I watched Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful last week and two things struck me about it. The first was that the first thirty-five minutes features the most convincing portrayal of date rape I've ever seen on film. Of course, he didn't intend for it to be that. Lyne meant to paint a highly erotic portrait of a woman succumbing to an affair. (BTW: I say "succumbing" rather than initiating intentionally here. That's the mythology we all desperately want to believe about women.)
First of all, why is it date rape? Our heroine, Connie Summer, goes to the city during a windstorm and is quite literally blown into Paul Martel. He takes care of her (establishing a Daddy and little girl relationship between them) and, in the course of this, there is an unmistakeable erotic charge between them. She insists she has to leave and does. She goes back. Again the erotic charge is intense and again, she insists that she has to leave and does. Then she goes back again. This time she tries to leave but he grabs her. he takes her to bed where she is so upset by the experience that her whole body is shaking and she keeps pushing his hands away.
And then he keeps pushing until she gives in.
That's about as clear-cut an example of date rape as you will ever see. Which brings me to the second thing that really struck me about the movie: I can't find a single review in which this problem is noted. Not one. Harmless Christmas songs get the third degree but this very ugly movie scene gets let off free.)
Date rape is real. Yes, the notion has been oversold by some feminists but it is a real and horrifying thing that thousands of women go through every year. So why was it that a film which played up this sort of rape as if it were a great erotic thrill to watch got off without anyone calling Adrian Lyne on this?
Part of the answer is that it is erotically thrilling to watch. Yeah, I know, that's difficult but it's inescapable. Ninety percent of women eroticize their fears and the other ten percent lie about it. But there is more to it than that: our culture just can't face female infidelity. We supposedly live in an era with few taboos but this taboo is very much with us. The big reason there are so few successful neo noir films with female leads is because we just cannot accept a woman who cheats as a sympathetic character. A female Don Draper would get more hate male than any other character in TV history.
It's not that women don't cheat on their husbands. They do it with shocking regularity and the statistical gap between husbands who cheat and wives who cheat has all but vanished in recent years. (And, given that it is such a big taboo, you have to wonder how honest women are about this when responding to pollsters.)
And thus this bizarre movie scene in which the woman cheating is anything but willful about it. This is not the way people actually have affairs. They tend to do that with people they meet and get to know a bit first and not in feverish encounters with relative strangers with the sex following very quickly on the first meeting.
The movie does a good job of showing the sort of moral arguments that surround affairs. There is scene in which the heroine is out with two other women at a restaurant and they spot Paul Martel. Both these other women are unaware of the affair. One of them notes how handsome Martel is and suggests that she would cheerfully have sex with him. The other, an older woman, talks in foreboding terms about the damage infidelity does.
The problem is that all this discussion comes after the affair has already started in. In real life, a woman (or man) would feel a growing erotic charge to their friendship and be considering just these moral issues before initiating the affair. And it would be a very different movie if this discussion had been shown to take place before Connie initiated the affair. Then we'd see what she does in a very different light.
To have told the story that way would require us all to take the woman seriously as a moral adult. And we'd judge her far more harshly if we did that. When we see her swept up by passion and barely in control of herself it may feel edgy but movies like Unfaithful are just protecting our illusions about women.
First of all, why is it date rape? Our heroine, Connie Summer, goes to the city during a windstorm and is quite literally blown into Paul Martel. He takes care of her (establishing a Daddy and little girl relationship between them) and, in the course of this, there is an unmistakeable erotic charge between them. She insists she has to leave and does. She goes back. Again the erotic charge is intense and again, she insists that she has to leave and does. Then she goes back again. This time she tries to leave but he grabs her. he takes her to bed where she is so upset by the experience that her whole body is shaking and she keeps pushing his hands away.
And then he keeps pushing until she gives in.
That's about as clear-cut an example of date rape as you will ever see. Which brings me to the second thing that really struck me about the movie: I can't find a single review in which this problem is noted. Not one. Harmless Christmas songs get the third degree but this very ugly movie scene gets let off free.)
Date rape is real. Yes, the notion has been oversold by some feminists but it is a real and horrifying thing that thousands of women go through every year. So why was it that a film which played up this sort of rape as if it were a great erotic thrill to watch got off without anyone calling Adrian Lyne on this?
Part of the answer is that it is erotically thrilling to watch. Yeah, I know, that's difficult but it's inescapable. Ninety percent of women eroticize their fears and the other ten percent lie about it. But there is more to it than that: our culture just can't face female infidelity. We supposedly live in an era with few taboos but this taboo is very much with us. The big reason there are so few successful neo noir films with female leads is because we just cannot accept a woman who cheats as a sympathetic character. A female Don Draper would get more hate male than any other character in TV history.
It's not that women don't cheat on their husbands. They do it with shocking regularity and the statistical gap between husbands who cheat and wives who cheat has all but vanished in recent years. (And, given that it is such a big taboo, you have to wonder how honest women are about this when responding to pollsters.)
But experts say that a large majority of the time, motivations differ by gender, with men searching for more sex or attention and women looking to fill an emotional void.
"Women tell me, 'I was lonely, not connected, I didn't feel close to my partner, and I was taken for granted,'" marriage and family therapist Winifred Reilly says. "They say they wanted to have someone who would look into their eyes and make them feel sexy again."As the Lemon Girl would say in response to some woman's claim that she just wanted her "emotional void" filled, "Is that what that thing is called?". These supposedly different-from-men reasons women have affairs are just lies women tell themselves and others in order to get laid. It's not unique to women; the classic male line is, "My wife doesn't understand me," as an excuse for an affair. It's not the quality of the tripe coming out of the mouths of women and men that is different but the extraordinary lengths people will go to not call women on stuff that they'd laugh at men for peddling.
And thus this bizarre movie scene in which the woman cheating is anything but willful about it. This is not the way people actually have affairs. They tend to do that with people they meet and get to know a bit first and not in feverish encounters with relative strangers with the sex following very quickly on the first meeting.
The movie does a good job of showing the sort of moral arguments that surround affairs. There is scene in which the heroine is out with two other women at a restaurant and they spot Paul Martel. Both these other women are unaware of the affair. One of them notes how handsome Martel is and suggests that she would cheerfully have sex with him. The other, an older woman, talks in foreboding terms about the damage infidelity does.
The problem is that all this discussion comes after the affair has already started in. In real life, a woman (or man) would feel a growing erotic charge to their friendship and be considering just these moral issues before initiating the affair. And it would be a very different movie if this discussion had been shown to take place before Connie initiated the affair. Then we'd see what she does in a very different light.
To have told the story that way would require us all to take the woman seriously as a moral adult. And we'd judge her far more harshly if we did that. When we see her swept up by passion and barely in control of herself it may feel edgy but movies like Unfaithful are just protecting our illusions about women.
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