Observations of Cinematic Knobbery: Part II

Ok, I watched movies again. Yeah, I know, hairy radical feminists with high blood pressure should limit their mainstream film-viewing to about one a fortnight, but living life on the edge, that’s me. Plus I have to have some way to avoid my uni assignments.

This week I will be critically analysing a piece of putrified patriarchal cheese known as The Notebook, and if I can get through this without having to make a trip to the vomitorium I’ll be very proud of myself.

The plot does not greatly differ from the usual sexist misogynist shit served up to us by Hollywood’s fat-arse honchos; boy sees girl; boy does a quick on the spot evaluation of girl to assess her human worth based on how happy she makes his wang; boy determines that girl ranks highly on his fuckability scale; boy carries out a series of behaviours designed to lure girl into a dynamic in which he exerts control over her, commonly known as romance…bla bla bla you know the rest.

In this particularly fetid expression of sugar-coated controlling behaviours, boy heroically climbs up a moving ferris wheel in which our unsuspecting girl is a passenger and then proceeds to demand that she accompany him on a “date” on threat of suicide, which it is understood will be on her conscience should she exercise any personal agency and refuse.

This is after she’s already turned him down once, mind you, that uppity bitch, she needed to be shown who’s boss, right?

So she agrees to go out with this crazed lunatic in much the same way one might surrender a wallet to an armed thug. Anything to diffuse the situation; it can’t reasonably be seen as a genuine choice, can it?
According to crazed lunatic boy it can, and he soon hunts her down in order to coerce her into complying with an agreement she entered into under extreme duress (Noah! It’s called stalking, dude!).
This is where the film demonstrates one of patriarchy’s dominant themes; women don’t know what they want, they can’t think for themselves; they need a man to make them see it. This theme was, I believe, popularised in The Graduate and has been recycled a shitload of times since then. Deep down, we are to understand, Allie secretly wants Noah to control her, so very very secretly she doesn’t even know it herself. In fact she wants nothing to do with him, something she has made clear to him several times now, but Noah’s gonna be a real pal and liberate her from that kind of independent thinking.

So on the long-awaited “date”, boy immediately sets out to undermine her familial support network. This is a classic control tactic used by perpetrators of domestic violence and/or abuse. Separate the victim from their social supports; all the better to drag you under my control, m’dear.

He begins an interrogation which starts with him criticising her lifestyle and her family AND her pursuit of an education, and accusing her of not thinking for herself, and ends with him convincing her to place herself in physical danger by laying down in the middle of the road until a car almost hits her. Apparently this is his idea of getting her to think for herself, by obediently following his orders, and she is depicted as feeling mysteriously liberated by this bizarre experience of covert manipulation.

Who woulda thought that that’s all it would take to liberate women huh? Just use extreme coercion to get her alone, then play a few mind games undermining her entire social support network, then command her to lay down in front of traffic and presto! One liberated woman! Of course it must be understood that from the dudely perspective “liberated” when applied to women-we-want-to-fuck, means getting women to do whatever we want them to do, am I right boyz?

Notice Noah had another meltdown, after monopolising her time for all those months, as soon as it looked like her family were going to have some influence over her after all, he was outa there! If he couldn’t have total control then he didn’t want her at all. This is where the film tricks us a bit, by depicting the class prejudices of Allie’s family; we have to feel a bit sorry for Noah for bearing the brunt of such middle class assholery, BUT, we’re not reminded that Allie too is under the thumb of middle class values and being a woman as well, is still WAY more oppressed than free spirit Noah. Most American women in the 1940s still didn’t have voting rights, and on top of that Allie is legally considered to be the property of her father.
Shameful case of audience deception here by director Nick Cassevetes (I looked it up on wiki) for pretending to address issues of oppression and social inequality, but oops, neglecting to tell both sides of the story, cos it’s not like women are actual real humans who make up just over half of the planet’s population or anything, is it? FAIL, Nick.

He trots out the class division issue again later on in the movie by having Noah “win” the prize (Allie) from the middle class rich dude who I was beginning to suspect actually respected her as an equal human being, but then doh! He goes behind her back and asks her parents if he can marry her buy her and make her his very own little sex/domestic servant til death do us part. Seriously, this poor woman doesn’t get to make one independent decision in the whole fucking movie. No wonder she developed Alzheimers, she had to repress all this shit.

I’m getting bored with this so I’ll skip to the end (even though there is plenty I could say about how Allie won out over Noah’s faithful partner- young always trumps old! But only with women, dudes are allowed to get old).

The film closes with the crazed stalker dude elevated to pedestal status, as the patient and devoted, long-suffering martyr, spending the best part of every day reading her the story of how she was conquered by him, over and over and OVER. That’s right, even when she’s old and sick and institutionalised, this dude just can’t leave her alone.
Every day he’s there with his fuckin’ book, forcing her to relive the experience of her totally oppressed life, until each night she cracks and tells him to fuck off.

But as we know, Noah has a pretty healthy track record for not understanding the word NO.

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