Category: Arts and Culture

I have a vagina and this makes me proud. It seems foreign to me to utter these words yet I try to repeat them, or it (vagina), so that it stops feeling so strange to do so.

I began to realize my aversion to the word vagina in my search to find the book The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. For those of you who have not yet heard of this eye-opening look into the forbidden female zone, I guarantee your view of a woman’s body will change – mine certainly did.

The Vagina Monologues is an adaptation of Ensler’s award-winning one-woman show that has been performed around the world. It is a series of humorous and sometimes heart-wrenching stories of women of all ages and races talking about their vaginas.

Ensler sums up the book in her introductory chapter. “Here’s the place to release the myths, shame and fear. Here’s the place to practice saying the word, because as we know, the word is what propels us and sets us free. ‘VAGINA.'”

I had to practice saying the word ‘vagina’ a few times as I searched the bookstores for the little red book with the powerful title. I walked into Indigo Books and the Chapters on St. Catherine Street and immediately found myself seeking the assistance of a female employee for fear of asking a male employee and having one or both of us blush at the request. Both stores were sold out and I grumbled at the prospect of continuing my search and repeating the word ‘vagina.’

I pressed on but chose the telephone method to see test myself and see if this would make the process easier for me. It became easier with each phone call but I did notice that I was guarded each time I asked for the book. I felt myself overcompensating for my discomfort by repeating the title with either an authoritarian tone or a lighthearted whimsical tone as if to convince myself that I was liberated enough to use ‘vagina’ in my everyday language.

My true colors blinded me with their vibrancy when I went to pick up the copy on reserve for me at the Chapters in Pointe-Claire. It was closing time and a line-up up of 10-15 people waited behind me to purchase their politically correct cooking and child-rearing books while I approached the payment counter to ask for my reserved book.

The girl at the counter asked me my name and I fearlessly told her. She walked about 15 feet away to search for my book and then realized she needed the name of the book. As she asked me for the book name, my fearlessness quickly dissipated as I thought of the prospect of loudly calling out the title. I heard myself pause and then in a cracked and hushed tone I said, “the vagina monologues”.

I resisted the urge to turn around to witness the expression of the people behind me. Instead, I noted my discomfort, paid for my book and walked out of the store with my head held high determined to end the battle of embarrassment between me and my vagina.

My search for The Vagina Monologues was launched after I watched an episode of Oprah in which Ensler was a guest discussing the topic of female genital mutilation (FGM) otherwise known as circumcision of the clitoris.

According to Ensler, a young woman will have a knife, a razor or a glass shard cut their clitoris or remove it altogether and will have part or all of the labia sewn together with catgut or thorns. Short-term results include hemorrhages and cuts in the urethra, bladder, vaginal walls and anal sphincter among others. Long-term results include massive scars that can hinder walking for life, chronic uterine infection, immensely increased agony and risks during childbirth and early deaths. This procedure has been inflicted on 80 to 100 million girls and young women in South America, Africa, Western Asia, India and the Middle East.

This information ripped through my emotional threshold and I cried. I cried for every woman who has died from this inhumane act. I cried for each woman who survived but has had to live with the physical and emotional wounds of this brutal mangling of her most intimate body part. I cried for each woman who has lived with the fear that she would be the next victim. I cried for the mothers who desperately sought to save their daughters from this horrific fate. I cried for all woman, including myself, who have not realized the sacredness, the beauty, the love and the life force we all embody.

The Vagina Monologues seeks to help women acknowledge that their vaginas are indeed beautiful and are a vital force of energy and creativity.

Ensler takes the shame out of the vagina through anecdotes and real life experiences to expose it in its rawest and purest form. Her writing is poetic, her views are revolutionary and her compassion towards women is admirable.

As for me, I have apologized to my vagina for my lack of compassion and my ignorance for thinking of it in a way other than with reverence and respect.

New media, such as film and photography, struggled through the century to be called an actual art. The bold exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences shows that film has become an accepted art.

