The Cheap Tricks of Me Too Thrillers

In the play “Poor Things” by Yorgos Lanthimos, the protagonist, Bella (Emma Stone), is a young woman who has been through traumatic experiences that have left her with the body of a fetus and the brain of a 30-something adult. She travels the world with a known womanizer, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), and is part of an experiment in reanimation by a Dr. Frankenstein-style mad scientist.

At a lively gathering one evening, I found myself drawn to an alluring man, and the feeling was mutual. Our connection was intense, but as we grew closer, I began to suspect that this charming gentleman had a dark side – a potential abuser, even a murderer. With newfound determination and anger, I resolved to free myself from his grasp and seek retribution. This narrative unfolds in Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, “Blink Twice“, where the character Frida (played by Naomi Ackie) finds herself trapped with a manipulative tech billionaire named Slater King (Channing Tatum), who subjected her to repeated abuse on his private island. However, in due time, she manages to exact revenge on this monstrous man before escaping

To put it straight, these contemporary social thrillers, such as “Promising Young Woman” and “Don’t Worry Darling,” share a common theme: they expose the pervasiveness of rape culture. However, by merely emphasizing this familiar message without delving into other intricate emotional issues surrounding sexual violence, these films fail to address many crucial questions that survivors and our society as a whole grapple with

Part of the reason Me Too thrillers cannot begin to answer these pressing questions is that their high-concept premises turn their characters — especially their women — into modern mythic archetypes rather than people. Blink Twice’s Frida, a working-class Black woman wooed by a hard-partying tech CEO, stands in for women who are exploited by powerful men; Promising Young Woman’s Cassie (Cary Mulligan), a med-school dropout obsessed with the rape and subsequent suicide of her friend, is the Ur-traumatized woman who can’t just “move on”; Don’t Worry Darling’s Alice (Florence Pugh), a surgeon whose husband traps her in a computer simulation that makes her believe she’s a 1950s housewife, represents careerwomen saddled with unsupportive partners.

In an attempt to make their characters universally relatable, Me Too thrillers often fail to fully portray the women whose stories they claim to tell. These characters are introduced without proper backstory, being drawn into the intricate plots typical of Me Too movies instead. Filmmakers may have valid reasons for creating such hollow female characters, but this approach has drawbacks. For instance, in the movie “Blink Twice,” Frida’s abuser erases her memory after assaulting her, which is meant to depict cycles of abuse but leaves viewers struggling to connect with Frida due to a lack of understanding about who she truly is. Similarly, Alice in “Don’t Worry Darling” spends most of the film unaware that she’s in a simulation, making it challenging for us to grasp her identity as well. Conversely, Cassie in “Promising Young Woman” has an overemphasized memory of her friend’s rape, which overshadows her other characteristics and risks reducing her to a one-dimensional character. Instead of skimping on the intriguing aspects of these premises, skilled filmmakers could delve deeper into how trauma affects selfhood, making it hard for us to comprehend our own identities during abuse and difficult to understand ourselves long after

Our protagonists torment and humiliate sleazy men, kill their husbands using whiskey glasses, or stab rapists with corkscrews.”

After highlighting injustices, films within the Me Too movement refrain from exploring the aftermath of abuse or assault disclosures for their characters or society. Instead, they replace introspective growth with hasty, superficial empowerment. For instance, in “Don’t Worry Darling,” Alice exclaims, “I loved working!” upon learning she’s a surgeon, but the film fails to explain what exactly Alice finds appealing about medicine. Soon after, the imprisoned wives abruptly turn against their husbands, one of them asserting, “You stupid, stupid man. It’s my turn now,” as she stabs her husband. (It is unclear what this ‘turn’ refers to, as the Me Too thriller does not consider it a significant question.) “Success is the best revenge” claims Frida in “Blink Twice,” who by the film’s end ascends to become a tech empire CEO, mirroring an earnest narrative arc from victim to CEO, which represents the underlying message of these stories: The body stores pain, but asserting oneself as a Girlboss offers liberation

In an attempt to provide a fresh perspective and intrigue, let me express the phenomenon through a different lens:

One way to rephrase the given text is: “The unique ability of films like ‘The Stepford Wives’ (1975) and ‘Get Out’ to offer profound insights into something commonly known yet disturbing was their major accomplishment. ‘The Stepford Wives’, a satire-horror film, depicts men who replace their spouses with robot housekeepers after killing them, which also influenced ‘Get Out’. What makes both movies remarkable is that they don’t aim to prove the existence of sexism or racism; instead, they assume we are already aware of these injustices. They then use satire to critique their respective subjects –- dull men in Connecticut and hypocritical white liberals in upstate New York –- before turning into horror stories.”

