There was a movie about a train in a frozen world. Snowpiercer? That was one of the more direct and visual references to Omelas that I've seen.

I figure people can read/watch/comment at their leisure through the month of September. Ideally responding to other comments that are there already, then hopefully revisit this thread at the end of September once everyone has posted just to see conversations that might not have been there when you posted. I will link this thread in next months thread and encourage people to revisit it and see if any new comments have been added since they last checked. Hopefully it's mostly wrapped up by the end of September, but there's nothing stopping people from visiting this far after that. I will try to respond to all top level comments so people know someone is engaging with their ideas, even if they respond after the designated month. I imagine the earlier comments will get more traction, but I'll at least read them all regardless.

Right? It's relatively short and in my opinion unfortunately eternally relevant, so I hope it'll encourage more participation! Excited to see people's takes.

Not sure why you're being so hard on yourself, no one is required to enjoy any particular piece of media. Your perspective on the so-called queer metaphor is especially valuable.

I didn't like it either. To be fair, I am not the right audience for it. I don't care for cartoons in general, because I don't like frantic motion or loud/irritating voices. This wasn't the worst movie for those, but not great. I didn't realize that Golden song was from this movie. I've had to skip it multiple times on Spotify because I hate the singer's voice.

That creator's comment about girls with pot-bellies is hilarious given how skinny those girls were drawn. I appreciated that they were enthusiastic eaters, but they have ridiculous proportions. There's nothing wrong with skinny bodies, but there is zero body diversity among the female characters. We got one fat character, a man who was comic relief.

Did no one find it weird that they were singing about how demons deserve to die, and everyone in that world thought "demons" were a metaphor for lousy romantic partners - and they were all ok with this song about murdering people?

It's so interesting that you came away from it thinking it is not feminist due to the emotions and sexualization. I felt like that almost made it a "better" feminist work. Showing these powerful women also being emotionally available to one another was empowering, or as empowering as a commercialized and fictionalized portrayal can be. The same about them showing sexual interest. So many strong confident women are shown to be "too cool" and exude a detached style when it comes to romance, so I really liked the way that it humanized them and allowed them to be both powerful and sexual beings, without being sexualized. It wasn't quite a role reversal, but obviously the men were being sexualized by them and it didn't take away from their ability to fight them.

You mention this concept of femme phobia and the recycling of tropes, but also that you view the bathhouse and abs scenes as not feminist.  I would suggest that one of the differentiating factors here between characters like Buffy or generic superheroes is this willingness to be overtly emotional and obviously interested in sexuality. They are able to just say "oh, I find him attractive!" and not have that take away from their perceived power or confidence. 

To a certain extent I can see how this might fit into some people's personal experience with their gender identity or sexuality, but I agree with you that it does not resonate that way for me.

I'm really sorry to hear that the movie left you feeling that way. I would agree with you that there wasn't anything particularly novel about the premise or the "lesson", but I did still find it a fun watch. I think for a movie that was probably predominantly aimed at children, it was the appropriate level of complex, but it obviously lacked the nuance necessary to address these topics for a more experienced adult audience. I don't think that you are missing anything, or failing to draw necessary conclusions. Obviously, I can't speak to your experience, but I do try to meet works where they are at. This one probably hit the mark for its target audience, but you might prefer something more mature in its tone and theme. Unfortunately, I don't think the runtime of a standard movie will be able to deliver a message that is coherent and conclusive and not be able to be boiled down to platitudes, especially if it is aimed towards a younger audience. For what it's worth, I find myself feeling more or less the way that you described when it comes to anime in general. I have watched a few that people referred to as the best of all time and talk about how impactful it was on their life and their outlook, but I really just don't see it. It might just be that the genre or style of this work did not vibe with you. 

I'm not sure if you didn't mention it because You didn't have anything to say, or you would just prefer not to read it, but if you are looking for something more ambiguous and intellectually challenging, the suggested book can be read in less time than it would take to watch the movie, and might be more substantive for you. You don't have to justify not reading it, plenty of reasons not to, I just don't know of any movie that would satisfy that itch off the top of my head in a way that the book did. If I think of/come across one, I will let you know. 

PS: the tangents videos you suggested have heavily influence my reading and analysis this past month. I refer to a few in my comment.Can't stress enough how much I appreciate the suggestion. I tried to binge them all this month before posting, but fell short. I'll definitely have them finished by next month. 

So glad to hear it's helping you cross something off your list! Excited to read your thoughts!

Glad to see it's making peoples to read list shorter rather than longer lol. Excited to read your thoughts on it!

Im going to make some fiction book recommendations. I have no idea how readily available they are. I have found all of these at some libraries, but ymmv.

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

Connie Ramos, a woman in her mid-thirties, has been declared insane. But Connie is overwhelmingly sane, merely tuned to the future, and able to communicate with the year 2137. As her doctors persuade her to agree to an operation, Connie struggles to force herself to listen to the future and its lessons for today....

This was published in 1976, and the abuse the MC suffers in the present-day asylum is a tough read. But the utopian visits are very interesting.

The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk

An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression.

This one has the utopia situated next to the distopia and character perspectives move back and forth between them. I never finished this one, due to circumstances at the time, nothing against the book.

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore

Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination.

Maybe all the more interesting because of how dated it is.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

Aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn't agree, they may need to be saved by force.

