Part 2: Women Talking...
...about the degeneracy of men for 2 hours!: 'A Miserable Vision of Stark Misandry'
As you will probably acknowledge if you read ‘Part 1’ of this review, and if you’ve seen more than two shows or films in the past five years, there is a kind of social/cultural agenda bending our entertainment in certain distinct directions. This agenda can’t be named or discussed in mainstream forums. You’ll never see it acknowledged in the New York Times (except perhaps for the ‘allegedly’-framing that they use to impugn obvious realities). Nevertheless, it exists and it is ubiquitous. There’s a different kind of cultural product, though. It’s somewhat more open in its goals (not honest, exactly, for it will never be acknowledged as the base propaganda which it is) but it is far more reprehensible.
I saw a film on HBO 3-4 years ago about a black high school girl who intimately knew a person (her brother perhaps? I refuse to waste 5 minutes researching this film) who was killed by police. These are happy, middle-class kids in a progressive and racially-diverse community, daily participating in the kind of extracurriculars that would have been familiar to my HS graduating class. The killer (white, of course) is depicted as basically a psychopath…a trembling and poorly contained ball of rage with a great deal of hostility to and fear of (it’s implied) innocent black citizens.
This is not an impossible scenario. All kinds of people end up being killed by police. I personally know 3 victims of police violence, none of them black, two of them unarmed at the time, all of them dead. There are certainly psychopaths within the ranks of the police and a disproportionate number (I would guess) of angry and racist men. BUT most victims of police violence are criminals and they’re nearly always committing a crime when killed. They’re almost never happy suburbanites. Again, imagine the counterpoint:
(film scene) A desperate and violent middle-aged black man (a serial spousal abuser) is charging his ex-wife with a knife and the cop screams at him to ‘drop it!’ and the man turns and begins striding toward the police officer, who’s 15 feet away.
The cop is a young Asian officer on the force for 4 years… and he opens fire. The batterer dies on the way to the hospital and the police officer suffers psychological effects for years.
This is an interesting and far more realistic scenario, and the family of the slain could be shown with their likely school behavioral issues, family drug problems, and financial insecurity. THIS story would never get made. It has all the wrong depictions of black life in the US (as if any community is devoid of dysfunction these days!) and introduces complicated and morally ambiguous factors which actually afflict poor families and involve police shootings every day. Instead we get a morality tale: black people = angelic, articulate, dignified; police = racist, angry, recklessly violent. The valences of the character depictions are completely consistent with the agenda of our cultural institutions and so the fact that it’s laughably distorted (and boring and poorly written) is inconsequential. No one should criticize a single film for an entire culture’s agenda but we now have a culture littered with such trite and idiotic artifacts… while the issues and interests of real life remain unaddressed. This is not a healthy state of affairs for a culture!
As I was saying (before my indignant recollection of that HBO film-still nameless to my recollection-derailed me): there are films which have been guided and constrained by the message of the cultural Left… and then there are pieces of naked, angry propaganda. ‘Women Talking’ is the latter kind of film. Like an abortion clinic-owning superhero or a reimagined biopic in which George Washington is a transwoman, this film is almost too extreme to be believable, and the rapturous awards season reception that it has gotten is another in a long line of confirmations that our elites have lost their collective mind. They’re completely unmoored from the characteristics and concerns of normal people (i.e., people who are not locked in an anti-patriarchy death struggle). Such a claim would probably astound them, yet I make it here: most women rather like many men (even masculine men! Perhaps especially masculine men), and most men are generally kind and decent towards women. It’s almost as if the two situations are related. Huh.
I recently watched a mocking film review of this movie which continued to refer to it as Women Talking. I was surprised to find out that is the actual name of the film. I then watched the film itself, and my mood is still recovering. The film is extremely slow, extremely dark (cinematically as well-the color balance is tilted to ‘low saturation’, making shadows deepen and all colors seem like shades of brown or grey), and extremely grim. This is not a film that anyone could ‘enjoy’ yet the critics awarded it 220 nominations, apparently. Why? Simply, because it tells a culture-approved story and all of the details and characters conspire to emphasize the hammer blows of thematic development in the correct political directions. This is not a happy film, or a well-made film (although the acting is excellent), or a realistic film… but it is an approved film and the approval has been enthusiastic.
This film is uninteresting to me as a piece of writing or cinema, and I suspect that it’s uninteresting to many of the critics. It received 220 awards nominations and a 90% Critics’ Score on Rotten Tomatoes and while the writing (aside from verisimilitude) and acting is top-notch that is tangential to the value of this film. The Critics’ Consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is fairly open about their focus:
"While Women Talking sometimes forsakes entertaining drama in favor of simply getting its points across, its message is valuable -- and effectively delivered."
