Suffer the Women
in which I present a very basic outline of archaic binary tensions because I am ignorant
Ah, women in peril. Where would our culture be without them? Just two days ago I spent a solid 6 hours (no judgement please, pandemic etc.) playing a Zelda game focused on some vaguely-defined quest to rescue the titular princess AGAIN. I have been saving her, on and off, since I was six years old! I’m not mad at her about it, I’m mad at Ganon for being the Prince of Darkness and I’m not even that mad at him because playing the games is fun. I enjoy fun, even when it’s to be had at the cost of distressed damselry, which it almost always is. Why is that? Someone with a PhD should work on figuring that out. They probably already have. I don’t have time to look into it while there are princesses to be rescued.
It’s a weird fact that so much of our culture and the art that reflects and nurtures it seems to revolve around this concept of Women in Peril and the subsequent efforts made to save them. I suppose this is a trope that has been pretty roundly criticized and there have certainly been plenty of efforts made to understand and possibly rectify the situation, but the trope indubitably remains. Obviously this is reflective of the staggering power imbalance created and sustained by our woefully patriarchal history. The perpetual threat to those of the female persuasion bleeds into every facet of our bizarre, violent culture. This blog alone features still images from Polish madman Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 film Possession, the production of which left star Isabelle Adjani in therapy for years, and 1974’s The Demoniacs, a film that hinges on the gang rape of its two female protagonists, written and directed by haunted French freakazoid Jean Rollin, who harbored a naive and arguably sexist obsession with the endangered “innocence” of his female lead characters whom he never stopped placing in grave danger. It’s worth noting that nearly all of Zulawski’s films center around women in precarious (to say the least) situations, similar to nearly all of the films made by Rollin. If you really take a minute to think it over you might be able to say the same thing about a surprising shitload of filmmakers. This is what makes it a trope. When it comes to a significant swathe of our arts & entertainments, women be imperiled.
I’m a very progressive guy. Really. Just take my word for it! I think it would be very cool if women were pretty much in charge of everything. It would at least offer up a nice change to the previous entirety of our run on this Earth. That being said, I am not particularly troubled by the narrative construct of the Woman in Peril. Its origins are sexist and infantilizing, yes. Probably even purely misogynistic; that would certainly be no surprise. And its perpetuation could also be dangerous and honestly pretty boring, but it really all depends on the approach. Zulawski is probably my personal favorite filmmaker. While mini-marathoning some of his films a few years ago my (female) girlfriend made the comment that I “seem to enjoy stories about tortured women,” or maybe it was “women being tortured.” This hurt my feelings because a) I was trying to get laid and b) I don’t really believe that’s a fair assessment of what it is that I’m enjoying. Yes, Zulawski’s women are both tortured and often being tortured, but that’s not the point. All of his characters are tortured and being tortured regardless of sex or gender, but his skill lies in crafting a catharsis from the torment & chaos of their unfortunate circumstances. He accomplishes this with a singular and genuinely nuts form of cinematic hysteria, all hyperbolic shrieking, violent physical convulsions and uncomfortably ghastly scenarios. Many of his primary characters are women and it is for these women that he reserves the most oppressive trials and corresponding triumphs and/or transformations. He squeezes performances from actors that make your skin crawl and your eyes well with tears of compassion in equal measure. Zulawski creates the Hell of his own vision, forces his characters to wallow in it and then dares us not to pity and root for them. To whittle this all down to the simple concept of “women in peril” is to castrate your own understanding of human tribulation. Or something.
ANYWAY. I thought it might be fun to focus on two recent movies that I really enjoyed which revolve around this much-discussed (by me, just now. See above) phenomenon of the Woman in Peril. One of them, directed by a man, is a nightmare vision of toxic masculinity haunted by the specter of the feminine mystique, while the other, directed by a woman, channels the righteous anger of the “woman scorned” into an excoriating and purgative fist-fuck to the face of unfettered patriarchal aggression.
