A Bad Movie
Jun. 2nd, 2003 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ltmurnauOne of my bad habits is to stay up really late on Friday and Saturday nights, watching videos that are too tedious to explain to my youngster. This weekend I watched a movie I had picked up entitled "Female Perversions".
No, it was not a porno film - I had actually picked it up by mistake since what I wanted to watch was another film called "Female Misbehaviour", a film directed by Monika Treut that is a series of four short documentary films about the fringes of femininity - sections with Camille Paglia, Annie Sprinkle, a butch woman into SM, and a female-to-male sex change subject. For some reason I did not remember the film title correctly.
The plot of the film involves Eve, a neurotic bisexual uptight lawyer, and her upcoming appointment as a judge. Her preparation for her interview with the state governor (who will make the decision about her judgeship) is interrupted by her sister Maddy, who is about to defend her PhD thesis. Maddy is a kleptomaniac and gets caught, so Eve has to tool out into the desert town where Maddy lives and get her out of jail. While there, she meets Maddy's female roommate, the roommate's daughter and some other woman who blows in from somewhere - it wasn't clear to me who she was related to. In the end, Eve gets her judgeship, Maddy gets out of jail and wins her PhD, the two of them have a climactic psychodrama scene where they recall that their father abused their mother, and Maddy's roommate goes on a date with a guy. As Eve is leaving to go back to the big city, she finds the roommate's daughter burying her menstrual pad under a tree, as she does every month, since it's a baby that was never born. She also finds that the daughter has carved the word "LOVE" into her leg with a razor blade "because I couldn't carve the word HATE into my bones". End of film.
Now that I think about it, perhaps this film could be called a form of pornography.
Porn has been described as depictions of sex without any form of emotional attachment or eroticism; without debating the pros or cons of that, it's still clear that porn presents an idealized version of sex without repercussions - practised on, with or by idealized people who use other idealized people as sex objects. In short, a sort of fantasy of human relations stripped down to only the basic aspect of rutting behaviour.
This film is also a gender-based fantasy, with two points to make:
1. MEN BAD.
Every male character in the film is some kind of caricature. Eve's father is a distant and unstable emotional abuser who doesn't want to hear about her good news about the judgeship because she called in the middle of the night to tell him. Eve's boyfriend is a hyper-rich engineer or architect (it's never made clear) who acts like a sex-obsessed, selfish little boy. Maddy's roommate gets all worked up about going on a date with someone and comes back in tears - again, it's never made clear how he upset or disappointed her, but he did something. In the interview with the state governor, Eve comes off thinking she blew it because she told him the truth about being single - "oh, why didn't I say I was engaged or something?" after the governor blathers on about how important his five daughters are to him.
During the film, Eve has these dream sequences where she imagines that the men she faces off against in the courtroom (in the film's only courtroom sequence, she is the only woman) are staring down her blouse or peeking at her legs while she goes on and on about how the defendant only understands "dominance" and therefore must have all his property seized. The defendant shows up later in two fantasy scenes, one while she is alone in her office and another while using a pay phone, grabbing her from behind, twisting her head around and whispering her insecurities into her ear (about her flabby butt, flat breasts, she's a fraud and everyone will find out, etc.)
2. WOMEN GOOD.
In contrast, whatever women do, especially without men, is a Good Thing. Eve is bisexual and has a hot affair with the curvy blonde psychiatrist who just moved into the office down the hall. Maddy's thesis is in Anthropology, on a village in Mexico that is some kind of ideal matriarchy. Maddy is a kleptomaniac but usually throws the stuff she steals into the trash outside the store; her justification for theft is that it gets her off sexually. The Unknown Woman talks dirty and gyrates around in her underwear while the other women drink wine and complain about men, so Maddy's roommate doesn't feel so bad about her bum date any more. When the credits roll, we see that the film was made almost entirely by women (except for a few technical and editing positions).
There is also a recurring fantasy or dream sequence where Eve is walking a tightrope - sometimes the end of the rope is held by an abstract male character in robes and a white mask, sometimes it is held by a naked fat old woman covered in mud who I guess represents her fear of old age, and sometimes it is held by the roommate's daughter, who is sawing away at the rope with a razor blade the size of a hardback book. I'm not sure whether this sequence relates more to 1. or 2. above, but the symbolism is appallingly crude.
I found this film alternately boring and off-putting, for the same reasons that I find explicitly pornographic films boring and off-putting. Films like this are repetitive, uninteresting, crude, simplistic, and not far enough removed from reality to make an interesting story. The characters are flatter than cardboard and are inherently uninteresting and unlikable.
At the bottom of it all, this film and any porn film you could name both have the same basic disdain for humanity - neither film is interested in showing respect or even acknowledgement of the complexity of human beings and how they relate to each other, or why they do what they do.
I should have just gone to bed. But I felt compelled to watch this thing to the end (and it seemed to go on forever) and analyze why I didn't like it. And now I'm wasting bandwidth and even more time telling you about it!
