“It’s a wad of chaos puked onto the big screen, an arbitrary collection of explosions and machismo posturing.” –David Cornelius, eFilmCritic.com
“Will insult your intelligence, hurt your eyes, and offend your sense of decency until you worry that your skull might explode while your brain trickles right out of your ears.” –Tricia Olszewski, Washington City Paper
“A perfectly dreadful sequel that’s the filmic equivalent of a 150-minute waterboarding session.”
–Matt Brunson, Creative Loafing
“Put in your earplugs and grab the aspirin. Enjoyable for the [sic] only the easiest to please 10-year-old boys; this deafening, tiresome epic is a skull-splitting hot mess for everyone else.”
–Diva Velez, TheDivaReview.com
And, my personal favorite: “Only an a*****e could have made this film.” –Rob Humanick, House Next Door
I share these snippets to illustrate, if you weren’t already aware, that this movie was clearly made for, and marketed to, young fanboys who like to watch shit blow up. But what else do they like to see? If you guessed “Megan Fox dry-humping a motorcycle,” you are correct.
In a recent interview, Fox told reporters, “Women in movies, in general, are sexy—especially in Michael’s movies. And if you want to make movies that people want to see, that’s part of it. That’s part of the formula.”
The director, Michael Bay, also chimed in. Referencing the shot of Fox sprawled across a motorcycle in hot pants and biker boots, he says, “We got that first shot out of the way, just to get it out for the young boys … and moved on.”
So, according to Fox (and Bay), making movies people want to see entails objectifying and exploiting women. And what’s worse, Fox goes on to say that making these Transformer films and gaining so much exposure (for her hotness) has opened up many doors for her—she’ll soon star in one film opposite John Malkovich and another film penned by Diablo Cody.
This rhetoric reminds me an awful lot of other excuses actresses have made for the roles they choose. Katherine Heigl famously called Knocked Up a sexist film, and then went on to star in a slew of women-friendlier movies, such as The Ugly Truth and 27 Dresses.
And Elizabeth Banks often finds herself in the same predicament: “‘You can go be in a female-driven indie and make two cents and maybe get an Independent Spirit Award, but then you can’t pay your car lease,'” she says. “‘So Vince Vaughn makes movies, he needs a girl to be in it with him, it might be me.'”
I understand and sympathize with actresses in today’s Hollywood climate. Studios continue to argue that actresses can’t open movies, that any successful women-centered film (Sex & the City, Mamma Mia!) is merely a fluke, and that they don’t find it profitable enough to continue greenlighting movies that exclusively focus on women.
I get that it’s a rough climate out there for young actresses especially, but I’m not exactly sure what the solution is. We need more women filmmakers, obviously. And we especially need women audiences to stop seeing every single ridiculous incarnation of The Proposal and He’s Just Not That Into You. While I don’t want to play into the blame-the-victim ideology, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for these actresses to take themselves a little more seriously as actresses and a little less seriously as male fantasies.
Making blatantly misogynistic films clearly pays the bills for them, but at what cost to women as a whole?
Drag Me To Hell. Starring Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao, David Paymer, and Adriana Barraza. Written by Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi. Directed by Sam Raimi.
The honest truth: I loved Drag Me To Hell. Even though I’m not familiar with Sam Raimi’s other cult classic horror films (the Evil Dead saga, etc), I understood, finally, why so many horror fans obsess over him—he’s hilarious. Some reviewers of Drag Me To Hell have rightly questioned Raimi’s depiction of the stereotypes in the film, particularly the gypsy character, an old, unnecessarily disgusting, false teeth-removing, evil woman who curses another woman because, you know, what would a gypsy character be without the famous gypsy curse? (The Angry Black Woman posts an analysis of it here).
But, I ask you, can a film that sacrifices a goat and a kitten really be taking itself so seriously? Everything that exists in this movie is a stereotype: the skinny blonde who used to be fat and now refuses to eat carbs, the skinny blonde’s self-hatred and rejection of her farm-girl roots, the rich boyfriend who will undoubtedly help her escape it all, his rich and consequently vapid, overbearing parents who want their son to marry a nice upper-class girl, the patriarchal workplace where the skinny blonde gets sent for sandwiches by her male coworkers, the jerk who sells out a coworker in order to get promoted, the brown-skinned psychics who hold hands around a table and chant in an attempt to invoke The Evil Spirit, the gypsy, obviously, and not least importantly, the fucking goat sacrifice.
The point is: it’s hard to play the I-hated-this-movie-because-of-the-blah-blah-“insert offensive stereotype”-game, when the film unapologetically turns everyone into a caricature.
Drag Me To Hell is about a young woman, Christine (played by Alison Lohman), who makes a questionable decision in an effort to get promoted at the bank where she works. She refuses to give a third extension on a woman’s mortgage loan, and in doing so, the woman, Mrs. Sylvia Ganush (played by Lorna Raver), could potentially lose her home. The twist? Christine could’ve given her the extension. But she chose not to. Instead, Christine wanted to prove to her boss that she’s a tough, hard-nosed, business savvy go-getter, and therefore certainly more qualified than her ass-kissing male coworker (who she’s in the process of, ahem, training) to take over the assistant manager position.
Then, as luck would have it, all hell breaks loose.
For the next hour and a half, these women go all testosterone and maniacally kick each other’s asses. This isn’t an Obsessed-type ass-kicking, where Beyonce Knowles beats the crap out of Ali Larter over, gasp, a man! and where all that girl-on-girl action plays like late-night Cinemax porn for all the men in the house. (Read Sady Doyle’s excellent review of it here). No, this is strictly about two women, one old, gross, and dead, the other young, gorgeous, and alive, trying to settle a score. Christine wants to live, dammit! And Mrs. Ganush wants to teach Christine a lesson for betraying her in favor of corporate success!
