Over the last few months I’ve been doing an occasional series on the feminist limitations of an ideology of empowerment. My argument has been that a feminism obsessed with power is a feminism that is indistinguishable in crucial respects from patriarchy. It’s also a feminism that tends to reject parts of women’s experiences out of hand. Domesticity, children, family, peace, selflessness, love, and even sisterhood can be tossed by the wayside in the pursuit of an ideally actualized uberwoman valiantly and violently staking vampires or what have you. And as for those who are not ideally actualized — well, for them, empowerment feminism often offers little but contempt and dismissal.
I still believe all that. But…well. If anything could convince me otherwise, I think it’s Pedro Almodovar’s “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!”. Mostly because, after watching it, I would like to see a passel of empowered feminists kick the director’s sorry ass.
As I am not the first to notice, “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” is an intentional, sneering, anti-feminist provocation. Ostensibly, it’s a romantic comedy featuring Antonio Banderas as the adorably amoral ingenue Ricky. Ricky is released from the mental hospital at the film’s beginning, and immediately goes off to kidnap former porn star and drug addict Marina (Victoria Abril). After hitting her in the jaw, he traps her in her apartment and tells her that she is going to fall in love with him and that they’ll then go off and have lots of babies. At first she is incredulous, but then he steals painkillers for her and gets beaten up for his efforts and she realizes that he really does love her…and so she falls for him and they have fantastic sex and then they ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after. Aww.
Like I’ve said, I’ve written a lot in this series about how a feminist text does not have to present women as perfectly empowered, and about how building your life around love is a really reasonable choice. So Marina is not perfectly empowered, and she chooses love. What’s wrong with that?
What’s wrong with that, I’d argue is that I don’t believe Marina is actually choosing love. That’s first of all because I don’t believe in the love. In a good romantic comedy, you need to become a little bit infatuated — or more than a little bit infatuated — with the leads. I don’t necessarily want to marry Cary Grant’s bumbling doofus, but he’s vulnerable and, contradictorily, witty enough that I can see why Katherine Hepburn would. Darcy is almost lovable just on the strength of his having the good sense to fall in love with Elizabeth, but if that weren’t enough, his competence and determination to help not her, but her whole family, certainly seals the deal. Even that bone-headed drama-queen Edward, so desperately trying to be cool and dangerous and so obviously a raging mass of hormones and stupidity trying incompetently to impress and care for the girl he loves — I can see the appeal.
But Ricky? What is there to like about Ricky? I know Edward is supposed to be all stalkery and abusive, but Ricky is actually, literally a stalker and abuser, tracking down a woman he barely knows (they had a one night stand at some point, apparently), hitting her, and threatening to kill her. He constantly engages in petty crimes, shaking down a drug dealer or stealing a car, and while I guess that’s supposed to make him dangerous and cool, in truth it just makes him seem like an untrustworthy thug. Even his tragic backstory (he lost his parents young or some such rot) seems like rote, tedious whining. His bland confidence that he’ll get what he wants; his noxious self-pity (he constantly chastises his kidnap victim for her selfishness and for not seeing how hard things are for him; his vapid cruelty — I mean, I know he’s Antonio Banderas with movie star good looks, but come on. He’s a charmless cad.
Lots of women (and lot of men, for that matter) do in fact date charmless cads — though even the most charmless cad doesn’t generally begin the relationship with battery and kidnapping. But, in any case, I don’t believe Marina is one of those women who dates charmless cads, because, just as I don’t believe in her love, I don’t believe in her. She’s not a real woman — or even a representation of a real woman. She’s got more in common with Pussy Galore than with Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice or even with Bella. She’s an instrumental fantasy of compliance — which is why her sexual dalliance with a child’s bath toy is what passes for character development. She is there to experience a conversion rape, and the conversion rape is all she is.
