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:
Things to add to Owlys book of learning:
Atheists are the same thing as anything not monotheistic.
Not watching TV allows you to know how all of TV really is.
Associated with that; When you are working 28 hour days, you have time to “not” watch TV, to know how all of TV really is, and then post about it on the internet.
Actually, having done research on potential calenders for other planets this past week, maybe Slavey really is just on a different time scale while living in his den of hate. His claims about his activities don’t match up to any basic scales of Earth time.
Moving on from that, and having mentioned final fantasy, I can’t be the only one who really enjoyed final fantasy 9, can I? I’ve played through 7, and I understand its iconic relation. But…. Vivi… <3.
NWO: I’m glad we’re all against pedophilia! 🙂
I can’t for the life of me think of one show that portrays men and always/mostly bad or stupid and women as always/mostly good or clever. Unless you’re really simplistic about things. Focusing on what gender the antagonists and protagonists are is probably one of the more shallow ways of evaluating a film in terms of gender portrayals. it’s really just scratching the surface.
I did like The Woman actually although I was sold on it pretty much straight away since the actress that plays the mother was also in May, another horror film that I like.
More movies with female villains:
-The Wizard of Oz
-Sleeping Beauty
-All About Eve
-Sunset Boulevard
-101 Dalmations
-X-Men
-Batman & Robin
-Queen of the Damned
-Kill Bill
-Almost every Bond film ever (which also feature the least incompetent or feminized male hero imaginable)
-Jennifer’s Body
-Body Heat
and so on…
Took the words right out of my mouth. I don’t mind sympathetic vampires either but I’m getting so sick of these vampire feeling feelings and relationship stories. Anne Rice did it well but then Stephanie Meyer just butchered it.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but every modern vampire film…about post year 2000 either goes to 2 extremes in character: the first is the heartthrob vampire who completely denies or holds back what he is. The second is mindless zombie vampire who is a total monster but behaves more like a zombie. Daybreakers did this.
Basically I would like to see a return to the classic vampire, a monster but not completely devoid of a brain haha.
@David
I will check out Thirst and Trouble Everyday, thanks!
Come to think of it, “May,” by the same director as this one, has a female villain.
NWOslave, I was serious about the data regarding the massive upswing in atheists in the developed nations in the last 5 years. Could you please share the name of the study, or an article referencing the study?
@Quackers
Those movies are to teach you to fear and hate men of course. The theme is the same, isn’t it? Pretty, skantily clad girl. She’s all good and pure. She’s a victim. The man is all evil and bad and ugly. That’d be the oppressor. You can fear and hate him, it’s justified!
@NWO Are you drunk?
For one thing, that’s a logical error, as Jezebel is not society. Second, she wasn’t calling men evil, she was calling companies evil, and only less evil due to the influence of some women board members. If you want to draw the inference that if the author is calling companies evil then she is calling the people in them evil, then she must also be calling the women in them evil. Of course, she’s not calling either the men or the women in the companies evil in the article, but the companies themselves (notice how the title is not “women make men less evil”). Taking the headline this seriously is ridiculous in the first place, because she probably wrote the entire thing in about fifteen minutes and this is a pop news site, but the obvious implication is anti-capitalism (where insufficient charity=evil) rather than misandry.
TL;DR NWOslave is always going to be able to spout idiocy faster than you can refute it.
I am not known for my thick skin but I am not having a particularly hard time in this modern western world.
You got me, I think it’s perfectly justified to hate an evil vampire, no matter his or her* gender.
*”zir” would be less clumsy, but we can’t go upsetting NWOslave, now, can we?
More female villains!
-Alice In Wonderland
-The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
-Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull
-Cinderella
-The Little Mermaid
-The Devil Wears Prada
-Christine (okay, “she’s” a car, but she’s a lady car!)
-Mommie Dearest
-Audition
and more…
@blitzgal
I don’t know if I’d characterize Carrie as evil. Her actions were evil but her character was very sympathetic. If anything her mother was evil. I can see elements of Meller in her, given the way she viewed sex.
