The Killer Inside Me

Directed by Michael Winterbottom
IFC Films



The song "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" sums up all Jim Thompson’s oeuvre. When he wrote his novels (mostly in the '50s) they were rightly regarded as violent misogynist twaddle. It was only after his death that certain misguided critics mistook his nihilistic, bad-day-at-the-abattoir style for art. Thompson’s writing has all the literary merit of pissing your name in snow. Like Mickey Spillane, he saw two kinds of people in the world: bad men and the women who love them. The mistake director Michael Winterbottom makes (in his new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me) is to believe Thompson’s worldview teaches us anything apart from bad taste.

In a dusty, nowhere little town in Texas, a young sheriff likes to beat women. He was raised to be bad, by his no-good daddy and his paedophile half-brother. Even his babysitter was a sadomasochist. Now, cloaked by his badge of office and spurred-on by legal impunity, he plots the death of a rich boy who manslaughtered his sibling. Since we’re in Jim Thompson-country, he can’t just kill the rich boy, of course. He must kill a few chicks along the way (because he’s bad and women want him, badly). He’s got two women in his life: a good girl and a whore (one girl, if you read Freud). They both worship him enough to inspire hate, and to turn him on to murder.

I shut my eyes when Casey Affleck beat Jessica Alba to death. Even listening for a minute was tough. This scene, which has stirred the critical backlash against the movie, is true to Jim Thompson’s lurid vision, but watching it doesn’t tell us much. In interviews, Michael Winterbottom has argued that ultra-violence is moral, because it’s unattractive to most people. The trouble is: it’s only unattractive to moral people. (Wife-beaters love watching women get punched in the face.) Does Winterbottom think we’re under some illusion about what beating a woman to death looks like? Jim Thompson wasn’t a feminist, for Pete’s sake. He wrote what he wrote because lurid violence sells. His work only seems insightful because psychos have so few thoughts. Pity the man who wants to see women battered.

As the sheriff, Casey Affleck has a coward’s smile. His signature look—like Ben Affleck if he’d killed somebody—is used to good effect here. He’s got eyes that seem to die on people. His voice is permanently curled into his throat, waiting to be kicked. Everything about him is wounded. Unfortunate women think he’s “vulnerable.” Men mistake him for a servant. But both ways of seeing him look like weakness from his point of view. His wounds aren’t there to be healed, or to be used against him. He’s long past that. His wounds are, in fact, the only reminder there is that he was once a child. For him, feelings are what he fakes, the way a hunter baits a trap.

There’s no such complexity to the women’s roles. (The old action movie maxim: “Any woman is superfluous to the plot unless naked or dead” was probably invented by Jim Thompson.) Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson do their best, but their roles are pretty much confined to the bedroom (or the grave). They are the women who’d sing "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)". Every woman in Jim Thompson’s fiction has a taste for male dominance and bloodshed disguised as sex. The only difference between a murder scene and a sex scene for Thompson is that his killers actually enjoy murder. Sex might be hot for these guys, but it’s always foreplay to death.

There is an audience for this kind of thing. In the '50s—hell, for most of human history—men wrote violent misogynist twaddle, and people lapped it up. As in rap lyrics today, there’s a supposed authenticity in boy-on-girl spite. But woman-haters are all liars. And not even interesting liars at that. Misogyny is the thinnest veil for self-doubt. Women are everywhere, after all. How big a man’s fears have to be to encompass an entire sex! (So big they dwarf him.) The makers of The Killer Inside Me know their anti-hero is a personality void, so they accentuate violence, like real misogynists. This can’t hide the littleness of the man, or how empty the movie is.

Review by James Tatham

Cross-posted at Movie Waffle

The Pregnant Widow

By Martin Amis
Knopf

I’m so upset that I’m not at Hay Festival right now. Because the lineup looks phenomenal. Not only is Stephen Fry doing a talk, but Zadie Smith and Martin Amis are both on the lineup. Now, Smith is awesome for all sorts of reasons, and, coincidentally, I actually read White Teeth at Hay Festival last year. But this year I’d be more interested in seeing Amis—which is surprising given that he is a grumpy old man with a penchant for misogyny. Or so the legend goes. He, in fact, denies this claim, and tells us that his book, The Pregnant Widow, is "very feminist"—although he admits it will get him in trouble.

Indeed, it has not been received particularly well from the lovely group of people at BBC 2's The Review Show. Supposedly about the feminist revolution and the destruction that it wreaked on the people who were affected by sexual liberation, I found (as, it seems, did Germaine Greer) that there was an awful lot of focus on body parts. Scheherazade has big tits. Gloria has a big arse. And Keith’s girlfriend Lily has neither. That seems to be all that matters for a lot of the book. Keith’s main mission is to sleep with as many of the girls as possible, and then (*spoiler alert*) he marries all of them in succession.

The characterisation of the female characters is weak. Scheherazade is a ridiculous appropriation of the "poor little rich girl" stereotype, lifted from a piece of chick lit where marriage is the only goal. (I am aware that comment is derogatory to chick lit and, as I am reading a book about that very subject at the moment, I thus present this long back-covering disclaimer.) Scheherazade is the only woman who ends up happy, because she gets married and has kids, ignoring the sexual liberation movement. Woop. Well done, girl.

