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b"This week on The Spectator Film Podcast… Tank Girl (1995) 6.13.19 Featuring: Austin, Maxx Commentary track starts at 35:50 — Notes — “Let’s Stop Calling Movies Feminist” by Anna Biller —- Here’s Anna Biller’s insightful blog post about our tendency to crown movies as “feminist”; we’re not only frequently wrong, but also convolute and trivialize the discussion of actual\\xa0feminist cinema in doing so, diminishing it’s potency. As with our discussion of\\xa0Legally Blonde (2001), we relied upon Biller’s criteria to frame a portion of our discussion on Tank Girl and better understand the film. We encourage you curious listeners to engage with Biller’s blog post directly, and listen to our Legally Blonde episode for additional discussion. \\xa0It’s also worth mentioning Anna’s Blog: Musings About Film and Culture has many other fascinating posts in which Anna discusses both her own work and film history at large. (Anna also seems to participate in the comments section frequently, which is pretty cool. Just sayin’…) Check out Criterion Channel’s Anna Biller Collection! Her two feature films –\\xa0Viva (2007),\\xa0The Love Witch\\xa0(2016) – are available for streaming in addition to a number of short films she’s made over the past several decades. They won’t be around forever, so watch them while you can. ‘Post-Human Romance: Parody and Pastiche in “Making Mr. Right” and “Tank Girl”‘ by Marilyn Manners and R.L. Rutsky from\\xa0Discourse — Here’s a link to the article we referenced throughout the episode, and the writers do a fantastic job of articulating how\\xa0Tank Girl‘s perceived disorganization, lack of stakes, and poor structure actually work as virtues for the film. Locating online academic resources on\\xa0Tank Girl may be slightly challenging, but this essay is an excellent place to start. We’ll include some relevant quotes below: \\u201c\\u2026Tank Girl is unique not only for having a female lead, but in its comedic, and self-parodic, approach to its subject matter and narrative. This difference is, moreover, very much connected to issues of style, a point foregrounded by the film\\u2019s use of drawn, comic-book images \\u2013 both stills and animated sequences \\u2013 at numerous points in its narrative. The inclusion of these comic book images, which in themselves contribute to the film\\u2019s sense of irreverent and exuberant playfulness, draws attention to the artifice of the filmmaking process and therefore serves to heighten the film\\u2019s parodic attitude towards genre conventions and its own narrative. Thus, these images not only tend to privilege style and image over narrative continuity and realism, they also link this emphasis on style to a playful irreverence that refuses to take the male-dominated conventions of science-fiction \\u2013 and cinematic narratives more generally \\u2013 seriously\\u201d (123-24) \\u201cTank Girl\\u2019s foregrounding of style and surface is, indeed, inseparable from its parody of authority and seriousness. At a narrative level, the film seems to borrow familiar plot devices from mainstream science-fiction films only in order to make fun of them\\u2026For Kesslee, this competition is about control. Just as he tries to control the world\\u2019s water, he also wants not to kill, but to control Rebecca, to force her to work for him\\u2026Yet, if the film thematizes the linkage of the female body to fluidity and of the man to the control of that fluidity (as we shall discuss further), it also formalizes these connections in its narrative, where the continuous, liner (male) narrative is constantly subverted, or diverted, by the currents of an irrepressible (female) style\\u201d (124-25) “The aesthetic style of\\xa0Tank Girl, in other words, is not radical chic, but ‘radical pastiche'” (127). ‘Mapping the Music and Style of ‘Tank Girl” by Elizabeth Sankey from\\xa0Vice — Here&"