![]() ![]() In “Los Angeles,” a woman lives in a sprawling house with her stock Husband and one hundred ex-boyfriends, including an abuser. ![]() ![]() But Ma’s characters continually break from their assigned roles and emerge raw. The Bliss Montage is a flattening technique, a refusal to recognize a fulfilled woman as complex and whole but to instead portray her as an object upon which the world must inevitably shape a recognizable narrative. The audience, Basinger argues, has only a passive engagement in women’s joy, and the “Happy Interlude” or “Bliss Montage” serves only as a prelude to her far more interesting trauma. Basinger’s 1993 work A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960 details a phenomenon in film of a woman’s briefly allowed period of happiness before the movement of the plot inevitably invites heartbreak. In the acknowledgements for her short story collection BLISS MONTAGE, author Ling Ma cites film critic Jeanine Basinger as coining the book’s title term. “I have sweetness too, just underneath thicker rinds.” (131) ![]()
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