Brittany Murphy – Bitch Flicks

Women As Perpetrators of Violence in ‘Freeway’

In films, as in life, women aren’t supposed to be violent. Women make up the majority of violent crime victims (domestic violence, assault, rape, and murder) but they don’t usually retaliate in kind. Even in the relatively rare film where a woman seriously injures or kills a rapist, like ‘Thelma and Louise’, she does so with lots of tears and anguish–in that film from both from the woman pulling the trigger and the one whom the man attempted to rape. The unwritten rule in movies seems to be that in order to justify a woman killing or even assaulting someone, we need to see her or some other woman suffer, a lot, beforehand. Contrast that rule with the male heroes of action films who leave dozens of corpses in their wake, and not one of the dead has raped or otherwise tortured the hero beforehand–though the hero may be avenging some great wrong the dead guy (or guys) did to his wife or daughter.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

In films, as in life, women aren’t supposed to be violent. Women make up the majority of violent crime victims (domestic violence, assault, rape, and murder) but they don’t usually retaliate in kind. Even in the relatively rare film where a woman seriously injures or kills a rapist, like Thelma and Louise, she does so with lots of tears and anguish–in that film from both from the woman pulling the trigger and the one whom the man attempted to rape. The unwritten rule in movies seems to be that in order to justify a woman killing or even assaulting someone, we need to see her or some other woman suffer, a lot, beforehand. Contrast that rule with the male heroes of action films who leave dozens of corpses in their wake, and not one of the dead has raped or otherwise tortured the hero beforehand–though the hero may be avenging some great wrong the dead guy (or guys) did to his wife or daughter.

Any experienced moviegoer will see all the signs in the beginning of Freeway pointing to the eventual degradation of its protagonist Vanessa (played by a pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon). She’s an “illiterate” (a script this uneven should be careful about throwing that word around) high school student in a midriff-baring halter top (the film is a runway of 90s fashion that would best be forgotten) who fights off her meth-head stepfather’s advances while her mother does sex work to support her own meth habit. After both her parents are arrested the movie takes off (and finds its comic horror tone) when Vanessa is left alone with her social worker, who doesn’t see any other option but foster care. While addressing the woman in the most respectful manner (“I’ll leave the keys on the TV”), Vanessa chains her to the bed and escapes.

As she sets off, Vanessa wears a red leather jacket and carries her things (including cans of beer) in a wicker basket, evoking Little Red Riding Hood (as do the tacky, sexist illustrations under the opening credits). She makes her way along the freeway to where her grandmother lives.

The family shitbox car breaks down, and Bob (a pre-24 Kiefer Sutherland), who is driving by, sees her ass bent over the open hood and stops to help. When he can’t fix the car, he offers her a ride, which she accepts. Bob, in his shiny SUV, pleated khakis, and glasses, talks like Mr. Rogers and works as a therapist. He gets Vanessa to speak at length with him about her troubled background, including her stepfather’s sexual abuse. But when (while still driving) he initiates a “powerful new” therapy in which he asks Vanessa to detail her feelings using explicit language and humiliating details she figures out that, like many men who pretend to help women, he’s a creep. When she tries to get out of the car, she finds the door handle is missing, which Bob dangles in front of her and then uses to hit her. We find out Bob is the freeway rapist and killer Vanessa has seen reports about on TV.

Bob holds a razor to her throat and tells her to take off her pants. She stalls him by telling him she will have to unlace her boots first, but kicks him in the head, rolls into the backseat and holds a loaded gun to his head while shrieking at him to drop the razor out of the window. She hits the back of his head with the gun more than once while he drives, then instructs him to pull over into a middle-of-nowhere exit. When he tries to talk her out of it, she shrieks, “You want to get shot a bunch of times?” Vanessa’s rage in this and later scenes is like an altered state from her usual manner, but she’s not hysterical. When they stop, Bob plays the role usually played by a woman in a movie, crying and pleading for his life while Vanessa decides what she should do with him. “The time for talk is over now,” she tells him, adopting his therapist demeanor. She asks if he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and when he says he has, she says in a thoughtful way, “That’s good. That’s really good.” At this point I thought she would let him go, because of the unwritten rule: we hadn’t seen her subjugated, and she could probably get away without further violence. Instead she shoots him in the neck and leaves him for dead.

She makes her way to a truck stop diner, covered in blood (again part of the Red Riding Hood motif). She’s arrested as she leaves. We see her entering the juvenile detention facility, her face scrubbed of her heavy eye-makeup, so she looks young, vulnerable, and angelic. When one “chola,” Mesquita (Alanna Ubach), and her companions start to threaten her (as, we learn later, a first step in getting Vanessa to “put out”) we think the movie will turn into Born Innocent (this film even has, as Born Innocent did, a weird young lesbian inmate, but this one is a character, not a predator, and is played by an excellent Brittany Murphy) or any of the other women-in-prison films in which the new inmate is assaulted–except Vanessa’s the one who attacks first–and keeps on punching. She yells at Mesquita all the while, beating her into unconsciousness and turning her face into a bloody mess until the staff grab Vanessa and throw her into solitary–where she uses her time alone to make a shiv.

