Not so much ****SPOILERS**** as not-so-subtle hints at major plot points (plus sort of spoilers for Antichrist and the Babadook), but read at your own risk. Or go watch it and then read it at not your own risk. Or just go watch it.
Goodnight Mommy starts out as an incredibly slow boil and gives you whiplash by the end. The trailer makes it look utterly terrifying - twin boys certain that their mother, who has just returned from getting facial surgery with a head wrapped in bandages, is not actually their mother. This is the premise of the film, and it is a scary concept. But the trailer is also incredibly deceiving. First of all, it only really uses clips from the first half of the movie, and edits different scenes together to imply events that don't actually happen. Additionally, however, it gets the main source of horror in this film wrong - it's not over whether or not mommy is really Mommy, but over how far the boys will go to find out. This is a film that makes you both root for the boys and against them, terrified for them that they are right but terrified for their mother that they are wrong.
For the most part, I was constantly reminded of two other films as I watched it. Goodnight Mommy is marketed as horror but feels more like a psychological drama; I have similar issues with the way Lars Von Trier's Antichrist has been advertised. Here is another film that's mostly just terrifying because you don't know who to side with, or who's truly right, or who's gone insane. The two films have more in common than just that, though - both take place largely in isolated settings; both focus on a very tiny cast of characters; and both (spoilers spoilers) are really just stories of families dealing with grief, and the private horrors that go with it.
Each film builds slowly, feeling more psychological than scary; when the horror finally does come, it's towards the end of the film, it's graphic, and it's drawn out. It's the horror that comes not from monsters or serial killers, but from watching what completely normal people do to each other when driven by fear (which is really just grief in disguise). They're films that force you to keep watching - and make it horribly difficult to do so.
The more obvious comparison - and one that's been made already - is to Jennifer Kent's film The Babadook, about a mother and her son haunted by a giant monster. And also by grief over the death of the father, who died six years earlier driving his pregnant wife to the hospital to deliver their son. And really (spoilers spoilers!!) just by both of these things at once, as one entity, a monstrous embodiment of the grief that neither mother or son has been able to confront. What's interesting about The Babadook is that it gradually becomes the film you expect Goodnight Mommy to become - one about children protecting themselves against the monstrous entities that are their parents. Whereas in Babadook, however, Sam's mother really has become possessed by the Babadook, in Goodnight Mommy the children gradually become more monstrous than their mother. Even if she is different, even if she is really an impostor, none of her actions toward them is nearly as horrifying as theirs toward her.
So where does that leave the film? Aesthetically, it's excellent - the settings are beautiful, the shots are well-composed, the camerawork and editing are highly effective. Visually, narratively, it's deeply disturbing - waiting for things to get dark and then feeling completely taken aback when they do, though in a completely different (and far more unsettling) direction than anyone expects. And morally, it's exhausting - a story in which the mother, the sons, and their collective grief are all competing for most monstrous entity, and the race is a close one. And the ending isn't giving anything away.
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Monday, January 18, 2016
Some thoughts on The Force Awakens
I should probably talk about The Force Awakens a little bit.
I don't feel quite like I'm the right person to write a review about The Force Awakens, since I haven't seen any of the original trilogy in years, and haven't seen the prequel trilogy at all (although that was on purpose). But I know the story, and I know the tropes, and I grew up with the geek friends and the culture. So I'll talk about it.
First off, I'll mention that I have multiple friends who've seen this movie somewhere between two and four times. Like, every single friend I have who's seen it has seen it more than once. The friend I saw it with was seeing it for the second time; I have a college friend who saw it for the fourth time and nearly left to see it a second time the night after it premiered. "It calls for a second viewing," they say. (Or a third or a fourth, apparently.) Does it? I wouldn't go back. But it also wasn't my lifeblood growing up - I read the entire Harry Potter series ten times, and had periods where I could recite most of the films from memory. So I guess we all have our pop culture vices.
That said, it WAS a good movie. The Star Wars people had, like, four jobs - they had to make a movie that 1) had an original and engaging plotline, 2) was still very familiar to viewers, 3) didn't mess with or invalidate the earlier narrative too much (I have some thoughts about this, but I'll get into those later), 4) was accessible to new audiences who had very little experience with early Star Wars, and 5) made up for the prequel trilogy. Or at least The Phantom Menace. Or so I've heard.
So five jobs. Which they pulled off pretty well. New characters? Check. And a HUGE plus that one major protagonist is a woman and another is a person of color. Familiar plotline? A bit too familiar - a bigger Death Star feels less like a familiarity pitch and more like lazy writing - but maybe some people were happier for that, and the entrances of all of the original major characters were a very sweet, if predictable (but also necessary) touch. The movie didn't pull a Steven Moffat on us and invalidate an entire generation's canon, so props to the writers there. As someone with a pretty poor context regarding the original movies, I was still able to walk into the theatre, recognize a lot of the in-jokes, and also appreciate it regardless of the in-jokes I didn't pick up on. And finally - as far as I've been told - The Force Awakens did indeed make up for the atrocity that was the prequel trilogy. So, five jobs done well.
I was a little surprised at the ((((((*****SPOILERS!*****)))))) Han Solo death. I figured that they wouldn't kill off any of the major characters, since that DID feel a bit like it was canceling out the canon of the story, and I figured fans would be mad. But I guess I was wrong. If I had to guess - this is totally a personal hypothesis and not backed up by facts in any way - I would say that Harrison Ford didn't feel like signing on for more than one Star Wars film, and this was like the second, more final way of freezing Han in carbonite. But then again, it might have been an actual narrative choice on the part of the writers. I do not know.
