Women in Science Fiction Week: ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’

 
Guest post written by Kirk Boyle previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on June 16, 2009.
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.

Kirk Boyle is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He previously contributed pieces about Horrible Bosses, Revolutionary Road, and Good Dick to Bitch Flicks.

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.

Kirk’s Take:
Claiming that Horrible Bosses is horrible understates the case and misleads one into thinking the movie is very unpleasant or disagreeable for formalist reasons: incoherent plotting, unsympathetic characters, humorless comedy. No. Horrible Bosses is an ideological atrocity, not just a shitfest farce. It should be titled Triumph of the Will of the Hapless White Male, for here the Great Recession is a ruse exploited to indulge the twin fantasies that white-collar, white men suffer just the same as everyone else during hard times and, in the satirical words of Michael Scott from The Office, “I think the problem is the chicks. The problem is the chicks, and you gotta blame them.” In sum, the movie channels economic frustration into misogyny. Instead of “Jump! You fuckers!” we get “Let’s kill this bitch!”

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:

Not at all. Your comparison with 9 to 5 is apt: the militantly fun, woman-power message of the earlier film has been replaced with mean spirited and murderous male hijinks. Horrible Bosses represents a kind of unconscious backlash in its portrayal of the economic downturn. We’re presented with three reasonably well-to-do white guys and their suffering. All three men have jobs, and two of them have what seem to be high-paying jobs. (I’m sure those who’ve been laid off and have lost their homes will sympathize.) The sexually harassed dental assistant, Dale Arbus (Charlie Day), is stuck in his less-than-satisfactory position because of his sex-offender status (for urinating in a public playground) and exists mostly as a whining comic foil. The characters played by the two Jasons (Bateman, Sudeikis) actually do have horrible bosses (Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell), whose onscreen moments are responsible for the film’s few real laughs. The idea that even guys with good jobs have it rough is a bit like millionaire Mitt Romney complaining to campaign audiences that he, too, is “unemployed.”

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.

Kirk’s Take:
I like the claim that “Horrible Bosses represents a kind of unconscious backlash in its portrayal of the economic downturn.” The movie is not about the downturn directly but a latent reaction to it. Nevertheless, it makes passing references to the recession. The most overt one involves a former acquaintance of the main characters from Yale who used to work as an executive for Lehman Brothers but who is now reduced to offering hand-jobs to men for money. Director Seth Gordon explains that “We needed to put a fine point on the fact that these guys didn’t have other options.” Horrible Bosses reminds heterosexual white men that capitalism makes of us all prostitutes or, as Spacey enlightens Bateman, “I own you. You’re my bitch.” YET, within the misogynistic and homophobic kaleidoscope of this motion picture, the “fine point” is that “real men” must fight back against being treated as pieces of meat. This threatened species has one of three choices: be fucked by bosses (read “exploited by capitalists for labor power”); be fucked by gay johns (read “exploited by perverts” (because, according to the movie, homosexuality = perversion, e.g., the whole “wet work” scene writ large)); be fucked by prisoners (read “you might as well try breaking the law by murdering your boss because you are already being fucked, so what do you got to lose?”). Of course, within the fucked-up-world of this film, all three choices are the same. The only way out is serendipity, i.e., the writers-as-gods-in-the-machine sweep down and save you via a racist plot device involving an outsourced super-Garmin.

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:

