In response to the Danish film Brothers, and in her astute readings of Toni Collette in Little Miss Sunshine, and elsewhere, Gio’s raised some great points about the depictions of female rage and anger. The topic deserves its own focus, so I’ll paste up her opening challenge and then some of the things she got me thinking about:
what if the mother had been the one to go ’round the bend? what if she had started throwing the house around? it would have been so much worse, so much more serious. but women stay put, stay sane, love everyone, understand everyone — while keeping absolutely gorgeous. i’m reminded of john cassavetes’ a woman under the influence but also, because i just saw it (and would like to write about, but please don’t let me stop you — i’ll be happy to comment!), notes on a scandal. and how about the forest for the trees? women’s rage is always a hair’s breadth away from battiness, whereas men’s rage tends to be rooted in cultural dissonances towards which we are meant to be understanding if not sympathetic.
I obsessed about your open-ended question while running (i.e., dragging myself in a turtle pace around a short loop, defying the Arctic air mass sitting on St. Paul):
–The first film I could think of was the execrable Damage, where philandering poor-male Jeremy Irons pisses off everyone, including the audience, but the film does offer Miranda Richardson–as his wife–one astonishing scene where the “good wife” shakes off the demands of her role and tears ferociously into Irons. It’s almost worth seeing the film to see her scene in the kitchen.
(I found it easier then to leap from this role to other Richardson performances — she defies stereotypes as the icy IRA assassin in The Crying Game, she’s full of rage and lust and also maternal love in her dual roles in Cronenberg’s Spider. And then it struck me that I found it easier to think of certain actresses who manage to connect with rage in their performances/personae; just naming films or narratives was harder, but if I could picture a particular person, her career often seemed marked by similar kinds of connections. I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but it made me curious, about my own–or more common?–critical frames. Other actresses that popped into mind: Mercedes Ruehl, Elizabeth Burton. And those two came up because, at first, of Edward Albee–a playwright who has many, many interesting variations on women and rage…)
How often is female rage licensed by hetero/familial betrayal or fear? (We might ask the same thing about depictions of male rage, but there seems to be a far broader spectrum available for male anger, as Gio suggested.)
–I know of a whole subgenre of revenge films which start with a woman being degraded then detail–lovingly–her brutal vengeance. (I Spit On Your Grave, etc.) Tarantino riffs on the genre, quite interestingly, in Kill Bill, but I’m most fascinated by Geum-ja in Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance. [Spoiler:]Geum-ja’s violence originates in maternal bonds, but we don’t learn that ’til far into the film; her violence is confusingly coupled with moments of seeming saintliness, of mixed affective motivations (and mixed responses from the men and women around her), and even when we are given a “reason” for her behavior, her actions seem to exceed, seem not to be explained away by the motive.
–Which got me thinking about other supernatural variants. Carrie‘s supernatural powers erupt in brutal refutation of the demands of gender and sexuality–her rage seems almost not entirely her own, as she blows up all her classmates, and we might read that as a displacement of agency (by making it a supernatural eruption, out of her unconscious, maybe she’s trapped in the “batty” camp that Gio named)… or we might read it as an interesting way that certain depictions of female rage capture something like the cultural resonance Gio noted for male rage? Carrie’s violence is both reaction to and representative of a brutal regime of gendered norms.
Or there’s the inexplicable rage of the ghosts in many films coming out of the recent wave of particularly Japanese horror–see, especially, The Grudge and Ringu, both far more interesting in their original (rather than their Americanized versions). There’s some nod toward narrative explanation or coherence: the rage of the ghosts comes from experience X. But the films always end with such explanations being NOT enough to remove the rage; the ghosts carry on (in sequel after sequel).
Another interesting enraged ghost: Thandie Newton’s Beloved…
–which kind of dragged me to literature. Maybe, if Nikki still lurks, she could pipe up about women and violence in American lit? Offhand, I noted on the parallel book blog that Katherine Dunn’s _Geek Love_ has some amazing stuff about maternal rage that does NOT dismiss it, or see it as other to maternal love; instead, rage and shame and love and lust underline the complex matrix of motherly affection for the narrator. Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison also strike me as writers recurrently interested in female violence, rage, anger–in ways that resist neat cultural narratives.
But that’s enough. It’s a really fascinating subject–others?
Cate Blanchet’s character in Notes on a Scandal fits as does Kate Winslet in Little Children, Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, Susan Sarandan in Anywhere But Here, which is a far superior novel as I recall, Annette Benning in Running With Scissors and American Beauty and The Grifters. Mother in Psycho? Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment. What was that British film with Daniel Craig, The Mother?
