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:
Well, none of you womyn have to worry about that as I’ve Gone My Own Way since the turn of the century and have long since become a herbivorous ghost. As I’v discovered (and so too are ever-more of my brothers) Modern Women are just too risky to be worth it anymore and even Traditional Women feel fake (heh, if you get accustomed to a bad thing, even a good thing will now feel false). But since I’m just not gay (hah, I’m pre-empting any slash-fangirls who’s going to suggests that), I’ll just wait until they finally perfect either A.I. or V.R. or both, which the futurists all promise should be within the next couple of decades or so (tsk tsk, it’s starting to become my reason for wanting to continue sticking around).
And BTW, you do realize that ages-of-consent fluctuate from state to state and culture to culture i.e. it’s all relative, don’t you?
@Kyrie
What’s a zie?
Don’t change the subject, Slave. So you WERE lying about not watching TV.
Men like you sure don’t. You spend the first few decades of your life having Mommy wash your undies; then you graduate to the local Asian laundry, where you insufferably patronize the woman behind the counter, imagining that because she doesn’t run away from you screaming, she must be feeling something for you, if she is young, or, if she is middle-aged, admiring her generous husband for allowing her to live past her expiration date; after that, you either expect the wife to do it, or you go on the Internet and whine about evil women not sticking to their natural role to cleaning up your shit.
You know, I know there are better times to comment than a troll trying to use it to insult you, but I always loved the Aeris avatar XD
Because they’re doing it with people who can consent and aren’t automatically in a position of grossly unequal power dynamics. A jackass who has a lot of sex by abusing zir power as a supervisor, for instance, isn’t really treated much better.
NWO enjoys the show Monk. It’s the only thing other than Star Wars books and ogling adolescents he has ever admitted to enjoying. Though, like many of out “I don’t watch television” trolls, he does seem to have a working knowledge of major dramas and sitcoms.
NWOslave, could you share the data on the high percentage of atheists in developed nations? The most recent information that I have been able to find regarding the percentages of atheists in Europe is from the 2006 Eurobarometer survey “Social values, Science and Technology” it showed that only 18% of Europeans were atheists, with France having the highest percentage, with 33%. Information on atheists in the United States is harder to discover, since results tend to combine agnostics and atheists, but even lumped together like that, the U.S. has no more than 8% atheist and agnostic according to a 2003 Harris Interactive poll. According to a Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey from 2007, only 23% of Canadians were atheists.
So, again, I would love to be able to find more current data on atheists, and the breakdown by gender would also be very interesting information. If you do not wish to link the information, simply naming the study or studies from which you gleaned this data will be sufficient. Thanks.
NWO, it boggles my mind as to how you can sound like a normal, coherent person when you talk about your job, but you suddenly are immune to logic and grammar and normal conversational conventions as soon as you start talking about feminism or politics or whatever. You can clearly function in one domain but not the other. It is like your brain totally shuts off when you talk about feminism. Have you seen what’s in your Book O’ Larnin’? You’re very odd, do you realize that?
It’s a gender-neutral pronoun (which I hope I use correctly), NWO. Equivalent to ‘s/he’ or ‘he or she’ in this context.
Tongue-in-cheek Jezebel articles: proof that feminism is a hate movement.
Sex with children: What, me worry?
@Holly Pervocracy
“Stupid man/brilliant woman really never comes into it.”
Well than you don’t watch TV either, because that’s all there is. Every advert, sitcom, drama. Men are always stupid/evil, women are always brilliant/good.
The only thing I pretty much watch is mythbusters.
What? Do you deny that’s the standard for all adverts, sitcoms and dramas?
Tell me? What’s this movie about? Hmmm? Is it the bad man? Doing bad things? Is the woman good? Doing good things?
Do you properly fear men now? Is it OK to hate men now? TV told ya so, it must be true!
NWOslave, zie is a nominative pronoun.
@Kyrie
Oooooo, a gender neutral pronoun! Would that be neither male nor female? Are there many of these genderless folks kicking about?
