The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Yara (2021) is a nonfiction crime movie about the disappearance and murder of 13-year-old Yara Gambirasio. The film follows magistrate Letizia Ruggeri’s long search to find her killer, taking us through the procedural twists and turns of the case and ending with the capture and conviction of Massimo Bossetti.

Based on a true story, Yara (2021) has the benefit of a ready-made audience of those who followed the investigation in the press and who will want a glimpse into the specifics of how the crime was solved. But turning true events into a narrative can be challenging. There’s a desire to tell the whole story without omitting any details, and this can bog the movie down in unnecessary particulars. Unfortunately, Yara (2021) lacks focus: in its attempt to tell the whole story, it struggles to tell a consistently engaging story.

Films about solving crimes tend to fall into two camps: focusing mainly on the investigative process or focusing more on the investigators themselves. By trying to do both in a 96-minute runtime, Yara struggles to do either story justice.

An excellent film that focuses on the investigative process is ironically one that doesn’t deal with crime at all (at least in any traditional sense). 2016's Shin Godzilla shows how government officials work behind the scenes to stop a giant monster from terrorizing Japan. Government minutia is tough to make interesting, but with its quick pace and driving momentum, Shin Godzilla proves that films about the inner workings of methodical and flawed government officials can be gripping (of course, the horrific destruction wrought by a giant terrifying lizard helps too). Yara (2021) has two distinct disadvantages. One, unlike the strangely beautiful destruction of Shin Godzilla, the crime is horrible and sad. And two, while Shin Godzilla takes place over the course of weeks, the murder of Yara Gambirasio took years to investigate and prosecute, which means the movie is inevitably filled with lulls in the action and dull moments. Real life government investigations are often boring, and when a film is based on a true story, the writers can’t invent more intriguing elements or alter the timeline to make the narrative more compelling.

The history of Hollywood is as ugly as it is beautiful. You can go back and look at decades of iconic films that have graced the silver screen, from Gone with the Wind (1939) to Citizen Kane (1941) to North by Northwest (1959). Most notably absent from Hollywood history, however, are Black-produced films. When movies did feature Black characters, they were always written by White writers and directed by White directors. The stories were never centered around Black people focusing on what it means to be Black.

Developed by Simon Frederick, They’ve Gotta Have Us (2018) is a limited series on Netflix that explores the rise of Black cinema in Hollywood. From The Birth of a Nation (1915) to Black Panther (2018), and everything in between, They’ve Gotta Have Us offers a comprehensive and compelling look at Black representation in film and the surge of Black-produced cinema.

I’ve mentioned before that some of my favorite classes I took in college were film history courses. I love contextualizing movies and seeing how every film influenced the next. However, I learned virtually nothing about the parallel history of Black cinema in Hollywood. They’ve Gotta Have Us proves to be incredibly enlightening, exploring so many facets of Hollywood history that were previously unknown to me.

The series features interviews with prominent Black filmmakers such as Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), Laurence Fishburne (School Daze, The Matrix), David Oyelowow (Selma, A United Kingdom), Kasi Lemmons (The Silence of the Lambs, Candyman), John Boyega (Attack the Block, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), Gina Prince-Bythewood (The Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights), Carmen Ejogo (Selma, It Comes at Night), and Robert Townsend (Hollywood Shuffle, The Five Heartbeats).

Going into the series, I would have assumed that Black voices had been suppressed in the industry for decades even if I didn’t necessarily know all of the details beforehand; I had no idea the extent to which this happened. The beginning of the series looks at the early years of Hollywood. The Birth of a Nation (1915) defined the motion picture and shaped everything about what movies are and how they are made. Director D.W. Griffith did not believe Black actors were capable of giving the performances he wanted, so he cast White actors in blackface to play horrific caricatures.

TW: Transphobia, Sexual Assualt, Violence, Misogyny // Spoilers for Sleepaway Camp ahead

We [meaning mainly the girls, the gays, and the theys] all love a good revenge film — Jennifer’s Body, Ms. 45, Carrie, and the new addition to the canon: Promising Young Woman. All the films feature a woman who enacts her own version of justice against those who are not being punished for a heinous crime — normally upholders of oppression like sexual assaulters. Though violent, sometimes exploitative, and not usually having a happy ending for the femme protagonists, at the center of these stories are questions about how justice truly functions in our society. As we’ve seen post #metoo, industries have slowed in making progress and even the so-called damaging “cancel culture” has not removed most abusers from their platforms. In this subgenre, fantasy and catharsis intertwine as one where we can escape to an alternate reality where the oppressed play karma in making those who killed our soul suffer in response. Though it does not fix the structural roots and usually punishes the women in the finale, the everlasting images are an escapist fantasy where related audience can feel sublime satisfaction that only comes with pure vengeance. That’s why we [see previous] love them.

For anyone who is not a cis white woman, a justice-fueled murderous rampage is not framed as liberation. Instead, they contribute to harsh stereotypes that vilify minority women with dangerous consequences. Particularly, trans women have been coded as serial killers for decades — especially since, possibly the most famous horror film ever, Psycho. The trope has expanded since then where explicitly or implicitly coded trans serial killers have made up some of the most well-known villains in horror and cinema history: including Leatherface, Bobbi, and, worst of all, Buffalo Bill. The most explicit — and “coincidentally” the most egregious, in my opinion — is the 1983 B-movie Sleepaway Camp. The protagonist is revealed to be trans, forced into being a girl by the eccentric aunt she is sent to live with after a freak boating accident kills both her sister and father. She goes on a killing rampage murdering all the bullies who torment and do her wrong during her time there. When Carrie did this to her classmates, there was a certain sympathetic tone to her atrocities. There’s even a clear case of justification for her murderous escapade. She, however, has never been referred to as a serial killer in cinematic discourse but more as something closer to a misunderstood superhero. For trans women in media, their perception and representation are completely different with grave consequences. Historically, when they have been shown in mainstream media, there is an association of fear, intense violence against women, and an issue of severe psychological trauma on part of the trans character. Cis white women from Carrie to Cassie are given the guise of innocence and retaliation while trans women are stereotyped into monstrous creatures more often than not.