Atonement, much?
Emilia Jones in Cat Person (2023)
In recent weeks a Marvel movie has bombed at the box office. A section of commenters will point to this as the reason why three actresses — and a particularly outspoken one on gender matters — should never headline a super-heroic blockbuster. The PR machine’s immediate response, if I understand correctly, has been to embrace the general Internet mocking the whole situation with cat parodies. Because yes — who doesn’t want the Marvel Cinematic Universe to ruin cats too.
I have thus arrived at the astute observation that Hollywood is in a strange place as far as whatever the research says, which a very long and winding strike has only exacerbated. I have also recently rediscovered that I am a Halloween person: love most of the pageantry, that it kicks off in (ahhhh) autumn, all the lazy commercials in between football possessions, will gladly hand out candy to all your children if they’re polite, and thank Tim Burton at least once a week for distorting my perception of both beauty and human nature. I was not aware that my fear of vampires, which is abating, had kept me away from horror movies in general — that I had not prioritised one in whiles, despite a childhood full of aspirations towards a career like RL Stine’s and/or Stephen King’s. So I asked a friend with impeccable taste, more impeccable than mine could ever aspire to be, for some recommendations; and found it quite telling that she recommended at least two features whose focus is on gender dynamics gone woefully wrong.
Culturally, I thought, the exchange spoke volumes about where women creators, and women consumers, are with cinematic storytelling. Is there a kind of correction happening, where women creators first attempt to address their gender’s lack of equivalent agency in relationships, before the law, in boardrooms, or is it that Hollywood will fund these sorts of endeavours purely because the audience is finally listening (and only somewhat)?
I suppose Fresh is categorised as a horror movie because it has incidences of and overtures towards cannibalism that ought put you off beef for at least a couple of days. But I, a man of some sort, consumed the movie as a necessary polemic against how all kinds of men unwittingly place women in dangerous or at least emotionally vulnerable positions. In the much heralded, but for me somewhat fraught Promising Young Woman, everything is going fantastic with a happy-go-lucky, Shins-adoring, adequately sophisticated young chap, before an unsavoury revelation turns both the romance and the movie on its head. Because you’ve seen the trailer, you know a dark turn is imminent in Fresh, and in the more recently released Cat Person, which is based on a very good, well-received short story in The New Yorker. The pivot satisfies an instinctive need in us as viewers, but it also allows men who don’t know what they’re capable of to go: oh, pshaw, I wouldn’t in a million years be capable of that.
By the time you settle down to take in Cat Person, it has already performed the disservice of giving the game away in the previews. My memory might be a little fuzzy but I don’t recall the short story’s problematic male being so overtly unlikable, or its female protagonist pursuing the central romance so aggressively. Don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to behold a woman with this much sureness of mind, at least for the movie’s first hour or so … but I worry that certain creative decisions play into the hands of an audience, and an industry, that is extremely slow to learn and reform. She was basically asking for it. She didn’t have to go so far. Couldn’t she tell he was an asshole, her friend tried to warn her. Cat Person, the short story, did a tremendous job of informing me that I have been or displayed glimpses of the problematic male before, or enabled a few, whereas the movie is more interested in leaving a trail of meaningless treats in an all-too familiar forest. By the time shit hits the fan, and boy does it, we’re so far-removed from reality that I’m not sure there’s a lesson left to learn?
It’s great that Hollywood is willing to fund more and more of these freakstravaganzas — with tall, dark, handsome men or sometimes just boys-next-door as the monsters — and that interesting new director like Mimi Cave (Fresh) and Susanna Fogel (Cat Person) get to make them. But I’m officially waiting to see what happens when these excellent minds decide they want to shoot original sci-fi epics, helm a period piece set in a problematic time, or just (as many males get to) a medium-sized movie about nothing much. If there are perchance monstrous men close to the centre of those efforts, perhaps we — and by we I mean us and Hollywood — can start to get uncomfortably honest about what these monsters look like in the real world.
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Image courtesy of MGM.com
There is yet more course-corrective action at play, it feels like, in the hugely disappointing Bottoms. Ayo Edibiri, of The Bear fame, and Rachel Senott, from Shiva Baby, are two up-and-coming talents I would drop most activities for. Edibiri in particular was in the trailer for what felt like every indie this past summer, and it was Bottoms I was most excited for: helmed by a director (Emma Seligman) who shares their sensibilities, playfully winking at Fight Club bros who take Fight Club way too seriously, and wading in the unexplored waters of same-sex high school romance. What we’ve actually got is a movie that walks and talks like one that is now streaming on Amazon Prime.
Edibiri and Senott play a pair of high school nobodies in a script that feels they must acknowledge, proud and out loud, that they’re high school nobodies. The first conversation they have is about sex, and the movie’s core dilemma is will a pair of cheerleaders ever abandon their football-playing (male) partners to explore fulfilling relationships with another woman. So somewhere in the middle of a follow-up conversation, with a third, equally undersexed ally, a proposal for a women’s fight club is hatched. What better way for queer girls to cop a feel or two off straight girls, and investigate whether or not there’s anything there?
The complexity of this challenge, how to tell whether someone of a different sexual orientation even looks at you that way, is never explored for all its painful subtleties. Bottoms would rather crib cheap laughs off the fallacy the girls perpetuate, that they’ve been to juvenile detention, and present its distinctly male obstacles as little more than annoying distractions. Things just fall into place, or don’t, because we only have ninety minutes or so to exist in this pretend world where queer women can be hilarious, assertive, and actually kick some ass. Sennott and Seligman do their story a disservice by focusing almost entirely on a slapstick and dare I say masculine flavour of comedy, complemented rather emptily by former Seattle Seahawk Marshon ‘Beast Mode’ Lynch getting to deliver a handful of barbaric lines.
Edibiri and Sennott are a likeable pair, even just trying not to fuck up YouTube interviews, so with a working smartphone and a social media app you can hang around their shenanigans in Bottoms ’til the end. But I’m not sure what the benchmark or comp. was in the brainstorm here. American Pie for lesbians? Superbad for girlies? I hope this creative core gets another shot, soon, and I hope they’re allowed to do a lot more than just gauge a few eyeballs.
