Saturday 25th April 2026
Blog Page 872

A gendered rewatching of The Silence of the Lambs

Angelica De Vido
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A gendered rewatching of The Silence of the Lambs

FBI agent Clarice Starling enters a race against time to catch serial killer ‘Buffalo Bill’ in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Twenty five years after winning the ‘Big Five’ at the Oscars, this film remains a landmark cinematic achievement.

Demme immediately posits Clarice (an outstanding Jodie Foster) as a brave, strong, and resourceful protagonist – the film opens with her powering onto the screen as she tackles an assault course. Indeed, despite the vulnerability suggested by Foster’s petite frame, Clarice is tough, underlined through Demme’s close-up of her hands as she climbs over obstacles. Rather than the sexualised images of the female body that routinely dominate cinema, Demme instead showcases female power, and establishes how the film will relentlessly rewrite the dominant gendered characterisations of the action genre.

Clarice uses this resilience to navigate the FBI, which is immediately established as a ‘macho’ domain through the sign on the assault course that reads, “hurt, agony, pain: love it!” Demme repeatedly underlines Clarice’s status as outsider and intruder in this masculine world by framing her alone alongside male colleagues, all of whom tower over her and scrutinise her through their gaze.

Indeed, one extraordinary element of Demme’s direction is his use of extreme close-up point-of view shots, to foreground Clarice’s obectification. As men leer at Clarice, the audience is also forced to become a victim of the assessing and objectifying viewpoint, a position that male viewers are rarely placed in, in society and in Hollywood cinema, which subsequently highlights the subtle, yet relentless ways in which patriarchal society exerts sexual pressures on women. It is these barriers that Clarice forcefully overcomes over the course of the film.

These extreme close-up, point-of view shots are at some of their most powerful and memorable during Clarice’s interviews with Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), theinfamous cannibal psychiatrist who becomes her unlikely aid in the hunt for Buffalo Bill. Their first meeting is one of cinema’s greats, as Clarice boldly confronts Lecter’s gaze, causing him to blink and look away first.

From its unforgettable characterisations of Clarice, Lecter and Buffalo Bill, to its innovative camerawork and thrilling plot, over 25 years later, Silence of the Lambs remains unsurpassed in the action genre. As Lecter tells Clarice, “the world’s a more interesting place with you in it,” and the same resoundingly applies to Demme’s masterpiece.

The late Mr Salinger deserves his enduring reputation

Barney Pite
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The late Mr Salinger deserves his enduring reputation

J. D. Salinger’s seminal The Catcher in the Rye has a bit of a reputation – beloved of all teenage boys with parental issues and bad hair, Catcher is something you’re meant to grow out of, like My Chemical Romance or nitrous oxide.

This reputation is helped neither by the fact that Salinger withdrew to a house in Cornish, in upstate New Hampshire, unable to cope with the mania that people brought to his book, and that Mark Chapman presented his copy to the police after he shot John Lennon. Now, 60 years on, The Catcher in the Rye, and what the novel might imply, is as important as ever.

But this is a reputation which Catcher only partly deserves. Holden Caulfield isn’t just a whiney teenage boy with a penchant for self-pity, he’s an expertly drawn character – grief struck at the death of his brother and traumatised by the harsh realities of the adult world. What makes Catcher so sad is that Holden is spectacularly unable to vocalise any of the problems that plague him. He admits late on in the novel the extent of the sexual abuse he’s suffered, without putting into words exactly what it is he’s had to go through: “That kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can’t stand it.” Yet he is totally unable to recognise why he does what he does. Following the death of his brother Allie, he breaks all the windows in his garage “just for the hell of it”.

In a modern environment defined by economic and social uncertainty, the image of Holden, cut adrift and lost, has a kind of sad relevance. JD Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, six years after the end of the Second World War, in which he fought, on D Day and in the Battle of the Bulge.

Salinger saw more combat than Vonnegut and Heller combined, but he writes a novel with no explicit reference to the war. Yet the war influences this novel intensely – Salinger must have felt that the consumerist and capitalist world to which he was returning had been irreparably changed and he must, like Holden, have constantly questioned his place in it. War does this to people and societies. A. J. P. Taylor wrote that the 20th century begun not in 1900 but on the first day of the Somme. Salinger might have similarly have felt that his society had lost its innocence.