I vacillated between these two women throughout the movie, hating one and loving the other. After all, Christine merely made a decision to advance her career, a decision that a man in her position wouldn’t have had to face (because he wouldn’t have been expected to prove his lack of “weakness”). If her male coworker had given the mortgage extension, I doubt it would’ve necessarily been seen as a weak move. And even though Christine made a convincing argument to her boss for why the bank could help the woman (demonstrating her business awareness in the process), her boss still desired to see Christine lay the smack-down on Grandma Ganush. I sympathized with her predicament on one hand, and on the other, I found her extremely unlikable and ultimately “weak” for denying the loan. (Check out the review at Feministing for another take on this.)
Mrs. Ganush, though, isn’t your usual villain. She’s a poor grandmother, who fears losing her home. She literally gets down on her knees and begs Christine for the extension. Sure, she hacks snot into a hankie and gratuitously removes her teeth here and there, but hey, she’s a grandma, what’s not to love? Other than, you know, evil.
I love that this movie is about two women who are both arguably unlikeable to the point where you hope they either both win or both die. (The last time I remember feeling that way while watching a movie was probably during some male-driven cop/gangster drama. Donnie Brasco? American Gangster? Goodfellas? Do women even exist in those movies?) Everyone else is a sidekick, including the doe-eyed boyfriend (played by Justin Long), who basically plays the stand-by-your-(wo)man character usually reserved for women in every other movie ever made in the history of movies, give or take, like, three.
But at the same time, one could certainly argue that Christine’s unwillingness to help Mrs. Ganush, which results in Christine spending the next three days of her life desperately trying not to be dragged to hell, plays as a lesson to women: you can’t get ahead, regardless, so just stop trying. (Dana Stevens provides an analysis on Slate regarding this double-edged-sword dilemma that Christina finds herself in.)
Some have also argued that Drag Me To Hell exists in the same vein as the Saw films: it’s nothing but torture porn and obviously antifeminist. Yes, it’s gory, with lots of nasty stuff going in and out of mouths (Freud?), but the villain gets her share, and Christine hardly compares to the traditional heroine of lesser gore-fests: for one, she’s strong, much stronger than the horror-girls who can’t seem to walk without falling down in their miniskirts, and for the most part, she makes life-or-death decisions on her own, growing stronger and more adept as she faces the consequences of those decisions.
Perhaps most importantly, Christine isn’t captured by some sociopathic male serial killer and helplessly tortured in a middle-of-nowhere shed for five days. She trades blows with her attacker, and at one point, in pursuit of Mrs. Ganush, she even states that she’s about to go, “Get some.” (Ha.)
I personally read the film as an attempt to uphold the qualities our society traditionally categorizes as “feminine” characteristics: compassion, understanding, consideration, etc. I’m not suggesting that men don’t also exhibit these qualities, but when they do, they’re often considered weak and unmanly, especially when portrayed on-screen, which is demonstrated quite effectively when Christine confronts her male coworker about his attempts to sabotage her career; he bursts into tears in a deliberately pathetic played-for-laughs diner scene.
But it’s only when Christine rejects these qualities in herself (the sympathetic emotions she initially feels toward Mrs. Ganush), and consciously coaxes herself into adopting hard-nosed, traditionally “masculine” characteristics (which her male boss rewards her for), that she’s ultimately punished—and by another woman, no less. The question remains, though, is she punished for being a domineering corporate bitch, or is she punished for rejecting her initial response to help out? Regardless of the answer, the film makes a direct commentary on the can’t-win plight of women in the workplace, and, newsflash: it still ain’t pretty.
This is a film I wanted to love. It’s directed by a woman (Christine Jeffs). It’s written by a woman (Megan Holley). It stars two brilliant actors (Amy Adams and Emily Blunt), not to mention one of my favorite indie-actors, who co-stars (Mary Lynn Rajskub). And for the most part, I liked it. For the most part.
Amy Adams plays Rose, a single mother with a troubled son who gets expelled from his elementary school. In order to send him to private school, she realizes her job cleaning houses won’t come close to covering the cost, so she gets the idea from Mac, the cop she’s having an affair with (her ex-boyfriend from high school, played by Steve Zahn) to start a biohazard crime-scene cleaning service. Her younger sister Norah (Emily Blunt), a darker, edgier, gothier version of Rose, goes into business with Rose after getting fired from her job as a server at a diner. Hilarity ensues. Sort of.
It’s a comedy in the sense that funny things happen, lots of bloody, yucky grossness, some witty quips from the girls’ father Joe (Alan Arkin), as well as the smile-inducing precociousness of Rose’s son Oscar (Jason Spevack). But we quickly learn there’s some serious darkness underlying the played-for-laughs desperation: Norah and Rose’s mother committed suicide when they were young girls. That added dynamic always keeps things from veering too far into clever-indie-comedy territory but sometimes forces it a little too far into brooding-melodramatic-indie-drama territory (with a little splash of Hollywood thrown in).
So it goes like this: two sisters love and support each other in typical love-hate siblinghood-rivalry interactions, with the older sister taking on the grown-up role (however superficial it actually is—she repeats daily affirmations in her bathroom mirror for god’s sake) and the younger sister taking on the needy, irresponsible, screws-everything-up role. I enjoyed watching a movie about two insecure women with mother issues; as much as I see films and TV shows and music videos and bar brawls and daytime talk show interviews about insecure men with father issues, this was a much needed change.
The best things about this movie revolve around that sibling bond and how they managed to make it through their childhoods without a mother by doing their best to take care of each other. But the whole “our mom died and ruined our lives and now we literally clean up the messes made by dead people” metaphor got slightly heavy-handed after awhile. And, as much as I hate to say it, I didn’t necessarily like that Rose’s motivation to change her life was spurred by her motherly duty to get her son a darn good education. (I’m an asshole.) About halfway through, I began to question if this movie even liked women.
One scene in particular bothered me. Rose happens to run into Mac’s wife at a gas station, and even though Rose tries to avoid her, his wife confronts her anyway, making it very clear that she knows about Rose’s affair with Mac. She says something along the lines of, “I know what you’re doing.” And then, “He chose me.” It isn’t lost on the viewer that Mac’s wife is pregnant, and for a moment, as much as I had admired Rose and her determination in the beginning, I suddenly despised her.