Almodovar is perfectly aware of this; in fact, he smirks about it. I mentioned that Marina is a former porn actor. She left porn to star in a exploitation film directed by the great director Maximo Espejo(Franisco Rabal) — roughly translated as “maximum mirror”. Maximo is aging, wheelchair bound, and impotent — he has hired Marina, the film makes explicit (literally in a sequence where Maximo watches one of her old films) because he finds her sexually attractive. The movie doesn’t find this icky, though, Instead, we’re invited to see Maximo’s impotence as a tragedy of genius. His crude comments, directed at both Marina and her sister, are supposed to be cute, just like Ricky’s naive egocentrism and sexual brutality is supposed to be charming. For the last scene of his film, Maximo orders Marian to be tied up and dangled from a window…a motif prefiguring her “relatonship” with Ricky. Ricky, then, becomes, and none too subtly, the director’s avatar, dominating and fucking Marina as Maximo cannot. It’s all just a harmless fantasy, isn’t it? Who are we to deny a genius his stroke material?
Almodovar is gay, of course, so his exact investment in the fantasy is a little unclear. You’re supposed to see him in part as Maximo the mirror, the watcher enjoying or manipulating the tryst. But even if what we have is a coded gay parable about embracing your forbidden love by fucking Antonio Banderas, the fact remains (and is even underlined) that Marina as a woman, and Marina’s desires, are, for the film, utterly irrelevant. It’s not a question of Marina being empowered or disempowered, or even a question of Marina being a blank (as Melinda Beasi recently said of Bella in the Twilight graphic novels.) In fact, it’s not a question at all. The movie simply doesn’t give a crap about Marina. She’s a marker in someone else’s story — which is maybe why she only actually seems to come alive during the film’s much-ballyhooed sex scene. Laughing and animated, she turns over and over with her lover/cad, begging him not to let his penis fall out of her. It’s like Almodovar can only imagine her as interesting, or human, when she’s got a dick.
I did just say in that last paragraph that it’s not about being empowered or disempowered — but I think that’s probably a cop out. The film is, after all, a two-hour paen to the joys of stalking and domestic abuse. It’s a useful reminder to me, perhaps, that one reason men advocate disempowerment for women is that they get off on it. Feminists have every reason to distrust them.
I don’t think this is one of Almodóvar’s better films, but I’ll defend it. You’re taking the depiction of Marina and Ricky’s relationship too literally. It’s a satirical film. The bondage relationship between the two is a metaphor that represents Almodóvar’s caustic view of heterosexual marriage, specifically that it is coercive and demands submission from women. (The “I do” moment is when Marina hands Ricky the rope and says, “Tie me up.”) The happily-ever-after-life-in-the-countryside ending is meant to be ironic. Does anybody really think Almodóvar romanticizes rustic life? It’s where you find the most buttoned-down and reactionary people in almost any culture, and buttoned-down and reactionary are the last words I would use to describe Almodóvar. It’s a very misanthropic film.
Hmm. That’s a thoughtful reading. You make a good case for the misanthropy. But misanthropy and misogyny can go together quite easily. (See Crumb, R.)
The film intensely and compulsively fetishizes Marina and her submission. The scene in the tub; the sex scene; the fact that she’s a porn star; her scene trussed up and hanging out of the window…. If he’s making fun of the way women’s oppression is fetishized, he needs to do (a lot) better at not fetishizing women himself.
Also, I’d say that the disgust for domesticity, which I can see, seems to be linked strongly to disgust for women. The movie says that women ask for their oppression, and love it, and are therefore culpable. The view of men isn’t especially friendly either obviously…but Ricky’s crazy and therefore essentially innocent, a kind of child man. Misogyny becomes about individual men being naive and imbalanced, which I don’t think is a very helpful or thoughtful way of thinking about misogyny.
It ends up seeming similar to some of Verhoeven’s work, I suppose — that is, the misanthropy and sneering at genre conventions is supposed to let you feel superior to the way in which you’re enjoying the genre conventions.
Almodovar is not buttoned down and not conservative, but that doesn’t at all mean that his gender politics can’t be unpleasant.
