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 NWO is getting close to the bottom of the bottle now. I expect he’ll bow out soon.
Teacher/Student ratio: actually the available info is that at least at university level (I don’t know about K-12), the teacher/student ratio is about the same.
What has changed: MOAR ADMINISTRATORS.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all&print=true
Administrators tend to make more than many faculty, so………………..
I liked this thread better when it wasn’t about the voices in NWOslave’s head.
@PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth
Tell me Liz? How’s that votin thing workin out for ya? Does the future look so bright ya gotta wear shades? I mean with all the good women countering evil men in boardrooms, womens issues are the only issues, women input, women leaders, women, women, women doin all kindsa stuff. Do ya think were gonna be better off next year than this year?
How is it, that worldwide, all ya hear is women, women, women. Feminism is just a sweepin the planet. It’s exported by the UN like it’s the second coming. I can’t open an newspaper, watch any newscast without hearing how women are just 10lbs of sugar in a 2lb sack. Women making strides, better in school, at work, at home, women taking over, women controlling virtually all the disposable wealth, it’s just endless.
I gotta be honest with ya. WTF? I got according to the book-o-larnin math A debt so monsterous we are owned by the bankers. Have a look!
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
The worldwide economic crash in our, “global community” is imminent. Our feminist global community. We got us a war cookin like you ain’t never seen before. Take a look at all those countries we invaded. Everyone of them was handed over to anti-western forces. Read the news. Why would western forces hand over the like of Egypt to anti-western forces? Egypt was totally pro-western. Libya, not a peep out of them in 40 years. Syria, Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan. And were gearing up for Iran as well. Ostensible, as the State news has repeatedly told us, we’re helping women be freed from oppression.
Feminism is a farce. It’s a cash-cow. It’s an excuse to kill. Once those countries ally with each other, we are gonna have us some fun. The gang at the top, that funds feminism, are divying us up. I guess individual men could’ve helped, but we got no power. You do. So I guess we should blame the ones with all the power?
Kyrie, don’t forget: Sex is also shameful if the woman overtly enjoys it. I find it amusing how in our supposed “gynocracy”, a movie with an explicit rape scene (as long as it doesn’t show the penis) gets an R rating, but a movie in which a woman is depicted having an orgasm is firmly in the NC-17 territory. Ditto almost any movie depicting consensual intercourse in which the woman is moving. I read how Eyes Wide Shut was threatened with an NC-17 rating because in the orgy scene, women were shown physically responding to men during sex. To scale it down to the R rating, images of other people were digitally inserted to obscure the moving women. Apparently, for a woman to do anything during sex other than to lie on her back motionless and thinking of England is “shameful”.
Sometimes I read NWO’s comments and I replace “feminists” with “acupuncturists” in my head, and honestly, it doesn’t really make any more or less sense.
I liked this thread better when it wasn’t about the voices in NWOslave’s head.
Same here.
“If you think Phyllis Schlafly is a feminist, then there is no hope for you. At all. She’s an anti-feminist conservative…”
Well, see, Quackers, NWOS know’s Phyllis Schlafly’s a woman; at least, that’s what he’s heard. Which means she can’t possibly be on his side. (What with the bitchez sticking together & all.)
BTW, NWOS, who is this Big Daddy you’re always talking about? Does he have a name or a street address? (E-mail would be fine too; in fact now that I think about it might work even better). He certainly seems to keep busy; I’d like to meet him some time.
So wait, we all have “sex blogs” now? Mine must be the most boring thing in the world…
Nice try, liar! All women are obviously greenish-yellow Ajah (because we are all sluts and man-haters respectively.) The secret Black Ajah part is right, though; we’re also all secretly Black Ajah. And we totally start all our secret meetings by stripping down to the waist, just like Jordan said. XD
@Amused: I still haven’t figured out why sex (on screen) is considered much worse than murder (on screen).
Even simple nudity is usually seen as worse that murdering a whole family with a chainsaw.
