Tag: Kirk Boyle
Guest Writer Wednesday: Horrible Bosses and the So-Called ‘Mancession’: A Review in Conversation
Horrible Bosses (2011) |
This is a guest post by Byron Bailey and Kirk Boyle.
Isn’t this movie the double-inversion of 9 to 5 (1980)? A progressive flick about exploited women enacting their (pot-induced) revenge fantasies against their bosses becomes, in these times, a reactionary tale about privileged men enacting their (resentment-fueled) revenge fantasies against their bosses. Where Parton and company hate their bosses for exploiting them, Batemen and bunch hate their bosses because they want to be (or fuck) them but can’t.
Am I being too harsh?
Byron’s Take:
The most execrable aspects of this star-studded mediocrity radiate from the characterization of Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston) as the dirty-talking, sexually harassing dentist-boss. Now have there ever been instances of female-on-male sexual harassment in the workplace? No doubt, but the truth is that women endure unwanted sexual attention from men at an astronomically higher rate. This is yet another example of portraying the danger–as is often the case, beneath a veneer of mirth–of uncontrolled female sexuality (a very old formula indeed), here inflated into physical coercion. It has the effect of seeming to level the playing field: “See, women do it, too!” I’m not saying the makers of Horrible Bosses set out to accomplish this ideological task. They just wanted laughs, but the cumulative effect of such filmic representations has a way of getting into the cultural consciousness. Fatal Attraction (1987) unleashed its depiction of a crazed female stalker into a culture rife with male stalkers of women. Horrible Bosses presents an attractive, oversexed woman essentially stalking her hapless male employee, a scene right out of hetero male fantasy. Both films present female sexual desire as out of control.
Surely the worst moment in Horrible Bosses occurs just after Dr. Harris shows her assistant a series of photos depicting her taking advantage of him while he was under dental anesthesia. It is not clear, but some of the posed pictures may actually involve sex. The assistant (Day) says, “That’s rape!” He may well be right. She replies, “Just hold on there, Jodie Foster.” This can only refer to the 1988 film The Accused, an account of a real-life gang-rape victim whose character was essentially put on trial. (After all, she must have been “asking for it,” right?) Googling the film to get my details correct, I was met with “Jodie Foster Hot Rape Scene Video,” first result. I am not kidding. Try it. (Think we still have a problem?) So, what can Aniston’s line mean? “Don’t be so fast to accuse me like Jodie Foster did in that movie?” Or what? Because Horrible Bosses‘ point of view is that female-on-male sexual harassment is not really so bad (and most men would enjoy it if the woman were “hot”), how can this comparison of what the film sees as merely humorous, or at most embarrassing, with a filmic account of a real-life gang-rape do anything but belittle the seriousness of harassment and rape? Look, I’m not holding up The Accused as some sort of holy object, beyond humor. Laughing can help us deal with horrific things. Given the context, though, I really couldn’t believe my ears. I certainly don’t expect a mainstream comedy to conform to my ideological beliefs, but Horrible Bosses goes beyond the typical misogynistic gross-out humor so popular in recent years and graduates to the realm of the truly offensive.
As you rightly note, these three downtrodden amigos hold not just jobs but careers, and they enjoy disposable income. For example, while brewing up the idea to kill their bosses, Sudeikis mentions paying someone to clean his apartment and cut his hair. This line of thinking informs their plot to kill their bosses by hiring a hitman. Although they gripe about their jobs, any dirty work (housekeeping or murder!) is beneath them and within their means to outsource (to black men who are stupid (Jamie Foxx), but wait, might be smarter than they seem to be. Essentially, what we have is two privileged white men (Batemen and Sudeikis) whose exasperation derives from being unable to take the next step up the corporate ladder because the economy has turned sour right when they were in line for a promotion, but since the dominant ideology peddled by Hollywood cannot represent the true culprit of their thwarted desires, it displaces responsibility onto the figure of the “horrible boss.” It’s not the perverted (rotten-to-the-core) capitalist system that is to blame for your unfair treatment, it’s the perverted (bad apple) capitalist.
The logic of the third guy’s (Day) “occupational” ressentiment, as you allude to, seems different than his buddies’. Day’s character is not “trapped” because he can’t get as sweet of a position as the one he already holds within this busted economy. No, he’s trapped because he is getting married and wives-to-be are expensive commodities (and untrustworthy, cheating whores, e.g. Spacey’s character’s wife). Perhaps, however, this plot line simply serves to amplify the ever-so-slightly-less-explicit misogyny of the other two.
