My mom told me that once, when I was a toddler, a stranger advised her to sign me up for modelling. My green eyes, medium-light skin, and curly dark brown hair gave me a certain look, they said, which was super in. My mom said no, despite the fact that mixed-race girls like myself were in demand.

Kimora Lee Simmons, who is Black and Asian, began modelling for Chanel when she was just 14 years old. It was the late 1980s, and soon, she was being mentored by Karl Lagerfeld, reportedly the first designer to put a mixed-race model on the Paris runway. Ten years later, she launched her own clothing brand, Baby Phat. It was an instant hit: people weren’t just obsessed with the clothes, but with Simmons herself wearing them down the runway.

By the early 2000s, when my toddler modelling career was put indefinitely on hold, being mixed-race in the industry was applauded: assuming, of course, that you were the right type of mix. Which is to say that your skin could be modified to suit whatever was most marketable at the moment. At the epicentre of this movement was America’s Next Top Model (ANTM), which Simmons would later be featured on as a judge. By the show’s second cycle, contestant April Wilkner’s half-Japanese, half-white race was regularly discussed. It wasn’t the only time race became a point of fashion on the show. The appearance of changing race through makeup and outfits was a challenge in cycle four.

Naima Mora, a mixed model whose background includes Black, Mexican, Native American and Irish, had her skin lightened with makeup and was posed alongside a blonde, blue-eyed toddler. Mora ultimately won the season. Her look echoed the sentiment across the modelling industry and Hollywood in general: it was the latest trend to be able to look at someone and not be able to tell where they were from.

In 2004, the Guardian dubbed this phenomenon Generation EA— ethnically ambiguous. “The fact that you can’t be sure who they are is part of their seductiveness,” casting agent Melanie Ross said in the article. What was attractive or “exotic” about my mom, a white woman from Ontario, or my dad, a Black man from New York, wasn’t something that I would fully grasp until I was a teenager. I didn’t want to be considered exotic or alluring or sexy as a mixed-race child. I wanted to see a family like mine on TV.

In elementary school, I was the only mixed kid. It was isolating: some kids made fun of my curly hair, others accused me of being adopted. Complete strangers would ask “What are you?” without even asking my name. Later, though, it seemed super common. In high school, there were at least three of us in just the school band. By the time I moved to Toronto for university, I had met tons of people who came from mixed backgrounds like mine.

Despite this, and despite growing up seeing that my identity was trendy in modelling, Hollywood tells a different story. The only time I saw a mixed family on TV actually exploring their identity was in a cartoon called American Dragon: Jake Long, and as much as I loved seeing the misadventures of a boy who was half dragon on his mom’s Chinese side, it wasn’t the same. It’s not that there aren’t mixed people on TV or in movies: Mariah Carey, Rashida Jones, Zendaya, Halle Berry, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Keanu Reeves are all examples. They also all have one thing in common: they have lighter complexions, allowing them to weave through roles easier than darker- skinned Black actors.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Viola Davis spoke candidly about not only missing out on jobs because of her darker skin tone, but also how easy it is to get cast in stereotypical roles. “If I wanted to play a mother whose family lives in a low-income neighbourhood and my son was a gang member who died in a drive-by shooting, I could get that made,” she said in the interview. “Let’s be honest. If I had my same features and I were five shades lighter, it would just be a little bit different.”

Colourism—the specific way that skin tone plays into prejudice and discrimination—is perpetuated by the global beauty industry. It acts within the realm of systemic racism: it’s not just that Black people are more likely to experience discrimination and racism, it is that within race, people with darker skin tones are more likely to struggle when compared to other people of colour. As a light-skinned mixed person, I benefit from this system whether I like it or not.

Season five, episode 10 of Black-ish discussed colourism in a way that TV hadn’t seen before. Protagonist Dre Johnson (played by Anthony Anderson), said: “Because we look different, we get discriminated against differently. Like in the case of O.J. [Simpson]. A magazine made his skin look darker to make him seem more villainous.” (That magazine was TIME magazine.)

Black-ish (and its spin-offs), which aired countless episodes focused on racial discrimination, has also been accused of perpetuating colourism itself, partly because of the show’s choice in casting biracial actors in the roles of Dre’s children, while also casting mixed women as the stereotypical exotic love interests.

The casting of mixed actors has sometimes been controversial. In 2016, actress Zoe Saldaña came under fire for her portrayal of Nina Simone in a biopic. Saldaña, mixed with Black and Latina ancestry, was accused of blackface after it was revealed that she was made to darken her skin and wear a prosthetic nose for the role. But at the same time, Saldaña has openly rejected the idea that just because she’s Latina, she can’t also be Black. “There’s no one way to be Black,” she said in an interview with Allure magazine. “I’m Black the way I know how to be.” (She has since apologized for playing the role.)

Saldaña’s words address the complexity of race, something that Hollywood has struggled to grasp. Though it’s common for celebrities to be mixed, they’re almost never cast as such. I would never deny Saldaña’s identity as Black; the issue is that actors aren’t given the opportunity to showcase their complexities in their roles. This contributes to toxic beauty standards of colourism and sends a horrific message, declaring that you’re only as beautiful as your skin’s ability to be marketable to the latest trend. More often than not, the trends involve lighter skin mimicking Eurocentric beauty standards.

In Hollywood, it’s easier to push mixed people into a single box. In Black-ish, the box is Black. For some actors, like Dwayne Johnson, the box depends on the project. His mix of Black and Samoan has allowed him to play roles from ancient Egyptian king (The Scorpion King, 2002) to Greek legend (Hercules, 2014) to Middle Eastern antihero (Black Adam, 2022). But usually, Johnson’s characters don’t have a background where their cultures are discussed, leaving it up to the audience to interpret.

Henry Golding, the British Malaysian star of Crazy Rich Asians, has said people told him that he wasn’t “Asian enough” to play the lead in the movie. “Just because by blood I’m not full Asian doesn’t mean I can’t own my Asianness,” he said in an interview with Bustle. He also said when he played a romantic lead in A Simple Favour alongside Blake Lively—his ideal role— the character’s race wasn’t specified: it was just a character written as a person. “It was never written as an Asian role— it’s never really highlighted that I am an Asian person married to Blake Lively. But that’s what it should be like,” he said.

But what about the mixed-race people who can’t fit comfortably into the ethnically ambiguous box? While actors like Dwayne Johnson and Golding can blend in, there’s more backlash for mixed people who aren’t Hollywood heartthrobs. Names play into casting just as much as skin tone does. Chloe Bennet, who is half white, half Chinese, struggled for years to book acting roles under her birth surname, Wang. The first audition she took after changing her name resulted in a job, she said back in 2016.

To be mixed-race is to be prepared to constantly contradict yourself. It’s always having to repeat yourself when someone accuses you of being too much of one thing or not enough of the other. It’s about never really seeing yourself accurately represented in media because there is no one way to look or be mixed. It’s unfair to say all mixed people in Hollywood should be forced to prioritize one half of their culture while simultaneously trying to prove that the other half exists. Pretending that mixed people aren’t mixed can perpetuate colourism. Dark-skinned Black girls deserve to feel beautiful and see themselves too.

You can’t choose your genetics, but you can choose to call out injustice. Whether we see ourselves reflected in media or not, there are infinite ways to celebrate culture while rejecting the idea that lighter skin is better.

A couple of years ago, a stranger approached me while I was volunteering at a film festival in Toronto. She motioned to a group of friends standing nearby. They placed a bet on my ethnicity, she explained, and wanted to know where I was from. I smiled and patiently regurgitated my now-rehearsed response: I was born in Scarborough, Ont., but my mother and grandparents are of mixed ethnicity from South Africa. She nodded and said my answer made sense—they knew I was “something like that.”

