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| The Woman |
After a midnight showing of horror director Lucky McKee’s The Woman at Sundance this past Sunday, right before the scheduled Q and A with the director, one irate moviegoer stood up to denouce the film, the director, and Sundance itself. According to film blogger Drew McWeeny, who was there, the unidentified man shouted:
“THIS MOVIE DEGRADES WOMEN! THIS MOVIE DEGRADES MEN! YOU ARE SICK! THIS IS NOT ART! YOU ARE SICK! THIS IS A DISGUSTING MOVIE! SUNDANCE SHOULD BE ASHAMED! HOW DARE YOU SHOW THIS!”
Ultimately, after a bit more of this sort of ranting, he was escorted out of the theater by security guards. You can read more about the incident, and see a couple of videos that capture its aftermath, here; you can read McKee’s response to it all here.
So what’s the connection to this blog? At this point, many of my regular MRA and other manosphere readers will no doubt have concluded that I will be joining the irate moviegoer in denouncing McKee’s alleged misogyny. If so, this will not be the first time (or even the first time today) that they have been utterly and completely wrong.
No, It’s because the incident provides such a clear example of a “White Knight” in action: someone who seems to think that women are delicate flowers that he, as a man, needs to protect from images of women being brutalized.
MRAs and other manosphere men love to denounce feminist men as “White Knights.” And sometimes they are justified in their complaints: there are men who consider themselves feminists who do indeed put women on a pedestal, and who talk about women as if their shit smells like roses. But that’s not really feminism; it’s a patronizingly traditional view of women masquerading as feminism. Real feminists don’t pretend that women don’t have flaws. White Knights do.* Real feminists don’t assume that women are too sensitive and delicate to see harsh images. White Knights do.
The irony of the kerfuffle at Sundance is that McKee is about as far from a misogynist as any director I know. Though, as far as I know, McKee doesn’t actually call himself a feminist, his films reflect a subtle, nuanced, and sympathetic view of women — at their best and, just as importantly, at their worst — that can only be called feminist. As McWeeny notes, McKee’s
sensitivity towards his actresses, and the perspective each of his films takes, is practically political. He returns to themes of power inequality and gender struggle, and he externalizes his subtext. He has been consistent in his interests, and as a result, he hasn’t been making $50 million studio films.
His films May and The Woods, and his Masters of Horror episode “Sick Girl” all center around female lead characters. But he doesn’t, as a real “white knight” would do, portray women as angels or innocent victims. No, he portrays them as, well, human beings. That is, as messy and complicated characters with flaws and evil impulses.
In May, while he is empathetic towards weirdo loner May, he also makes clear she’s out of her fucking mind, a creepy stalker and a violent sociopath to boot; she’s both the protgonist and the villain of the film. Nor does he portray men as mindless evil thugs: in Roman — which he wrote, but which was directed by his frequent collaborator Angela Bettis, who played the lead in May — he plays, er, Roman, another strange outcast and creepy stalker, and manages to render him quite sympathetic, despite the fact that the socially stunted, sexually and romantically frustrated character (SPOILER ALERT — highlight to read) actually kills a woman while trying to rape her early on in the film.
In The Woods, a more mainstream horror film, McKee portrays the almost-all-female world of a private girl’s school in the 1960s; he does a marvellous job getting into the head of the troubled girl at the center of the film, and plays with female stereotypes in a way that challenges and surprises the viewer. (I’m being deliberately vague here so as not to give too much away.) The villains in the film? All female.
Still, I can see how a less-than-careful viewer might get the impression that McKee hates women: many of his female characters, both women and girls, are crazy, violent, and sometimes simply evil; he isn’t afraid to show women being brutalized — or brutalizing others. In this view, if you portray a female character as evil, you therefore think all women are inherently evil; if you portray violence against women you aid and abet real-world brutalizers of women.
That’s the essential complaint of one putatively feminist critic on Pajiba, Dustin Rowles, who saw The Woman at Sundance:
The more images of sexualized and subjugated women we see, the less likely things are going to improve. They perpetuate steretypes about women. Lucky McKee’s The Woman is the perfect example of this.
