By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
What Will Women Watch(men)?
I’m looking forward to seeing Watchmen tonight. I know what’s coming, having read the graphic novel and hearing from early reviews that the film is as true to the source material as it is to the costumes. So as a woman who’s not terribly enamored of violence in films, how will I react to watching that violence on a screen, bigger than life?
I fall into the female demographic, but I’m probably not what a Hollywood studio exec would consider a typical female consumer. I loathe most rom-coms and “chick flicks,” both for the way in which they tend to generalize gender roles and objectify women, and for the overall banality of their scripts. It’s a rare thing to find a genuinely smart film targeted primarily at the female audience. I tend to favor art films by obscure foreign directors, or interesting documentaries, or little indie films at fests. I’m not a huge fan of horror, but I will see (and frequently enjoy) good horror films that have some element that sets them apart, even if they’re violent (Teeth, Shawn of the Dead, Dance of the Dead, The Descent, Let the Right One In, Grace and Make Out with Violence, for instance).
On the other hand, I think the ultra-violent, misanthropic premise on which films like Saw and Hostel are based is abhorrent. I avoided the remake of The Last House on the Left because the original ranks second in my Most Hated Films of all time list. I hated Funny Games, both the original and the remake, and I’m not a fan of Reservoir Dogs, though I like Quentin Tarantino generally. I’m not a scifi geek or fangirl and I don’t read a lot of comics or graphic novels, but even so, I’ve seen most of the superhero/geek and sci-fi flicks that have come out in the last decade or so. I’m not the most likely target demographic for Watchmen, but I’d be going to see it, even if I didn’t need to see it for my job.
Conventional wisdom says violent films and films in the superhero genre aren’t targeted at women, andWatchmen falls into both categories. Does anyone think Warner Brothers is banking on nailing the female demographic with this film? The question is, are they right? What do women want at the movies? And how much violence is too much for the average female film consumer?
I don’t know all the answers and yet, I cannot wait to see this film tonight.
The question of whether women will stay away from a film like Watchmen just because of its violence intrigues me. Are women just more discerning than men with regard to the context in which the violence in a movie takes place? Does the type of violence matter? There’s a big difference for me between the violence in the Saw and Hostel films versus the violence in, say, Hancock, Iron Man orThe Dark Knight, or even Silence of the Lambs and The Cell. There’s a difference between violence within a reasonable context and violence for the sake of thrill, between a violent film that’s smart and has something to say and violent film that’s little more than masochistic rubbernecking at blood-spatter-gore. What’s a reasonable context? For starters, something more to the storyline than “Attractive, scantily clad young girl with ample bosoms becomes target of psycho for no particular reason. Lots of blood, sexual torture, and other fun sociopathic serial killer methodologies ensue.”
In The Silence of the Lambs, there are two serial killers, Hannibal Lector and Buffalo Bill, but the focus is on female FBI agent Clarice Starling and her need to unravel the mystery of Buffalo Bill — with help from a sociopathic madman — before another girl is killed. There’s some fairly graphic violence, yes, but the emphasis of Silence of the Lambs is on the suspense: Will Clarice find Buffalo Bill’s lair in time to save his latest victim, and will she herself end up hunted by one or both of the serial killers in her life? What’s particularly effective about Silence of the Lambs is how much of the violence is never seen at all; much of the horror around the actions of both the Hannibal the Cannibal and Buffalo Bill comes from only hearing about them — and then having your imagination go into overdrive as your mind’s eye pictures one person carving up another for dinner, then serving the unwitting “dinner guest” up as the main course with some “fava beans and a nice chianti,” or a man skinning dead women to make their skins into a “woman suit.”
In The Cell, writer Mark Protosevich and director Tarsem Singh avoid making the violence in the film feeling overly gratuitous through the context in which the story is presented. Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio) is a nightmare of a man, a serial killer who completely objectifies his victims, first by drowning them tortuously slowly, and then by bleaching their bodies to eerie whiteness. What he does to his victims in reality is bad, but it’s in his graphic, brilliantly constructed fantasy world that he turns the dead women into hideous S&M mannequins, tortured and put on display for the benefit of the crazed superego in his head.
And yet, we see another side of Stargher and what makes him tick in the film, via Jennifer Lopezteleporting herself into his mind. While aspects of J-Lo’s presence in this film are laughable (Tarsem himself talked at last year’s Ebertfest screening of The Cell about the studio’s demands that J-Lo be in practically every scene, with lots of close-ups of her pink, glossy lips), the purpose of both her character and the storyline is to provide a vehicle to allow the audience to go someplace they would otherwise never be able to go: inside the mind of a serial killer, to see what makes him tick. And in the process Carl Stargher, for all that he’s a miserable excuse of a human being who slaughters his female victims with zero empathy or acknowledgment of their humanity, somehow becomes sympathetic. The use of Carl’s alter-ego personality in the fantasy scenes — himself as a small boy, always running and hiding from danger and violence — acts further to build empathy between serial killer and audience. And for all its flaws, and all its violence, The Cell is a remarkably engaging and astute film.
Superhero films like Iron Man, Hancock and The Dark Knight have violence in abundance, but when the characters are interesting and I’m engaged in the storyline, I very rarely step outside the movie-moment to ponder whether the violence is overwhelming. You could argue that women are more inclined to go to superhero films because they’re drawn to the archetype of the tortured hero in a sexy costume, or the good-versus-evil theme underlying many of the storylines, or even because they’re trading their significant other off on date night films (although “I’ll go with you to see Watchmen, if you go with me to the next Kate Hudson rom-com” hardly seems a fair trade). But will women stay away from a superhero film, even of the lesser-known variety like Watchmen, simply because they hear it’s graphically violent?
You pretty much go into any superhero film anticipating there will be violence galore, don’t you? Why would Watchmen be an exception, especially if you’re familiar with the comic series? I’m not going toWatchmen anticipating seeing a superhero movie involving a bunch of crime-fighting, costumed vigilantes sitting around playing Guitar Hero or sipping tea. The context of this story is that these are “superheroes” who are, with the exception of the glowing, blue Doctor Manhattan, normal people who dress up and play vigilante crimefighters who’ve been forced to stop doing what they do best. And then they start getting killed off, and end up having to defend the world from a sinister plot to bring about world peace through targeted the united violence and chaos of dissenting global forces at an outside invading force (an idea not completely original to the series, but still, a great plot idea for a superhero storyline). They’re fighting bad guys, and people die. Violently.
Do I expect Watchmen to be violent? Having read a good deal of the graphic novel, yes, of course. The novel itself is pretty graphically violent and often disturbing. But Watchmen, the comic series, while bleak and dark and depressing is also intelligent and penetrating in its unrelenting dissection of society. The story is set in an alternate-history 1985 version of the US where Nixon is still president and the Cold War is balanced not just by missiles but by one American superhuman, a living WMD. Underneath the violence and fighting and bloodshed, there’s a philosophical discourse going on, as writer Alan Moore presents various world views through the perspective of his characters and leaves it to the audience to judge which view is morally right. So long as director Zack Snyder gets the underlying brilliance that makes his source material great, however violent the movie is, it will be within a context that makes sense for the reality the story sets up. And if he gets the story and the characters right, I’m likely to enjoy it, however violent it is.