Her question was one I was all-too accustomed to answering. Growing up in a variety of Ontario suburbs, I constantly faced questions about my ethnicity. People asked me: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? What are you? I was left confused and conflicted. I didn’t have trouble identifying with my mom’s side of the family. They raised me to feel proud of my ethnicity and our family’s history of fighting apartheid. But I didn’t have a sense of belonging to my Latinx roots. I didn’t have a relationship at all with my dad, who was from Uruguay.

My parents divorced when I was a baby. By the time I reached elementary school, I wanted to know more about my dad: his life, what music he listened to, what his parents were like. I wanted to know more about Uruguay. There were few Latinx students in our grade; I had no Latinx teachers and no Latinx family members at home. At school, when we filled out family trees, we were asked about our parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts. I left half of my tree blank. While my mom answered my questions as best as she could, I had questions about who I was. With my dad gone, I always felt something was missing.

I turned to movies and television for guidance. I was obsessed with pop culture—it allowed me to explore the world, imagined and real, beyond my life. Maybe there were Latinas on TV, I thought, or people like my dad who I could learn from. I learned fairly quickly, though, that movies and TV wouldn’t bring me any closer to my dad. But this deflating realization didn’t discourage me from questioning the way Latinx were portrayed on screen. Even as kid, I could tell the Latinx characters in movies and television were often negatively portrayed—if they were even portrayed at all.

***

In the 1970s, 7,000 refugees fled Chile and other Latin American countries to live in Canada. While it was common for refugees to flee countries under political unrest, many from Latin America also migrated to Canada for better economic stability. As of 2001, with almost a quarter of a million Canadians of Latin American origin living in the country, the Latin American community is growing “considerably faster” than Canada’s overall population, according to Statistics Canada. As of 2011, the Statistics Canada National Household Survey reported 381,280 visible minorities of Latin American origin, many of them with Mexican, Chilean, or Salvadoran roots. Yet, despite being one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in Canada and the U.S., Latinx are largely absent from mainstream English-language television and film.

Certainly, there’s a general dearth of inclusion in Hollywood, and a growing awareness that many audiences experience whitewashing, racism, and erasure first hand. There are “disturbing patterns” in representation of women and people of colour in television and film, concluded a 2016 report from the University of Southern California’s (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Assessing inclusion on camera and behind the scenes within 10 major media companies between 2014–2015, the study found that out of 109 films, 50 percent had no speaking Asian characters and 18 per cent had no speaking Black characters. Behind the camera, 87 percent of film directors and 90 percent of broadcast directors were white.

Other studies have reported similarly dismal representation and portrayal. “The Latino Media Gap,” Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race 2014 study, found 24 percent of Latino characters on U.S. television were linked to crime and made up a whopping zero percent of leading roles between 2012–2013. The numbers concerning Latinos working behind the scenes aren’t optimistic either: in film, from 2010– 2013, Latinos consisted of just two percent of directors, two percent of producers, and six percent of writers.

This may also help us understand why the majority of Latinx characters in mainstream television and film are stereotypes: Latinx are seldom included in the creative process deciding how they’re represented on screen. As pointed out by “The Latino Media Gap,” most of the memorable maids in television and film from the past 20 years are Latina (think: Maid in Manhattan, Family Guy, and Will & Grace.) These numbers only account for representation in U.S. media—when we look at representation in Canada, we don’t fare any better.

“[Latino Canadians are] not shown enough on screen as much as we exist in Canada. There’s a serious shortage,” says Maria del Mar, an elected council member of the Toronto branch of Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, who has worked as a professional actor for 25 years in Canada and the U.S. She says when American productions are filmed in Canada, a Canadian Latinx is still rarely cast in a lead role. What’s more, these productions typically reflect American life. “It’s almost like we’re invisible. We’re not worthy of telling our stories or our experiences,” she adds. “That can have a very negative effect on everybody because it basically gives you the impression we’re not worthy of being represented.”

In conversations about diversity, I’ve struggled to name a mainstream movie or television show reflecting the experience of a Canadian Latinx or starring Canadian Latinx talent. At the same time, I’ve had no trouble naming stereotypical, whitewashed, and racist portrayals of Latinx people in U.S. media, like West Side Story, Crash, Suicide Squad, and Hot Pursuit. A 2013 study from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found, in relation to their percentage of the U.S. population, Hispanics (their wording) “clearly are the most underserved racial/ethnic group by the film industry.”

That’s not to say there are no contemporary mainstream Latinx pop stars, writers, filmmakers, and actors from Canada. They include season four Canadian Idol winner Eva Ávila; actress and Mexican Hooker #1 author Carmen Aguirre; and urban-pop singer Fito Blanko. The country also boasts several film and culture events dedicated to celebrating Canadian Latinx art, including aluCine Latin Film + Media Arts Festival and Expo Latino, Western Canada’s largest outdoor Latin festival. We have a rich history of Canadian Latinx produced works like La Familia Latina, a 1986 documentary feature film about Latin American immigrants in Quebec, and I Remember Too, a 1973 documentary about children of Chilean refugees exiled in Canada. All of this is encouraging, but it’s not enough to quell the overall lack of representation—never mind that many aspiring and accomplished Canadian Latinx still face obstacles breaking into the mainstream.

Rosa Carrera, a Vancouver-based actress and model, has difficulty branching out from stereotypical Latino roles. Although she did background work as a child for the 1987 show 21 Jump Street, in the past two years she auditioned for three maid roles—each written for someone with “Hispanic” or “ambiguous” ethnicity. Despite these obstacles, Carrera won’t give up. “You can’t move mountains, but you definitely go through them slowly,” Carrera says. “An industry is not going to change tomorrow, as long as it does change slowly.”

Some casting directors blame the underrepresentation on a supposed lack of Canadian Latinos in the arts, del Mar says, but that doesn’t reflect reality. It’s an age-old excuse those in positions of power use to dismiss calls for inclusion. But this mentality negates the fact that Latinx in Canada do exist— and they deserve to be seen. “There’s a wave of Latinos out there that need to be recognized,” del Mar says. “[Latino Canadians] are a force to be reckoned with. We are becoming a huge part of the population.”

***

When I was five, two of my favourite movies, Clueless and First Wives Club, featured Latinx maids or housekeepers. Later, it struck me that both were stories filtered through the perspective of wealthy white women. The problem with diversity in pop culture is not only how many Latinx characters were (and are) featured in my favourite movies and TV shows—but also how they’re portrayed.

Silvia Argentina Arauz, co-chair of Toronto’s Latin American Education Network, teaches media literacy to Toronto youth. In a workshop called “Putting the Me Back in Media,” Arauz draws a pair of aviators. Using herself as an example, she depicts the “me on TV” on one lens and the “me in reality” on the other. She asks students what they assume about her based on the image in the media. “Unfailingly, I’m told I do drugs, I carry drugs, I’m a single mom possibly on welfare, I have a drug dealer boyfriend, I haven’t gone to school or I’m a high school drop out, I’m promiscuous,” Arauz says. When she asks for their opinion about what they see in person, however, the students say she’s nice, educated, and nonaggressive. “What happens when so many people don’t meet me in reality and all they have is the me on TV?”

In high school, I encountered people who referred to me as “their” spicy or sexy Latina—a trope I’m certain they plucked from movies and television. Non-Latinx people, assuming my ethnicity, spoke to me in Spanish—and condescended me when I couldn’t speak back. As per Arauz’s metaphor, I was caught in a double bind between the real me and the images non-Latinx people saw in pop culture. Studies show repeating stereotypes of Latinx have a negative effect on how they are perceived. In 2012, the National Hispanic Media Coalition and Latino Decisions studied how stereotypes in media affect non-Latinx’ attitudes toward Latinx and immigrants. The respondents reported Latinx were portrayed as maids, criminals, and gardeners “very often” and nurses, teachers, and lawyers “sometimes” and “not too often.” While there’s nothing, of course, inherently wrong with being a maid or gardener, in pop culture, these characters are often minor, one-dimensional, and menial. The result? “People exposed to negative entertainment or news narratives about Latinos and/ or immigrants hold the most unfavourable and hostile views about both groups.”