Correction: Rowles saw PART of the film at Sundance, then walked out:
I’m certain that, like many rape-revenge fantasies, the men get their commuppance in the end, both the father and his son, who has taken after his father. I wouldn’t know — I couldn’t make it past the scene where the woman is power washed.
Criticizing a film without watching the ending — particularly a horror film based around a rape-revenge plot — is a bit like criticizing a joke without hearing the punchline.
Now, again, I haven’t seen even a minute of The Woman either, so maybe it is really a long exercise in violent misogyny. Given McKee’s past work, and the nature of the complaints against the film, this seems about as unlikely as Sarah Palin sprouting wings, reading a book, and/or endorsing a handgun ban.
What really strikes me is that the complaints directed at The Woman are similar to those directed against numerous other horror films in the past, particularly those centered around rape and revenge, like the notorious low-budget shocker I Spit On Your Grave, which inspired a infamously indignant, and rather White-Knighty, column from Roger Ebert that completely and utterly missed the point of the film. It was, he wrote,
a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theaters. … an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, Because it is made artlessly, It flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. “I Spit on Your Grave” does not. It is a geek show.
Ebert was angry about the brutal and graphic sexual violence directed at the female lead in the first part of the film — that is, before she sets out on her (brutal, graphic, violent) revenge against the men who brutalized her. Never mind that the central plot of, say, your typical Western movie features a hero who has to endure horrific violence and pain before exacting his revenge at the end — and that this formula has produced a vast library of amazing films.
Ebert rightly considers The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to be a “masterpiece.” You may recall some of the crazy and brutal shit Clint Eastwood’s Blondie had to endure in that film — you know, like that walk through the desert that left his skin looking like pulled pork. Why is violence against men, in the context of a revenge drama, artistically justified, while violence against women, also in the context of a revenge drama, not?
By allowing its brutalized heroine the same chance for revenge that Westerns offered many generations of heroes, I Spit On Your Grave is, while hardly a great film, a feminist one. Indeed, it offers one of the most memorable depictions of what has come to be known as “the final girl,” a character familiar to horror movie fans — that is, the one victim, invariably female, who manages, through wily evasions and sheer force of will, to survive the assaults of the monster or psycho at the center of the film. Here’s how feminist film critic Carol J. Clover described her in the legendary essay “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” which first introduced the notion of the”final girl” to film criticism:
The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B). She is inevitably female.
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| Halloween 2: Final Girl in action |
As Clover notes, in some horror films, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, the final girl merely endures; in others, like A Nightmare on Elm Street, she triumphs. Most of these final girls don’t start out as badass in the slightest; if anything, they tend to be nerdy, awkward introverts. The brutality they endure is necessary to understand their transformations.
“Protecting” female film characters from violence also “protects” them from having agency in their own stories. Portraying them as free of evil thoughts and urges is similarly patronizing and ultimately disempowering. Women in the real world aren’t angels, and there’s nothing feminist about portraying them as such. Like McKee, most feminists are well aware of this. True “White Knights” — male or female — do the women they hope to uplift a disservice, treating them as one-dimensional characters in some simplistic morality play. Women, like men, deserve better than that.
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* This is not to say that we should overlook the simple fact that women are more likely to be brutalized by men than vice versa — that men commit far more violent crimes and sexual assaults against women than women do against men, that men cause the majority of serious injuries associated with domestic violence. Women, like men, have violent impulses. But they are less likely than men to act upon them in ways that seriously damage others, male or female. To point this out is to recognize reality; it is not a case of White Knighting.
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>a lot of feminists in the blogosphere had the same reaction two years ago to deadgirl, while horrifying, does the same things that you say the woman does.