I wanted this movie to not play into that stereotype, you know, the one about women always competing with one another for men and getting all vicious with their “keep your hands off my man” talk and never dealing with the real issue: the fact that it’s their man who’s fucking other women in the first place. (This stereotype is yet another, more subtle example of the man-child in film; by women placing blame solely on other women for their partner’s infidelity, it plays into the “boys will be boys” mode of thinking—he can’t help it, because he’s a man and therefore can’t control himself poor thing, but you, as a woman, and consequently the entire world’s moral compass, should know better.)
On the other hand, I admire the film for acknowledging how horribly women can sometimes act toward one another. I’d almost say it’s one of the movie’s themes. The only time Rose feels the need to apologize for how her life turned out, for secretly fucking her married ex-high-school-quarterback-boyfriend, for being a single mother, for cleaning other people’s houses for a living, occurs when she fears being judged by other women, most notably when an old high school friend invites her to a baby shower, where she’ll undoubtedly see many of the women who knew her in high school as the gorgeous, envy-inducing captain of the cheerleading squad.
However, I can’t figure out if the film is deliberate in its portrayal of female interactions, and attempting to make a statement about society’s ridiculous portrayal of them (think faux-Angelina Jolie/Jen Aniston rivalry and, more recently, faux-Kara DioGuardi/Paula Abdul rivalry), or if it’s merely validating the dominant ideology that there isn’t much female sisterhood or solidarity outside of actual sibling relationships. As a feminist, I know that not to be the case, but as a feminist critiquing this film, I ultimately left the theater feeling disappointed.
I expected more from a film about women’s experiences, especially when that film is written and directed by women. I know from reading other reviews of Sunshine Cleaning that many feminist women adored the movie, if only for the fact that it’s women-centered, which is something we certainly don’t see enough of in mainstream (and even indie) cinema. And we should definitely do as much as we can to support women filmmakers, given how few of them exist. But I don’t feel content leaving it at that. It was a decent movie. We can do better.
Glenn Whipp of the L.A. Times wrote a fascinating piece a few days ago titled “Dude rules: leaping into buddydom,” which explores Judd Apatow’s legacy of films, as well as films that imitate the ever-popular prepubescent man garbage that continues to dominate the box office. Whipp lists seven rules on how to nurture on-screen guy bonds, and I offer my response to these rules, highlighted in red below. It’s a good idea to take a look at Whipp’s original article to get the full context of what we’re dealing with.
Rule #1
Sharing fun, challenging and intellectually engaging activities can strengthen friendships.
The point is: Male friendships need not solely revolve around sports and beer. In fact, in today’s movie world, those guys are the losers to be mocked and avoided.
The Real Point is: Male friendships need not solely revolve around sports and beer. In fact, in today’s movie world, male friendships can revolve around exploiting women (the boys’ Flesh of the Stars website in Knocked Up) and living out their 30s and 40s as man-children, sometimes with their mothers (Will Ferrell in Wedding Crashers), while often jobless and perpetually stoned.
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Rule #2
Friends are optimists, not naysayers.
The point is: No one likes to be around negative energy. If the dude doesn’t like Bob Marley, tell him “peace out” and move on.
The Real Point is: Friends are optimists, not naysayers, especially when it comes to getting you laid. Without Kumar, Harold wouldn’t have hooked up with Maria. Without Harold, Kumar wouldn’t have hooked up with Vanessa. Without the sage advice from the gang at SmartTech, Andy would now be a 44-year-old virgin. Without a little prodding, Carl (Jim Carrey) would still be a single guy, watching movies alone in his apartment (Yes Man). If the dude doesn’t help you score, tell him “peace out” and move on.
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Rule #3
Friends carry each other.
The Real Point is: This rule can often be applied when your friend’s adolescent shenanigans go just a little too far. In Old School, when Frank (Will Ferrell) destroys his marriage by acting like a 12-year-old, his friends warmly accept him as their fellow fraternity brother. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, when Andy (Steve Carell) is too freaked out to hook up with the girl he went home with, the token crazy-sex-whore (Elizabeth Banks), Cal (Seth Rogen) does the right thing and steps in to take care of it.
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Rule #4
Friends accept friends for how they are. Even when alerting the authorities might be the more prudent call.
The point is: If your friends are 40 years old and still living at home (“Step Brothers”), don’t try to change them. Buy them a case of Fruit Roll-Ups instead. If your buddy is a heavily medicated mall cop looking to join the police force (Seth Rogen’s upcoming “Observe and Report”), you pat him on the head and hand him some pepper spray. And if your wingman gets a fake ID with the name McLovin on it — well, you can tell him he’s an idiot — but then you ask him to go score some beer.
The Real Point is: If your friends are 40 years old and still living at home, that’s totally acceptable. If your friends are 40 years old and still living at home, that’s totally hilarious. It’s funny when Will Ferrell’s character in Wedding Crashers screams, “Ma! The meatloaf!” after saying goodbye to a woman he lied to (at a funeral, no less) in order to get in her pants. In fact, why not just say “fuck it” and live out your 40s in a fraternity, with an entire group of man-children, complete with blow-up dolls, underage girls, and bikini-clad mud wrestlers (Old School).
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Rule #5
Friends make an effort to stay in touch.
The point is: …You don’t wait for buddies to call you. You pick up the phone. Or better: Just show up on their doorstep.
The Real Point is: You don’t wait for buddies to call you. You call them, so you can avoid your wife and kids to hang out with 19-year-old girls all day (Wedding Crashers). You call them, so you can lock them in a room and force them to watch pornography (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) as a way to educate them on what it’s like to score. In fact, why not just show up on their doorstep to lend them your very own giant box of porn. Knowing your friend’s at home, jerking it to your homemade mixed-porn-tape, Boner Jams ’03, surely qualifies as staying in touch.
