, we become privy to their inside jokes, we understand their past even if we did not participate in it. Many mainstream films use female friendships as easy plot devices. Femme friends are side characters good for a few quips, blatant foils to the protagonist, or sexy foreshadowing to preempt the betrayal of a stolen fiancé. But that doesn’t have to be the case. If a filmmaker takes the time to make an audience understand the intricacies of a friendship, that this bond is as powerful and complex as romantic love, then whether that friendship survives or how this intimacy changes becomes crucial to the plot, energy, and point of the story. The artist is saying that the character's friendship, however trivial one could disregard it as, is not only important, but necessary, to making the film go forward. It’s being taken seriously, and therefore there are aesthetic, tonal, and technical considerations to be made. Maybe in the real world this “storyline” wouldn’t even be given the dignity of narrative, but on screen the minutiae of so many women’s lives (people’s lives!) gets its moment of glory.
There’s the argument that in a sexist landscape people don’t necessarily want women to succeed, so it’s easier for a woman to make work that debases herself before someone else can on their own terms. There is perhaps some truth to that, but there’s a big difference between self-flagellation that elicits pity and vulnerability in the name of self-empowerment. These films, which I believe succeed most magnificently when they make me cringe, squirm, die a little inside, and rebirth me into a more receptive and courageous thinker, are definitely not interested in pity. They demand to be on an equal playing field of empathy. The vision feels more sacred, like modern martyrdom. To put yourself so vulnerably on screen, and to do so knowing there is a high possibility of condemnation, is a sacrifice, but at least it’s one that the artist is in control of. Unfortunately, unfairly, maybe being a woman means having a body always on the precipice of some kind of sacrifice, and you can either accept it or let someone else take control of the ritual. The lore of legendary filmmaking is rife with horror stories of women who allowed a male director to take control of their body and psyche. They gave themselves up for a vision that was deemed greater than their individual suffering, but the films don’t necessarily honor this unnecessary loss. If a film actually necessitates a sacrifice from a woman, shouldn’t she make it for the sake of her own vision and ideals?
Appropriate Behavior (Desiree Akhavan, 2014).
To sacrifice something means that the thing given up has power and value. To degrade someone means that that person also holds in them the potential to be venerated. You don’t knock someone down unless there is the threat that they can destroy you. When humiliation is given the spotlight, it is deemed something worth filming and showing the world; even the smallest acts surpass trivialization—there is this uncompromising humanness that must be recognized, like someone has just been stripped bare in front of you and you mourn in real time that you have no covering to offer them. After all, can’t “humus,” earth, dirt, imply a person has been brought down to the most fundamental forms of existence? The film’s stakes, however small, become charged, brutal, meaningful, and you’re a part of them. You understand them. Perhaps without the audience ever fully realizing it, the woman on screen who they thought was so pathetic and unruly has gained full control of the viewer's attention and empathy. And maybe even respect.
In 2022 Elaine May, already long considered a legend, received an honorary Oscar. Akhavan went on to win Sundance. Issa Rae recently won the Trailblazers Peabody Award. There are countless other successes from these artists that once bared all and asked for nothing but someone to watch them in return. They are more than respected, they’re revered, lauded, canon. They let their onscreen personas have the most awkward sex, cry over bad decisions, suffer, fail at the easiest things, get taken advantage of, have their hearts broken by the wrong people, and a thousand more humiliations. And we took them seriously too.
At the same time, May hadn’t been able to make a movie since 1987 because she was continuously stifled by the patriarchal bureaucracy of the studio system. The gender disparity in Hollywood is still abysmal. Among the dozens of successful women auteurs I admire, some of whom I have the privilege of knowing personally, I know the struggle for funding, validity, and respect can be as difficult as when they first started out. As I attempt to get my third film off the ground, the prospect of acting in my own project feels not only like a financial hindrance, but potentially spiritually draining; I wonder if there would be anything left of me once I call the final “cut.” After all, sacrificing yourself over and over again is fucking exhausting.