>**This is not to say that we should overlook the simple fact that women are more likely to be brutalized by men than vice versa — that men commit far more violent crimes and sexual assaults against women than women do against men, that men cause the majority of serious injuries associated with domestic violence. Women, like men, have violent impulses. But they are less likely than men to act upon them in ways that seriously damage others, male or female. To point this out is to recognize reality; it is not a case of White Knighting.**________With due respect David, you are omitting a crucial part of the picture. Women as the primary nurturers of children are also the primary abusers of children. That is to say, children are most likely to first learn violence from their primary abuser. And abused children have a higher likelihood to go on to become abusive adults.From Child Maltreatment 2002 (Administration for Children and Families. Child Maltreatment 2002. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C., 2002. Based on data collected via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System – NCANDS, National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information):1) We know that women comprised 58.3% of the perpetrators of child abuse and men comprised 41.7% (Figure 5-1 of the Child Maltreatment Report and accompanying Table 5-1, Age and Sex of Perpetrators );2) We also know that 32.6% of child fatalities were perpetrated by the mother acting alone, while 16.6% of child fatalities were perpetrated by the father acting alone (Figure 4-2 of the Child Maltreatment Report, Fatalities by Perpetrator Relationship). That is to say: Approximately twice as many mothers as fathers are responsible for the fatalities of their children.I appreciate that my "systemic" perspective is not generally accepted in our linear-thinking (reductionist) zeitgeist. But the argument that I present is that all cultural phenomena are ultimately inter-related, and to omit this crucial interconnectedness is to fail to understand how living systems, like cultures, operate.
>A few years ago my wife was knee deep in an altercation with a local politician, it was getting the best of her. She phoned saying that she needed a night of self-pity, I rented a silly looking movie and opened up a bottle of wine.It was the movie May. She laid her head across my lap and shed a few tears while we watched it, in the end she was laughing. When I said, “ See darling even if they win you can always Make new friends” all bets were off, the self-pity moment was well over. Neither of us are horror fans, but there was something about the movie May that was so earnestly funny?, that we both give that movie some credit for our substantial win.So hats off to the filmmaker, the next time one of us needs whatever it was May brought out in both of us that night we’ll be sure to rent that film!
>ChuckeedeeWhen you look at the stats on child abuse and cross reference them with time spent as a caregiver of children those statistics you quote come out quite unflattering for men.A riddle for you.Men drive more then women. The vast majority of long distance truck drivers are men. Men are involved in many more collisions then women.Who are the better drivers?
>Aliens obviously Kave.
>Sorry Elizabeth the answer was puppies 🙂
>If I may make a comment to the premise of the argument you're making (as best I can make it out)? I think there is a difference between showing people having violent throwdowns of one sort or another and showing sexual violence, if only because they exist in very different social contexts. Violence can be righteous or brutal or any number of things; you can punch someone to break their bones, to torture them, to get them back for a lame joke, etc. but rape and sexual violence tend to be about humiliation and/or titillation.Now, I do agree wholeheartedly that everyone regardless of gender should be treated largely the same, but Clint Eastwood's never been raped in a film. Maybe this is a lack of cinematic knowledge upon my part but I can't think of a rape/revenge film centering on a guy, in fact. Similarly, if this were a straight-up revenge flick where something belonging or precious to the titular woman were in some way stolen, damaged or otherwise done-wrong and she went on a rampage on the malefactors in question, getting beat to shit along the way as the protagonist of a straight-up revenge film does, I don't think there'd be quite the reaction.The whole rape/revenge genre does seem to be a lot about shock/titillation followed by a rousing round of violence after the fact to make the viewer feel better about having watched the rape in the first place.I think people in this case are reacting to what sounds like pretty sexualized violence against a woman played in the long form which… yeah, maybe this makes me a White Knight, but even though I'm not saying it should be banned, I do think it has a whiff of the exploitative about it, just in theory.Of course, like yourself, I haven't seen the film and I did enjoy "May" quite a bit. I'm sure I'll have an actual opinion of the film itself once I've seen it, but I do think there might be more criticism of the film than just white-knighting.
