Since the new millennium, a succession of women film-makers have entered the formerly male territory of sado-masochism and screen violence. Is this a sign that women have finally thrown off their shackles? (Or put them on, if that’s your thing?)
Now women can do anything men can do both in front of and behind the camera. Like Lara Croft, or Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, they can kick butt, kill 10 men with one blow, save the world and give great sex. Or are women filmmakers and their on-screen sisters being co-opted into the glamorous, testosterone-driven world of screen sex and violence under the guise of liberation?
Jane Campion’s new serial-killer thriller, In the Cut, has a masochistic heroine who finds the sleazy underworld of brutal men and brutal sex attractive.
In Catherine Breillat’s Romance the heroine also goes on a masochistic spree. She picks up a brainless hunk in a bar for a night of alienated sex and has a protracted affair with a fetishistic sadist who gags her and ties her up. And when she meets a stranger on her stairwell who offers her oral sex she foolishly agrees, only to be raped — another confirmation of her self-loathing.
As for Claire Denis’s blood-sodden Trouble Every Day, her heroine is infected with a virus that causes her to literally devour the men she has sex with. According to Denis, the film is about “the marriage between desire and spine-tingling fear”.
The most notorious of this wave of noughties “women’s films” was Virginie Despentes’s Baise-Moi, which followed two women on a revenge spree of brutal sex and indiscriminate mass murder, including gunning down an entire bar full of Saturday night revellers. Despentes’s total lack of concern with any moral questions put Quentin Tarantino in the shade.
The glorification of violence and exploitative sex in films used to be considered a man thing. Feminism began by asking tough questions about the endemic misogyny in society, male power and what it really means for women to be viewed as objects for the gratification of men’s voyeuristic and violent sexual fantasies. The few feminists who got to direct their own films (exemplified by Campion) set out to redress the balance, to tell stories from women’s point of view.
This didn’t mean their films avoided the sleazy underworld of sex and violence. Marleen Gorris’s 1984 film Broken Mirrors brilliantly portrays life in a brothel when a serial killer is stalking the streets outside. We get to know the prostitutes as complex individuals, so when they are attacked, and in one case murdered, the effect is shocking, as it should be. Gorris’s point is clear: the daily eruptions of violence against prostitutes are symptomatic of a deep-rooted fear, and in some cases hatred, of women in society at large.
Women should have the artistic freedom to explore the dark side of women’s (and men’s) experience including violence, self-destructive sex or masochism. But film is intrinsically a voyeuristic medium. We routinely witness images of murderers pouncing, women screaming, naked female corpses being dragged out of the canal or splayed on mortuary slabs.
The question for all filmmakers, irrespective of their gender, is how to tackle familiar genre-movie themes with psychological insight and a real attempt to understand the subject — though most choose not to bother with tedious ethical questions, preferring instead to show off their brilliant craft skills to maximise the sensuality and the thrill of the cinematic experience.
So why should women filmmakers be any different? Maybe because the dilemmas facing women are different. When it comes to sex, women have always been caught between knowing what they want for themselves and turning themselves into the kind of fantasy sexual icon they imagine men find attractive (learned from screen images of women).
In the overheated and highly sexualised world of the film industry, the confusion is even greater. The recent trend for films about female masochists (made by men and women) who long for a tough guy to give them a bit of rough may be a sign that the 1990s, feminised “new man” is boring in bed.
On the other hand, I suspect that there are men who have power in the film industry who despise the sensitive, caring men many feminists longed for. They want a return to the good old days when women craved “tough guys” like themselves. (In their dreams!) And films about macho men, masochism and crazed murderers, irrespective of whether they are male or female, are more likely to bring in the megabucks.
As for feminist whingers, the movies with sexualised images of actresses who look like supermodels and think and fight like Arnold Schwarzenegger prove that women have got what they want, don’t they?
The message stands — if women can equal men in the sex and violence arena, both in front of and behind the camera, they get noticed, they get financed and they get international reputations. — Â