Indeed, this movie–in terms of contemptible messages of all kinds–makes uniquely explicit the old phrase about “an embarrassment of riches.” I couldn’t agree more with your “bad apple capitalist” point. (After all, it wasn’t the system as such that failed us back in 2008, just a few dishonest swindlers who made the other Wall Street paragons look bad!) Sutherland’s brief portrayal of the environmentally responsible, good-guy CEO is meant to reinforce the idea of capitalism-with-a-human-heart and occlude the amoral, monopoly-tending behemoth as it really is (absent sound regulatory restraint), a smokescreen at least as old as Frank Capra’s sentimental masterpiece, It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). For every evil Mr. Potter, there’s a kindly George Bailey. (Yeah, maybe in the days of mom & pop savings and loans.) The TV show Undercover Boss serves a similar function. It seems only necessary that “the big guy” lower himself to the loading dock for a couple of weeks to see what wonderful human beings those little people actually are. (Why, they have feelings and dreams and everything!) At the end they all have a good hug-n-cry, the peons receive a slight raise, and the boss is whisked back to his smoked-glass penthouse office suite, a better, humbler millionaire. As for the former Lehman Brothers employee having to do humiliating gay stuff to survive– is Seth Gordon fucking kidding me? Almost no one actually got dumped from the worst offending banks that helped precipitate the crisis, at least not without sumptuous bonuses, and then kicking and screaming the whole way as if they’d been the real victims. I suppose some lower-level people who were “just following orders” may have been downsized out of their jobs at such firms (though I heard nothing about it), but the film makes no distinctions. We only have a guy from Lehman Brothers selling hand-jobs, as if he were representative of those greedy law-breakers finally getting their comeuppance. Please.

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.

Byron Bailey is an adjunct instructor at the University of Cincinnati and Wright State University. He’s currently trying to finish his dissertation on Shakespeare and Machiavelli.
Kirk Boyle is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He previously contributed pieces about The Day the Earth Stood Still, Revolutionary Road, and Good Dick to Bitch Flicks.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Cardboard Cutouts Beware! A Review of Good Dick

Good Dick (2008)

A feminist romcom that fails to pass the Bechdel Test? How can that be? Good Dick (2008) suggests that it is not only possible, but that it can be done in a way that makes one wonder about the typical inanity of the genre.  Why must the overwhelming majority of romcoms perpetuate a status quo that lionizes men while demeaning women? Why can’t we be presented with complicated characters who navigate the complexities of sex and love instead of cardboard cutouts who confirm dangerous conventions?
On the surface, Good Dick, which Marianna Palka wrote, directed and stars in, seems conventional, albeit quirky. A video store clerk (Jason Ritter) is attracted to a woman (Palka) who comes into his store to rent “bad ’80s girl-focused porn” (Cynthia Fuchs). The clerk looks up the woman’s address on the store’s computer and pays her a visit. Through cracks in her window blinds, he spies her masturbating to the video rental and decides to set up camp in a nearby parking lot, living in his car so he can pursue her affections in closer proximity. Eventually, the peeping Tom gains entrance into her apartment by lying about a dead relative. Despite our reservations about this character—as Fuchs writes, “In another movie the boy would be a serial killer”—he proves to be patient and persistent enough to gain the woman’s hard-earned trust and eventually win her heart.
I admit, the setup of the story sounds awful. In Palka’s Director’s Statement, she writes, “The story is almost like a knight slaying a dragon to save a damsel in distress.” Palka’s observation that the dragon is part of the woman does not reassure that this flick will rise above the regressive romcom fantasy fare of man-as-savior, woman-as-saved. The fact that there are no women in the supporting cast, let alone strong women, does not seem to help matters. Nor does a clichéd scene of an old man (Charles Durning) who visits the video store to deliver the moral of the story to the suitor and his coworker-compadres (in so many words, find love before it’s too late). 
At this point, I might use a turn of phrase such as “In spite of these pitfalls, Good Dick succeeds…”. However, transitioning from a well-wrought counterargument misses my overall point that Good Dick succeeds because of these pitfalls, not in spite of them. The argument in the film lies firmly within the counterargument; it could be no other way. In other words, the only way for Palka’s debut film to overturn conventions is to court them with all the attendant dangers, much like the man in the film does with the woman who, it becomes more and more apparently clear, is struggling to overcome sexual abuse. The film succeeds because it romances romcom normativity to buck it in two vital ways.
First, the woman’s sexual abuse is not sensationalized. The film portrays its lingering effects with a subtle realism that would leave the Hallmark channel crowd squeamish, and rightfully so. The last thing a woman who has been sexually abused by her father needs is some paperback-Fabio-figure to waltz in the picture and show her how “it’s supposed to feel.” Palka hits the right note by including no sex in a film permeated by it. The cure for a “bad dick” is not a “good dick,” sexually speaking.
The title “Good Dick” is more ironic than literal. The man is a dick in the eyes of the woman because he will not leave her alone. He is dogged, pesky, slavish. He at once confirms and frustrates her beliefs about men (that they are all dicks all the time). He wants to have sex with her, but he seems capable of waiting forever for her consent. In short, he seems to be in love with her. But instead of love being treated as the goal and the lover as the prize, as is the case with most romcoms, love is perceived by the woman as abhorrent and the lover as a contemptible (“a dick”). The abuse she suffered at the hands of her father has corrupted her sense of love; love has been confused with abusive sex. The man represents “good dick” because he disentangles the notion of love from sex, thus opening up a space for her to discover (on her own terms and at her own pace) the possibility that good love and good sex can exist, and simultaneously at that. (The father (Tom Arnold) appears in one scene at the end. In this scene, we discover that he is not only sexually abusive but wealthy and financially supporting his daughter. In short, she is a victim not just of her “bad dick” father, but of patriarchy at large, another subtle touch in the film that opens up the scope of its social commentary). 
Although made by a woman, the film strikes me as a romcom aimed at men as much as women—not in that sense of norming guys to carry the torch of patriarchy or apologizing for their man-child behavior. Rather, the film exposes men to how damaging these norms are to women while offering them an alternative form of masculinity. From Palka’s Director’s Statement again:
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.

