Tuesday, 14 June 2016

Blindness: Apocalyptic Patriarchy

Warning: Spoilers (for film and book).

Blindness is a film based on a book of the same name, it came out in 2008 & it boasts starts such as Julianne Moore, Danny Glover & Mark Ruffalo. Problem is, it’s sexist as hell. It starts with the First Blind Man, played by Yûsuke Iseya, suddenly going blind, a man helps him back home and he explains to him how everything is white, utterly white. He sees a specialist, Mark Ruffalo and as time passes he wakes up and he too can only see white. Then it starts to spread, infecting more people and eventually all the few people who were in Ruffalo’s office when Iseya visited him also have the ‘White Sickness’ disease. They are put in a quarantined sanatorium and left to their own devices – yep, they are given food and there are guards to shoot them for stepping out of line but no one even remotely tries to go in and help them lest they get sick themselves. Eventually outside help starts to run out because the entirety of the world has gotten sick and gone blind too.
However, throughout all of this the one person who is not blind is Ruffalo’s wife, played by Moore. For some reason, unknown in the film, she is immune to this disease. Great you’d think, that’s amazing she can help the officials and help get the world get back on track (with the help of already blind people who live ordinary lives) and hell maybe even she has antibodies that can be used to create a vaccine and a cure. Oh, wait – she’s a character’s wife… never mind! As I was watching it felt like there were a lot of pretty basic messages the film was trying to get across but none of those were that women are more than wives, not really. Yes, she achieves different degrees of success, yes she helps them all in the end but ultimately she spends the entire film selflessly helping her husband and everyone else. Somehow I doubt the film’s message was ‘women’s unpaid labour drives everything in the world and we should stop taking it for granted’.
Now I love pandemic films and zombie films and all that sort but unfortunately these films, and others, have a tendency to get pretty stupid when they try to make points about the nature of humans. I think the films that try to point out human nature usually say more about the writer than they do about the human race – human race by the way is a terrible film example of this, so too is Circle. They devolve into ‘everyone is an arsehole, expect children and except maybe women, but only some women, and even then fuck those women they can put up or shut up’ and it gets really old. Every new film, and in this case book, comes at the angle as though it’s fresh and original and maybe people will be less of an arsehole after watching this film. But no, they won’t because you can’t even make a film about being less of an arsehole without showing rape.
So after a couple of weeks when each ward in the sanatorium is full of blind people the one ward that is full of men, that is run by a man who literally declared himself king of his ward, has started stockpiling the food. He has a gun and first he takes everyone’s valuables and then when they are all gone he demands – yep, originality at its finest – ‘the women’. Or girls as he repeatedly calls them, because that’s what you want to do to the women you rape: infantilise them. So we have this film that’s really looking at people, their prejudices, how they come together, how violent men rip them apart, and then because apparently in an apocalypse the one thing you can bet never dies is patriarchy we get rape. It throws in the usual mess of well the women volunteer themselves and oh one of the characters is a prostitute, the men trying to point out that yes actually it would have been different if he had demanded all of the men to rape instead of the women, and it’s just all a total mess.
Then Moore’s character has to lead eight women to their rape, each woman is terrified and the men are acting like animals. Instead of cutting away, instead of feeling ashamed that the audience couldn’t just know that this is bad they carry on because hey narrative. They film Julianne Moore getting forced to her knees, they show other women being abused and raped whilst the one man who was born blind asks if he can suck on a faceless woman’s nipples. Then one of the men gets violent and he beats one of the women to death. Again, I’d say it was the film showing that rape, violence and murder are all on one great male violence spectrum but nothing in the film leads me to think it was anything other than hey of course this would happen because that’s what women do right – they die.
Later when it’s Ward Two’s time for the women there to be raped the man who was born blind stops by Moore’s ward and she tells him how one of the women died. He actually looks fucking sad, he looks shocked and mildly horrified. As though raping women was fine but hey he didn’t actually want them to die. If your audience is men, then do you really need to show women being raped for them to understand not to do it? Like they have no capacity for empathy to know that hey maybe raping, beating and killing women is a bit fucking much? Then Moore decides enough is enough, had to have the rape and murder first though because the threat of rape isn’t enough to stand up to (none of the men ever gave a shit by the way, one of the husbands was revolted his wife was going to be violated because it reflects badly on him, and one man got pissed off that the women didn’t want more nights of being raped). She takes a pair of scissors and she goes and stabs the ‘King’ in his throat, not before the camera showed us plenty of women being raped though just for good measure.
Then a woman burns the whole place down because fuck that shit. The world by then has already gone to absolute hell so there are no guards and Moore lets everyone out, she guides them home, there’s a scuffle about food and yada yada they all go back to her house to live out of their days. Until, spoiler the first guy who lost his sight, Iseya, can suddenly see again. Danny Glover gives us a voice over of how he’ll miss blindness because it might have given him a chance with a younger woman, that everyone is happy because it means they too might get their sight back, and hey what of this poor exhausted woman who’s been looking after everyone else. Personally, I hope she runs away and lives out her days not being sucked dry.
Throughout the whole film her husband treats her like rubbish, is unappreciative of the fact Moore is going through hell to stay and help him, and then he literally cheats on her. But she doesn’t give a shit, because of course she doesn’t. She’s a fucking saint. So he carries on pawing at her, saying how he can’t see her as a wife anymore because she’s more like his carer (not that that’s dealt with in anyway in this film), and it’s just all so annoying. It’s annoying because Ruffalo has played this character a million times; this sappy type of man who expects and demands unpaid emotional labour from fictional women who turn around and act like he’s a gift to women. It’s not enough to tell men that rape is bad, you have to also tell them that they aren’t entitled to shit. That women do not exist to make them feel better all the time, to pick up after them, and to do all of this at the expense of their own feelings, time, and desires.
Overall it was a disappointing and infuriating film and I should know now that nine out of ten films will be. More women need to be allowed to write films, to direct and produce films. We need the female gaze, the female voice to educate and entertain. Cause frankly I’m bored to death of the male gaze showing me the same thing while it’s male voice bores me with the same old stories. I’ve read great apocalyptic fiction that doesn’t have rape in, that doesn’t throw women to the outskirts, and you know what? It’s absolutely awesome. So I’ll say as I always say, step up men. Stop preventing women from getting a word in, pay attention to your own crappy behaviour and let’s stop acting like a patriarchal world will outlive us all.


