I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors. I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.
I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors.
I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.
Her work is so different from what we are used to that, it’s usually depressing to read anything about the making of her films, which always seem to struggle for financing and spend years in development hell.
Harron’s film are like long monologues, focusing on the experiences of a single, larger than life character. In my head, I’ve compared them to less glossy magazine profiles.
These are difficult women to portray in an even handed fashion. Their personas and actions have transcended the truth of who they are and in the cases of Bettie and Anna Nicole, tend to be seen rather than heard. They are also women who have appeared difficult to defend and explain from within a feminist framework.
Harron, who wrote for Punk Magazine in 1970s New York, mixes feminine aesthetics and masculine grit to find beauty in the often ugly experiences of her subjects. She takes daring subjects and portrays them in a formalistically unique style, using different film stocks, gorgeous cinematography and fast kinetic edits to portray different time periods.The Notorious Bettie Page, uses a Wizard of Oz style switch from black and white to lush colour, to portray the character’s feelings of freedom. She lets her actors breathe and inhabit the characters and when her films succeed, they do on the lead character’s stand out performances.
Though it is often unclear what she is trying to say with them. As a whole, her oeuvre does not present a cohesive sense of auterusim or even stick to a specific genre, medium or perspective. Harron’s main interest appear to be intriguing stories.
If her films do have one message, it’s that people are more complicated than we assume. They don’t make a snap judgement about the characters. Mary Harron doesn’t tell us Valerie Solanas was “crazy” or Bettie Page was exploited or Anna Nicole Smith was a gold digger. She says, there are good and bad parts of everyone. What seems to matter is being interesting.
I Shot Andy Warhol is a little art scene movie about Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor), a lesbian writer famous more for the delusions that lead her to (non-fatally) shoot Andy Warhol in 1968 than for her feminist treatise, the S.C.U.M. manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men).
The film is Valerie’s show, portraying her as a desperate person living on the fringes of society and struggling to make a living, who comes face to face with Warhol’s beautiful world and its superstars and hopes to be invited in. She comes to believe Warhol is trying to control and exploit her when she cannot get him to produce a play of hers.
The film doesn’t seem to take a stance on Solanas, but allows the audience to try to understand her based on what they have been shown. We are helped along by Taylor’s performance, intense to the point of being frightening, which makes her character come alive.
The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)
In Harron’s portrayal of the life of 50s pin-up Queen, Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol), we meet a woman who is a living contradiction. She is portrayed as an innocent who doesn’t understand the idea of pornography yet enjoys posing naked. Even the most aggressive bondage scenes where she is tied up and gagged seem to be a great game for her.
Though the film is about pornography, Harron skillfully avoids giving us overtly sexualized or salivating gazes of her star. The nude scenes are either awkward as Bettie fumbles unsure in the beginning or triumphant in portraying Bettie’s proud nudism and her sun-kissed body, glowing. I think Gretchen Mol’s portrayal of Bettie really helps here; she is wide-eyed and perpetually stunned. The way she inhabits the character makes her sexuality seem natural. She enjoys her body and the film’s switch to technicolor emphasizes that happiness.
However, it’s a film with a lot to unpack. Because Harron opens it with scenes of Bettie’s rape and abuse, it’s easy to believe she’s suggesting Bettie’s sexual openness is because of her rape. It’s gets slightly heavy-handed in one point where she is invited to show a private moment in her acting class and she begins to take off her clothes.
The relatively short span of Bettie’s life Harron focuses on cuts out her later mental illness and the extent of her evangelicalism. It’s discomforting to see younger Bettie enjoy her work when contrasted to older Bettie whose conversion suggests she begins to view what she participated in as exploitative.
The Anna Nicole Story is a Lifetime movie, it’s campy and trashy, but it has aspirations. Harron gives Anna Nicole the Marilyn Monroe treatment, telling us that she is a misunderstood bombshell hiding a deep sadness. Though, the device of the ghostly figure of an older glamorous Anna Nicole guiding her through her life is a bit much.