It’s best to keep in mind the context in which this film was made. Watch Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar’s previous film and a huge international success, and tell me he has a misogynist perspective. On the basis of that film and What Have I Done to Deserve This?, he was being celebrated as a feminist director. The depiction of Marina seems intended to pull the rug out from under that to a degree. Almodóvar is very much the kind of filmmaker who wants to shock and outrage and otherwise up-end expectations, particularly during that stage of his career.
He’s not a Verhoeven or a Crumb, whose gender attitudes throughout their work have been very consistent.
Oh, that last statement isn’t phrased well. My meaning is that Almodóvar isn’t starkly misogynist like Verhoeven and Crumb are, as can be seen when one looks at their entire bodies of work.
I don’t remember seeing Tie Me Up (Almodovar’s films mostly blur together), but what is it that supposedly makes Verhoeven a misogynist?
Yeah; it’s clearly meant to be a thumb in the eye of feminists. But anti-feminism often goes hand in hand with misogyny. And the desire to shock and titillate is often also associated with misogyny. The fact that it’s deliberately, hyperbolically misogynist to irritate feminists doesn’t mean that it’s not deliberately, hyperbolically misogynist.
I haven’t seen other Almodovar films…and am unlikely to given how much I disliked this one. However, I think it is possible for a creator to have a range of attitudes in different works. I would say, for example, that C.S. Lewis’ Til We Have Faces is a consciously feminist and even queer-friendly work, even though his space trilogy is just as consciously patriarchal and homophobic. So I can believe that Almodovar isn’t starkly misogynist throughout his oeuvre…but I still think he is in this particular film.
Oh…that’s a good question Charles. I’d say there’s a sadistic sexualized gaze in a lot of Verhoeven’s films which is disavowed the better to embrace it. And Total Recall, for example, has a bad case of madonna/whore going. I’d say for him it’s generally run of the mill genre misogyny, made more irritating perhaps by the quotation marks. But to me it seems more about his genre enthusiasms than a really personalized, ideological hatred of women….
Have you seen Verhoeven’s Dutch films? The Fourth Man is pretty blatantly misogynist. The portrayal of sexually aggressive woman as castrator/murderer that you see in Basic Instinct started there. The heroine of Flesh and Blood falls in love with her rapist, the film’s hero. Spetters doesn’t take a very flattering view of its women characters, all of whom are stereotypical biker chicks. Turkish Delight is more ambiguous–oh, she’s just acting like a slut because she has a brain tumor–but I would hardly consider it a portrayal feminists would be terribly happy with.
I’d forgotten Basic Instinct! Duh. Haven’t seen the Dutch films, though.
Noah–
Tie Me Up! isn’t an Almodóvar film I would recommend. Women on the Verge, Talk to Her, All About My Mother, Law of Desire, Volver, Bad Education–those are the ones I would recommend most. The first two are his best.
I always saw “Tie Me Up”as a work of camp that satirizes the conventions and trappings of the romantic comedy by wallowing in them.
Basically, if you take RSM’s reading of the film, but substitute the Hollywood portrayal of marriage for the “heterosexual marriage” you get my interpretation.
As I’m sure most of the readers of the blog will notice the Hollywood portrayal of marriage is more often than not a heterosexual male fantasy of the first order, so to wallow in that is to wallow in some pretty nasty slop. And I think Noah is making the case that “Tie Me Up” is lacking the cues necessary to read it in this way. But I’d argue that film-within-a-film motif is a pretty obvious tell. So is the director’s name. Maximum Mirror is an allusion to Lacan, which is in turn an allusion to Mulvey, all of which suggests that what we’re going to get treated to a over-blown male’s eye perspective. So yeah, nobody without a penis has a voice in “Tie Me Up,” but this is part of its blanket indictment of a particular kind of fantasy.
I suppose you could argue that it’s still misogynist because it fails to communicate its intent, or because even if does communicate its intent its wallowing constitutes a re-inscription of the practices it wants to send-up. But I think the former is belied by a careful reading, and the latter is a bit a totalizing.
I think the mirroring is also doubling of the director himself, surely?
