A chat with Donna Cross
Mood:  happy

 About a month ago, our book club decided to read Pope Joan, by Donna Cross.  Now, I know you'll never believe me, but I had absolutely nothing to do with influencing the choice.  While everybody was discussing which book to read next, I happened to be in the bathroom changing out of a wet bathing suit.  (We'd had our club meeting in the middle of a lake.  Because every book club should be at least partly amphibious.)

When I came out of the bathroom, I heard "blah blah blah Pope Joan blah blah Pope Joan blah blah Pope Joan".  At first I thought they were just the usual voices in my head, but then someone asked me what I thought.

"Why, that's a terrific book", I said (supressing the urge to jump up and down and squeal like a game show contestant).  "Great choice!  Let's do it!"   We love discussing history, politics, and social justice, plus it's a great story, so I knew everybody would enjoy it.  The woman who proposed it said she'd found it through Google, when she was looking for historical novels about Rome to get ready for an upcoming trip.

Later that week I emailed Donna through her website, to see if she would be willing to call our book group and chat with us.  She sent a warm and enthusiastic reply, and we arranged a 7:30 call (which turned out to be a little later since she had some unexpected things come up, but we were delighted when the phone rang.)

Right off the bat she told us she'd be happy to answer any questions (although "I'm not telling anyone my weight", she said, which made us laugh, though she looks quite svelte in her photo!).  It was a delightful conversation - she had a lot of interesting quotes and observations.  One thing I hadn't known: she wasn't a feminist before she started writing the book.  She said (I can't remember exact quotes, so I'll have to paraphrase) "I've never burned a bra in my life, and I was part of a generation that was raised to be reasonable."  After researching Pope Joan, and discovering how brutally women were oppressed and treated like chattel during the Middle Ages, her eyes began to open to sexism, ignorance, lack of education, and its profoundly corrosive effects on society.  We talked about what "being reasonable" means for women, and her attraction to unreasonable, strong female characters.  Her next book features a similarly unreasonable heroine (whose name she could not divulge, for fear her publisher would "rip my tongue out", but it's set in 17th century France).

For me, Pope Joan opened my eyes to the way women have long been marginalized in literature and on film, usually because they aren't the ones who get to tell the story.  Joan, a courageous woman motivated by knowledge, creativity, and generosity, is such a  refreshing rarity.  Generally, women in fiction are given the motivation of romance/love/seduction, and not much else.  They are rarely shown trying to improve society or change the world (and if they do, they still must be smokingly hot and perform all their karate kicks in 4 inch heels, thankyouverymuch Dan Brown).  This is why films like Julie & Julia feel so honest and surprising: the two women in that film are shown achieving fulfillment through work, with romance relegated to a supporting role.

There's a thought experiment called the Bechdel Test (invented by the comic strip artist Alison Bechdel), which can be applied to movies and books as a sort of rough measure of sexism.  The test has three parts:

1) There must be at least two female characters

2) who talk to each other

3) about something other than a man.

It's surprising how few films pass the Bechdel Test.  Now, keep in mind it has nothing to do with how good or bad the movies are: Citizen Kane flunks the test, while High School Musical 3 passes.  It's not intended to be used as a guide to the worth of a movie.  Rather, it's a measure of how thoughtfully female characters are treated.  Are they central to the story?  Are they allowed to advance the plot, or are they just an appendage to the action hero?  Do they have agency, or are they just arm candy?  (If the character wears a gold lame bikini, chances are good that it fails.)

Of course, one does have to make allowances for settings where women wouldn't naturally be - films set in all-male military schools, or prisons, for example.  Also romances, where "talking about men" is the whole point.

I'm not sure very many of David's movies would pass the Bechdel test.  300?  Not so much.  Van Helsing? Nope.   Better Than Sex passes the first two but flunks on criteria #3.  Lord of the Rings...has female characters, but they never talk to each other.  Australia passes (Sarah Ashley and Cath Carney get brief war-related dialogue).  So does Three Dollars (mother & daughter bath scene).  Pope Joan should pass handily if any of the tender exchanges between Joan and her mother, Gudrun, about the pagan gods make it into the film.  (Even if not, Pope Joan arguably could earn an exemption from the Bechdel Test, since the entire point of the story is that Joan must make her way in a male dominated world). 

By the way, here's my version of the Bechdel Test to assess the quality of a film:

1) There must be David Wenham in it

2) Does anything else really matter?

But anyway, back to the chat with Donna.  We went on to discuss whether we ourselves would ever have had the courage to risk what Joan risked, and endure what Joan endured, for the sake of an education.  Donna pointed out that many women around the world, every day, engage in similarly courageous acts, like the three Afghani girls who had acid thrown in their faces last year by the Taliban for attending school.  Despite being permanently disfigured by the attack (one girl is half blind), they returned to school a few months later and are still attending.  Now that's courage.

