Erin Cressida Wilson – Bitch Flicks

‘The Girl on the Train’: Trauma, Fragmentation, and Female-Driven Resilience

The film captures the self-deconstructions, the collisions, the rebuilding, and the acceptances of women who live with and in spite of brokenness. It functions as a kind of thesis for resilience, and a specific female-driven resilience, unafraid of battle wounds, that often is reserved only for men.

Written by Eva Phillips, this is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at Indie Film Minute. It is cross-posted with permission. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of alcoholism, infertility, abuse, and trauma.]

The Girl on the Train functions, in myriad unexpected ways, as a soliloquy. It is a soliloquy for ineffable, unattended loss; an ode, of sorts, for shattered, misplaced desires, for lives ended or redirected. Most compelling, and most devastatingly at times, the film — directed by The Help’s Tate Taylor — is an unflinching soliloquy for broken women. I have a fair amount of hesitation even considering employing the term “broken women,” let alone assessing a film or any text as a soliloquy for them. So much is insinuated on a personal, social, and even voyeuristic level when the phrase “broken women” is used, and often the overarching implication is women defined and stultified by brokenness, immured in an agony or vulnerability that leads to some fetishizing of these women. In The Girl on the Train, however, the brokenness is not all-encompassing, nor definitive. Aided by the melancholic, complex irreverence of Erin Cressida Wilson and her screenplay (she also wrote Secretary (2002) and 2010’s Chloe), the film captures the self-deconstructions, the collisions, the rebuilding, and the acceptances of women who live with and in spite of brokenness. It functions as a kind of thesis for resilience, and a specific female-driven resilience, unafraid of battle wounds, that often is reserved only for men.

Based on Paula Hawkins’ outrageously popular 2015 novel, much of the film’s upholding of this complex, painful, but intensely refreshing and even invigorating portrayal of femininity lies in the fact that the film is centered around women acting upon, around, in conversation, and in unique matrix with one another. The film is not predicated upon interactions with or justifications from men — either within the film or in the larger, more metaphoric audience — nor does it seek a sympathizing or adjusted response from its audience. This is no more apparent than in a moment of excruciating discombobulation near the end of the film’s action.

The moment is brief but echoes seismically: the titular protagonist, Rachel (an astonishingly brutal Emily Blunt) approaches the wife of her ex-husband’s boss to apologize for a night of blackout-drunk rage, only to be told she did nothing other than slept the night away in a guest room. This revelation allows Rachel to sift through the fractured and blotted out memories of her months of alcoholism, clearheadedly recollecting the abusiveness of her former husband, the vile manipulations he would enact and deceptions he would weave, capitalizing on her depression and drinking to gaslight her into believing her behavior and her blackouts were the cause of their marital disintegration. Rachel is finally aware, critically coinciding with her troubled investigations into a murder that drives the mystery of the film, of the realities of the tempestuous relationship with her husband and the violence and fights he initiated and blamed on her. The film, which interestingly often flirts with the mediated ways in which women are forced to reconcile or contend with their grief and the limitations put on them — obsessive social media behavior and male-orchestrated therapy, as fascinating examples — provides women (most importantly Rachel) their own space to confront the anguishes and often male-driven suppression that stifles epiphanies with their own consciousness.

It is important that this moment of epiphany and awakening — which is not hyperbolically lofty, as Rachel quite literally is awakened to memories and moments that had been occluded throughout the film, either as a result of drinking or trauma — is shared between women and catalyzed by a woman. This is one of the myriad moments and facets of the film that transforms it into a cinematic experience of women viewing, interacting, and behaving in correlation to one another, when it could have very easily been limited and diminished by the unending problem of the omniscient patriarchal glare.

