Girl Reel

by Bonnie J. Morris

What do Susan Sarandon, Barbara Hershey, Meryl Streep, Bette Midler, and Cher have in common?All have portrayed lesbian characters on the silver screen. Although cinema and television in the last three decades of the twentieth century have been a wasteland for women in general and lesbians in particular looking for strong images of themselves, Bonnie Morris gives readers a front row seat on a life growing up and coming out at the movies. Morris writes, This is a collection of movie stories-by which I mean recollections of events, images, turning points generated by specific moviegoing experiences, and specific movies and the book is built around the catalyst of going to a movie as a chunk of formative girl identity. Girl Reel is a raucous, rollicking, sometimes acerbic look at the powerful influence the entertainment industry has on our community, family, and social lives.

A must-have for all film buffs, Girl Reel is a book about our relationship to popular culture-how media images both preview and rerun our own lives. By surveying images of women and lesbians in television and film over the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and chronicling the move of lesbian and gay issues from the margins to the mainstream, Morris offers her own images of strong women, for a new generation of readers / viewers.

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2000

About the author

Bonnie J. Morris grew up in Los Angeles and North Carolina. She earned a B.A. in Jewish history from American University, the first student there to minor in women’s studies. She completed her Ph.D. in women’s history at Binghamton University in New York in 1989.

Dr. Morris taught at both George Washington University and Georgetown for almost 25 years, becoming professor emeritus and Professor of the Year at GWU and Vicennial Medalist at Georgetown. In 2017 she joined the history faculty at the University of California-Berkeley, earning a nomination for its Excellence in Teaching Prize.

She is the author of 16 books, including three Lambda Literary Finalists, two national first-prize chapbooks, and the critical feminist texts Women’s History for Beginners, The Disappearing L, and The Feminist Revolution. She may be found lecturing on C-Span, Olivia Cruises, Semester at Sea, the National Women’s Music Festival, and on Pacifica Radio KPFK.

Reviews

[kavya · Rating 2 out of 5]

"We have long been a media nation in the making, and since the era of talking pictures a substantial percentage of our population has used moviegoing for emotional expression,rather than keeping a journal or—heaven forbid—crying and talking with a loved one in the privacy of bed.

Desperate for emotional outlets, we go to the movies as an excuse to hold hands, to weep copiously, to feel a vicarious and “safe” ethnic experience, to be sexually aroused, to grieve. We go to get out of the house when family members are fighting, or we go because we like to eat popcorn and Jordan Almonds in the dark. We go to have a broad spectrum of feelings flashing in front of us in a vertical therapy session, while we, knees up and bodies open as though to receive lovemaking, are the passive horizontal. Popcorn box between our knees, we dip our hands repeatedly between our own legs, the act of recreational feeding a mimicry of self-loving, self-stimulation. Surrounded by complete strangers, we can snicker, gasp, and sob, knowing that our personal reactions to carefully budgeted stimuli will never be a matter of public record because no one is watching us. In this group experience, this audience experience, there is safety for emotional display. The actual film is almost irrelevant."

"In all my biking through town, and all the quarters of my allowance, and all my matinee afternoons in the theaters of Durham, I never found a movie about two girls who loved each other. It was not until many years later that I realized I had really spent my allowance searching for that one thing."

"I could prepare myself for disaster; protect myself from loss. But there was no way I could protect my friends from what might happen to them in the normal course of summertime dating and sexual intitiation. Every guy who read Benchley's book [Jaws] would read and believe that normal women longed for rape. My friends were far more likely to be attacked by the guys they met than by sharks. And I wondered why no one ever made a disaster movie about that."

"As a teenager I was flabbergasted to confirm that historically, Lillian Hellman did not take issue with being called a lesbian, but with being taunted by a rapist. And no one would learn this unless they read the original short story in Pentimento. How many other screenplays twisted the authentic stance of women, as lovers, as heroines, as writers? I was so angry that I risked taking my father to see Julia, although I was years away from coming out to him. I wanted him to bear witness to the moviegoing experience, to see if he, too, cheered when Jane Fonda slapped John Glover's face, just so I could challenge his reactions."

"Here my lesbian cousin Shannon (not out herself, then, either) had taken me to see My Brilliant Career, a film about a real-life Australian lesbian writer (whose sexual orientation was never mentioned in the film)."

"All over the theater, Jewish women were laughing, crying, eating, moaning, and transmitting an almost audible radio frequency of what might be called cultural arousal, for this was the moment we had all waited for through years of renting Barbra Streisand movies: Barbra, who during her 1972 concert at the Forum declared she would never have her nose "fixed." Here was the chutzpadik girlchik herself in a story blending the highest of scholarly ambitions with lust and desire, embodying my own personal credo that good brainy talk is indeed arousing, and that study partners do become passionately attracted."

"All of us were united in our hunger, our almost physical ache for moving images that truly reflected our lives. These were the very last years before lesbian feature films became a reality in America, before Desert Hearts, Go Fish, Bar Girls, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love; before Vito Russo's critically acclaimed book and video The Celluloid Closet. There were exactly three lesbian movies that we knew of (and watched critically, over and over): Personal Best, which ends with one young lesbian leaving her partner for a man; Lianna, which ends with a newly out woman being dumped and forced to rely on her homophobic friend; and The Hunger, which ends with one lesbian vampire destroying another."

"I still ask myself how I ended up in two movies in one year. I just happened to pick up the paper the day they ran the cattle call for Contact. Some impulse moved my hand. That's the mystical aspect of all of this. With Out of Season, the facts are plain: I've stayed in touch with every cool friend that I have, and the old girl network lives. Loyalty and love will get you there. But for the new generation of independent women dire-tors, especially lesbian directors, the old girl network is going to make all the difference in the world. And here, in the brand new century, we are finally starting to see our lives on-screen."

Movie list:
My Brilliant Career (1979)
Baby blue marine (1976)
The rose (1979)
Yentl (1983)
personal best (1982)
lianna (1983)
the hunger (1983)
the girl most likely to (1973)
desert hearts (1983)
go fish (1994)
bar girls (1994)
the incredibly true adventures of two girls in love (1995)
Out of Season (1998 film) directed by Jeanette L. Buck

[Neelybat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is both a coming of age story, and a series of lovely, funny and insightful movie reviews. Not to mention all of the tidbits of lesbian history thrown in.

[Frances · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memoirs of a Jewish lesbian growing up, told through experiences involving movies. I enjoyed it, though I'm sure it would have been more interesting if I were of the same generation and had seen the same movies. Occasionally self-indulgent, but well written.