Content warning: This post is going to be pretty explicit about portrayals about first violence, and later sex, in four movies. It will probably be unpleasant. You are forewarned.
Spoilers for: Inside Man, American Animals, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Megan is Missing.
This post was written in reaction to the choking of Jordan Neely on a subway in New York, some four months late. The event was a rich text with many interpreters and I had nothing to add then I thought could be useful. It was a tragedy, both in the moment and in the preconditions leading up to it. Now maybe I'll say some things, about movies.
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I recently watched the Spike Lee movie "Inside Man" starring Denzel Washington and Clive Owen. It's a clever thriller about robbers who take a bank hostage, and along the way we discover who the real criminals are - the founder who started the bank with Nazi gold stolen from Jewish victims.
The con is that Clive and friends take thirty customers and employees of the bank hostage, to break into the founder's deposit box and expose his secrets, and manage to escape by blending into the hostages when they let them go (and not having any money on them when they are leaving.) This "dissolving into the people" is a powerful metaphor about the way revolutionaries should act.
Their violence is swift and effective - they pretend to hurt some compatriots, so the other thirty are cowed into place. They let an old man who is having an attack of some sort go. Their guns only have blanks. They may hold these people against their will overnight, but no one really dies and the cops themselves seem to cause more pain and damage.
It's what we imagine our use of violence would be like. Righteous, and inflicting no more harm than we intended, and no more than they deserved. (The most annoying thing about the movie is just how smug Clive is about his ridiculously complicated plan that went off without a hitch.)
A very slickly made movie, and I hated it.
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Around then I also watched "American Animals", the biopic about four real college kids who realized their library held several books worth over twelve million dollars, and had no more security than any other suburban state university library. They make a plan to steal and fence the books, it goes horribly wrong, and they all end up in jail.
It has an extremely meta directing style, intercutting interviews with the actual kids (grown up and out of jail now), and scenes of these relatively famous actors pretending to be them as they hatch their scheme (Evan Peters and Barry Keoghan fan club shoutout.) Sometimes we'll get a scene with one character played by the actor and the other played by the real person. Some scenes will be repeated three or four times as they can't agree on the details in their memory. There are scenes that are hypotheticals, and other ones that look real but later we question whether they happened at all.
The movie is pathetic. We get one incredibly slick scene of how they think the heist will go - upbeat music playing, tazing the librarian on watch into unconsciousness with a surprise twist of the wrist, tossing the books perfectly onto their blanket - and then we see how the heist actually went. These kids were terrified of doing actual violence to a person. They put it off to the last second, full of sweat and anxiety. They learn tazing isn't trivial and they only knock down the librarian and scare her, causing her to piss herself. It's just terrible and awful all around, and made me sick watching it. They spend terrified minutes looking for keys, they fuck up getting any of the books but one, they accidentally give their real phone number to their appraiser, and they go into hiding knowing they will be caught. There's nothing they can do but wait for the hammer to drop, and it does.
Even though the acting and the writing and oh god the pacing was so much worse than Inside Man, I loved it.
It was the most realistic depiction of violence I had ever seen. Not something grand and unholy, a tool of the gods. No it was sordid and cowardly and chaotic. It was "all too human."
Violence is chaotic. Once we have started using it, we can't control what happens as a result of it, but we are still responsible. There is no way a team of bank robbers could hold thirty people over night and stage a chaotic release without anyone sustaining harm. In Inside Man, we don't see the scared mother worried she won't get home to her kids or her mother in time. We don't see the assault victim suffer panic attacks as they are retraumatized. We don't see someone who is terrified into senselessness asking over and over again what's going on. We don't see any of the human reaction that could go wrong at all.
I don't doubt that Neely's assailant thought he was using righteous violence, to contain a situation he felt was out of hand. The point is, that any choke hold has a chance of killing someone.
If you start violence, you have opened the gateway to chaos. It will not go how you think it will. Sometimes you have to pull the trigger anyway, but if your only excuse is "I have the perfect plan where nothing will go wrong", then you are setting yourself up for failure.
***
More recently, I watched the moral panic sensation "Megan is Missing." MiM is a found footage movie about two 14-year-old girls who get kidnapped, violated, and killed. It feels designed to stoke fears of how dangerous the internet is and who you could meet over it. It recently went viral on teen tiktok, and created a counter-outrage by people disgusted at how prurient this movie is.