Frustratingly, whenever I would talk about the film or would attempt to look it up, I constantly found myself referring to it as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The two films, aside from sharing the potentially problematic reliance on the designation “girl” — the debates over and problems with “girl” as an identifier for adult women can ignite a discourse that would necessitate pages and pages of writing. For instance, while the “girl” identifier can carry positive resonances for women of color, highlighted by the “Black Girl Magic” phenomenon. “Girl” in the case of The Girl on the Train, works as a curious juxtaposition to the “girl” in the various adaptions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as both present films about feminine ferocity and intuitiveness in the wake of a crime. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo functions as piece that emphasizes, both explicitly and implicitly, passivity and fetishizing the violence done to and by women, using “girl” as a nomenclatural tool of disempowering. In contrast, The Girl on the Train could easily be read as a remark on female fragility, female promiscuity, female unreliability, and a gamut of other tropes and disqualifications cast upon narratives involving women, addiction, and depression. Rather, the film transcends these tropes — primarily with the help of the astonishing, female-driven cast, who vivify Erin Cressida Wilson’s devastating and complex screenplay — and the film emerges as a testament to the agonies women endure (and often expected to be silent through) and the elocutions women engage in their handlings with each other, their reconciliation of selfhood, their desires, and so on.

Structurally, the film replicates the fragmented sense of self and the process of reassembling that each woman in The Girl on the Train undergoes or is involved in. The action of the film is conveyed in vignettes from the perspectives of three achingly intertwined women. Rachel, hiding that she lost her job over a year ago as a repercussion of her alcoholism, rides the same train into the city to drink and further descend into the misery of her infertility and disintegrated marriage. When riding the train, she excruciatingly obsesses over the neighborhood which use to be her own, fixating on the gorgeous, enigmatic, and seemingly blissful “new neighbor” Megan (Haley Bennett), and is haunted by the vision of her former home, inhabited by her ex-husband (a delightfully impeachable Justin Theroux) and his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson).

As each woman’s vignette is further explored in brilliantly disjointed episodes and reveals, the possibility of rendering vile, redundant archetypes of each of these women — pathetic, obsessive alcoholic (Rachel); oversexed, cold twenty-something (Megan); narcissistic, type-A “new woman” (Anna) — is obliterated. Haley Bennett portrays Megan with such a compelling amount of brusque aloofness paired with subtle, unbearable pain, that she transforms the character into a tragic heroine, and her murder, that becomes Rachel’s multilayered fixation for most of the film, reads more than just a sacrifice of a woman. Most critically though, Rachel’s character, both through the script and Blunt’s astonishing performance, is presented with such delicate yet overwhelming agony that the woman immured in the savage cycle of alcoholism and relentless depression is not pitiful or an object of scornful gazing. Rather, Rachel is an embodiment of every woman who has been demolished — by those she loves; by the expectations and hopes she had for her own body that “failed”; by the unpredictability of her own psychology; etc. — and finds her form of coping and torment to be indiscernible. Her behavior and missteps are often bleak, but never objectified.

Yet, in her own unceremonious and dangerous way, Rachel perseveres and ultimately triumphs. Each of the three women of The Girl on the Train, by the film’s denouement, have prevailed or are vindicated in some form. What distinguishes the women, however, is they are not vindicated by some unseen but always felt Male Gaze censor: they are not vindicated by some impulse of proving a woman’s worth through her death or her sacrifice or how a man has changed his opinion of her. The men in the film are flailing, meretricious, violent, unreliable, and ultimately impotent. Rather, the female characters are women of incredible worth and mettle; they contend with incredible pain that women are expected to grin and bear. Moreover, the female body and the things done to it — specifically Rachel’s infertility and her consequent addiction — are not vilified or voyeuristically portrayed. Devastation and obsession, bodily and psychological manipulation, are all conveyed as natural, and not symptoms of deviant or fetishized femininity. The women then succeed and emerge validated through their own words, their own actions, and their interactions with and discoveries about one another.

The matrix of women and female dialogues in The Girl on the Train is an exquisite example of the crude diminishing that women experience under the trope-centered expectations of male (and popular) viewership, and the crucial need to allow women to speak, to act, to suffer, to exposit in their own language and their own space.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Girl on the Train: We Are Women, Not Girls

Eva Phillips is a relatively recent import to Pittsburgh, PA. She relocated from the crust of Virginia after receiving her BA in English at the University of Virginia to complete her Masters at Carnegie Mellon University. Her interests include: representations of femininity and violence in film, refusing to quell her excitement over The Fast and the Furious franchise; having every cat; queer representations in horror and melodrama (both film and television); queer sexuality and religion; and finally getting to meet Sia and maybe wear her wig. In addition to Bitch Flicks, she writes for the good folks at Indie Film Minute, and has appeared in Another Gaze Journal. Her various disintegrations can be viewed at https://www.instagram.com/menzingers2/.

