Willem Dafoe – Bitch Flicks

In ‘Boondock Saints,’ the Men Shoot Gangsters, and the Women Don’t Exist

The ethics of the film are one thing, but it says a lot about the world of the movie that it’s able to go nearly two hours without a single important female character showing up on screen. There are no women cops, there are no women in the mob, there are only a couple of wives or passers-by or maybe a drug-addled girlfriend or two. But no one who matters. The acting characters in the film are all overwhelmingly and vocally male.

Even the ethos of the characters, that they will destroy that which is evil, but leave alone the pure and blameless, is inherently sexist. Because when they say pure and blameless, what they mean is the women and children. In this universe, women are not even people enough to do things wrong. We do not have enough agency even to commit evil.

This guest review by Deborah Pless appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

I fell in love with Boondock Saints the summer that I turned sixteen, about four days before I went off to live and work at a Christian summer camp for eight weeks – a torturously long time when you’ve just fallen in love with the most profane and violent movie possible. I was told that I shouldn’t watch it, that I couldn’t watch it, because it was too violent, too swear-y, too much for my faint little heart to take. I told them to eff themselves and watched it anyway. And I fell in love instantly.

It was a long lasting love affair too. I had the poster hanging above my bed, I still own a copy on DVD, and I saw that film so many times that I could recite it in real time as my college roommate watched in horror. I even went to see the sequel. In theaters. On purpose.

But it wasn’t until last year, when I started to write out a list of my all-time favorite movies that I realized something important: I might love Boondock Saints, but it doesn’t love me back. Or, specifically, it doesn’t love my gender. That was when the romance started to fade.

To back up a little, Boondock Saints is a cult shoot-em-up film released in 1999 and written and directed by Troy Duffy. It stars Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus as the McManus twins, two good old Irish boys living in South Boston who receive a message from God to go kill gangsters. Which they then proceed to do with alarming vigor and good humor. They’re pursued by Agent Smecker, played by Willem DeFoe, and helped by good friend Rocco, played by David Della Rocco.

Also, Billy Connolly turns up as a terrifying hit man known only as “Il Duce,” and Dot-Marie Jones makes a brief cameo as Rosengurtle Baumgartner, who kicks one of the boys in the crotch. But I digress.

The film is weird and violent and profane, like I said. The basic premise, that Connor (Flanery) and Murphy (Reedus) are on a holy mission to rid the world of evil is both strange and deeply non-Biblical, but there is a thrill to it that makes you want to believe. The plot kicks off when the boys are involved in a bar fight with two enforcers for the Russian mob. After the fight, the mobsters go track down our heroes and try to finish the job, but Connor and Murphy get the drop on them (literally), and kill the two men.

Agent Smecker is then called out to figure out what the hell happened. Smecker, who is inarguably DeFoe’s best and most interesting character to date, deduces the exact events effortlessly and is proven right when the two boys show up at the police station, turn themselves in, and claim self-defense.

The story would end right there if during the night spent in jail, the two men didn’t receive a vision from God. A mission, you might say, that calls them to “Destroy that which is evil, so that which is good may flourish.” This all tracks in with a sermon shown in the beginning of the film that cites the murder of Kitty Genovese as a sign that good men must do something to stop evil from spreading. All well and good, but I’m not sure the priest was calling for mass murder.

Which is precisely what happens. Connor and Murphy start picking off members of the Russian and Italian mobs, with a little help from their friend Rocco, a low-level numbers runner. They get so good at it, in fact, that Smecker is at a complete loss and the mob is running scared. It all comes to a climax when they try to take out the Don of the Italian mob in Boston, get captured, and come face to face with the man hired to kill them – Il Duce. Except Il Duce is actually their father, and the men happily reunite to go off and kill another day.

Like I said, it’s a weird, violent movie.