In her preliminary hearing Vanessa sees that Bob isn’t dead, but is left with permanent disfiguring injuries. He, of course, is posing as an innocent victim of a robbery, and just as he predicted–before she shot him–the authorities believe his word, not hers. “Holy shit,” she says, her eyes opening wide as she sees him across the courtroom and we steel ourselves for her inevitable tears, anguish and suffering, but we don’t get them. Instead, Vanessa taunts him in her thick Southern accent, “Look who got hit with the ugly stick!” When he and his wife later appear on television (to lobby for juveniles like Vanessa to be tried as adults) she watches with the other girls at the facility and taunts him further, imitating his electronically aided voice and alluding to his grotesquely distorted mouth, “My dick may not function, but I haven’t lost my smile.”

Women in films and in life are sorry for so many things, all the time, even those things that aren’t their fault; a film heroine (or antiheroine) like Vanessa, so hilariously unrepentant about her acts of violence, is a triumph. Also refreshing for the audience is being in the position of cheering on a woman threatening and assaulting men (Mesquita is Vanessa’s only female victim, and they become feminist allies by the end) when so much film and television continues to offer up men’s abuse of women–sexual and otherwise–as entertainment.

The writer-director Matthew Bright doesn’t exactly have a magic touch with all the actors (Michael T. Weiss as the stepfather and Brooke Shields as Bob’s wife are particularly execrable), and some of what passes as “satire” in the script, especially before Vanessa gets on the freeway, falls as flat as the worst Saturday Night Live skits. But Witherspoon’s Vanessa shows off the expert comic timing she would later become famous for. She also gets all the best lines. Her scenes with Sutherland (who is great at projecting both creepiness and “normalcy”) when she has her gun on him are a stellar parody of the therapist-patient relationship, with the roles reversed. Her Vanessa also uses her voice to make up for her small stature when she intimidates her victims, the way Ben Kingsley’s character did in Sexy Beast. With Dan Hedaya as one of the police detectives on her case it’s easy to see Vanessa as the violent, class-conscious, NC-17 (the film was censored to finally receive an R rating) version of the main character, Cher, in Clueless (Hedaya played Cher’s father in the film, which was released one year before Freeway). Both of them are headstrong Southern California blondes whom audiences at first underestimate, but by the end come to respect. Freeway is far from a perfect film but well worth seeing, even for those who don’t count themselves as fans of Witherspoon.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eQbglH0FJ4″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Disabilities Week: Crazy Bitches Versus Indulgent Little Girls: The Binary of Mad Women in ‘Girl, Interrupted’

Movie poster for Girl, Interrupted

This is a guest review by Sarah Domet.

At first glance, Girl, Interrupted appears to be Hollywood’s version of feminist nirvana. It’s a veritable oasis in an industry where only 23% of speaking roles belong to women, an industry that tends to only depict women as supporting characters for the ever-important leading men. This 1999 film adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of the same title features a strong core cast of women, some of whom went on to bigger stardom in the aftermath of the commercial success of the film.

Set to the backdrop of the late 1960s, Girl, Interrupted chronicles a fictionalized Susanna’s (Winona Ryder) year-long stint in the woman’s ward at Claymore, a private mental institution, after her attempted suicide and subsequent “break” with reality. Susanna is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a diagnosis she reluctantly accepts and from which she eventually “recovers.” Throughout the year, Susanna comes face-to-face with the “real” crazies in the form of sociopathic Lisa (Angelia Jolie), pathologically lying Georgina (Clea DuVall), schizophrenic Polly (Elizabeth Moss), and cocktail-of-issues Daisy (Brittany Murphy) who grapples with eating disorders, OCD, and a history of sexual abuse. The film suggests, sometimes overtly, that Susanna, by comparison to her ward-mates, isn’t doing so badly. In fact, Nurse Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg), in one of the most emotionally resonant scenes of the film, declares Susanna is “not crazy” but instead “a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who is driving herself crazy.” At this point, viewers are likely nodding their heads. Certainly, we’ve all met that girl. Or maybe we are that girl.

Winona Ryder as Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted

Thankfully, Girl, Interrupted decidedly positions itself as not a love story. In fact, all of Susanna’s romantic interests are purely sexual, involving little emotion, a ”symptom” that gets her labeled as a borderline in the first place. Instead, Girl, Interrupted explores a young woman’s coming of age as she struggles in an uncertain world, meditates upon what it really means to be “mentally ill,” and, ultimately, discovers her sense of self. The equation is simple: the almost all-female cast + a story of female self-discovery = a feminist victory in a male-dominated Hollywood, right?

