Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

The latest version of "Little Women," written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is a lovely adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's much-adapted novel, one made especially so by its emphasis on what it meant to be a woman in a world run by men. The options left to women are few: marriage is the main path to solvency, and writers of fiction must have young women married or dead by the end. That life turns out all right for most of them is appealing, but it's built on the idea that "Little Women" is a romance, and that in the real world sometimes you have to sell out a cherished idea in one area to achieve what you need elsewhere. And even though "Little Women" is set in the past, the idea of What Women Must Do is also part of the contemporary "Bombshell," as well as Margaret Atwood's novel "The Testaments." These are all blending in my head because I saw "Bombshell" and "Little Women" on consecutive days re...

When I was in college, between the end of Christmas break and the first-semester exams was  Reading Period, about 10 days where students were given a chance to prepare for their tests. These days, I still have a Reading Period of sorts, between Christmas and the resumption of my teaching at the University of Akron, when I just dive into books. The current stack is above. It's not that I cannot read the rest of the time; before tackling my post-holiday reading, I spent happy time with an advance copy of The Sopranos Sessions , a detailed examination of the landmark series by my friends Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, which is officially available in a week. I also read Thomas E. Ricks 's Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, and dipped into the Library of America's collection of Carson McCullers' s Stories, Plays and Other Writings, which LOA had made available at a nice discount. For a school project, earlier in the fall, I had read Tara Westov...

Spoilers included. At dinner with friends recently, the conversation turned to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the ending of the second season. I thought the season as a whole was powerful in the way it repeatedly emphasized the ruthlessness of the powerful – that the men in charge of Gilead were going to maintain control no matter how brutal they felt they had to be. And that control was not over some women, but all women, as we saw in the execution of a misguided teen (who had been betrayed by her own, control-minded father) and the repeated punishment of Serena. As one of our friends said, Serena thought privilege gave her a pass on society’s worst treatment of women – only she learned otherwise, and finally saw that her “daughter” would be denied even those few things Serena had carried over from the pre-repression years. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the portrayal of women, men and power – not only because of what we see from the men ruling the country (and their, w...