There are, in all honestly, a lot of things worth discussing with Boondock Saints, from the way it is one hundred and ten percent a white, male fantasy of justice and badassery, to the fact that it’s so Biblically inaccurate as to be kind of painful, to Agent Smecker as one of the most interesting gay characters to grace the silver screen, to the fact that it’s honestly just a very strange story, chock full of coincidences and arguably terrible writing that somehow becomes awesome instead of cliché. But let’s focus in for a minute on what turned me off of it. Let’s talk about the ladies.

Or, rather, let’s talk about the lack of them. In point of fact, the women of Boondock Saints are most notable by their absence. I can count the number of named female characters on one hand, and none of those characters appear in more than two scenes. That’s actually a false representation as well, because only one of them appears in more than one scene at all. Of all of the female characters in the film, not a single one receives more screentime than the scenes of Agent Smecker in drag toward the end of the film.

That is bad enough in and of itself, but there is also the actual characters to consider. Of the female characters shown or mentioned, one is an unnamed stripper (who, ironically, is the most visible woman in the film, appearing in two whole scenes), two are junkies and sluts (according to Rocco), and one is Rosengurtle Baumgartner, an avowed lesbian who we are supposed to laugh at for taking offense to one of Connor’s jokes. She kicks him in the nuts. He deserves it.

There are two more women of note in the story, but both had their stories cut down in the final version of the film and appear mostly in the deleted scenes on the DVD. One is Connor and Murphy’s mother, who calls them to wish them a happy birthday, and the other is a nice girl outside the courtroom who gives the news cameras a completely convincing and not at all ridiculous explanation of why she is perfectly fine having seen someone shot to death right in front of her moments before.

Like I said, that’s pretty much it. There’s a waitress, a nun in a hospital, an Italian grandmother, and a female news reporter, but I genuinely struggle to think of any more female characters. At all. In the entire movie. It would seem that in the world of Boondock Saints, women are not just irrelevant to the narrative, but also virtually invisible. They just don’t seem to exist.

I suppose it makes sense, given that the film is a white, male power fantasy. Connor and Murphy are the ultimate slacker heroes, the guys we’re supposed to want to be. They have no formal education, but somehow happen to know about six languages fluently. They seem perfectly content living on the fringes of society, because tough guys don’t need furniture or shower curtains or functioning plumbing, I guess. They’re religious, but in the cool way. They don’t have to learn how to use guns, or find out where to buy weaponry, or even struggle as they assume their mission. They just effortlessly seem to know what they need to do and then do it. No fuss, no muss. Without a second of training they are the two most proficient hit men ever to grace the streets of Boston.

It’s a fantasy, and you can see why it would be intoxicating. They’re good at what they do. They’re cool. What they do is unassailably (within the context of the movie universe) right. They get to shoot people and have fun and laugh with their friends, and it’s fine because it’s all justified by God. They don’t kill women or children, so it must be okay, right?

Well, no.

But here’s the problem. I know all of this, and yet I still like the movie. I mean, I’m not in love with it anymore. The scales have lifted off my eyes, and I can see it for what it is – a bloated, self-aggrandizing, violent ode to vigilantism – but I still enjoy it.

How?

I think ultimately it comes down to something deeper. Something about how it took me eight years to realize that the movie was toxic for women. I genuinely did not expect this story, or really any story like it, to include women. I naturally didn’t even think to look for a female character to relate to, because it inherently assumed there wouldn’t be one.

Troy Duffy, aware of the criticism he received for this first film, included a major female character in the execrable sequel, Boondock Saints: All Saints Day. In it, Agent Smecker is gone and in his stead we have Agent Bloom (Julie Benz). But this is just another stunt meant to show how “progressive” and “totally not sexist” Duffy is. Bloom is relegated to a backseat role, and shown to be yet another innocent in the world. She’s a badass lady cop, but actually just a scared little girl who needs to be protected. And if she happens to fulfill a couple of fantasies about women in power suits and heels while she’s at it, then so much the better.

