On Dead, Naked, Women as Props…

FEMINIST KILLJOY RULE:

if there is a dead and naked woman in the first fifteen minutes of a movie, I turn it off.

When I was seventeen years old, I was driving home from a friend’s house after dark and, as I belted out showtunes while winding along the road dotted on either side by lakes large and small, a car drove past me.  I watched in the rear view mirror as its driver pulled into a small subdivision, turned around, shut off the lights, and pulled back out onto the road, and followed me.

I sped up.  So did they.  I slowed down.  So did they.  I drove faster and faster planning on driving straight to the police station when (and if) I made it around the winding curves of the lakes in the pitch black to the main road only a few miles away.

This was before cell phones were ubiquitous and there was no one to call and nothing to do but to drive as fast as I could to the police station—somewhere I expected (as a young white woman) to be safe.  About one-mile from the juncture with the main road the car behind me began flashing its lights.  It was a cop who chased me, lights off, for fifteen minutes along treacherous roads.  I was at once relieved, terrified, and angry in ways that I would not, could not describe.  After he pulled me over he asked, “Do you know how fast you were going?!” to which I replied through my tears, “Do you know how badly you scared me?!”

I was given a hefty ticket which I fought and won.  Apparently, this cop had a history of this kind of behavior, and while I’m certain there were no consequences for him, I was glad that I wouldn’t have to see his face in court.

When I sat down on my couch to watch HBO’s new film The Little Things, written and directed by John Lee Hancock, the film’s opening scene recalled those events in clear and vivid memory.  My chest tightened, my palms began to sweat, and my heart started to race.  I knew what that girl was feeling and the thoughts that were running though her mind: what would happen to her? would she survive? would anyone find her body? would anyone help her or stand up for her? how did she suddenly become so powerless? was there any way to fight? maybe letting whatever would happen.. happen might save her?  The scene was impactful, and I’ll admit I was less than excited to see where else the film would go, but I pressed on.  With a cast this strong, it must be worth watching!

Here I offer an admission of sorts—I am not a film critic.  I love movies, and with a parent who worked as a filmmaker, I watched the classics and then some growing up.  But I am not a movie critic.  I am an academic and artist in the field of theatre and performance studies and teach the history of theatre, acting, and feminist and queer theory.

As such I tend to apply that experience and training to works of culture I encounter, both professionally in the theatre, and on my television with a glass of wine after I put my kids to bed.

The Little Things intrigued me with its stellar cast (Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto—my teenage dreamboat from his days playing Jordan Catalano on “My So-Called Life”), but what I found in this film so angered me that I once again felt compelled, as I did that night on the road, to cry, scream, and excoriate the person who made me feel so powerless.

The Little Things does not just show us violence.  It performs it.

Allow me to explain…

Sara Ahmed, feminist cultural theorist, writes about the role of fear in its ability to control women as potentialized future victims.  She writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) that “[t]he object of fear is not simply before us, or in front of us, but impresses upon us in the present, as an anticipated pain in the future” (65).  What Ahmed argues here is that in an “anticipation” of future fear, we (women-identified people) experience fear in the present.  It is the pounding of our hearts, the wetting of our palms, the tightening of our chests.

These physical manifestations of our fear can be explained through the use of affect theory, which argues that affects are embodied experiences that happen before conscious thought. Regardless of whether or not we are under attack, our subconscious feels that we are and our body responds in-kind.

Brain Massumi, a leading scholar in the field of affect theory argues in “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat” in The Affect Theory Reader (2010) that “[t]hreat is from the future. It is what might come next. Its eventual location and ultimate extent are undefined. Its nature is open-ended. It is not just that it is not: it is not in a way that is never over. We can never be done with it […] The future of threat is forever” (53).  In watching this film I was threatened.  The violence on the screen can happen to me—to my friends—to my daughter.  The violence is out there… waiting… for us.

The Little Things is billed by its distributer, HBO, as a “psychological thriller from director John Lee Hancock following two cops, one haunted by echoes of his past investigating a series of murderes in Los Angeles,” but it is so much more, and so much less than that. 

