Freeland, Cynthia A. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.

In Chapter 4 of The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror, Freeland offers a feminist interpretation of Stoker’s novel, Dracula, and three of its film incarnations, including Browning’s Dracula (1931). She focuses on the sexual transformation of Dracula and the changing nature of his evil through his incarnations in these works.

This section of the book is ordered chronologically and charters the evolution of Dracula through Stoker’s original novel Dracula (1897), Browning’s Dracula (1931), Badham’s Dracula (1979), and Coppola’s Dracula (1992). In the novel, as in Nosferatu, Dracula is unremittingly evil, symbolized by his ugly, disgusting appearance, hairy palms and nostrils, and bad breath. He is an abomination of nature, a thing that causes revulsion and disgust. Freeland asserts that, for this Dracula, “the threat of gender transgression lurks amid scenes of erotic abnormality and rape.” She compares this Dracula to Browning’s, noting Dracula’s transformation into a “sex icon with continental flair.” Perhaps this sort of Dracula was more appealing to contemporary audiences. The nature of this Dracula’s evil was primarily that of a sexual threat and male predator, not that of the intrinsically foul. Freeland goes on to analyze more recent films, in which Dracula is increasingly portrayed in a sympathetic light and with a greater depth of character.

Because this article takes a methodological approach, it is not very accessible for the average film scholar. It also talks about trends as a whole, leaving out the detailed scene analyses that those interested in films often enjoy. But the article does a good job of trying to examine what the medium of film might have to say about our culture, and its strength lies in its ability to offer empirical evidence of trends, such as an explosion of romantic comedies in the 1990s, as opposed to individual examples. In this way, we can look at the trends of particular decades. When Sabrina was released, in the 1950s, for example, romantic drama was more popular than romantic comedy, a reversal of what is currently true. Other subsets that are popular now, such as teen romances or romances that feature supernatural elements (like 1990's Ghost), were nearly nonexistent in the 1950s.

The study also found that cultural conditions have effectively killed many formerly popular plotlines of romance movies. Couples in different classes, for example, no longer offer a "convincing dramatic impediment." Movies that feature these aging romantic conventions," then, can only remain popular today as "relics of an earlier era." This statement serves to justify Sabrina's ongoing popularity despite its perhaps hard-to-swallow plotline. All in all, romantic films, even the current ones, do continue to reinforce some of the more conservative romantic tendencies in our culture, namely the importance of marriage and fidelity, and this has not changed since the days when Sabrina was released.

All three versions have the same essential Cinderella story skeleton. The "Cinderella" terminology that is often used in describing them is not quite apt, however, because the character of Sabrina is self-reliant and never depends on a man to save her. How strong she is does vary from version to version, though.

Wood argues that in the original play, Sabrina is autonomous, politically active, and well-educated. She returns from Paris not because she is in love with David Larrabee, but to escape a marriage proposal that she doesn't want to be tied down to. She doesn't need to be rescued, and her relationship with Linus becomes one of mutual companionship. Gender and class issues are sidestepped when Sabrina declares herself as self-supporting and her chauffer father comes into a windfall of money.

In the play's original adaptation for the screen, Wilder and his associates conceived Sabrina as a teenager in puppy love. Though her time in Paris leaves her sophisticated, this Sabrina is not educated or assertive, like her predecessor, and becomes an object to be passed between the Larrabee brothers. She chooses Linus, in the end, because she wanted to care for him. Wood argues that this allows the movie to become "a dark study of gender," because "Sabrina feels strongest when she is helpful to others, when she denies her own needs and desires." Wood refers to the theories of developmental psychologist Nancy Chodorow, which state that while boys develop intimacy problems, girls learn to doubt their identities. This can lead to passivity and vulnerability to manipulation in women like Sabrina.

Wood reasons that the 1995 film version, while not without problems, is instilled with better representations of gender politics. The Sabrina character is in the fashion industry, less domestic than cooking, and while in Paris she "finds herself." This autonomous description is at odds with her actions, though, as she still displays a tendency towards caretaking.

All three versions are at fault because class and gender problems disappear without explanation during the happy ending. The film versions, though, let Sabrina be manipulated by men and lose her own identity.  Wood's analysis of the role of gender in the play and films gives readers a way to understand these ingrained cultural messages, rather than just consuming the film as entertainment.

Director John Whitesell literalizes tropes of gender and racial identity confusion in his Big Momma's House 2, which meditates upon the nuanced difficulties of existing in society as an obese African-American woman, while in reality being a skinny black man. Martin Lawrence plays Malcolm "Big Momma" Turner, a humble FBI agent whose passion for national security motivates his subtextual fascination with cross-dressing as a 250+ pound, festively patterned muumuu-sporting woman.

To appeal to a wider audience, Whitesell has ingeniously pitched Big Momma's House 2 as mind-numbing comedy, pregnant with redundantly inappropriate and awkward quips and gags. However, Big Momma House 2's purportedly feather-light farce grapples with many a complex and politically-charged question regarding the role racial minority cross-dressing plays in contemporary American culture.

Martin Lawrence's dual identity as an ambitious young sharp-shooting National Security agent, driven by his unremitting patriotism to go incognito as an elderly corpulent female, provokes comparisons between his two radically different personae. In doing so, it raises an interesting question: how does our society corner successful young black men into performing absurd self-caricatures in order to be embraced by mainstream culture?

By challenging us to laugh at our own violent and repressive racial and sexual stereotyping, Big Momma's House 2 instigates important cultural conversations regarding America's deep-rooted societal prejudices: have these bigotries really evolved since the Civil Rights Movement, or have they just been transformed and made less recognizable?

The film suggests that if we can allow ourselves to reflect openly and honestly upon these questions and anxieties, instead of displacing them onto a grossly caricatured 250+ pound African-American woman, perhaps we can also preclude the culmination of a Big Momma's House trilogy.

website for Maori Karmael Holmes director of Scene Not Heard (ihouse link)

"Unlike many other film criticism collections, which concentrate on the representation of a particular group or genre, this volume collects a range of writings on a number of very different and specific topics and links them together through the rubric of gender. Pomerance (sociology, Ryerson Polytechnic Univ., Toronto) has divided the book into three main areas: gender in non-American films, gender as coded through actions, and transgressive representations of gender that are held up as "paragons or pariahs." While the range of topics makes the volume difficult to pin down conceptually, the essays are, for academic work, quite readable. This collection is unusual enough to warrant a spot in most academic libraries with collections devoted to film studies or gender issues." (Library Journal, 05/01/2001, Vol. 126 Issue 8, p88)