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The Marriage Plot: Lucky McKee and Jack Ketchum's The Woman (2011)

Posted by Charles Reece, October 16, 2011 10:29pm | Post a Comment
the woman poster

Having never seen Offspring (Andrew van den Houten and Jack Ketchum's adaptation of the latter's novel about a Northeastern cannibalistic kin, who first appeared in the book Off-Season), I took its sequel's opening pre-credit sequence to be a phantasmagoric continuation of I Spit On Your Grave where the eponymous Woman retreated into nature after having escaped the tyranny of Man and patriarchal culture. Surely, Lucky McKee and Ketcham's The Woman is more than an accidental synecdoche for the original title of Meir Zarchi's classic, Day of the Woman. Their film is, at its core, another rape-revenge film, but with the twist that the victim is feral, so outside of man's law. The misogynistic repression perforce comes from a different place than horror's generic South, since its resident hayseed hordes are uncultured and would likely sympathize with the bestial Woman. Zarchi's victim-protagonist Jennifer HIll, on the other hand, was an urbane writer who had culture stripped from her by barbarous rednecks. The Woman has just as much dirt under her fingernails as those rednecks, her language isn't much more than a growl, plus she's a cannibal (a taboo even greater than the use of the contraction "y'all"). Therefore, her victimization is a form of structural violence, that which is the repressed base of the status quo. The central fear expressed by The Woman isn't in having the Woman's culture dismantled (as it was for Jennifer) -- for she is pure cultural Other and has none -- but that cultural normativity is structured around the primordial violence she represents. Hillbillies can't victimize her any more than animals can victimize other animals, but the nuclear family can in the same way that a suburban adolescent might torture a cat.

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The Gadget Laid Bare: Some Rambling Thoughts On Quantum of Solace (2008), Liberalism, Montage, Stalin's Aesthetics and A.I.

Posted by Charles Reece, December 6, 2008 07:26pm | Comments (4)
Sean Connery James Bond Ursula AndressDaniel Craig James Bond bathing suit beach

I'm not much of a James Bond fanatic; I can take him or leave him, and have tended towards the latter for the past 20 years of installments. I grew up on the Roger Moore version, but the problem with the Quantum of Solace upcoming posterfranchise started there, only getting worse with each new Bond film. Too many gadgets and too many one-liners were used to cover the fact that Sean Connery had been replaced with a bunch of pantywaists (except George Lazenby, but his reign ended after one film). Not that there's anything wrong with wit, it's just that in an action film it should be backed with the assurance of brawn. That's why Christian Bale makes for a better Batman than Michael Keaton or George Clooney. No matter how editing might be able to slice and dice the action sequences, there's always going to be an aesthetic flaw in any machismo-centered film where the physiognomy and somatotype of the lead don't meet the iconic demands of the hero. (Just consider two recent examples: fresh-faced fratboy Matt Damon playing a badass in the Bourne Trilogy and pipsqueak Freddy Rodriguez as a renegade secret ops soldier in Planet Terror.)