There’s a fine line between campy trashy and exploitation trashy and Harron is fairly successful here. For the last years of her life, evidence that Anna Nicole Smith was mentally unwell and struggling with drugs was turned into a joke and her weight gain was excoriated by men who just wanted her to get hot again. While Anna Nicole was various exploited and exploitative herself, the film tries to rein in her image to something palatable to the viewers at home. Agnes Bruckner tries to make her seem human, but though we are left unsure of the motivations behind many of her stranger actions.
It seemed like every interview Bruckner did for the film was about the enlarged breasts she sported as Anna Nicole. She was asked “How were they made? or “How did they feel?” over and over.
In the finished picture, too much fun is had with Anna Nicole’s breasts, whose size the film enjoys exaggerating and displaying, though this may come with the territory. The scene where she bring cantaloupes to display the size of implants she want is played for laughs, as is the revel of her new large breasts getting her attention at the strip club.
As it’s a Lifetime movie, Harron is hampered by a PG rating, a low budget and shot production schedule, but she still gives us something interesting to explore.
She always has.
Elizabeth Kiy. is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. Someday she will take over the world.
When I reflect on the recent twitter conversation #notyourrescue project, I think of ‘The Client List’ as a seriously flawed baby step forward in the portrayal of sex workers in the media: the sex worker is the main character, she is portrayed as making a decision to do sex work in a situation of economic constraint, not abject victimhood. But I can only call it a baby step forward from a perspective of harm reduction.
Jennifer Love Hewitt in The Client List
This guest post by Aya de Leon appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Sex Workers.
When I first sent literary agents my novel about a former prostitute who starts an escort service and robs rich and unscrupulous men to support a clinic for sex workers, I was told frequently that my character was not relatable or likeable. What? She’s robbing rich guys to pay for street-based sex workers to have health care. What’s not to like? But in the process, I learned how deeply women have been conditioned not to identify with sex workers, unless they have done sex work or have close relationships with sex workers. I have friends and family members who are current and former sex workers, so I underestimated the amount of effort that would be needed to make my character “likeable” and “relatable” to mainstream audiences. While I saw her as a badass, many may have seen her as a wrongdoer. While I created a story in which she was rewarded for her daring rule-breaking, others might expect her to be punished.
The conventional expectations of female sexual transgression and punishment are often played out on the screen, and the Lifetime movie The Client List is no exception. Samantha Horton (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is a Texas mom on the verge of financial ruin who turns to sex work to save her house and support her family. For Samantha, sex work becomes a desperate but predictable conclusion from her upbringing as a beauty pageant winner: “This is America. If a girl is pretty, she’s not supposed to be poor.”
Sam says this in a moment of financial crisis. She’s standing in a filling station with a gas-guzzling American truck on empty. Her credit card is declined, and she digs through the wallet of her drunk, self-pitying husband who had to be carried to the car. She can only find a single dollar for gas to get home to a house that’s weeks from foreclosure. Sam is a massage therapist, and had applied for what she thought was a non-sex work massage job. She left abruptly when she found out that the place offered erotic massage and full sexual services.
But in the moment at the gas station, she sits on the verge of financial ruin. Sam finds the massage parlor’s business card, and tries to talk to her husband about the decision to begin doing sex work. She prepares to open her heart to him, but he’s passed out. Sam steps out of her drunk husband’s earshot, and calls to accept the job.
In my novel, the protagonist has a similar revelation. In her case, she had been a sex worker, but she stopped servicing clients and started a clinic for sex workers. Then she’s become a madam of an escort service to keep the clinic open in tough times. However, a billionaire client wants to bring her out of retirement. Like Sam in The Client List, she initially said no, but then changed her mind when the circumstances got more dire; her clinic building will also face foreclosure if she doesn’t take immediate action:
The decision had slid into place like a deadbolt, with a sharp click, locking her in. Just like when she was seventeen and standing in a grimy hallway with a red eviction notice in her hand. I don’t care who I have to fuck, I’m not gonna end up out on the street.
