toy story

by lori waxman

I was in a toy store the other day. With customers behaving like the Neanderthals that consumerism turns us all into (hoarding, shoving and drooling), the items on the shelves stood out in stark contrast. In row upon row of colorful display boxes were lessons in how to be a contemporary boy or girl, and how to grow up into the accepted adult version of either gender.

Wouldn't it make life a little easier if we were taught early on, as impressionable children, to come to terms with such necessary evils as weaponry and kitchen appliances? What better way to accomplish this than through toys? Growing up playing with something regularly, it becomes a naturalized part of daily life. After a childhood spent imitating the motions of driving in a plastic Hasbro buggy (pink for girls, red for boys), owning and using a real car becomes something to look forward to expectantly. Play with Barbie for long enough, and having a body like hers becomes something to look in the mirror for every day.

Barbie, despite her recent makeover as a multi-racial career woman, is still built with proportions that would make it physically impossible for her to stand up, breath or bear children, were she a real, live woman. In response, Polish artist Zbiegnew Libera has built Ken's Aunt (1995), one in a set of forty modified Barbies, each of whom comes complete in a believable box.

At first glance, Ken's Aunt looks not unlike the African-American version of the Barbie doll. Look again. Here are large, chunky hips, sitting below a thickish waist which supports a pair of pendulous, maternal breasts, all of which are encased in a lacy, white, full-body girdle, the kind that make adolescents shudder with embarrassment and horror when they catch mom wearing one. This is a good approximation of what most of my aunts (and most of the women in the locker room at the YMCA) really do look like when half-dressed. Barbie, with her smoothed-out, hairless pudenda, modest, perky breasts and death-defying body, has never looked this life-like -- nor this frightening. Frightening, because that is the inevitable conclusion to which dolls like Barbie lead: a realistic, adult female body must be so potentially horrifying to children that it needs to be toned down and smoothed out lest a child die from terror.

One of the elements that contributes to this potentially frightening aspect of the female body is its sexual nature. The de-sexualized body is never a threatening body; it doesn't change, doesn't desire or incite desire, isn't caught up in the cycle of life with all of its mysteries and births and deaths. With all of these confusing and important ideas tied up in sexuality, it's no wonder that toy manufacturers have thrown any and all references to sexuality out the drawing room window. Artist Kirsi Mikkola reinserts them by creating installations where characters from the Scandinavian folktales of her childhood morph into vulgar little creatures who do wicked, wicked things.

Here are the characters: Glo is the innocent one, the pretty little girl who looks like she could do no wrong, at least not deliberately. Quickie is one of Glo's playmates (the other kind of playmate). Naked and buxom, with big tits and an ass that she likes to stick out, her hair resembles a mass of fecal matter and her distorted facial features suggest genitalia. Pansy is a giant, evil, phallic flower with droopy yellow petals. No. 1 is a paunchy, beer-bellied slob of a bald guy who ends up the butt of everyone else's jokes. Sicker than usual specs for characters who populate the world of children's tales.

Stories for kids usually end with a moral that cautions them to be good and do good, to never steal or lie or cheat, or wander off into the woods alone. Hansel and Gretel's tormentor meets her well-deserved fate in an oven, and the good Cinderella marries the prince. No such clear-cut moral scenarios are enacted by Glo, Quickie, Pansy and No. 1. If anything, their's is a world of immorality, where the Ugly Duckling would have grown up to be a big, fat, and even uglier duck.

In Mikkola's fantasy world, none of the nasty facts of the adult world are kept under wraps, and cruelty plays a constant role. The war between the sexes is fought from a guerrilla feminist position when No. 1 lies prostrate under the naked Quickie's poking, prodding cello bow. She has control, just as Glo does when she beheads Pansy, littering the area surrounding the flower bed with castrated Pansy heads. When she's not clipping evil blooms or squashing No. 1s with a rolling pin, Glo spends her time imitating Quickie's obscene postures, in all of their female sex-object glory. Glo's mimicry is just that, of course, and Quickie comes off looking like a bestial piece of ass. Just like little girls dressing up in mom's clothes, if mom were a street walker.

If none of these elements are usually found in acceptable children's toys and tales, Mikkola does retain one tradition of the genre: death is only playing. Just like in Saturday morning cartoons and cops and robbers, no one has to pay the consequences for their actions. No matter how many times Glo murders No. 1 and cuts off Pansy's heads, they both comes back to life in the next scene. Mikkola mocks this standard ploy of kids' stories, meshing it with nasty tales from real life. The fantasy of childhood keeps ticking, even when everything turns grisly.

Not only are all of the ghastly elements Mikkola invokes part of the real adult world, they're also part of the world that children inhabit, despite their parents' idealized recollections. Children bully kids, torture small animals, pull the legs off insects, break their friends' toys, throw tantrums and just generally behave like little monsters. In reinserting such less than idyllic tendencies, Mikkola does much to smash dearly-held romantic notions of childhood. Kids aren't temples of innocence; they never were and they never will be. Mikkola makes a strong case for putting an end to treating them as if they were.