>"I can't think of a rape/revenge film centering on a guy, in fact."There's a brilliant, disturbing and very darkly funny Belgian film called Calvaire that sort of fits that description. Sort of. It's more like an all male-version of a horror film in which the final girl is a guy. As for rape-revenge films being about titillation, most of those I've seen really aren't. There's really nothing titillating about the rapes in I Spit on Your Grave, the original film anyway (haven's een the remake). Or the rapes in Ms. 45, which actually is a pretty good film to boot. I'm not sure where Deadgirl fits in all of this, given that the titular character is sort-of dead. I basically read it as a feminist film. Definitely one that could encourage a lot of very interesting discussions. McKee's earlier films (despite the, er, "makign friends" bit in May) aren't really all that gruesome or horrifying; The Woman sounds much more brutal. But I will definitely be seeing it.
>"Halloween 2: Final Girl in action?"I believe that shot is from the first Halloween. "This is not to say that we should overlook the simple fact that women are more likely to be brutalized by men than vice versa — that men commit far more violent crimes and sexual assaults against women than women do against men, that men cause the majority of serious injuries associated with domestic violence. Women, like men, have violent impulses. But they are less likely than men to act upon them in ways that seriously damage others, male or female. To point this out is to recognize reality; it is not a case of White Knighting."Men hurt their enemies differently than women do. Not more. Women use emotions as weapons. While you may not consider women to be 'white as snow' you still considers men more harmful, bad, etc. for the same reason whiteknights do. They are less (physically) violent therefore they do little 'serious damage'. Never mind that a lot of that 'unserious' damage often snowballs into serious damage over time.You are still a whiteknight David. Just not YOUR caricature of one.
>evilwhitemale empire.Emotions hurt more then a punch?
>Men hurt their enemies differently than women do. Not more. Women use emotions as weapons.Well, so do men. I'm not sure anyone really knows if men or women do more of it. Emotional damage is far harder to measure than physical damage. Do you have anything to back up your generalizations here?
>evilwhite talks about his emotions getting hurt then calls someone a manginaWould evilwhite like his head patted while he talks about women being too emtional?
>Kave, there are many dimensions to "systemic". I provided the one only because I had the references at my finger-tips. Other dimensions include:1) Munchausen's-syndrome-by-proxy (overwhelmingly female perpetrators);2) Infanticide (overwhelmingly female perpetrators);3) The various types of men that women validate in the choices they make, like the frat boy, the psychopath, the serial killer and the rapist. … and so on.The love letters that women submit to violent criminals you may like to dismiss as the isolated workings of aberrant minds, but the more realist interpretation is that they reflect something about the culture and how it interprets authority;"Systemic" means that you have to consider everything from the subtleties of how a mother defers to (respects) violent authority through to history, the words in a language, and so on. For example, the question of how a culture interprets authority, civility, morality.While I take your point about exposure and the time spent doing something (like truck driving or parenting), ultimately this is but one slice from a much broader whole.
>"Do you have anything to back up your generalizations here?"http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9c05e5d81e3ff937a15751c0a9649c8b63"Emotional damage is far harder to measure than physical damage."Is it? You think post office employees just 'go postal' without provocation of any kind? (bad blood between labor and management, between employees, etc.)You see only one domino in a ten domino chain. Violence doesn't just happen. It's the result of cascades. e.g. Dude A yells at dude B. Dude B takes it out on dude C who in turn takes it out on dude D who has unluckily been taking it from a bunch of other dudes (each with their own cascades). If dude D snaps then it's entirely his fault.incidentally…Girl A dumps on girl B. Girl B takes it out on girl C who then takes it out on girl D who has been taking it from a lot of other girls.If girl D snaps it's probably the fault of the nearest man.
>evil, I said that emotional damage is harder to MEASURE, not that it doesn't exist. As for your link, I am well aware that girls can be cruel, as are most people who've ever met girls. Heck, there was a movie about mean girls that came out not that long ago; I believe it was called Mean Girls. We were actually discussing violence and aggression between adults. So I ask again: do you have any evidence on emotional aggression between men and women, who does what, who does more, etc etc. Again, like I said, this sort of thing is hard to MEASURE. If someone has done good work on this I would like to see it. Whatever point you were trying to make with Dude A and Dude B and the rest, uh, you failed to make. I don't think like that and I don't know anyone who does.
