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Author:
Grace McKeaney
Writer, producer of plays, television, cable movies etc. and receipient of all sorts of acknowledgements, but most significantly, she is the mother of two beloved daughters, Kate Deirdre and Hannah Guinevere.
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Grace McKeaney is a graduate of Northwestern University and attended the Yale School Of Drama for an MFA in playwriting. A recipient of Le Conte Du Nuoy Prize for contribution to the American Theater, she is the author of ten nationally produced plays and has developed new works at both the Eugene O’Neill Conference and the Sundance Institute. A veteran of television, she has written and produced shows (for all networks and many cables) as varied as “Roseanne”, “St Elsewhere”, “The Client”, “The Hoop Life” and “The Education Of Max Bickford”. She has written movies for Lifetime, Wonderful World Of Disney and Hallmark Hall Of Fame, including “Grace and Glorie” with Gena Rowlands and Diane Lane, (winner of a Christopher Award). Grace has taught creative writing at all levels, initiating the WORD PLAY program at Baltimore’s Center Stage which took professional writers into Maryland public schools. She is the author of two (as yet) unproduced screenplays. Most significant, she is the mother of two beloved daughters, Kate Deirdre and Hannah Guinevere.
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A TALE OF TWO VAGINAS
What follows is a sort of compare and contrast between two fundamentally “vagina-centered” enterprises currently appearing in popular media.
In the first instance a guy has made a film he suggests makes a statement which empowers women.
In the second instance a guy has ACTUALLY made a television pilot/series which empowers women.
I think putting these two works side by side and staring them in the glory hole is kind of instructive. But I’m funny that way.
I like seeing beyond the hype.
In the first instance, we have TEETH, the story of a teenage vagina with incisors currently in theaters masquerading as comedy legitimized-by-ancient-female-oriented-myth.
TEETH was written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein (as reported to me by the Los Angeles Times on January 19), the son of Roy Lichtenstein (as if pedigree in this instance saves.)
Mr. Lichtenstein is quoted as saying he wanted, in TEETH, to make “a fun movie about a girl who has to deal with anatomical uniqueness like a superhero, learn to use it to protect herself and discover she’s a sexual being at the same time.”
So, THAT’S HOW rotten movies get pitched to and made by studios and then lobbed like gobs of grizzle before unsuspecting teens!
Reported by way of added pedigree is the fact that Mr. Lichtenstein went to the Yale School of Drama and I must accept that in creating this story of a chomping teenage vagina he believes he has tilled New Ground defying categorization by utilizing what the article describes as “... baroque
horror, teen romance and black comedy.”
Well, I went to the Yale School Of Drama and I like black comedy/horror very, very much. But Carrie this ain't. I’m gonna say simply: this movie is not fun by a bloody mile.
In fact, it makes you wish you could climb back inside the safety of your own mother’s womb and not know how deeply dreary cinema on this planet can some days be.
Chalk up one more needless descent into a pornography of violent images calling itself “fun” for the young.
See, it’s one thing to make a bad teen horror movie and get away with it.
It’s quite another to do so under a kind of banner of empowering young women by indenturing their vaginas to the deeply unhappy business of serrating penises from horny young boys.
Help me here.
As a woman am I REALLY supposed to feel empowered and satirically delighted by listening to AN audience of young men and women tittering nervously at half-cocks graphically spurting blood on screen?
And even if a myth exists in ancient cultures regarding a certain "Toothed Vagina" phenomenon, myths aren’t very interesting when literalized in dim ways.
Myths which are literalized without insight become mercilessly cold, almost institutional... and we all know that institutions can be dark and dangerous places obscuring the art of thinking clear thoughts.
If the goal and function of the ancient non-literalized, non-concretized myth served primitive man to dispel and even heal fear, what are we doing here concretizing it to CREATE AND DISSEMINATE MORE FEAR?
We’re doing something here, but I think it’s more like selling tickets to the unwitting than creating a fun, empowered, mythic female super-hero.
What we got here is failure to understand the function of myth -- why a symbol is a symbol and not a fact -- coupled with a failure to make a truly biting satire (which to qualify, I think we can agree, need be both perceptive and witty. Neither adjective can be applied to TEETH.)
Anyone interested in the power of myth will be served by reading any chapter ever written by Joseph Campbell instead of seeing this unsavory, misguided nonsense.
Let's recap: Mitchell Lichtenstein indicates in the Times that he thinks there’s fun in “a girl who has to deal with anatomical uniqueness like a superhero, learn to use it to protect herself and discover she’s a sexual being at the same time.”
Wanna REALLY do something fun with anatomical uniqueness and burgeoning sexuality in women?
Carson Kressley (of “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy”) has found a splendid way.
Which brings us to our second example, HOW TO LOOK GOOD NAKED, a new show on Lifetime which succeeds brilliantly, is so breathtakingly simple, so genuinely female-empowering, one wishes it could be made in tablet-form and placed in the water supply.
Mr. Kressley wants to help women of all shapes and ages feel good about how they look naked. How positively mythic of him!
You mean it’s okay (possibly even desirable) for a woman to look like a fertility goddess and not a Barbie doll?
Kressley’s take on female empowerment is genuinely mythic in scope... as borne out by representations celebrating female forms of all proportions throughout the cultures of antiquity.
HOW TO LOOK GOOD NAKED borrows the power of the ancient goddess figures to create a contemporary myth for women both life-affirming and good humored.
Watching Kressley’s show is time well-spent for women and the species in general, since the truth and multiplicity of the female form is celebrated in a sincerely human way.
What’s at work between the legs of the penis chomping teen heroine in TEETH is something altogether different: an energy intent on murdering a living organ for fun -- at ten bucks a pop.
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