What’s more, people who often don’t know anything about us write simplified versions of our diverse, complicated histories and identities, which also effects how non-Latinx people view us. In 2005, when The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series was a big deal, my friends decided I was the Carmen Lowell (America Ferrera) of our friend group. At first I was confused—if I was like any character, it was the snarky Tibby. Plus, despite us both being Latinx, Ferrera and I looked nothing alike. I quickly realized as the token Latinx in our group, I was automatically viewed as the Latinx in the Sisterhood. My friends probably didn’t realize Ferrera wasn’t the only U.S.-Latinx actress in the movie: Alexis Bledel, who plays Lena Kaligaris, is of Argentinian descent.

I couldn’t blame my friends for their blunder. Although Latinx are incorrectly referred to as a race, we are actually an ethnic group composed of diverse races, languages, and cultures. The mainstream media, however, typically ignores these complexities and our diversity in favour of lazily painting people of Latin American descent as one and the same. This catchall attitude toward Latinx suggests we not only look the same, but that we face the same stereotypes. Many Latinx experience some form of prejudice and erasure, but we each experience them differently. While U.S.-Latinx actresses like Cameron Diaz, Bledel, and Aubrey Plaza may not appear often in “Latina-specific” roles, they are also more often given the chance to play characters outside their ethnicity.

Most films and television shows featuring Latinx people also don’t reflect Latin America’s diversity—the various cultures, countries, and races that make up Latin American countries and the U.S.-Latinx population. The recycled stereotypes—the hyper-sexualized Latinx, maids, and drug dealers—are roles that are almost exclusively shelled out to Latinx of colour. These characters are rarely portrayed as complete people with lives and back-stories like their counterparts, only as the butt of the joke, the sidekick, or the villain.

Even Spanish-language television in the U.S. is guilty of favouring white Latinx over Latinx of colour, often portraying the latter in racist or stereotypical roles. In 2014, Proyecto Más Color, an awareness campaign founded by sisters Sophia and Victoria Arzu, urged Univision and Telemundo to include more positive portrayals of afro-Latinx in their programming. Most Americans don’t know afro-Latinx exist, Victoria argued in a video for their petition, and when Black people are portrayed on Spanish-language soap operas, they’re often maids, gunmen, prisoners, security guards, or drug dealers. “We have the same right to shine on television as anyone else,” Victoria said.

In Canada, despite the dearth of Canadian-Latinx representation on television and film, I still found a handful of characters, albeit American, that positively affected my childhood. I watched the Disney Channel to catch reruns of the movie Gotta Kick It Up! starring Ferrera and Camille Guaty. And as a teenager, I devotedly watched My So-Called Life every Monday night because I loved Rickie Vasquez. Played by Wilson Cruz, Rickie was one of the first openly gay teenagers in a recurring role on U.S. television. Rickie was a troubled teen who experienced stigma, homophobia, and homelessness. But unlike stereotypical Latinx characters that are criminalized or ridiculed, Rickie was humanized and given significant airtime.

Latinx advocates all over the U.S. and Canada are mobilizing for change. In 1998, Latinx successfully advocated for the retirement of a Seinfeld episode that depicted the burning of a Puerto Rican flag; in 1999, the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts organized a “brownout” to boycott four major networks in response to the “virtual absence of Latino images on television;” in 2009, news host Lou Dobbs retired from CNN after surmounting pressure from Latinx advocates who challenged Dobbs’ anti-immigration rhetoric “in relation to undocumented Latino immigrants.” And, several contemporary U.S. television shows like Jane the Virgin and Devious Maids are subverting tired tropes to comment on the way media portrays Latinx.

Even with these considerable strides, some studies report Latinx representation is actually getting worse. In 2016, as a follow up to “The Latino Media Gap,” co-authors Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Chelsea Abbas helmed “The Latino Disconnect: Latinos in the Age of Media Mergers.” Looking at recent mergers between telecom and cable providers, the researchers found, after the 2011 Comcast-NBCUniversal merger, stereotypical Latinx roles on television rose from 34 percent in the 2008–2009 season to 52 percent in the 2014– 2015 season; in film, stereotypical Latinx roles reached an alltime high of 66 percent in 2013.

As for Canada? There’s no up-to-date or sufficient data offering insight into how Canadian Latinx are represented in Canadian English-language television and film. The lack of information available—paired with the near invisibility of our diverse communities reflected on the screen—suggests a want for something more. We need to continue promoting diversity, del Mar says, and teaching Latinx children they can grow up to be directors and writers. It’s hard, she adds, to convince people Canadian characters can also be Latinx—they think they may not appeal to a broad audience. “The truth is, the broad audience needs to be reflected,” she says. “The way to do that is to encourage more Latinos and to cast more Latinos in the industry.”

I’ve learned in order to discover new Latinx artists, I need to look past Hollywood and the mainstream, which still struggles to keep up with decades-old conversations about diversity. Still, I have hope. After all, Uruguayan-born filmmaker Fede Álvarez directed the summer horror hit Don’t Breathe. In the weeks the film debuted, I was ecstatic to see the words “Uruguayan director” in dozens of mainstream news headlines, some even praising Álvarez for reinventing horror. Maybe someday everyone will realize Latinx everywhere deserve to be seen.

An in-depth review of Hollywood’s problem with women

“You could try to hold your camera like this… but your breasts would probably get in the way.”

“Women do not belong on set unless they are in hair and makeup.”

“Your main job is basically to be my work wife. You need to anticipate my needs. Especially when my wife’s on her period.”

“Women just freak out all the time. They’re crazy. Their hormones are all over the place and they can’t be calm and rational. They make the worst producers.”

These are just a few of the depressing testimonials from the new blog Shit People Say to Women Directors (& Other Women in Film). Launched in April, the site calls attention to the blatant sexism and barriers women working in the film and entertainment industry face. In less than 24 hours, it received enough material for a year’s worth of posts. The anonymous stories come from a wide range of women working in film and television, from directors and actresses to writers and crew members. And if the blog posts aren’t proof enough of the gender bias in the entertainment industry, there are no shortage of studies or women in Hollywood speaking out against the horrible way women are treated.

Sadly, women in the silent film era were better off than women today; at one point back in the day, the highest paid director was even a woman. Yet today, if you look at the top 500 films from 2007-2012, the average ratio of male actors on screen to female actors is more than two to one, according to the New York Film Academy. If you look at the ratio of men to women working on films, the numbers get even more depressing at 5:1. Of all the directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films of 2012 only 18 percent were women, reported Celluloid Ceiling, a comprehensive study of women working in film.

Recently, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal revealed that at 37 she was told she was too old to play the love interest of a 55-year-old leading man. A review of top grossing romantic films found that the average age of a woman lead is 29, compared to 37 for leading men. In the male-dominated wish fulfillment film industry, it’s unfortunately no surprise that ageism exists and an older man seducing a woman in her 20s is the norm. Female fetuses are currently being auditioned to fill the role Gyllenhaal couldn’t.

Comedian Amy Schumer recently mocked this practice on the Season 3 premiere of her hit show Inside Amy Schumer. In “Last F**kable Day” Schumer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette celebrate the day the media decides female actresses are no longer desirable, poking fun at the ridiculous double standards Hollywood has for women.

Hollywood’s gender bias extends to everything from screen time to pay scale. The top 10 highest paid actresses made a collective $181 million while the top 10 male actors made $465 million, according to a 2013 Forbes study of Hollywood’s highest paid actors and actresses. One of the biggest reveals of last year’s Sony hacking scandal concerned the movie American Hustle and the fact that Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams were paid less than the film’s male stars.