Most of the world is still distopic, but our heroes live in a socialist community that feels like it could really work. They have a very interesting dynamic with the aliens.

Last Woman Standing by Winona LaDuke

A powerful and poignant novel tracing the lives of seven generations of Anishinaabe (O)bwe/Chippewa).'...an impressive fiction debut....skillfully intertwines social history. oral myth and character study...."

It's been so long, I don't remember the storyline to this one. Just that the very beginning read like traditional folklore, but the main part of the book was like a normal novel; and that I really enjoyed it at the time.

For a movie, how about Thelma and Louise?

If Omelas feels like a deeply philosophical, scalpel-precise bludgeoning to the feels, unsettling in its profound moral ambiguity and its unflinching stare at US and our culpability in a system we are an intrinsic part of, my suggestion for the next book will instead be a sledgehammer to the face wielded by a laughing maniac shouting "SEE WHAT I DID THERE?!". Because I propose The Power by Naomi Alderman as the follow-up work. Let's not just discuss a feminist text. Let's strap in and explore a world gone mad with it and see what breaks.

The premise is deceptively simple. It's the literalization of thousands of "what ifs" crammed into one: What if, overnight, women and girls worldwide develop the sudden biological ability to generate and wield electrical jolts from their bodies. They can electrocute people at will, in short. The power dynamic of the entire planet, from geopolitical stage to bedroom, is inverted overnight.

Alderman, however, being a protege of Atwood, is not interested in simple revenge fantasy. This is not utopia she presents. It's a brutal, but gripping (and profoundly uncomfortable!) exploration of a single question: What happens when the powerless suddenly become the powerful? Do they build a better world, or do they just become The Who's "new bosses"?

This is an unflinching allegory for how power corrupts. Full. Stop. It viciously dissects gender, violence, and hierarchy, but doesn't do it with Le Guin's razor-sharp scalpel. It does so with a live wire connected to the mains. Are the horrors of life intrinsic to something inherent in men ... or something inherent in the very nature of power itself?

This is a book that will make you cheer one moment, then recoil in horror the next. Often this happens on the same page. Sometimes in the same sentence. This is no subtle Daoist trap, a scintillating intellectual jewel that cuts you open with its sharp edges to reveal what was inside you all along. This is a visceral, adrenalized thought experiment and yet, for that—perhaps because of that—it may be the most honest and challenging books about systemic power ever written.

If we go with this book, here are some questions we could discuss:

• Alderman inverts the world. Does she recreate patriarchy with a different face ("meet the new boss, same as the old boss") or does she reveal something new about its architecture?
• There is a lot of violence in the book. Is it justified as a correction, or is she indicting human nature?
• The book is framed intriguingly as a "historical novel" written by a male author thousands of years into the future. Does this metafictional twist reframe anything in the rest of the book?
• Is this book hopeful or despairing?

I'd like to suggest something most people have never heard of for the next movie: Certain Women, directed by Kelly Reichardt. It's a vignette film of interlocked women's lives. The stories are the kinds of stories that are not deemed sufficiently dramatic for film by most, yet Reichardt creates a compelling feminist tapestry through realism and empathy.

This lacks the bombast of the usual suspects for feminist film, but for that it is probably the most weirdly engaging (possibly because of the lack of bombast).

Edited to add:

https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/certain-women

A list of places to watch it. And of course there's always the 🏴‍☠️ way.

Some questions I'd suggest for this one, if it's picked, are:

• Everybody knows about the "male gaze" in cinema. What is the gaze in this film?
• How is the theme of quiet desperation and isolation communicated across the three different primary characters of the film? How is it resolved (or is it even resolved)?
• Is the atmosphere of the film oppressive ... or is it perhaps more a full-blown character in the film with its own arc?
• The ending of this film is (in)famously enigmatic. What does it mean to you?

for October's book, maybe Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

for October's movie, maybe In Fabric?

Wow! I didn't want to read anybody's comments prior to posting my own in case it would interfere with what I took away from it as a standalone text, but this is such great and interesting information.

Though in my comment I somewhat argued that it is not a fully feminist work, I definitely understand how it was written by a feminist and how that affected the content of it. I had no idea that she was a Daoist. I would be really interested to hear how that would affect her prescription for the way to "solve" the issue at the heart of the work. Obviously no solution is offered, but does she just consider it unsolvable at its very core? Are we all doomed to perpetuate injustice onto others until the end of time? I also understood it to be at least somewhat critical of those leave, and I had drawn a parallel between that and the 4B movement, with some obvious caveats. I wonder if removing yourself from the system while still somewhat participating in it as in the 4B movement would be viewed as better or worse from her perspective.  on the one hand, you are continuing to exist within the current framework, yet on the other hand you are rebelling against the framework and showing others something to emulate.

Thank you for that detailed history. It really adds additional layers to the work. 

Coming in clutch with formatting help again. Thank you! For what it's worth I didn't even think about trying to format it as a list, I just used the dashes for clarity, but I will edit it now since actually appearing as a list would be more helpful! Thank you for the information.

I figure we would all just check back here at the end of the month (right now for me) and respond to comments that piqued our interest or prompted us to engage. I didn't want to coax anyone to a second location lol. This is potentially not be best format, but at the moment I don't know that a discord is needed. If it becomes something people really want to do, maybe after three or four successful months we can look into it. I don't want to set up that infrastructure if that's not generally wanted or if this is unlikely to be consistent. That is a great suggestion though.