I wrote earlier this year about the controversy swirling around Lucky McKee’s film The Woman. After a midnight showing at Sundance last January, one angry man in the audience stood up and denounced the film as a “disgusting movie” that “degrades women.” Given McKee’s nuanced treatment of gender issues in his previous films May and The Woods, I suspected that this outraged critic had completely missed the point.
Now I’ve finally gotten to see the film and, yep, he did. The Woman isn’t a misogynist film; it’s a film about misogyny. The Woman revolves around a cheerful , self-satisfied and and superficially charming country lawyer who captures a ferocious feral woman he spots on a hunting trip and chains her in the cellar in what he perversely sees as an attempt to “civilize” her. A patriarchal king of his castle, he introduces her to the rest of the family and assigns them all chores relating to her upkeep.
I don’t really want to give away much more than this; suffice it to say that as the film progresses we learn just how much of an odious psychopath this “family man” really is. But while the film offers a savage critique of his cruelty, and his misogyny, none of the women in the film are unambiguously noble victims, and when they begin to fight back the story is no simple tale of feminist empowerment. It’s a bit more subtle and unsettling than that.
While less overtly violent than, say, your typical Saw film, The Woman is a film that’s often, and by design, hard to take. Yes, there are some grisly deaths, but this isn’t a film that glories in gore for gore’s sake; it’s really about cruelty and complicity and feeling trapped, the ways in which fucked-up families can ensnare even outsiders in their toxic dynamics.
Naturally, the film has drawn sharply mixed reactions from critics. It got a glowing review from Andy Webster in the New York Times, who described the cast as “remarkable” and praised the way McKee invests the film’s “a powerful parable with an abundance of closely observed details.” Marc Holcomb of the Village Voice, meanwhile, dismissed it as “torture porn for people who’d never admit to liking torture porn.” (He also noted sardonically that the feral woman is “apparently tame enough to shave her armpits.” And her legs too, I might add; under the caked-on-grime, she’s what the PUAs would probably rate a HB10. )
But the strangest review I’ve seen so far is one by Rene Rodriguez in the Miami Herald, who perversely describes the film as, er, fun. While acknowledging the film’s feminist themes, she dismisses them as mere window-dressing:
[C]ome on: You want a feminist movie, go rent Norma Rae. The Woman is the sort of horror picture designed to make you throw popcorn at the screen, groan with disgust and shriek out loud when McKee springs a shock on you. … Good times.
Really? Were you throwing popcorn at the screen during Antichrist too?
Of course, it doesn’t exactly help – as Rodriguez and a couple of other reviewers have noted – that the film’s publicists sent out the DVD screener with a barf bag “just in case.” The Woman deserves better than that.
EDITED TO ADD: Regular Man Boobz commenters might want to check out this thread on the IMDb forums, in which a (somewhat oversimplified) discussion of the feminist themes in the film is quickly derailed by a dude who thinks it laughable that a mere woman could possibly overpower the family patriarch:
I feel sorry for you and any other woman who truly believes that they can physically overpower a man.
You know, if women are just as physically capable as men, I’d love to start my own inter-gender boxing league. Sign me up, baby! Equality at its finest. 🙂
And the trailer:
I think Vlad Dracula and Count Dracula match up quite well, but I just think it was more of a lucky coincidence than design on Stoker’s part. I think he just thought the name was cool, and hey, I can’t blame him; it is cool. Apparently Dracula was called “Count Wampyr” in early drafts.
Speaking of Dracula, I just finished a book called The Beetle; a supernatural horror novel that came out the same year Dracula did, made use of the same writing style (as if it had been gathered from various documents) and apparently initially sold better.
It doesn’t have a character that matches up against the ole’ Count though. The villain in the book has a more mysterious backstory which is never fully revealed. We don’t even get a real name.
It suffers from a lot of the same flaws as the book Dracula. For one thing, the human characters are pretty dull for the most part (although one of the hero characters drunkenly kills a cat for no reason, which was…weird).
Also, the structure is off. It starts off in a creepy but exciting way, but gets duller as it goes along, and finishes in a much-less-than thrilling manner. Dracula was best in the scenes with Jonathan in Transylvania, and the Beetle’s best scenes were at the beginning with the Lovecraftican descriptions of the creature and the horror it inspires in the Robert Holt character. Lovecraft apparently praised The Beetle, and you can see why parts of it would be up his alley.
Huh. Another little fun fact according to NWO. Let’s say the average wage for men was 100 dollars, and for women was 70 dollars. This isn’t oppression! Why? Because at some point in the past, the average wage for men was 70 dollars! Granted, at that point the average wage for women was 50 dollars, but men had to go through the same hardship!