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Rule #6
Friends remain equally loyal in good times and bad.
The Real Point is: Friends will very loyally do anything to get you laid, including enduring a “midnight rape” by the hilarious token psycho female (Wedding Crashers), accidentally setting you up with a transsexual (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), which leaves room for the always-hilarious and requisite gay jokes, and giving you amazing, hard-earned advice on how to spot the most vulnerable drunk girl to take home (The 40-Year-Old Virgin).
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Rule #7 Friends know it’s OK to say, “I love you.” But they don’t have to, you know, talk about it at length.
The point is: These days in movies, male friendship means never having to say anything more than “I love you, man.”
The Real Point is: These days in movies, male friendship means never having to say anything more than “I love you, man” as long as it’s a way to prove that you’re secure in your masculinity. Of course, you’ve probably spent most of the movie bonding over hot chicks, and ways to go about screwing hot chicks, and fetishizing lesbians (who are most certainly always hot and making out for your pleasure only), and fantasizing about the MILF, and standing around with various nude-for-no-reason background women who you probably never speak to, and throwing in a few gay jokes here and there. Congratulations! By that point, I’d say you’ve proven your straightness to the audience enough to risk just a little hetero-bro-love.
Two Lovers. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, Moni Moshonov, Isabella Rossellini, John Ortiz, Bob Ari, Julie Budd, and Elias Koteas. Written and directed by James Gray.
I’ve always respected Joaquin Phoenix’s acting ability, and I respect it even now, while he’s pretending to be mid-crazy, launching a fake rap career for Casey Affleck’s fake documentary—about Phoenix’s fake retirement from acting—and while he’s a full-bearded, drug-taking (that part’s real), mumbling, late night talk show phenom turned YouTube sensation. His documented fake freak-out definitely piqued my curiosity about his last film role, prior to his fake retirement from acting, Two Lovers. As it turned out, Phoenix’s brilliant performance, and the Brighton Beach, Brooklyn setting, were the only real reasons to keep watching this piece.
Leonard (Phoenix) is a medicated, suicidal mess of a person, who moved back in with his Jewish parents after his fiancé dumped him when it became apparent that they both carried a recessive gene that would prevent them from having children together. He helps his parents with their dry-cleaning business while also pursuing a half-hearted interest in photography. As his parents solidify a deal to sell the business, they set up their son with the daughter of their buyers. Enter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), a pretty, sweet brunette who’s secretly liked Leonard ever since seeing him dance with his mother at the dry cleaner’s.
Around the time Leonard meets Sandra, he also coincidentally meets a gorgeous, glamorous blonde, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who just moved into his apartment building. Already as a viewer, I’m wondering how I’m supposed to believe that this guy, who just attempted suicide (again) at the beginning of the film, and who keeps a picture of his former fiancé on his nightstand, falls into a situation where he’s swimming in new vagina. Regardless, he’s most taken with the hot, fun blonde (shocking) who inhales drugs on her way to club-it-up in Manhattan and who lives the rest of her life in a codependent daze. Turns out, she’s a lawyer’s assistant, and—guess what—she’s fucking the lawyer!
Much to the dismay of Leonard (and me), Michelle lives in an apartment paid for by her married lawyer boyfriend, who’s planning to leave his wife for her, and who takes her to the opera an awful lot and other whatever. Michelle sees Leonard as “just a friend” and constantly asks him to do things for her, like, oh you know, tend to her after her miscarriage and etc, just like people who’ve been friends for two weeks often do. (That scene particularly bothered me, as it paints Michelle as not just codependent but completely manipulative and codependent exclusively on men. Where are her women friends?)
The worst part about all this is that the movie pretends these female characters have some complexity, by at least giving Paltrow some decent dialogue to work with, but the reality is that the characters are mired in clichés. It’s hard to overlook the fact that Leonard’s two relationship choices include a sensible, sweet brunette and a wild, drug-addicted, smokin’ hot blonde, which is so completely the opposite of subversive or interesting, and actually brings to mind the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. Also, we’re meant to believe that Sandra goes along with Leonard’s wishy-washiness because she just loves him that much, and, as she blatantly says to him, she understands him and just wants to take care of him. (Gag.)
Michelle, on the other hand, a character based entirely on the boss-screwing-his-hot-assistant cliché, goes from dumping her married boyfriend because he won’t leave his wife, to screwing Leonard on the roof of their apartment building, all in the span of a few hours. She is a sad character, and it’s never more evident than in this moment—her need to feel desired by men, to depend on them, to be taken care of by them, always overpowers anything else she may be feeling—it’s obvious she doesn’t care for Leonard as more than a friend, and yet she makes the decision to run away with him to San Francisco. (But don’t worry; he’s taking care of the tickets and any other necessary accommodations.)
I understand this film wants to give Leonard a choice and that Sandra represents a stable life, near his family, in partnership with her family, where he’ll enjoy a financially secure future, while also pleasing his parents, especially his very concerned mother. Conversely, Michelle represents his freedom from that life, and the literal escapes he makes with her—leaving grimy, unglamorous Brighton Beach to hang out with her in the big city—further illustrate his unwillingness to remain static. That’s the part of the film I love. Phoenix does the man-child bit in a way that isn’t a cliché taken straight from an Apatow film; he somehow makes you sympathize with Leonard and his dilemma.
Leonard’s obvious internal conflict with embracing his Jewish heritage—the choice Sandra represents (she’s almost a replacement mother for him)—and his desire to abandon his working-class neighborhood and subsequently the dry cleaning business—the choice Michelle represents—certainly save the film from replicating many recent comedy-dramas, where the slacker man-child lives out his slacker existence until falling in love with a gorgeous woman, way out of his league, who finally domesticates him, curing him of his adolescent slacker ways.