MANDY (2018) dir. Panos Cosmatos
Panos Cosmatos has very famously said that he strives to create films that match up with the imaginary films in his childhood head, which were conjured in an effort to construct coherent stories from the fragments of videostore box art of the 1980s. I can relate. I too was a child in the 1980s who was frequently frustrated by my mother’s reluctance to let me rent the movies contained within these boxes, often splashed with the most otherworldly images and lurid descriptions of sex & violence that I couldn’t possibly have understood. I did once trick her into letting me go home with a copy of Albert Pyun’s extremely horny cheeseball fantasy The Sword and the Sorcerer from 1982 (glorious year of my birth), which ended up being waaaaaaay more violent than either of us were expecting. To her credit she let me watch the whole thing, and then let me watch the whole thing again every single day that week until we had to return it. I have no idea why, and it can probably singlehandedly explain my lizard-brain obsession with “boobs and blood” for the rest of my entire life. There are some legitimately gruesome images from this otherwise goofy movie that have been burned into my memory ever since. I would be pretty surprised to find out that Cosmatos himself isn’t also familiar with this movie’s wall of gruesome tortured bleeding faces (yikes). But if he did only ever see the box cover, and never have the chance to watch the actual film that it advertised, then I’m sure his imaginary version was better than the reality everyone else had to deal with. Despite my undying nostalgic devotion to it, “The Sword and the Sorcerer” is a pretty lousy movie.
Panos Cosmatos has so far made two actual films, and neither one of them is lousy. The second of them, Mandy, could almost be seen as a remix of his first film Beyond the Black Rainbow similar to Sam Raimi reimagining Evil Dead into the more expansive and less frightening/more wacky Evil Dead II. While “… Black Rainbow” slowly hovered around its unspeaking lude-soaked female protagonist in her quest to escape the psychological probing and nefarious sexual motives of a manipulative male quasi-scientist and his mysterious institute, the latter film as a whole is progressively sucked into the hallucinatory void created by the sudden and violent dispatching of the character of Mandy herself. Both films deal with an interpretation of the much-bemoaned concept of Toxic Masculinity and its ravages on more feminine elements of the world that each films’ men will never understand, and thus grow to either childishly adulate or churlishly seek to destroy.
In Mandy, Nicholas Cage is Red, our audience surrogate and he’s an absolute wreck, tenuously perched atop a field of stumps (shout-out to the penectomy of his introduction, a slow swagger across the screen as a recently chainsawed tree crashes to the earth behind him). A man of few words, the psychological scars very obviously run deep beneath his understated stabs at middle school humor and gentle giant affection toward Mandy, his stoned partner in comfortable, forested domestic bliss. There is a hard-earned quality to their relationship, seething with suppressed malice and memory beneath quiet moments of watching TV together during dinner, both man and woman fully sharing the intimate codependency of a believable love while also plainly locked within their own invisible spheres of a hard-fought triumph over past wrongs. Red is a recovering alcoholic, and his dependence on Mandy for the success of his wavering salvation is evident in every bearhug and bad joke. A tale she tells of her brutish father’s act of participatory violence towards helpless little birds—this harsh childhood memory seared forever into her psyche like the wailing wall of grotesque visages from a forgotten VHS tape burned forever into my own—reveals the depths of her own inner demons. Perhaps they saved each other, but one never gets the false impression that Mandy is anything less than the very anchor of their shared sanity.