I’ll leave you with the line from Wikipedia on the director talking about the rape scenes in the film:


Meirelles explained his goal, "When I shot and edited these scenes, I did it in a very technical way, I worried about how to light it and so on, and I lost the sense of their brutality. Some women were really angry with the film, and I thought, 'Wow, maybe I crossed the line.'

Sunday, 5 June 2016

Knock Knock: Ugh.

Warning: Spoilers.

Knock Knock is a film directed by Eli Roth, it was also written by him & two other men and it’s a remake of a 70s film called Death Game. It certainly feels like it got its politics and campiness from the 70s film. I can’t imagine watching Death Game and feeling like it needed remaking for a modern audience. I’d certainly add it to the list of films that are more about backlashing against feminism, such as Jurassic World, than I would saying it’s a film feminist’s would like – you know, like Eli Roth said. When I first heard about Knock Knock, seeing that it was a film about sexy women hurting some poor man I instantly thought it sounded dreadfully sexist (of course it is) but then for the director to go oh well nah they’ll love it is just so typical and embarrassing.
Basically the plot goes like this: one night a family man (the most loving, amazing, perfect husband and father) is at home working while his family have gone away for the weekend (join us Daddy! No I can’t, I have to catch up on being an architect as you can tell how successful I am at it by my amazing house) and then there is, you guessed it, a knock at his door. It’s raining heavily and there are two young women at the door drenched and they explain that they were trying to find a party but their taxi driver misheard them and took them to completely the wrong place and can they come in and use his phone. So instead of being a jerk, and come on what could these innocent women possibly do to him, he lets them in; eventually they’re in dressing gowns as their clothes dry and Keanu Reeves’ character Evan acts like they’re so weird for not wanting to sit in soaking clothes but oh they’re cute and young and isn’t it just all great.
Then they ‘seduce’ him because you know that thing where men just literally lose all their faculties and use of their brain when a woman makes a move on him – frankly I’d say that makes them dangerous people to run the world if that’s all it takes for them to become idiots. So he sleeps with them, a lot – in the bed he shares with his wife, in his shower and then the next morning is when things change. He awakes to find his house trashed, and as the film goes on they tie him and make him sit there as they write things like ‘whore’ on a picture of his young daughter and all the rest – feminism, remember. Then they start to play a game, they explain how they have done this many times – go to a house where a man is alone, ‘seduce’ him, and then fuck with him after the fact – and they make him answer questions about how many man say no (none).
Then they tell him how he’s now a paedophile because they’re both under the age of consent, now spoilers here, they’re actually both over 18. But again the three male writers oh so feminist that they are wanted to use an ‘erotic horror thriller’ to make the point that maybe if you’re going to sleep with a woman you make sure she’s old enough first. But men I hear you, women are liars, they have fake IDs, it’s just so time consuming in between meeting a woman and getting undressed before asking how old they are when you didn’t even bother to ask their name! But hey, when the other option is jail…
Now amongst all this I had a very hard time understanding really what Eli and his co-writers wanted from me, the audience. Did they want me to be on the side of the women? Agree with them that Evan was in the wrong (he was, but also they were in different ways)? Or be on Evan’s side that he was perfect and instead just the victim of two psychopathic hotties (last two words were ones used by rotten tomato reviewers of this & the original film). I didn’t feel sorry for Evan because yeah how hard is it to say no to sex when you’re married with kids but also there are moments where the two women are criminals such as when they destroy his house, his wife’s art, where they stab Evan, and you know when they accidentally cause a man’s death, paper maché him, paint him and then call their usual guy that disposes of bodies for them.