Sooo… when did we do that again? It looked a little different to me. :p
@ozymandias42
“Also, entitlements don’t cause poverty, which is kind of like explaining that bacon doesn’t cause fluctuations in the euro, but still.”
Hey genius. Go to the realtime debtclock link I just gave. See that debt, that’s entitlement debt. HAWHAWHAW!
I like mint.
The plant, I mean. I have one growing in my bedroom at the moment, using a grow light I bought at one of the cornucopia of indoor “tomato” growing stores hereabouts.
Before I bought the grow light, I nearly killed the damn thing — brought it inside in a great hurry, because of the prospect of snow, then put it in my kitchen sink and thought “I should do something about that mint” for two weeks. It got sad. Many of the leaves dropped off and it got infested by at least spider mites. So I cut off all the dead and infested bits and watered it and stuck it under the grow light (complete with timer), and it promptly started shooting out new healthy leaves.
I conclude that given the infamous health of mint and the fact that this particular mint had clearly developed a healthy root system during its time outside, that this is the sort of plant that provides substantial rewards to proper attention to the basic plant inputs, i.e. water and light. This is a cheerful thing to have around, and I like looking at it every day and observing yet another new shoot coming up through the soil.
The thing about mint, though, that is novel among houseplants I’ve seen to be satisfyingly resilient so far (e.g. spider plants, african violets, to a certain extent rubber plants) is that it has a pleasant herbal smell that is like the standard “mint” smell but with more complexity and, of course, it can be eaten and is tasty. Since my previous houseplant experience has been more with the standard items from tropical or tropical-ish environments that tend to be inedible and/or not tasty, this is a welcome change; it’s really quite nice to come back to my apartment at night and see it lit by the grow light and smell what I fancy is a faint odor of mint.
I like mint.
Okay, NWO must be drinking, ’cause now he’s apparently turning into one of those donkey things from Pinocchio…
It’s official: NWOslave is a character from a Jack Chick comic.
So, NWO, when and why is sex shameful?
I like origami, SF books, hiking and kittens.
NWO – You still have yet to explain to me how compared to corporate welfare, any sort of social safety net is more than a drop in the bucket, or how feminists as a group are more statist than any other group. Like I said, sure most feminists are statists, but most people are statists. Then, it literally broke your brain for me to say that I wasn’t one. Come on, dude. Do you even know your own political position? Are you a “fellow libertarian”? Like I said, okay, if that’s how you want to play, sure, taxes are bad, the state is bad, etc. So do you want them or not? If you’re gonna play “YOU VILE CREATURE PAWNS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER LOVE YOUR BIG DADDY YSE YOU DO” then I’m gonna point out that you sure do seem to love him too. If you’re a statist, just say so. Again, most people are statists. But it doesn’t mean you have the moral high ground over “most feminists” – and it doesn’t mean feminist = statist. I mean, if you want to be a pawn of the illuminati space lords, just go for it. And jail me in your tax jail.
I love pie. And needlepoint. And guinea pigs.
What do you like, dude?
You know what I like?
I like sex. I like the human connection, the vulnerability, the silliness of it all, the opportunity for creativity and play, and the very private (even when it’s public!) bond it can create between two people. I also like some less noble things about it.
Also I like pumpkins. Growing ’em, carving ’em, makin’ pie, it’s all good. Pumpkins are awesome.
Sex is shameful when a woman is having it with anyone except NWO.
Sex is also shameful when a woman is having sex with NWO, because, man, that would just be a shame, wouldn’t it?
I like guinea pigs.
And I like this video.
Kyrie, it’s because shameful things should be shamed. Try to keep up!
@zhinxy
How could I possibly answer the multitude of questions, so earnestly put forth.
Such as… ” I mean, if you want to be a pawn of the illuminati space lords, just go for it. And jail me in your tax jail.”
I guess I’m just a pawn of the illuminatti space lords.