Clitoral Readings of ‘The Piano,’ ‘Turn Me On, Dammit,’ and ‘Secretary’

But how can female arousal be visually expressed? If women stereotypically prefer to read literary erotica over watching porn, with erotica’s descriptions of the interior sensations of female arousal, is that because many women imagine that female performers of porn are uncomfortably simulating their pleasure? Can there be a clitoral cinema of female arousal, and what would it look like?

Written by Brigit McCone as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

In Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, a lesbian couple justify their preferred choice of pornography – gay male porn – by the fact that erections make desire excitingly visible and unarguable. The essence of sex positivity is shared arousal, yet, as Nora Ephron and Meg Ryan famously reminded audiences of When Harry Met Sally, female arousal and orgasm are easy to visually fake. Male craving for confirmation of orgasm in their own porn-watching leads to the “cum shot” becoming a standard trope of male-oriented pornography. But how can female arousal be visually expressed? If women stereotypically prefer to read literary erotica over watching porn, with erotica’s descriptions of the interior sensations of female arousal, is that because many women imagine that female performers of porn are uncomfortably simulating their pleasure? Can there be a clitoral cinema of female arousal, and what would it look like?

I would like to investigate that question using examples from three female-authored films: The Piano, Turn Me On, Dammit!, and Secretary. Judged only by their premises, they appear to be the height of exploitation – The Piano explores the sexual blackmail of a mute woman, Turn Me On, Dammit explores the lustful fantasies of a slender, blonde Scandinavian teenager, and Secretary explores an inexperienced young woman’s desire to be spanked and dominated. Yet, by making the female erotic imagination and self-stimulation central to their aesthetic, each of these films became erotic classics for female audiences. How?

The Piano

Written and directed by Jane Campion, The Piano contains some equal opportunity nudity and straightforward sex scenes, but it also disrupts the male gaze and centers the female spectator at key moments. Consider the scene in which Harvey Keitel’s Baines is examining Holly Hunter’s Ada from every angle, with casual male entitlement, as she plays her piano. Lying on the floor, he discovers a small hole in her thick, woollen stocking. The hole is symbolically clitoral to the female audience, as Baines circles his finger slowly over the little patch of heightened sensation and Ada gasps, but for the male audience it offers no spectacle. It is, rather, an evocation of the sensation of clitoral stimulation, in the same way that a woman licking an ice-cream may evoke oral sex to a male sexual imagination.

With Ada reaching through a crevice of wood to play secretive piano notes, Campion portrays the instrument as inherently sensual. Later comes a lovingly lit shot of a naked Baines caressing and rubbing the piano itself with a cloth. The hetero-female audience can take pleasure in both the spectacle of his body, and the suggestive quality of his attentive and caressing touch, but the female body is removed from the realm of spectacle. Instead, Baines is caressing the piano as a symbol of Ada’s voice and will, representing his deeper appreciation for her. Some critics (including Bitch Flicks) have said that it is problematic for Ada to fall in love with a man who is sexually blackmailing her. I would suggest, however, that, in a society that normalizes the purchase and conquest of women, it is Baines’ initial desire to negotiate, and his eventual total rejection of models of ownership,to request that Ada shows active desire for him, that marks him as her chosen mate.

Sam Neill’s controlling husband Stewart voyeuristically peers through a chink in Baines’ cabin to see his sexual play with Ada. At the moment at which Baines performs oral sex on Ada, Stewart’s gaze is distracted by his dog licking his hand. If Stewart carries the male gaze and male identification in this scene, then Jane Campion playfully interrupts that gaze to turn the man’s own hand into a symbolically clitoral site, vividly evoking the sensation of being licked for female audiences. The Piano, and its reputation as peculiarly erotic to women, is perhaps the strongest evidence that the female imagination responds to clitoral symbolism on a level that equals male susceptibility to phallic symbolism.

When Neill’s Stewart submits to Ada’s exploring his naked body with her hands, the male body becomes available to woman as spectacle and tactile pleasure while the woman herself remains clothed. If the male audience is uncomfortable with this passivity, they can identify with Stewart’s own discomfort, which explodes when Ada reaches the taboo territory of his backside, and he pulls up his hose and dashes from her, eyes averted. Just as his relationship with the Maori is colonial and acquisitive, Stewart’s only model for sex is male conquest and female submission. Just as Baines has surrendered to Maori language and culture, so his model for male/female relationships is a negotiated dual surrender and an attempt to learn the meaning of Ada’s piano language. The film’s finale rewards Baines’ model of negotiated interdependence and dual surrender over the Stewart’s domineering conquest model, with clitoral cinema triumphant.

