force five: femme fatales and blade runners
Today is Rita Hayworth’s birthday. The past two days social media has been inundated with #metoo posts, where survivors of sexual violence, opened up about that they too had been subject to violence, in response directly to the Harvey Weinstein story coming out, but also in response to lifetimes of being subjugated. In the breaths after the fall out of the Weinstein story, film and cultural critics have started to consider again artists who also have allegations (or convictions!) of sexual violence against them, like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Mel Gibson. Then there’s another layer of artists who just seem to treat people, especially women, terribly, for the sake of their art, like David O. Russell, Darren Aronofsky, Michael Bay. What do we do with their art? How wide is our condemnation? Really the question is how much do we condemn others for not matching our level?
On Sunday night, perhaps foolishly, I watched Blade Runner for the first time. I found it dull, dimly lit and underwritten, at least for the first 40 minute or so. Then there is a scene where Deckard keeps Rachel, the replicant who didn’t know she what she was, from leaving his apartment by slamming a door she is trying to open shut. He then encourages her to repeat emotional phrases to him (replicants aren’t supposed to feel emotions, so I guess he is proving her humanity to him/herself? This grace is not extended to the other replicants that Deckard is assigned to kill/ones that he doesn’t want to sleep with) and then they kiss.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is the moment in the movie where I checked out. The back end of the movie is definitely more exciting and skirts the edge of the questions of morality that I wanted it to discuss, but I was so disengaged and disinterested, both in a movie that sells a scene like the one I describe as consensual or in doing any mental work to try and understand or theorize about the film.
About half an hour after the movie was over, I started uncontrollably crying, replaying different violent scenes in my head from the film.
What really upset me, and is causing me to continue to think about this movie that I really didn’t like, is the narrative surrounding views of it, and from what I can tell, the sequel, and that I watched it during a weekend that the news cycle was taken up by revelations of sexual violence. I wanted to know what people saw in it and was greeted with reviews telling me that viewers who didn’t get it were lazy/not willing to do the work.
My mental and emotional workload maxed out when I had to watch Harrison Ford slam a door to keep a woman in his apartment, knowing that it was going to be sold back to me as a romantic, freeing relationship. I don’t think movies need to be devoid of violence, but it would be nice if some after the fact work could be done by people who have the means to do so. I mean that, I try to view my lack of entry into a movie like Blade Runner as neutral. It is neither my fault, nor the movie’s. But then being told that I need to try harder to understand it? That is a judgment against me because the person saying it isn’t trying very hard to understand why someone might recoil at the violence, and it is not for lack of effort.
But today is Rita Hayworth’s birthday. She is one of my evergreen crying topics. I get compromised so easily by thinking about her life for too long. Her life was plagued by violent abuse, by men she hated and men she loved. Changing her body was often the outward medium for this abuse, her hair especially. Her dark hair first gave away her ethnic background, then her auburn hair became her signature. When her increasingly estranged husband Orson Welles insisted she chop it off for The Lady from Shanghai, Harry Cohn, president of Columbia pictures and serial abuser of the casting couch, was infuriated by the marring of Hayworth’s most identifiable (and bankable) feature. Welles and Hayworth would divorce and her auburn hair would grow back to be dyed again.
So by virtue of time, Rita Hayworth and Blade Runner are running parallel in my head. Also Blade Runner is also sold as a neo-noir, and as obvious visual references to late 1940s aesthetic, especially in the way Rachel first presents herself. The first obvious connection is to Joan Crawford. But then Rachel takes her hair down and it is mass of curls, and as someone who frequented rolls her hair, that not what happens when you take down Joan Crawford hair. Her hair is down because she is free with knowledge/sexuality blah blah blah. It also edges closer at least to a Rita Hayworth type.
I think of two characters as the ultimate femme fatale points of reference. Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon and Gilda in Gilda use the loyalties of men to make them question their moral frameworks. They can be punished, like Brigid, when the detective Sam Spade rights his ship and realizes her deception or revealed to be victims of men, and not really femme fatales, like Gilda. Gilda may twist and manipulate men with her sexuality, but by the end of the movie, it is clear she does this as a means of escape from relationships with men who are abusive. Brigid wants power and money and uses sex to get it. Gilda wants love and not to be hit or locked away by her husbands.
