- Deconnick/De Landro/Image
- BITCH PLANET:Spot the exploitation tropes, then watch DeConnick et. al subvert them.
Exploiting exploitation? With words by Kelly Sue DeConnick and art by Valentine De Landro, Bitch Planet is my new favorite comic—I wrote about DeConnick and Bitch Planet‘s first issue in this week’s paper. What’s especially interesting about Bitch Planet is its origin. DeConnick wanted to revisit classic women-in-prison exploitation stories, to see if it’s possible to repurpose their elements in without taking on their exploitative qualities:
Women-in-prison movies—a subgenre of a genre literally named for objectification—may seem like odd subject matter for a feminist reboot. The prison films DeConnick and I discussed are typically low-budget messes that deal heavily in gratuitous nudity, gore, and murderous women being variously degraded and abused by captors. In other words, a very unhinged male gaze, on hallucinogens. Still, these films have been influential for many giants of pop culture, like Quentin Tarantino (DeConnick and Tarantino have Lady Snowblood in common; it was reportedly a model for Kill Bill), and Lady Gaga, whose “Telephone” video slapped a Thelma and Louise-like rescue fantasy (courtesy of Beyoncé) onto a collection of prison film tropes.
What sets Bitch Planet apart from these and so many other pop cultural responses to exploitation, however, is how risky it’s willing to be. It isn’t merely broad parody or unexamined homage. Instead, DeConnick and De Landro repurpose elements of exploitation as a means of pointing out what’s wrong with it, which is quite a lot. When DeConnick revisited some of the films she’d enjoyed when she was younger, she found that they didn’t hold up at all. “They are far more transgressive than progressive,” she says. “I remember them as being empowering and they’re really not. [They] put the viewer in the place of the abuser.”
Here’s that Lady Gaga video, which is a pretty good primer on the prison tropes you’ll see subverted in Bitch Planet. It has the added benefit of not being a true women-in-prison exploitation film, plus Beyoncé:
What I love about this project is that in a way, DeConnick, with a feminist aim in mind, is attempting to recuperate stories that historically have had antifeminist recuperation arcs themselves. It’s like she’s recuperating the recuperation, which is crazy and very interesting and maybe a little too meta if you think about it too hard.
“First” Thursday: Speaking of thinking too hard, that’s what the Portland Art Dealers’ Association didn’t want you to have to do. So instead of holding First Thursday on January 1, they went ahead and rescheduled for tonight. A.L. Adams has a roundup of what you can see, should you venture out, including Victoria Haven’s woodblock prints, “modern interpretations of religious icons” at Duplex, and lightsabers (sort of).