Turn Me On, Dammit!

Depictions of female masturbation as erotic spectacle tend to focus on a woman moaning softly as she caresses her face, breast and thighs, running her fingers through her hair. The clitoris, effectively, becomes dispersed and distributed across any secondary sexual characteristics that the male audience happens to find attractive, hence the weirdly clitoral scalp of compulsive hair caressing. Female writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen of Turn Me On, Dammit!, by contrast, opens with her teenaged heroine lying clothed on the floor, her hand jammed down her panties, frantically rubbing her clitoris, breathing rapidly and screwing up her face in unphotogenic arousal. This realistic depiction of masturbation immediately establishes the woman as sexual agent, not object. Because it is solitary and largely unphotogenic, masturbation has no function but to be the expression and release of female arousal.

Alma is masturbating to a phone sex hotline, where a male voice describes a hot encounter in the imaginary realm, like narrated literary erotica. Despite its sexed-up publicity, Turn Me On, Dammit! features only one brief, confusing sex act, as Alma is poked in the thigh by the naked erection of her crush, before he immediately withdraws. Instead, the film is saturated with Alma’s erotic imagination as she narrates imaginary encounters over fragmented photographs, ridiculous surrealism and vivid close-ups. Fragmenting the encounters in this way evokes the partial and inadequate imagination of a sexually inexperienced girl, attempting to project what sex might be like. Her fantasies include older men to whom she is not attracted, as well as female rivals, capturing the wide ranging of a horny teenager’s exploratory imagination. By combining fragmented visuals with Alma’s own narrated voiceover, the female viewer never feels an intrusive male gaze. The teenaged female voice of desire and sexual curiosity dominates and narrates throughout.

Secretary

Although the film is directed by Steven Shainberg, he is sensitive to the female origins of his story, adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson from a short story by Mary Gaitskill. Determined to portray the sexual awakening of a submissive woman, rather than the focussing on the pleasure of a dominant man, Secretary harnesses many of the same techniques used by the fully female-authored The Piano and Turn Me On, Dammit. Where Baines demonstrated his attentive, caressing nurture by lovingly wiping Ada’s piano, James Spader’s Mr. Grey demonstrates attentive, caressing nurture to the delicate, vulva-reminiscent orchids in his office. The flowers symbolize burgeoning arousal and desire explicitly in the heroine’s own fantasy sequence, as giant blooms burst open behind Mr. Grey. This fantasy sequence is alternated with shots of the heroine’s frantic, realistic masturbation. Like Turn Me On, Dammit!‘s Alma, Secretary‘s Lee is fully clothed during her masturbations, emphasizing that they are expressions of arousal rather than spectacle. After the film’s most potentially degrading act of domination, where Lee is required to bare her ass while Mr. Grey masturbates over it, the act is reclaimed for audiences as having been arousing for Lee, by her immediate withdrawal into the bathroom to masturbate over the memory of it. A middle-aged woman in a neighbouring stall is shown overhearing her masturbation with a look of compassionate understanding that emphasizes the universal female experience of arousal and desire. Finally, however, it is Lee’s own narrating voice, like Alma’s, that owns the film and challengingly asserts her active role in submitting.

So, can we say that these three films – The Piano, Turn Me On, Dammit! and Secretary – are sex-positive films? I would argue that their clitoral aesthetic of female-authored desire and imaginative sensation make them sex-positive for their female audience. However, in the world of the film, its men are still technically committing acts of sexual harassment where the woman consents by her imagination rather than her voice. This harassment is reclaimed for the female audience by our insight into the heroine’s desire. Can we assume that the male heroes are aware of the women’s desire, because they’ve read it on her face or in her subtler physical responses? We are still a long way from a society that takes it for granted that women should voice their desires, and that sex should be openly negotiated. But recognizing and developing a clitoral aesthetic of film is a step in the right direction. A cinematic language of female desire can be harnessed to support conversations about female needs and sensitivities.

Brigit McCone became obsessed with Harvey Keitel after seeing The Piano at an impressionable age. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and reveling in trashy romances.