Andrea Riseborough is phenomenal in everything, and her work here is absolutely electric. Her monologue about the birds in particular is a showcase not only for her subtle powerhouse of a performance but also the underlying theme of the Evil that Men do, and the shattered world that results for everyone. It makes perfect sense that the movie in its entirety should be titled after her, and the emotional gulf that results from her murder plunges the story deep into the swirling, ugly mess of maleness personified by Red’s own self-destructive history and ultimate impotence in protecting her, failed musician and cult leader Jeremiah Sand’s wormy gas-lighting and psychological abuse of his female followers and the unbridled psychosis of the half-demonic and fully intoxicated Black Skulls biker gang. With Mandy out of the picture we’re stranded in a world of erections throbbing with hatred and the unfortunate remaining women destroyed by them. It makes perfect sense, then, that the tone of the film lurches through a seismic shift (what up Cheddar Goblin) immediately after Mandy is ritualistically burned “at the stake” (dangling from a swingset), and the very next scene is Red transcendentally chugging an entire bottle of hidden booze in the bathroom and beginning his total plunge back into fucked-up masculine aggression.
And what glorious aggression it is that follows. The montage of super-weapon creation that honestly would have fit better in The Sword and the Sorcerer, the constant and increasingly horrific intimations of murderous-carnage-as-phallic-penetration, the dick measuring contest of the best honest-to-god chainsaw fight since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (another grueling marathon of women in danger and phallic murder weapons), and all of it soundtracked by the balls-to-the-wall deafening amplifier sculpture of Stephen O’Malley & Johann Johannsson. This is a movie where a lunatic sheathed in self-inflicted lacerations snorts mountains of cocaine from a table while gurgling & grunting nonverbal exhortations at a television screen awash in rough pornography, who eventually stands up to reveal a literal knife blade protruding from where his penis should be. Red stabs him in the throat and receives an ejaculation of arterial spray directly into his face. Shit is BONKERS.
And yet there are so many moments of genuinely powerful tranquility before it all goes to shit. Before Mandy is violently ripped from its parameters. His anchor lost, Red spirals into substance abuse of cosmic proportions, ingesting any and all available poisons to erase his pain. Again, I can relate. May he who has never treated recent heartbreak by eating acid and fucking around with throwing stars or “accidentally” smoking crack with their friend’s weird neighbor cast the first stone! Through the awesome prism of getting/being fucked up, Mandy nearly resolves itself as a treatise on the taming of unchecked masculinity, as Red is able to navigate his return to a drug-riddled existence with a calm mastery that the movie’s other men lack. His final taunt towards the defeated Sands, a paraphrase from the dark heart of Joseph Campbell that “the mystic swims where the psychotic drowns… you’re drowning… I’m swimming” is like a macho brag of having a bigger (metaphysical) dick and being able to better handle his shit. Of course Mandy herself had already delivered the crippling blow to Sands’ ego when she, in possibly the film’s most incredible scene, aggressively cracks up at his inflated sense of self while he stands naked before her, thus crumbling his illusions of masculine self-importance and leading to his only desperate response: the pathetic violence of a weak mind against its better. Mandy destroys him first. Red just ties up the physical loose ends. The final image of him driving off alone into a strange new world is a devastating denouement. She was his anchor and his addiction, and he is absolutely nothing without her.
REVENGE (2017) dir. Coralie Fargeat
The rape-revenge genre is basically the shunned sub-basement of filmdom, and without a doubt the most heinous offender re: Women in Peril. To quote a certain animated lady teapot, this “tale as old as time” is a plot device that can easily be found in some very old-ass scrolls of Greek mythology or whatever, but it’s pretty funny that dour Swedish visionary Ingmar Bergman probably crafted its cinematic prototype with his 1960 banger The Virgin Spring (reimagined in 1972 as Wes Craven’s notorious The Last House on the Left). If you’re unfamiliar with the concept (and if the genre’s very name proves a bit too complex for you), the basic premise is that 1) a woman is raped, followed by 2) revenge is sought. The exploitative luridness is matched only by the raw simplicity! Traditionally, the defining spree of revenge is enacted by a male protagonist (usually the father or husband) closely entwined with the raped victim. Tradition —> Trope —> Genre, an equation that applies even to this indefensible sub of all sub-genres which I sometimes still enjoy (sorry). But of course, there are outliers and subversions throughout the sordid history of this unforgivable filth (which I sometimes still enjoy). Sorry.