The exhibit brings together 19th and 20th century artworks in the form of painting, drawing, and sculpture with over 300 cinema documents of Alfred Hitchcock’s work. Included are beautiful stills of Ingrid Bergman, Tippi Hedren and other Hitchcock leading ladies and excerpts of films playing mysteriously, sometimes soundlessly in discreet corners.

The framework of the exhibit is pure Hitchcock. There are countless chilling artifacts on display. One is a reconstruction of a Bates’ motel room complete with a view into the bathroom where the form of a nude woman can be made out through the shower curtain.

There is a roomful of “props” from the films, such as the razor Cary Grant shaves with in North by Northwest, and the would-be murder weapon scissors from Dial M for Murder. These stand in a dimly lit room with eerie music playing. Each piece is displayed in its own glass case on a tall stand. The light reflecting on the glass plays tricks on your eyes. The best way to describe it is to picture yourself in a room full of mirrors, where you can see twenty versions of yourself. This portion of the exhibit is its own house of horrors.

The truly extraordinary thing about the exhibit is how it mixes in pieces of art that may not have struck you as being strictly “Hitchcockian”.

Sir John Everett Millais painted Ophelia, the strange, cold portrait of the young Shakespearean character floating dead in a river with her face framed by the water around her. On the wall next to it is a still from the film Vertigo, where Kim Novak is faking her drowning in a river in a startlingly similar pose.

Hitchcock used influences from other artists. He brought aboard Salvador Dali to work on the film Spellbound. Dali, known for painting the absurd, constructed a sequence of the movie where a psychiatric patient recalls a dream to Bergman, his psychiatrist. The product is so entrancing Bergman herself said it belonged in a museum for its beauty. It mesmerizes the senses as if it were truly one of Dali’s still paintings coming to life on film.

Those who are Hitchcock buffs will love the exhibit for everything there is to absorb about the man and his films.

Those who have seen only a couple of the famous films, like The Birds and Psycho, will be drawn into the master’s work. Intrigue is inevitable.

Those who have never heard the name Hitchcock or do not know what he is about will enjoy the exhibit for its excellence in combining interdisciplinary arts. The masterpiece is that no single art form overshadows nor controls another. Sweet unanimity and a symbiosis exist between the artworks in this exhibit.

The bold and groundbreaking exhibit is the first where a museum creates a link and draws parallels between film and painting. It is fresh and fun, with dark, foreboding tones.

Most of all, it accomplishes what Hitchcock strove for in his films, particularly the film Rear Window. We become the ultimate voyeur, being brought to intimate places that are also shocking. We see the man and his films laid out on a wall to be examined under our control.

This intimate view of the extraordinary is what makes us a voyeur. As Hitchcock commented, “with the help of television, murder should be brought into the home, where it rightly belongs. Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table or the bathtub.”

The movie rejoins Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis from Forrest Gump, in a tale about a FedEx guy whose plane goes down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) spends four years on a small, and amazingly bug-free island, learning to use the few resources available in the most creative ways.

For those of you who constantly complain about predictable movies, this could be one for you. Few of us have been stranded on desert islands, so it is hard to know what to expect.

In terms of storyline, this one is creative and entertaining, at least for the hour of the movie that takes place on the island. Noland fortunately finds FedEx packages washed up on shore from his wrecked plane, with treasures inside to help him survive, like ice skates and videotapes.

He also finds his only friend for the next four years, a volleyball he names Wilson (as in the name brand on the ball). This is one of the truest segments in the film.

Countless miles from anybody he has ever known and what he considers normal social atmosphere, Noland’s human nature becomes starved for interaction with another being. A gripping and heart-wrenching friendship ensues. I’m serious.

What happens on the island is fascinating. What Noland does, what he thinks, the way he struggles as a man to start a fire, get fresh water and fish is remarkable.

Unfortunately, once he leaves the island and returns home to his girlfriend who has believed him dead for four years, the whole movie goes to hell. There is nothing satisfying or remarkable about the last half-hour of the movie.

Despite this, I maintain that the movie still stands tall on its first hour. Instead of walking away disappointed by a thoroughly disappointing ending, I was still thrilled by Hanks’ performance on the island, and all the components that went with it. This is a great movie. It just would have been better if he never got off the island.