The family dynamic in particular plays out in Leonard’s choice between Sandra and Michelle. Sandra, a Jewish woman, has an obvious connection with her family. When Leonard asks her what her favorite movie is, she tells him it’s The Sound of Music, not because she thinks it’s a great movie, but because it reminds her of watching it with her family as a child. We see scenes with her and her family at her brother’s bar mitzvah, with Leonard there too, almost lurking in the background.
Michelle, however, is the opposite of Sandra, a blonde WASP, who only mentions her father once, when we hear him yelling off-screen at the beginning of the film. We never see any member of her family, and that certainly appeals to Leonard. If he chooses Michelle, he can avoid living a life his parents and Sandra’s parents seem to have already planned out for him, and Phoenix, a master at playing this type of emotionally wounded character, truly makes the audience sympathize with his struggle to get his life together.
But as much as I loved watching Joaquin work the screen, I absolutely despised the pseudo-complexity of Paltrow’s character. (They don’t even try to make Shaw’s character into anything more than Future Doting Wife.) Michelle’s codependence isn’t interesting— no matter how effortlessly Paltrow performs it—the blonde wild-child thing is tired at this point, and the over-the-top female insecurity just completely and unapologetically lacks inventiveness. (Women can demonstrate insecurity in ways other than becoming drug addicts, passing out in bar bathrooms, screwing their married bosses, and manipulating men, I promise.)
So what the hell? Ultimately, I’m left with this question: why does a film about a man’s attempt to pull himself out of a very real darkness have to rely so heavily on traditional clichés regarding women’s experiences, while simultaneously creating an actual interesting life for the male hero?
Let the Right One In. Starring Kare Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist, Peter Carlberg, and Ika Nord. Written by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Directed by Tomas Alfredson. I want to describe Let the Right OneIn as a vampire love story, but that wouldn’t nearly do it justice. That description wouldn’t, however, be entirely inaccurate either. The movie’s protagonist is a twelve-year-old boy named Oskar who lives in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg in 1982. We first encounter him pretending to defend himself against the school bullies who constantly berate him, but the reality is he doesn’t yet know how to stand up to them. Instead, he collects newspaper clippings of violent crimes and secretly files them away in a notebook, almost as revenge-fantasies. He sleeps with a knife and carries it with him everywhere, and the night he stands outside in the freezing cold, stabbing a tree while calling it “piggy” (the school bullies’ nickname for him), he encounters Eli.
Eli appears out of nowhere behind their shared apartment building, watching Oskar. She’s got wide, creepy eyes, and Oskar tells her she smells funny. He also wonders why she isn’t cold, since she’s wearing only a t-shirt and standing in the snow barefoot. These questions hardly get resolved; when he asks her why she isn’t cold, she says, “I guess I’ve forgotten how.” They both leave their first meeting declaring that they don’t want to be friends, and that declaration more or less showcases just how “other” each of the characters feels—it’s easier to remain alone than to risk yet another person’s contempt.
It isn’t clear whether Hakan, the man who lives with Eli, is her father or her familiar. (In vampire myth, a familiar is a human who wishes to become a vampire by signing with the vampires through a blood oath.) Regardless, Hakan acts as Eli’s caretaker by slinking through the streets of Blackeberg in the middle of the night in search of a human to drain for blood. In each of his attempts, he screws up, and it provides several instances of black comedy in the film. But when Hakan can’t get the blood Eli needs to survive, she’s forced to go find it herself.
Watching such a small girl ravenously and violently latch onto a man who attempts to help her (she calls out to him, pretending she’s hurt, then buries her face and teeth into his neck), well, I jumped in my seat. It’s scary. And just as the audience begins to understand that, omg, she really is a vampire! she breaks her victim’s neck and leans over him sadly, almost apologetically, creating one of the many beautiful scene juxtapositions in the film, first exposing Eli as animal, then immediately highlighting her humanity. She kills because she needs to kill, not because she wants to.
From this moment on, the movie tackles several themes, one of which is violence, specifically the kid-on-kid violence Oskar experiences at the hands of his classmates, and how that plays against the vampire-on-human violence Eli’s responsible for. What does it say, for instance, that Eli, a killer by definition, experiences remorse for a necessary act of violence, while a group of young boys, most notably the leader of the pack, gets off on torturing and humiliating Oskar? As Eli and Oskar’s friendship develops, Eli ultimately convinces Oskar to stand up to the school bullies, and the consequences of his actions set the stage for the film’s finale.
At times, while watching the wonderful chemistry between the two young actors onscreen, it almost seemed as if the vampirism were a subplot rather than the main focus. The movie wants, after all, to tell us something about childhood, how lonely and alienated a child can feel, and how important it is to feel connected to someone. They toy with the idea of a romantic relationship somewhat—Oskar asks Eli “to go steady”—and she agrees, if it means keeping everything the same. This pretend-romance illustrates two things. One, that Oskar’s tale is a coming-of-age story, and two, that while Eli lives in the body of a twelve-year-old, she has in fact been “twelve” for quite a long time.
Without giving too much away, it’s important to mention both characters’ androgyny. When Eli says at the beginning of the film, “I’m not a girl,” we naturally assume she means she’s a vampire. Is it possible she means something else? And if so, how does that change the dynamic of their interactions? A brief screen shot of Eli’s scarred genitalia forces us to ask these questions. Ultimately, the shot reminds us that Eli will forever remain as she is, an outcast in a child’s body, while Oskar will grow up, perhaps even grow out of his current status as “other.”
Let the Right One In takes a story about a vampire and makes it sweet, and in the end, takes that sweetness and turns it right on its head. Many people won’t read the ending as so dark, and I can see how one might even interpret it as a happy ending. But everything that comes before: Eli’s incessant quest for blood, Oskar’s increasing reliance on her strength and approval, their shared loneliness, and each character’s saving of the other’s life (both literally and metaphorically), frames the final scene (and possibly the entire film) as much more sinister than sweet.