Good Dick reminds men to fight this good fight against the abusive power of cardboard masculinity. It challenges men to redefine masculine power in a way that is genuine, benevolent, and (dare I say?) loving. Although not a perfect film, Good Dick’s merits lie with warning men and women not to confuse our culture’s “deformed” definitions of masculinity with masculinity itself. “Man up” can mean something other than the masculinity peddled in Miller Lite commercials.

Kirk Boyle is an Assistant Professor of English who will be joining the University of North Carolina at Asheville’s Literature and Language Department in August. He previously contributed pieces on The Day the Earth Stood Still and Revolutionary Road to Bitch Flicks.

Guest Writer Wednesday: On Sam Mendes’s Almost Feminist Revolutionary Road

Winslet and DiCaprio star in Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road (2008) is almost a feminist film. It also just falls short of being something more than the hackneyed anti-suburbia types of film Sam Mendes revels in making.
A couple, who once fell in love over common artistic dreams, pulls off to the side of a highway to engage in verbal combat, sparked by the kitschy play the wife has just acted in, that threatens to turn physical. Each blames the other.
April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) reflects on their life together throughout the next day. As she drags her metal trash cans to the curb to join the others aligned down both sides of their anything-but-revolutionary road, she recalls her real estate agent introducing her and her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), to their future home, the typically perfect white suburban house. Later, as she looks through old photographs, a second flashback recalls a conversation with Frank where she told him he was the most interesting man she had ever met.
As April reminisces about the hopes of the past, Frank woos a secretary at his cliché-ridden office job in a sales department. He gets her drunk, uses her as a shrink to confess that he has turned into his father despite his best intentions, and—as you already have guessed—sleeps with her. When he returns home past dusk, April meets him with smiles, an enthusiastic apology, and a birthday cake with thirty lit candles. Frank cries as his wife and two children—one girl, one boy—sing to him.
At this point I thought to myself, à la SNL’s Seth Meyers and alum Amy Poehler, “Really? Really? Do we really need to see another suburbia-is-the-ninth-circle-of-hell film? Really?” Hadn’t Mad Men already taken this trite formula to its farcical limits? The irony has lost its whip; there’s no need to tell us that life on Revolutionary Road is the conservative fast lane to Hades. We’ve been wise to the parable for some time: American beauty is anything but.
When I saw Frank washing away his infidelities in the shower, I puked a little in my mouth.
But then something unexpected happened. Instead of Kevin Spacey throwing a plate against a wall and toking up with his teenage daughter’s boyfriend, April lays bare the message of films like American Beauty. Road becomes meta-cinematic when she tells Frank:

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.