Perhaps too, we have reached a point in the post-ironic, late capitalist, culture industry where we need as many words for “sexism” as the Inuit have for snow. Horrible Bosses does its very best to showcase them all. Explicit misogyny: Jennifer Aniston’s character is introduced with white-lettered words that fill the screen: “Evil, Crazy Bitch.” Patronizing sexual harassment: Sudeikis’s character’s treatment of the “FedEx girl” who delivers to his company. Objectification: Sudeikis leaves a sports bar stool so he can “see that girl about her vagina.” Homophobia-as-misogyny: Aniston calls Day a “little pussy” and “little faggot” when he won’t sleep with her. Reverse-sexism-is-traditional-sexism: Aniston’s character is meant to imply that men can be sexually assaulted at work like women, but all it really reinforces is that men have a right to hate women for not fulfilling their fantasy images of them. Meta-misogyny: the outtakes include Sudeikis looking directly at the camera to remind the frat row yahoos of the film’s takeaway absurdist joke: “bend her over and show her the fifty states.” That’s not even to mention the relentless rape-is-hilarious misogyny.
Byron’s Take:
The use of “little faggot” and “little pussy” as companion terms of abuse (as you observe) unites misogyny and homophobia in one neat “little” package (pun intended). On broadcast television where the explicitness of those words calls for a cleaner alternative, the admonition “Man up!” encompasses both notions. (Why are we getting so many examples of women ordering men to be more masculine lately?) Horrible Bosses goes out of its way to police male affect, from the insufficiently masculine dental assistant (Day) to the automatically-masculine-by-virtue-of-blackness ex-con (Jamie Foxx) and his fellow bar patrons. There is, however, a moment of slippage. It occurs in the scene that follows the trio’s consultation with “Motherfucker Jones” (Foxx), their presumed hit-man. The two more successful–and in the film’s gaze, seemingly more attractive–guys (Bateman, Sudeikis) begin to argue about which of them would be raped the most if they went to prison. This works within a constellation of rape references in the film as yet another way in which white guys (with good jobs) can (potentially) get fucked (or fucked over) by someone or something. Allow me to overlay another reading. Psychological surveys suggest rather strongly that the most virulently homophobic males tend to be haunted by same-sex desire; hence, they project their loathing outward. They unconsciously know something about themselves, something that gnaws at them. This scene could be the film (or its screenwriters) expressing its/their unconscious gay desire. Additionally, the scene explores a blurring of subject positions; that is, it depicts desire and gender performance as a continuum rather than an either/or. While the film berates “faggots,” it nonetheless depicts hetero males displaying an affect that the culture defines as “feminine” (“Will they find me attractive?”). There’s a moment of complexity here, as if the film (like a human mind) knows more about itself than it thinks it knows. Still, this knowingness is itself part of a regressive network of references whose overall messages you’ve summed up perfectly, to which I would add the cultural acceptance of men being raped in prison as an eventuality that can’t–or needn’t–be avoided. (After all, they’re mostly black, right? Don’t even get me started on our rapacious prison-industrial-complex and how the “justice” system so ably feeds it).
There will probably be those who say we’re making an awfully big deal about a throw-away comedy, something that’s “just entertainment.” Unfortunately, contemptible crap like Horrible Bosses teaches the culture to affirm its worst negative stereotypes beneath a veneer of farce. (If only it were smart enough to satirize them at the same time.) Leaving these complaints aside, in the plainest terms of bang-for-the-bucks multiplex entertainment, this film is still a dismal failure. The considerable talents of Spacey, Farrell, Bateman, and Foxx are wasted, and Aniston, who can be very effective in the right role, hits an all-time low. (I guess we’re supposed to find it progressive that Aniston, at the advanced (Hollywood) age of 42, can still be displayed as a sex object. Granted, but she’s playing young, not “cougar,” which is another issue altogether.) Bateman’s character alone is marginally sympathetic, and mostly because one associates him with better material. Arrested Development is a comedic project that pushed the limits of taste, dealt with a character going to prison, presented a female character who satirized sluttiness, explored sexual orientation for laughs, had characters contemplating violence, and mixed a great many other over-the-top situations together for the sake of humor. That show illustrates how topics like these can be the occasion for genuine belly laughs, and at the same time be thoughtful and smart and not at all mean-spirited. Nearly everybody I know who watched Arrested Development–people of diverse ideological outlooks–found the show hilarious, and it was anything but safe or tame. Neither of us is asking for politically-correct comedy (which would suck), just comedy that makes us laugh without adding overtly to the negative aspects of our culture. Lately, this seems too much to expect.