Catcher is certainly a novel obsessed with childhood and its end. The Catcher in the Rye is the one root from which teen literature has sprung. But more than that, it is a novel that encapsulates something central about our modern world. We live in uncertain times, and Catcher depicts someone trying, through it all, to cope.

A beastly tale of life and death

Josephine Southon
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A beastly tale of life and death

A foreboding wooded labyrinth where destinies are altered and lives transformed… Sound familiar? Like something from a dream? Or perhaps a nightmare? For many children, the Grimms’ forested fairytale world allows imaginations to roam free, uninhibited by the restrictions of daily life. But don’t be fooled. In fairytales, nothing is as seems.

To cross the threshold into the old German forest, to wander along its mysterious snaking paths, amongst enchanted towering trees, is to succumb to its remorseless authority. In the face of imminent peril, the Grimms present Man’s contradictory, and often brutal, relationship with nature as a paradigm for the ruthlessness and vulnerability of human life.

Take a fairytale character’s interaction with the forest animals. At times they are feared by man, as in The Skilled Hunter – “when evening came he seated himself in a high tree in order to escape from the wild beasts”. At others they fear man, as in Strong Hans – “wherever they went the wild beasts were terrified, and ran away from them”. Others still, they are comforted by his presence, as in Snow White and Rose Red – “no beasts did them any harm, but came close to them”.

But for the Grimms, an amicable encounter with a woodland creature is hardly sufficient grounds for heroic triumph. In primitive territory, the protagonist is stripped of basic necessities in the ultimate test of survival, often through means of hunger: “In his madness he ran into the forest and must have died there of hunger, for no one has ever either seen him or heard of him again” (The Two Travellers); “They always got deeper into the forest, and if help did not come soon, they would die of hunger and weariness” (Hansel and Gretel).

The Grimms’ ultimate message is that, if death is at the heart of nature, then it resides at the core of human life also. The tales were not an escape from reality but rather a reflection of it, this battleground of beast against beast in a brutal test of survival paralleling the rampant individualism of capitalism, and the world in which the Grimms lived.

So next time you decide to take a jolly-old stroll through a German forest, think about the consequences. Or take a map.

Those Who Follow review – “an appreciation of some too often ignored parts of this city we all call home”

Matthew Roberts
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Those Who Follow review – “an appreciation of some too often ignored parts of this city we all call home”

The main exhibition at the Ashmolean this term, Imagining the Divine, has already had rave reviews up and down the media landscape, from this student publication to the heady heights of The Guardian, so I will presume that you’ve already been to see it. However there is also another, smaller exhibition opening this week, with considerably less fanfare than its grandiose sibling, but equally affecting and important. Those Who Follow (open until 20th March 2018 in the Ionnau Centre on St Giles) is a simple collection of photographs, with a very simple goal. Unlike Imagining the Divine, which seeks to explore the material culture of world religions over the course of a millennium, Those Who Follow serves as a simple record of religious observances in modern day Oxford.

The pictures themselves are somehow quotidian, and yet hauntingly beautiful. Thirteen places of worship are displayed, representing the five major world religions also included in Imagining the Divine. There are two photographs for each building, an exterior and an interior – very rarely do these two pictures intersect quite as we’d expect. To this end, they interrogate our expectations of sacred space – how do we know that a building serves a religious function? A semi-detached house on the Abingdon Road transpires to be the permanent home of a Buddhist Vihara, with large statues depicting the Buddha filling what appears to be a bay-windowed living room. Another former residential house serves as the Quakers meeting House on St Gile’s – the appearance or feeling of domesticity here playing a vital role in the religious meanings it hosts. Similarly the innocuous exterior of the Rosehill Community Centre transformed with red and white fabrics into a transient setting for Hindu worship. As a nation we are so used to thinking about the permanent contexts for religious observance, stone and brick, centuries of religious continuity – understanding other forms of worship, which don’t benefit from, or actively reject, this kind of permanence is eye opening, and must play a role in making our society a more welcoming place.