I was also a little bit distracted by Adam Driver's presence as a dramatic character. I don't watch Girls, but I do know him from his work with Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, While We're Young) and from the trailer for What If. The context made him feel out of place. It wasn't even that his performance was bad - it was more that I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching Adam Driver, in a movie that was very much NOT an ironic, melancholic look at privileged millennials. I feel like I would have to rewatch the movie at least once more specifically to decide how I felt about his performance.
Finally finally, the ending felt a little bit hokey. Even though it also felt like it was that way for Very Important Dramatic Reasons. What was Luke Skywalker doing on top of that very windy hill? Did the Force tell him Rey was coming? So he just hung out there for a couple of hours so that it would look super dramatic when she finally found him? That is not practical. When I think back on it, I just keep imagining that scene at the end of The Holy Mountain where ((((((*****SPOILERS!*****)))))) the disciples are pulling off the hoods of all of the mannequins sitting around the table on the Holy Mountain and the last hooded person is actually just Alejandro Jodorowsky, chilling at the table and waiting for them to arrive. Luke Skywalker is like the Star Wars version of the Alchemist, only Holy Mountain has a strong absurdist comedy element to it. Not so here. Now I feel like I'm overanalyzing the final scene of the movie. Oh, well.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens was an enjoyable movie with strong performances, a nice sense for the nostalgic needs of its viewers, a good standalone narrative, and - props to John Williams - a killer score. If you have not yet seen it, it's probably because you don't care that much about Star Wars (nothing wrong with that), but if that's not the case and maybe you're just on the fence because you're afraid it's going to be boring or mediocre, do not worry, it is not these things, It's a good movie and probably worth your time if you like major pop culture phenomenons or sci-fi or sequels or J.J. Abrams. And that is all I have to say about that.
On not that related of a note, this is the very funny first part to a pretty good seven-part video essay on why The Phantom Menace is terrible. As long as you ignore the very very bad side plot where the narrator keeps people in his basement, and also the horrible slew of rape jokes he sticks in (seriously, I don't condone rape jokes ever, but the essay is strong enough in other ways that if you disregard them with the knowledge that rape jokes are terrible and normalize rape and perpetuate a rape culture and are never ever funny and you know all of this and are watching the video with the understanding that things can be very smart and very problematic at the same time and nothing is all good or all bad, it's a good essay), it's a good essay. And also ultimately the reason I never watched The Phantom Menace. Not that I probably ever would have, anyway.
I don't feel quite like I'm the right person to write a review about The Force Awakens, since I haven't seen any of the original trilogy in years, and haven't seen the prequel trilogy at all (although that was on purpose). But I know the story, and I know the tropes, and I grew up with the geek friends and the culture. So I'll talk about it.
First off, I'll mention that I have multiple friends who've seen this movie somewhere between two and four times. Like, every single friend I have who's seen it has seen it more than once. The friend I saw it with was seeing it for the second time; I have a college friend who saw it for the fourth time and nearly left to see it a second time the night after it premiered. "It calls for a second viewing," they say. (Or a third or a fourth, apparently.) Does it? I wouldn't go back. But it also wasn't my lifeblood growing up - I read the entire Harry Potter series ten times, and had periods where I could recite most of the films from memory. So I guess we all have our pop culture vices.
That said, it WAS a good movie. The Star Wars people had, like, four jobs - they had to make a movie that 1) had an original and engaging plotline, 2) was still very familiar to viewers, 3) didn't mess with or invalidate the earlier narrative too much (I have some thoughts about this, but I'll get into those later), 4) was accessible to new audiences who had very little experience with early Star Wars, and 5) made up for the prequel trilogy. Or at least The Phantom Menace. Or so I've heard.
So five jobs. Which they pulled off pretty well. New characters? Check. And a HUGE plus that one major protagonist is a woman and another is a person of color. Familiar plotline? A bit too familiar - a bigger Death Star feels less like a familiarity pitch and more like lazy writing - but maybe some people were happier for that, and the entrances of all of the original major characters were a very sweet, if predictable (but also necessary) touch. The movie didn't pull a Steven Moffat on us and invalidate an entire generation's canon, so props to the writers there. As someone with a pretty poor context regarding the original movies, I was still able to walk into the theatre, recognize a lot of the in-jokes, and also appreciate it regardless of the in-jokes I didn't pick up on. And finally - as far as I've been told - The Force Awakens did indeed make up for the atrocity that was the prequel trilogy. So, five jobs done well.
I was a little surprised at the ((((((*****SPOILERS!*****)))))) Han Solo death. I figured that they wouldn't kill off any of the major characters, since that DID feel a bit like it was canceling out the canon of the story, and I figured fans would be mad. But I guess I was wrong. If I had to guess - this is totally a personal hypothesis and not backed up by facts in any way - I would say that Harrison Ford didn't feel like signing on for more than one Star Wars film, and this was like the second, more final way of freezing Han in carbonite. But then again, it might have been an actual narrative choice on the part of the writers. I do not know.
I was also a little bit distracted by Adam Driver's presence as a dramatic character. I don't watch Girls, but I do know him from his work with Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, While We're Young) and from the trailer for What If. The context made him feel out of place. It wasn't even that his performance was bad - it was more that I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching Adam Driver, in a movie that was very much NOT an ironic, melancholic look at privileged millennials. I feel like I would have to rewatch the movie at least once more specifically to decide how I felt about his performance.