If Glo and Quickie provide contorted ideas of the female and the female body, the typical kewpie doll does much the same, if less deliberately. Shonagh Adelman's 1996 series Badseed dissects a number of these dolls in a way that unmasks their effects on girl-children's (and consequently women's) body image and behavior.

On canvases two times the size of a human head, Adelman has painted carefully cropped replicas of the original head of a kewpie doll which hangs limply underneath. It's that old Cartesian duality: body vs. mind. In the case of Adelman's Badseeds, the mind seems to win out, though how much intelligence can be read into a kewpie's brain matter is debatable. Those wide-open, empty eyes; the tiny, dumbly raised eyebrows; that puckered, pouting, bottle-sucking mouth. And the skin, oh the skin, shiny, peachy, plasticky, and so so smooth and unreal, almost androidal. How can any girl possibly live up to the standards of the dolls with which she plays?

Each face in the series was painted from an actual doll manufactured between 1930 and 1977. Arranged chronologically, the dolls form a genealogical tree whose lineage is a disturbing one, a visual catalog of the requirements placed on the female form throughout the twentieth century. Badseeds doesn't provide an alternative to these cultural normalizers, but in its presentation of so many different forms of normality, depending on the yearly fashion, the work highlights the myth-making status that these dolls are too rarely recognized as having.

If violence lurks in the headless dolls' bodies, it only recalls the torture little girls often inflict on their dolls. Violence, however, is an issue that few girls' toys ever acknowledge overtly, though toy stores are chock-full of plastic weaponry for boys. While I'm not an advocate of any toy that makes a game of war and killing, I do take issue with the gendering that such boy-specific marketing advocates. Adelman's headless dolls give some space to violence in the little girl world, and not to a violence necessarily associated with warmaking, but rather with daily life: cutting off a fish head or amputating a limb. We all inflict some violence here or there. I used to stick staples in my Barbie's ears, and pulled off her limbs to see what has inside. Adelman has simply chosen to address this fact rather than hide it.

If there is to be moral to this story, and there should be a moral to all stories told about children (especially those that are looking to get published), perhaps it is that we need to rethink the notion of childhood as a pseudo-sacred space where plastic uzis and newborns are acceptable -- but not the death and stretch marks to which they lead. But then, how might a real kid respond to such a toy? If I took my niece to a Zbiegnew Libera exhibition, would she want to take Ken's Aunt home with her? More to the point of our consumerist reality, would anyone shopping at Toys R Us actually buy one for their child?

benz film

by pam bagdzinski

Fresh off a trip to Berlin, Ben Berkowitz and Ben Redgrave stroll into Earwax for coffee and an interview. These are "the Bens," the two men that started Benzfilm, a film production group, two years ago. Berkowitz, 27, is the loud and admittedly obnoxious Ben. He is a self-proclaimed egoist with a wicked sense of humor. But there is a sincerity and seriousness about him that occasionally pushes through the bravura. Redgrave, 25, is his complement. Quiet, subtle and more reserved, he provides astute observations and occasional one liners, all the while sighing and wincing through Berkowitz's orations.

The thing about this unlikely duo is that they co-wrote and co-starred in-pretty much co-everythinged-their first film, Straightman. They went on to win a post-production grant from the Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF) last summer, and completed the film this past February. Straightman was shown for the first time to the European Film Market at the Berlinale a few weeks ago, and the film makes its public "world premiere" in the LA Independent Film Festival this April. Yet, despite all this film industry hobnobbing, the Bens' roots are in Chicago, more specifically at SAIC. Berkowitz graduated in 1998; Redgrave is still finishing up his last few credits. So how did two guys from the Art Institute go on to make a film that's generating attention in the independent film circuit?

"We didn't start off to make a film," says Berkowitz. The impetus for Straightman was not for these two guys to see their names on a film, it was about two people working together to develop an idea. It all started with an idea of Berkowitz's, scrawled on a napkin several years ago. The story, called Straightman, would be about two brothers with a vaudevillian comedy routine; only the straight man would be the joke-man, and the gay man would be the straight-man. But Berkowitz realized it really was a "dumb idea." The real content of the film would come later, after having met Redgrave.

In the fall of 1997, Ben and Ben both enrolled in an SAIC acting class taught by Tom Jaremba. That was their first meeting. I was there as well, and had the pleasure of seeing the two of them rehearse and perform Edward Albee's two-man show The Zoo Story a multitude of times throughout the semester. Each time their dedication to the piece showed as their performance differed. Each time you could see them getting to know one another as friends and actors, a factor that improved their performance.

"After doing Zoo Story, I thought Ben was a good actor," says Berkowitz. And he thought an independent study with Jaremba would be an easy way to "not go to class." So he pitched an acting project idea to Redgrave, and not only did Redgrave accept, he also wanted to be a full partner in the venture--even though that venture remained, as of yet, unnamed. Berkowitz recalls, "I thought he was stupid to want to do half the work." And so the partnership began.