Well, my battery is drained, so I’ll be login off, but before I do — again this obsession with the equality of power dynamics! If there’s one thing I learned in life, it’s that perfect equality is as utopian an ideal (in the classic negative sense) as a functioning communist system and we all know how that well that idea worked. Then again, if any of you were any stripe of realists, I suppose this site would never have existed in the first place.
Yes, that show relentlessly portrays men as idiots, doesn’t it? :p
I haven’t seen this movie. But yes, there is an evil man in it.
If you want to see an evil woman, you’ll just have to watch:
-Basic Instinct
-One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
-Snow White
-Fatal Attraction
-Misery
-Carrie
-Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
-Friday the 13th (omg spoiler)
-Cruel Intentions
-Saw II
-Single White Female
The list goes on…
NWOslave, you seem to have mistakenly conflated a gender neutral pronoun with a genderless being. A pronoun is a pro-form function word that replaces an antecedent noun.
In that case, it can be any gender. The point is that it doesn’t matter what is the gender of the raped child or of the adult rapist.
If I agree to replace ‘zie’ by ‘he or she’ in my sentence, do you agree to condemn raping children? 🙂
Oh God… I watch Mythbusters too.
I feel dirty now.
You better not hate on Kari. I know you’ve said some despicable things on this blog, but one word about Kari…
@Moewicus
“Tongue-in-cheek Jezebel articles: proof that feminism is a hate movement.”
Sounds like proof positive of societal-wide misandry to me. You can tongue-in-cheek call men evil.
What’s say we have a whole wack of MSM articles and TV shows about women being shit, tongue-in-cheek of course. Day in and day out, every minute of every day. In our schools, our stores, our Government. Just everywhere, so women get hardened to it. Ya gotta have a thick skin to be a man in the modern western world. Lets tuffen you ladies up.
Mina said something like that in chapter 24:
http://www.literature.org/authors/stoker-bram/dracula/chapter-24.html
I’m a bit weary from reading I, Rigoberta Menchu and then Octavia Butler’s Kindred so you’ll forgive me if I leave recovering the context to you.
Speaking of Mina, I found that she was easily the most likeable character by the end of the book, being resourceful and competent throughout. Did anyone else feel like Stoker was trying to do a little subverting of gender roles by having her lack of participation in the hunt come back to bite the group in the butt (so to speak)it? There’s a bit where she says “I went to bed just like the men said…” [paraphrasing] that stuck out to me because of how baldly it’s put, and I believe Dracula starts preying on her soon after that.
@Kyrie
“If I agree to replace ‘zie’ by ‘he or she’ in my sentence, do you agree to condemn raping children?”
I always did. Feminists are the ones determined to sexualize children. Pedophilia will be the next great, “cause” of feminism.
Mina seems to think that Dracula’s soul will go to heaven when he’s freed from his vampiric body. This is after she established her mental connection with him.
I hate Mythbusters, now I have another reason for doing so.
@CassandraSays and @Blitzgal
YES! this is exactly what I’m talking about, the sexualization of violence. When women die in horror films there are always sexual undertones in hand with the violence. Its really disturbing and I caught onto it before I even learned about feminism. What is it trying to tell us? that sex should lead to pain for women? that rape is acceptable? that women will be punished for being sexual? well this one is a given, remember the rules of horror movies?
And women screaming in fear half naked, or being killed while naked or practically naked. Nope. I can’t see anything misogynistic about that. *eyeroll*
And then there’s the rape scenes in horror. Wetherby mentioned a few movies with them. I didn’t even know the rape scene lasted an hour in I Spit on your Grave. After I saw the one in Cannibal Holocaust I felt so hollow inside, and that one lasted about a few minutes I think.
Examining these movies, suddenly the theory that society hates women doesn’t sound so crazy 🙁
Anyway, I’m not trashing the entire horror genre, because I do enjoy some of the films. I just find the that mixing sex and violence is really fucked up. I’m not calling for censorship either so before the trolls yell at me for trying to take away their precious rape scenes they can relax.
@PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth
“I hate Mythbusters, now I have another reason for doing so.”
It doesn’t even follow the script of bad man/good woman does it? It’s almost like there’s no reason to hate men at all! I can see why you’d hate it.