I mean they clearly are criminals, who yes make good points that seduction is a stupid word designed to excuse grown men’s actions – especially when those actions are criminal – but at the end of the day they’re meant to be the villains and we’re meant to root for Evan. But that’s difficult when he’s just so dreadful, so self-righteous about how his life is ruined by nasty little women who gave him no choice but to have sex with them – and god that speech he gives, if you’ve seen it you’ll know the one. So really it just made me feel bored, that I was watching the usual sexist rubbish, and that this film really shouldn’t have the word feminist anywhere near it – other than in ‘yet another film for feminists to avoid’.
Who I do feel sorry for is his wife, which again is a character whose story doesn’t care much about – she sees her trashed house at the end but mostly just looks shocked before the film ends. But now she has to divorce her cheating husband, move house or live in one that is defiled, mourn the loss of a close friend, reorganise her career because her art gallery is missing its main piece that was trashed by them and has her friend’s blood on it; she has to presumably clean up the house – women’s work am I right! – and remove all the family portraits that have penises drawn all over them, explain why Daddy isn’t around anymore to her kids and generally just find a way to move forward.
Or alternatively, if she stays with her husband despite his cheating she has to do all of that whilst listening to her husband justify it by him going on and on about how those psychopathic whore bitches tricked him and left him in the ground, literally, up to his neck while he watched a video of him being raped – yep, one of the women literally rapes him while he’s tied to a bed and the film skips over that fact, instead it’s creepiness is her being dressed in his daughter’s school clothes (how they fit her I’ll never know) and uses it in the end of the film as the video of that rape is posted on Facebook for his friends to see. She’ll have to stand by him while he rebuilds his life, she gets to explain to all her family and friends what happened, what they saw on Facebook and hear how dreadful that must be for Evan, and her. She’ll have to sacrifice her time to help him emotionally while her own art exhibit goes up in flames. Not saying that other horror films don’t have similar endings, with untold consequences (or told ones if you watch the many dreadful sequels of so many franchises) but this one in particular is one where Evan won’t be the only one suffering.
Especially if you watch the alternate ending, where Evan finds the two women playing the same game with another man – another poor, helpless man who couldn’t help but sleep with women – and one where he puts on black gloves and knocks on their door for a change. I don’t doubt that that scenario would most likely end with both of their deaths, and that if that film existed men would cheer him on – you make those bitches pay! Ugh. In many descriptions of this film Knock Knock is described as a man’s fantasy gone wrong, i.e. two young and sexy women showing up at your door then having sex with you. Those women give you what your wife can’t, they let you have fun then leave the next day without a trace, free sex with no strings attached – unless they end up like all women are, psychos! Again, ugh.
This film is basically what three men think women are like, but don’t want to admit they think women are like that. Where they take the idea of empty women who just want to have a bit of fun and then decide their personalities would be murdering criminals. It’s not enjoyable to watch, it’s not scary at all and it more sounds like if someone made a film of what their mate Steve told them about this story he heard of these two hot women – phwoar – who went crazy and attacked his mate John, and the story ends with him and his friends sitting in the pub going – well, that’s women: crazy.