One has to wonder if Oskar has any real idea about what’s in store for him by running away with Eli. In the end, Eli needs a new familiar, a human who will actively kill for her. While I believe Eli consciously manipulates Oskar by playing on his vulnerability, I don’t necessarily think Oskar, as naïve as he may come across to Eli, is unaware of Eli’s plan for him. It’s an exchange of sorts, and it’s about need—Oskar’s need to feel unconditionally accepted by someone, and Eli’s very practical need for blood. But it’s the film’s interrogation of “the monster within the human,” that works so well, ultimately positioning the weak, fear-based (and sympathetic) hero as the monster, a transformation that Oskar, unlike Eli, accepts willingly.
Welcome to the first installment of a new feature on Bitch Flicks: Reviews in Conversation. We take a movie that’s worth talking about, and do just that.
“This is some revolutionary shit. We’re tying up white women in Mississippi.” –John Singleton, on filming Black Snake Moan in the South
Why does the revolution necessitate wholesale exploitation of women?
Since Black Snake Moan was one of the initial movies (along with Hustle & Flow…maybe we should officially thank Craig Brewer for the inspiration) that made us want to start this site, it’s fitting that we discuss the movie in our first Review in Conversation segment.
In Mississippi, the former blues man Lazarus is in crisis, missing his wife that has just left him. He finds the town slut and nymphomaniac Rae dumped on the road nearby his little farm, drugged, beaten and almost dead. Lazarus brings her home, giving medicine and nursing and nourishing her like a father, keeping her chained to control her heat. When her boyfriend Ronnie is discharged from the army due to his anxiety issue, he misunderstands the relationship of Lazarus and Rae, and tries to kill him. (Claudio Carvalho)
Before I address the film’s atrocious sexism, which the above summary characterizes well, I’d like to say what I love about BSM. The music, first and foremost, is outstanding. Brewer calls this a movie about the blues, and I’d like to take that a step further and say the movie is the blues. Or it tries to be, at least. The movie and its story are too small, conflicted, and tone-deaf to achieve greatness. It tries to be the blues and ends up being a blues music video, where Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) is the tortured and tired star, and Rae (Christina Ricci) is the video vixen, shaking her ass for the camera.
This is a movie that I want to love. It’s gritty, unique, and aware of class and race—a rare combination. However, there is no female perspective in the movie. Is it really too much to ask for a sharp film to also be sharp about gender? Is it right for a film like BSM to claim gender as a theme, while not really exploring women at all? Rae is the only female character (brief appearances by Lazarus’ wife, Rae’s mother, and a kind pharmacist easily fit into the angel/monster dichotomy), but she isn’t quite a real person. What is wrong with her? She is talked about as a nymphomaniac, and has strange, demonic fits of desire, but she’s really a victim of rape and abuse. Lazarus, whose trauma is that his wife aborted his baby and left for his younger brother, takes it upon himself to “cure” her by chaining her to a radiator. Even if the movie isn’t to be taken literally (but as a metaphor of sorts), why are the other characters so human and she so other, so animal?
Response by Stephanie R.
I, too, fell in love with the music in this film. It complements the key themes—race and class, as you mentioned, religion, and I’d also take it a step further to include sex. The scenes with Ricci shaking her ass for the camera are wonderfully sexy, and I found myself wavering back and forth during those scenes, wondering, is this just another female character being exploited by the camera? Or, is this a female character finally owning her sexuality?
Early on, she’s portrayed as a woman who’s at the mercy of her untamable sexual desires, and I didn’t ever get the feeling that she enjoyed them. She’s often shown squirming around on the ground, rubbing her hands all over her body, and moaning, like she’s struggling to fend off an attack. It’s at that point that she must find someone, anyone to screw, in order to make that feeling go away.
Later though, after Lazarus “cures” her by wrapping a giant chain around her waist and attaching it to a radiator, Rae is allowed to enter society again, showing up at a bar with Lazarus, drinking, rubbing up against everyone on the dance floor while Lazarus watches her from the stage, almost approvingly. What’s going on here? I truly want to read this as much more complicated than a man giving a woman permission to flaunt her sexuality, and I think it is.
But I also can’t help getting a little unnerved by the frivolity with which her sexuality is treated earlier in the film, when she’s portrayed as nothing more than the town whore. (At one point, the local mechanic says, “It’s already noon, Rae. Do you think those shorts should still be on?”) And when she’s described as “having the sickness” by another character (meaning nymphomania), it’s impossible not to think about the double-standard we still hold for men and women, especially when it comes to sexual desires.
As you mentioned, she is portrayed as “other,” often animalistic in her sexual conquests. Since I don’t think a film like this would work at all if a man were the one with the sexual “disease” (it’s natural for men to have uncontrollable sex drives, after all) then what does one make of using the myth of nymphomania to drive the plot? (See Peter Green’s “All Sexed Up,” a review of Carol Groneman’s 2000 book Nymphomania: A History, for a brief discussion of the myth.)
Response by Amber L.
I agree that the scene in the bar was very sexy, and I think I agree with what you said about that being a moment of Rae owning her sexuality. I think we’re supposed to understand that scene as a very important moment in which both characters are owning something that they’d lost—or lost control of. For whatever reason, Lazarus had lost his music (and I suspect it had to do with his wilting marriage), and Rae had lost control of her sexuality. However, that scene was exhilarating, and I think it has to do with reclamation and individual victory.
But back to the way gender and sex intersect. If nymphomania is itself largely fictitious, the strange way Rae’s fits were portrayed—moments in the film that were suspended between fear and comedy—reveals some of the ideological confusion of the film. If not for her nearly-naked body, battered and bruised and constantly displayed, I might have more sympathy for the film’s motivations. Add that to Rae’s moment of catharsis where she beats the shit out of her mother with a mop handle (for allowing Rae to be raped, either by her father or another male figure in her home), and we see women destroyed by sex who we’re supposed to sympathize with.