The pictures are resolutely and defiantly emblems of ‘town’, as opposed to ‘gown’ – we fall into an easy trap of interacting with Oxford, and its representations, as presented to us through the stream of geo-tagged churches and colleges – how many pictures have you seen of the Rad Cam, Tom Tower, or St Mary’s? In some senses this is an inevitable product of a town so reliant on transient inhabitants – students that appear for 8 weeks and then vanish, or the coach loads of thousands of tourists than pass through every day during the summer months. This creates an artificial and lingering feeling of novelty around these ‘highlights’ of Oxford’s built environment – the famous locations that your extended family expect to be shown when you finally invite them for dinner. However, as a result of this rhythmic perpetuation of novelty, our roots are prevented from growing deeper into the built environment – this makes this exhibition all the more important, because it forces us to look at the liminal and the peripheral spaces within this city, and interact more earnestly with the religious lives of the people that actually live here as opposed to the places that tens of thousands pass through.

The photos themselves, taken by Arturo Soto, a fine art DPhil student, hold a wonderful feeling of immanent, and to some extent imminent, worship. There are no people in any of the images, so the spaces seem crying out to be filled with their congregations, to fulfil their purpose. This reflects a theme in the exhibition in the Ashmolean of the divine depicted through absence – the powerful statement made when we present the Buddha by his footprint, or even Jesus through an empty and expectant throne. Just like these artefacts, Those Who Follow make the bold claim that the act of worship itself is in some sense unrepresesentable, and that any attempt would simply do a disservice to the transcendent and complex reality of the practice of faith. A picture taken at a certain angle, at a certain moment in the act of worship could never do justice to the totality of that place of worship. The colour red acts as a striking unifying feature across the pictures of the different spaces. Red is often utilized intentionally within the material accoutrements of worship, but is also caught in mundane, incidental and accidental details such as the sign of the Pizza Hut on George Street (above which is the permanent home of the Oxford Chabad Society). Ultimately the feeling that these images create a cohesive thread between a plurality of faiths, ranging from the Christian Life Centre in a converted cinema, to the flying-buttressed Gothic-Revival traditionalism of the Cowley Road Methodists, brings some hope that a society built on religious freedom and diversity can succeed and thrive.

Curators Dominic Dalglish and Stephanie Lenk should be immensely proud of what they have achieved with this exhibition, which asks important questions about where and why we worship. You should visit it, whether you are of any faith or none, simply to think about how the buildings we spend our lives in affect us, and to appreciate some too often ignored parts of this city we all call home.

Confessions of a Drama Queen: The Final Showdown

Katie Sayer
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Confessions of a Drama Queen: The Final Showdown

Due to some unfortunate pacing and the weird numeric system of recording time at Oxford, you’re just going to have to take my word for it that two weeks have passed since I was last outlawed to my room in shame.

Apologies for the incompetent temporal dissonance, but let me tell you – these have possibly been the most dramatic two weeks of my existence.

I successfully transformed my tragedy of a life into a ten-minute stand-up set for The Oxford Revue, complete with a dramatic power ballad, interpretive tap dance, and comedic series of Welsh accents, and it was all going brilliantly.

I even made it into the new show. I thought I heard someone say “quota”, but I must have misheard. They must have said “quinoa”. There are a lot of vegans at Oxford.

Lo and behold, the day of the show came, and I was just recounting the tragic tale of how thespian Jacob cruelly rejected me and initiated a restraining order.

Naturally, I had added in a few comic details, mostly about him having syphilis, when I looked up at the audience, and of course, who should be in the front row? It was, of course, the treacherous ex-love-of-my-life… who had phoned the police. The restraining order had technically been violated.

How we women must suffer for our art.

Now all I have left is my minor role as a cannibal pot plant, and my small-time position as a reviewer for Cherwell. I hear they’re recruiting for new stage editors, which is probably for the best – whoever allowed this column to run for eight weeks is clearly incompetent.

Apparently the deadline is next Thursday at 12pm? I might check it out. I can think of worse ways to spend a term than editing a minor sub-section. Until the second curtain call – adieu, fair reader.

Heretical text of Jesus’ brother found in Oxford

Greg Ritchie
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Heretical text of Jesus’ brother found in Oxford

The first original Greek copy of a heretical Christian writing, which describes Jesus’ secret teachings to his brother James, has been discovered in Oxford.

The discovery, made by Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau of the University of Texas at Austin, is particularly significant because it was previously thought that only Coptic translations of the apocryphal Gospel still existed.