Violet, however, Keith’s free-spirited sister, gets destroyed. Killed off because she has too much sex. She is apparently based on Amis’ own sister, Sally, whom he is convinced was killed by her promiscuity, or some other such ridiculous reason. Maybe it had actually nothing to do with feminism, and neither does the demise of Violet, who appears to have mental health issues and is dire need of help. That is why she dies—not because feminists allowed women their sexual agency and made it less (not completely) shameful to have sex as a woman.

Keith is an overly whiny character. He needs to get some courage and just deal with his issues. He always seems to want to blame someone else for his own failings in life—and it’s irritating. He is not a lovable character and, quite honestly, I’m not rooting for him for most of the novel. Or any of it, actually.

Despite all this, and despite Amis’ desire to elevate his own (or Keith’s own, although it’s supposed to be semi-autobiographical) struggle to a higher level by associating it with 1970s feminism, I really enjoyed The Pregnant Widow. The personal is not always political, which I think Amis might need to think about before he tries this sort of thing again, and despite it making me angry every now and again (particularly the pretentiousness of Keith’s character), I liked it.

The Pregnant Widow is evocative, well-written, and clever, and the story is enjoyable. (Although I do feel it tapers out a bit when we get into serious mid-life crisis territory.) It’s not the usual "zOMG look how postmodern I am" offering from Amis, and I really liked it. Maybe even loved it.

Review by Amy Elizabeth Richards

Iron Man 2

Directed by Jon Favreau
Paramount Pictures



Before Iron Man hit theatres in 2008, most of us thought of Jon Favreau as the guy who was so money, baby—and he didn't even know it. Critics and audiences expected little from yet another Marvel Comic-inspired film. So when director Favreau delivered an entertaining film with tons of personality (mostly in the form of the amazing Robert Downey Jr.), it was an underdog smash. And what should logically follow an over-performing film (or an under-performing one, for that matter) but a sequel?

Iron Man 2 reintroduces weapons contractor and physicist extraordinaire Tony Stark as the unmasked Iron Man, combating politicians who want Stark to share his Iron Man technology with the U.S. government for security. There's plenty to glean about private property rights and government corruption in this conflict, but you'll have to visit some other blog to satisfy your government paranoia.

While Stark tries to keep his intellectual property out of U.S. government's and the military's hands, he's also contending with an old, Russian grudge-holder (Mickey Rourke), a suspicious but ogle-worthy new executive assistant (Scarlett Johansson), and his ever-nagging, inexplicable love interest Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). All the while, he's scrambling to find the combination of elements that will power his suit and his heart without slowly poisoning his blood.

There are plenty of feminist elements at play here. First, we deal with the Pepper problem. The original film featured the frigid and nagging yet doggedly loyal Pepper Pots in a supportive role to the womanizing and sarcastic Tony. The only thing that really distinguished her was that she slut-shames the women Tony sleeps with, and Paltrow looks bad in bangs. In the sequel, Tony promotes her to CEO of his company on a whim. Although she faces major scrutiny for her complete lack of experience, she deftly handles the company's affairs in a turbulent time. Unfortunately, Pepper's main purpose here is still to hurl more insults at the reporter Tony slept with in the first film (Leslie Bibb), whose investigation played a key role in the plot, and glare at the new women Tony wants to sleep with: Natalie Rushman. After Tony meets Natalie for the first time, he declares, "I want one."

For her part, Natalie could have been the classic femme fatale. Her character is smart, accomplished, all business, and completely badass. She's an excellent employee, and although Tony attempts to play Pepper and Natalie off each other in a competition of feminine wiles, Natalie doesn't seem interested in anything but getting the job done, even in spite of Tony's constant sexual harassment. The two women do briefly talk to each other about something other than a man a time or two, so Iron Man 2 does (barely) pass the Bechdel Test.

However, these two female characters face some sexism individually, in addition to some more general woman-hating. At one point, the leader of the secret 'good guys club' (Samuel L. Jackson) uses the fact that Tony "made a girl your CEO" to prove that he is going off the deep end. (The other reason was that he got drunk, and basically destroyed his house with his Iron Man suit.) The problem isn't that Pepper has no experience leading a multi-billion dollar company or that she doesn't have the necessary leadership style, it's that she's a "girl." (Although Pepper's age isn't specified, Paltrow is 38-years-old, by the way; she is hardly a girl.) Apparently it's just as stupid to hire a 'girl' to be a CEO as it is to basically drunk-drive a weaponized suit around dozens of party guests.

In another scene, creepy contractor Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) asks his colleagues to get "these bitches out of here" when Pepper and Natalie take over the reins of Hammer's weapons demonstration that turned deadly. Luckily for my temper, Natalie puts him in a headlock moments later, and the two women clean up his mess before Pepper has him arrested.

Finally, in a well-trodden cheap shot at married women (oh, what ballbusting harpies we are), Hammer describes the potential for utter devastation held by a missile he's selling to the U.S. Air Force. What does he dub this harbinger of death? The Ex-Wife.

There's more to say, especially about Pepper and Tony's fraught and completely uninteresting flirtation (I know how to shut her up: I'll kiss her), but I've hit on the main points: slut-shaming, sexual harassment, girls are stupid, girls are bitches, and marriage sucks the life out of men. Thanks for making analysis so simple, Iron Man 2.

Yes, it's possible to like a movie and still deplore its messaging on women. But be aware of what you're watching.

Review by Smalls

Cross-posted at Ladybrain Reviews