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Towelhead: Alan Ball's Controversial New Film
Writer-director doesn't shy away from controversy, as he's proving once again with Towelhead
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AB: When I’m working, I’m telling the story of these characters. I don’t really think about any meta aspect or engaging in any sort of conceptual dialogue with the audience because I don’t respond to that kind of work myself. The book allowed Jasira to be sexually curious and also to feel good and to have ambivalent responses to this attention from men. On the one hand she knows it’s weird, but on the other hand it makes her feel powerful, validated—you know, what passes in her own developed psyche for “loved.”
The intent was certainly never to be titillating or to say, “Oh my god, young girl with a much older man, isn’t that hot?” No, it’s not hot. But I do think Alicia’s intent with the book was that young people who are experiencing sexual sensations for the first time are allowed to enjoy them. That’s part of the dynamic of many sexual molestation cases that victims have to struggle with, that there are aspects that might have felt good. However, we live in such a black and white society. Our paradigm at looking at sexual molestation is the mythology of the 100 percent innocent victim and the 100 percent sub-human monster, which doesn’t allow either one of the participants to be fully human.
What I appreciated in the book, and what I really tried to maintain for the movie, was that all of those aspects go into this kind of situation, because again, it’s incredibly common. Some statistics have the occurrences of untoward sexual interaction between a young girl and an adult man as high as one in three women—and one in six men. Of course, you flip the genders and then all of a sudden it becomes a raunchy teen comedy with, “Woo hoo, he scored with the older woman.” We don’t like women to be sexually aggressive unless they’re “sluts.” We still sort of view women in our culture through that whole virgin-whore paradigm and I feel like the time for that has passed. But I don’t really control mass culture! (laughs)
MM: The film premiered at Toronto under the title Nothing Is Private. Was there trepidation to call the movie Towelhead before Warner Independent bought it and reverted back to the book’s original title?
AB: Absolutely. Yeah, there was fear early on in the process. Somebody said “Well, we can’t possibly call this movie Towelhead,” and I went, ‘Okay.’ Then we tried forever to come up with a title and we came up with a really lame one, Nothing Is Private, which is wrong for the movie.
The fear, of course, is that it’s an incendiary term, but the woman who wrote the book is half-Egyptian. She’s been called “Towelhead” in her life, Summer Bishil has been called “Towelhead” in her life and the thing about any racial, ethnic or gender-based slur is that when you use that word, you take away the person’s humanity. You turn them into a concept, so you don’t really see the real person that is there, and that’s exactly what everybody does to Jasira. She’s surrounded by raging narcissists and they basically see her as a prop in their own personal drama. Even Melina [the neighbor played by Toni Collette], to some extent. Though she probably sees Jasira more for who she is than anybody else… she still feels like, “Oh, I get to be the rescuer. I get to be the Mother Earth savior.” So in that sense, I feel like the title is a perfect metaphor for the movie, and I’m really glad that once the movie was purchased somebody said, “Come on, man up, call it what it is,” as opposed to “You can never call it that!”
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Sim only contracts on 11/17/08 at 2:54 pm
great converstion between MM and AB..
i really like this post..
thank you very much..
Sim only contracts- Comment by Mobile Phone blog on 11/18/08 at 5:32 am
after reading this article i have decided to watch this movie
Great presentation by the author
Thanks
mobile phone blog- Comment by free g1 on 12/17/08 at 11:40 am
sounds like a good movie!
- Comment by Khaled Quadrant on 1/28/09 at 8:10 am
Not heard of the movie before but certainly looks interesting and worth a watch. Interesting they changed the name for the film festival it was first shown at.
- Comment by janine on 3/05/09 at 6:06 pm
aaron echart is hot btw :D
- Comment by Sim Only on 4/09/09 at 9:33 am
Very cool good movie! Would like to see more of these
- Comment by dead sea salt on 4/24/09 at 11:06 pm
seems like a very good movie..ima watch it
- Comment by Danny R on 5/22/09 at 9:12 am
I’ve actually read the book and it’s great. Can’t wait to see the movie.
How to Get Rid of Cold Sores- Comment by SIM Only Contract Deals on 6/03/09 at 7:27 pm
Is the movie available anywhere in the UK? If anybody can provide any info, please post a comment and let me know.
- Comment by guccilo on 6/23/09 at 8:29 pm
Interesting article! I read about this before. Thanks to author. Design is also pleased. Well, there are more things to read in the internet.
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- Comment by صور on 12/21/10 at 3:08 pm
thank you very much
تسريحات
صور للماسنجر- Comment by صور on 12/21/10 at 3:08 pm
- Comment by iPad aanbieding on 1/27/11 at 2:54 am
This movie makes you sick at some points, but it interests you enough to watch it through. I still have some mixed feelings about it
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This story was published in the Summer 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Hard Ball
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