@ozymandias42
“NWO: I’m glad we’re all against pedophilia!”
Pedophilia will be the next great cause of feminism.
Feminism has nothing to do with equality. It never did. Women were never oppressed. Since it’s not about equality, unless you can name me a right I have that women don’t, what’s it about? “Causes,” of course. Well, since Big Daddy hands women anything they want feminism has moved into the realm of the mainstream sexualizing of children.
Feminism embraced lesbians, then gays, then bi, then trans, then s&m and on and on. There’s only one thing left, pedophilia.
@NWO
if anything, these movies teach me that raping and torturing women is entertainment.
Before feminism, women were not allowed to own credit cards in their own names. Done. That took, literally, ten seconds of thought, NWO. Present more difficult challenges!
@ Crys – Ah, that makes sense too. You’d hate Lady Vengeance then, even with the openly feminist subtext – the ending is all about the torture, physical and psychological.
Which actually makes me think of another thing. Does how people view torture in movies depend on how the movie depicts the victims, ie. is it OK if they’re clearly depicted as bad people, but not OK if they’re random people who we don’t see as having done anything bad?
(And yeah, I think this is part of why we often see sex in slasher movies. It’s not just exploitation in the “look, nudity!” way, it’s also intended to provide the viewer with a reason why it’s kind of OK that all those nubile young women are killed. Which is why you see really, really different responses to those movies based on people’s feelings about sexulity, particularly female sexuality.)
NWO, could you please try to keep your “see, feminists did a bad thing” comments vaguely on topic? Whatever you feel about the Jez article or the study it’s talking about, that has nothing to do with the topic being discussed in this thread.
Hello again, Whatever, how are those fantasies about coercing homeless children into sex that you have going? On another note – since you made it very clear in the other thread that you’re not exactly drowning in sexual encounters, I think we’re just going to put your ideas about how to train anyone to do anything related to sex in the Ignore – Not Relevant file, OK?
also NWO, weren’t you the one who demanded the age of consent laws to be lowered? isn’t the entire fucking manosphere constantly screeching about how old and gross any woman over 25 is and how “natural” it is for men to be attracted to teenagers? aren’t you the guys who then BLAME feminism for age of consent laws?
Stop contradicting yourself!
More more MORE movies with female villains!
-Sleepy Hollow
-Orphan
-The Witches
-The Craft
-Monster
-The Last Seduction
-Double Indemnity
-Star Trek: First Contact
-The Rescuers
…Are you getting the picture yet?
@Moewicus
Stop making excuses for the hatred of men.
Plain and simple, the more women CEOs the less evil.
Not much else needs to be said.
Would you be defending an article as adamantly had it said, “The more men CEOs the less evil?”
Of course not, you’d be screaming misogyny out the wazoo. Every damn feminists in the world would’ve jumped on here high horse. The article would’ve been retracted, somebody would get fired, apologies galore would’ve been made. All from the gender who claims to hold no power. What a crock.
I think the thing Owly is trying to say he wants feminism to legitimize pedophilia so he can finally realize his desires.
No.
Right. Also, Van Helsing said something about the danger of facing “that voivode Dracula, who won his name against the Turk.”
While I’m not about to accuse Stoker of being a historian, I think he chose Vlad Tepes as his villain for a reason.
@ozymandias42
Really? Feminism gave women credit cards? This is priceless, tell me more!
In their own names, NWO. Read the rest of the goddamned sentence, will ya.
Other than a Colecovision (which barely counts), the Playstation was my first console, and Final Fantasy VII is one of the first games that I endlessly played on it. And Aeris’s death is one of those shocking game moments that I’ll never forget. She’s one of my favorites.
Wrong. The good and pure girl is the sole survivor at the end of the slasher flick. The dirty whores are the ones who get killed. It’s such a stock meme for the genre that it gets satirized again and again.
Randy Meeks: “She didn’t show her tits until she went legit.”