The story follows the “two cops,” Joe ‘Deke’ Deacon (Denzel Washington), and Jim Baxter (Rami Malek), as they attempt to find the serial killer, (ostensibly) Albert Sparma (Jared Leto)… but we’ll never know for sure.  Deke and Baxter know in their guts that Sparma is the killer, but must find the evidence to prove it.  As Deke seeks to right wrongs of the past, Baxter looks to right the wrongs of the present.  The unlikely duo leans on one another in an effort to bring the killer to justice.

And all of that is fine on its face… but when you put a film out into the world that purports to be about men finding out what justice might look like and the sacrifices you might have to make to find it and to find yourself—and the way that the men find themselves is by confronting more than half-a-dozen dead, naked, tortured women, then you have a problem (and I’m not even getting into the fact that this film essentially valorizes killer-cops).

These aren’t well-developed female characters whose lives are cut short by events outside of their control… they never speak.  With the small exception of Maya Kazan who tells her running buddy that she can run home in the dark because “it’s only three blocks” and is never seen or heard from again, NOT ONE of these dead women speak.  They are props.  Their bound, naked, tortured bodies are props… so that the men at the center of the film can have a transformational experience.

I’m a feminist who enjoys movies.  I’m used to female characters who serve the ‘larger purpose’ of providing a transformative experience for male characters.  Whether it’s Natalie Portman’s manic/ pixie/ dream girl from Garden State, or Nicole Kidman’s “prostitute-who-learns-to-love” from Moulin Rouge, there are many movies and films that I genuinely enjoy even when the female character’s “journey” is really just there to serve the greater purpose of the male-lead.  But when those female characters never speak—when they have no stories, no context, no faces—when they are not even characters, then they cannot be subjects, they are objects.  And in this film women are objectified in the most grotesque possible ways—hooded, bound, naked, and bloody.

To be a filmmaker is to tell stories.  What story is John Lee Hancock trying to tell here?  What lesson are we to learn?  As a cis-gendered woman watching this film all that I could think was that the objectified, dead, female prop-bodies looked like me.  Like my friends.  Like my daughter will one day.

John Lee Hancock’s film is violence.  Watching it is consenting to violence and perpetrating violence against women.  It makes us afraid in the present for what could, might, probably will, happen in the future.  It is affective and it is powerful and it is violence.

What’s worse is that Hancock seems to be somewhat aware of this fact.  He posits that several of the objectified, dead, female prop-bodies were “hookers.”  In fact, multiple women listed on the film’s IMDB page are in uncredited roles as “Hooker,” or “Lady-of-the-Night.”  This trope of the dead prostitute is affective as well, and in some ways even more evident of the filmmaker’s complete and total lack of regard for women writ large.  “Hookers” are used as a distanciation effect—to make viewers feel some sense of safety because “those women… they live a more risky life than I do… they engage in ‘bad behavior’ and while I don’t think what happened to them is okay… I know it wouldn’t happen to me.  I’m not a hooker!”

Let’s problematize this trope in two parts: first, even if a woman is a “hooker,” “prostitute,” “lady-of-the-night,” or even the more acceptable term (this is 2021 after all) “sex-worker” they still should not be expendable—in real life or in films.  Women who exchange sex for money are people too.  Second, by putting “regular” woman at ease because sex workers are somehow more ‘murder-able,’ Hancock (and the litany of cis-straight white men before him) posit that if a woman does find herself hooded, bound, bloodied, and dead… well… maybe it was a little bit her fault.

Stop it.  Just stop. 

In 1985 Alison Bechdel wrote and illustrated the comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For and in it she created what came to be known as the Bechdel Test to determine the representation of women in film (though she credits her discovery with reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own).  The “test” is three simple questions:

1.     Are there two female characters with names?

2.     Who speak to each other?

3.     About something other than a man?

The paucity of films that pass this test even today is shameful.  Not only does The Little Things not even come close to passing this test, one look at the cast list reveals that not only is it a Bechdel failure, but that the majority of the female characters in this film are objectified, dead, female prop-bodies.  There are only three women who speak more than a few words in this movie.  A woefully underused Natalie Morlaes, and the always compelling Michael Hyatt, whose entire purpose in the film is to hand Denzel Washington an old bullet on a keychain (notably pulled from one of those dead, mutilated, female prop-bodies).  The only other woman to speak is Isabel Arraiza who plays the ‘worried wife’ to Malek’s ‘tortured-husband.’