We also touched on the "Pope Mary Sue" issue.  Joan is a pretty extraordinary character - she invents modern courtroom procedure, germ theory, intinction, healing techniques, rescues peasants from floods, among much else - and some readers have questioned whether it's too overwhelming to make her into Superwoman, on top of rising to the top of the Catholic hierarchy.  Donna replied that Joan, being the main character, can't sit on the sidelines and be passive - she has to be a prime mover, she has to act on the world, and she did indeed possess a keen intellect that surpassed most of the men of her day.  Also, quite a few of her "inventions" are known to have sprung up close by and in roughly the same time period, so it's not a stretch to suggest that Joan might have known about these things, or been able to apply her knowledge to improve existing techniques.

NOW THEN.  What you really want to hear is The Scoop On Gerold, yes?  It is, after all, the elephant in the tiny little room of this Grove post.  During our chat, I had been weighing in my mind all evening whether it would be too forward and fangirly to ask specifically about Gerold/David.   Believe me, the last thing I wanted to do was hijack the conversation or ask self-indulgent questions.  However, the phone call had started late, and most of our members were preparing to leave.  After some thought, I decided that well, if the group dwindles it might be all right to ask about the upcoming movie.....and perhaps casually, in passing, with the lightness of milkweed down brushing past the wee whiskers of a sleeping white kitten, mention that the casting of David as Gerold was a fine choice.....and then quickly move on to the More Businesslike Topic of The Movie In General.

There was some desultory shuffling of feet and goodbyes as the club members started to depart, and Donna very generously said she'd be willing to keep chatting with anyone who could stay.  The last two people remaining were me and Erica, the host.  I asked if I might have one last question and Donna said "Of course".

"Well," I said, "I'm VERY excited about the upcoming movie, particularly because I'm a huge David Wenham fan..." For a moment I paused, trying to quell my fangirl attack and casually move on to the second part of the question (something to do with how wide of a release she thought the movie would get in the US), when Donna pounced at the mention of David's name.

"Oh!" she said.  "David Wenham!  Oh, I'm so glad you've heard of him!  I have great news for you...he's an absolute sweetheart.  He is the nicest man in the world.  I just adore him to pieces.  My daughter loved him too.  I first met him in Morocco, but when we were in Germany, he went out of his way to make sure I felt at home."

"Gawrsh!" I said (or something similarly hicklike...by this time my face was beet red. Erica tactfully drifted out of the room and began putting away dishes).  "I think he's a fantastic actor.  I've seen just about every one his movies."

"I've seen quite a few of them," Donna said.  She told me that she first saw David as Faramir in Lord of the Rings and said to herself "That's Gerold!!"  At that point she was already working on the screenplay for Pope Joan (apparently it's taken 10 years, 8 scripts, 7 producers, and 5 directors to get the film realized).  She knew right away she wanted to cast David as Joan's romantic lead, and lobbied hard to get him on the project.  The producers also agreed he was the best choice.  At the time there was some other project in Australia that David was committed to, or going after, or occupying him (she didn't say what), so she ended up writing a pleading letter to him.  It said something to the effect that even though people generally think of him as an action-hero type, he'd really be amazing in a romantic-lead, Clark Gable type role.  ("By the way," she said, "even though he looks great with short hair, he really should wear his hair long more often.")

We talked more about Lord of the Rings and the epic tragedy of leaving most of Faramir's romance scenes on the cutting room floor.  "One minute they're in the garden gazing at each other," said Donna, "and the next minute they're kneeling next to each other at Aragorn's coronation."  (By this point in the conversation I had zillions of little cartoon hearts percolating over my head for Donna.  I tell ya, nothing bonds women like ginger manes and badly edited romance.)

I commented that I thought Pope Joan would be good therapy for dissatisfied Faramir/Eowyn fans who didn't even get to see them smooch.  Donna replied something about there being a nude sex scene in Pope Joan (though she wasn't there when it was filmed, so couldn't supply details).

!!!!!, I said.

"Did you see Public Enemies?" she asked.

"No, not yet" I said.  "I heard David wasn't in it very much."

"It was such a waste!  I heard his voice, and he turned his head, and I said to my husband, 'Is that David Wenham?" and that was literally all you see of him in the film.  I can't believe they wasted his talent like that."

Truer words were never spoken.  I agreed, wholeheartedly, that it must be frustrating for actors sometimes to put in all that work only to have most of their scenes wind up cut, even though it's an artistic decision, not a personal one.

Ignoring the pointed yawns of Erica, I went on to ask "Did David get a chance to read your book?"

"That's an interesting question," she said.  "I left a copy in his trailer with a note, but I don't know if he ever got around to reading it."

I told her the story about David getting the part in 300 without having read the book first, and then going out and buying a copy and flipping it open, and the first thing he saw was his character in the nude telling a story by the campfire.  And that he swore he would never agree to another role without first checking out the book.  Donna thought that was quite funny.

At this point Erica sort of bodily intervened and said "I hate to cut things short, but I do need to get to bed".  I certainly didn't want to impose any longer on our host, though it was a shame, because I think Donna and I could have chatted all night about Faramir, Gerold, and the 179 kinds of awesome that David's acting is made of.

Oh dear.  Two women, chatting about a man?  I'm afraid our book club failed the Bechdel test.