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By Laurie Meunier Graves
The silly season is behind us. Summer, with its long, hot days and popcorn
movies, has given way to a far grimmer fall than anyone could have
envisioned. Images of Hurricane Katrina and all the people left behind are
still vivid to me, and I expect this is true for many Americans. In
addition, the storm blew away many misperceptions. In this land of the free,
we were sure that race and poverty were no longer serious issues and that
our government would be there to help us in times of great need. Well, now
we know better, and like most lessons, it was a painful one to learn.
Recently, another lesson was brought home to me, and it came as I watched
David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. The movie ostensibly
focuses on how violence lurks beneath the surface of even the most placid
looking man (Tom Stall played by Viggo Mortensen) and that Darwin was right
about survival of the fittest. Critics have been raving about this movie and
have used words like “chilling” and “redemptive” to describe it, referring,
of course, to Cronenberg’s notion of violence and how it runs like a hot
current through American society, a nation of gun lovers.
I, too, found the movie chilling but for a reason not mentioned in any of
the many reviews I read. Instead, I was chilled by its treatment of women.
Or rather, a woman, because although this movie was packed with men, it
really only had one major character who was a woman. Not surprisingly, this
character was Tom Stall’s “hot lawyer” wife Edie, played by the
smoldering-eyed Maria Bello. Well, we certainly see evidence that Edie is
“hot,” at least from a certain point of view. Early in the film, she puts on
a cheerleader’s costume so that she and Tom can pretend they are teenagers
and have forbidden sex. Needless to say, Tom does not don a football uniform
to get into the spirit of the evening. It’s strictly a case of the little
woman performing for the man of the house. The scene is ridiculous, worthy
of a porn movie, and it infantilizes Edie’s role, turning her into a sexual
object rather than portraying her as a mature woman with complex thoughts
and motivations. Unfortunately, none of the following scenes dispel the idea
that Edie’s chief function is as Tom’s sexual barometer. When he’s gentle
Tom, the sex is playful. When he’s violent Tom (actually, Joey), the sex is
nasty. But more on that later.
Supposedly, Edie is a lawyer, but we never see any evidence of this. She
doesn’t appear ever to dress up and go to work, and she never talks about
clients or cases or tort reform. Instead, she always seems to wear flannels,
takes her daughter shopping for shoes (a nice girlie outing), and makes tea
when Tom comes home from the hospital. She’s certainly no trial lawyer
because when she finds out that unbeknownst to her, Tom was a hit man (Joey)
before they met, her questions are dull, perfunctory, and devoid of
curiosity. Now, this could be attributed to shock. After fifteen years or so
of an uneventful yet zesty marriage, a woman might be forgiven for being
nonplussed to find out that her husband was a hit man in another life. Yet,
it’s also reasonable to suppose that when the shock wore away, this woman, a
lawyer, after all, would be interested in learning the details of her
husband’s past, which include a conversion in the desert. But no.
Instead, Cronenberg apparently wanted to leave plenty of time for a
sadomasochistic sex scene on the stairs with nasty Tom, who has gone back to
being Joey, literally banging Edie into submission and enjoyment. Ah, these
hot lawyer wives! Men know what they really want. After this scene, that’s
pretty much it for poor Edie until the end of the movie, and even then, she
doesn’t really say anything, and the audience is treated to yet another shot
of her glittering eyes.
Readers might be asking, why make such a fuss about a movie? Why indeed?
First, David Cronenberg is a respected director whom critics take seriously.
His movies get a lot of press and a lot of publicity, and he has become
something of an icon in the film world. Second, it is my belief that movies
are a window on our society and show, with varying degrees of clarity, our
hopes, our fears, our concerns, and the issues of our days. When a serious
filmmaker portrays a woman this way, and, as far as I know, no one makes a
single comment about it, then this says a lot about who we are.
What A History of Violence tells me is that sexism is very much alive
and well in our society. In fact, it is so ingrained that none of the
critics seemed to find anything amiss with the fact that Edie Stall’s main
purpose is to be a sexual foil for Tom. As such her character is a nasty
stereotype rather than a woman. As the director John Sayles so brilliantly
shows in his movies, it only takes a few telling details to round out
characters and give them depth, to portray people as a believable mixture of
contradictions, to show how a woman could be a smart lawyer who dons a
cheerleader costume for sex. Cronenberg could have done this with Edie, but
instead he chose to portray her as a one-dimensional fantasy-woman whose
purpose is to orbit around her dark-star husband.
In the book Ways of Seeing, published in 1972, John Berger put it this way:
“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at….The surveyor of
woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into
an object.”
I had hoped we had moved beyond this, but as with poverty and racism, it
seems that sexism is still deeply entrenched in our society. A disheartening
thought but somehow fitting for this long, terrible time in our country.
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