It’s not just woman actors Hollywood has given up on. At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Salma Hayek accused Hollywood of giving up on women viewers as well. Despite making up 50 percent of the ticket-buying public in the U.S., Hayek noted that Hollywood thinks the only films women wants to see are dumbed-down romantic comedies (I believe these are commonly referred to as chick flicks).

Hayek also discussed the sexism and racism she’s experienced in Hollywood. One Hollywood executive told her that her Mexican accent was a drawback since it might remind moviegoers of their maids. A talented actress, Hayek has been reduced to playing a hot trophy wife co-starring alongside fart jokes and punches to the crotch in the Grown Ups movie franchise. (Never mind the fact that they keep making these movies, which just seems like one giant punch in the crotch to moviegoers everywhere.)

The examples of Hollywood sexism are endless. Melissa McCarthy recently called out a sexist critic over comments he made about her appearance. In this month’s Fast Company cover story, Amy Poehler talks about being in meetings with powerful Hollywood men who ask her where her kids are, implying she’s a neglectful mother who doesn’t see her kids enough—something they would never ask a man. Speaking at Cannes of her new film A Tale of Love and Darkness, Natalie Portman admitted to being afraid to direct herself in the film because people might see it as a vanity project, despite the fact that they would never do so if she were George Clooney.

As if Hayek and Portman’s Cannes comments weren’t enough to confirm that sexism is coming soon to a theater near you, #flatgate happened. The #flatgate controversy emerged when an unnamed festival source was quoted in the British press saying that women on the festival’s red carpet must wear high heels or risk being turned away. This after several women in flats were, in fact, turned away from a screening of the new Todd Haynes movie. Paris Hilton at your festival is classy; flats are not.

The no flats policy—which I initially thought was an Onion story— happened in a year when Cannes was trying to appear more female friendly by showcasing a number of films with strong female leads and selecting Standing Tall by Emmanuelle Bercot as the festival’s opening film, the first time a woman director has opened the festival since 1987.

Flatgate comes on the heels of this year’s #askhermore. The social media campaign to get red carpet reporters to ask actresses about their accomplishments rather than focus on who and what they’re wearing launched during this year’s Oscars. As if it’s not bad enough that women are hugely underrepresented when it comes to awards nominations—even more so for women of colour—they then have to endure full body camera pans on the red carpet and endless internet snark about their dress choices. At the 85th Academy Awards in 2013, across 19 categories, 140 men were nominated compared with 35 women. And in its entire history, only four women have been nominated for a best director Oscar. Of the four, only one woman has won: Kathryn Bigelow in 2009 for The Hurt Locker—regrettably, not for Point Break.

Response to the #askhermore campaign was mixed with some arguing that awards carpets are for talking about fashion with many celebrities, using the opportunity to promote brands and designers. Admittedly, at my Oscar party, the possibility of Ryan Seacrest going off script to discuss global warming with Sienna Miller increased wine consumption by at least 30 percent. As the man responsible for Keeping Up with The Kardashians, Seacrest has already unleashed enough awful on us and must be stopped.

I know the responsibility shouldn’t be on Reese Witherspoon’s shoulders to stop sexism on awards night, but I’d love to see actresses simply refuse to walk the red carpet or show up in a Dinosaur Jr t-shirt with a chip dip stain on it and sweatpants—a little look I like to call “Saturday night.” At least the dreaded Mani Cam was gone after many actresses refused to participate in it and Elizabeth Moss famously flipped it off in 2012. Peggy Olson would be proud.

The double standard certainly doesn’t end when actresses are off screen. In the same week that #flatgate broke, actor Bill Murray appeared lit like a road flare on MSNBC. Having just wrapped up a final Letterman appearance in which he chugged vodka, Murray drunkenly wandered onto the MSNBC set like he got lost looking for the washroom. He proceeded to spectacularly fall off his chair and then slur his way through an interview.

The next day, there were no calls for Murray to go to rehab, no concerns about whether his drinking was out of control or whether his career would ever recover from his drunken television appearance. If Murray had been a woman, the internet would still be talking about it and not in a good way. Instead, the internet found it all very charming. Full disclosure: I found it amusing, but that’s because Murray’s midlife crisis is way more entertaining to witness than my own.

But it’s not just Hollywood who is fed up with the double standards. Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced it will ask federal and state governments to examine the hiring processes studios use for directors and investigate the discrimination faced by women directors. While the discrimination certainly extends beyond directors, the ACLU investigation provides some hope, especially given the possibility that studios and networks could be charged with gender discrimination.

The hopeful moments tend to be short-lived. The 2011 success of the Kristen Wiig-penned Bridesmaids—the film grossed $288 million worldwide and was nominated for a best picture Golden Globe as well as an Oscar for best original screenplay and best supporting actress—was seen as ushering in a new wave of smart funny films by and starring women. Despite a few films like 2012’s Bachelorette, the “Bridesmaids Effect” seemed largely to be a mainstream media construct that, sadly, yielded few lasting effects. Also, cooking with summer squash is an example of a trend; women being funny is not.

When Kathryn Bigelow won best director, people were optimistic the situation would improve for women in Hollywood. Similar optimism greeted the box office success of director Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight, which had the biggest opening ever for a female director, and also, most recently, Elizabeth Banks’ Pitch Perfect 2. Still, having a woman behind the camera is not the norm. An annual studio by San Diego State University found that women directed only 7 percent of the top 250 grossing films last year, two percentage points lower than in 1998.

Disappointingly, it seems like the responsibility to end Hollywood’s gender bias falls largely to the women. Meryl Streep recently announced she will fund a mentoring initiative for female screenwriters over 40—further proof that Meryl is awesome. Her announcement comes after reports that both the number of female screenwriters, as well as their pay levels are dismal. At last year’s SXSW keynote Girls actress and creator Lena Dunham—who also wrote, directed and acted in 2010’s wonderful Tiny Furniture—said “Something has to change and I’m trying.” Both Dunham and Girls have certainly had a positive effect, but we haven’t come a long way, baby.

Oscar-winning actress and director Helen Hunt summed it up perfectly in a recent Huffington Post interview: “What are the great movies for younger women where they’re the protagonist [being] made now? You know what I mean? The whole thing — there’s no equal rights amendment. We’re fucked.” And Hunt should know. At 34 she played 60-year-old Jack Nicholson’s love interest in As Good As It Gets. At least she got an Oscar for it.

Manipulated photo from Kristin Nelson's series My Life With Pamela Anderson (2010). Images courtesy the artist.

Surfing the internet for a Grey Cup art project in November 2008, Kristin Nelson landed on a saucy image of Pamela Anderson. It immediately provoked a spark of inspiration that she couldn’t explain but also couldn’t deny. Thus emerged the seed of a body of artwork called My Life With Pamela Anderson that documents, in finely crafted fiber works and manipulated photos, an imaginary yet deeply felt relationship between the artist and the celebrity.

The Winnipeg-based multi-disciplinary artist has often explored the cultural representation of identity and sexuality, yet she had no feminist or deconstructionist impulse going in.

“I had a lot of hesitations about using her image,” Nelson says, “but in working out those thoughts I decided the main purpose would be to get to know her.”

In some ways the work is typical of Nelson’s art. She strives to get to know people and places and to reveal over-looked or un-thought-of aspects of them to herself as much as to her audience. The much sought-after Drag King Trading Cards (2007 and 2010), for instance, featured portraits of butch women in packs like those of sports stars for sale at corner stores. These subversive collectibles allowed Nelson to collaborate with and explore her own relationship to the queer community.

Manipulated photo from Kristin Nelson's series My Life With Pamela Anderson (2010). Images courtesy the artist.