Finally finally, the ending felt a little bit hokey. Even though it also felt like it was that way for Very Important Dramatic Reasons. What was Luke Skywalker doing on top of that very windy hill? Did the Force tell him Rey was coming? So he just hung out there for a couple of hours so that it would look super dramatic when she finally found him? That is not practical. When I think back on it, I just keep imagining that scene at the end of The Holy Mountain where ((((((*****SPOILERS!*****)))))) the disciples are pulling off the hoods of all of the mannequins sitting around the table on the Holy Mountain and the last hooded person is actually just Alejandro Jodorowsky, chilling at the table and waiting for them to arrive. Luke Skywalker is like the Star Wars version of the Alchemist, only Holy Mountain has a strong absurdist comedy element to it. Not so here. Now I feel like I'm overanalyzing the final scene of the movie. Oh, well.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens was an enjoyable movie with strong performances, a nice sense for the nostalgic needs of its viewers, a good standalone narrative, and - props to John Williams - a killer score. If you have not yet seen it, it's probably because you don't care that much about Star Wars (nothing wrong with that), but if that's not the case and maybe you're just on the fence because you're afraid it's going to be boring or mediocre, do not worry, it is not these things, It's a good movie and probably worth your time if you like major pop culture phenomenons or sci-fi or sequels or J.J. Abrams. And that is all I have to say about that.
On not that related of a note, this is the very funny first part to a pretty good seven-part video essay on why The Phantom Menace is terrible. As long as you ignore the very very bad side plot where the narrator keeps people in his basement, and also the horrible slew of rape jokes he sticks in (seriously, I don't condone rape jokes ever, but the essay is strong enough in other ways that if you disregard them with the knowledge that rape jokes are terrible and normalize rape and perpetuate a rape culture and are never ever funny and you know all of this and are watching the video with the understanding that things can be very smart and very problematic at the same time and nothing is all good or all bad, it's a good essay), it's a good essay. And also ultimately the reason I never watched The Phantom Menace. Not that I probably ever would have, anyway.
Monday, January 4, 2016
THOUGHTS ON THE HATEFUL EIGHT
stolen from my letterboxd account. link in the blog description.
I need to talk about this movie.
The Hateful Eight is a very good movie that is also - secretly - kind of a disappointing movie. It's a movie with two slow, solid, hours of buildup and one chaotic hour of...confusion. Not viewer confusion - well, that too, but that's not unexpected - but confusion on the part of Quentin Tarantino, who seemed to have run out of steam by the third act of his film. It's two hours of certainty followed by an hour of "maybe if I throw in some plot twists and make everything EXTRA violent people won't notice that I forgot to write an ending!" We know from Reservoir Dogs that a good ending CAN involve everyone dying. But everyone dying is not what makes it a good ending. Everyone dying here did not make it a good ending.
It makes me kind of sad that Tarantino pulled out so many stops. Panavision, yes, but a lot of other ones, too. The whole roadshow presentation (which, granted, was super cool), plus bringing together ALL of his alums, plus pulling Ennio Morricone out of retirement (at least as far as Westerns are concerned), plus all of the drama that surrounded the whole production - the online leak, the hissy fit, the production, the advertising, the number eight being plastered all over everything just to make sure we KNOW that this is The Eighth Film by Quentin Tarantino. It was like frosting a cake made of cornmeal. He put all the bells and whistles on the wrong movie.
And his concept for this movie was, granted, super cool. To jog your memory: "You would pass halfway through the show [this is in reference to classic Western TV shows like Bonanza] to find out if they were good or bad guys, and they all had a past that was revealed. I thought, 'What if I did a movie starring nothing but those characters? No heroes, no Michael Landons. Just a bunch of nefarious guys in a room, all telling backstories that may or may not be true. Trap those guys together in a room with a blizzard outside, give them guns, and see what happens."
Super cool premise. But at the end of the day, what are you left with? Everyone is terrible. We know going into the movie that everyone is going to be terrible. How possible is it for an audience to connect with a film that has no protagonist, no audience surrogate, no one to identify with? Whom do you ally yourself against? Whom do you root for? Is this just an exercise in letting your audience figure where their morality lies, letting them watch themselves instinctively side with some characters over others? By the end of the film, I was certain I was supposed to side with Daisy; my dad was certain he was supposed to side with Samuel L. Jackson. Was I siding with Daisy because she was the only woman? How did Tarantino want the audience to FEEL walking out of this movie?
(Side note: I know some people like to disregard director intention - once the movie is released, all that matters is the audience - but I think it makes all the difference in the world. That's a different essay. But Tarantino's intentions matter to me.)
And I'm not saying that I didn't like this movie. I did. A lot. Even though most of the film takes place inside, the outdoor shots DO deliver (if you have the opportunity to see it in Panavision, there is no other option). The performances are consistently solid. Some people complain that the first third is TOO slow, but if you have the patience for it I think it's a necessarily slow build. The dialogue is good and clever. If you appreciate graphic, graphic violence (and, since you're here, you probably do), you won't be disappointed (lesson learned: puking is the most cinematic when the characters are projectile vomiting blood). The social commentary is solid (see more below). And, had the third act turned out differently, the first two acts are part of an excellent movie. Don't get me wrong, it's a GOOD movie. It's just also a disappointing one.
It feels like the only thing Tarantino wanted us to be sure about was the movie's stance on race relations. And maybe gender relations, but I'll get to that in a second. We don't know how we feel about any of the characters - true to his title, he really did try his hardest to make us hate them all - but at the very least we know that racism is bad. Which we knew already, but the fact that Major Marquis Warren's comments on his fake Lincoln letter are the most relevant in the whole film says a lot. Pretty cool of Tarantino to be one of the many voices shouting that racism isn't over.
As for gender relations: a lot of people complain that this movie is misogynist, and I'm still deciding whether or not I agree. But one of my friends (hi, Daniel) makes an interesting point - partway through the movie, it switches from the n-word to "bitch" as its primary Bad Word. No matter where the characters stand on racism, they ALL hate women. It's the one thing they all have in common. Is it necessary to make Daisy the sole punching bag for most of the movie? Maybe if the point you're trying to make is that sexism also isn't over. In this film, it's as normalized as racism. Tarantino uses extremes to point out society's biggest issues. So maybe the aggressive character (not director) misogyny here is okay, then. Or at least somewhat more justified.