Back then it had been her sister Cristina that she’d been determined to protect. Now it was all the girls who came to the clinic, even the girls on her team. In particular, she thought of Dulce: wide eyes, bruises and silver platform boots. Marisol would make sure that the clinic would always be there for girls like Dulce. She didn’t care if she had to fuck an arrogant billionaire.
I hadn’t seen The Client List when I started my novel back in 2008, but I identify with both of these female protagonists’ willingness to do whatever is necessary to protect those they love.
There’s also a similarity between the two stories in the communities of sex workers they depict. Both reflect a range of other interests that they support via sex work. The women of The Client List include an aspiring novelist, a dancer in musical theater, a tattoo artist, and a teenager with a strict Pentecostal family who ran away to try out for American Idol. In my novel, the secondary protagonist is getting her degree from Columbia University in Public Health. She’s prepared to take over the running of the clinic when she graduates and is working her way through school as an escort.
Similarly, both stories provide a range of attitudes toward sex work. On one end are those who do it only out of economic desperation and feel a sense of disgust, and on the other end are those who feel like one sex worker in The Client List says: “I love sex. I’m gettin paid to do somethin I love.” In The Client List, what they all agree on is that sex work “beats the hell out of waitressing.”
There’s a similar moment in my novel, when the secondary protagonist gets a phone call:
“It’s the public health department,” Tyesha said laughing. “I put a resume on file with them when I was job hunting last year.”
“Oh hell no,” Kim said.
“Dear public health department,” Tyesha fake typed on her phone. “Please kiss my black ass. I am now gainfully employed as an escort fucking one well-behaved client a week, and making more money than you offer at any of the sorry-ass jobs I applied for.”
Kim laughed. “You should sign it ‘Miss Tyesha, one of the smartest bitches on the block.’”
Kim and Tyesha high fived.
“Ladies—” Marisol began. “Remember, you are not bitches,” she admonished Kim. “You are hoes.”
The four women laughed.
I added this part, this celebratory attitude toward sex work at the suggestion of a sex worker activist who has been consulting with me on the book. She explained that contemporary sex worker culture includes the self-congratulation of having figured out how to have a level of economic freedom in today’s society.
So, up until this point, The Client List, like my novel, has painted an empathic portrait of a woman who does sex work. However, after this, the perspectives of the stories begin to diverge. In my novel, the protagonist and her team pursue a daring heist to save the clinic. While I won’t spoil the ending, I will say this: there are some consequences to her choices of robbery and sex work, but they have more to do with the organization of society and attitudes toward sex workers. These are obstacles that will not hinder my protagonist from triumph. In The Client List, however, the story’s plot moves into cliché and the perspective moves into a moralistic tone of judgment and punishment.
Sam Horton gets addicted to the fast money, starts to do cocaine, and gets caught in a police sting. Later, Sam says that she also got hooked on the lavish gifts of jewelry from her clients, and the constant male attention. At the character level, however, these motives ring hollow, as do her reasons for doing cocaine, which don’t even make logical sense. She gets arrested and divulges client information in exchange for minimal jail time. She does 30 days. In the process, her husband leaves her and takes the kids.
The lesson for the fallen woman is driven home by the best friend who had warned her to stop: “I knew it would end like this…at first you did it to save your family; I get that. But then it was for you. You threw your whole life away for what’s on your ears and around your neck.”
The Client List is “…a dramatization inspired by a true story…characters and events [have been] fictionalized.” I would be very curious to see what the real story had been. By making Sam into a gold-digger, they paint the husband as humiliated victim, and the sex worker as penitent sinner. But I should have known that the film’s underlying conservative Christian values would prevail when Sam kept talking to the angel on her dashboard on the way to and from work.
There are, however, a few touching moments that feel true to the realities of sex work. When Sam is with her first client, her daughter calls, and Sam takes the call. The client gets upset because seeing Sam as a mother, a human being beyond her role with him, sort of kills “the feeling” he was trying to get. Later, Sam says she’s running behind because “the last guy was in real estate, and he wouldn’t stop crying.” Finally, after Sam is caught, she experiences another occupational hazard of sexwork, TMI: “ever since this happened [being outed as a sex worker], people think they can tell me anything. Checkout girl at the Save-A-Lot says she doesn’t like to do it doggie style.” These moments reflect a feminist perspective on sex work, key aspects of sex industry work where women who provide sexual services for men are expected to be exclusively sexualized, to play key emotional roles, and are expected to be sexually available to everyone in every way at all times.