While I commend Hancock for centering non-white characters and actors throughout this film, I can only assume that he expected kudos for representation while simultaneously telling any and all female viewers, and any and all viewers who know women that “this just happens to women.”

To telegraph that message in 2021 is beyond tone-deaf, it is actively contributing a culture of violence against women. 

It is widely known that Hancock wrote the film in the 1990’s where it was set.  And maybe (okay, definitely) that is where it should have stayed.  As a script, in a drawer, in the past.  No one needs to see this.  This film contributes nothing to a larger conversation, and while Denzel Washington is excellent in nearly everything he does, there are no stellar performances to note.  Malek is melodramatic and while Leto has successfully erased Jordan Catalano from my heart strings, his performance of a creepy would-be-serial killer is boring and uninspired.

Moreover, Leto was nominated for (and thankfully lost) a Golden Globe (problematic in-and-of-itself) for the role. And this isn’t the first time he’s received accolades for a role that did violence to a marginalized community!

In 2013 the film Dallas Buyers Club made headlines for sharing the true story of Ron Woodroof, a straight white cis-man, who finds himself battling HIV and then AIDS at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Stars Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto were showered with praise for their radical transformations— McConaughey for losing fifty pounds for the role, and Leto for putting on make-up and high heels and playing Rayon, a trans-woman with AIDS.

While much of Hollywood held up the film as a testament to the both actors’ range and willingness to sacrifice for their respective roles, the LGBTQIA community wanted to know why? 

Why was Jared Leto cast in a role based on an actual trans-woman when there are hundreds, if not thousands, of incredibly talented and versatile trans-women performers?

When Leto won Best Supporting Actor for the role at the Golden Globes he (in)famously joked about shaving his legs in his acceptance speech.  Thankfully, that joke fell by the wayside when he accepted his Oscar for the role. 

The criticism of Leto for playing a trans-woman wasn’t just that Leto was taking on a role that he couldn’t possibly understand and that should have gone to a trans-woman.  It was that having him in that role didn’t just show us what violence against the trans community looks like, it contributed to it.

By continually casting (often straight) cis-men in trans-women’s roles (Eddie Redmayne in The Dutch Girl, Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent, Matt Boemer in Anything) it perpetuates the (false) notion that trans-women are really just men in dresses.  By affirming that trans-women aren’t really women, it makes the world a demonstrably less safe place for trans-women to live.  Because, and this needs to be made abundantly clear: trans-women are women.

Now, in 2021 audiences once again find Jared Leto, in what the Hollywood Foreign Press believes to be an award-worthy role, perpetuating violence.

This isn’t a Jared Leto problem, though in this instance he seems to embody it—it is an issue of who gets to tell whose story and, maybe more significantly, it is the problematizing of what the consequences of telling a story are—who tells it, how it is told, who is it going to effect and affect—that needs to be considered.

The most interesting, if meta-theatrical, moment of the film came when all three men found themselves in an interrogation room at the police station.  As the detectives, Deke and Baxter attempted to rouse a confession out of Sparma, they show him the photos of the victims (and the viewers get to see them too!).  All women.  All naked.  All bound, gagged, hooded, and covered in blood and “love bites.” 

Sparma flips through the images and becomes erect and as soon as Deke sees the erection he exclaims, “Your dick’s as hard as Chinese arithmetic” at which point both he and Baxter charge at Sparma.  When another cop comes in to break up the scuffle Sparma laughs and Deke tells him, “We know… you know… we got you by the balls!”

Maybe that’s what these films are—a sick pornographic vision of the violence that can be done to women and enjoyed by men—either casting men as larger-than-life, violent, powerful, monsters, whose erections at the images of women’s dead bodies are the evidence of their monstrosity; or “angelic” heroes trying to find justice for those silenced and bloodied.

Either way, I’m done.  I am so over films that use women as victim-props to tell male stories.

Moreover, I have a new personal rule: if there is a dead and naked woman in the first fifteen minutes of a movie I turn it off.  And I would urge you, dear reader, to do the same.

I’m not watching this shit anymore.