I think it’s a reinscription, in part because exaggeration isn’t an effective means of dismantling stereotypes. Stereotypes aren’t based in reality; exaggerating them just makes them more themselves, not an effective critique.
I think there’s also some genre confusion that isn’t dealt with very thoughtfully; specifically, romantic comedies as a genre tend to be aimed at women, not men. The insistent male perspective doesn’t satirize the romantic comedy genre; it colonizes it.
The problem with the re-inscription argument as you’re presenting it is that you’re Almodovar isn’t satirizing reality but the cinematic inscription of the real.
Your argument that “Tie Me Up” colonizes a genre aimed at women is interesting. I do think you could argue that Almodovar is guilty of not giving the female audiences of these films their interpretive due. That said, his attack seems to me to be more on the self-indulgence and cynicism of Hollywood (and the men who dominate it), and not women.
Oh, and I don’t think it’s a thumb in the eye of feminists, but a thumb in the eye of Hollywood.
I think I’m ending up in a similar place to where I was with my review of contempt, maybe, though I liked that film better.
Or to put it another way — casting two very good looking actors and having them engage in various forms of bondage and sex play, is not actually in any meaningful way forgoing the pleasures that you claim you’re critiquing.
Robert and you have convinced me that the film is more self-conscious and deeper than I was willing to give it credit for. But I still find it an ugly, joyless exercise.
I’m thinking about this more and may write more about it later in the week. Thanks for showing me where I had erred, Robert and Nate.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…misanthropy and misogyny can go together quite easily. (See Crumb, R.)
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Since women are half the human race, wouldn’t misanthropy inescapably include both misogyny and misandry?
There’s plenty of hatred of males and macho-ism in Crumb’s work! A memoir of his adolescence told how he got along better with girls, saw boys (shown kicking a dog, as I recall) as “vicious animals.” His strutting arrogant males, police and military goons, the “Ruff-Tuff Cream Puffs” and others represent plenty of loathing of those qualities that are the worst/most noxious in the male gender.
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
…My meaning is that Almodóvar isn’t starkly misogynist like Verhoeven and Crumb are, as can be seen when one looks at their entire bodies of work.
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Crumb is “starkly misogynist”? Maybe compared to the membership of NOW; don’t let little things like much of his actual personal behavior confuse you…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…But anti-feminism often goes hand in hand with misogyny. And the desire to shock and titillate is often also associated with misogyny.
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You’re doing the old guilt-by-association bit in a jaw-droppingly unsubtle fashion. Do those necessarily go together? So, any comedian/creator who likes to “shock and titillate” — John Waters, Lenny Bruce, Salvador Dali, Sarah Silverman, Moms Mabley — are to be thus tainted with misogyny?
Imagine somebody saying, “Emotional sensitivity is often associated with homosexuality. Artistic sensibilities and interest in fashion and decorating go hand in hand with homosexuality.” And thus, in the vile fascistic hell that is school, God help the boys who are sensitive, artistic, and interested in anything past sports and cars; to be tainted and attacked as a “bunch of fags!”
Lest we forget, Dr. Wertham also told how those juvenile delinquents liked…comic books! He might as well have said, “Anti-social behavior often goes hand in hand with reading comic books. And the desire to commit crimes and disrespect for society’s values is often also associated with comic books.”
I said they often go together, Mike. Not always.
Mike–
Crumb’s body of work is starkly misogynist. As for him personally, here’s what he has to say:
Noah–
Casting can throw the meaning of movies off. I don’t think either Elia Kazan or Tennessee Williams expected Marlon Brando would become a major romantic idol from playing Stanley Kowalski–a man who rapes his sister-in-law and beats his pregnant wife–but that’s what happened. I’m sure Almodóvar selected Victoria Abríl because she’s a centerfold-model type, although he’s gay, and as such, that doesn’t mean quite the same thing to him that it would to a male heterosexual director. As for Banderas, this was before he became an international romantic idol. In 1990, he was only known for his work in Almodóvar’s films. They had worked together since the time both were nobodies, and he was essentially Almodóvar’s go-to actor in the way that De Niro and DiCaprio have been Scorsese’s go-to actors at different times. You might be seeing his casting in a way that you wouldn’t have 22 years ago.