“To say that we were excited once we realized what we’d found is an understatement,” Dr Smith, an assistant professor of religious studies at UTA, said in a statement. “We never suspected that Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James survived from antiquity. But there they were, right in front of us.”

The ancient manuscript, written in the fifth or sixth century, describes secret revelations made by Jesus to his brother James about the heavenly realm and future events. These include Jesus telling James that they are both predestined to die violently, though he stresses that death is nothing to be feared.

“The text supplements the biblical account of Jesus’ life and ministry by allowing us access to conversations that purportedly took place between Jesus and his brother, James — secret teachings that allowed James to be a good teacher after Jesus’ death,” Smith said.

Such apocryphal writings fell outside the canonical boundaries set by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his “Easter letter of 367” that defined the 27-book New Testament. This led to the destruction of many ancient apocryphal texts, including copies of the First Apocalypse of James.

“This new discovery is significant in part because it demonstrates that Christians were still reading and studying extra-canonical writings long after Christian leaders deemed them heretical,” Smith said.

Smith and Landau discovered the fragments among the unpublished Oxyrhynchus papyri housed in the Sackler Library at Oxford University, which is owned and overseen by the Egypt Exploration Society.

The collection comprises thousands of papyrus texts from ancient Oxyrhynchus and other sites in Egypt and is the largest collection of papyri in the world.

The First Apocalypse of James fragments were unearthed in 1904/5 from the city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

The team who excavated this site from 1896-1907, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, unearthed upwards of 200,000 papyrus fragments and sent them back to Oxford to await publication. To date, only about 5300 have been published.

Edward Scrivens, Ashmoleon Junior Teaching Fellow, told Cherwell: “This discovery reminds us of the importance of the collections we have here in Oxford. Our libraries and museums contain so much material that we don’t even necessarily know everything that’s in them.

“It’s moments like this that remind those of us who study the past that it can be just as important to ‘excavate’ in the archive as the trench, and to responsibly use and care for what we find there.”

Passion over party in Pasternak’s Russia

Maria Minchenko
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Passion over party in Pasternak’s Russia

Though set against a deeply political backdrop, Doctor Zhivago’s story itself is more like a beautiful, and slightly cheesy, melodrama. The film is based on Boris Pasternak’s novel, which was banned by the Soviet Union, and published independently in Italy in 1957.

It is perhaps a little poignant that the filming rights for Doctor Zhivago were won only a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Carlo Ponti in 1963.

It was released in the West in 1965, and director David Lean was taken aback by the mixed reception. Bosley Crowther complained that the screenplay “reduced the vast upheaval of the Russian Revolution to the banalities of a doomed romance”.

Indeed, civilians being attacked by Cossacks during a peaceful demonstration, or entire villages being burned by Bolshevik forces, fade into the background as Zhivago tries to decide which lady to go for in his love triangle.

Crowther admits, however, that the physical production of the film was phenomenal, and most viewers and critics agreed. Doctor Zhivago won five Oscars and five Golden Globe awards, and is the eighth highest-grossing film of all time in the USA, as of 2016.

The reason behind such reverence for a flawed movie is the quality of the scenery. Even though the movie was mostly filmed in Spain — with actors struggling in their furs in the Spanish heat — Lynn managed to portray the vastness of sights such as the winter steps so well that even Russian audiences were awed.

As a viewer with a Russian background (I emigrated to the UK during my childhood), I couldn’t help but feel bothered by what critics deem ignorant portrayals of Russia. I see now where all the stereotypes come from.

An American director with no access to the USSR couldn’t help his lack of knowledge, of course. Still, I feel bitter when I watch Western adaptations of Russian classics, and I know some Russians feel the same way. Should we, as critic Richard Roud suggests, in response to Doctor Zhivago, collectively decide not to adapt foreign classics?

Nonetheless, Doctor Zhivago is a great movie. I sat down to watch it and found myself absorbed by the stunning camera work and charming details (such as a pony chasing a carriage, or an obnoxious army officer falling into a barrel), even if the history was less accurate and emotional gravity somewhat lacking.

Maybe there is some pleasure to be found in seeing your country through a foreigner’s eyes after all.