Go see The Hateful Eight. It's a good movie, and Quentin Tarantino works really hard on it. He'll win some awards for cinematography, since, as my dad put it, he kind of gave the gift of Panavision back to the cinema (NO ONE ever tell him his work is a gift to the cinema - his ego will explode). It's funny, and it's gleefully disgusting, and it makes some good comments about some deeply messed-up pieces of our society. Its whole is no greater than the sum of its parts, but rather exactly as good as all of them put together - and the parts are good.
I need to talk about this movie.
The Hateful Eight is a very good movie that is also - secretly - kind of a disappointing movie. It's a movie with two slow, solid, hours of buildup and one chaotic hour of...confusion. Not viewer confusion - well, that too, but that's not unexpected - but confusion on the part of Quentin Tarantino, who seemed to have run out of steam by the third act of his film. It's two hours of certainty followed by an hour of "maybe if I throw in some plot twists and make everything EXTRA violent people won't notice that I forgot to write an ending!" We know from Reservoir Dogs that a good ending CAN involve everyone dying. But everyone dying is not what makes it a good ending. Everyone dying here did not make it a good ending.
It makes me kind of sad that Tarantino pulled out so many stops. Panavision, yes, but a lot of other ones, too. The whole roadshow presentation (which, granted, was super cool), plus bringing together ALL of his alums, plus pulling Ennio Morricone out of retirement (at least as far as Westerns are concerned), plus all of the drama that surrounded the whole production - the online leak, the hissy fit, the production, the advertising, the number eight being plastered all over everything just to make sure we KNOW that this is The Eighth Film by Quentin Tarantino. It was like frosting a cake made of cornmeal. He put all the bells and whistles on the wrong movie.
And his concept for this movie was, granted, super cool. To jog your memory: "You would pass halfway through the show [this is in reference to classic Western TV shows like Bonanza] to find out if they were good or bad guys, and they all had a past that was revealed. I thought, 'What if I did a movie starring nothing but those characters? No heroes, no Michael Landons. Just a bunch of nefarious guys in a room, all telling backstories that may or may not be true. Trap those guys together in a room with a blizzard outside, give them guns, and see what happens."
Super cool premise. But at the end of the day, what are you left with? Everyone is terrible. We know going into the movie that everyone is going to be terrible. How possible is it for an audience to connect with a film that has no protagonist, no audience surrogate, no one to identify with? Whom do you ally yourself against? Whom do you root for? Is this just an exercise in letting your audience figure where their morality lies, letting them watch themselves instinctively side with some characters over others? By the end of the film, I was certain I was supposed to side with Daisy; my dad was certain he was supposed to side with Samuel L. Jackson. Was I siding with Daisy because she was the only woman? How did Tarantino want the audience to FEEL walking out of this movie?
(Side note: I know some people like to disregard director intention - once the movie is released, all that matters is the audience - but I think it makes all the difference in the world. That's a different essay. But Tarantino's intentions matter to me.)
And I'm not saying that I didn't like this movie. I did. A lot. Even though most of the film takes place inside, the outdoor shots DO deliver (if you have the opportunity to see it in Panavision, there is no other option). The performances are consistently solid. Some people complain that the first third is TOO slow, but if you have the patience for it I think it's a necessarily slow build. The dialogue is good and clever. If you appreciate graphic, graphic violence (and, since you're here, you probably do), you won't be disappointed (lesson learned: puking is the most cinematic when the characters are projectile vomiting blood). The social commentary is solid (see more below). And, had the third act turned out differently, the first two acts are part of an excellent movie. Don't get me wrong, it's a GOOD movie. It's just also a disappointing one.
It feels like the only thing Tarantino wanted us to be sure about was the movie's stance on race relations. And maybe gender relations, but I'll get to that in a second. We don't know how we feel about any of the characters - true to his title, he really did try his hardest to make us hate them all - but at the very least we know that racism is bad. Which we knew already, but the fact that Major Marquis Warren's comments on his fake Lincoln letter are the most relevant in the whole film says a lot. Pretty cool of Tarantino to be one of the many voices shouting that racism isn't over.
As for gender relations: a lot of people complain that this movie is misogynist, and I'm still deciding whether or not I agree. But one of my friends (hi, Daniel) makes an interesting point - partway through the movie, it switches from the n-word to "bitch" as its primary Bad Word. No matter where the characters stand on racism, they ALL hate women. It's the one thing they all have in common. Is it necessary to make Daisy the sole punching bag for most of the movie? Maybe if the point you're trying to make is that sexism also isn't over. In this film, it's as normalized as racism. Tarantino uses extremes to point out society's biggest issues. So maybe the aggressive character (not director) misogyny here is okay, then. Or at least somewhat more justified.
Go see The Hateful Eight. It's a good movie, and Quentin Tarantino works really hard on it. He'll win some awards for cinematography, since, as my dad put it, he kind of gave the gift of Panavision back to the cinema (NO ONE ever tell him his work is a gift to the cinema - his ego will explode). It's funny, and it's gleefully disgusting, and it makes some good comments about some deeply messed-up pieces of our society. Its whole is no greater than the sum of its parts, but rather exactly as good as all of them put together - and the parts are good.
CINE 290 final paper, fall 2015
note: I won't always just put up film class essays. this one, however, I'm particularly proud of. also, writing about films in relation to Laura Mulvey is fast becoming a new favorite activity.
