♀️🌍 “Creamerie” milks the Dystopian Bogey
It’s “Orphan Black” meets “The Last Man on Earth” with a side of "The Handmaid's Tale"
Creamerie is playing on Hulu.
Grade: A- (Unassuming, clever, witty, and refreshingly different)
Origin: New Zealand
Directed by: Roseanne Liang
“Do you know what happens to cows if they’re not milking or pregnant? I shoot them.”
Jaime on her value in the “Creamerie” world
The Lottery
In the land of abundance and wellness, there are no men. They have all been eradicated from the planet, or so we think... Eight years ago there was a virus that targeted men and boys, causing them to be quarantined and eventually die off. What’s left is a “Brave New World” of its own making, run by women, but a select committee of them that put The Stepford Wives of the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop variety to shame.
The leader of this governing body known as “Wellness” is Lane (Tandi Wright). She determines which of the women can be inseminated and therefore be “abundant” via a lottery system which on the surface seems random and fair but it’s not. Also, this isn’t “The Lottery” of the Shirley Jackson variety whose themes have been explored in movies like The Wicker Man. However, like those stories, from the get-go there’s an ominous vibe in the rounds of eligibility the women need to undergo to determine if they are fit to be abundant mothers.
The three main characters in this two season series are a trio of women living out on a farm that produces milk (hence, the show’s title but the double entendre of fertility in women is not missed either).
Jamie (JJ Fong) and sister-in-law Alex (Ally Xue) are connected by the thought-to-be deceased Jackson, who was (is) Alex’s brother and Jamie’s husband. Prior to this knowledge however, he makes appearances in Jamie’s hallucinations which get old in the same way Physical overused this artistic device to illustrate Sheila’s dissociation from her reality in season 3 of that show and even brought in New Girl’s Zooey Deschanel to bash us over the head into submission on that front.
Jamie was a mother whose son, Oscar, died from the virus and she’s still very much grieving Jackson and her son. Pip (Perlina Lau) is a loyal friend of Jamie’s who works at Wellness and she and Alex bicker a lot. Friendship to the socially awkward and conflicted Pip should mirror the relationship between Elliott and ET in the iconic film, ET and she references the film a lot to make analogies to her and Jamie.
The irony is that while this is a world reconstructed by females after the fall of the males, the new world order is decidedly anti-female. Fertility and sisterhood are exploited to gross effect by Wellness. It’s not to say that being a mother isn’t a top choice for some women (it clearly is for Jamie) but it’s not every woman's desire nor is it accessible for every women, as the show presents to us in the portrayal of Alex and even Pip. And the way vulnerability in this area is weaponized is chilling.
In the Wellness state, if you’re not happy there is something wrong with you and this requires state intervention. Joy is the end goal but it’s also the life flow. To combat any dissent or non-happy emotions, there are bliss release pellets that get embedded in your brain or neck to put you into a forever peaceful place. Alex witnesses the consequences of defying the state first hand not just through her own punishments, but also in her mother’s terminal condition of bliss administered to her brain directly (via a drill which effectively lobotomizes her), a sentence handed to her, we assume, because she actively disagreed with the party line.
Here “speak truth(s)” are continually milked by Lane to hurt her own people, rendering them non-threats, as we see with another Lottery hopeful, Viv, whose number is initially picked for lottery, but in the end, like Jamie, is told she’s ineligible. When she receives a package of anonymous sperm, with her milk drop-off from Jamie’s farm, she immediately reports the illegal action to Lane who rewards her by “perming” her which equates with a lobotomy.
Who’d have thought “THE MAN” could answer our problems?
Well, not the man, but a man’s presence does solve Jamie, Pip, and Alex’s problems, sort of, while simultaneously complicating their world. The casting of Jay Ryan as Bobby works well. He emits every bit “dude” frequencies coupled with a survivalist mentality, plus he’s cute to watch. There is early Pip-Bobby flirtation that adds some humor to an otherwise heady comedy. You can imagine how Bobby’s presence might answer one of Jamie’s prayers (motherhood). And for Alex, Bobby represents salvation in the form of a revolution against the status quo simply because he’s a man.
The more poignant scenes in the show which call upon our empathy and compassion involve the interactions between Bobby and other men, like Shawn and Daniel. This is a world in which the surviving men are hunted and there is no safe place for them. They have experienced intense trauma and are abused in horrific ways. As an example, one episode features how captured men are chained to a chair in a lab, gagged so they can’t speak or scream, with an automated pump attached to their penis to continually provide sperm to fuel Lane’s Wellness empire. Here, they are seen as enemies of the state with no rights who serve a progenitor purpose, similar to a Gilead gender role reversal, where instead of “handmaids” we have manservants.
In the comedy The Last Man on Earth (2015), not to be mistaken for the 1964 film of the same name with Vincent Price, Will Forte thinks he’s a sole survivor of a virus that killed off most of the human race. He’s wrong and as the series goes on, he picks up a ragtag crew of survivors and they form a chosen family of sorts. It’s a quirky, offbeat comedy and its similarities with Creamerie at first sight are pretty evident, but deeper than this, the desperation of characters living in a post-apocalyptic world and clinging to vestiges of their past in a well-timed comedy resonate in both, as does the important role of chosen family.
Final Cut
Creamerie is a welcome and easy-to-love entrant in the life, love and relationships dramedy category mixing in a post-apocalyptic reality that is jarring and refreshingly different. It soars with Roseanne Liang at the helm directing and serving as a co-writer, alongside Kirsty Fisher, Dan Musgrove and Shoshana McCallum. The show presents as if the Barbie monologue read by America Ferrera was completely subverted and twisted for ill-gotten gain.
Here a woman in the hierarchy who has made it to the top of the pyramid does everything in her power to suppress the well-being of the masses, ruining their lives, while abusing her authority with commercial grade “mean girls” tactics cloaked in Lilith Fair style sisterhood. Lane is relentless in using the women's greatest fears against them, for who knows these women better than another woman. And as this show reminds us sometimes, “the bad guy” can be a woman.
Watching this made me nostalgic for Orphan Black. It’s a twisted dystopian reality in which Tatiana Maslany played like 5 characters. The theme of rebels battling baddies and getting branded as “enemies of the state” reigns high. Any other Orphan Black fans?
Source: IMDB / Even the title art is transcendent. Speaking of Canadian talent, last week I saw I Like Movies which premiered at the Boston Jewish Film Festival this week. For those living in Canada, it should be streaming on Netflix. For those of us not in Canada, when do we get it on Netflix? In the meantime, add it your list of “must see(s).” It’s a beautiful tale about a rather unlikeable cinephile, who I’m going to go out on a limb and say is on the spectrum, but it isn’t referenced this way in the film which takes places in the early 2000s. Lawrence is a high school senior working at a video store in Burlington, Canada, a superb of Toronto, who enjoys making silly mockumentaries like “Rejects Night” with his “placeholder” friend, Matt (Percy Hynes White from Wednesday, which is on Netflix). It’s a story about a boy scripted by a female filmmaker, Chandler Lewick, and in it we see how he is transformed for the better by the dominant female relationships in his life, his boss at the video store and his mother. They aren’t afraid to call him out on his crap because these boundaries = love.