SolidariTee: Student activism for global issues

Mouki Kambouroglou
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SolidariTee: Student activism for global issues

Two images spring to mind when I think of student activism: ‘gap yah voluntourists’ and protests outside the Rad Cam. Give me a couple minutes, and I’ll provide you with crisis relief club nights, like Honeyy’s launch at Cellar, or mental health support fundraisers like Bad Rap’s Dance for SANE. There’s no doubt that activism can manifest in many varied ways, and we’re certainly not lacking in opportunities here at Oxford. There is, however, an issue that underpins most forms of ‘aid’, and the refugee crisis highlighted that to me. It’s clear that the well-intended and crucial work of those who spend a month or two in camps like Calais is largely unsustainable – unless the aim is to sustain thousands of people living in plastic jungles.

Last year, Tiara Ataii, a first-year at Cambridge University, set up a charitable initiative named SolidariTee. As a volunteer interpreter herself in Calais, Dessau and Chios, the “legal limbo” she encountered was a cruel shock. She decided to invest her student loan in the making of slogan t-shirts that she then sold around Cambridge, ultimately raising nearly £4000 for Advocates Abroad. At first glance, the concept is a simple fundraiser, similar to any other student fundraising initiative that fleetingly engages the privilege of some for the benefit of others, yet the team managed to organise a photo campaign and a ‘SolidariTee day’ where all those who had purchased a ‘SolidariTee’ wore it. The streets of Cambridge and all its social networks showed unity and support, and the campaign became not only a practical one but one with great sentiment too. In addition to this, the money was sent to a charity that directly helps refugees whilst constantly looking to the future.

Advocates Abroad is an NGO which provides legal representation for refugees in Greece, Italy and Turkey. It’s a team of field and remote lawyers and interpreters from all over the world. Since it began in early 2016, the team has run 120 field missions in four countries to asylum seekers from more than 25 states and nations around the world. Whilst other organisations and independent volunteers vitally distribute the flood of food and clothing donations, Advocates provide legal and non-legal aid for groups or individuals, host information sessions and circulate multilingual ‘know your rights’ leaflets. They respond to, and report, human rights abuses and legal violations, provide support in asylum interviews and encourage appeals, as well as providing court representation for asylum related claims in Greece. Recently, they’ve started a Medical Advocacy Team of doctors, lawyers and interpreters that support patients and ensure they receive the medical attention they are due in public hospitals and clinics in Greece. Essentially, Advocates Abroad fight the long-term issues. It goes without saying that it’d be impossible to do so without the foundation of short-term support provided by those spending their summers volunteering, but in order to progress durable solutions across the board must be guaranteed.

This year, the SolidariTee campaign has spread to universities across the nation. The fundraising concept isn’t novel but it certainly is unique: the design on this year’s T-shirts comes from a meeting between an Afghan man and an Advocates lawyer in Chios. It’s a map of his life; where he was born, where he trained as an army officer, where he was captured by the Taliban. It’s personal, as everything referring to such a horrific humanitarian crisis should be.

Each T-shirt sells for £10, the cost of one night of accommodation for a field lawyer, the cost of 24 hours of potentially life-saving expertise. Advocates, like many similar NGOs, focuses on only a part of the struggle of refugees and asylum seekers. The truth is that without a combination of short term relief and long-term aid there can be no resolution; but we must not lose sight of the ultimate goal no matter how far off it seems, as it can often be closer than we think.

Science fiction that shaped the Revolution

Daniel Villar
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Science fiction that shaped the Revolution

If you had been in Petrograd in 1917, during the first few months of ferment after the Tsar had been expelled and before the new regime had entrenched itself, you would have had the pleasure to encounter scores or brilliant and original theoreticians.

However, none would have been quit as interesting as Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov was a polymath – as a philosophy, physician, politician, and novelist he had gained note. But it was as a novelist that he most aided the Russian Revolution. In his 1908 work of science fiction, Red Star, Bogdanov gave one of the clearest vision of the scientific socialist society which was envisaged by most of the Russian intellectual class during the Russian Revolution.

The story revolves around a mathematician, Leonid, who travels to Mars and discovers how socialism, brought about by technology, has created a utopia. By the end of the novel Leonid returns to earth, and seeing that utopia is possible, enters the revolutionary fray with new vigor.

Bogdanov is often forgotten today, but a century ago he was a close friend of Trotsky and involved in most of the revolutionary movements, in arts, sciences, and politics, which were in the air at the time.