The Bens started doing video interviews of each other. They told stories about their lives, both fiction and fact, and the characters for Straightman began to develop. Berkowitz became David, a womanizing glutton, and Redgrave became Jack, a blue-collar guy struggling with his sexual identity. Friends began inventing other characters, and the Bens realized they were on to something. The story of Straightman was becoming more cohesive. Berkowitz began drawing on some real life experience; part of the final story is autobiographical. A close friend and roommate came out to him a few years ago. Remembering how he dealt with that experience helped the story evolve. The focus then became the dynamics of the friendship between Jack and David. As friends and roommates, Jack and David each clearly have their own separate lives from the other, yet they have very similar problems with the elusiveness of romance. Each is trying to come to terms with their own identity, Jack dealing with it more successfully than David.

"We started to realize it could be a really cool script, but we had no idea what to do," says Berkowitz. So after the semester ended, both returned to their homes for the summer, and showed the tapes to some family, friends, and friends of friends. When they got back midway through the summer, they had about $11,000 with which to start buying film, getting a cameraman, and arranging for shot locations.

"Every week we ran out of money," says Berkowitz. Funding for the film was the constant problem, but by getting people to invest or lend them money, or by cutting deals of some sort here and there, the Bens were able to keep Straightman afloat. Once they were finished shooting, it then took several months to get the money to pay for the lab processing. They still have debts and bills of all kinds that need to be paid off, but the film is completed and is beginning to get attention from people in the film industry.

"I thought the biggest hump would be getting noticed," says Berkowitz. But attention hasn't really been their problem. Since getting the CUFF grant last fall, they've shown clips of the film at various festivals, receiving critical praise and making connections of all sorts. Berkowitz says that of the 2,000 or so independent films in the country right now, there are a few hundred that industry people know about--and Straightman is one of them. Of that few hundred, maybe ten will get picked up for wide-scale distribution.

While Straightman has garnered attention, it hasn't garnered offers of distribution, and that's something the Bens aren't that concerned about. "We didn't make this film to sell to Miramax and make a lot of money," says Berkowitz. And even selling it to a company like Miramax wouldn't guarantee its reaching a wide-scale audience. More often than not, films are bought up by these companies and then never released. So the Bens are looking into alternative means for distribution.

"We just want as many people as possible to see this film. It's a challenging film. We're proud of it," stresses Berkowitz. Challenging, Berkowitz says, "because the characters in the film go against 'type' of what a gay man is supposed to be or is thought of in the media... The film is a really honest portrayal of sexuality." Redgrave adds, "You don't see queer characters striving for a monogamous relationship [in films]--they're always promiscuous and catty." With Straightman, the Bens are challenging some of those stereotypes in an attempt to present the story of two young men attempting to figure out who they are. Beyond these aspects, the Bens admit that the overt sexual content of the film has garnered them some criticism.

The style of the film has also proved challenging to viewers. It is "decidedly low budget," according to the Bens. "We set out to make a film for $50,000. And we did," says Berkowitz, "but you can't make a feature film for that [and expect distribution.]" In this day and age, it is possible to make a film cheaply, with all the computers and digital equipment available. But the end product will look a certain way. "I hesitate to use the words gritty or raw," says Berkowitz, but a friend of theirs said the film "has dirt under its fingernails." While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it is, however, against the grain of what Hollywood seems to be looking for in independent films today.

When asked about their time at SAIC, Berkowitz notes, "We would never have met or worked together without Tom [Jaremba]." He also notes that performance instructor Werner Herterich--who has a small, but integral, role in the film--was extremely important to them. Redgrave adds that, having spent much time in SAIC's film department, he received a lot of support and encouragement from both the school's faculty and curriculum. The department to him is "much more abstract...dealing with theory. [There's] a huge aesthetic bias, it's more visually expressive than narrative." But with a good mix of classes--from do-it-yourself image making, to screenwriting, to technical information--his general knowledge of filmmaking was significantly broadened. The Film Center provided a big resource for them in terms of film exposure. "It's a venue that plays films from all over, that you wouldn't normally get to see."

While in school, Berkowitz comments, "I didn't feel like I was doing anything worth taking beyond the walls of the school." And while having a certain degree of self-criticism is a good thing, Berkowitz realizes it can also hinder one's experience. "I wish I'd learned the film fest circuit earlier...[people] should explore these things. There's nothing worse than only showing within school." And learning the ropes of film fests early on, he feels, would have helped the Bens with Straightman now.

As for the attention the Bens have been receiving for Straightman, Berkowitz admits it's weird. "I haven't really received much encouragement from anyone [over the years]. I'm more comfortable [being] the obnoxious one who's stared at. So it's weird to get compliments. It's odd to me, and that's not false modesty."

Redgrave interjects, "The world has finally caught up," implying the world has discovered their true genius. And this is all Berkowitz needs. "Ben and I deserve everything we've got. We worked hard for it." He is unashamed and smiling all the way. "It's dangerous to encourage me," Berkowitz laughs. "This is the closest I've ever gotten to being popular. Now people have to wince and pretend to like me." I turn to Redgrave and guess he's heard this before. He knows his friend and loves him for it, no matter how many times he has to sigh and cover his face with his hands, wincing.