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:
You know, mral’s “HER ROYAL HIGHNESS” BS gave me a brief moment of pause in discussing a game with some friends. The MC has no canon name given in this series, so it’s common to refer to them by a title of some sort, and the one I’d always used for this one is “His Royal Highness” because it’s used so frequently in game. “Wait, why does that feel weird to say now?”, then I remember MRAL’s little absurdity, and giggled about the possibility of this character behaving like MRAL dreams women everywhere do. Complete with spitting!
I kind of want to turn MRAL’s paranoia into a comedy skit, actually. All we need is a small team of women to walk around being cartoonishly snooty and rude to random men, but in ways that are so absurd that it’s quite clear that they’re taking the piss. It would be like a very specific sort of flash mob.
“Lucky Mangina Fuck” is my new favorite name for anything. I can’t decide if I want to use it for a band or a novel or my firstborn child.
MRAL, you’re in Boston, right? And you like sci-fi stuff? Friggin’ go to Arisia! I was a guest there last year and I had a blast. You will meet a ton of guys who are less studly than you and still have like three poly girlfriends. And lots of nerdy girls. It will have a positive impact on your worldview. Plus the “Girl Genius” creators will be there! I can introduce you to the organizers (or the Foglios) if you like. Shoot me a line.
Personally, David, I like the horror posts; I’ve been on a horror movie kick since Halloween. I’m interested on your take on Antichrist, if you’ve seen it.
@shaenon
*reads wiki page on Antichrist*
hmmm…I can’t decide if MRAs would love or hate that movie 😛
…I’m quite a fan of vampires so I think I’ll enjoy it…
Quackers, have you seen Nosferatu? Best adaptation of Dracula I’ve seen so far. Max Schreck was one scary dude.
I have only seen bits of Nosferatu. That scene of Orlock’s shadow on the wall? love it. 😀
My favorite vampire film is Interview, though I know there are vampire fans that have their qualms with Anne Rice. Do you like the Coppola’s version of Dracula? I caught it on TV once but wasn’t too into it. I’d really like to give it another chance though, could have just been having an off day.
I like Anne rice okay. Beats Stephanie Meyer any day. Not a fan of Tom Cruise though.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about Coppola’s Dracula. On the one hand, it’s visually impressive and mostly well cast, though Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker is pretty hard to take. On the other, I really detest the tacked-on romance between Dracula and Mina Murry. I don’t mind sympathetic vampires, but to me Dracula’s supposed to be a monster, not some kind of tragic romantic hero or something.
Antichrist, yeah. Like The Woman, I took it to be a film about misogyny rather than a misogynist film. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen it; so I don;t have much else to say about it off the top of my head. MRAs might like it because, hey, evil woman! Cuz that’s how they are! But they might also see it as glorifying the, you know, what happens with the, you know, penis.
I thought it was a brilliant movie, and one that I’ve been meaning to rewatch.
And Quackers, if you want some other interesting vampire films, I’d recommend Thirst (a Korean film by the director of Oldboy) or the French film Trouble Every Day.
I tend to think that gender issues in horror movies are really complicated and ambiguous. Fear is coded female in our society — if you show a man being terrified he tends to be seen as a wimp — so most victims in horror films (or at least the ones that get the most screen time) tend to be female. But I think there’s more to that than misogyny; as Carol Clover argues in a famous essay on the “final girl,” even guys who are watching horror films tend to identify a lot with the victims. (And directors use various tricks to get you into the victim’s POV.)
Also, while women tend to be the main victims, they also (since victims fight back) get to be the heroines of the films, especially if they survive. There are a lot of great female characters in horror movies, and they tend to pass the Bechdel test with flying colors. (Or at lest more often than films in most other genres.)
In some ways I think horror films are a modernized and feminized version of westerns, which in many ways are all about suffering — the heroes (usually male) have to endure a lot of shit, in many ways as bad as what victims in horror films have to endure. Just think of Clint Eastwood’s sun-ravaged face in The Good the Bad and the Ugly. Of course, westerns are all about stoic endurance, while horror films are about terror.
