jentleman film journal.

Love and Undeath: “Twilight,” Misandry, and the Female Blockbuster

With a sense of trepidation and mild disbelief, I bought myself a ticket on Monday to see Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part One, with the idea that I should see what all the fuss is about. I emerged two hours later, rueful, even a little shell-shocked: there really are some things that you’ll never be able to un-see, and Twilight, as it turns out, is one of them.

The important question, though, isn’t “Just how bad is the new Twilight flick?” but “What is it about these certifiably awful films that has captured so many people’s imaginations?” Like so many Michael Bay movies, the Twilight series has overcome generally poor reviews to ride to box-office success, yet it bears little resemblance to Bay-type blockbusters. Beyond its vampires and werewolves, Breaking Dawn has none of the characteristics of a fantasy or sci-fi film, without spectacular set pieces or epic battles or even the darkness of tone that one might expect from something dealing with its subject matter. Its closest cinematic kin isn’t Harry Potter but the Underworld films, which have been reliable, if unspectacular, earners for Sony.

Where Twilight has found its success, of course, has been in its appeal to women: an incredible eighty percent of the opening weekend audience was female, and when I looked around a crowded-if-not-packed Monday night theater I couldn’t have counted more than four or five men, including myself, in the audience. Deconstructing the appeal of Twilight, then, must mean understanding what it is about these films that is so attractive not ‘to people’ in general but ‘to women’ in particular. We’ve all heard of the chick flick, but Twilight isn’t that – it’s a chick blockbuster, something that Hollywood has never really seen before.

Actually, let’s stay with the ‘chick flick’ angle, because I think it is a revealing one. The stereotypical chick flick – the one that husbands and boyfriends groan about when their significant others bring it up, then go anyways – is the romantic comedy, a familiar genre going back to the Golden Age of Hollywood and before. Boy meets girl; hijinks and misunderstandings occur; boy and girl split; boy tries to win girl back; they all live happily ever after. This seems to be, more or less, the storyline of the Twilight movies: they may not be comedy (at least not intentionally), but they are romantic, and with the added bonus that ‘happily ever after’ can be read as ‘happily forever and ever.’ Twilight simply does what any successful genre hybrid does. In reappropriating the tropes of the romantic comedy for a fantasy film, it rejuvenates and re-empowers them. What was in Letters to Juliet a recipe for sentimental schlock suddenly becomes a treatise on everlasting, undying love.

In that vein, there’s much to be said on the film’s portrayal of its male characters. Feminist critics like to talk about how Hollywood reduces women to objects of male fantasy, sex objects that exist to please and titillate their mostly-male audiences. Hollywood has responded to this criticism by trying to insert ‘strong’ female characters into its movies, a la the fight-evil-and-look-good-doing-it female action characters of The Matrix or, most recently, In Time. These characters still end up being hypersexualized, however, either because we are at some point made to see that they look good in a dress (I refer you to the the trailer for the new Mission: Impossible movie, among any number of possible examples) or because they invariably end up taking their clothes off.

Well, turnabout is fair play, after all; Twilight, in my view, is just as much a female sex fantasy as any Lara Croft-type character is a male one. Sure, part of that is in Taylor Lautner’s never-out-of-sight-for-long abdominals, which make an appearance within the first minute of Breaking Dawn: one female friend of mine told me that one of the reasons that she watched the Twilight films was that it gave her a chance to look at bare-chested men. Really, though, the men who figure in Twilight, not just rival love interests Edward and Jacob but even Bella Swan’s father Charlie, aren’t so much sex objects as they are ‘affection’ objects, emasculated adorers whose only function is to make Bella feel loved.

If this seems like an unlikely claim, one need only consider what these three characters do over the course of Breaking Dawn. Charlie Swan puts aside his distrust of Bella’s choice of mate and walks her down the aisle; later on, when she is pretending to be sick on her honeymoon (actually pregnant with a half-human, half-vampire demon child, by the way) he states his intention to fly to wherever she is and bring her home immediately. Okay, but he is her father: perhaps it is to be expected that he would be so protective, though to be so after she has just been married seems mildly overbearing. Edward, meanwhile – the vampire that she weds at the beginning of Breaking Dawn, if you’re not familiar with the story – refuses to touch her after the headboard-annihilating consummation of their marriage because it has left her with bruises on her back and arms, even though such noble submission of the self seems misguided when she herself is unbothered by it. (That said, Edward may be forgiven for not believing it when Bella asks, “Why can’t you see how perfectly happy I am?”, given that Kristen Stewart’s wooden acting comes off making her seem like she isn’t happy at all.) Submission of the self characterizes Jacob’s interactions with Bella as well. His conflicts with the protagonist are never about how what she does affects him but because he worries about what the consequences of her decisions will be for her. Similarly, when Jacob and Edward argue, it is because of their rivalry over Bella, and when they join forces it is likewise because they agree that Bella’s safety is more important than their disagreements.

Admittedly, the I-know-best attitude that all of them take with Bella may smack of misogyny. The problem with such a rebuttal is that it ignores that fact that none of them have much of a personality or identity beyond their love for the protagonist. They really think that they’re behaving in her best interest, and in the end they always let her do what she wants, swearing to support and protect her no matter what. Despite his temper tantrums and his musculature, no character is as emasculated as Jacob, who rejects his tribe for Bella even after she has gone off and married someone else. To the women who had made Twilight a blockbuster, this may be read as the ultimate romantic sacrifice and a testament to some sort of twisted modern ideal of courtly love. Such an idea of romance, however, is one that denies men any interiority except insofar as it is overpowered by their love – some might say obsession – for a particular woman.

The point, of course, isn’t that women (necessarily) desire the attention of such emasculated males but that this form of emasculation works, however meretriciously, towards constructing the movie’s ideal of perfect, undying romance. Crucial to this as well is the fact that this movie has no ambitions to be about good and evil or right and wrong in the way that more male-oriented fare usually is. There are no ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ not really: conflicts are personal, not political or moral, and so, in Twilight’s romantic ideal, they are insignificant, and therefore resolvable, in the face of the power of love. Twilight is a character-driven movie in a genre and medium that are almost always plot-driven, and women tend to prefer more character-driven fare, as the fact that so many girls (and so few boys) like Pride and Prejudice and stories of its ilk is indicative of. At least part of Twilight’s success is that it’s a cross-genre spectacle that’s aimed at women and that plays its brand of misandryst romance to the hilt.

The reason that that fact alone can overpower its obvious cinematic and narrative weaknesses has as much to do with the scarcity of female-slanted offerings as it does with any actual strengths of the film. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Twilight isn’t a phenomenon so much as a beneficiary of Hollywood’s almost willful ignorance of half of its potential audience. We could have drawn the same conclusion when Mamma Mia! grossed twelve times its budget back in 2008 and Meryl Streep went off on how Hollywood ignores women, but the sample size at that point was too small. What Twilight has definitively proved is that there’s a huge female audience out there that’s just as willing to pay for schlock as the male audience is. It just wants that schlock to be something that caters to its own interests, not to its boyfriend’s.

The Unauteur: David Lean vs. Auteur Theory

Or, The AFI List Project #36: Bridge on the River Kwai

Is it possible to be underrated if you directed the greatest movie of all time? That’s the puzzle that confronted me this week when I was thinking about Bridge on the River Kwai and, in particular, its director, David Lean, who was also responsible for several romances, two adaptations of Dickens novels, and such classic epics as Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India. Most spectacularly, of course, he was the director of Lawrence of Arabia, one of the short list of films that enter the discussion of the greatest in history.

Somehow, when the discussion shifts away from great films to great directors, Lean tends to get lost in the shuffle. Names like Kubrick, Hitchcock, Welles, Godard, and their ilk are remembered as great artists. Their renown is individual, dependent on but also apart from the films that they created; their reputations as artists transcend their films. Lean, on the other hand, is overshadowed by the enormous edifices of his later career. If he is remembered as a filmmaker and not as a name, it is always as a director of epics, one who perhaps went wrong in trying to make non-epics on an epic scale (I refer in particular to Ryan’s Daughter, probably Lean’s least critically successful movie).

This is strange because, with all due respect to Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin, Lean is almost certainly the greatest director ever to come out of the British Isles. Lawrence of Arabia requires no introduction, but the other epics — Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, and the somewhat less indelible Passage to India — are embedded in the collective cinematic imagination as well. Yet Lean’s oeuvre, today so defined by these huge enterprises, had another side to it that today is almost completely forgotten. As noted above, he directed those two Dickens adaptations, including a rendition of Great Expectations that was good enough that it remained the only big-screen adaptation of the novel until Alfonso Cuaron’s so-so 1998 version. And, surprisingly for those who associate Lean with 70-millimeter grandiosity, he also directed a string of very excellent, very British romances. Among them was Brief Encounter, a film that has had little longevity in the United States but which in Britain bears the same sort of cultural legacy that Casablanca does here. To give the laundry list: over the course of a forty-two year career, Lean directed only sixteen films (compare with countryman Hitchcock, who made more than fifty in a slightly longer career). Two of them won Best Picture Oscars. He was nominated for Best Director an incredible seven times — making him the third-most nominated director in Academy history — and won twice. Seven of his movies appear on the British Film Institute’s list of the hundred greatest British movies, including four in the top eleven and two of the top three. His resume is, in a word, impressive.

So why does he so figure in discussion of that pantheon of world cinema’s greatest artists? There is any number of reasons that are offered against him: he is too British, or too commercial, or his films are cold, or they are too aristocratic (which amounts to the same thing). Other British directors — and ‘other British directors’ invariably means Michael Powell, a lesser, though still fearsome, talent — are pointed to as more significant, particularly as standard-bearers of the island’s national cinema. I think there are two central reasons for this, which are related but not interchangeable. One is simple snobbery. Lean’s movies have always been successful with the public, and the three major epics — Lawrence, River Kwai, and Doctor Zhivago — were box-office hits; adjusted for inflation, Zhivago is the eighth-highest grossing movie of all time in the US. Pooh-poohing anything that appeals to the general public is an easy trap for cinephiles — myself included — to fall into.

Contributing to that snobbery, however, and in my opinion the major intellectual obstacle to giving Lean his due, is the auteur theory school of film criticism, a school which would have to stretch itself immensely to find a place for the director of Brief Encounter and Lawrence of Arabia. A French product (unsurprisingly, given that the French national cinema spends almost as much time reflecting on itself as it does producing movies), auteur theory sets out the idea that the director must be an ‘auteur’ — literally, the ‘author’ of his films. Auteurs have a distinct and undiluted authorial vision, which is transmitted through the ‘mise en scene’ (a notoriously ambiguous term that more or less refers to everything that you see onscreen in a movie) and through the story. That vision is supposed to be representative of a particular worldview, which is played out over the course of the auteur’s career. There should be, in other words, a particular ‘Scorsese-ness’ to all of Scorsese’s movies, which criticism can tease out and put on view so that we can all appreciate everything that’s great about Scorsese. This in turn motivates the social, political, and sociological predilections that characterize most film criticism.

Such an understanding is, I think, inherently inimical to a director like Lean. First of all, though Lean’s best-known films share a certain superficial look — that is, they are all very, very large — he was a great collaborator. His early movies, including Brief Encounter, were made with writer Noel Coward, who had written the plays on which the movies were based. Later, he collaborated several times with both producer Sam Spiegel (producer of both River Kwai and Lawrence) and screenwriter Robert Bolt (Lawrence, Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter, and the unproduced Mutiny on the Bounty, which was to have been an immense, two-part career-capper for Lean). Contrast that with the careers of Jean Renoir, an early hero of the ‘auteur theory’ school who wrote or co-wrote most of his own movies, or Hitchcock, who rarely put pen to paper but was always deeply involved in the writing process. Though it’s possible to highlight a few major themes running through much of his work — Lean was certainly interested, for example, in the moral consequences of British imperialism — the result of such collaboration is that it’s hard to point to a distinctly Lean-ian worldview beyond the epic aesthetic of his later works. There’s always a question of what belongs to Lean and what is Coward’s, or Spiegel’s, or Bolt’s.

Even more troubling, in the eyes of the auteur school, is Lean’s total disinterest in setting forth an absolute point of view. Auteur theory is predicated on the idea that directors should have a clear take on their subject. Hence film criticism’s aforementioned tendency towards social, political, and sociological analysis: when Michael Powell makes Peeping Tom, it is viewed as important not for its actual narrative or cinematic merits (though they are significant) but for taking the genre of horror and encasing it in a richly complex psychoanalytic framework. Lean, by contrast, was always at his worst when his own sympathies were readily apparent, which is one of the reasons that Ryan’s Daughter is less successful than his other films. Andrew Sarris, a leading American proponent of auteur theory, criticized Lean harshly on the grounds that his films ‘cannot support the luxury of a directorial point of view… by the time [he] gets around to propounding a question, no one really cares about the answer.’ Sarris was reacting specifically to the scale of the epics on which Lean’s reputation rests, but it’s a telling statement as far as understanding what he, and the school of thought that he approached cinema from, wanted to find: articulated questions and clear answers both.

The truth is, of course, that Lean’s genius resided precisely in his ability to relate complex, multilayered stories truthfully without telling his audience to think about them. When Alec Guinness’s Colonel Richardson goes from defiant soldier to oblivious collaborationist over the course of Bridge on the River Kwai, we recognize his counterintuitive transformation as being in fact truthful to a man of his character being placed in the situation he is given, but any judgment we pass on him is our own, not Lean’s. Similarly, Lawrence of Arabia deftly lays before us both the uncomplicated grandiosity of T.E. Lawrence’s vision and the reality of its failure while allowing us to try to understand for ourselves what that means about war, about the British Empire, about Lawrence himself. The ironic, devastating final shots of the movie – of Lawrence being driven off in the desert, with the car being passed by a motorcycle in a reference to the film’s opening scene – drives home the inevitability of the film’s tragedy, but that inevitability lacks any judgment on what has happened. It is the truth of how Lawrence’s story must end, given the circumstances; that is what makes it tragic. But any grander conclusions we draw beyond that are again entirely our own.

Lean’s work, in other words, does what all great art does: it represents the truth of human life to us in all its simplicity and all its complexity, without easy endings, without solutions. It doesn’t ask or answer questions – it merely invites us to do so. That separates him from auteur theory and, therefore, from an influential school of criticism, one which plays a major part in shaping our conception about what it means to be a great director. Given what I’ve read about Lean, I suspect that he himself wouldn’t care very much about how he was perceived as a director or artist as long as people liked his movies, which, however grudgingly, they usually do. But, just as it is time to recognize that auteur theory is a helpful but not definitive approach to understanding the cinema, it is time to acknowledge Lean as one of the great masters of the medium.