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:
Yes. Feminism gave women credit cards. That is a fact. You can look it up yourself.
Don’t get all UH OH NO REBUTTAL SARCASM MODE when presented with a true thing that actually happened.
Also, do you like my list of movies with female villains? What do you think of it?
@Amused
I’m afraid it was the bankers who gave women credit cards, not feminism. Unless there’s a feminist credit card? Where does one get them?
I loved 9… though I’m still trying to sort out why Zidane had a tail… and don’t ask me how many hours I lost playing that card game (and was that the one with chocobo hot and cold or was it 10?)
Speaking of vampires, anyone seen Breaking Dawn yet?
(Personally I’m putting it off until after I’ve given birth…I don’t think the “Edward bites the baby out of Bella” scene would be particularly fun to watch right now. o_O)
Slave: In the same place where male executives “give” women jobs.
NWO, you’re an idiot. Bankers said that women couldn’t get credit cards; then feminists protested, and then women got credit cards. Feminism is the causal factor here.
NWO, can you please cite a single comment made by any of the regulars (or even occasionals) here that unambiguously endorses this hatred?
You can tell too?
I’m waiting until the Rifftrax.
@Nobinayamu It’s the only explanation I can think of for such a combination of belligerence, inconsistency, stupidity and lack of self-awareness. I’m impressed that he can mostly still spell though.
I think I’m getting better at translating troll. If I’m reading it right, what NWO is saying is that the fact that, historically, men could hold credit cards but women could not is not evidence that men held power that women didn’t, because men never held power that women didn’t. So… having control of credit is not that big of a deal and gives you no advantages.
Then, at one point, banks just decided that women should get them too, because it just seemed like a good idea at the time. For reasons entirely unrelated to privilege (because credit has nothing to do with privilege) and entirely unrelated to feminism. Ta-da!
Otherwise a more recent trend is to have everyone in the movie die. This is particularly popular in the “found footage” genre, which makes sense. There wouldn’t be much point in watching found footage to figure out what happened to those nice folks at the mental institution if they came out alive. See Quarantine (Spanish version, called “REC,” is better), Paranormal Activity, Grave Encounters, and of course one of the originals, The Blair Witch Project.
Most of the films coming out of the horror genre are atrociously bad, but I’m a sucker for scary movies.
No, I’m pretty sure envelopes gave women credit cards! Ha ha ha! Feminism has been disproved forEVAH!
The credit card thing is so hilariously typical of NWO. Nope, folks, if it doesn’t say “issued by Feminist Corp – ruining the lives of men since Seneca Falls TM”, feminism had nothing to do with it. Except by using Big Daddy to get the banks to do it.
(Every time he writes Big Daddy I picture a dude in full leather regalia spanking him.)
Guys, guys! You know where credit cards really come from?
Dinosaurs.
Dinosaur -> Oil -> Plastic – > Credit card.
I don’t see “feminism” anywhere in there.
Q.E.D.
NWO: Not that you aren’t my favorite anti-semite and misogynist, but maybe you should lay off the kumys for awhile.
@Holly Pervocracy
Oddly enough, since I watch so little TV and such, for obvious reasons. The few I recognize are cartoons. And even though there was a bad woman in snow white/cinderella, the stars, so to speak were good and pure.
You like the situation just like it is. We can have articles about how women take the evil out of boardrooms. There’ll be no retraction, no apologies, no one’ll get fired.
Of course, if say the Spearhead features that particular article and calls women evil your feathers will all get ruffled and you’ll use that as proof of misogyny.
The MSM article is just peachy by women in general. It stokes their ego’s. Women make things less evil. They just exude empathy and generosity. The goodness flows from the very soul of womanhood.
It’s really what men have come to expect. An equality movement would’ve demanded the writer of the article be fired, Jezebel to retract everything and apologize. Feminism is not about equality, it never has been. It’s a hate movement. That’s all it can ever be.
Yeah, Spear, Rifftrax do make Twilight movies a lot more fun.
Which is weird because he normally blames anything and everything on feminism…except in cases where it would prove him wrong apparently.
Also: some of you have great taste in movies. Just saying.
Could some of the oil possibly come from dead mammoths, too? Which men totally hunted? Therefore the credit cards actually come from the men who hunted the mammoth all along?? o_o
…No, wait, fuck, doesn’t most of the biomatter that turned into oil come from plants? Like the plants that women totally gathered and stuff? THEREFORE CREDIT CARDS CAME FROM WOMEN?? O_O
Right! Like the princes!
You’re so dense, you don’t even want to hear good news for your gender.
That’s all pretty standard NWO fare, regardless of his level (or my opinion of his level) of sobriety. Dumb as a bag of hair, with little to no reading comprehension, abysmal grammar and an absolute lack of consistency and moral core.
But I actually think that his spelling improves when he’s been drinking.
@NWO
Have you considered the possibility that less evil companies are likely to be less sexist. Less sexist companies are more likely to promote women. Therefore less sexist companies have a higher chance of being run by a woman.
It’s not that the presence of a woman makes the company less evil, but that being less evil results in the presence of women. Correlation, causality and all that stuff.
By NWO’s logic, it was the government that gave women the right to vote, not the numerous civil-rights groups that campaigned for years to get the thing to happen. Also, we should all be thanking slave owners for ending slavery, since they were the ones who set the slaves free. What, you say that they were forced to do so by outside forces? Pah, only the final step in the chain matters.
Also, if I ask you to make me a sandwich, you better feed it to me yourself. If my hand touches the sandwich to bring it to my mouth, suddenly it’s me and only me who procured said sandwich.
@Bagelsan
“…No, wait, fuck, doesn’t most of the biomatter that turned into oil come from plants? Like the plants that women totally gathered and stuff? THEREFORE CREDIT CARDS CAME FROM WOMEN?? O_O”
Well duh! Woman good/man bad! Tell me something I don’t hear every second of every day.
Men are evil and oppressive. Women are good and victims.
This message brought to you by feminism.