Feminism, baby, feminism.

Before this week, I spent several years watching only romantic comedies, superhero movies, and costume dramas. The justification was such: I read enough about violence that there was no need to force myself to watch it too. Recently, though, I (again) noted with astonishment how quickly habits affect affects. Just as commercials seem riotous when you haven't seen one in awhile, the occasional rapier wound inflicted through an eighteenth century waistcoat started to seem indecent, untenable.

There is no use in being so prim, and something disingenuous in disassociating myself from, disidentifying with, all visual representations of murder. This week, I watched films on masculinity and violence. Next week, I start watching documentaries. I suspect this week's films are going to have been easier to watch.

"The Lives of Others"

Number of women who die a violent death in the film's culmination: 1

Wiesler, Hemf (and his proxy Grubitz), and Dreyman all vie for power, with Christa-Maria as currency. Her sudden suicide serves as much to consolidate the division between and the camaraderie within "the good" and "the bad" men, as it does to smooth over a few plot holes and keep the movie to a reasonable length.

"No Country for Old Men"

Number of women who die a violent death in the film's culmination: 1

Lewelyn, Ed, and Anton all vie for power, with Carla Jean as currency. Carla Jean hasn't a chance to play the game, and she knows it when she refuses to "call it." Her quick death--no struggle, no attempted protection-- also serves to keep the movie to a reasonable length. My critics will point out that we don't know she whether she dies. Astonishingly, it doesn't really matter.

Bardem and the Coen brothers deserve Oscars for making Bardem's Anton look

a mountain of a man,
immeasurably high,
a hulk of a human from head to
hips,
so long and thick in his loins and
his limbs
I should genuinely judge him to
be a half giant,
or a most massive man, the
mightiest of mortals.

--Sir Gawain an the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation by Simon Armitage.

"Eastern Promises"

Number of women who die a violent death in the film's culmination: 1

Nikolai, Kirill, and Semyon all vie for power, using sex slaves and their daughters as currency. Here, the woman's early death serves as the basis for the film's long denouement.

Before I turn to documentaries, "Freeway." Before I turn to "Freeway," a clarification based on a comment: the above are not film reviews. I am not critiquing how women are portrayed in these films, or proscribing how they should be portrayed, or saying that the films suffer because of how women are portrayed. The films deal with the relationship between masculinity and violence--and they just so happen to offer strikingly similar depictions of the role that women play in cultures (or subcultures, in 'Eastern Promises") constructed through violent masculinity, in cultures where Anton is the real, the force that determines life and death. The explicit and exclusive association of violence with masculinity raises interesting questions about the necessity of this association, to be sure. But the films suggest, I think, that the generic or cultural constraints that dictate violence as masculine accordingly relegate the feminine to that which is fundamentally beside, if not outside, the genre and culture.