These moments, however, are fleeting. And because it is a Lifetime movie, the latter part of the film moves into what I will call “faux feminist” revelations. The first is when the angry townswomen caravan from church on Sunday morning to show up at her door like an angry mob. They hear her tearful confession. Sam says:
My whole life I just always depended on my looks, and I thought this was just gonna be another one of those times. I really thought I was doing the best thing for my family. But in the end the very thing I was trying to save I lost…and I’m just real sorry…for the pain that I caused you.
But instead of vengeance or penitence, it turns out they want information:
“Why do they come to you?” the women ask. “What do you do that we don’t?” and “How can we get them to think about us the way they think about you?” Sam answers, “You all want tips?”
They agree, and she brings out a banana and two apples to give them sex techniques.
This provides the girl power moment where the women cooperate, but it is also steeped in misinformation. The allure of sex workers for married men is not all about skills and techniques, it’s also about power, compartmentalization, and fantasy. The sex worker is playing the role that a man pays her to play. She can keep it up throughout the entirety of their interaction, because it is limited and is a transaction. Whatever happens in the bedroom, a man knows that his wife has a full picture of his weaknesses, his failures, his funky smell in the bathroom. Nowadays, his wife also has a right to expect their sex life to include satisfaction of her needs and desires. There’s nothing Sam could teach many wives with that banana that would address those reasons that men pursue commercial sexual services.
The ClientList poster
The second faux feminist moment happens when her mother gives her an apology for encouraging her too much to focus on her looks and not sufficiently praising her intellect and character qualities.
This is faux feminism, because it blames individual women for buying into sexism, as opposed to blaming the institutions of sexism. It implies that sexism is something passed down from mothers to daughters, as opposed to understanding women as passing on the internalized sexism they’ve learned from the society, including the best strategies for survival and advantages, which often involve collusion with the institutions of sexism. In The Client List, there’s never any accountability placed either on institutions, or on individual men. In particular, her husband is never held accountable for choosing to get drunk at the toughest point in the family’s biggest financial crisis. He chose to get blasted after having spent the day standing around trying to get hired as a day laborer. He felt humiliated by his drop in status from football star. Although he apologizes later, his actions are never factored in to her decision. At the time, they were very clear: her family was facing ruin. This was the only job available. Her husband had put himself out of commission, and she made an executive decision. She stepped in as breadwinner and took care of her family.
In my novel, the protagonist also faces the challenge of losing a relationship because her partner can’t accept her history of sex work. Of course, they are not the same–my character was not married and doing sex work in secret–but the core dynamics are the same. My character justifies her actions, and turns the tables on the love interest for questioning her choices:
“I didn’t even hear it from you. [my character’s love interest complains] Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I would have told you eventually,” she said. “I just wanted to get to know you a little better before I sprang my fucking prostitution past on you. I thought you would run, and you did….I did what I had to do, then and now…you left me hanging for weeks trying to decide if you could fucking handle the fact that I was a hooker ten years ago,” she said. “And it’s not like it was my first goddamn choice of a job.”
In The Client List, however, at no point does Samantha tell her husband off. Instead, she’s tearful, fallen, and apologetic throughout the latter part of the film.