With this piece of dialogue, a character within the film’s diegetic reality provides an accurate account of the predicament of the film’s starring couple…near the beginning of the film! Road replaces Beauty’s device of a dead male narrator who knows the foibles of his life only after it is over with a living, breathing, and INTELLIGENT female character who knows them and wants out before it’s too late. In a later scene, she tells one of their neighbors that she actually wants “in” to life, a nice reversal that equates suburban living with death, that favorite topic of anti-consumerist zombie films.
After some initial resistance, Frank agrees with April’s analysis and her diagnosis. They will move to Paris so that he may figure out what he wants to do with his life while she supports the family on secretary’s wages (thanks to France’s fairer treatment of women workers). Although such a plan seems anti-feminist on the surface, and one neighbor says as much upon hearing it, there is something liberating about it. Shots follow of April and Frank almost glowing with the prospect that they will soon be leaving the humdrum rhythms of Eisenhower America.
Of course, the best-laid plans of mice and couples often go awry, and the Wheelers fail to make it to Paris (I mused that their voyage would be cut short somewhere in the north Atlantic anyway). The Wheelers’ plans go awry when Frank comes up with a business slogan that impresses his higher-ups so much that they offer him a promotion. The irony is that Frank’s sudden show of corporate creativity only comes after he has convinced himself to leave. The mere thought of becoming a class traitor opens the wells of inspiration trapped inside him not a moment too late, which is so often the case, but a moment too early. The prospect of becoming a well-compensated company man leads him to waver on his early retirement. As if this were not enough, April discovers that she is pregnant with their third child. Although they convince each other that Paris is still in the cards, the odds seem stacked against them.
Here is where our co-heroes separate into their roles as protagonist and antagonist. I assert that Frank betrays April by buying into the “realist” narrative of his friends and colleagues, i.e. the American middle class. Notably, in the key scene where he dismisses Paris as a pipe dream, he responds to April’s proposal of an abortion like a Right-wing conservative. 
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.
He reduces her to a scolded child, the idea of moving to Paris now considered a “childish dream.” Frank promptly resumes fucking his secretary like the mad man that he has become (and unconsciously always was and desired to be despite himself).
The ensuing fight between the Wheelers parallels the one that opens the film with one significant difference: although they both recognize that Truth has just spake, only April refuses to ignore it. She no longer loves Frank precisely because he is no longer the man she married, the man who wanted more from life than a cookie-cutter existence, and she reaffirms this fact. Frank cannot handle the Truth, and does his best to defend against it. He speaks for April, putting words in her mouth that she cannot express because she no longer loves him. April has not grown cold to him because of his unfaithfulness with another woman—April sleeps with another man, too—but his infidelity to himself.
The film should end with the two most disturbing scenes of all.
First, Frank awakens to find April playing Stepford wife. She pauses from cooking breakfast when he enters the kitchen and apologizes, just as she does earlier in the film with the birthday cake and party, except this time her words sound eerily scripted. Because Frank no longer cares about Truth and desires only to live in bad faith, he plays along, a bit surprised but also pleasantly amused. When he leaves, one gets the sense that he has bought into the male-centric American Dream. One knows that April hasn’t.

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…”

A perfectly disturbing end, right? No! Mendes cannot help but steal the show from his now ex-wife. Instead of ending with a shot of the blood on the carpet—the blotch in suburbia that betrays it a violent, life-draining lie—and April voicing the title of the film offscreen, Mendes includes a coda, a series of short scenes that a) turn the film anti-feminist and b) reinstate the generic codes of the cinematic anti-suburbia tract. 
Instead of being left with a woman who may or may not be in critical condition, we learn that April dies, and her death acts as a sacrifice to return the men to normalcy. Frank moves to the city with his kids, thus finding some compromise between Paris and the American suburbs. The neighbor, who professed his unrequited love for April after she slept with him, becomes closer with his wife. We might brush these scenes against the grain to argue that they are the most feminist part of all because they show that female sacrifice undergirds the American Dream of the middle class, but they also inspire an unwarranted sympathy for Frank. The men are allowed to mourn almost as an act of contrition.
The final insult comes in the concluding scene where Mrs. Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) tells her husband about how the new couple who has moved into the Wheelers’ house seems perfect for their abode. When the husband reminds her that she said much the same when the Wheelers moved in, she claims that she always knew that something was not right about the Wheelers, showing us that she, too, continues to live in bad faith by refusing to treat her Truth-telling son as the normal one (and not the folks she sells houses to). In my vote for the platitudinous scene of the decade, the husband is shown turning down the volume on his hearing aid.

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.