The final topic I want to bring up is religion. We can’t deny the role Christianity plays in the film. From the name of the main character to the supporting cast (which includes a preacher), the issue of faith (and a very certain brand of faith) comes up again and again. If the movie is a metaphor for “anxiety, fear, and unconditional love,” according to Brewer himself, then religion is the element that holds it all together. The instantiations of religion, however, are clunky at best; the radiator is God, the chain is faith, et cetera. I don’t really know where to go from here, except to acknowledge the large role of religion, although it plays out in hackneyed ways.
Response by Stephanie R
While I would like to see both characters in this film actually achieve some level of reclamation and individual victory, I think it fails for the most part, but the film especially fails Rae. She remains “chained” in a metaphorical sense, even in the final scenes. I don’t believe her character discovers much, or achieves much of an arc; she remains, for me, completely static. In fact, the film pretty much uses her as a vehicle to showcase the success of Lazarus, (which is yet another example of female exploitation that Brewer has either no awareness of or no desire to address).
I was left feeling no hope for Rae in that final scene—she’s imprisoned, (in a stuffy car, surrounded by semi-trucks) stuck in a relationship with a man who’s essentially a child needing to be coddled, with only the memory of her radiator-chain to keep her from jumping from the vehicle and fucking her way across the interstate. But Lazarus has his music again. He’s managed to overcome his anger about his wife leaving him, and he’s even got a nice new chick to look after him. See how chaining up a white woman in Mississippi can revolutionize an entire worldview?
The truth is I never gave a shit about Rae. I could’ve cared for her, if Brewer hadn’t used her sexuality against her—it’s filmed as if the abuse she suffers is deserved. (See what you get when you go around whoring yourself? Tsk, tsk.) By the time we get to know her character, when, as you mentioned, she divulges her history of sexual abuse, then beats the shit out of her mother with a mop handle, it’s way too late for sympathy. By that point, Brewer has already managed to turn a young woman’s sexuality into a cross between sketch comedy and porn, where nothing about it feels real.
In that moment of catharsis with her mother, I found myself detached. Instead of sympathizing with Rae and coming to some kind of realization myself, I just rolled my eyes at the ridiculous, clichéd consequences of her abuse—girl gets raped by father-figure while mother does nothing to stop it, girl develops low self-esteem, girl becomes town slut, girl develops a fictional sex disease, girl gets chained to radiator by religious black man. Wait, what? Ah religion, how you never cease to reinforce the second-class citizenship of women, perpetually punishing them for their godless desire to fuck.
So Rae is possessed by an evil sex demon, and, at one freaky moment, Lazarus’s ex-wife. Lazarus and his brother are Cain and Abel. There’s adultery, lust, preachers, fire-and-brimstone, bible passages, and judgmental townsfolk. Basically, the religious themes receive the same clichéd treatment as women’s sexuality. Rae is pretty much “saved” by Lazarus, and Lazarus pretty much gets his shit together and “rises from the dead” (as Lazarus in the bible).
And, after this conversation, I’m starting to wonder if I’m the problem, if I made the mistake of taking this film seriously, when what it really wants to be is one big sensationalist metaphor. A metaphor for what, though? I’ll conclude with something Brewer says in an interview.
“I’m not writing from a place of progress. I’m not writing a movie that I want people to necessarily intellectualize. And I think that really messes with people who feel that they need to make a statement against this, and they don’t quite know what it is they’re against. Because man alive, you look at this imagery on this poster, and I’m so obviously banging this drum. It’s like, you really believe that I believe this? That women need to be chained up? Can we not think metaphorically once race and gender are introduced?”
Rent Black Snake Moan from Netflix ReadCarol Groseman’s article, “Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality,” published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society Readthe Salon.com interview with Craig Brewer
Welcome to our new feature, “Ripley’s Pick of the Week.” Each week, we’ll showcase a film that passes Ripley’s Rule, aka The Bechdel Rule.
Ripley’s Pick of the Week
Rachel Getting Married. Starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Tunde Adebimpe, and Debra Winger. Written by Jenny Lumet. Directed by Jonathan Demme.
Rachel Getting Married isn’t your typical wedding movie. The film takes place over the course of a weekend, where the audience watches Rachel’s wedding unfold, complete with uncomfortable wedding speeches, recovering addicts, and live music playing in the background at all times. But the film isn’t about Rachel’s wedding—it’s about the awkward and often heartbreaking family dynamics at play, particularly among Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), her perpetually-rehabbed-since-adolescence sister Kym (Anne Hathaway), and their absent mother Abby, played (amazingly) by Debra Winger.
The film centers around Kym, fresh out of rehab in time for her sister’s wedding. (Interestingly, it isn’t clear whether she’s let out of rehab only to attend the wedding, or if she’s out for good, which lends an uncomfortable urgency to the weekend.) When she shows up at home, in the typical heavy black eyeliner and choppy haircut reserved especially for onscreen female addicts, it’s immediately obvious that her family views her as out of control and unpredictable—for good reason. She demands to be the maid of honor. She references her twelve-step program during her rehearsal-dinner speech. She seduces the best man (who she initially meets in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting) in the first fifteen minutes of the movie.
If Kym encapsulates the bad-girl cliché, Rachel embodies the opposite. She’s sweet, in love, studying Psychiatry, and even her future in-laws describe her as an angel. Rachel’s earnestness, particularly in the scenes with her fiancé and her mother (it’s clear she craves her mother’s love and approval), works well juxtaposed with Kym’s constant biting sarcasm. While Kym seems to steal the attention of her parents by playing up her wildness and forcing them to acknowledge her, Rachel seeks it more sincerely, for instance by subtly letting her mother know she’d like her to contribute more than just the flower arrangements to her wedding ceremony.
What’s great about the film though, is that the characters prove to be much more complicated than this. The audience recognizes from the beginning that something isn’t quite right with this family—why is Kym in and out of rehab? Why do their divorced parents feel so awkward around each other? And why does Abby seem so obviously uncomfortable around her daughters, especially Kym? It’s not long before Kym, in her NA meeting, reveals the family tragedy haunting their family. The scene works well, and Hathaway is brilliant here, because, in Kym’s telling of the tragedy, we begin to see her vulnerability, and the audience gains a broader understanding of the guilt, sadness, even the self-loathing that each family member struggles with.
