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 worship Sephiroth instead, I’m a heretic. XD
Frankly, sometimes I think Tarantino is bordering on magninahood. But then he kills one of his female characters or includes a female henchman or something and I think that he’s okay.
Considering how Vlad Tepes treated subordinates who failed him while he was alive, being beaten to death is positively merciful.
Well, I had deeply held convictions, but if the star of Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit says different, I guess I’ll have to change ’em.
I can’t watch horror movies myself, sadly (thanks to my OCD, which will often randomly latch onto a particularly horrifying scene and replay it constantly for months in a literally traumatizing way 🙁 ) but I love reading or watching reviews of them because the themes and how they’re made can be fascinating.
As always, it sounds like The Woman runs into the problem of “how smart and/or analytical can we trust our audience to be?” There is something very valuable in showing scenes that are obviously perverse and shocking because they can send a powerful message, but it’s impossible to make a scene so disturbing that no one will get off on it. If 99% of the audience is like “wow, that’s a fucked up way to treat women” and 1% of the audience is like “lol, why didn’t I think of that approach to dating?” then is a horror movie successfully feminist? I’d say yes, personally.
That part amused me. In my head-canon, Van Helsing’s blood transfusions were the immediate cause of Lucy’s death.
Much is made of both Dr. Seward’s and Van Helsing’s medical incompetence in the annotated edition, actually.
Whatever, you have heard of “Sane, Safe, and Consensual” right?
Whatever: Okay, now you’re just trolling. You do realize that it is not ethical to actually have an actualfacts sex slave? Sex slavery can only be practiced safely and consensually with submissives, although I don’t know any sub who’d have your creepy ass as a dom. Good doms understand consent, care for their subs and, um, don’t want to rape children.
Speaking of symbolic rapes. >_<
@Whatever
Yea, but you forgot about the power dynamic of the gender imbalance within the predominant aggressor kyriarchy as it intersects with the hetro-normative patriarchy!
Don’t you feel foolish now?
NWO: I love it how you tell us that you don’t watch movies or TV because “it rots the brain”, then proceed to lecture us about the plots of all those shows and movies that you supposedly don’t watch. So: Were you lying about not watching TV and movies or were you lying about knowing their plots?
Also: congratulations on having mastered the random word generator. Next up: learning to operate the washer.
@ozymandias42
Still legislating morality with your votes, aye suffragette Ozy?
NWO, if you don’t like big words, I’ll make it simpler for you: having sex with a ten-years-old child is rape, even if zie didn’t fought back, no matter what is the gender or the sexual orientation of the rapist.
Obviously, you’re not Catholic. Lust or excessive carnal desire is one of the 7 deadly sins, don’t you know? You can go to hell for that when you die. And even if you are secular, you would have to admit that it’s de rigeur for society to treat people who indulge to excess lacking control/restraint as morally/ethically bankrupt/deficient. Why should satyrs and nymphos be given a free pass, when rationally/logically, they’re cut from the very same cloth and sewn with the very same thread?
Maybe it’s “de rigeur” in a sick and hypocritical society. But a healthy and humane society should stay the fuck out of people’s private business, as long as that business is conducted between consenting adults.
It doesn’t seem as if Stoker really did any research on the historical Dracula. Didn’t Mina have a line about how he was a good man in life?
I have to admit, NWO’s concept of charities and nonprofits is particularly fascinating to me because my husband works for a nonprofit, and every day I get to see how hard such organizations struggle to stay afloat. And no, my husband’s nonprofit is not dedicated to exclusively helping women, nor is it owned by a corporation. Sigh.
NWO has been on a tear about nonprofits lately, so I’ve had to add a whole section to the book…
Charitable Giving
The few businesses owned or run by women are nonprofit organizations dedicated to hurting men.
For every dollar women donate to charities to help men, men donate ten billion dollars to help women.
There are only two kinds of charities in existence: charities that exclusively help women, and charities that exclusively help women and children.
Women give a trillion dollars a year to charities, but these “charities” actually fronts for the huge corporations these women own. Economists are still trying to determine how women can simultaneously run all big corporations and only run small man-hating nonprofits.
Nonprofit organizations operate by photocopying fliers, posting them on walls around town, then sitting back and waiting for the money to roll in. Even though the average nonprofit doesn’t do anything else, it’s much too hard for a man to start one, because men are so oppressed they can’t even use a Kinko’s.
You can also go to hell for being rich, wearing the wrong kind of clothes, eating shrimps, getting a divorce or simply not believing in god. Also, the world was created in six days a few thousands years ago.
Also, society sometimes shame people even if they’ve done nothing wrong (which, in my book, has to prejudice on other to qualify. Just having a great sexual life doesn’t).
What’s you’re point?
Okay, so just so we’re clear: too much sex with consenting adults, morally reprehensible. Sex with those below the age of consent: totally okay. As long as its not too much, I assume.
@Amused
Oh I’ve seen a few shows. But for the most part I really don’t need a TV. Maybe between 5 to 10 hours a month. All shows, drama, sitcoms, adverts have the same message. Stupid man/brilliant woman. Fear men/save women. Hate men/love women. The recurring theme is the same, bad man/good women. Hell, I hear more women in the board rooms makes them less evil. There’s a fine message to be propogating!
What’s a washer? That’s beyond my level of comprehension. Can you show me how to operate one? It all seems so technical. I’m only a man. We don’t understand such techy stuff!
NWO, what tv show do you watch? o_0
It’s Aeris from Final Fantasy VII, you moron.
@shaenon
Nuh-uh princess. We got us a study, in the antidote to boobery blogroll. Women make boardrooms less evil!
That’s what you should be puttin in the old book. Men, left to their own devices in the boardrooms, aren’t merely inefficient or wasteful, they’re actually evil.
I dunno, the Count was quite vociferously proud of his warrior heritage, and his family’s having beaten back wave upon wave of invaders. So there’s some similarities to Vlad Tepes, I think.
I thought Mina commented on how he could have been a force for great good if he hadn’t directed his energies to wicked purposes, but I could be wrong.
Maybe because you don’t watch TV, NWO, you don’t know what’s on it?
I know I’m violating the First Law Of Troll Epistemology (conclude first, gather information never) here, but really.
The main message of the TV shows I watch are:
1) Let’s build things and then blow them up! Ostensibly for science!
2) Let’s see how things are built and maintained by blue-collar Americans with very difficult jobs!
3) SHARKS!
Stupid man/brilliant woman really never comes into it.
Boom de yada.