Or, Wikipedia:
Peter Debruge from Variety wrote that the film is a "powerful act of nonviolent protest" (Wikipedia)
When I read critical statements like this I immediately wonder if it’s a good film. That, frankly, is not the point for most critics these days. If a film or a comedian or a book transgresses a few of the thousands of invisible tripwires it is worthless, counterproductive, problematic, and should be savaged accordingly… boycotted if possible! Craft, characterization, and viewing experience are now second-rate (at most) considerations for critics. Unfortunately they remain the primary interests of film-goers (at least until the crowds have been thoroughly re-educated).
Women Talking is supposedly based on a case of group serial rape which occurred in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia… but the two stories are wildly different and the changes have all been made to justify the prejudices and political agendas of the writers. Consequently it’s not really reflective of Mennonites, or victims, or women… or human beings.
This film is an allegory. It’s not an attempt to create a story so much as to make a political statement-even many of its fawning critics recognize that the film is bare and plodding. It’s certainly not character-driven, because there is powerfully little character development. The men are a uniformly oppressive and evil mass (save one, who I’ll cover shortly). The women are individualized but are only foils for feminist archetypes: the young and innocent and confused victim, the hard-bitten and world-weary self-protector, the outraged young activists (the clear heroes of the film). A good work of fiction (written or filmed) contains moral complexity and sympathetic villains and situations which seem difficult but imaginable to the reader/viewer. Good writing contains nuance. This film has no nuance because the people who created it don’t see the world in a nuanced way. They understand society and cultural and political debates as simple good/evil narratives in which they eternally hold the moral high ground. They understand people as primarily avatars of their racial/sexual/social group and therefore individually uninteresting. This film is not, in any sense, an account of the Bolivian Mennonite sexual abuse scandal, for it bears absolutely no resemblance to the “true events” it was “inspired by”.
The massive deviations are instructive. In brief (from Wikipedia):
The Bolivian Mennonite gas-facilitated rapes refers to mass serial rapes by a group of men over at least four years in the Bolivian Mennonite settlement of Manitoba Colony. At least nine male members of the colony sprayed a veterinary sedative through window screens to render whole households unconscious. They then entered homes and raped the residents, particularly women and girls (but also small children).[1] The minimum number of known victims stands at 151.[2] Many victims were raped on multiple occasions. The youngest victim was three years old, the oldest was 65.[1] Multiple victims were pregnant and one delivered an extremely premature baby after going into labor following a rape.[3] There are believed to have been both adult and child male victims as well, but none were publicly identified.[2] The perpetrators were in some cases blood relatives of the victims, the crimes thus including incestuous abuse.[4]
The initial series of rapes was interrupted when two of the perpetrators were caught breaking and entering in June 2009. They implicated seven others within the Manitoba Colony community of about 2,500 people. The culprits stated they had been committing the rapes since 2005.[1] The men were turned over to Bolivian law enforcement for prosecution.[2]
So a gang of 9 psychopaths exploited the rural innocence and communal introversion of an isolated South American community to perpetrate many, many acts of sexual abuse over the course of years. When they were discovered they were handed over to the authorities by the enraged and horrified community members (men and women) and the men received lengthy prison sentences.
In the film…
The men are all complicit in the rapes. Every man in the community (and yes, even the boys) knows what’s happening. While the rapes are perpetrated by lone actors or small groups there seems to be a general awareness of the crimes. It’s strongly implied that rape is actually sanctioned here, if only through inaction, and so you have groups of men raping young girls and brothers raping sisters (yes, really). When the police become aware of the situation they arrest some of the offenders but the men (the leadership of the community is solely done by men-any indication of the radical democracy of real Mennonite communities has been erased) go as a group to bail their friends and brothers out and command the women to forgive their attackers. Rather than being horrified and angry (as the male relatives were in Bolivia) the male relatives protect the rapists. Why? The men are a uniform mass here. They’re almost never referred to as individuals, even when women are describing lone acts. This is difficult to imagine in a small, close-knit community. Rather than seeing all women as a coalition with shared interests against the oppressive category of ‘men’ the women would relate to the men (and vice versa) as individuals, in ways proscribed by gender roles but also circumstance and temperament and need. While Mennonite women would not talk like this, 21st century urban feminists would and do. This is a screed against a group of people who are depicted as holding all of the power and leveraging it to rape and assault at will. Traditional communities throughout history were never like this and none of the religious communities I’m aware of had a system of values remotely similar. This is a allegory about ‘patriarchy’, not a story or a true account. It makes me rather pity the public image of the Mennonites! If these were indigenous or black men in the story the plot would never take this shape but they’re white and Christian, and so well within the accepted modern categories for cinematic evil.
Mennonite women are educated as much (often more, for they are often schoolteachers and office workers in the community) than men… but none of these women can read or write. They have not only been kept in sexual bondage, prey to violence at any man’s whim, but they have been denied education! This is a rather dramatic change to make and makes no sense if the aim is to convey a story. It only makes sense in the context of creating a female versus male revolutionary struggle, the dream of feminists everywhere, constantly foiled by the fact that men and women aren’t separate classes or parties but occupy the same houses and workplaces and stores and love each other and work together. This situation remains a bitter disappointment to some.