Well, yes and no.

At its core, Girl, Interrupted strives to be a feminist film. However, I find the film’s representations of “mad women” problematic, particularly the ways in which mental illness becomes so closely linked with eroticized otherness. And here is where the film’s deep ambivalence comes into play: it attempts to dispel the myth of what it means to be a mentally ill woman, while at the same time reinforcing cultural stereotypes that portray mentally ill women as hypersexual, dangerous, amoral, or inherently unfeminine. In the end, Girl, Interrupted posits mental illness as a choice from which one, like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, can always return.

As Susanna checks into Claymore, she catches a glimpse of her doctor’s case notes that indicate her “promiscuous” tendencies as one symptom of her ailment. Yes, she had an affair with a married man, and, yes, she slept with the brother of one of her classmates; she loves neither of these men. At one point Susanna notes, “What kind of sex isn’t casual?” Certainly, her disavowal of love as a necessary component of sex is a feminist gesture. In the free-loving 60s, that sweeping diagnosis—promiscuity—encompassed nearly every rally, march, or peace protest in America, or at least modern-day viewers might suspect from the comfort of our viewing couches.

The women of Girl, Interrupted

Yet, her “promiscuity” continues, even at Claymore where Susanna engages in a physical relationship with a doting orderly. When challenged on this point by her therapist, Susanna becomes indignant, and rightly so. She argues, “How many guys would a girl have to sleep with to be considered promiscuous? Three, four, ten? How many girls would a guy have to sleep with? Fifteen? Forty? A hundred and nine?” Feminists across America high five each other.

At several junctures, such as this one, Girl, Interrupted positions itself firmly as a feminist film, shattering assumptions that there exists one “proper” behavior for women. We sympathize with Susanna and with her plight against The Man, against a gendered, cultural understanding of what is and is not appropriate sexual behavior for a young woman. In many ways, her “illness” manifests itself in the typical American teenage coming-of-age way. Susanna asks herself questions we all have asked, at one time or another: Where do I fit in? Who am I? What do I value?

Throughout the film, Susanna’s character works to unravel stereotypes about what it means to be a woman with a mental illness: she’s beautiful; she’s smart; she’s never threatening. She’s much like any other young woman as we watch her negotiate friendships, write in her journal, sneak out at night with her friends, smoke cigarettes, and, generally, protest authority. In most ways, she’s an ordinary girl, just like you might find on the “outside.” The viewer begins to question if Susanna even really needs to be at Claymore in the first place.

Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) and Nurse Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg)

Yet, if Girl, Interrupted creates a binary with Susanna on one side, dismantling preconceived notions about mental illness and female sexuality, on the other side lies Lisa, who reinforces cultural narratives about “crazy bitches.” Let’s face it: Lisa is the real villain of the movie, a sociopath with no real moral compass, a young woman who is manipulative and unnervingly magnetic all at once. The moment she enters the film, returning from one of her many attempted escapes, we’re to understand that she’s a threat. She pins Susanna in the corner of her room shouting at her, demanding to know where her friend Jamie had gone, until she is physically restrained.

However, like many “crazy bitches” of cinema (Nina Sayers in Black Swan, Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction) she exudes sexuality and charisma, deepened only by her sense of danger. As Susanna and Lisa spend time together, their growing friendship feels more like a courtship. Susanna herself can’t help but be drawn in by those pouty lips, her playfulness, her rabble rousing and bravado. At one point, as Susanna and Lisa are on the lam from Claymore, the two share a kiss. The moment is innocent enough, but the implications become clear. Lisa represents the eroticized other, the taboo, the forbidden, dark and amoral mad woman.

Angelina Jolie in her Oscar-winning role as Lisa in Girl, Interrupted

This stereotype becomes clearer a few moments later, in a pivotal scene of the film, when Lisa and Susanna crash at the apartment of Daisy, who has been newly released from Claymore. Susanna sits mute as Lisa taunts Daisy, exposing her deepest vulnerabilities. Lisa points out the cuts on Daisy’s arm, accuses Daisy of enjoying the sexual abuses of her father: “Everyone knows your father fucks you, what they don’t know is that you like it.” Lisa speaks the unspeakable, and Susanna watches doe-eyed, stunned at Lisa’s capacity for cruelty. The next morning, upon witnessing Daisy’s limp and lifeless body—she hanged herself—Lisa calls her an idiot, then picks her pocket for cash. Lisa, Susanna finally learns, has no capacity for emotion, no nurturing feelings at all. If anything makes her less than human—less than woman—it is this fact.

This scene in the movie, arguably the most important one, pits Lisa and Susanna against each other. But it also pits “good” against “evil,” and “feminine” against “unfeminine,” which is tied up in representations of mental illness. Susanna is faced with a choice: continue life with Lisa, a life that will certainly lead to chaos and casual sex and countercultural adventures, or return to Claymore to truly invest in her recovery. It’s a choice.