Rachel’s and Kym’s father Paul (Bill Irwin) shouldn’t be left out of the discussion, as he has an integral role, obsessing over Kym’s whereabouts, her safety, her health. Because of this, he’s often the catalyst for arguments between Rachel and Kym—Rachel despises that Kym has always taken up his attention, and Kym can’t stand Rachel’s over-analysis. Ultimately though, the film fascinated me because of its treatment of the female characters and how they interact with one another. There’s no sentimentality here; in fact, the realness of their interactions makes for seriously uncomfortable viewing. But it’s the kind of uncomfortable viewing I couldn’t recommend more highly.
The movie picks up where the last one (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) left off, with Harold on his way to Amsterdam to meet up with the girl he fell in love with. Kumar tags along for the sheer excitement of being legally stoned for the first time in his life. But, because Kumar can’t wait until Amsterdam to toke up, he sneaks his smokeless bong invention onto the plane, which is mistaken by other passengers as a bomb.
Naturally, Harold and Kumar are accused of working together as a “North Korea and Al Qaeda alliance,” and they get shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. All this happens within the first 15 minutes of the film, and by the 20-minute mark, they’ve already escaped Guantanamo. The rest of the film follows their wandering across the United States, looking for a way to prove to the paranoid government that they aren’t, in fact, terrorists.
Because the first film was such an unexpected surprise in its intelligent dissection of both racial stereotypes and stoner culture (ha, seriously), I was excited about seeing the sequel. Unfortunately after sitting through most of the movie feeling somewhat uncomfortable, I left the theater entirely enraged.
To say this film is misogynistic is an understatement. What most upset me wasn’t merely that women were unnecessarily objectified (I can’t remember the last time I saw so much gratuitous nudity), or that women were basically one-dimensional morons (and were given some of the most ridiculous dialogue I’ve heard in awhile, which is saying a lot in the age of Judd Apatow).
What bothered me most was that I couldn’t help but laugh at and appreciate the subversive way the film deals with race; the writers manage to satirize traditional perceptions of racial groups by using stereotypes to reveal the ridiculousness of racial stereotypes (yeah, I just defined satire), but for some reason, the writers couldn’t manage to treat traditional stereotypes of women with the same care.
While the audience laughs with the characters when race is addressed (when an old white woman on a plane stares at Kumar in fear, he morphs into a terrorist right before her eyes, complete with full beard and turban), the audience laughs at the female “characters” (like when two prostitutes, confronted with the question, “Have you found the love of your life?” get all ditzy and say, “No, we’re whores!”). Welcome to the films of the millennium: if we’re talking about race, forget about gender (see also Black Snake Moan, Hustle & Flow, maybe even Borat).
Two of the more extreme examples of sexism in the movie are scenes involving gratuitous female nudity (“the bottomless party”) and clichéd portrayals of prostitutes in a brothel.
The Bottomless Party
You know you’re in for a real treat when Harold and Kumar show up at a pool party where all the women walk around completely naked—oh, except for their tops. When they enter their friend’s mansion, in hopes of getting some help in avoiding Guantanamo again (they’ve escaped by now), they’re confronted with an array of tanned women’s asses and barely-there pubic hair, and whose mouths are wide open. In similar reaction, the group of men sitting next to me in the theater couldn’t stop making comments (“yeah man, hit that, daaaaaamn, that’s what I’m talkin’ about”), and this scene lasted at least seven hours from my perspective.
My favorite part of the scene was when one of the women started to take her top off, and the host responded with something along the lines of, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Put your top back on; I don’t know what kind of party you think this is … ” Of course, she rolled her eyes as if to say “silly me” and apologized while covering her breasts. The audience got a terrible kick out of that. Because, if you didn’t know, it’s hilarious to watch women walk around naked while men tell them what they can and can’t do with their bodies. Sure, in the final moments of the scene, Harold and Kumar pull down their pants, but then the camera cuts away. What, no cock-shot?
The Brothel
Neil Patrick Harris is gay in real life, so I’m still coming to terms with Neil Patrick Harris supposedly playing himself, when what he’s really doing is playing a heterosexual, drug-addicted character named Neil Patrick Harris. Regardless. Neil insists on taking Harold and Kumar to a brothel to get [insert several degrading comments about screwing women here]. Harold refuses, instead choosing to sit with a group of prostitutes, who he then complains to about his devolving friendship with Harold, while the prostitutes console him. (It’s unfortunate here that the writers rely so heavily on conventional clichés regarding “the hooker with a heart of gold” stereotype and the mother/whore fantasy.) Kumar, of course, takes two prostitutes into a room, while Neil goes through several choices before deciding on the one with the biggest breasts.
Kumar gets his girls to make out with each other, but then bursts into tears about his ex-girlfriend marrying some government-employed douchebag. So we’ve got two naked women sitting on either side of him, consoling him, helping him feel better about himself just after they’ve made out with each other—what more could a guy want? Is it just me, a feminazi audience member, who’s expecting too much? Maybe I’m over-analyzing. Maybe this is funny. They’re just whores after all. And Neil reminds us ever-so-subtly by literally branding his giant-breasted whore’s ass.
Throughout the film, the audience can’t help but be positioned as a collective participant in this sexism, and while I appreciated the intelligent discussion of post-9/11 race relations, I couldn’t help but hate the film’s mistreatment of women. The writers had many opportunities to complicate gender issues, and yet, as always seems to be the case in films geared toward male audiences, they chose to exploit the women instead, turning them into nothing but naked body parts; their only importance is the fulfillment of male desires. I hated that. And I hated how, when I got up to leave the theater, the group of men sitting next to me talked about needing to wait out their hard-ons before they could stand up to leave.
Despite its abysmal reviews, Transformers: Rise of the Fallen took home the top spot at the box office over the weekend.