MiM feels very amateur, and the plot is the simplest and bleakest plot I've ever seen (The plot is two girls meet a guy online, get kidnapped sequentially by him, don't escape, they die, the end.) And yet it has a power in its acting and understanding that is rare in media. It shows a mastery of tension using backgrounds or foreground objects that we dread something is going to happen with, as we wait and wait.
These girls aren't unaware that men want them in unseemly ways. They are very aware, and mock the transparent desires of men. They use cynicism to be above it all. But underneath that they have an insecure need for affection and belonging that convinces them to go along with whatever a sketchy male in their life proposes, telling themselves that if they look unimpressed and resign they are retaining their independence. There is a monologue where one teen even breaks down and describes all of this to her friend, and it is incredibly moving.
(The movie also has a complicated relationship with authenticity. It is based on a story of a drifter kidnapping a 14 year old girl from a sleepover and her body was found the next day. In this version there are two girls, they look well above 14 and participate in a very mature lifestyle, they meet a man over the internet, and after a series of exchanges he just grabs them in broad daylight, and holds them in a prison for weeks.)
The movie is also gross.
We don't see a lot of sex (and no nakedness beneath underwear), but there are without doubt a few extremely sexual shots. They are graphic and disturbing. There is porn for everything on the internet, so one can't deny the accusation that someone gets off on this (the most common target of the accusation is of course this director.) But like, you'd have to be into pretty hardcore fetish to find those shots hot. They are grimy and dirty and lacking in all humanity for the subject.
The climax of the movie is when the kidnapper has taken the second, more innocent girl, and he drags her out of her cell, bends her over a table, and points her camcorder at just her face. He transparently takes her virginity, and we spend several minutes seeing her face scream in agony, before going into shock and her face becomes slack and unresponsive, all hope having been lost. Incredibly powerful scene.
Maybe someone finds this sexy, but it's not possibly erotic. It's disturbing, and that is what makes reviewers uncomfortable. There is no quasi-romantic kidnapping, where the kidnapper tries to accommodate his victim, and the victim plays along to seduce him. There is just pain and suffering and really it doesn't look like either of them is deriving satisfaction from this.
I can not recommend this fucked up movie enough. The final ten minutes are just a shot of a barrel and dirt, and one of the most powerful endings of any movie.
***
Just yesterday, I watched "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", 2011 by David Fincher. It's extremely well done. My generalization about Fincher is that he tells very creative original stories, but sometimes his adaptations are just like "the book, but now it's on film." That's what it felt like - I could not recommend this or Gone Girl to anyone who had read the book, unless you really like seeing the characters you imagined played by Ben Affleck and Daniel Craig. Whatever.
The movie commits the mortal sin of "nominally being about the sexual exploitation of and violence against women, while taking many opportunities to show these women in the struggle, looking very pretty and well made up, or other sexualized, spruced up women that are very erotic to look at." See like, every Law and Order show about a sex crime.
Contra MiM, at some point our protagonist goth heroine has been assaulted by her lecherous social worker. She is handcuffed in a cross pose to his bed, and we see her spread out symmetrically, completely undressed with a well-curved ass sticking in the air, and picture perfect smooth skin with gothy tattoos on her back. She's upset and she struggles but this is infinitely more "hot" than the filthy shots from MiM.
She later turns the tables, and has her assaulter handcuffed, fucks him with a dildo, tattoos humiliating words on him, and controls his every life decision there after. She even approaches him to threaten him again and let him know she's watching. And honestly, that looked like a scene from an femdom porn and I think the assaulter is even more satisfied with this form of their relationship.
This isn't the only example. There is more consensual fucking, there are polaroids, and skin tight catsuits. It's a very sexy movie. And none of it makes people uncomfortable like MiM did, and there's a nominally "the woman eventually triumphs" story, so it's accepted as quality cinema. Even though way more men - rapists and innocents both - probably got off on it than MiM.
The smooth story is the false one. If we are demanding ethics from our movies, then we should demand the gross realism instead of the comfortable competent sex and violence. Then maybe some would be heroes won't fantasize about how easy the take down will be for them.