Rachel is not quite a femme fatale; her loyalties to Deckard are never in question. But what is she instead? A means for Deckard to understand his own humanity, I guess and maybe the nature of humanity. He seems to decide firmly that she is worthy of not being killed indiscriminately, but the sexual relationship confuses what his motivations for that are.
Instead of disrupting Deckard’s right system of morals, Rachael disrupts one that I believe the movie at least makes an argument might be wrong headed--that replicants being shot on site is a moral practice/for the greater good/a job that Deckard should agree to do. Deckard never fully bounces back to his old morality, the way that Sam Spade does. He gives over to Rachel’s needs (that he not kill her). It is just up in the air if the reason for Deckard’s conversion of morality is empathetic or self-serving.
This gets back to the question of condemning the morality of auteurs. I don’t like auteur theory. I think it expressly punishes the skill work of teams that make movies, especially female editors. What I really don’t get is the union of auteur theory and formalism. An auteur has his hands in every aspect of filmmaking, but his views on anything other than what he prints in the film is sealed away? Sometimes what I see as interesting in a film is underdeveloped or unexplored. So do I take the film in a form vacuum and declare the film Bad because the form doesn’t serve the thesis that I see it arguing for? Or do I take into account the creator who claims authorship is purposely using his medium to poke and prod at vulnerabilities, and doing it quite well, and that maybe I think that makes him a Bad person?
Ridley Scott, director of Blade Runner, is one of the proponent of the theory that Deckard himself is a replicant. Okay, fine. But the crux of this movie for the creator is so clearly not about the parts that pulled at me. Parts like that the memory that Deckard uses to confirm to Rachel that she is a replicant is about her playing doctor with her brother and being too embarrassed to participate. To me that raises questions about Rachel’s purpose in-universe, to Tyrell, to Deckard. Why would Tyrell give her that memory, why would he share it with Deckard and why would Deckard use it against her?
But in a movie where I don’t see evidence of any of the makers taking seriously Rachel’s interiority in a way that feel substantial, especially in terms of sexual violence. I also wonder if the inclusion of this bit about her remembered, but false pasts, comes out simply because it makes her feel uncomfortable, similar to how I felt when I heard it be spewed back at her.
Partly as such an avid Hitchcock fan, I’ve had to reckon with the clarity that I see that his films were sometimes weapons against women. But like some of the anxieties of people posting about #metoo who were wary of calling what happened to them sexual violence if it wasn’t rape, that are layers here of cinematic violence against women. There’s Hitchcock casting Tippi Hedren in Marnie, making the movie because he wants to film the rape scene, after attempting to rape the actress he casts in the role. There’s Cohn and Columbia lasering and dying Hayworth’s hair, only to have Welles cut it off and make it platinum blonde in her most restricted role of her career. And then there’s Ridley Scott presenting glimmers of sexual violence against Rachel, but neither using it to condemn the men who perpetuate it or give the audience insight in her perspective. And these are just the violences that play out on camera. Weinstein reminds us that most of them remain off camera and #metoo reminds us that Hollywood is not the only space where power begets violence.
So here are five things I’ve been thinking about over last weekend and into today.
American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the “It” Girl and the Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu: I am really enamored with Evelyn Nesbit; I hope not totally because she was so beautiful and so young, which is the reason that everyone in America was enamored with her. This book does employ some language that made me cringe a bit in reference to Nesbit’s sexuality which made me uncomfortable because she is so young for the majority of the book. But I do think it still a lot more sympathetic to the woman than a lot of what is written about her.
Tippi by Tippi Hedren: I recommend this to anyone who is having trouble cope with the onslaught of discussion about sexual violence. Her whole memoir is charming and interesting, but how she talks about Hitchcock is so personal and powerful.
Episode 31 of You Must Remember This podcast by Karina Longworth: If you’re not just perpetually steamed about Orson Welles, this is a good place to start.
Cover Girl: my personal favorite Rita Hayworth movie
The Divorce of Lady X: This recommendation doesn’t really have anything to do with my thematic essay except that I watched it last night as a Blade Runner antiseptic and it worked. Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as a comedic couple is not something I thought I needed, but it is great.