Of course the other big thing to remember about horror films is that the audience basically identifies both with the victims/hero(ines) AND with the monsters/villains. (Think of the opening of Halloween, where you’re literally seeing the first murders through Michael Meyers’ eyes.) People are a lot more likely to dress as Frankenstein’s monster for halloween than they are Dr. Frankenstein, or the little girl he throws into the river. People are a lot more likely to dress as Michael Meyers than they are to dress as Jamie Lee Curtis’ babysitter character.
I’m sort of working on a horror-related project so I’m trying to sort a lot of these things out.
You know, as much as I hate obligatory heterosexual romances, I tend to let this one go.
…Mostly because I like to pretend Carmilla was tortured and angsty, and not *really* trying to eat her lover, but she must! And I pretend the book isn’t a warning tale against lesbians. And if I want one, I surely have to let everyone else have their’s.. XD
David, if you get a chance, check out the book it’s based on. The movie was actually very sanitized. In the book, the child vampire is a boy who pimps himself out to pedophiles for blood. I caught a whiff of that creepiness in the movie when it came to the adult human who was caring for her, but had no clue how much starker the source material actually was.
Regarding the conversation about slasher films, anyone who discounts the sexualization of violence in them is in serious denial. Stabbing stands in as penetration while the female victim moans in “agony,” oftentimes naked while it happens. Shit, in Hostel they had an exploding eyeball standing in for a come shot. And again, while we watched the white fluid dribbling down the woman’s face, there she was moaning in pain. Do not for one second think that was accidental. In I Spit on Your Grave we’re forced to spend over an hour watching a woman get brutally gang raped before she’s allowed to get her revenge. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a woman is impaled on a meat hook and again, instead of screaming in pain, she’s moaning. Similar thing happens in Silent Night, Deadly night, except the woman is impaled on deer horns, and of course, is topless at the time.
There are better horror films out there now, but torture porn (called “slasher movies” in the 80’s) is still big. As Quackers suggested, my guess is MRAL simply is too young to have been around in the late 70’s and early 80’s to even know what those films were like.
Rutee- Eh, people are welcome to their star-crossed Dracula and Mina if that’s what they want, it’s just not my cup of tea.
As if by magic, MRAs provide us with an example of how unsuited their deluded mindset is to anything relating to art;
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/activism/1000-bounty-to-identify-swedish-scum-members/
Looking at AVFM is a cross between watching paint dry and watching a slow degeneration into lunacy.
I would have been fine with Coppola’s Dracula if he’d stayed the way he was when you first encounter him. Granted it was a bit campy, but still monstrous enough to work. After he turned into hot emo Dracula with a monacle I started giggling even more than I had been at Reeves and Ryder’s attempts at English accents.
You’re talking about Spaghetti-Westerns, they were different from their American counterpart made before the 1960s – the ruffled and laconic hero was created in Spaghetti-Westerns. In American westerns made before the 1960s, the hero was always clean-cut. After that American western were strongly influenced by Spaghetti-Westerns.
I’m going to have to put I Spit on your Grave in the Hostel/Saw torture porn category too. I know there are tons of people who think it was a feminist parable, but I can’t help but notice that most of those people are men. It’s very hard for a woman to be emotionally distanced enough to sit through the long drawn out rape without empathising with the victim far too much to make the revenge bit at the end justify making the audience sit through the majority of the movie.
An interesting one from a feminist POV is The Descent. I knew some men who refused to watch it because there are hardly any men in it at all, but you’d think MRAs would love the fact that the monsters are female. In terms of gender split among viewers, though, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance was pretty much a texbook example of how male and female audiences read female characters differently. It was amazing how many men’s comments on that movie ended up being all about how she was a bad mother and/or vicious to empathise with purely because she was a woman (apparently the whole torture/murder thing at the end wouldn’t have bothered them if she’d been a man).