By conveniently (and unrealistically) making Sam money grubbing and a cliche cocaine addict who’s cold and mean to her family, the film creates a justification for her blame and downfall. The Client List sidesteps the much more complex and realistic question: what happens when a woman makes a justifiable decision to take charge of her family’s financial future? How would a husband react if he knew he dropped the ball and his wife turned to sex work as the only option to save them from homelessness? Let’s say Samantha did the more realistic thing based on her character, and got out of sex work as soon as the family was on their feet. I would have found the story much more satisfying (and believable) if she had stopped sex work after the family got their finances together, but was prosecuted in the sting because there was evidence that she had worked there in the past. But the story would lose the vital moralistic tone if the best friend had to say, “You did it to save your family; I get that. But you’ve moved on and are working at a sports clinic now. Why are these assholes ruining your life?” Similarly, when the husband got mad, she could really tell him off: “We had one dollar left, and two weeks to get our house out of foreclosure. I had a woman promising me money if I just gave a few hand jobs, and when I went to discuss it with you, you were passed out drunk. So yes, you missed a crucial moment of decisionmaking. And as the only adult left standing, I made a choice. I did what I had to do, and I used what I had at my disposal.” Turning Sam into a cliche is a cop out.
Finally, the film has a predictable Lifetime movie ending. After Sam suffers her punishment—shame, losing her family, and jail—she straightens up. She starts going to night school. She and the sex worker who “loves sex” both become waitresses, settling for $5 tips where they used to get $1,000 tips. But Sam clearly implies that it’s worth it, now that she has her dignity back, thus, undoing the “beats the hell out of waitressing” moment of camaraderie. Now that her bond with the sex workers is broken, she is sufficiently humbled that her man can finally “look at her” again. The film ends at her kid’s birthday party with the beginning of a reconciliation with her husband and children.
When I reflect on the recent twitter conversation #notyourrescueproject, I think of The Client List as a seriously flawed baby step forward in the portrayal of sex workers in the media: the sex worker is the main character, she is portrayed as making a decision to do sex work in a situation of economic constraint, not abject victimhood. But I can only call it a baby step forward from a perspective of harm reduction. This type of portrayal is less harmful than portrayals that show sex workers as less than human, without agency, or deserving targets of violence. If you’re looking for a film that presents a feminist perspective on sex work, you might have to “just say no” to The Client List.
Aya de Leon is a Black/Latina writer/performer whose work has received acclaim in the Village Voice, Washington Post, American Theatre Magazine, and has been featured on Def Poetry and in Essence Magazine. Aya has been a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a slam poetry champion. She is currently working on a sex worker heist novel. She is the Director of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program, teaching poetry, spoken word, and hip hop at UC Berkeley. She’s on Twitter @AyadeLeon and blogs at AyadeLeon.wordpress.com.
If you were once a certain type of precocious, fanciful preteen girl chances are you encountered ‘Flowers in the Attic.’
Maybe it was the cover drew you in, the face of a young girl, pale and uncertain, peering through red shutters, and when you opened it, three other eerie blonde children huddled together under the spectral form of a sinister old man. Who were these strange beautiful children? And why was unquestionably evil figure about to crush them with his bare hands? If you saw the cover, surely you had to wonder.
Lifetime promoted their 2014 TV movie with full knowledge of the book’s significance to readers
If you were once a certain type of precocious, fanciful preteen girl chances are you encountered Flowers in The Attic.
Maybe it was the cover drew you in, the face of a young girl, pale and uncertain, peering through red shutters, and when you opened it, three other eerie blonde children huddled together under the spectral form of a sinister old man. Who were these strange beautiful children? And why was unquestionably evil figure about to crush them with his bare hands? If you saw the cover, surely you had to wonder.
And then you had to read it, in secret most definitely, huddled under your covers gasping, passing it around at a sleepover, maybe you snooped through your parents’ or other sister’s copies or pursed through it at the house where you babysat. Or that one loud friend who gave you all the facts on sex recapped the story over school lunch.
The famous keyhole cover for Flowers in the Attic
Even if you didn’t read it, a lot of us did. First published in 1979, V.C. Andrews’s trash-classic has since sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and spawned 4 bestselling sequels known as the Dollanganger series. It also was the beginning of a ghostwritten empire of family saga books, full of Andrews’s favorite themes: incest, child abuse, rape, imprisonment, slut-shaming and beautiful girls wandering around in flimsy peignoirs.