Noah, you should try his most recent film, The Skin I Live In. Except for the heroine’s breast size, it’s exactly like a Gilbert Hernandez comic — you’d love it!
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I said they often go together, Mike. Not always.
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Yes. But can you concede that, for instance, saying “The Catholic priesthood and child abuse can go together quite easily,” “Being a Catholic priest often goes hand in hand with molesting altar boys” — which likewise could be excused as saying “they often go together…Not always” — is a tad inflammatory?
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
Crumb’s body of work is starkly misogynist.
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Sorry, repeating a distortion — which leaves out all the inconvenient exceptions — doesn’t alter reality.
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As for him personally, here’s what he has to say [ http://www.tcj.com/archive-viewer-issue-180/?pid=18629 ]:
Well, when you’re talking about misogyny, you’re talking about some kind of generalized feeling towards the sex. Which I do have. I have this resentment towards women.
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Thanks for the link! (Aha, so I did remember the “kicking a dog” bit right…)
Even that excerpted bit can be picked apart; is a mere resentment the same as the hatred which is misogyny?
I heartily recommend reading the linked-to page, with Crumb’s more detailed thoughts on the subject. Where he says of “misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic,” “These words are just thrown around…People are going around trying to brand each other with these thought crimes.”
As for Crumb’s even stronger thoughts about men as a group (which I’d mentioned earlier), from that page:
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Women seemed kinder, more sympathetic than men…most men, teen-age boys, even little boys were savages, dangerously aggressive, predatory animals!!
By comparison, girls were saints…sure they were petty and snotty, but at least they weren’t menacing…they seemed to like the finer things, art and so forth…
Women’s minds have their own particular brand of bullshit in them. Men have a whole brand of even uglier bullshit in their brains…Do they have an equivalent word for hating men?
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Gee, where’s all the morally-righteous condemnation of Crumb for being “anti-male”? As is the case in “enlightened” gatherings when whites and Christians as a group are slammed, you can clearly hear crickets chirping…
And as the typical liberal that he is, Crumb is a harsher critic of himself than he deserves; when he says he’s a misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic, well! Those who are SERIOUS, truly venomous in their attitudes and behavior would despise him as a wishy-washy “amateur bigot,” a closet liberal.
We’ve had Hergé’s fat-lipped “coon” caricatures at Tintin in the Congo described as “viciously racist” by Noah. I see this as as devaluing the currency of condemnation. If you want to read something truly “viciously racist,” check out the Fox News comment thread on Whitney Houston’s death, linked to at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/39912_Fox_News_Commenters_Respond_to_Whitney_Houstons_Death_With_Deluge_of_Hatred_and_Racism .
Somehow — it must prove what a hopelessly non-liberal type I am — I think that for a cartoonist in an era where regressive, condescending treatment of blacks in comic strips was the norm to show Africans as thick-lipped simpletons is a significantly milder offense (though yes, it is a wrong) than to have the frothing-at-the-mouth hatred expressed by those Fox News commenters.
(Gee, rabid racists flock to watch Fox News; who’d’ve thought?)
Jones, the Gilbert comparison had occurred to me.
Robert, you have a much lower bar for misogyny than I do. You’d seemingly include something like Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, too. I don’t think negative portrayals of women necessarily qualify. Nor does the castrating murderess or the femme fatale. I don’t much remember the early Verhoeven I’ve seen, though, so I’ll have to rewatch them.
“you have a much lower bar for misogyny than I do.”
Bella qualifies, but not Basic Instinct? Weird.
Don’t go starting with Twilight again! No, I don’t see Bella as a misogynist figure, either. Religiously sexist, yes. Sharon Stone is the most independent, forceful and controlling figure in Basic Instinct. She is evil, but not because of being a woman. The men are pathetic, however, and pathetic for being stereotypically masculine. Is Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt misandrist for having a similar male villain?