Women in cinema have long received the short end of the stick. They are abused, disrespected, ignored, and objectified. They are constantly used as either bland pillars of male emotional support or as bland objects of male sexual desire. Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo exemplifies the trend well: his main character falls in love with the erotic image, or idea, of a woman, mistreats and manipulates her throughout the film, and ultimately leads her to her death when she asserts her own identity and tries to become the maker of her own meaning. In her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey explores such cinematic misogyny. Her essay lays out a number of points regarding female sexuality, agency, and visual representation onscreen, often intertwining with Freud’s ideas about castration anxiety. She explores themes of spectatorship, dominance, and motherhood, working to destroy the patriarchal pleasure encoded into cinema’s DNA. Recent cinema is often more subtle than Vertigo, but the issues Mulvey explores are still glaringly obvious: woman is frequently portrayed as little more than a passive object, present only to provide erotic interest to the male protagonist and with little independence or individuality of her own.
Many films unknowingly comply with these tropes; some, however, approach Mulvey’s ideas head-on, working to examine and often challenge concepts of female punishment and woman as receiver of the gaze. One such film is Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Over the course of this essay, I intend to use Nymphomaniac to explore how Laura Mulvey’s ideas about female agency and punishment are relevant to female sexuality in modern cinema. In her essay, Mulvey writes, “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (200). I believe that modern cinema operates upon a similar idea. While modern filmmakers such as Von Trier are clearly aware of Mulvey’s ideas, often acknowledging and examining them, they simultaneously work to subvert and counteract them, continuing the work Mulvey begins with her essay.
Before I delve into this film, I need to briefly discuss Laura Mulvey’s use of the phrase “determining male gaze.” Nowhere in the essay does she address the concept of non- heterosexual sexuality. The fact that the “determining male gaze” intertwines significantly with the ideas of the active male, passive female, and the power structures involved, however, means that the gaze must be that of a heterosexual male - the gaze of the theoretically more dominant figure, and one that sexualizes women, not other men. Of course, Mulvey’s focus on this dichotomy is problematic in other ways, as well; gender is a spectrum, not a binary, and Mulvey’s thoughts make room only for the gender binary. So as to operate within the framework of her essay, I will also be writing exclusively about the binary; I acknowledge, however, that this line of thinking is inherently flawed, and has great potential to be improved upon in the future.
The determining male gaze is absolutely present in Nymphomaniac, a film that aggressively explores female sexuality. Split into two films, Nymphomaniac tells the story of Joe, a self-described nymphomaniac who begins her story as a child but narrates it entirely retrospectively, as an adult. Over the course of the story, she describes her experiences with love, motherhood, and sex addiction, particularly the consequences of the latter. The relationship between sex and power figures prominently into her narrative - both in the ways characters wield sex as power and in the power Joe’s sex addiction holds over her. The very fact that she uses her sexuality as a form of power at all, however, already challenges one of Mulvey’s assertions: whereas Mulvey states that woman’s visual presence “tends to work against the development of a storyline, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (203), it is frequently Joe’s presence and identity as a sexual being that advances the story. By making his protagonist a hyper-sexual woman, Von Trier nods to Mulvey’s ideas while simultaneously superseding them.
Another major theme Von Trier borrows from Mulvey is the idea of guilt and punishment. Throughout the film, Joe continually asserts her extreme guilt and self-blame, just as Seligman, her audience and the man who helps her recover after he finds her beaten and unconscious, argues against it. Joe seems convinced of her own guilt: in the beginning of the film, she states, “I’m just a bad human being,” and after she seduces an unwilling married man, she tells Seligman, “I discovered my power as a woman, and used it without any concern for others. That’s completely unacceptable.” Finally, much later, she rejects the leader of her sex addiction support group, saying, “All you are is society’s morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth… I love my cunt, and my filthy, dirty lust.” Even as Joe takes pride in her identity as a nymphomaniac, she still views it as an obscenity; she still describes her lust as filthy and dirty.
Mulvey addresses ideas of guilt in describing one avenue through which the male unconscious can escape castration anxiety:
What is interesting here is that it is Joe, not Seligman, who asserts Joe’s guilt. Joe punishes herself here more than anyone else punishes her: she alienates herself from her family, seeks out physical abuse as a form of sexual exploration, and constantly deals with feelings of self-loathing. Seligman, meanwhile, argues against her guilt throughout the film, justifying her actions to her every time she blames herself for them. Perhaps it is because of Seligman’s asexuality and celibacy that Von Trier chooses to reverse these roles. Whereas typically the aggressively sexual, active male is preoccupied with the guilt and subsequent punishment of the passive and less autonomously sexual female, here the opposite is the case: Joe, the female, is the more sexual and more active character, and her sexuality and autonomy are the qualities that link her with placing guilt upon the woman. Seligman, meanwhile, is generally the more passive and definitely less sexual character of the pair, and is preoccupied with defending and saving the woman. In a way, they could also represent the two avenues Mulvey describes for dealing with the guilty party: Joe subjects her through punishment, and Seligman subjects her through forgiveness.
Mulvey and Von Trier also both explore the ideas of motherhood, particularly the meaning motherhood provides for a woman. Joe experiences motherhood twice in Nymphomaniac: first with her accidental biological son, Marcel, and second with a parentless teenage girl, P, whom she takes under her wing with the intention of training as a successor to her debt collection business. Joe loses Marcel when, as she becomes more and more focused on her outside sex life, her lover Jerome forces her to choose between that sex life and her family. Meanwhile, later on, P transitions from Joe’s protege to her lover before finally betraying and abandoning Joe to be with Jerome herself. Twice Joe takes care of a child, and twice she loses that child. The entire time, however, she struggles with the idea of motherhood: she states that she never feels like her love for Marcel is being returned, and later has extreme qualms about attempting to take P under her wing.