Flowers is the story of four children hidden away in their grandparents’ attic so their mother can inherit a fortune from her father, who will disinherit her if he ever learns she had children with her late husband, her father’s brother and her half-uncle.
Like any book that couples salacious elements with overwrought highly purple prose, it’s both chilling and laughable, part fairytale, part gothic horror story, and as its success makes clear, it’s a delicate formula. The 1987 film adaptation starring the original Buffy (Kristy Swanson) and Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) was reviled by fans for excluding one element they felt crucial to the story: the incestuous relationship between brother Chris and sister Cathy. So when Lifetime announced plans for a TV movie remake they were quick to note their version would keep the incest intact.
Despite poor reviews, ratings-wise it was a huge success; according to the Hollywood Reporter , 6.1 million viewers tuned in to the film’s premiere Saturday night. The 1950s-set drama was also the highest rated basic cable TV movie since 2012.
Like the book, the film is full of heightened emotions. Every other line is delivered with a slap and an exclamation mark and the acting vacillates between wooden and frighteningly animated. Mad Men ’s Kiernan Shipka (maybe someday we’ll see her in a modern day role) who plays Cathy does as well as she can with a poorly paced script and clunky dialogue, often lifted directly from the book. It’s really not such strange territory for Shipka after playing Sally Draper through her difficult adolescence. Mason Dye as her onscreen brother/lover and Ava Telek and Maxwell Kovach as twins Carrie and Cory gave unremarkable performances, with the twins just hovering around the room not given anything to do.
Ellen Burstyn gave a nuanced performance as the children’s grandmother
As the children’s cruel grandmother, Ellen Burstyn gave her character some degree of ambiguity and humanity, particularly in her reaction to the children’s Christmas present. Burstyn allows the grandmother to become an interesting character when she visibly struggles with her affection for the children and at the film’s end, her own fears of the attic. I’ve gone back and forth on Heather Graham’s portrayal of the children’s mother, Corrine. Her line reading range from flat and vapid to manic and bug eyed with no sane middle ground, but if it’s an acting choice, it may be a good one as it does suit the character.
The Grandmother teaches the children a lesson about disobeying her by showing them their mother’s whipped back
For a story about people tempted to inflict and endure suffering for the promise of wealth, the film has cheap production values and poor effects (such as the whip marks on Corrine’s back that look like lipstick streaks) and never shows viewers the house’s glamour or gives the sense of opulence that gave the children their hopes even in the darkest moments. We are also informed of the passage of time, but never truly feel it, so it becomes difficult to relate to the characters’ ordeal. Though most of the creepy elements from the book are there: the beatings, the taring, the poisoned doughnuts, the film never becomes creepy as it should. For all its Gothic dressing, it’s still a Lifetime movie, cheesy and tonally awkward.
There are interesting ideas about vanity and appearance carried over from the book that become more significant in the film as a visual medium. The book’s premise, that Corrine refuses to work to support her family after her husband’s death, is given more sympathy in the film thanks to the constant reminders from the backdrop and clothing that the film is set in the 50s where this would be difficult for a woman.
Corrine explains why she needs her parents’ money
Born wealthy and raised to be a wife, she is also given a sad Daisy Buchanan quality, absent in the book, as she tells the children, she can’t support four children because she only knows how to look pretty. Her assertion in the book, that her incestous marriage was not sinful because her children are not physically deformed and are “perfect” is given more weight as the viewer can actually see the children and their grandmother’s appraisal of them. Here and in Cathy’s refusal to cut her hair when given the choice of cutting it or allowing herself and her siblings to starve, vanity is heightened to hubris as it leads Chris and Cathy into their relationship, which shows they are far from the perfect children their mother had assured herself they were.
There are some changes from the original story, the addition of electric fence as a pointless obstacle, the heavy handed symbolism of the deer being shot, but the most problematic (though it does make the film easier to watch) is the change of the main incest scene from a rape into a consensual encounter between siblings. I have to wonder if Lifetime felt they could tell story of incest and imprisonment, but that incest and imprisonment punctuated by rape (a Lifetime staple) would make the story too dreary.
