Lisa Knisely – Bitch Flicks

This guest post by Lisa C. Knisely previously appeared at Medium.

Her is an achingly beautiful film that adroitly explores postmodern alienation and the alterity at the heart of our relationships, both with other humans and our increasingly intelligent machines. I found the lonely, withdrawn main character, Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix), to be an immensely relatable and sympathetic protagonist.

But, that’s the problem.

Much like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character at the beginning of 500 Days of Summer, we know Theodore is a sensitive and depressed dude from the moment we see him listening to “melancholy songs” in the elevator as he leaves work at a large and impersonal office building in the city. And, like Jim Carrey’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we soon come to find out that Theodore was once deeply in love with an emotionally complex and intelligent woman who has left him heartbroken. Films like Her bank on the audience’s ability to relate to the experiences of lost love and existentialist ennui of their main character. And we do. As, I think, we should.

Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in Her — Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in *Her*

But, as a woman in the audience, my relationship to these types of characters, who are reliably, predictably, boringly male, is fraught. I relate to them, but only insofar as I must continually reinvest in the myth that men are the only people who are truly capable, truly deep enough, of having wrenching crises of the soul. Even though I know this to be false in reality—women experience alienation and existentialist ennui, too (I can’t believe I even just typed that)—I am deeply troubled that the experience of this sort of angst seems to be the exclusive province of men in our cultural imagination.

Why are these stories we tell, stories about something I would venture to call essentially human, also largely stories about being men? As Noah Berlatsky points out in a piece for Salon.com, “In Her, difference is simply subsumed into a single narrative of midlife crisis and romance — everybody’s the same at heart, which means everybody is accepted as long as their stories can be all about that white male middle-age middle-class guy we’re always hearing stories about.”

And women? Well, we’re mostly relegated to the role of foils for man’s (meaning men’s) quest for meaning, transformation, and lasting human connection. As Anna Shechtmen writes in a piece for Slate.com, “Her commits the most hackneyed error of the big screen: It fails to present us with a single convincing female character—one whose subjectivity and sexuality exist independent of the film’s male protagonist or its male viewers.”

While I agree with Shechtmen’s assessment, I’d also wager that there is nothing particularly unusual about this state of affairs in a great many Hollywood films. That the main female character in Her is a disembodied operating system through which (whom?) Theodore’s subjectivity is revealed and transformed didn’t strike me as unusual. Zooey Deschanel’s character in 500 Days of Summer might as well have been a disembodied computer voice as far as I’m concerned. Ditto Natalie Portman in Garden State. Ditto Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation. Ditto Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club. Ditto the real doll in Lars and the Real Girl. Ditto any film where the role of the main female character is to be a beautiful and sexually available aid to the male protagonist’s gradual transformation as he gains a deeper level of self-understanding as he learns to connect with others.

Joaquin Phoenix in Her — Joaquin Phoenix in *Her*

Maybe Samantha, the operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson with whom Theodore falls in love in Her, is just the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Or maybe Spike Jonze is critiquing contemporary heterosexuality in which men project their desires onto objectified women. As Shechtmen notes, “One could argue that Jonze knows just what he’s doing…he is foregrounding Samantha’s role as the dark screen upon which we can project our erotic and romantic fantasies.” Daniel D’Addario at Salon.com maintains that the critique of possessive masculine desire is exactly Jonze’s point in Her, writing, “[the] evocation of female sexuality as easily controlled isn’t what the film is telling us is inherently good; calling to mind the control Theodore seeks to have over women doesn’t mean Jonze is seeking the same control. If anything, making Samantha invisible totally forecloses the option of the ‘male gaze’….”

While there is an implicit feminist critique of masculine heterosexual romantic desire in Her, D’Addario is oversimplifying the concept of the male gaze. The male gaze, as it was developed by feminist film critics like Laura Mulvey, isn’t just about women being sexually objectified and gazed at on screen; it is more deeply about the way a film structures its viewpoint so that we, the audience, are made to see through the eyes of the (usually male) protagonist and thus identify with him. In Her, there is only one brief moment during the film where the camera switches and we see Theodore from Samantha’s viewpoint. Any other glimpse of her subjectivity we get solely through Theodore’s relationship to her.

Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) goes on a date in Her — Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) goes on a date in *Her*

One can argue that all people, of any gender, project a certain amount of fantasy onto others in our intimate relationships with them. This too, seems to be something definitive of human experience. And Her examines that experience thoughtfully, with complexity, pushing our conceptual understanding of what it is to be “human” at a moment in history when we are more and more becoming cyborgs.

Still, I have trouble coming up with a Hollywood film where a woman’s subjectivity, her struggle for meaning, self-transformation and connection with others, has truly taken center stage in such a way that men in the audience are expected to identify with her story as one that is universal. Even more unimaginable, and currently unrepresentable in our current cinematic landscape, is a film in which a man or men operates as a reflective vehicle for a woman’s existential journey.

Go see Her. Ache with Theodore. Enjoy the beautiful aesthetic of the film. But, take a minute to imagine, too, if Joaquin Phoenix had played Sam to Scarlett Johansson’s Thea instead. That’s a film I’m still waiting for someone in Hollywood to write, direct, and especially, to produce.

Dr. Lisa C. Knisely is a freelance writer and an Assistant Professor of the Liberal Arts in Portland, Ore.