In a regrettable turn of events, the Me Too social thrillers often lack the humor and satire found in classics like “The Stepford Wives” or “Get Out.” Instead, they seem overly focused on proving the existence of patriarchy rather than exploring its impact. For instance, “Promising Young Woman” appears to be one such example where the protagonist, Cassie, meticulously punishes those involved in her friend’s demise, from the dismissive university dean to the backstabbing frenemy. It feels as though the filmmaker, Fennell, is urging us to jot down lessons for home, rather than delving into the authentic lived experiences of patriarchy

In a truthful manner, “Blink Twice” recognizes that, having passed six years since the start of the Me Too movement, people are no longer surprised by instances of men’s misconduct. The narrative introduces Frida, who is seated on the toilet, viewing a video that mirrors our current post-Me Too atmosphere – an interview with the disgraced tech CEO Slater, who seems remorseful for his past indiscretions. Later, we see Frida scolding her friend for persistently returning to a less than ideal partner; soon after, when Frida manages to arrange a meeting with Slater, she playfully asks the therapist introduced by Slater to “blink twice if I’m in danger.” The therapist does exactly that. It is clear that Slater is a questionable character, and both Frida and her friend are aware of this, yet they still choose to accept an invitation to Slater’s island akin to Jeffrey Epstein’s. The storyline of the Me Too thriller “Blink Twice” does not delve into the motives behind their decision, as it is not essential for the plot

It’s a disappointing omission, because what’s most interesting here is precisely these gaps in the storytelling: What did Slater do, and how does Frida explain his misconduct away? Why do we trust powerful, obviously Bad Men when we know better? What exactly is Frida drawn to about Slater? How does her inner life change as she comes to suspect something’s wrong? How does she relate to herself, her friends, other men, other women? We never learn, because the genre is pathologically allergic to specificity, and because the Me Too social thriller’s job is not to render a portrait of how one woman gets entrapped by one man; it’s to show us all women, trapped by all men. Why spoil the thrill of revealing the patriarchy with the messy details of an actual woman’s life?

One recent movie that does actually take a sincere interest in a specific woman’s life after trauma is Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film Poor Things, about a young woman named Bella (Emma Stone) who embarks on a sexual awakening. Perhaps more than any of the women in Me Too thrillers, Bella could be nothing but a traumatized body: Though she appears to be a 30-something young woman, she actually has the brain of a fetus, which a Dr. Frankenstein–style mad scientist implanted into her as part of an experiment in reanimation. To make matters worse, when Bella seems roughly adolescent-brained, and with the partial blessing of her semi-paternal figure, she absconds on a world tour with a known womanizer, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo).

Similar to the Me Too thrillers, Poor Things delves into a form of escapism, but instead of physically confronting male abusers with violence and retribution, it presents an emotional exploration. This story asks, “What if marginalized girls and women could challenge their manipulators and predators using the power of swiftly developing intellects and mature bodies aware of their own desires?” The result is that we may find such men to be comical figures in the end. It’s worth noting that a lesser-explored aspect about abusers is that they can be truly terrifying at one moment but foolish in another. In the heat of trauma, it’s hard to perceive their folly, but art serves as a sanctuary – perhaps the only safe haven – where we can transform villains into jesters, effectively diminishing their threat. (Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, in a similar vein, constructs an imaginary world where we can view patriarchy, embodied by Ryan Gosling as Ken, as absurd.)

In an effort to shed light on a subject that’s been overshadowed by the focus on men’s power, it’s regrettable that so many Me Too narratives have been fixated on the male perspective. Abusers’ stories don’t have to be clichéd, but movies about abuse can delve into other aspects of their lives. The inner realities of sexual-assault survivors, let alone our connections with each other, friends, family, and institutions, are incredibly diverse. However, if we wish to listen to those varied narratives, we need to keep the lens trained on them instead of switching to black-and-white imagery

2024-09-05 15:54

The Cheap Tricks of Me Too Thrillers

Read More

Minority Mindset