Currently, however, Nelson’s interest is finding more universal points of entry to her art. Her most recent subject, however, proved a challenge: How do you get to know someone so famous, not to mention already a well-worn subject of cultural criticism?

“It was important for her character that I stay quiet about the project and not justify it,” Nelson says. As she researched lesser-known aspects of Anderson’s life, Nelson decided that she would put herself in, thereby going beyond a critique of celebrity consumption to a playful take on how we absorb the lives of the famous into our own.

In the most striking pieces, pin-up pictures of the actress have been transformed into shimmering, larger-than-life cross-stitch portraits executed in yarn on aluminum panels. Also, in line drawings made from yarn and nails and manipulated family photographs, Nelson and Anderson hang out, watching TV and riding bikes, like old pals in gauzy dreams. The whole effect softens the celebrity’s official image and transforms preconceptions of its audience, too.

Large cross-stitch tapestries from Kristin Nelson's series My Life With Pamela Anderson (2010). Images courtesy the artist.

On the one hand, Nelson’s work is laugh-out-loud funny, a luscious manifestation of celebrity idolization. On the other, the needlepoint technique highlights Nelson’s patience and care for her subject. “She’s a very dehumanized person, even in scholarly discussions by feminists,” Nelson points out. “She’s something to bitch about, or insult. She’s talked about in terms of either-or, but nobody is just an image of themselves.”

Indeed, in Nelson’s images, Anderson is neither Madonna nor whore, but something less sensational—a focal point for talking about sexuality and popular representations of it. “I’ve learned to see her in a different light, rather than categorize her as ‘other’ than myself,” Nelson says.

Currently, she is making another series of smaller cross-stitches about what she imagines was a real turning point in the actress’ life, this time patterns generated from the landscapes of a well-known leaked video from the mid 1990s of Pamela and her then-husband, Tommy Lee, having sex on a boat. The hope is that people may recognize the images. As Nelson explains, “Discussing is more interesting than showing.”

It's easy to be cynical about awards season, but a chance to promote quality is still valuable. Illustration by David Donald.

If you ever want to get your hands on an Oscar, you’ll probably have to earn it the hard way. Security is tight on those things, and the resale market starts at $50,000 and heads into the seven-figure bracket if the winner was anyone you’ve heard of. (Michael Jackson once paid over $1.5 million for Gone with the Wind’s Best Picture award.) If you’re not at all picky about your statuettes and don’t mind owning one that looks like an Oscar minus its arms and with an extra ass for a head, you could always go for a Genie. (Resale value is negligible unless it once belonged to Al Waxman.)

The annual giving of hardware is actually the culmination of several months’ worth of prognostication, deliberation, and dispensation of less glamorous awards. This period— which can stretch from early December all the way into March—is “awards season” in the movie business. It’s when the average moviegoer is suddenly supposed to really, really care about film as an artistic medium, irrespective of the hype, lies, and misleading marketing schemes she’s routinely fed for the rest of the year. It’s the time when we learn a lot about the films that are supposed to represent the medium’s highest achievement, even though most of us gain this knowledge only to better our chances in office Oscar betting pools.

It’s easy to be cynical about awards season and its rituals. (Unless, of course, you have a direct stake in one of the movies bound for victory. This year, Precious, Up in the Air, and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus are among the early faves.) After all, studios spend millions on “for your consideration” advertising, events, dinners, and everything else they do to help position their films as deserving. That includes courting the various critics organizations in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, giving hacks who spend the rest of their year fretting over newspaper bankruptcies a brief taste of power and influence. For one brief flickering moment, it’s as if their opinions matter.

This feeling may be the main reason that anyone takes part in the shadowy processes that yield awards. And while even these participants might complain about the ever-swelling glut of prizes, citations, and Top 10 lists, on some level they know that this might be the only means to let the world know about what matters to them, especially when it comes to movies as an art form.

Speaking as a critic, I can say that opinion-making by jury or consensus—and not individual reviewers—is already the norm. Whereas a rave by Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert may have once put asses in seats, now most movies live or die by their user-generated ratings on the Internet Movie Database or the aggregated scores of reviews as tabulated by the geek wizards at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.

To participate in a vote for a prize or a list—like Canada’s Top Ten, a worthy initiative by the Toronto International Film Festival group to create a more valuable guide to the year’s finest homegrown efforts, than the more industry oriented and often baffling Genies—almost concedes how little the individual critic’s voice matters. As for the moviegoer, the prizes and the lists have become another means of managing all the unruly streams of information, opinion, and invective pouring in from every direction. It’s a filtering of data that tells us the important books we’re supposed to read, the essential music we’re supposed to hear, the must-see movies we must see. All of these comprise what used to be called the mainstream and disparaged accordingly by snobs like me. Lately, it feels like an increasingly futile effort to construct some sort of fluctuating canon of Things Worth Caring About in an ever more fractionalized and factionalized culture. Prizes and lists reassure us that it’s not too late to impose some degree of order. Somehow, somewhere there’s a panel of experts who’ve done the hard thinking and decreed that, yes, the state of art is better than fine, it’s great (and here’s another masterpiece in case you were worried).

To believe that such an endeavour has value might be as naive as believing the Best Picture Oscar actually goes to the year’s best picture. (Remember: they gave one of those to Chicago.) But if three more people went to see Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy or Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg— the best feature and best Canadian feature of 2008 according to the Toronto Film Critics Association, of which I’m a member—because of stupid awards, then maybe it’s worth the trouble.

Kevin McHale takes centre stage and heat for playing wheelchair using Artie Abrams. Image from The Fox Network

Sometimes it seems that no minority sits on a higher horse than people with disabilities—give an inch and they want a mile.

I bet that’s what creator Ryan Murphy,  executive producer Brad Falchuck and the rest of the creative muscle behind Glee thought, in their most private moments, once they started hearing the complaints from disabled viewers and those actors with disabilities still fighting to break through television’s representational barriers.

At issue is one character in particular, Artie Abrams. He is probably the most complex and nuanced wheelchair-using teen on television. I would hazard to say we’re finally seeing ourselves accurately and respectfully, not just represented, but legitimized on a hit television show.  Artie is fully realized, you might even mumble “reality” under your breath when no one was looking, if it weren’t for one major detail that has the activist and soapbox crowd among us up in arms. Artie is played by able-bodied actor, and former boy-band member, Kevin McHale. He is not a paraplegic and for those advocating for disabled talent in Hollywood, along with those who truly want to see themselves on television, this is yet another sign of Hollywood’s glass ceiling where disabled people are concerned.

It’s not like their concerns are unfounded. The stats, so often cited, come from the Screen Actors Guild [SAG] UCLA Study on Employment of People with Disabilities in the Entertainment Industry, commissioned in 2005. It tells us that 20% of the American population between the ages of 5-64 is living with a disability and yet, they are represented by less than 2% of the characters on television. Worse than that, only one-half of 1% of the words spoken on television are spoken by someone with a disability.

When I asked Adam Moore, SAG’s associate U.S. national director of affirmative action and diversity, last winter for my “Coming Attractions” article in Abilities Magazine, why this was the case, it essentially came down to an inability to prove discrimination was taking place beyond anecdotal statistics. Disabled performers don’t want to self-identify, for fear of being passed over in auditions, and producers are uncomfortable with keeping track of the number of disabled people on set (the way they’re required to for other minorities in the union) because they feel unable to tell what counts as a disability.  Their questions surround whether they should count invisible disabilities or temporary injuries. All in all, not having the proper information prevents SAG from doing anything on their own because they can’t prove it.  Even when they joined forces with American Federation of Television and Radio Artists [AFTRA]  and Actors Equity Association [AEA] at the beginning of the year for the I AM PWD tri-union campaign, the initiative has gone largely unnoticed by mainstream audiences and there’s no real visible employment spike to be found.