I wish I could tell sixteen-year-old me not to bother with this movie, that I should, for once, listen to my friends and back away slowly, but I don’t think I would, even if I were given the chance. Because as much as I now can see this movie for the sexist doggerel it is, it still has a place in my heart. It was the movie that taught me how much fun schlock flicks could be, the one that showed me that a movie doesn’t have to be good to be fun, and the movie that introduced me to one of my all time best friends. I wouldn’t take it back.

But I still wish it didn’t make me feel so gross inside.

Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a youth advocate in Western Washington. You can follow her on twitter, just as long as you like feminist rants and an obsession with superheroes.

Antichrist Roundup

Lars Von Trier’s new film Antichrist opens in select cities on October 23, and already the controversy surrounding the film’s potential misogyny has the web and blogosphere buzzing. Much of it has to do with the Cannes Film Festival giving the director an anti-award. In the article, “Antichrist gets an anti-award in Cannes,” Jay Stone writes:

The ecumenical jury—which gives prizes for movies that promote spiritual, humanist and universal values—announced a special anti-award to Antichrist.

“We cannot be silent after what that movie does,” said Radu Mihaileanu, a French filmmaker and head of an international jury that announced the awards Saturday.

In a statement, Mihaileanu said Antichrist is “the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world,” a reference to a statement by Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier at a post-screening news conference. The movie, Mihaileanu added, says that the world has to burn women in order to save humanity.

And, the New York Times article, “Away From It All, in Satan’s Church” by Dave Kehr summarizes the film as follows:

Antichrist is the story of a woman (Ms. Gainsbourg) who blames herself for the accidental death of her young son. With her husband (Willem Dafoe), a cognitive therapist, she retreats to a cabin in the woods with the hope of working through her debilitating grief. But rather than a source of calm and comfort, the forest manifests itself as an infernal maelstrom of grisly death and feverish reproduction. Seeing herself as another “bad mother,” Ms. Gainsbourg’s nameless character identifies with this nature, red in tooth and claw, and descends from depression to insanity. “Nature is Satan’s church,” she proclaims, before moving on to acts of worship that will have some viewers looking away from the screen (if not fleeing the theater).

Great, another film about a woman falling victim to the Bad Mother complex while her husband desperately tries to save her from her inability to not get all irrational and insane and shit. But what I find so interesting about the controversy surrounding Von Trier’s latest probable woman- hatefest (see Dancer in the Dark and Dogville for similar themes) is that many people who’ve seen it argue that Antichrist actually takes religion to task, illustrating its harmful contribution to the continued second-class citizenship of women.

I haven’t even seen this yet (will I?) and I’m skeptical to say the least. A film that, according to Cannes judges, positions a woman as essentially evil, unapologetically physically abusive to her husband, and in the end, so self-loathing that she cuts off her own clitoris, well, yeah, I’ve got some skepticism about the whole “but he’s merely exploring misogyny!” theme. However, through my web and blogosphere research, I’ve found that many reviews and articles attempt to argue that exact point—Von Trier’s latest film has nothing to do with misogyny.

Take a look at some of the following excuses I mean apologies I mean theories about Antichrist and the description of how it actually (heh) portrays women (or how it doesn’t intend to say anything about women at all).

Landon Palmer at Film School Rejects writes:

Antichrist has received many an accusation of being misogynistic. There’s certainly an argument to be made there, and the film will no doubt become a central text in feminist film theory and criticism, coupled with von Trier’s history of treating his lead actresses in not the most respectful manner (many of which have consequently resulted in some of the best performances of their careers, including Gainsbourg’s). But to call Antichrist misogynistic is like saying American Beauty is a movie the champions pedophilia. Just because the idea is introduced and explored does not mean the standpoint of the film, the filmmaker, or how we perceive the film simply and directly runs in line with that. To make such an accusation is dismissive and simplistic, ignoring the many of ideas going on in a film whose central flaw lies in its very ambition. That the message of Antichrist is confused and muddled is a reaction to be expected, but the accusation of misogyny entails a frustrated preemptive refusal to explore the film any further. If Antichrist should be lauded for anything, it’s the many debates on sexism, the depiction of violence, the responsibility and influence of the filmmaker, and the important differences between meaning intended by the filmmaker and meaning interpreted by the audience. But the only way these debates can be constructive is if one genuinely attempts to view this film outside its now-notorious knee-jerk reactions at Cannes and take it at face value.