I think you’re out on a limb and sawing vigorously if you think Sharon Stone isn’t evil because she’s a woman. The film is obsessed with lesbian killers, and it’s most iconic scene involves her using her cunt to manipulate men for her evil purposes. She’s a misogynist stereotype. (Though that doesn’t mean that the evil bitch figure she incarnates can’t be positive in some ways…)
Victoria Abril has a body, yes, but that doesn’t make her the “centerfold type.” She’s got too much spark to be classified that way. She’s certainly livelier than most of Hollywood put together.
I agree that “Women On the Verge” is PA’s most fully-realized work. Was it that film, “High Heels” or “Kika” where he winds up taking jabs at a professional feminist character? And I think for the same reasons Noah lists in his opening paragraph.
“If he’s making fun of the way women’s oppression is fetishized, he needs to do (a lot) better at not fetishizing women himself.”
I think you’d hate “Hable Con Ella.” Probably his most amped-up fetishistic film. And that really sums up my problem with his movies. He’s a casual provocateur from that post-Franco generation more satisfied with pushing buttons and trangressing than with fully thinking through the plot and characterizations.
Yeah…I think Nate’s wrong that TMETMD is not a thumb in the eye of feminists, though probably it’s a thumb in the eye of Hollywood as well.
Noah, you’re jumping from an evil woman to women are evil. I don’t see there being any reason for that. Stone is something like an anti-hero. Along with being the sexiest, she’s the most capable and smartest person in the film, like Hannibal Lector. She has complete control of her sexuality. Michael Douglas has none.
No. I’m jumping from “every murderer in the film is an evil lesbian” to “the film has some serious problems with queer women, and by extension all women.” The idea that women manipulate men through their sexuality, and that, therefore, women’s sexuality is dangerous and frightening, is a staple of misogynist discourse.
I think it’s possible to make the argument that Stone is an anti-hero. Her coolness and sexiness is still built on misogynist stereotypes, though.
I don’t hate Basic Instinct. But arguing that it isn’t flirting heavily, and even deliberately, with misogyny and homophobia is kind of crazy.
There’s one murderer! That’s a rather restricted sample size. She’s a lesbian (possibly bi-) and you’re supposed to fear to her, so I guess that’s flirting heavily with homophobia, but that’s a fairly limited homophobia. I don’t see Stone as trying to extinguish heterosexuality, only being a sociopath who doesn’t care much for her lesbian lover, either. If she could marry rich lesbians for their money, she probably would. As for misogyny, the film doesn’t express hatred or negative emotions towards the Jeanne Tripplehorn character. She’s a victim of caring for Douglas who kind of gets what he deserves.
Haven’t seen it for a long time…but there are a number of lesbian murderers mentioned. It’s a them. The theme, actually.
I’m willing to cede the point that “Tie Me Up” is problematic from a feminist perspective because it singles out for ridicule a genre aimed at women. But I don’t think it’s a deliberate poke in the eye.
Really? You’re the one who brought up the Mulvey reference, which I think is right — you think he’s doing that to say that Mulvey is awesome and male directors need to kowtow to feminist critics? He’s sneering at her, as well as at those she criticizes. He’s deliberately being an asshole.
I don’t think he’s saying directors need to kowtow to feminist film critics, I do think he’s camping-up the male gaze in order to critique it…or at least have a laugh at Hollywood’s expense.
To support that last comment, the Maximo character is totally unsympathetic and more-or-less epitomizes the male spectator Mulvey theorizes. That said, he’s enough of a caricature that I can also see him as a tweak to her work. Given the gender essentialism implicit in her theory any effort to queer it will yield some uncomfortable results.
I don’t think he’s completely unsympathetic, or intended to be so. You’re supposed to pity him, at the very least.
I’ll admit, it’s been years since I’ve seen the film, but I recall him as being pathetic, which could arouse sympathy. But mostly I remember everything being technicolor and cartoonish and the characters too unidimensional for me to get worked up over one way or the other.