Right now, articles like this one from Associated Press have Glee in the employment inequity crosshairs. The barbs have already started flying, especially in light of the show’s recent disability-focused episode called “Wheels”.  Robert David Hall the chairman of the I AM PWD campaign, who is best known for playing C.S.I: Las Vegas coroner Al Robbins, had this to say to Associated Press.

“I think there’s a fear of litigation, that a person with disabilities might slow a production down, fear that viewers might be uncomfortable. All of that is nonsense, I’ve made my living as an actor for 30 years and I walk on two artificial legs.”

What Hall says is true; it also costs productions more to implement adaptations for disabled talent in some cases, but none of those reasons or excuses should be laid at the feet of Glee. If anything, Glee’s creative team did a better job striving to achieve employment equity and represent minorities on television than their critics in the disabled community did in assessing the validity of their criticism against the show.

Glee is a hit series working in the tradition of  High School Musical and Fame. It follows a fictional high school glee club through the ups and downs of teen life. It is known for mixing hit songs past and present into musical mash-ups and then giving them the full Broadway treatment. It also goes a step beyond: conscious of the fact that television has the ability to shape attitudes and perceptions, their creative team intentionally built a cast representing every culture and visible minority. There are white characters, black characters, Asian characters, gay characters, Latino  characters, Jewish characters, Christian characters, male characters and female characters. The principal of the school is not white, but South Asian, and, of course, there’s McHale’s character Artie as the person with a disability.

Falchuck told the AP that they did this to not just reflect the so-called “mainstream,” but to reflect America as it really is. Of course, critics can turn around and say that they aren’t really reflecting America because there isn’t a real disabled person in the cast. In the same article though, Falchuck does say that they did look at people in wheelchairs for the role of Artie.

“We brought in anyone: white, black, Asian, in a wheelchair,” Falchuck said.

Really, that’s all you can expect from casting directors. The disabled community is absolutely right in cases where disabled actors aren’t even allowed to audition.  Joanne Smith, former host of CBC’s Moving On, revealed in a recent Abilities article that some casting directors point blank told her they don’t want to hire people with disabilities because of a lack of talent or too much politics involved in the decision.  However, even Robert David Hall admits that you have to earn the role you audition for, disability or not.

“Society has had a telethon mentality for a lot of years. If we’re doing a story on Aaron, then we will play soft piano music and talk about the brave little writer with a cane—that sucks. The best way to avoid that is to always do good work. We’re competitive with the entire world and our job is to do the best work we can,” he told me when I interviewed him for Abilities last winter.

Even the most staunch disability activists don’t want to be hired to fill a visible minority quota. In the case of Artie, casting directors needed a triple threat performer. He needed to sing, act and follow choreography. In Kevin McHale, they found someone who could do all that and play an instrument as well.  “It was very hard to find people who could really sing, really act, and have that charisma you need on TV. It’s hard to say no to someone that talented,” Falchuck told AP and so far, he seems to be right. There are disabled people who can sing, act and dance (either in pairs or individually), but I have yet to find any disabled person who can do all three.

So while the casting directors need to give us a shot at auditioning, performing arts schools need to be willing to train us and agents need to be willing to represent us. That way, when when casting directors try to cast a disabled triple threat they might actually be able to find one.  When I say represent and train us, I mean not in a Special Olympics, everyone’s a winner, it’s enough just to participate, pat you on the head and give you a lollipop kind of way.  Not even in a segregated-under-one-roof, institutional, Famous People Players kind of way. There are a few organizations, like Lights, Camera, Access and Witt Entertainment Management Inc. willing to train and represent disabled actors, but both of these are small potatoes compared to the amount of professional talent with disabilities that needs to be out there to penetrate the market in big numbers.

Remember, just because a disabled actor with talent makes it through, even when they get a supporting and speaking role, doesn’t mean the creative team knows what to do with them. Vince Gilligan cast RJ Mitte in Breaking Bad in tribute to his friend with cerebral palsy, but after that stand-up move, the show has been on for two seasons and Mitte’s character hasn’t been given a significant storyline while everyone else in the principal cast has. Mitte has had his moments and he has had his scenes, but often he simply walks on set, says a line and walks off again—a clear indication that Gilligan doesn’t know how to write for him.

I’d rather have a non-disabled actor (who obviously takes the responsibility of playing a disabled character seriously) shown as a full  participant of the show, whether it be through a solo, playing a guitar, prominent roles in the choreography, or having a whole episode devoted to him, than have a truly talented disabled actor on set used as a token.  All of those articles that feature criticism from the disabled community over Glee’s casting, neglect to mention that they added a supporting role that is a person with a disability. Lauren Potter is an actress with Down’s syndrome who takes Quinn Fabray’s spot on the cheerleding team, but who isn’t given a free pass just because of her disability. Coach Sue Sylvester is realistically tough on her.

That’s another thing about Glee. In the “Wheels” episode, they dealt with disability issues in a tongue-in-cheek, but not mocking or stereotypical manner. They dealt with things like sex and disability realistically. (I have actually had to confirm the functionality of my penis in real life and I’m not the only one) It seems Kevin McHale appreciated how the show handled disability as well, as he told the New York Post:

“Going in, none of us knew anything about our characters so we kind of made up back stories for them, so when I read what happened to him, I thought it was very cool. And I love how they did it too, how his story fit into the context of the episode. It just kind of sums up ‘Glee’—you have this sweet story and then I say, ‘but I still have full use of my penis.’ That’s like a metaphor for our show.”

People seem to forget that it’s okay to have a sense of humour about disability.  Recently, deaf organizations have been squawking about how offensive the Family Guy Presents live special was for making fun of deaf actor Marlee Matlin. They seem to forget that the cast was laughing with her because she was in on the joke the whole time.

I often think that if disability organizations put as much effort towards creating and fostering disabled talent as they seem to in their whining and issuing press releases regarding injustices towards them, then casting directors may actually see a lot more talent with disabilities. People with disabilities need to start opening up about their circumstances. More people with disabilities need to pursue jobs in Hollywood, rather than avoid them out of fear. If you really have problems with the way the able-bodied world represents us on television or in any other media, maybe you should write a script, make a film or study acting. Who better to write dialogue for a disabled character than someone with a disability?

Watch the entire “Wheels” episode of Glee and tell us what you think.

The website “When Will Amy Winehouse Die?” reads like a macabre count-the-jellybeans contest. How many days does a junkie have left to live? Leave a guess, and a “pre-condolence,” like this one: “It’s not like you didn’t see this coming.” (This commenter chose July 11, 2008.) “We’ll miss you,” pre-eulogizes another, with a slightly more optimistic expiration date of March 11, 2011. If you’re correct, you’ll take home an iPod touch—presuming the gadget doesn’t fall into obsolescence first—and you’ll be crowned “Mr. or Mrs. Death.” “Amy is on her way out,” the site reads. “As the world is profiting from this decline, we thought it only fair that you should profit from it too.”

The same company runs the same contest for Britney Spears—this one for a PlayStation 3. It also hosts a half-dozen Europe-based websites for those looking to see pictures of Angelina Jolie’s tits or watch videos of guys wiping out on their Girls motorcycles. On the Winehouse death page, thousands have left their guesses alongside pictures of the singer in decline. Many entrants, it seems, have chosen their own birthday, with comments attached. “Thanks for the iPod!” one reads. Several say: “Die, bitch.” Others riff on Winehouse’s own lyrics: “You should’ve gone to rehab. Yes Yes Yes!”

It may be less overtly cruel than the putting a bet on when Amy Winehouse will die, but a lot of celebrity journalism appears to be a countdown to death. We watch bad girls like Winehouse stumble before us under the 24-hour surveillance of paparazzi. Lindsay Lohan gets drunk and disorderly, and crashes her car. Britney Spears is photographed without panties while the world debates whether she’ll commit suicide. Gossip blogger Perez Hilton registers another million hits, and the Bratz Pack keeps the party going.