The only man whose character is at all fleshed out is one young schoolteacher (August, played by Ben Whishaw) who is conscripted to stay behind (as all the men leave to bail out the serial rapists, and then probably have some beers and watch the game before returning to the colony). This is the only man who has any real dialogue and the only one who is not portrayed as thuggish and evil. His character is instructive: this is the kind of man such feminists want to replicate. He’s shy, stammering, emotional (weeping so hard he can’t continue on multiple occasions in the film) and submissive. He gladly accepts the rage and derision of the women in the barn. “May I request that you take it in turns to speak… “ he begins (for he’s the stenographer of the conversation around which the film centers). “Should we put up our hands as if we’re children in your schoolhouse?” revolutionary heroine replies. “I apologize…” he stammers. “We the women will decide what happens in these meetings! not a two-bit failed farmer who must teach. You’ve been invited here to listen to what we have to say and write it down… nothing more!” Revolutionary heroine later says. Aside from being fairly ungrateful, this is vitriolic (and misplaced) and feminist. It’s gold for some of the young women watching the film but it’s not what a Mennonite woman would say! Rather, it’s a fantasy self-insert: this is what a woman who’d been victimized by men would like to say to a man… so in it goes. The whole film is like this, with August simultaneously bearing the scorn and anger for being a man while constantly apologizing and hesitating. He’s a trophy of female empowerment, a not-so-hidden symbol of what qualities the writers of this film wish men more often possessed: abject, deferential, submissive, cowed.
His last scene in the film is one where he expresses his love for one of the pretty young radicals (spirited, angry) and she say to him, smiling with casual pity, that “if [she] were married…” she wouldn’t be herself and so she wouldn’t be the woman he loves! This focus on self-actualization (the idea that marriage would change who a person is fundamentally) and the impression of marriage as an optional lifestyle accessory bears no resemblance to Mennonite women but is very familiar to contemporary feminists. The film is absolutely rife with sweeping political declarations: “Our freedom and safety are the ultimate goals… and it is men who prevent us from achieving those goals." Spoken like a true Christian housewife, indeed. One of the older women says “The leaders taught the men and boys the lesson of power and the men and boys learned it well.” This kind of abstract, power-focused, class-structured social commentary isn’t likely to come from a woman who can’t read. It’s also unimaginable coming from an actual Mennonite woman (remember-these are non-overlapping categories). It’s perfectly rote coming from a third-wave feminist though. This entire film is simply a radical feminist lecture, structured as dialogue and placed into the context of a kind of muted crime drama.
The last element I will describe here is the most repulsive. I’m actually surprised they left it in the film. I believe it will degrade the propaganda value for women who have sons… but perhaps the women involved in crafting this film know so few mothers of sons-or women with masculine boys around them regularly in any capacity-that this flaw wasn’t apparent to them. The women are discussing whether the boys (12, 13, 14, 15, etc. year old boys) are a threat to them and their daughters. Bear in mind: these boys are close friends and family of the women in the barn. The women are considering whether to leave their 12-year old sons and brothers behind when they flee or whether they are already too infected by misogyny, and therefore a danger to the women and girls. They ask August (the teacher of these boys!) for his opinion. This is the only time in the film such a radical thing happens, and we immediately see why it does. “Do the boys pose a threat to the women and the girls?” “Yes. Boys of 13 or 14 are capable of causing great damage to girls and women… They are possessed of reckless urges… “ blah blah blah. This goes on for another 2 minutes but the point is made: 12-year old boys (all of them) are simply too saturated with masculinity to stay with their mothers and sisters. There’s never any mention of God or instruction or morality or scripture in all of these exchanges.
This film was absolutely showered in awards nominations.
As the anti-boy monologue is delivered, the camera shows boys roughhousing and running into class and (muted) laughing and talking. It cuts away and shows the dead-eyed glare of boy after boy staring into the camera in still-frame close-ups, while ominous music plays. The message is clear: not only are all men collaborators in raping and oppressing women but boys are little better, evil men-in-training, as it were. None of the boys are mentioned by name (just as none of the men ever are). They must be judged as a group, and so they are condemned as a group. “Hello little brother” one young, despondent girl intones, staring at the ground as the camera pans away. “I don’t know if the baby is yours or… if it was… one of your friends…” It this moment I understood the deep depravity of this film. This film is creating a fictional world in which religion and masculinity and tradition all contribute to a dehumanization of women so profound that young boys rape their sisters as a matter of course. Never, to my knowledge, has there been such a culture on Earth. Yet it exists, in the minds of the writers and in the hearts of some of the critics
Even for a film produced by radical feminists, this is unusually hateful towards men and boys. It received more awards nominations than any film in the past 5 years (other than Everything Everywhere All At Once). More than an adaptation or an allegory this film is a symptom: our culture is distorted in unhealthy directions. That a story this venomous towards men could be written and the flaws and unreality overlooked by judges in their enthusiasm is truly astonishing to me and it’s a symptom of a cultural malady. The nausea you feel as you watch this horrible misandrist screed? That’s yet another symptom…