I don’t want to give the impression that I think “Tie Me Up” is a feminist film. I think it’s more concerned with Hollywood, and a particular, heteronormative story that it tells over and over again.
It’s definitely cartoonish. And yeah, the characters are unidimensional.
I think I’m going to watch it again and reassess…though it may take a few weeks. We have a roundtable coming up, so it won’t be before that….
It’s interesting to think of it in contrast to something like Pretty Woman, a movie I really dislike (though I saw it a long time ago.) Is Almodovar’s caricature romance (asylum stalker/porn star-junkie) really more extreme than wall street scum/prostitute? Does it matter if it is or isn’t?
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Nate says:
I’m willing to cede the point that “Tie Me Up” is problematic from a feminist perspective because it singles out for ridicule a genre aimed at women…
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But, what if it’s a stupid genre, based upon all manner of reactionary “traditional” attitudes? (Like, the quest for Mr. Right is the focus of a woman’s life, “love for man is a thing apart, ’tis woman’s world entire,” arrogant jerks are to be pursued and domesticated by the heroine’s love…)
Shall we bow in reverence before those moronic “women’s magazines” lining the way to the supermarket cash register, whose focus is on celebrities’ love life, marriages, babies…and diets?
Is razzing superhero comics “problematic from a masculinist perspective because it singles out for ridicule a genre aimed at men”? (Ah, but men don’t count…)
As I’ve said before, men and women are treated differently in this society; that’s sexism. Pretending that they are equivalent (which is what you do when you equate romance and superhero genres) doesn’t make them so, and just leaves you confused.
I’d argue that Almodovar is ridiculing both romantic comedies and feminism in a way that links the two and denigrates them on the basis of their femininity. Or at least that’s my sense of things at the moment; I need to work it through a bit more. But hopefully I’ll write more about it eventually.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
As I’ve said before, men and women are treated differently in this society; that’s sexism.
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So, when “pregnancy happens,” should the guy — who only contributed a squirt of sperm — get the exact same amount of paid time off, “maternity benefits,” hospital care, as the woman, who ends up bloated with a massive parasite, that she then hands to spend an agonizing amount of labor excreting, with countless ill-effects from the experience?
Or if a business rightly decides that contributing a squirt of sperm doesn’t really merit all that time off and benefits, they should then treat their pregnant female employees exactly the same, or else it would be “sexism”?
Is it “sexism” when — in order to ensure that a certain amount of women are hired in physically-demanding jobs, like firefighting — the standards for the weights that a prospective candidate can lift and carry are lowered?
Why, then, it’s “racism” when — in order to ensure that a certain amount of ethnic minorities are enrolled in college — testing standards are lowered to a degree for those of the proper race.
‘Way to give those who’d like to eliminate affirmative action programs, maternity leaves, an enlightened-sounding excuse to do so…
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Pretending that they are equivalent (which is what you do when you equate romance and superhero genres) doesn’t make them so, and just leaves you confused.
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There are certain genres (and magazines, TV shows) whose focus not only caters to, but feeds the regressive attitudes that this exploitative society encourages in both men and women. The better that their thinking should be narrowed; that attitudes which wouldn’t suit the ruling class (such as that some women might decide being enslaved by kids is not in their best interest, that men would decide the hell with being “tough” and “manly,” they’d rather be a conscientious objector than go to war) would be discouraged.
And those deserve to be criticized — and ridiculed, a form of criticism — for being the negatively-manipulative and simplistic things they are.
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I’d argue that Almodovar is ridiculing both romantic comedies and feminism in a way that links the two and denigrates them on the basis of their femininity.
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But, he’s gay! It’s been argued at HU that gays understand heterosexuality better than heteros do, because they’ve had the experience of being persecuted by straight society! (Don’t remember if it was you who said that, but I don’t think you disagreed with that jaw-dropping assertion…)
I think I said that. I think it’s often true…but that doesn’t mean that every work by a gay artist is going to be brilliant or insightful. There’s a long history of misogyny among gay men, as there is among straight men.