Though her anti-rehab anthem sold more than fi ve million albums and made her an international star, Winehouse has, of course, been to rehab several times. Who hasn’t? B- and C-listers air their traumas on the latest reality show, Celebrity Rehab. Exclusive centres seem more like resorts than hospitals, with yoga, shiatsu and garden parties. Hospitalization is no longer shameful. It is trendy.

Star Magazine: rock bottom, indeed

But while the young women who are famous bad girls—Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton—check in and out of treatment, they seem unconcerned with redemption. Rehab always seems like someone else’s choice, the advice of publicists perhaps, and our suspicions are confirmed when a week later they’re up to no good again. They remain willful and unapologetic, refusing to conform to any sense of how women are “supposed” to act. They won’t be victims, patiently suffering in silence, and they aren’t trying to be anyone’s sweetheart. We can try to make them stay in rehab, but they say, “No, no, no.” “I told you I was trouble,” Winehouse coyly sings, “You know that I’m no good.” When the world yells, “Behave,” they only give us the finger and march, empowered, toward their own death.

As viewers of this spectacle, we’re caught between pity and condemnation. “How sad,” we say, that young women are cruelly targeted by the media, contorted by our demands that they be innocent but not childish, sexy but not slutty. We may hope they get the help they need, but most of the time, we’re less generous, believing they are getting what they deserve. They are getting paid; it’s not our fault they are too stupid, and obsessed with fame at any cost, to get their lives on track. We claim to worry about their health—hence the constant supervision of weight, pregnancy, reckless sexual behaviour. After all, don’t they know that they are role models? Rarely, if ever, do we allow that this is how they choose to live, that they don’t want to be Grace Kelly and they aren’t interested in our approval.

Society as a whole once held celebrity as the paragon of what we all could be: glamourous, rich, witty, beautiful. Scandals were kept out of the press, often by the press, infidelities buried, abortions arranged; we knew little of the excesses and depressions stars faced when there was no one around to watch them. America’s Sweetheart could be our dream, even though we knew nothing about her at all—in fact, because we knew nothing about her at all. Now, America’s Sweetheart is an album by Courtney Love, another debauched rebel rockstar.

In February, New York magazine published photos of Lindsay Lohan re-enacting Marilyn Monroe’s famous “The Last Sitting”—taken just weeks before her death in 1962—a creepy homage to a woman who pioneered the now well-worn path of sexy self-destruction, performed in front of the camera for all to see. Critics charged that the photos eroticized and exploited Lohan’s own downward spiral. “They are sexual, funereal images,” wrote Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times, which “ask viewers to engage in a kind of mock necrophilia.” These eerie photos link beauty and death, equating glamour and sickness, connections that are usually well hidden or airbrushed out.

Never before has so little been kept private; now everything is published, and every inch of women’s bodies scrutinized. As David Denby wrote in the New Yorker last fall, “every part of a star’s existence, including the surgical scars and the cellulite deposits, belongs to the media—and to the public.” Rumours that Britney is pregnant are dashed when the paparazzi snap a shot of her period-stained panties. Amy Winehouse’s damaged skin is shown in high magnification on UK news sites. She is diagnosed publicly, doctors showing up in the media to speculate about cause and treatment. “Notorious junkie failing to keep up with beauty regimen,” one headline read in June. Another article calls her “a shadow of her former smooth-skinned self.”

These photos show that the illusions that prop up celebrity culture—flawlessness and mystery—can fail. What could be more subversive in an industry based on beauty than to be publicly ugly? There is a kind of bravery here—however nihilistic—that these bad girls refuse to be our royalty, to play the role of demure ingénue. “In a nation of finger-wagging, name-calling, letter-writing, comment-posting, mean-spirited, stalking busybodies,” writes Heather Havrilesky in Salon, “maybe the crotch flash is the ultimate subversive act.”

Like them or hate them, the bad girls have an honesty to them that is difficult to find elsewhere. They do what they want, sleep with whom they choose, and refuse to be guided by a morality that’s not of their own making. As Lakshmi Chaudhry writes in The Nation: “[Paris] Hilton, Lohan and their peers represent a radically new generation of celebrities who receive attention—or more precisely notoriety—because they violate rather than perform traditional modes of femininity, especially when it comes to matters of the heart.”

They “no longer feel the need to hide their appetite for pleasure, status and attention behind a giggle or a teary smile,” she writes. “It is progress—of a sort.”

I didn’t enter a guess about Amy Winehouse’s death, or Britney’s either. I’ll wait until the end to see how the story plays out. And while we, the viewers, may be all-too focused on watching these women self-destruct, the situation isn’t entirely hopeless. Today’s bad girls are tearing down the feminine ideal instead of just redefining it. It is progress. We’ll get there in the end—but it will take more than 12 steps.

Terrance Houle. Photo by Jarusha Brown.

In a small bright room in downtown Toronto, a young Aboriginal woman is auditioning for a role she never expected to play. “I’d like to read the part of Billy Jack,” she says. With script in hand, the woman narrows her eyes and begins to read: “It’s my medicine bag. Got some owls feathers, sacred corn, snake teeth …” Behind the camera, looking every bit the director in jeans, baggy T-shirt, and ponytail, sits Terrance Houle — filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, and all-around funny guy. Though he’s only been creating films and art for five or six years, Houle is making waves with his humorous post-modern take on the unique issues facing contemporary Aboriginal Canadians.

On the “set” of Casting Call, his most ambitious project to date, Houle is relaxed and in charge, guiding nervous volunteers through their lines. The piece — part performance art, part film — confronts the stereotype of the “Hollywood Indian” by holding fake auditions for the roles of “Natives playing non-Natives acting in Native roles.” Anyone can audition, and each participant chooses from a selection of scripts from old Hollywood films that originally used Caucasian actors to play Aboriginal characters. “Everybody who auditions pretty much gets in,” Houle explains between readings. For Houle and the participants, it’s about “Natives taking back the roles themselves.”

Houle’s cheeky critique covertly drives his message home, but even when the subject matter is potentially sensitive, he can’t resist a joke. The piece has been staged at festivals and events across Canada, and each time it’s performed Houle posts an ad to attract participants that lists possible qualifications: “Traditional, contemporary, bannock experience; an interest in bingo; braided hair; owners of buckskin loincloth, breach cloth and general hides a bonus.” This playful mocking is Houle’s signature as an artist, an approach he uses intentionally to make his art accessible to a wider audience. “I don’t want to be somebody who’s pointing a finger,” he explains. “I find that, for me, that doesn’t work.”

Evidence of this approach can be observed in his 2005 short film, Metrosexual Indian, in which Houle addresses the conflicting identities that confront males of his generation. Dressed in full 1950s Hollywood-Indian-style regalia overtop metro duds, Houle and his buddies brave the streets armed with cellphones and no-foam cappuccinos. In another piece, Terrance, adorned in (only) a loincloth and moccasins, portages a canoe from public fountain to public fountain in downtown Vancouver. The point is clear: it is near-impossible for Aboriginals to negotiate a meaningful relationship with nature in a world of glass and concrete.

And his work isn’t just getting laughs — it’s getting attention. In 2006 he won Calgary’s Enbridge Emerging Artist Award, and last year he was nominated for the Sobey Award, Canada’s most prestigious award for young artists. While most reactions have been positive, there are still some who find his work confusing. Houle laughs as he explains, “for this piece especially, I’ve had a lot of people email saying, ‘This is racist tripe! Artists should know more about Aboriginal people!'” He chuckles at the irony. “For me I find that funny, that I have to email and say, ‘well, in fact I am Native, and I’m very well versed, and these are actually culled from my experience as an Aboriginal person.'”