Laura Mulvey explores some very Freudian concepts in regards to motherhood. In her essay, she writes:
What’s interesting about Joe’s experiences in regards to Mulvey’s ideas is that whereas Mulvey suggests that woman desires a child, so as to provide her with temporary meaning, Joe never actually wants one. Perhaps, if we imagine that Joe is already a maker of her own meaning, children serve the opposite purpose: they fetter and castrate her, forcing her away from her focuses - her sex life and her career - and into roles she rejects: domesticity, vulnerability. Granted, Joe is clearly upset at losing both her children. When she describes Jerome’s placing Marcel into foster care she becomes briefly angry, shouting and smashing her teacup against a wall. When she is abandoned by P, she attempts to leave, saying, “I couldn’t stay in this town with her and him. I had cowardly made a plan to escape and head south, like from some ice age I didn’t have the guts to turn around and face.” Joe lambasts sentimentality throughout the film, repeatedly asserting that it is not genuine. Every sentimental relationship she forms, however, ends poorly, suggesting that her contempt for it - and her sadness at losing her children - stems not from a fear of loss of meaning, but from a fear of vulnerability and loss of connection.
The final major parallel between Mulvey’s writing and Von Trier’s film is the most prominent: the idea of the bearer versus maker of meaning. As noted before, Mulvey describes the dichotomy between male and female characters in this way: the male is active, and the female is passive. But she also constantly brings up the idea of woman’s meaning, her significance within the film:
One thusly unexamined tension in Nymphomaniac is that between Joe and Seligman, as each competes to interpret Joe’s story. Throughout the film, the same pattern repeats itself: Joe tells a segment of her story; Joe asserts her own guilt; Seligman interprets her story; Seligman reassures her that she is not guilty. In one analysis of Nymphomaniac, blogger CS Bhagya describes this cycle very well:
This competition is fascinating in that Von Trier seems to both comply with Mulvey’s observations and then counteract them. In regards to every other element both Mulvey and Von Trier explore - woman’s visual presence, the placing of guilt, motherhood - Von Trier reverses Mulvey’s ideas. Female sexuality typically pauses the narrative, yet Joe’s sexuality is what drives it forward. Yes, society blames Joe for certain actions, but primarily, it is she who places the most guilt upon herself. And whereas Mulvey asserts that woman needs a child to make her own meaning, Joe’s children remove her meaning. But here, finally, Von Trier’s plot points align with Mulvey’s ideas: man fights to make meaning, to interpret Joe’s life for her. Man forces Joe to bear the meaning he makes.
What is interesting is that even as Seligman does try to explain Joe’s life to her, he credits her for making her own meaning. In the final scene of the film, he compassionately summarizes everything Joe has just told him:
This speech seems to be Von Trier’s way of redeeming Joe’s actions - or not so much redeeming them as simply justifying them. So then why does he allow the character who has been aggressively explaining Joe’s life to her to make it? Why does it seem like Seligman has won, by making this final speech that reaches the heart of the entire film? And why, oh why, does Seligman undermine it two minutes later by trying to rape Joe while she sleeps?
One answer - the easiest - is that Seligman is as flawed as any other human. The truth is more complicated. Every action Seligman takes in the film - finding and helping Joe, explaining her story to her, forgiving her, even trying to rape her - fall squarely into the pattern Mulvey has detected, and the one that Von Trier works to subvert. Regardless of how kind Seligman is to Joe at any given time, he consistently asserts power and dominance over her. When he finds her at the beginning of the film, Joe is weak and injured; Seligman presses her in vain to accept help from the police before finally accepting her refusal and helping her into his house, into his pajamas, into his bed. Her insistence wins out, but she rejects one form of hospitality in exchange for another; she is still the weaker as he is the stronger. As CS Bhagya notes, he spends the entire film fighting for control over Joe’s story, patiently waiting for her to pause before reinterpreting the events she describes. And when he forgives her, it is in keeping with the pattern described earlier, Mulvey’s voyeuristic avenue of escape from castration anxiety: Seligman subjects the guilty person, Joe, through forgiveness. His kindness has nothing to do with his position as the dominant character; when he rapes Joe at the end, his lack of regard for her physical being is simply an extension of his earlier lack of regard for her intellectual autonomy.
Von Trier’s ending to the film has been criticized as obnoxious, cynical, a bleak joke, when in reality, it is entirely in keeping with his subversive patterns of before. By killing her would-be rapist, Joe reasserts her own autonomy - both sexual and intellectual - and acts as Von Trier’s vehicle to challenge Laura Mulvey’s assertions, to reverse her ideas about male cinematic dominance, and to fight back against the men of the cinema. By suspending this reversal until the very end of the film, by giving Joe the final word and making this counteraction to Mulvey’s ideas the final plot twist, Von Trier makes his statement that much more powerfully.
There is one more component to the film’s conclusion that I haven’t yet discussed. Just after Seligman’s speech and before he tries to rape her, Joe makes a speech of her own:
My concern with this monologue is not related to Mulvey specifically, but rather to Von Trier’s ideas about female sexuality. What does it mean for the character who has spent the entire film expressing her sexual autonomy, who has lauded her experiences and walked away from sex addiction therapy, to suddenly decide to abandon her life as a sexual being? Is it an extension of Joe’s apparently deep sense of right and wrong? Has Joe suddenly discovered the moral high ground? Yes, but not in the way one would think. Von Trier is not condemning sexuality here; celibacy is not the same as chastity. Joe’s decision is moral in the way she decides to help herself, in the way she chooses to step away from the force that has controlled her her entire life. Nymphomaniac respects and supports female sexuality, but it also respects its main character’s decision to take care of herself, even if that involves giving up her own sexuality forever. Here, in Joe’s decision to end her sexual life, is one more example of her autonomy. She is independent enough to lead life according to her own whims and desires, and she is independent enough to walk away from those desires that are harmful. Von Trier does not end his film with a denunciation of female sexuality; he ends it by empowering his main character further than before. Here is one final example of a woman who makes her own meaning - one final rejection of Mulvey’s observations.