Guest Writer Wednesday: Cardboard Cutouts Beware! A Review of Good Dick
Good Dick (2008) |
For the lead male role I wanted to see the lover archetype illustrated in a way that is all loving, all kind, all ways. I knew the guy had to be strong and thereby protective, but not in a stereotypical sense. Definitions of masculinity often tend to be deformed in our culture, forgetting the good fight and glorifying what I like to call, “The cardboard cutout man.” In Good Dick the man’s power has nothing to do with his physical strength, his appearance or his social status. He is masculine in a way that is genuine; this masculinity stems from his lack of chauvinism. His chivalry is his depth of kindness.
Guest Writer Wednesday: On Sam Mendes’s Almost Feminist Revolutionary Road
Well, I happen to think this (suburban life) is unrealistic. I think it’s unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working like a dog year after year at a job he can’t stand, coming home to a place he can’t stand, to a wife who’s equally unable to stand the same things. You want to know the worst part? Our whole existence here is based on this great premise that we’re somehow very special and superior to the whole thing, and you know what I’ve realized…? We’re not! We’re just like everyone else. Look at us! We’ve bought into the same ridiculous delusion. This idea that you have to resign from life and settle down the moment you have children. And we’ve been punishing each other for it.
April, a normal woman, a normal sane mother doesn’t buy herself a piece of rubber tubing to give herself an abortion so she can go live out some goddamned fantasy.
The second scene finds April crying in front of her mirror after Frank has left. She makes a fitful call where she threatens to break down at any moment to the babysitter watching her kids to ask if she can prolong her duties. The egg yolks that the camera focused on her scrambling in the prior scene retroactively become a foreshadowing moment, as she methodically carries out the abortion. When she descends the stairs, the camera focuses on her unsteady feet. Her face is pale. She goes to the window. The sun shines upon her and she lets out a small smile. Then a drip of blood falls to the carpet. The camera pans back to show a pool of blood expanding on the back of her skirt. She slowly moves out of the frame to make a phone call, “I think I need an ambulance…Yes…One one five Revolutionary Road…”
Road should resolutely not be framed as a film about all suburbanites remaining deaf to the truth of their existence, as Mendes’s grandiloquent closing sequence suggests. The film is resolutely not about everyone’s bad faith. One woman, in the great tradition of Ibsen’s Nora Helmer, remains faithful to reality in an unreal setting and demonstrates her sanity despite her insane husband and unfaithful director.
Kirk Boyle has previously contributed a Flick-Off of The Day the Earth Stood Still to Bitch Flicks.
Flick-Off: The Day the Earth Stood Still
This Flick-Off is a guest post from Bitch Flicks follower kb.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) is a diplomat for a group of intergalactic civilizations who lands in Central Park to speak with the world leaders of the human race at the U.N. His intention is to “save the Earth” by reasoning with them to change their way of life so they do not destroy the planet. When U.S. leaders respond with unilateral violence instead, Klaatu begins the process of collecting the animal life forms of the Earth’s various ecosystems in globular “arks” before unleashing a swarm of self-replicating nanobots to destroy human civilization, thus saving Earth from us.
Eventually, with the help of Karl Barnhardt (John Cleese), a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on biological altruism, Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), an astrobiologist at Princeton, convinces Klaatu that humans can indeed change, and he interrupts the attack of the insect-like bots.
The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still‘s fraudulent feminism is exposed in how Klaatu (Reeves) is finally convinced to spare humanity in his bid to “save the Earth.” In a supposedly progressive way, the remake turns the traditional stay-at-home mother of the 1951 original (Patricia O’Neal) into a Princeton astrobiologist who is important enough to be put on a “vital list” of scientists and engineers who the U.S. government calls upon in the event of an imminent collision of “Object 07/493” with Manhattan. However, this liberal update is nothing but subterfuge.
Throughout the movie, Benson (Connelly) tries repeatedly to persuade Klaatu that humans can change, including taking him to see Professor Barnhardt (Cleese). The unflappable Klaatu begins the process to end the world anyway, and remains unconvinced by Barnhardt’s syllogistic arguments. In the film’s climatic moment of revelation, Klaatu sees Benson consoling her stepchild (Jaden Smith) at his father’s grave.
Only after witnessing a mother’s love does Klaatu feel that there is another side to humans (besides their unreasonable and destructive one), and curtail the attack of the killer nanobots. Unwittingly then, Benson changes Klaatu’s mind based on the advice Barnhardt gave her as they fled his house: “Change his mind not with reason, but with yourself.” In your standard anti-feminist fare, Barnhardt’s advice can only mean one of two things. Being a family-friendly film, the remake of Day passes on Benson’s seduction of Klaatu, deciding instead to confirm that she is a mother first and foremost, her position as scientist at a prestigious American university be damned.