Oops, Angelica Huston in The Grifters. I prefer her to Landsbury if we must choose.
just a thought, a few examples of films about female and/or maternal rage that strike me as somewhat complex: Mildred Pierce, Clash by Night (Stanwyck who could always rage without seeming to go batty-I wish she had gotten angry at the end of Stella Dallas), Monster, Alfie (though the rage is unexpressed there, I think). I hate to bring up that great object of hot controversy but I think Straw Dogs has something potentially interesting to say about female anger–I’d have to spend some time working it out, but while I don’t think it’s necessarily particularly flattering to women, it’s even less so toward the motivations of male anger/violence.
Ms. 45 is another of those female-revenge movies that foregrounds explicitly the bizarre but persistent notion that female innocence is a hair’s breadth from devastating violence (also Repulsion, also Eastwood’s obscure Gothic civil war film The Beguiled–of course, too, Carrie which Mike has already mentioned). Ferrera is perhaps more conscious of the dynamic, dressing his avenging heroine as a nun. Irreversible, the nearly unwatchable film from Gaspar Noe who also did I Stand Alone, is noteworthy for not using rape as a means to reveal the barely-hidden violence of the victimized woman–instead this rape furthers male violence, though Noe seems to want to make some point about male homosexuality which is entirely unclear to me. perhaps only a controversy-baiting young French director could set a final scene in a place called “Club Rectum.” though something makes me think von Trier could sink to such allegorical levels (oh, he already did in Dogville, which is not an interesting movie about female rage).
I forgot to say, “Club Rectum?” It nearly killed ‘um!
i’m following, i’m following. but i need to finish my syllabi, y’all! back online when things calm down. thanks, mike, for opening this conversation. i’m particularly enjoying arnab’s contributions.
i don’t like it when mommies get angry.
I think Irreversible to be a pretty remarkable film. Don’t think I will be watching it twice (which I need to sort out my thoughts about a film), but was quite impressed by the filmmaking and the plot structure the first time around.
I’m with you, Jeff, I’m not sure I could watch it a second time. I admire I Stand Alone but I’m much more ambivalent about Irreversible–I can’t quite clarify it but there seems to me to be some kind of gap between the assured filmmaking and the overly “relentless” nature of the film’s thesis (for lack of a better word). The structure too is impressive but again rather too determined?
Okay, we’ve got this whole range of texts and potential issues/subjects. Wanna zero in on any?
I’ll start–it struck me as I watched Notes on a Scandal that the film was a lovely companion piece to The Departed: both films deal with issues of identity and secrets, of demanding relationships and what we keep from one another. Both films depict the shrewd narrative deployment of secrets and cellphones; both films delight in the thrill of hiding and revealing the secret, not to mention the dark pleasures of a main character’s brutal misanthropy and bad behavior.
But we revel in Nicholson’s bad behavior, seeing a pathology but relishing its excesses, whereas Dench’s Barbara is (as Gio noted) easily made into a batty baddy, a figure more pathetic than intriguingly (agentively) pathological.
I was wondering:
–could/would/should we read the two films as two gendered manifestations of congruent thematic and narrative concerns? I.e., these two films are a case study in the different ways we’ll tell a narrative about male identity as complexly but powerfully coming out of secrets, whereas female identity is (ahem) crippled by such secrets, and must be resolved?
–What, if any, are the differences in our pleasure at watching Jack be naughty and Judi be nasty?
–Similarly, how are our identifications with Leo and Cate comparable or contrastable?
It also strikes me how many critics have dismissed Notes as well-done but empty, insignificant even if its performances are grand, whereas such genre pleasure is roundly valorized in critical acclaim for Scorsese’s film.
i wish i had the smarts, or the understanding of the departed, to answer mike’s great questions in his last comment. but i don’t understand the departed enough. to me, it’s basically a nice cop-and-robber movie, with the added spicing of a beautiful psychiatrist whom both the good and the bad guy fuck. oh, and everyone dies.
at the end of the day, i understand femininity a lot more than i understand masculinity. this is a tragedy, compounded by the fact that, as this blog shows, men seem to have an exactly symmetrical kind of understanding. or am i being ungenerous? i am being ungenerous (see jeff and mike).
the other problem is, if i had to make a list of films in which female “rage” (i’m not a rage fan, so i’d rather have the milder “anger”) features prominently, i’d come up with a completely different number of films:
thelma and louise, of course
girls’ town
girlfight
boys don’t cry
monster (oh, you do mention monster, michael!)
the hours (julianne moore leaves her child)
and why not? red eye.
it’s a tiny list, but, as you can see, they are all movies in which we are rooting for the women. they are not bad (except julianne moore, for a little while). we like them. monster, the only one in which the woman is a bad ‘un, drips with sympathy for her. we love her. at the end, we cry for her.
i wanted to address mike’s question about hetero/familial betrayal (“How often is female rage licensed by hetero/familial betrayal or fear?”), but i’ve got to go teach, and then i think my choice of films may speak for itself…
oh, and just about every film in which isabelle huppert stars, though i’m not sure we always root for her…
Gio–what is an “exactly symmetrical kind of understanding.” Since I apparently suffer from it (Mike and Jeff get a provisional repreive) I should know what it means. imagine all that training going to waste just to fall into gender-determined patterns!