Nymphomaniac challenges Laura Mulvey’s ideas in a number of ways. Whereas Mulvey claims that the image of the female body works against a film’s plot development, Joe’s body - and by extension, sexuality - drive the plot forward. Whereas man often punishes woman onscreen for her lack of a penis, it is Joe who punishes Joe the most. Whereas children provide woman with temporary meaning, Joe’s children remove hers. And whereas man is generally the dominant cinematic maker of meaning and woman the passive bearer, Joe fights to and succeeds in becoming her own maker of meaning. In many ways, Nymphomaniac is a triumph over the sexist conventions of the cinema.
But Nymphomaniac is not a kind film to Joe. She deals with guilt, punishment, self-hatred, loneliness, rejection, and judgement - many of which people only direct at her because, as Seligman points out, she is a woman living life with the autonomy and audacity of a man. Her character, her experiences, are often in direct opposition to the trends Laura Mulvey describes in modern cinema - but at what price? Why does Lars Von Trier choose to tell such a painful story, to make his protagonist an autonomous woman but then watch as the world beats her down? Why does he even try to counteract Mulvey’s observations in the first place? To me, it’s because Nymphomaniac symbolizes the fight for gender equality. In 1975, Laura Mulvey identified the sexist patterns of the cinema. In 2014, Lars Von Trier worked to subvert them. He made a film about a character fighting against patriarchal judgment and oppression, and used the pain and difficulty of Joe’s journey to represent the difficulty of creating gender equality in the cinema. In this day and age, Laura Mulvey’s ideas are far from obsolete. Nymphomaniac is simply a film that makes a traditionally silent battle more external.
LAURA MULVEY & NYMPHOMANIAC: AN INTER-MEDIUM CONVERSATION
Many films unknowingly comply with these tropes; some, however, approach Mulvey’s ideas head-on, working to examine and often challenge concepts of female punishment and woman as receiver of the gaze. One such film is Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Over the course of this essay, I intend to use Nymphomaniac to explore how Laura Mulvey’s ideas about female agency and punishment are relevant to female sexuality in modern cinema. In her essay, Mulvey writes, “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (200). I believe that modern cinema operates upon a similar idea. While modern filmmakers such as Von Trier are clearly aware of Mulvey’s ideas, often acknowledging and examining them, they simultaneously work to subvert and counteract them, continuing the work Mulvey begins with her essay.
Before I delve into this film, I need to briefly discuss Laura Mulvey’s use of the phrase “determining male gaze.” Nowhere in the essay does she address the concept of non- heterosexual sexuality. The fact that the “determining male gaze” intertwines significantly with the ideas of the active male, passive female, and the power structures involved, however, means that the gaze must be that of a heterosexual male - the gaze of the theoretically more dominant figure, and one that sexualizes women, not other men. Of course, Mulvey’s focus on this dichotomy is problematic in other ways, as well; gender is a spectrum, not a binary, and Mulvey’s thoughts make room only for the gender binary. So as to operate within the framework of her essay, I will also be writing exclusively about the binary; I acknowledge, however, that this line of thinking is inherently flawed, and has great potential to be improved upon in the future.
The determining male gaze is absolutely present in Nymphomaniac, a film that aggressively explores female sexuality. Split into two films, Nymphomaniac tells the story of Joe, a self-described nymphomaniac who begins her story as a child but narrates it entirely retrospectively, as an adult. Over the course of the story, she describes her experiences with love, motherhood, and sex addiction, particularly the consequences of the latter. The relationship between sex and power figures prominently into her narrative - both in the ways characters wield sex as power and in the power Joe’s sex addiction holds over her. The very fact that she uses her sexuality as a form of power at all, however, already challenges one of Mulvey’s assertions: whereas Mulvey states that woman’s visual presence “tends to work against the development of a storyline, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (203), it is frequently Joe’s presence and identity as a sexual being that advances the story. By making his protagonist a hyper-sexual woman, Von Trier nods to Mulvey’s ideas while simultaneously superseding them.
Another major theme Von Trier borrows from Mulvey is the idea of guilt and punishment. Throughout the film, Joe continually asserts her extreme guilt and self-blame, just as Seligman, her audience and the man who helps her recover after he finds her beaten and unconscious, argues against it. Joe seems convinced of her own guilt: in the beginning of the film, she states, “I’m just a bad human being,” and after she seduces an unwilling married man, she tells Seligman, “I discovered my power as a woman, and used it without any concern for others. That’s completely unacceptable.” Finally, much later, she rejects the leader of her sex addiction support group, saying, “All you are is society’s morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth… I love my cunt, and my filthy, dirty lust.” Even as Joe takes pride in her identity as a nymphomaniac, she still views it as an obscenity; she still describes her lust as filthy and dirty.
Mulvey addresses ideas of guilt in describing one avenue through which the male unconscious can escape castration anxiety:
Preoccupation with the reenactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object… Pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness (205).
Mulvey and Von Trier also both explore the ideas of motherhood, particularly the meaning motherhood provides for a woman. Joe experiences motherhood twice in Nymphomaniac: first with her accidental biological son, Marcel, and second with a parentless teenage girl, P, whom she takes under her wing with the intention of training as a successor to her debt collection business. Joe loses Marcel when, as she becomes more and more focused on her outside sex life, her lover Jerome forces her to choose between that sex life and her family. Meanwhile, later on, P transitions from Joe’s protege to her lover before finally betraying and abandoning Joe to be with Jerome herself. Twice Joe takes care of a child, and twice she loses that child. The entire time, however, she struggles with the idea of motherhood: she states that she never feels like her love for Marcel is being returned, and later has extreme qualms about attempting to take P under her wing.