See, according to NWO, if men have ever ever ever in the past ever not been able to vote, then the fact that women can’t vote but men can isn’t oppression! If women are constantly behind men in income for all time, women will never be oppressed!
[/massivesarcasm]
So tell us, NWO:
What is the male equivalent of not having the right to vote? What’s the male equivalent for being owned by the men of your family? What is the male equivalent of not having the right of having a job, a bank account or take basically any important decision without the agreement of your husband? What is the male equivalent of living in a country where a huge majority of leaders are men? What is the male equivalent of being shamed because you have sex/you have female genitals? What is the male equivalent of receiving death and rape threat on a daily base because of your gender?
Also, “you hurt me, I hurt you back” is still not what a zero sum game means.
@kyrie: War and denial of sex =P
@NWO:
“Both of those things should be shamed. I am a man, I am not like a woman. I don’t want to be a woman. I don’t want to act like a woman.”
Hoo boy, I thought you were supposed to learn at a very young age that your mind is distinct from other minds. I happen to not like buffalo wings very much. Does that mean everyone who does should be shamed? No! Does the fact that people are allowed to eat buffalo wings mean I am forced to? No! There are some (genetically) men who do want to be women! There are some men who want to take on traits that women normally take on, like wearing dresses or makeup or dating other men.
Does any of this, in any way shape or form, cause you to be forced to participate in any of these things? No. So what exactly is your reason for wanting these things shamed?
@Joanna:
I really, desperately hope that there aren’t people who actually believe that constantly getting rape threats is at the same magnitude of wrongness as a woman refusing to sleep with you. Therefore it is fine for you to threaten women with rape as long as they refuse to sleep with you…
My brain… my poor broken brain.
Shame I have to leave in a couple hours, I feel like I’ve been away from y’all for too long! :3
I wonder if NWO is typing another long winded response about how even God couldn’t create a world in which feminism wasn’t evil, or whether he’s just gonna swoop by later to say that he’s reached his daily quota for (not) answering questions…
Oh, and one more thing about The Beetle: the villain is a woman who masquerades as a man.
Not sure how NWOslave would react to that one.
She can also hypnotise people and turn into a giant scarab beetle, so…yeah…
They tried raping women who agreed to have sex with them, but it was ineffective.
Okay, NWO, if you don’t want to consider librarians, I have another hypothetical for you.
Elmo is outside the room. He can’t see or hear what we do. I show you a box, and I show you that it’s full of candy. Then I close the box up and hide it. Then I let Elmo in the room.
Does Elmo know about the candy?
(This is called the False Belief test, by the way. It whether you can understand that other people know different things than you know. And it ought to open your mind to the fact that occasionally you are Elmo, and you are the one who doesn’t know something.)
Ooh I wanna play too!
what is the male equivalent of being told you’re not as intelligent as men? that your mind is frail and inferior?
what is the male equivalent of being denied a college or university education because you have a vagina?
what is the male equivalent of not being able to control the property that is yours or the money you earned?
what is the male equivalent of being told your value as a person is only based on how beautiful and young looking you look?
@kirby: Wasn’t it NWO that said women’s sexiness turns men into primitive animals and we have to have sex with them just because…?
But but holly librarians are evil! http://evillibrarians.com/
(fun YA book series by Brandon Sanderson were librarians are in control of everything and are evil people from another dimension)
If you have an ebook email me and I will let you borrow them. Quite silly and fun.
You’d loan me a book about evil librarians?
I think I see through that flimsy disguise, Aloren, or should I say… ALIBRARIAN!
@Holly Pervocracy
“Okay, NWO, I know you’re not good at this, but let’s play pretend. Pretend you had gotten a mistaken idea. Pretend someone told you librarians were evil, but that person was wrong. And you made a mistake. You believed them. You thought librarians were evil, because you screwed up and thought a wrong thing.”
Ohhh, I’m not good at this. When women condecend does it make them feel superior? Most likely, why else would women do that? Pretty standard stuff if todays world.
To show you how I have changed my mind about things. I used to believe women didn’t lie about assault or rape. And I also used to believe in any altercation between a man and a woman, the man was at fault. What a fool I was.
That propaganda almost worked. That was just schooling, Big Daddy and the MSM of course. Naturally when you go out into the real world you realize the lies that have been propogated. Feminism of course likes those lies. Women get to play the victim card when it suits them, Title IX, AA, and on it goes. Plus all the fear-mongering to add to the victim card. 1 in 4 rape crap. Then ya got the shaming language, misogyny-misogyny-misogyny.