Along with discovering what it means, I’m also interested in knowing what I have an exactly symmetrical kind of understanding of. Everything?
I forgot to add…I also want to know in what ways mike and jeff are “asymmetrical”—-it just doesn’t mean funny-looking, right?
I just wanted to say here that I have nothing to say. I haven’t seen Notes on a Scandal. But I’m listening. I think nikki might have something to add to this thread. Or maybe she’s already reached her maximum of one comment per year.
see? i said so many interesting things, and you all get smoked out by my one funny sentence. well, at least i smoked you out.
i FACETIOUSLY meant that, while i seem to understand femininity better than masculinity, you seem the understand masculinity better than femininity. i exonerated jeff and mike because i like them better than the rest of you losers. plus they live in the twin cities. plus they read a lot of books written by she-males.
now can we talk about all the interesting things i said?
No
why not?
I hit the send button too quickly! I meant to say, “No, maybe we should hash out these issues since they keep coming up, as enigmatic little asides.” Also I wanted to introduce myself…my name is Michael. Other individuals on the blog by name include Chris, Arnab and John. I haven’t written a collective entry with any of them.
Mark, too– another masculinist! but he appears to be keeping himself wisely out of the thread
Well, I’m honored to be called out for my sensitivity, which I’ll take as a serious honor although simply meant as a joking jab at others, and I’ll say I deserve the acclaim, since men have been so mean to me my whole life, including the evil testosto-cabal of Michael, Arnab, John, Chris, and sometimes Mauer. However I take umbrage at being lumped in with Jeff, who clearly doesn’t deserve this honor. Perhaps a typo, Gio?
In response to Gio–films where we identify with women. What about slasher films? Carol Clover notes the complications attendant with such films, but there is a sense that the escaping (and avenging) female is the locus of the audience’s attention? Or this is like the revenge flicks Michael and I noted (and Thelma/Louise is a really great, far more complicated version of such films)–such films, even as they reproduce some suspect male-gazing elements (with these women protagonists subject in and by the film to a kind of degrading attention as objects), they also set up some resistance… don’t they? I’d argue yes, mostly. Even in their most egregiously sleazy forms (which I’ve discussed before).
And, more seriously on the man thing, I think we’ve discussed this before, but: I was never a guy’s guy, never played sports, most of my friends (until college) were women–and yet I find myself pretty neatly pleased by those kinds of films and texts which do circle around portraits of masculinity. I think Michael said it in his tireless and smart (if not entirely convincing) efforts to make sure Straw Dogs gets the acclaim he thinks it deserves, that a lot of the cabal of boys here on this blog are drawn to stories of masculinity besieged and deconstructed, more than the basic rah-rah affirmation shit.
Now, Michael: I *do* want to hear you defend Straw Dogs‘ portrait of the woman, which you alluded to above. I may not be convinced, but you’ve almost got me ready to rewatch the film with your better eyes…
I really don’t want to participate in this thread since I object on principle to discussing women/femininity in any cultural form. However, on reading the contributions, surely the more interesting question is how often do we come across films in which we are NOT invited to identify with an angry/enraged female lead, and how is that non-identification is produced? Isn’t that a much, much smaller group of movies?
I’m not as convinced that this is as gendered as Gio, Jeff and Reynolds (the “I want you all to call me Loretta” collective) suggest. We are invited to identify with the lead — male or female — in most revenge movies (hence both a Mr and a Lady Vengeance, and those Charles Bronson vigilante movies) or movies where the lead finally goes off the deep end in response to the various forms of alienation of modern society (the Michael Douglas character in ‘Falling Down’).
So the task is not to endlessly list movies in which women show anger/rage, and the audience identifies with them, but to demonstrate that there are differences between those movies and their male lead equivalent.
Now I’m off to surf the web for previews of Die Hard 4 to share with the rest of the guys.
Die Hard 4–that fuckin’ rocks to the max ‘n shit!
Where is the female rage in Boys Don’t Cry?
doesn’t the chloe sevigny character shoot up everyone at the end? gosh, my memory is sooo foggy. and whatever happened to chloe sevigny, anyway?
She’s on a hit TV show: Big Love. I haven’t seen it. It’s about a polygamous family.
someone told me yesterday that i should watch it. anyone knows anything about it?
why gio, there’s a separate discussion of it on a blog whose name and url escape me for the moment.
Sevigny is in the new David Fincher film.