Indoctrination in the Dark
After Brett Kavanaugh cited movies from the 80’s in his Confirmation hearing, I looked back on the movies we'd grown up on to see what attitudes and behaviors they were modeling for us. What I found were a lot of movies where in scene after scene a woman's protests, feelings, wants, were disregarded, overridden, overpowered or ignored.
And the plot lines rolled out accordingly, all kinds of heinous male behavior directed at women was rewarded. At the end of this "Meatballs" movie, these two, they’re a couple.
I began to think of us as trained. As Indoctrinated in the Dark.
Here, in "Meatballs", as I often did in this series, I juxtapose the common, innocent doodles of girlhood daydreams, here it’s the palette of rainbows, against the harsher reality of the world that girls grow up to face, a world where they are asked to laugh at and ultimately love and participate in these kinds of behaviors that demean them, ignore them or worse.