Finally, ya figure out the game. Big Daddy does all that shit to gain power. It’s not a failed policy, it performs exactly the way it’s supposed to. Take the mandatory arrest crap in DV. It doesn’t work in the least. It is the cause of more violence, as every emperical study has shown. Yet it is promoted by feminism as something great. Big Daddy takes our money and uses it to jail men. That’s power.
Women are an easy mark for Big Daddy. Women are the cash cow of the system.
Watch!
Sexual assaults are running rampant thru our colleges!!!
Women fear for their safety!
Roofies found in 90% of college dorms!
It’s all lies but it doesn’t matter.
Now we can have the mandatory, “she fears you” class. Cha-ching. More money. More power!
More campus security. Cha-ching. More money. More power!
Investigative teams. Cha-ching. More money. More power!
Surveliance cameras. Cha-ching. More money. More power!
Hall monitors. Cha-ching. More money. More power!
Women now fear men for no other reason than a lie. Once the lies are propagated it’s all over but the taxes.
And women fearing for their safety! Cha-ching. Cha-ching.Cha-ching. Cha-ching.Cha-ching. Cha-ching.Cha-ching. Cha-ching.Cha-ching. Cha-ching.Cha-ching. Cha-ching.Cha-ching. Cha-ching.Cha-ching. Cha-ching. All the money! All the power!
Like shooting fish in a barrel. But as always, try to tell any woman this and she’ll usually condecend down to you. She has a way of knowin stuff.
I don’t think you really thought about my example very hard NWO.
Reading, for one. :p
Also did you just say that hall monitors are an example of feminists getting drunk on endless money and power?
@Joanna:
I have no idea, though that sounds familiar. Given that NWO gets turned on by all those sultry 14-year-olds out there, though, I really hope that wasn’t him.
Story Time actually, cause I realized something strange. I was watching “My neighbor Totoro” yesterday, and there’s a scene where the two main characters, two young girls, are having a bath with their father. In one shot, you can totally see a nipple on the older (but still very young) girl.
My original thought was “yikes, that’d probably be censored normally.” My second thought was “hold the fuck on. Why? Are we afraid that people would sexualize a prepubescent girl to the point where a nipple showing in a completely non-sexual scene would be too scandalous to be seen?” And that’s when I realized… the answer was yes. A girl too young to have boobs, in a movie that has absolutely nothing to do with anything related to sex, would be censored because it’s a girl, and girls eventually have boobs, which are considered sexual in any circumstance (even breast-feeding).
And that’s what it means to treat sexualize women.
@Joanna:
I have no idea, though that sounds familiar. Given that NWO gets turned on by all those sultry 14-year-olds out there, though, I really hope that wasn’t him.
Story Time actually, cause I realized something strange. I was watching “My neighbor Totoro” yesterday, and there’s a scene where the two main characters, two young girls, are having a bath with their father. In one shot, you can totally see a nipple on the older (but still very young) girl.
My original thought was “yikes, that’d probably be censored normally.” My second thought was “hold the fuck on. Why? Are we afraid that people would sexualize a prepubescent girl to the point where a nipple showing in a completely non-sexual scene would be too scandalous to be seen?” And that’s when I realized… the answer was yes. A girl too young to have boobs, in a movie that has absolutely nothing to do with anything related to sex, would be censored because it’s a girl, and girls eventually have boobs, which are considered sexual in any circumstance (even breast-feeding).
And that’s what it means to sexualize women.
The Beetle sounds intriguing. I’ll have to look it up.
Damn, double post… Only difference was a typo in the last line. Sorry folks.
“When women condecend does it make them feel superior? Most likely, why else would women do that? Pretty standard stuff if todays world.”
If it makes you feel any better, I feel superior to you regarding sanity and social intelligence. But I’m on equal grounds with everyone else I know =P
@NWO:
Still waiting for you to answer my question, which you only partially responded to by way of responding to Holly. Are you ignoring me? Cause that would make me a sad panda… 🙁
@Johanna, you’re right. To tell the truth, I am actively denying sex to every MRAs as a principle, to most men since I obviously never had sex with them and to my boyfriend for now. On the other hand he’s not in the building, so I don’t really have a choice right now.
The war part, I can’t really feel responsible because I’m a pacifist so I would never send anyone to war, and I still don’t understand how things that are decided and done at 99% by men (since women were forbidden to enroll) are the fault of women and feminists specifically) Not to mention that being a woman in an occupied country/country at war/country that lost a war sucks. A lot. And being a war widow (especially if you have kids) has never been a very much envied place in society.
Thought mosts men don’t profit either from wars, usually only the already-powerful or already-rich (men, usually) profit from it.