I agree—the debate is refreshing. We’re actually talking about misogyny. In film. But why the desperate attempts to defend Antichrist against accusations of misogyny? Have these defenders gone to the movies lately? You can’t even see a movie that doesn’t on some level reflect our cultural values and beliefs, and unfortunately, we live in a society that still strongly portrays women in film through embarrassingly and unapologetically sexist, misogynist stereotypes. And they especially run rampant in the supposed oh-so-inoffensive, “perfect date movie!”: the romantic comedy. (To be honest, I often wonder if these supposed film critics can even identify misogyny.)

But perhaps more important than the apologism of critics like Palmer: Von Trier actually hired a misogynist consultant who took part in an interview regarding her role in researching centuries worth of misogyny (so that he could include it in the film). In the interview, she says:

Antichrist shows completely new aspects of woman and adds a lot of nuance to von Trier’s earlier portraits of women, but you can’t really tell from his films what his own actual view on women is, just like you can’t conclude from Fight Club that Palahniuk wants to promote more violence in society. Art doesn’t work that way. The good question is why it is such a provocation for so many to be confronted with the image of woman as powerful, sexual and even brutal?

If that weren’t enough, she also wrote her own piece, arguing that:

The indictment against women I composed for Von Trier sums up the many misogynistic views all the way back to Aristotle, whose observations of nature led him to conclude that “the female is a mutilated male”. Should we avoid staring into that abyss or should we acknowledge this male anxiety, perhaps even note with satisfaction that women are mostly described as very powerful beings by these anxious men?

Many of the defenders of Von Trier’s portrayal of women argue that he really attempts to explore people’s relationship to nature, or problems with psychiatry and an over-medicated society, or depression, or how we’re all inherently evil, or that it’s just too brilliant a film to even warrant analysis—it just needs to be experienced. Even Roger Ebert says:

I cannot dismiss this film. It is a real film. It will remain in my mind. Von Trier has reached me and shaken me. It is up to me to decide what that means. I think the film has something to do with religious feeling. It is obvious to anyone who saw “Breaking the Waves” that von Trier’s sense of spirituality is intense, and that he can envision the supernatural as literally present in the world.

But others came away from the film with an entirely different interpretation of being “shaken.” One of the most thought-provoking pieces I came across was an article in The Guardian, which asked several women—activists, artists, journalists, professors, and actors—to respond to Antichrist. Surprisingly, I felt like most of them dodged the “Is it misogynistic?” question by either choosing not to go there at all or barely glossing over it. Julie Bindel, however, had this to say:

No doubt this monstrous creation will be inflicted on film studies students in years to come. Their tutors will ask them what it “means”, prompting some to look at signifiers and symbolism of female sexuality as punishment, and of the torture-porn genre as a site of male resistance to female emancipation.

It is as bad as (if not worse than) the old “video nasty” films of the 80s, such as I Spit On Your Grave or Dressed To Kill, against which I campaigned as a young feminist. I love gangster movies, serial killer novels and such like. But for me they have to contribute to our understanding of why such cruelty and brutality is inflicted by some people on others, rather than for the purposes of gruesome entertainment. If I am to watch a woman’s clitoris being hacked off, I want it to contribute to my understanding of female genital mutilation, not just allow me to see the inside of a woman’s vagina.

Alas, I haven’t seen the film. And because of that, I don’t have much commentary to offer, other than the opinions of the critics who have seen it, and to say that getting people talking about misogyny in film certainly pleases me. However, the over-intellectualization of films like Von Trier’s (and Tarantino’s and other misogynist directors) irritates me not only because it tends to dismiss accusations of misogyny with “but you just don’t get it!” language, but critics who use that language also fail to convey what, for them, would actually qualify as misogyny.