My rape-revenge introduction was the Meir Zarchi anti-classic I Spit on Your Grave from 1978, the movie that made Roger Ebert second-guess his chosen career path. I’m not going to waste any keystrokes trying to convince anyone that they should watch this movie (they shouldn’t) or that it’s okay for me like it (it isn’t), but I kinda like this movie. The total lack of non-diegetic soundtrack heightens the vibe of unfathomable yet mundane dread, although this is more likely the result of budgetary nonexistence and artistic laziness than a chosen quirk. Either way, it’s effective. The (endless, repeated) rape sequence itself is positively stomach-churning (Camille Keaton deserves sainthood for her dedication to the role), but why wouldn’t it be? And the revenge is appropriately gruesome and cathartic and, most importantly, wreaked by the victim herself. This is the epitome of a story wholly dependent on a woman in danger. But seriously, you probably shouldn’t watch it. Another key entry for me was Gaspar Noe’s equally inexpiable Irreversible from 2002, although this particular film has received a significantly warmer critical reception (probably because it’s French and has a vaguely “experimental” stylistic approach). I also really like this movie, but I never need to watch it again and I never recommend it to anyone because I want people to like me. I hate to break it down to an explanation as simple as “backwards = better,” but Kris Kross didn’t go quadruple-platinum at the age of 12 because their music was original.
Enter into this wrought dialogue the debut film by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, iconically and effectively titled, simply, Revenge. At the risk of hyperbole, this movie fucking RULES. Fargeat comes straight out the jump with the absolute cojones to not only have her full-length introduction to the filmmaking world be a rape-revenge pic, but also the audacity to have that movie be an absolute blast to experience. As the title indicates, this film particularly focuses on and celebrates the vengeance aspect of its chosen genre, but there is an interesting dichotomy at work here. The opening scenes present the very basic scenario of our protagonist Jen (the wonderfully named Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) on a sex vacation in the Moroccan desert with her married lover Richard. We are given the bare minimum of necessary info about these characters: he is married, obscenely wealthy and therefore powerful; she is young, aware of his marriage and possessed of the clichéd aspiration to “make it to LA.” There is no nuance or subtlety to their relationship, which is purely sexual (sadly, there is still a near-revolutionary aspect to the fact that this purely sexual relationship is never really judged as such, and these opening scenes depict a surprisingly tender freedom in each character’s guilt-free embrace of their carnal desires). So far, so good.
When Richard’s two business associates/hunting partners Stan & Dimitri show up a day early and interrupt this lovers’ retreat, Fargeat utilizes some very effective stylistic choices (quick cuts, perfectly edited musical cues, uber-macho wrestling footage, the queasy image of ants converging on and eating away at a slowly rotting apple) to gradually reveal the increasing tension amongst the three ego-driven men, as well as the underlying gulf and imbalance of power between the sexes. There is a party; everyone is having a good time, but the seeds of violence are planted within the wounded pride of Stan’s destructive male coveting of what Richard seems to have. When Richard leaves for the morning, Jen is cornered by Stan, who insidiously berates her for perceived flirtations that she is unwilling to fulfill and ultimately rapes her (an act witnessed and ignored by Dimitri in a grotesque moment of hyper-stylization that Fargeat expertly employs as a visual barometer for Jen’s total violation and the men’s complete position of unconcerned privilege and self-assured ownership of all things female). The rape scene itself is framed as a specific type of realistic violence that “violent cinema” all too often tends to shy away from, and it is truly the slow, unbearably uncomfortable lead-up to this act that really cements Jen’s helplessness. Her quietly terrified efforts to ease Stan’s pathetic ego while avoiding further incitement of unjustified male rage will unfortunately be familiar to approximately every single woman on Earth. When Richard returns and predictably expresses more interest in selfishly maintaining his status & privilege than in seeking justice for Jen’s rape, the prison walls of the patriarchy are erected around her in total. There is no escape, and she is subsequently pushed off of a cliff by Richard and left for dead. A life assumedly extinguished in a callous act of self-preservation, and one less trophy for him to fondle.
