“I don’t want to be a background image,” says Nadia as she sits in a glass-walled holding pen inside the Moscow courtroom where she and her comrades are on trial for “hooliganism.” Only inches from the glass stands a crowd of paparazzi worthy of Amanda Bynes’ latest faux pas. As the camera flashbulbs converge on Nadia like bullets from a firing squad, she laments the fact that the media will most likely manipulate these photos by adding all kinds of disparaging headlines. “They’ll say we were laughing during the trial,” she tells Masha, who sits beside her, as the two giggle over an inside joke — does that reporter’s tee-shirt really say “cannabis”? Nadia tells Masha that they’d better try to look serious, and the two young women stick out their lower lips and look tough.
For a second, they seem like jaded, American pop stars, like Lady Gaga and Kanye West, these iconic 21st century figures so wise to the way media works that they self-reflexively construct their own public personae. Watching her now, a young woman in an HBO special, I can’t help but notice that she is movie-star beautiful. She has a stiff upper lip that the HBO camera just loves to dwell on. She reminds me of Jean Seberg in Breathless. Then I repent. This is just what Nadia knew would happen. I’m turning her into a background image, a character I’m inventing myself, instead of listening to what she has to say about feminism and the separation of church and state. I’m almost as bad as the Russian government, which is claiming that Nadia wants to harm people of the Russian Orthodox faith. I’m almost as bad as Putin, who’s using her as an example to dissuade Russians from political protest. No wonder Pussy Riot wears those masks. They’re symbols of the way we delude ourselves about women, about the ways in which we don’t see them.
Aren’t all young women on trial? Like all young women, Nadia represents something of a screen onto which others project their fears and desires. And yet her power, and the power of Pussy Riot, lies in the way in which they don the masks of their otherness by choice. Like Kanye West, who deconstructs black male stereotypes by self-consciously performing them — “Everybody knows I’m a motherfucking monster” — the members of Pussy Riot are staging something of a postmodern performance piece about the repression of individual freedom. Unfortunately, the performance spins out of control, and they now find themselves on trial by a court worthy of Kafka. The whole world is laughing and shaking their heads at the Russian “system,” but Pussy Riot are still stuck with two years in a penal colony. Pussy Riot is imprisoned in a glass box, and no one can even hear their astute analysis of patriarchy or the male gaze — that is, until this HBO special Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, which is a lot better than I expected.
In true world-weary feminist mode, I was assuming that HBO just wanted to capitalize on a bunch of women dancing around and saying the word “pussy.” I thought that we’d see images, pop stars, not young women like you and me. I wasn’t sure what an HBO special could really do to help get the girls out of prison, and while it can’t do much, the film does succeed in convincing us of exactly how intelligent, even brilliant, the members of Pussy Riot are — of how meticulously planned their actions are, how astute they are as readers of their country’s political fate, and how they are, perhaps, the iconic punks that never were, and never could be. Pussy Riot, as we learn from this film, are a bunch of kids active in performance art circles. Russia seems to have little fondness or understanding of performance art, judging by the way nearly every one of Pussy Riot’s “happenings” has been misinterpreted as something other than art. Pussy Riot is not a band as much as a collective who have seized upon punk as a way to create a bunch of loud, fast, and surprising song-and-dance routines in public places. On the stand, the girls call themselves “holy fools” who “speak truth to power,” which is a real revelation — to me, and to punk, and to those in power too: Who would have thought that punk would become something this holy, a real method of civic disobedience and not just a show of such? Did Iggy Pop know that when he writhed like a shirtless Christ on the cross, his actions would inspire others to debase themselves in favor of a cause greater than themselves?
The riot grrrls fought hard, but they were never in danger of being imprisoned for speaking their minds. In this film, we see three brave young heroes — female heroes, so short in supply, so desperately needed — go head-to-head with “the system” they idealistically claim to be dismantling, and then — here’s the shocker — actually dismantle it. In a scene that gave me shivers, Pussy Riot supporters protest on the street outside the court, and a woman clad in a neon ski mask climbs atop a lamppost to shout and cheer. The crowd erupts into applause for her, and then the police come after her. The woman climbs down onto a chain-link fence and walks across it as it were a tightrope, teetering back and forth, evading the man in uniform who now walks the fence behind her. He moves fast, but she moves faster. She looks like Spiderman, or a female version. She almost seems to be dancing. The crowd goes wild. Then a police officer on the ground hits her with a stick, knocking her down.
The world is a tightrope, isn’t it? And all the women merely tightrope walkers, one step in front of the state. The system is metaphor now. It’s visible in songs and dances. It can be toyed with, as long as you can stay one step ahead of those in power, and even if you can’t, others will put on their masks and take your place. The whole thing reminds me of the final scene from the 1982 movie Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, when the righteous girl punk band gets destroyed, but dozens of others girls dressed just like them appear, instruments in hand, ready to continue the work that’s been started.
So what to do when you find yourself inspired by an HBO documentary about a political situation so unlike ours that it becomes romantic, the stuff of cinema? Well, for me, the takeaway point of this film is really that we, as women, need to continue the work of feminism, and of punk, and that feminism and punk no longer have the limited definitions that they once did back in the ’70s. Watching the teary-eyed reunion of Katia with her father, after she is released following an appeal, I can’t help but think of the new Sesame Street videos in which young children describe how it feels to them when a parent is incarcerated. Yes, so many American children — nearly two million of them — now have a parent who is incarcerated that we as a culture need to have Sesame Street videos about the P-word: “prison.” Those videos are heartbreaking to watch, and the issues that they raise must be just as important for American feminists as the issues raised by A Punk Prayer. It’s easy to criticize “the Russians” for the unfair trial of Pussy Riot, but our own criminal justice system is now so unjust that 70 percent of these two million children with parents in prison are children of color. And how have we gotten to a point where the incarceration of individuals has become a major moneymaking industry?
At the end of the film, we see the members of Pussy Riot stuck in the same place they were at the beginning — a fluorescent-lit interrogation room in a prison, where police investigators degrade and demean them. Perhaps the true strength of this film is that it shows viewers the cold hallways of prisons and the frustrations and impasses and falsehoods that stand in flawed justice systems. It reminds us of the glass cages that still exist in America, and in our own minds.
