The Center for Advanced Media Studies; the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Political Science Department collaborated to host “Politics, Family and Precarity Cinema in Winter’s Bone” in Mergenthaler Hall on Friday.
Dr. Robert Watkins, Assistant Professor of Humanities, History and Social Sciences at Columbia College in Chicago, gave a lecture based on his latest book, Freedom and Vengeance on Film: Precarious Lives and the Politics of Subjectivity.
Watkins presented his observations on the human tendency to negotiate the conditions of family in order to feel a sense of belonging. He used Winter’s Bone, a 2010 film directed by Debra Granik, for which Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award, as the platform from which to explain his theory.
“Subjects who seek freedom and vengeance must always negotiate contexts and relations not of their choosing and not fully under their control,” Watkins said early in his talk.
“Family is a valuable lens through which to view these issues, for family is often a locus for freedom and vengeance, as individuals struggle to free themselves either from or with family and as they most often seek vengeance in response to familial loss.”
The movie’s protagonist, played by Lawrence, is Ree Dolly, the child of a methamphetamine-dealing father and a psychotic mother. She is left to take care of her two younger siblings in the Ozarks of Southern Missouri.
Watkins explained Ree’s quest for family and her negotiations therein.
“Ree’s journey on an affective level functions as a series of hopeful, if increasingly circumspect interviews with prospective families: her immediate family, her extended family, what you might call her clan — the Dollys — and the U.S. army,” Watkins said.
Watkins also referenced the film’s artistic elements as motifs that trace Ree’s family situation. He described the tone of the light in different settings of the movie and paired his explanation with screenshots of relevant scenes in the film.
“Though the film is not presented in black and white for the greatest part — though there is one impressionistic dream sequence in black and white — one might be forgiven for having the impression that it was,” Watkins said. “Throughout her quest, whether she is walking or driving from encounter to encounter, Ree travels the rural highways and byways through the nakedly gray trees and under overcast skies. Even when the film goes indoors, scenes are set in spaces lit with severely white fluorescent lighting.”
The only exceptions to the overcast tones are in scenes where Ree feels a sense of safety.
“In these settings, including Ree’s own home and the home where she visits an old girlfriend of her father, the look of things is sharply different, bathed in golden light as if there were crackling hearth,” Watkins said. “The warmth and togetherness — sometimes more aspiration than reality — in these spaces visibly contrasts with the cold lonesomeness of the many other spaces where Ree searches for her father with little help.”
According to Watkins, the film culminates in Ree’s acceptance of her siblings as her true family. After searching for a home dependent on adults or higher institutions, the protagonist decides that her home is with those who depend on her.
“Ree authentically chooses to stay, to take up the burden of family and even affirm it. She chooses her inheritance, both literally with the homestead and timber acres and symbolically with her declaration of dependence,” Watkins said. “Ree has every reason to resent the situation her parents have put her in, the responsibilities they have abandoned, and to reject this inheritance. Instead she has taken the burden, made it her own, and occupied the role of caretaker with real diligence and affection.”
Associate Professor of Political Science Samuel Chambers organized the talk, along with the two other co-sponsoring departments.
“The Department of Political Science retains a number of strong and important ties to other departments and programs, so interdisciplinarity is very much a part of our approach to the study of politics. And the group of us in my own field of political theory are very committed to interdisciplinary work,” Chambers wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
These intersections between departments and topics also influence Chambers’s individual work. He recently published The Queer Politics of Television, which connects political theory and media studies through the lens of sexuality.
“My own writings in political theory have been closely linked with gender and sexuality studies, on the one hand, and with film and television studies, on the other,” Chambers wrote.
Given the interconnected nature of the three Hopkins departments and similar characteristics in Watkins’s work, the co-sponsorship seemed natural to Chambers.
“His work operates at the interface between cinema studies and political theory, so it was natural to tie his visit in with [the Center for Advanced Media Studies]. And much of contemporary political theory (Watkins’s field too) is linked up with current work in gender and queer theory,” Chambers wrote.
“It thus made good sense to connect to [the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality] as well... I thought it was an exemplary illustration of so many of the best elements of strong interdisciplinary work.”
Chambers was pleased with the outcome of the program.
“We enjoyed a very vibrant discussion, with some great substantive exchange about so many important topics in the world today. Indeed, that’s the sort of interactive engagement between scholars of different backgrounds and specialties that can really only emerge in a truly interdisciplinary setting,” Chambers wrote.
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