But Jen, unlike Mandy in Cosmatos’ film, does not indeed die. And this is where Fargeat’s dichotomy flips the script. What follows is an outrageously entertaining mini-opus of resurrection and retribution, as Jen quite impossibly survives her ordeal to be transformed by fire and peyote into the avenging Phoenix of her own defilement. Suspension of disbelief is an obvious prerequisite, as the revenge segment swerves away from the nauseating realism of the rape scene to deliriously immerse us in a bilious concoction of mystical imagery, drug-induced nightmare visions and red-hot neon & synth-soaked style. Fargeat’s tongue hammers directly into her cheek as Jen, tripping on peyote in a cave and miraculously not bleeding to death, seals her wound with a flame-heated, carved-up can of discarded booze; her stomach forever etched with the mythical image of an actual phoenix and the hilarious mantra of “MEXICAN BEER.” With a hunting prowess that seems to originate from nowhere and an absurd resiliency to all manner of physical assault, she seeks her deserved (and required by the rules of the genre) revenge. Overt symbolism ensues, as Dimitri (worthless witness to her violation) is gruesomely blinded with his own knife, and Stan “the man” spends an astounding full minute trying to dig a shard of glass from the bottom of his foot while comical amounts of blood spurt from the vaginal wound so mercilessly penetrated. I was lucky enough to see the movie in a packed theater (followed by a fantastic Q&A with Fargeat and Lutz, no big deal) and the audience went from squirming in agony to howling with joy as this scene continued into the lengths of absurdity. The genius of the film is how it effortlessly shifts from an unsettling depiction of very real abuse to a borderline joyful celebration of the much-deserved comeuppance that never seems to occur in the real world. You don’t even realize you’re having fun until you suddenly realize that Revenge is your new favorite movie.
An entire semester of Film Studies could be dedicated to Jen’s eventual, bombastic showdown with Richard. I won’t even try to sum it up. But I will point out a few things you probably don’t realize until your second or third viewing: after her attempted murder, Jen doesn’t utter a single word for the rest of the movie. Instead, we’re forced to suffer the competitive pettiness and misplaced aggression of the male antagonists while she silently picks them off. Effectively silencing the female protagonist so early in the film is a pretty bold choice, especially for a first-time filmmaker who knows that she’ll be intensely scrutinized for her handling of what critics & audiences alike will try to comfortably categorize as a “feminist rape-revenge movie.” It makes me think of Abel Ferrara’s 1981 litmus test Ms .45, in which Zoë Lund portrays a completely mute and twice-raped angel of death. Ferrara’s film walks a similar tightrope between horror and humor, but he ultimately depicts Lund’s character as altogether shattered by her violation; her vengeance is indiscriminate and increasingly sociopathic. Fargeat refuses to banish Jen into hopelessly damaged victimhood. Her revenge is precise and unwavering. As Richard remarks to Stan, “the desert is sublime, but merciless,” and by the end of the film Jen has salted the earth of her oppressors, all while gorgeously awash in Fargeat’s sense of visual splendor. Another thing you may not have noticed is that in Jen’s final slow march to the edge of the wilderness, the sound & fury of masculine domination utterly destroyed, we hear the soft, encroaching sounds of insects and gentle wind for the first time. Mother Nature, so eternally battered and tormented by the hubris of Men, once again reigns supreme in their welcome absence.
*while conceiving and typing this entry, I was highly anticipating and then thoroughly enjoying the gnarly debut full-length of fun death metal from Anthropophagous, Death Fugue. But I feel like I should also point out and suggest the staggering masterpiece Caligula by Lingua Ignota, which seems like a more appropriate accompaniment to this post.