Laura Mulvey explores some very Freudian concepts in regards to motherhood. In her essay, she writes:
[Woman] first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and, second, thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end… [Woman] can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (199).
The final major parallel between Mulvey’s writing and Von Trier’s film is the most prominent: the idea of the bearer versus maker of meaning. As noted before, Mulvey describes the dichotomy between male and female characters in this way: the male is active, and the female is passive. But she also constantly brings up the idea of woman’s meaning, her significance within the film:
Woman stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning (199).
When Joe starts losing patience with Seligman’s interruptions, it indicates the more coercive moments of Seligman’s relentless analyses, a moment when Seligman reveals himself to be little more than a sophisticated mansplainer, instructing Joe on the meaning of the occurrences of her own life, not allowing her the final authority to have a conclusive say in what her own life means to her.
What is interesting is that even as Seligman does try to explain Joe’s life to her, he credits her for making her own meaning. In the final scene of the film, he compassionately summarizes everything Joe has just told him:
You were a human being demanding her right. And more than that, you were a woman demanding her right… Do you think anybody would have raised an eyebrow...if a man had led the life you had? ...You had to take on a guilt, a burden of guilt, that could never be alleviated. And all in all, the blame and guilt that piled up over the years became too much for you, you reacted aggressively - almost like a man, I have to say - and you fought back. You fought back against the gender that had been oppressing and mutilating and killing you and billions of women.
One answer - the easiest - is that Seligman is as flawed as any other human. The truth is more complicated. Every action Seligman takes in the film - finding and helping Joe, explaining her story to her, forgiving her, even trying to rape her - fall squarely into the pattern Mulvey has detected, and the one that Von Trier works to subvert. Regardless of how kind Seligman is to Joe at any given time, he consistently asserts power and dominance over her. When he finds her at the beginning of the film, Joe is weak and injured; Seligman presses her in vain to accept help from the police before finally accepting her refusal and helping her into his house, into his pajamas, into his bed. Her insistence wins out, but she rejects one form of hospitality in exchange for another; she is still the weaker as he is the stronger. As CS Bhagya notes, he spends the entire film fighting for control over Joe’s story, patiently waiting for her to pause before reinterpreting the events she describes. And when he forgives her, it is in keeping with the pattern described earlier, Mulvey’s voyeuristic avenue of escape from castration anxiety: Seligman subjects the guilty person, Joe, through forgiveness. His kindness has nothing to do with his position as the dominant character; when he rapes Joe at the end, his lack of regard for her physical being is simply an extension of his earlier lack of regard for her intellectual autonomy.
Von Trier’s ending to the film has been criticized as obnoxious, cynical, a bleak joke, when in reality, it is entirely in keeping with his subversive patterns of before. By killing her would-be rapist, Joe reasserts her own autonomy - both sexual and intellectual - and acts as Von Trier’s vehicle to challenge Laura Mulvey’s assertions, to reverse her ideas about male cinematic dominance, and to fight back against the men of the cinema. By suspending this reversal until the very end of the film, by giving Joe the final word and making this counteraction to Mulvey’s ideas the final plot twist, Von Trier makes his statement that much more powerfully.
There is one more component to the film’s conclusion that I haven’t yet discussed. Just after Seligman’s speech and before he tries to rape her, Joe makes a speech of her own:
At this moment my addiction is very clear to me, and I’ve come to a decision. Even though only one in a million...succeed in mentally, bodily, and in her heart of ridding herself of her sexuality, this is now my goal. (S: Is that a life worth living?) It’s the only way I can live it. I will stand up against all odds.
Nymphomaniac challenges Laura Mulvey’s ideas in a number of ways. Whereas Mulvey claims that the image of the female body works against a film’s plot development, Joe’s body - and by extension, sexuality - drive the plot forward. Whereas man often punishes woman onscreen for her lack of a penis, it is Joe who punishes Joe the most. Whereas children provide woman with temporary meaning, Joe’s children remove hers. And whereas man is generally the dominant cinematic maker of meaning and woman the passive bearer, Joe fights to and succeeds in becoming her own maker of meaning. In many ways, Nymphomaniac is a triumph over the sexist conventions of the cinema.
But Nymphomaniac is not a kind film to Joe. She deals with guilt, punishment, self-hatred, loneliness, rejection, and judgement - many of which people only direct at her because, as Seligman points out, she is a woman living life with the autonomy and audacity of a man. Her character, her experiences, are often in direct opposition to the trends Laura Mulvey describes in modern cinema - but at what price? Why does Lars Von Trier choose to tell such a painful story, to make his protagonist an autonomous woman but then watch as the world beats her down? Why does he even try to counteract Mulvey’s observations in the first place? To me, it’s because Nymphomaniac symbolizes the fight for gender equality. In 1975, Laura Mulvey identified the sexist patterns of the cinema. In 2014, Lars Von Trier worked to subvert them. He made a film about a character fighting against patriarchal judgment and oppression, and used the pain and difficulty of Joe’s journey to represent the difficulty of creating gender equality in the cinema. In this day and age, Laura Mulvey’s ideas are far from obsolete. Nymphomaniac is simply a film that makes a traditionally silent battle more external.
Works Cited
Bhagya, CS. "If You Thought Fibonacci Had Nothing to Do with Lars Von Trier or Women’s Bodies, Think Again." The Ladies Finger. N.p., 3 July 2015. Web. 18 Dec. 2015.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. By Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 198-209. Print.
Nymphomaniac. Dir. Lars Von Trier. Perf. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf. Potemkine Films, 2014. Netflix. Web.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)