Chris and Cathy engage in consensual romance
Though Chris explicitly acknowledges that it was a rape in the book, Cathy forgives him saying it was her fault because she could have fought him off if she didn’t want it, leaving it unclear to young readers what they supposed to believe about Cathy’s rape and who to blame in real life. A blogger who writes as The Fifth Dollanganger runs the blog, The Complete Annotated VC Andrews Blog-o-Rama frequently posts the search terms readers use to access her blog. Some of them include things like “flowers in the attic chris and cathy make love” and “flowers in the attic sex excerpt”, showing at least some readers misinterpreted the dynamics of the scene. By making a rape scene into a love story, Lifetime lessens the gothic horror of the story, as well as romanticizing and confusing the abusive conditions Cathy faces. Though there is one scene where Chris is rough towards Cathy and grabs her wrists, he stops quickly when he is asked to, suggesting Cathy has the power in the situation and could indeed stop him if he wanted to hurt her, a very problematic message for the film to give.
The removal of Chris’s aspiration to be a doctor from the film takes away the authority the book allows him, adding power imbalance to the conditions leading up to the rape. As a would-be doctor, he approaches the removal of the tar from Cathy’s hair as an experiment and gives the excuse of clinical interest for his fascination with Cathy’s naked body and developing breasts. Whittled down to such easy gender roles, Chris and Cathy are starkly contrasted as boy doctor doll and girl ballerina doll. In caring from their young siblings, Chris’s aspiration towards this ideal 50’s husband profession casts him as the ideal masculine father, paired easily with ballerina Cathy as a feminine mother. It also allows his to take over from his father in his authority over his sister, as he frequently knows more about Cathy’s body than she does. It is Chris who tells their mother to buy bras and pads for Cathy and instigates the sex talk between mother and daughter. Cathy’s relationship with her father is given an incestous element in the film as she refers to the ring her gave her as a promise ring, a deeply creepy custom which allows him guardianship of her virginity. As Chris becomes the male head of the family, her also takes “ownership” of Cathy.
We’ll have to see what happens with the upcoming sequel based on the second Dollanganger book, Petals on the Wind, which Lifetime green-lit even before the first film aired. The book includes three additional rapists as love interests for Cathy.
Corrine lounges on the legendary swan bed, living in luxury while her children suffer
But I have to wonder who is meant to enjoy this movie. There’s no fun at all if you have no familiarity with the material, be it nostalgia or morbid curiosity. Though its suggested for teens on Lifetime’s website, the film has a mature content warning and airs on a channel targeted to older women. And anyone who read the books when they were younger is at that stage where their former interest amuses or embarrasses them, to watch it and talk comfortably about it, I think you need a mix of both.
Flowers in the Attic is ultimately the kind of story you’d act out with your Barbies, it’s appeal belongs in your youth, before you’re too self aware, too conscious of reality, the workforce and job training, of sex and money. They belong to that time when you think adult women just lie around in silks and feathers, eating pastel candies and periodically putting on gowns and dancing with gentlemen. They have to pass into your consciousness like a young girl’s daydream, Cathy’s salacious horror, her sexual curiosity, her bright ambition for attention and beauty and love. When you encounter it you have to be the type of girl who reads too much, plays elaborate fantasy games at recess and runs through long scenarios in math class of what she’d do with millions upon millions of dollars. A girl who wanted to be a ballerina, then an actress, then an artist, then a witch and then an impossibly glamourous authoress lounging around in marabou heels and furs. A girl who puts on Shakespeare plays in the backyard and wears cat’s eye sunglasses, a feather boa and jean shorts and it never occurs to her to find it crazy.
Cathy looks out the attic window, uncertain if she will ever be free
I think the film’s real failure is in its removal from the forbidden environment of taboo consumption, presented onscreen and sanitized for grown-ups where there’s nothing to fear in engaging. As with the books, the only way to give the story its enduring significance is to watch in secret, imposing your prepubescent imaginings over the narrative. It’s the type of story that needs the constant fear that someone will burst in the door and find you, engaged in the literary equivalent of masturbation.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