Brittany Murphy as Daisy in Girl, Interrupted

But is mental illness always a choice? And if so, between what and what?

Here’s a statistic: nearly 1 in 5 Americans suffers from mental illness of some sort, and a majority of these cases are women. This alarming number becomes even more important when recognizing that the film industry plays an important role in shaping public or cultural perception. In light of this, I wonder how detrimental a film such as Girl, Interrupted might be when questioning the legitimacy of mental illness and perpetuating stereotypes of those who suffer from these invisible diseases. Susanna’s renewed commitment to get better situates itself as a choice, and not necessarily one between health and illness or between one treatment and another. Instead, Susanna’s choice is oddly contingent upon morality, what’s right and wrong. Will she choose to return to Claymore? Or will she tread the darker path, represented by the villainous Lisa?

Which brings us back to Nurse Valerie’s diagnoses that Susanna is “not crazy” but, instead, “a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who is driving herself crazy.” The idea that Susanna is not really sick—that her invisible illness is a complete manifestation of her imagination or her culture—may be true. But it may be equally true that she, and young girls like her, are not just lazy and self-indulgent. That no amount of “trying harder” or “choosing to be well” necessarily helps, without the proper intervention. The movie wants to suggest that, yes, Susanna is a little confused, uncertain, depressed, even, but at least she doesn’t burn her face, or hide chicken bones under her bed, or require the padded room for her outbursts. At least she’s not crazy-crazy. Not like “them.” Girl, Interrupted paints a world where mental illness is not an invisible illness. Invisibility means conformity means health, and only when one adapts more culturally-sanctioned “moral” or “feminine” behavior will she be considered well again.

Susanna (Winona Ryder) and Lisa (Angelina Jolie) share a kiss

I wonder, too, why films depicting men with mental illness rarely cast their subjects in the same light. Films like A Beautiful Mind, or One Flew Over the Cuckcoo’s Nest, for example, present their flawed heroes as just that: heroes. Sure, these flawed fellows need treatment, but they are brilliant, misunderstood, complicated men. They are sympathetic precisely because of their mental states, not despite them. Viewers are never lead to question the sexuality, morality, or masculinity of these leading men. Moreover, films such as these don’t portray mental illness as a choice or a course of action, but as a circumstance. Hollywood afflicts male protagonists with insanity as a cross to bear, which makes them all the more heroic.

Susanna’s heroism, however, comes distinctly from her choice to overcome her diagnosis. To be fair, in real life, choice does play a legitimate aspect in the treatment of diseases. One can choose to be in treatment, or not to be. However, Susanna doesn’t simply learn to live with her personality disorder, she defeats it entirely. Toward the end of the film, the TV in Claymore’s living room flashes a scene from The Wizard of Oz as Glenda the Good Witch says, “You’ve always had the power to go back home.” Here, the film’s message reveals itself clearly: the power of recovery has always been with Susanna.

Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted

Susanna’s declared “recovered” by her doctors and ultimately joins the ranks of the “outside” world where she now belongs. It’s fitting that her penultimate scene at Claymore shows her applying make-up to look more suitably feminine. Her final act at Claymore is to polish the nails of a now drugged and restrained Lisa. “I’m not really dead,” Lisa says—and so the movie leaves us with a glimmer of hope that she, too, can choose to go home. If only all women could be cured of mental illnesses by clicking their heels together three times, painting on some Cotton Candy No. 7—and believing.

Viewers should be happy for Susanna, and I think most root for her. I know I do. But even as she’s being driven away from Claymore in the final scene, I wonder if she, herself, downplays the magnitude of the year she’s just spent under professional care. Perhaps she’s doing this because in the “outside” world, it’s still not okay to talk about such things or to admit to a mental illness without suffering stigmatization, or sideway glances, or nervous, sympathetic looks.

Lisa (Angelina Jolie) confronts Susanna (Winona Ryder) on her first day at Claymore

She notes, “Being crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me, amplified.” That’s a nice thought. Mental illness is a reality for many, a part of their very composition, what makes many individuals unique, or creative, or sensitive. But the problem in the film—just like the problem in our real world, our post-Adam Lanza world—is that we must find ways to have conversations about mental illness, and not just within the confines of hospitals or therapy rooms. In real life. In the “outside” world. Susanna calls herself a “girl, interrupted,” and not a girl with a history of mental illness. What might the need for this euphemism say about the world that she’s rejoining? If 20% of Americans suffer from mental illness, a majority of these women, this issue is not just a cultural problem, but a feminist one.

Sarah Domet is the author of 90 Days to Your Novel. She writes fiction and nonfiction and currently teaches at Georgia Southern University.