I personally can’t name the last film I watched where I couldn’t identify at least some form of misogyny, the most “harmless” of which (romantic comedies, bromances, Apatow) get rave reviews from critics with rarely a mention of the extremely detrimental portrayals of women as one-dimensional sidekicks, either virgins or whores, love interests, nagging wives, irrational/insane and conniving, etc. So, maybe another question to ask is, why should I trust them in this debate at all?

Regardless, check out the links below for more commentary on the film.

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Antichrist shows that men have objectified women as being closer to nature because of their roles as mothers and their natural cycles; and while that can sometimes be seen as a positive stereotype Antichrist makes the case that this particular objectification also renders women terrifyingly alien to men by linking them to the darker aspects of nature that men universally fear.

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The notion of the ‘punishment of women’ in his work is not only the outworking of themes dealing with patriarchal oppression, but it juxtaposes the brutality of the world (power, money, hatred, etc) with the spiritual (forgiveness, love, transcendence, etc). While there’s nothing original about this, it seems (judging by reviews) that many people simply don’t get it.

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Some critics say that the film is misogynist because the mother takes on to herself all the guilt and blame for the loss of her child, while the father seems almost completely untouched by it. I’d say that sounds rather more like misandry, but what do I know?

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Like a number of Von Trier’s films, Antichrist too can and has come under the scanner for its alleged misogyny. While the aggressor in this film, be it in terms of sex or violence, is the woman, seeing her as the Antichrist would do the film a great deal of injustice. Von Trier has certainly moved on from the helpless Golden Heart(ed) girl as a protagonist, and this time around, he doesn’t have an agenda.

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Just as much as Antichrist is sure to provoke debate, it is likely to provoke disdain. Despite providing a historical context (both in the film and in his own body of work) to explain his misogynistic premise, von Trier has already been attacked as a misogynist. Such a reading of Antichrist is oversimplified. This is a movie that dares audiences to declare either one of its characters an aggressor, especially since it situates each of them in a realm that shows nature to be just as aggressive itself.

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If Antichrist escapes being labelled a misogynist film, Gainsbourg’s fiercely committed screen presence will be the main reason—you sense she’s in control of this character in a way Von Trier isn’t. Indeed, that’s the other reason it’s hard to call Antichrist misogynist: Von Trier made it on such an instinctive level, apparently even incorporating images from the previous night’s dreams into that day’s shooting, that I’m not sure he consciously intended it to be either misogynistic or feminist.

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Dafoe elaborated: “It’s not saying anything about women. It doesn’t speak. It’s telling you a story that evokes many things. It’s telling you things about the relationship between men and women. I think Lars has a very romantic idea about women, and in this configuration the man is the rational guy, the fool who thinks he can save himself, and the woman is susceptible to things magical and poetic. And she also suffers from an illness. He’s identifying with women.”

He added that just because misogynistic things might happen in the movie, it doesn’t condone or encourage that attitude. “A woman being self-hating can happen, without saying that’s the nature of women.”

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Here is a film that explicitly confronts the director’s intertwined fears of primal nature and female sexuality. But does a fear of femaleness automatically equate to hatred? I’m not convinced that it does. Yes, the “She” character is anguished and irrational; a danger to herself and those around her. And yet for all that, she proves more vital, more powerful, and oddly more charismatic than “He”, the arrogant, doomed advocate of order and reason.

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The actresses who have worked alongside Von Trier often attest to his bizarre relationship with women. Kidman famously asked the director why he hates women, while Bjork was so disturbed on set that she began to consume her own sweater. All that highly negative press is probably what led to Von Trier hiring a misogyny specialist for his latest film, ‘Antichrist.’ But he needn’t have bothered. Anyone in their right mind (i.e. none of the characters in the film) would realize this movie is not about men or women, at all, but about the repercussions of depression. Misogyny requires a certain commitment to hating women while anyone who knows anything about depression is aware that those afflicted with it have no attachment to anything at all.

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