Next time I'll watch "24 Hour Party People" again - at least it's funny and has a great soundtrack.
No, it was not a porno film - I had actually picked it up by mistake since what I wanted to watch was another film called "Female Misbehaviour", a film directed by Monika Treut that is a series of four short documentary films about the fringes of femininity - sections with Camille Paglia, Annie Sprinkle, a butch woman into SM, and a female-to-male sex change subject. For some reason I did not remember the film title correctly.
The plot of the film involves Eve, a neurotic bisexual uptight lawyer, and her upcoming appointment as a judge. Her preparation for her interview with the state governor (who will make the decision about her judgeship) is interrupted by her sister Maddy, who is about to defend her PhD thesis. Maddy is a kleptomaniac and gets caught, so Eve has to tool out into the desert town where Maddy lives and get her out of jail. While there, she meets Maddy's female roommate, the roommate's daughter and some other woman who blows in from somewhere - it wasn't clear to me who she was related to. In the end, Eve gets her judgeship, Maddy gets out of jail and wins her PhD, the two of them have a climactic psychodrama scene where they recall that their father abused their mother, and Maddy's roommate goes on a date with a guy. As Eve is leaving to go back to the big city, she finds the roommate's daughter burying her menstrual pad under a tree, as she does every month, since it's a baby that was never born. She also finds that the daughter has carved the word "LOVE" into her leg with a razor blade "because I couldn't carve the word HATE into my bones". End of film.
Now that I think about it, perhaps this film could be called a form of pornography.
Porn has been described as depictions of sex without any form of emotional attachment or eroticism; without debating the pros or cons of that, it's still clear that porn presents an idealized version of sex without repercussions - practised on, with or by idealized people who use other idealized people as sex objects. In short, a sort of fantasy of human relations stripped down to only the basic aspect of rutting behaviour.
This film is also a gender-based fantasy, with two points to make:
1. MEN BAD.
Every male character in the film is some kind of caricature. Eve's father is a distant and unstable emotional abuser who doesn't want to hear about her good news about the judgeship because she called in the middle of the night to tell him. Eve's boyfriend is a hyper-rich engineer or architect (it's never made clear) who acts like a sex-obsessed, selfish little boy. Maddy's roommate gets all worked up about going on a date with someone and comes back in tears - again, it's never made clear how he upset or disappointed her, but he did something. In the interview with the state governor, Eve comes off thinking she blew it because she told him the truth about being single - "oh, why didn't I say I was engaged or something?" after the governor blathers on about how important his five daughters are to him.
During the film, Eve has these dream sequences where she imagines that the men she faces off against in the courtroom (in the film's only courtroom sequence, she is the only woman) are staring down her blouse or peeking at her legs while she goes on and on about how the defendant only understands "dominance" and therefore must have all his property seized. The defendant shows up later in two fantasy scenes, one while she is alone in her office and another while using a pay phone, grabbing her from behind, twisting her head around and whispering her insecurities into her ear (about her flabby butt, flat breasts, she's a fraud and everyone will find out, etc.)
2. WOMEN GOOD.
In contrast, whatever women do, especially without men, is a Good Thing. Eve is bisexual and has a hot affair with the curvy blonde psychiatrist who just moved into the office down the hall. Maddy's thesis is in Anthropology, on a village in Mexico that is some kind of ideal matriarchy. Maddy is a kleptomaniac but usually throws the stuff she steals into the trash outside the store; her justification for theft is that it gets her off sexually. The Unknown Woman talks dirty and gyrates around in her underwear while the other women drink wine and complain about men, so Maddy's roommate doesn't feel so bad about her bum date any more. When the credits roll, we see that the film was made almost entirely by women (except for a few technical and editing positions).
There is also a recurring fantasy or dream sequence where Eve is walking a tightrope - sometimes the end of the rope is held by an abstract male character in robes and a white mask, sometimes it is held by a naked fat old woman covered in mud who I guess represents her fear of old age, and sometimes it is held by the roommate's daughter, who is sawing away at the rope with a razor blade the size of a hardback book. I'm not sure whether this sequence relates more to 1. or 2. above, but the symbolism is appallingly crude.
I found this film alternately boring and off-putting, for the same reasons that I find explicitly pornographic films boring and off-putting. Films like this are repetitive, uninteresting, crude, simplistic, and not far enough removed from reality to make an interesting story. The characters are flatter than cardboard and are inherently uninteresting and unlikable.
At the bottom of it all, this film and any porn film you could name both have the same basic disdain for humanity - neither film is interested in showing respect or even acknowledgement of the complexity of human beings and how they relate to each other, or why they do what they do.
I should have just gone to bed. But I felt compelled to watch this thing to the end (and it seemed to go on forever) and analyze why I didn't like it. And now I'm wasting bandwidth and even more time telling you about it!
Next time I'll watch "24 Hour Party People" again - at least it's funny and has a great soundtrack.