August: Osage County. Carloads of fun! — *August: Osage County*. Carloads of fun!

This article by Lisa Knisely was originally published on Bitch. Read more feminist film reviews at Bitch.

August: Osage County has garnered mostly lukewarm reviews. This is somewhat of a surprise: the movie is based on the Pulitzer-winning play by Tracy Letts and the film’s cast is packed with talented actors. Although both Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts were nominated for Golden Globes for their powerful performances, both of them walked away from the award ceremony last Sunday night empty-handed.

But then, this is a movie that is, unambiguously, about women. August: Osage County is about morally flawed, sometimes cruel, and often unlikable women.

And that’s what makes August: Osage County good.

At its essence, the film is about Julia Roberts’ character, Barbara Weston, and her struggle to both claim and reject her identity as a “strong woman.” She inherits her strength from her mother, Violet (Meryl Streep), and it’s a mixture of involuntary responsibility for others and a hardness necessary for survival. At one point midway through the film, Barbara and her two sisters (Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis) sit together discussing their mother. Ivy, the reserved middle sister played by Nicholson, distances herself from affiliation with the rest of the Weston clan by claiming that family is simply a genetic accident of cells. Despite this bit of wishful thinking on Ivy’s part, we see clearly throughout the film that this is far from true. August: Osage County hammers home the idea that our upbringing shapes us no matter how much we may want to escape our complex relationships with our less-than-perfect mothers. The film is deeply evocative of how the familial, social, and physical landscapes of our childhoods leave indelible marks on our adult identities.

Film poster for August: Osage County — Film poster for *August: Osage County*

In his review for the L.A. Times, Kenneth Turan writes that the film “does nothing but disappoint,” comparing it to “that branch of reality TV where dysfunctional characters… make a public display of their wretched lives.” The problem with the film, according to Turan, is that its high melodrama doesn’t make the audience care about the characters, but instead makes the audience feel trapped.

But, this, I think, is the point. The experience of watching the film is stifling and emotionally difficult, much like the experience of growing up in a dysfunctional, addiction-fueled family like the one we see on the screen. If Turan feels like a voyeur looking in on the “wretched lives” of the Weston family, other viewers of the film will recognize, perhaps with too much familiarity, the uncanny mixture of very dark humor and gut-wrenching trauma at the heart of Weston family life. In the tradition of Faulkner and McCullers, this is a story that holds no punches.

Like Turan, New York Times’ critic A.O. Scott reviewed the film poorly, though he was slightly less negative in his review, writing that it lacked “fresh insight into family relations, human psychology or life on the Plains.” Randy Shulman also gave it an unfavorable review claiming, “The film has one electrifying scene, in which a husband (Chris Cooper) takes his bitchy, critical wife (Margo Martindale) to task. It’s a bracing moment that, for an instant, jolts us out of our lethargy. Had the entire film been on this level of engagement, August: Osage County might have been one of the year’s best films.”

Reading Shulman’s opinion struck me. That same moment in the film was my least favorite scene. I was, indeed, jolted by the scene that Shulman lauds, thinking it seemed too easy in its moral righteousness. It was at that moment of Osage that most of the men in the film (played by Chris Cooper, Sam Shepard, Ewan McGregor, and Benedict Cumberbatch) suddenly seemed to be the innocent and heroic victims of a pack of soul-devouring, child-eating, Gorgon harpies from the hilly plains of Oklahoma. This struck me as strangely out of tune with the rest of the film, which walked the line between making viewers simultaneously despise and sympathize with the women characters who forcefully drive its plot.

The strength of Osage is that it never once sentimentalizes women’s relationships with one another. It does not allow for trite Hollywood portrayals of women as somehow less violent, less complex, or less serious than men. August: Osage County is an odd sort of respite for those of us who don’t relate to stories of quirky, privileged, white girls from Brooklyn. The women of Osage would destroy Girls’ Hannah Horvath with a word and look. For me, it’s a kind of comfort to see these steely women on screen.

The women of August: Osage County looking mightly unlikable. — The women of *August: Osage County* looking mightly unlikable.

Despite its relative strengths, though, the film has one glaring failing: its treatment of race. Actress Misty Upham plays Johnna Monevata, a Native American woman hired at the start of the film to take care of the cancer-stricken, pill-addicted, racist Violet. That Violet is raw and unflinching in her racism against Native Americans isn’t the problem, as this seems realistically in accord with her character. What is an issue though is that the film’s attempt to deal with Native-White race relations in Oklahoma comes off hollow and under-developed. While she was a central figure in the original play, in the film, we never get to know Johnna beyond the fact that she can bake good pies.

While most of the narrative is so adept at portraying the mixture of intimacy and violence in the Weston household, the relationship between Johnna and the rest of the characters is flat. Toward the very end of the film, a disoriented and distraught Violet seeks solace and comfort from Johnna. This scene could have been a striking commentary on the way that people of color are often compelled within racist social structures to provide emotional labor and physical care for white people when their own kin will not. If this was the intended subtext of Johnna’s presence in the story, her character ultimately registers more like a problematic aside to the “real” action of the white characters in the film. This is really a missed opportunity for a film that is otherwise so successful at highlighting the complexities of being a strong woman from the Plains.

Dr. Lisa C. Knisely is a freelance writer and an Assistant Professor of the Liberal Arts in Portland, Ore.

Tag: Lisa Knisely

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