>I disagree about rape-revenge films. While I do think there are rare exceptions, most of them are rather exploitative and putting suffering on showcase. While revenge narratives do happen with male leads, those films are far less likely to focus on physical or sexualized torture of the male lead (often, the revenge is not for the male lead at all, but for some nameless wife or girlfriend who gets offed in the first five minutes and is forgotten by halfway through when the new girl arrives). Torture scenes with a male lead in a revenge plot are generally short, or nonexistent (told in speech by a character). They also tend to depict types of violence unlikley to occur in reality, making the cheapening of violence that is so common in such films less intense (women do get raped and beaten by classmates or killed by ex-boyfriends, men are assaulted by a pack of ninjas or spies rarely to never). Revenge films with a female lead are horror, revenge films with a male lead are action. Salt, (a rather bad film, plot and writing wise) starring Angelina Jolie actually was written for a male lead, and the violence and reaction to it is extremely different than revenge plots written for female leads (and, again, the violence is unusual-battling a secret spy assassination group).And, the thing about the 'final girl' in slasher flicks is those films love to play a 'virgin/whore' dicotomy with female characters. The sexualized, loud, or butch women are routinely killed off first. The final survivor is white, thin, rather submissive in general, usually a an actual virgin (or pretty damned close).It's not that I think that plot lines involving violence against women or with revenge plots with a female lead can't be done well, it is just that they rarely are.
>"We were actually discussing violence and aggression between adults."No. You were actually discussing violence and aggression between/among (human) males and females.You RETROACTIVELY confined your argument to 'adults' when it suited your purposes. Of course such disingenuity IS a hallmark of creationists and other right wing Christian types (your sworn enemies) just so you know."Whatever point you were trying to make with Dude A and Dude B and the rest, uh, you failed to make. I don't think like that and I don't know anyone who does."I know you don't think like that. OR you wouldn't be on your side of the fence."I said that emotional damage is harder to MEASURE, not that it doesn't exist."Oh look! David scored an (actual) point for a change. Yay David! (clap clap)Well… sort of.If you HAD been able to understand all that dude A, dude B stuff then you could have worked out for yourself that emotional distress, trauma, etc. can be measured (same as physical violence) by the very physical violence that manifests at the end of the cascades.
>There is nothing feminist about 'I Spit On Your Grave'. There is nothing feminist about showing someone being raped for extended sequences by a gang, then killing them violently. The protaganist survives, but as what? Rape victims are often 'called to arms' by people who are not rape victims. No one should be expected to respond violently to a rape, and as I did not respond violently due to my own physical strength apart from anything else, I was later criticised. These revenge fantasies might look empowering to an outsider…but as a victim, I would beg to differ.Rape is almost never treated respectfully in films. It is either graphic or romanticised, totally destroying someone or not affecting them at all. Rape revenge fantasies are nothing new, and they usually involve men saving women or killing their rapists.I enjoyed 'May' and this movie seems to have a premise not entirely based around rape and murder, but I am tired of rape being sensationalised and included in movies where it will not be treated sensitively.I've also noticed that both 'I Spit On Your Grave' and the equally upsetting 'Last House On The Left' have had Hollywood remakes in the last two years. The latter was a revenge fantasy, but not of the young girls who are raped, they are long dead. I would really like to ask what you think is 'feminist' about these movies.
>evil, to clarify, the part of the Dude A stuff I disagreed with was your insinuation that people routinely conclude that "If dude D snaps then it's entirely his fault," whereas "If girl D snaps it's probably the fault of the nearest man." Again, I don't think like that, and neither does anyone I know. Whenever someone commits violence, male or female, people try to figure out what caused, or motivated, or triggered it. They don't immediately turn to ridiculous stereotyped non-explanations. If you want to discuss all forms of aggression between males and females regardless of age, fine. What I have been asking for from the start is some evidence to back up the assertions of yours I quoted above. You have not provided any. The mean girls article you linked to is interesting, but it doesn't answer the question.
