In his Alternate Take on the portmanteau horror film V/H/S, John Bleasdale questions the distinction between a misogynist film and a film about misogyny. In the case of that film, it can be seen as both “about woman hate” and “an endorsement of woman hate via a legitimized woman fear.” When it comes to reading a film, there is no definitive answer and opinion is entirely subjective. What deeply offends one person, another can find extremely perceptive or truthful. To simply dismiss a film, then, for being misogynist or offensive seems like a largely unhelpful notion. Instead, it would surely be more worthwhile to study these forms of representation, how they are shaped and disseminated, and for what purposes. This article aims to examine two recent films - Side Effects and Trance - in order to illustrate how the manifestation of nastiness and, more specifically, misogyny, can be reflected through genre tropes, character archetypes, and self-reflexivity to achieve a variety of resolutions.

Side Effects

In Side Effects, genre is deployed almost as a narrative device to shift the pace and direction of the film; it starts under the guise of a mystery - whose are those bloody footprints in the apartment? Why happened to its inhabitants? What is the significance of the model sailboat? Moving back in time, the film picks up three months earlier, shifting focus from young married couple Emily (Rooney Mara) and Martin (Channing Tatum) to Emily’s psychiatrist, Dr Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), after she drives head-on into the wall of an underground car park. Jonathan sees his life come tumbling down around him after Emily murders her husband, seemingly under the influence of the new miracle drug she has been prescribed, named Ablixa. At this juncture, the film moves from psychological drama into a kind of pharmaceutical thriller akin to Michael Clayton (2007), hinting at the dangerous commercialisation of Big Pharma and the harmful impact of psychoactive drugs on an overmedicated America. However, as Nick Chen acutely observes, “Side Effects has as much to say about mental health and pill culture as Silver Linings Playbook - which is a snarky way of saying not much at all.” Shifting gears once again, the film gives way to Hitchcockian intrigue as Jonathan realises he is being set up as the fall guy in a larger conspiracy he is unable to fully comprehend. Taking the foot off the pedal, the film then becomes more procedural in following his attempts to discover the truth and outwit those responsible for his predicament, and extends into neo-noir territory through its emphasis on the figures of the femmes fatales.

Jude Law has always been a difficult actor to warm to, and perhaps seems suited to darker, more devious roles. His performance as the serpentine, immoral Australian blogger in Soderbergh’s Contagion (2012), for instance, showcased his sleazy talents in an pertinently entertaining fashion. In Side Effects, his character is pitched at just the right level of educated superiority and unwitting naïveté, and it is this combination that makes him so ripe for plucking. In short, although he is very good at what he does, he is not half as smart as he thinks he is.

It is a playful film, toying with chronology, character and style. Once again acting as his own director of photography (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews), Soderbergh indulges both in the comforts of digital filmmaking and the expressive potential of a drab, melancholy New York City. This detached realist style combines with the urban backdrops to give a sense of the characters’ roles and their states of mind. For instance, in one carefully orchestrated montage, slow motion and HD clarity is used to convey Emily’s content, doped-up condition when the drug works, while shallow focus and diffuse lighting relates her gloom and detachment when the side effects overshadow the drug’s benefits. Soderbergh has occasionally been accused of manipulating form and genre at the expense of storytelling, and here Scott Z. Burns’ clever script is almost unwittingly facile, making the story both more palatable and more disconcerting. For all its incursions into different genres and the cold, impassive style in which the film is presented, it breaks down into a rather modest tale of greed and corruption, one in which no character is capable of salvation.

Some have called Side Effects a nasty film, and this moniker is hard to refute; but does this nastiness derive from the coldness of the presentation and the lack of humanity conveyed through digital detachment, or does it spring from the absence of decency or morally upright characters in the film? Taking a pragmatic perspective, the film’s depiction of real-life degradation is brutally honest, a world in which people have little mutual respect and fail to demonstrate any sense of altruism. Like recent films such as Shame (2011) and Killer Joe (2012), Side Effects is almost entirely populated by nasty, unsympathetic characters, men and women incapable of compassion or remorse. However, this depiction of nasty or immoral behaviour can also be seen as a cleansing experience, a representation of unsparing truthfulness. The film’s atmosphere is evoked through its static compositions, tight framing and expressive use of warm filters, sapping it of energy where Trance goes for visual flair and pounding techno tracks. While this lugubriousness takes nothing away from Side Effects’ narrative propulsion, it instead imbues it with an air of objective studiousness and a Hitchcockian mélange of fear and fascination. Cinema is clearly still in need of filmmakers like Soderbergh who possess such a level of creative intelligence, evincing a considerable gift for expression together with a deep understanding of adverse and deleterious forms of human interaction. The film is a bitter expression of the modern world, absent of hope or redemption; like Killing Them Softly (2012), Side Effects is a State of the Nation delivered with more honesty and integrity than a multitude of political speeches, presented with greater subtlety but lacking in satirical bite.

Some reviewers have pointed to the misogynistic nature of this twist. It is easy to understand this reasoning given that the characterisations seem so politically incorrect and the plot twist itself is so outdated. However, it could also be argued that this is both deliberate and somewhat tongue-in-cheek. In a way it is redolent of the ridiculous furore that followed the release (and success) of Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992). This controversy resulted from what was seen to be the negative depiction of homosexuality in the film, with some claiming that the representation of a bisexual serial killer had a negative impact on the perception of the gay, lesbian and bisexual community itself. Roger Ebert commented on this controversy in his review of the film, stating that, regarding the allegedly offensive homosexual characters, “The movie’s protesters might take note of the fact that this film’s heterosexuals, starting with Douglas, are equally offensive. Still, there is a point to be made about Hollywood's unremitting insistence on typecasting homosexuals - particularly lesbians - as twisted and evil.”