Well, that was in keeping with Stoker’s novel, where the Count kept getting younger the more he fed. He didn’t just go from scary and menacing to sexy and endearing in the book, though.
That should have been TOO vicious to empathise with. It was amazing how many men said that, given that all of them seemed to have seen Oldboy first. After that one I’d have been surprised if Lady Vengeance was less violent, but apparently because the protagonist was a woman the same level of violence that was OK in Oldboy was suddenly unacceptable.
It sounds interesting, but how much of a horror movie is it?
To be clear, I LOATHE torture porn. The Saw movies, hostel, to me anyone that quotes the twist at the end to justify their liking of the movies is just grasping the only plot point conveiently placed so they wouldn’t have to admit they just liked the violence. However, I’m not particularly delicate to violence either, Tarantino makes some of my all time favorite movies, I even reasonably enjoyed Sin City.
So my question is, is it more like Texas Chain Saw Massacre with some undertones of feminism or whatever, or is it more like a psychological thriller with some death scenes thrown in?
Talking about violence in movies always ends up frustrating me a bit, because I think we need to be more specific. For example, I had no issues at all with Oldboy, but Iichi the Killer, which was about comparable in terms of overall level of violence, made me want to go find Miike and kick him in the nuts (I’ve loved some other things he’s done, but there are bits of Iichi where you can really see his issues with women showing up, and the stories about what happened on-set just confirm that feeling). There’s a big difference between violence and violence that’s sexualised, at least for women viewers, so I don’t think that talking about overall level of violence answers the question that, for example, Crys seems like she might be asking.
I think this is also why a lot of people who can’t stand Hostel/Saw/etc. love Oldboy, and Park’s other movies. Park’s movies are every bit as violent, but not in a sexualised way. They’re vicious, but they’re not rapey.
Blitzgal,
I really liked Let The Right One In. I thought it was the most original vampire movies I’ve seen in years. I got the idea, though, from a single scene that the girl was, in fact, a castrato. I also picked up the prostitution angle. Did you see the Sweedish version or the American remake?
I heartily agree with you on the sexualized violence in slasher movies. It’s so clear and obvious, that if you can’t see it, it’s because you don’t want to.
I liked both of those movies. Also Oldboy, as you mention later. And Tarantino is one of my favorite directors. Inglorious Basterds is amazing, and it’s hilarious to listen to dudebros talk about how “lame” it was because Brad Pitt was barely in it and there wasn’t enough Nazi killing. That film features it’s own “Nice Guy” MRA type, too!
As you say in a subsequent post, there is definitely a big difference between violence and sexualized violence. Some directors are able to make their point about various issues without exploiting them. For instance, in Kill Bill, we know that the orderly has been selling the Bride’s comatose body and can feel all of the revulsion in that revelation without him having to actually show someone raping her.
It’s interesting that guys are reacting that way regarding Lady Vengeance, because she doesn’t even kill the guy who wronged her. Without spoiling it too much, it’s a group of people.
I saw both. I definitely got a hinky vibe and thought that her caretaker was probably sexually involved with her, but you got it exactly right! Which scene did you catch that in?
I admit I had to watch the movie twice to realize why she wasn’t killing people herself — it was to avoid making more vampires. It seemed odd to me watching her in action. It’s clear that she’s strong enough to get her own blood.
I always took the feminist idea that women could stand up to men physically as a manifestation of the suppressed masochistic desires possessed by all women. Feminism has created a world of manginas and beta men who no longer have the ability to control their women or dominate them in the way they crave, and women, who are naturally submissive, find this intensely frustrating. Thus, feminists brainwash women into actually believing that they can defend themselves, and that there’s no risk in provoking or otherwise displeasing a male in a way that may cause him to react with hostility. Women, having been taught to think in this dangerous way, are now more inclined to waltz like lemmings into situations where men can remind them of their vulnerability – and thus make them feel like fulfilled women – time and time again. In other words, women turn themselves into magnets for mistreatment because, to quote Dune, “the vaginas must flow.”
Shorter Arks: Men beat women because women want them to.