>laura, obviously I don't have the perspective on this that you do. But my take is: the rapes in I Spit on Your Grave are horrifying, not titillating; they depict rape for what it is, a horrible act of violence; they make the audience uncomfortable, and they're supposed to make the audience uncomfortable. This is very different to many Hollywood films of the time and earlier that glamorize or trivialize rape. The film also depicts the way in which men can goad one another into violent acts, the ways in which their retrograde notions about women and sex feed into their violence. Rape victims are often 'called to arms' by people who are not rape victims. No one should be expected to respond violently to a rape, and as I did not respond violently due to my own physical strength apart from anything else, I was later criticised. These revenge fantasies might look empowering to an outsider…but as a victim, I would beg to differ.I have no good answer to this. All I can say is that I don't think the filmmakers intended to stigmatize women who do not/cannot fight back. While the rapes depicted in the film are realistic, the revenge part of the film is more fantastic — as is the case with many revenge films involving male protagonists, whether serious films or completely unrealistic action flicks. Last House on the Left? I don't know what to say about it. It's extremely disturbing, and from interviews I've seen with Wes Craven about it, it apparently disturbed the filmmakers when they were making the film. Is it a good film? I don;'t know. Is it a feminist film? I don't know. I think Craven does have feminist leanings, and I think some of his later films are clearly influenced by feminism and certainly by feminist film criticism. Last House is a lot closer to the id than those films are. I don't know what it means. All I know is that it unsettled me.
>I'm not really questioning whether the writers etc. define themselves as feminist, that doesn't bother me, I'm just unsettled by a movie depicting brutal rape and then brutal murder being called 'feminist', even if it isn't good.I'm sick of rape as a plot device, I'm sick of rape as an excuse for other forms of violence being shown, I'm sick as rape as a motivator for characters. A feminist movie about rape may show rape in it's true horror, but it would also show realistic consequences. What about a film where a woman is raped by her boyfriend, tries to report it, and no one gives a fuck? But eventually she proves herself through her awesome detective work or something. I don't know, I'm not pitching this very well!It's not a coincidence that both 'I Spit on Your Grave' and 'Last House' have a stranger-gang rape. Statistically the least likely, but definitely the most sensational, graphic and violent, so let's choose that one.
>"I can't think of a rape/revenge film centering on a guy, in fact."Hello, Deliverance?There was also a strange sort of movie called The Book of Revelation about a male victim of female gang rapists. He makes a half-assed attempt at revenge, but only ends up in trouble with the law. I call it strange because I honestly couldn't tell if it was supposed to be titillating or not.
>I agree with laura, there are a ton of exploitative movies with rape plots and "I Spit on Your Grave" and "Last House" fall squarely in that category. I do not have a problem with rape as a plot device, I have a problem with rape as a cheap plot device, as a luxuriation in scenes of graphic violence against women. There is a world of difference between "I Spit on Your Grave" or "Last House" and "Hound Dog", "Lady Vengeance", and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", though all use rape/violence and/or revenge as a plot line.
>DarkSideCat, I agree, rape is an important issue and should be examined in plots. I read Dragon Tattoo as well and hated it for mostly the same reasons, despite the movie being about other stuff. I don't understand all the praise the book got, to me it was a pretty basic crime thriller with author insertation and the rape and torture of women.I have seen rape used in movies well, e.g. a tv-movie here called 'The Mark of Cain' which examined prisoner abuse by British soliders in Iraq. It showed sexual assault, consequences and used these things to make a good, critical point about the way our military is run.The fact is, if you are raped you will probably never see justice. I undestand the need to force justice into movies to satisfy the audience, but I feel patronised to even consider that murder and violence should be the way to 'get over' a rape.
>I'm not a big fan of horror movies, so I might have a warped perspective here. My impression of horror and action movies, though, is that they exist mainly as a vehicle for violence. Watching people meet their gory, improbable end and watching things blow up is at the center of the fun. Contrast this with a non-action/horror movie, where violence is generally jarring, unsettling, etc., just like real life. So considering that violence in a horror movie setting is titillation, why would violent rape in a horror movie setting not be titillating? And why is it necessary to drive a revenge fantasy – you mention other McKee movies that don't need it, and at least two Tarantino movies have female-centered revenge plots that don't rely on rape.