Many Russian scientists and intellectuals were introduced to socialism via Red Star, and although he is little remembered today, the influence of his technologically driven space communistic ideology survives in things as varied as Star Trek and the technology of Richard Stallman.

Makeover Montage

Shamika Tamhane
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Makeover Montage

For me, the makeover montage is the guilty pleasure within the already guilty pleasure of the rom-com, the perfect thing to watch when feeling under the weather in bed and far from glamorous.

The transformation from ugly duckling to sexy swan is seen as far back as fairy tales like Cinderella and remains a common plot line, sometimes accompanied by a desire to change a woman’s behaviour to conform to societal expectations as seen in Pygmalion and The Taming of the Shrew.

This is all deeply problematic when we look at it from our modern, feminist perspective and yet we still enjoy it. Conventions like ‘monobrow removal’ and ‘girl takes off her glasses and she’s suddenly hot’ leave a lot to be desired but seem to reoccur time and time again with little real complaint from their audience.

In its modern form the makeover montage is seen in iconic movies including Grease, Clueless, Mean Girls, and The Devil Wears Prada. The messages of the montages in these movies often seem to be more positive or empowering and less troubling, but there is still the underlying assumption that changing your appearance will help you attract men and, by consequence, success.

Some poor girl is often shown to be assaulted by hairspray and tight clothing in a bid to improve herself and her social standing within high school cliques, the career ladder, or the romantic playing field. As a severely myopic woman I’m most concerned by the way glasses are broken without a second thought.

Can the girl see? Why not insert a section where she puts on some contact lenses so we can all rest easy? It is certainly perplexing that we love watching something that disempowers women and crudely reduces them to their physical appearance. So why do we enjoy it, even when the flaws they remove are ones we have, and can something valuable be taken from the makeover montage?

On a purely superficial note, these montages are fun. Fast paced eyebrow plucking and throwing clothes around coupled with a breezy pop song can never go too wrong. Transitions are made more humorous because no one ever seriously believed that Sandra Bullock (Miss Congeniality) or Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries) are even mildly unattractive. It simply makes for good entertainment watching the frenzied attempts to get a girl ready.

The physical comedy is also pretty good because painful hair removal does have its funny moments. We can relate to pain of a bikini wax and eyebrow plucker. That’s the crux of it- it is all somewhat relatable to our own lives, and to the ritual of getting ready. We recreate our own version of the makeover montage each week before a night out. We cram ourselves into one room sharing gossip, hair straighteners and a bottle of £4 Sauvignon Blanc purchased hastily from Tesco at 9:45pm.

It’s our Cinderella-esque transformation from being hunched over in the library to feeling like a queen  We had similar ceremonies when we were younger – albeit without the Tesco booze run. At sleepovers we painted each other’s nails badly using Miss Sporty glitter nail varnish and put on homemade yoghurt face masks to try and sort out our burgeoning acne. Makeover montages have been and still are a real part of our life.

Beneath the lip gloss, DIY crop tops and haircuts, the makeover montage represents something much more important. Rarely do we see a girl transform herself – the makeover is a social act, a bastion of female friendship. It’s women coming together to talk and trying to empower and help each other. Granted that empowerment shouldn’t come solely from our physical appearance, or at the expense of others’ self esteem, but a flick of mascara can definitely help you feel a little better about yourself.

Perhaps what helps the most is that the recipient of the makeover is surrounded by friends who in their own, sometimes misguided way, are attempting to help. Friendships are built during the montages which are much more significant than a new look.

In film, a makeover montage frequently undercuts its own values before the end credits. For instance, it is Alicia Silverstone’s character in Clueless who needs an internal makeover because of her harsh judgements and prejudice, while Brittany Murphy’s Tai is eventually accepted for who she is. The execution of these montages can definitely feel disempowering but they often come from characters’ good, albeit warped, intentions. We have to dig through the superficiality and layers of makeup in order to find what really matters- the friendships and bonds created through getting dressed up.

Even if the end goal is pleasing a male protagonist, the makeover itself is a distinctly boy-free zone. Now more than ever, it is increasingly important for women to support each other and show kindness and empathy.

Helping a sad friend pick out some shoes is just one step along a path that leads to solidarity and love amongst women and for that the makeover montage is at its core a good thing.

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