In the audition room, though, the mood is jovial. One woman shows up laden with props, wearing a dress with braids sewn on the front; another does a “valley girl” impression. A man reads the entire script with a campy, effeminate affectation. Everyone seems to know the films, and most burst into laughter as soon as they finish reading, along with Houle. “I know all these movies. Everyone kind of associates themselves with them. I loved Billy Jack,” Houle says of the 1971 cult classic. “I was like, ‘A kung-fu Indian! How cool is that!’ And then I found out that he wasn’t Indian and I was like, ‘Oh.'” Casting Call serves to right that Hollywood wrong, and is getting Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals alike laughing-and thinking. No easy trick, but one that Houle has mastered.

"Sitting Bed" (2006) by Life of a Craphead. Photo courtesy the artists.

Amy Lam, left, and Jon McCurley, the "conceptual comedy" duo known as Life of a Craphead.

For Toronto’s “Making Room” art show in 2006, Amy Lam and Jon McCurley—the duo who call themselves Life of a Craphead— erected a bed sitting on a couch. The couch was large and blue and the bed sat as a human would, folded at the waist, with two wooden legs on the ground. It looked comfortable. On a sign nearby, hand-written, as if the bed itself got down on bedposts and springboard to scrawl the words, was the caption “SOMETIMES EVEN I HAVE TO SIT DOWN.”

“It’s supposed to be funny,” Lam says of their work. McCurley nods. “But the first couple of shows, people just didn’t laugh.”

Today, Lam and McCurley are one of Toronto’s most sought-after installation-, performance-, and conceptual-art teams. They have appeared everywhere from rock clubs to abandoned factories, hoity-toity galleries to Hollywood’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. In Toronto’s Chinatown, Life of a Craphead offered a “Free Lunch,” giving away everything on the menu; in Montreal they sat in a church basement, selling $40 “laughter-treated” wood.

Life of a Craphead call themselves a “conceptual comedy duo,” but their work by any other name would be as funny. “Someone from a gallery will ask us to perform at it as performance artists or as installation artists,” McCurley explains, “but someone from the comedy world will ask us to perform [as comedians], or someone from the theatre world will ask us to do a play.”

They met at Canzine in 2004, each there with their own projects. The following year, the duo performed their first comedy set together for the Drake Hotel’s Joke Club night. As they chow down on eggplant curry, their chemistry is palpable: conversing in gentle punchlines, a string of sympathetic giggles, and each peeping through enormous granny glasses.

Whereas Lam has lived in Hong Kong, Calgary, Waterloo, and Montreal, McCurley has known only Ontario, growing up in Mississauga before spending a “year of hell” at Queen’s and then OCAD. Life of a Craphead’s first joke involved boxes of books taken from the house of McCurley’s parents, who had recently moved. “We pulled [them] out on stage and then we went offstage and played Beethoven,” McCurley says. “And nobody laughed. After that we brought out a dog on a cinderblock and we let him loose, with Beethoven. And nobody laughed.”

“And that was the first joke ever,” Lam sadly intones. In their earliest routines, they avoided addressing the audience directly—trying “not to do the things that stand-up comedians usually do.” But as they began to do more “fine” art events, the context changed. “The popular notion of performance art is ‘It could be anything! There are no limits,’” Lam says.

“Comedy’s expectations are different and much more clear,” McCurley continues. “You’re going to go in and you’re going to laugh at these jokes.”

"Laughter Treated Wood" (dates vary) from New Thing Travelling Show by Life of a Craphead. Photo courtesy the artists.

Life of a Craphead’s work began to test the relationship between performance art and comedy, artworks and jokes, often while occupying or reshaping public spaces. In 2007, the pair illegally sawed “musical lines” into Yonge Street—trenches that would play “music,” or rather a brief coughing sound, when cars drove over. More recently, they crashed their own gallery show— engineering a fake wedding party that seemed to sabotage a play at its climax. “Wise art people, who have a handle on things, were tricked,” McCurley gloats. “They asked, ‘How did they do that? Why did they do that?’”

But it’s the arbitrary, self-organized events that most tickle Life of a Craphead: their show at an abandoned truck factory; their proposed “stress ramp” for frustrated Torontonians to jump into Lake Ontario; taking a saw to the road outside Future Shop. “It’s more important to do something with people here than to impress people who don’t exist over there,” McCurley says. “If it gets busted by the police, then no one cares. ‘Oh well! Everyone goes home!’ But if it works, it’s like—‘I can’t believe it’s happening! This is amazing!’ Then it’s like heaven. Nothing else matters. This here is the best place to be.”

Michelle Williams as Wendy in Kelly Reichardt's 'Wendy and Lucy.' Courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.

In cinematic terms, the Great Depression is arguably best represented by Mervyn LeRoy’s 1932 classic I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Wrongfully convicted of robbery, First World War veteran James Allen is sentenced to 10 years on a chain gang. He eventually manages to flee and build a new life, only to be recaptured five years later. Asked how he survives as a fugitive, Allen whispers, “I steal.” While chain gangs have mostly been abolished, recent events have proven that no era is safe from the punishment of economic depression. Years of corporate greed and irresponsibility have led to a stock-market slump and a new crop of fiscal casualties that recall James Allen. But the character’s true 21st century successor is a young woman named Wendy.

Kelly Reichardt. Photo courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy (now available on DVD) stars Michelle Williams as a drifter who is driving cross-country on her way to Alaska to work in a cannery. As bad luck would have it, Wendy’s car breaks down in small-town Oregon and she is forced to hang around waiting for it to get fixed. Meanwhile, her only companion, a dog named Lucy, suddenly goes AWOL. Wendy spends her days calling the local kennel, sleeping in her car, showering in gas-station toilets, and watching her savings dwindle.

Normally a striking blond, Williams was de-glamorized for the role of Wendy. The actress drifts through each scene sporting short brown hair, scrubbed skin, and asexual clothing.

In opposition to Williams’ conspicuousness, Wendy is almost invisible—a decision, Reichardt says, that was inspired by the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Despite the levees breaking and scores of residents dying, New Orleans was incapable of getting the attention of the Bush administration after disaster hit in 2005. Reichardt and frequent collaborator Jon Raymond wrote Wendy and Lucy with New Orleans’ disenfranchised in mind.

“Jon and I were musing on the idea of having no net—how do you get out of your situation totally on your own without help from the government?” Reichardt told Bomb magazine last year. “There’s a certain kind of help that society will give and a certain help it won’t give.” In Wendy’s case, help arrives in one form only—a gregarious Walgreen’s security guard. The silver-haired drugstore warden scolds Wendy for sleeping in her car, but then lends her his phone to call the kennel about her missing dog. Later, he secretly hands his new friend some money before he departs.

“Your crop died, but my crop is enough to feed both of us. That was the American Dream,” Reichardt said recently in an interview with SpoutBlog. The filmmaker considers the lack of help now offered to people like Wendy an example of the American Dream “devolving.”

Like the train-hopping itinerants and nomadic workers of the 30s, Wendy is forced by an economic depression to live off society’s grid. In Wendy and Lucy, the fragility of such a life is underscored by Wendy’s gender and the fact that, besides her dog, she has no social net. According to Reichardt, even Lucy offers her only a “false sense of security.” The retriever is too small to protect Wendy from danger; in fact, the dog does her more harm than good. Without Lucy, Wendy would be free to pursue her own path, instead of spending her pennies on dog food and her time searching for the runaway. When Wendy is faced with the possibility of losing her companion, it is no doubt gut-wrenching, but it is also a relief. Like James Allen before her, Wendy has finally jimmied her way out of her shackles. We can only hope—for our sake as well as hers—that the future is less bleak than her predecessor’s.

Watch the trailer for Wendy and Lucy: