Marnie is the film in the Hitchcock canon most guaranteed to rankle feminists.  Tippi Hedren plays the frigid, thieving titular character whose only hope for salvation is at the hands of strong, virile Mark Rutland, eagerly embodied by Sean Connery, who blackmails her into marrying him – and makes her enjoy his punishment.  Most Marnie enthusiasts answer accusations of misogyny by ducking under the director’s craft, as in “Yeah, Connery plays a sadistic hero – but look at the way Hitch frames the back of Hedren’s head!” – as if the plot needs to be apologized for, swept under the rug.

What neither the feminists nor cinephiles seem to appreciate is that Marnie is one of the greatest bondage and discipline (B&D in sadomasochistic parlance) pics of all time. Artfully disguised as a psychosexual thriller, Hitchcock’s classic is actually kin to The Story of O with Hedren’s O-like Marnie at the sole mercy of Sir Connery’s sexy daddy (think Sir Stephen), reduced to being trapped like a wild animal to be broken and trained, owned and cared for, eventually becoming Rutland’s wife/slave. This ain’t misogyny – it’s erotic art!

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Wow, I’m tired of talking about Sex and the City. How about you? I’m happy that millions of women found something on a movie screen that appealed to them, even if it’s not something that appeals to me, and I feel like that should be the end of the story. It won’t be, but personally I just want to put the period on this sentence and move on to the next manufactured hysteria. But first, two final thoughts:

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I feel like in order to talk about Sex and the City in any depth more than I already have, I have to tell you a little something about my personal worldview, to explicate how it’s possible that a pushing-30 single gal living in New York could not only not identify with but actually feel hostile towards, as Susie Bright put it in an excellent piece in Salon, the “racket part of what once was recognizable as the sexual self-emancipation of the feminist movement.”

Fortunately for all of us, talking about my personal life on this blog is the last thing in the world I want to do. So, instead, I combed the panoply of reviews of and writings about film that have come online over the last week, in order to cull five different commonly-cited grounds for why this film is a toxic scourge on the entirety of the human race. Or maybe just not the best possible way to spend 2.5 hours.

1. The women aren’t attractive!

Proponents: Anthony Lane, Roger Ebert, Noah Forrest, Armond White, virtually every male blogger with aspirations to be Harry Knowles.

Representative Pullquote: “The most human character is Louise (Jennifer Hudson), who is still in her 20s and hasn’t learned to be a jaded consumerist caricature…Louise is warm and vulnerable and womanly, which does not describe any of the others.” — Ebert.

Who Says it Best: Lane, who hasn’t produced a review to gain this much traction in the blogosphere since his legendary pan of Revenge of the Sith. Still, it’s not so much what Lane says (he makes fun of not just the ladies’ thirst for expensive outfits but the outfits themselves, complaining that all four are “little better than also-rans” compared to Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face) as the illustration the New Yorker saw fit to attach to his review. A masterpiece of grotesque caricature, it’s the only piece of critique of the film that this self-professed third (or is it fourth?) wave feminist considers to be truly, maliciously misogynist.

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“Smell is very nostalgic.”

Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her latest perfume. She’s also, indirectly, talking about her appeal, her brand, what she does for a living, the reason why an audience in the low triple digits (mostly female, mostly younger than the actress by a decade) has rushed to the Times Center on a Friday evening exactly four weeks before the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, to see her interviewed on stage by journalist William J. Carter. I was invited to the event as a member of the press; I accepted the invitation in the spirit of making an honest effort to learn something about why adult women find Parker and the Sex and the City phenomena appealing.

The two women sitting next to me, who breathlessly climbed over my legs a few minutes after the program began, left behind their own fragrance trail: hair products, manicures, menthol cigarettes and pink drinks. A surface-only snap-judgment says these women were a representative sample of those in attendance: young(ish), upper-middle-class, not particularly cosmopolitan but enthusiastic about both cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitan.

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image via Stop Smiling.

“I’ve been struggling to try to do a memoir,” said Andrew Sarris at the beginning of the Moving Image Institute session with he and fellow critic/wife Molly Haskell. “I haven’t made much progress, so don’t hold your breath.” Not to brag, but anyone who was in that room won’t have to. The Haskell/Sarris Hour (actually, several hours––the discussion continued over dinner, including wine for many of us and a vodka tonic for Sarris) was, for me, both the most purely pleasurable session of the Institute, and the portion of the program that gave me the strongest dose of film cultural-historical education. It all came down through Andrew and Molly’s candid storytelling. MOMI’s David Schwartz more than once credited Sarris for having mastered the lecture-as-stand up comedy, but in our small group, with Haskell at his side snarkily finishing sentences, it felt more like lecture-as-autobiography. With jokes.

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While I’m on the subject of film studies classes I’m taking this semester, here’s another story inspired by a film I watched at school yesterday. In Women in Film, which, in case you can’t tell, is a class on feminist film theory, we screened Marleen Gorris’ mind-numbing debut A Question of Silence (original Dutch title: De Stilte rond Christine M.). While bored from the obviousness of the film, which tells the story of three women on trial for the random murder of a boutique salesman, I thought about how much it reminded me of 9 to 5, a movie I would have much preferred to be watching (and not just because the music is soooo much better).

Then, as my mind kept wandering, I realized that three popular movies I loved as a small child were 9 to 5, The Incredible Shrinking Woman and Mr. Mom, all silly comedies made and set in the early ’80s (as was Gorris’ film), all obviously informed by the women’s movement of that time, which could each be given a serious reading from a feminist film theory approach. But since none of the films are really given enough credit, I’ll avoid attempting to write a scholarly paper on any of them. Instead I’ll use this as my outlet to expose what ran through my head, as I wished for the “real” feminist film to end.

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Prompted by Disney’s new line of Princess products, Barbara Ehrenreich rails against the studio’s entire family of female animated characters at The Nation. Her key arguments:

• “Today, there is no little girl in the wired, industrial world who does not seek to display her allegiance to the pink- and-purple clad Disney dynasty.” Read: your daughter understandably wants you to buy her shiny things, but she’s too young, impressionable and greedy to understand what consumption of those things mean. It’s up to you to decode the messages she’s unconsciously slurping through her Princess toys. This is of primary importance because…
• “Disney likes to think of the Princesses as role models, but what a sorry bunch of wusses they are.” Ehrenreich is particularly concerned that these so-called heroines generally “have no ambitions and no marketable skills,” and are prone to allowing themselves to become intoxicated at the hands of men and/or devious older woman. No work, free booze––I guess your daughter’s supposed to wait until college before indulging in that dream.
• “No need for complicated witch-hunting techniques–pin-prickings and dunkings–in Princessland. All you have to look for is wrinkles.” The Princess films fail to give middle aged and elderly women the respect that they’re accorded in … um … real life?

My favorite takeaway, and my own conclusions, after the jump.

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This is a holdover from the weekend, but it’s worth going back to: Nikki Finke says three people have told her that Warner Brothers is no longer greenlighting pictures build around female stars. This is apparently in reaction to dismal box office returns for The Brave One and The Invasion, but as Finke points out, those weren’t exactly the chickiest of flicks. Ergo, this seems to be less about the female audience and more about the general audience not responding to female stars. Or, it could be about WB looking for scapegoats to cover their own failure to efficiently market genre fare to grown-ups. Regardless: it looks bad, and, if it’s true, celebrity feminist/attorney Gloria Allred (who has been awfully busy lately with Britney Spears’ custody battle) isn’t going to let it slide. She tells Finke:

This is an insult to all moviegoers and particularly women. It is truly unfortunate that women get blamed for decisions which are made by men…If that studio confirms that their policy is to now exclude women as leads, then my policy would be to boycott films made by Warner Bros.

This will probably go nowhere, because if pressed, WB will be like, “Of course we love women!” And it’ll all blow over as soon as Finke finds a tastier string to pull. But at some point, someone is going to have to explain to me how 40 year-old actresses having trouble finding work is anything other than business as usual.

The troublesome gender attitudes encoded within Disney’s animated canon have long been a hot topic for cultural scholars (for a 6-minute crash course, see Sanjay Newton’s video essay Sexism, Strength and Dominance, embedded above). But while the films themselves often telegraph mixed messages (Disney heroines are often stubborn and independently minded, but at the end of the day almost always function as damsels in distress), today Boing Boing’s Cory Doctrow has opened up the floodgates to reveal evidence that the institution that produced these films has always been, by design, an unambiguous boys club.

It all started when Doctrow linked to this rejection letter, on beautiful full-color Snow White-themed stationary, received in 1938 by a young lady who had inquired about Disney’s animators training program.

“Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen,” the letter informs a Miss Mary V. Ford of Searcy, AK. “For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.” The letter goes on to say that although ladies were hired to do basic tracing and coloring in the Ink and Paint department, “it would not be advisable to come to Hollywood with the above specifically in view, as there are really very few openings in relation to the number of girls who apply.”

A Boing Boing reader then went on to point out that this letter was not an isolated incident, but indicative of Disney’s institutional policy of excluding women from all non-inking work. This Disney Studio Artists Tryout book, also dated 1938, firmly states that the Ink and Paint sector is “the only department in the Disney Studio open to women artists.’”

Both of the above examples are almost 70 years old, so it would be easy to write them off as relics. But then there’s the first-hand testimony of Danah Boyd. Today, Boyd is one of the most well-respected technology/social media bloggers/writers/thinkers out there; ten years ago, while a sophomore studying computer science at Brown, Boyd approached an Imagineer recruiting booth at a trade show. As Boyd tells Boing Boing,

I approached and asked if there were internships available, but the recruiter told me that there were no internships available for artists. I responded by saying that I was a developer and that I wanted to code. The response I received was, ‘but you’re a girl.’

“I walked away stunned and midway out of the convention hall, I ran into my advisor (Andy van Dam) and relayed this story. He turned beet red and ran off to ‘make things right.’ Not 15 minutes later, I saw the recruiter at Disney stomping out of the hall. I found out later he was fired. “

Interestingly, three years after Boyd’s incident, Disney inducted Harriet Burns into their Disney Legends hall of fame. This probably qualifies as nitpicking, but check out her bio on the Disney Legends site. After introducing Burns as “the first woman ever hired by Walt Disney Imagineering in a creative rather than an office capacity”, the bio then relegates the actual projects Burns worked on to the fifth paragraph; graphs one and two are devoted to the fact that Burns was “the best-dressed employee in the department.”