Indeed, a casual glance at the representation of lesbians in contemporary American cinema reveals a higher proportion of nuanced, progressive explorations of sexuality and identity in films such as Mulholland Drive (2001), Chloe (2009), Black Swan (2010), and The Kids Are All Right (2010) in contrast to problematic portrayals in films like The Roommate (2011). The conscious decision to return to this tired, outmoded and (once) controversial plot twist is therefore an intriguing one. This revelation does make sense in genre terms, being both referential to neo-noirs such as Basic Instinct, and also so passé as to be almost beyond consideration. It is rare to see such a blatant depiction of lesbian sexuality as male fantasy following this extended period of representational progression in cinema, and yet this depiction makes sense when it is understood that is simply in service of the plot - an intentionally sensationalist pastiche of earlier genre forms. It should also be noted that this homosexual undercurrent has another significance given Rooney Mara’s recent depiction of Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), a film about overt misogyny and the hunt for a “killer of women.” In Side Effects, it is the very un-PC nature of the twist that makes it impactful, though not exactly credible. For a film that is so handsome and controlled, and has such a fond and playful sense of genre, this revelation seems almost too banal, too out of place to be a feasible option in attempting to unwrap this mystery.

To an extent, both Trance and Side Effects interrogate and re-evaluate this archetype, even if it is depicted in outmoded and problematic ways (Danny Boyle actually refers to the femme fatale as a MacGuffin here). Like these neo-noirs, Side Effects is less about the corkscrewing plot twists and more about issues of identity and perspective, using archetypes to undermine rather than reinforce convention. By complicating the role of the femme fatale, the film highlights the chauvinistic treatment of women in the patriarchal system of the medical profession. At one point, Jonathan is asked by his partner (Peter Friedman) whether he would have treated Emily differently had she been a man; indignant, Jonathan disabuses him of this notion, but it raises an important question regarding the patriarchal nature of the doctor-patient relationship, and about who is taking advantage of whom in this dynamic. The film uses these misogynistic traits to expose the misandry of the figure of the femme fatale, such as playing on the attraction that Jonathan might have for Emily by fabricating erotic photos to insinuate an intimate encounter. This can itself be seen as a sexist form of representation: depicting women as misanderist is misogynist; depicting men as misogynist, however, seems to be far more acceptable, even expected. This is a troubling paradigm.

Jonathan is selected for his masculine weaknesses but is only able to overcome them through his own moral failings. He tells Emily that he believes she is “a victim of circumstance and biology”; instead, it is he who is the intended target, in his own way a victim of circumstance given his profession and his unsuspecting demeanour. Noah Berlatsky argues that, in the film’s generic mutability, “Noir and its attendant misogyny aren't really the point, in other words; they're just a byproduct of Soderbergh's rage for cleverness.” He goes on to say that the film does not have the courage of its own misogyny: “Catherine Zeta-Jones and Rooney Mara are both ready, willing, and able to overwhelm the film with malevolent gyno-evil, but Soderbergh just isn't quite willing to go there.” However, while Jonathan is neither consumed by lust for Emily nor separates himself from her due to his psychiatric instincts, there is no realistic point at which he would need to refuses the advances - sexual or otherwise - of a femme fatale. Interestingly, he refutes the claims of sexual impropriety from an earlier case, yet this plants a seed of doubt strong enough for his wife to lose her faith and walk out on him. Upon their first meeting in the film, Victoria and Jonathan discuss Emily’s case history: “I’m glad she’s being seen by a man this time,” Victoria says. “That will help.” Law has been targeted, seen as an easy mark for their complex scheme. This is an attack against both his masculinity and his professionalism and, though he triumphs by the film’s end, he has failed on both counts. “We didn’t go looking for you, we just looked at the world,” Emily confesses later. The world is full of dupes, it seems, and he is just the first credulous, sympathetic male doctor that happened to fall into their laps.

While the film might be moving in the direction of ending on a note of pessimistic realism with the evil-doers getting away with their crimes, the false optimism of its conclusion is more potent, emphasising the human cost one must pay to succeed in such a cynical world. While Victoria and Emily are both imprisoned at the end of the film, Jonathan’s victory is decidedly unheroic. He lies and falsifies documents in order to test Emily’s compliance, using his superiority in the doctor-patient relationship - not necessarily the male-female dynamic - in much the same way that Siebert did in order to achieve certain desired effects. Perhaps this is, once again, an old-fashioned return to Classical-era Hollywood wherein the femme fatale has to pay for her misdeeds lest we forget that what she did was wrong. Critics may point to the fact that the women in the film are shown to be evil, crazy or both; but it also depicts men as immoral and corruptible. Martin ruptures the notion of marital trust through his criminal misdeeds, and Jonathan compromises professionally for self-preservation and for the good of his family. The women are manipulative, the men are manipulable; in short, more damage is done to the men in the course of the film than to the women. They are the victims of superannuated desires for money and revenge. Martin is coolly dispatched, stabbed in the back by his adoring wife, while Jonathan, a figure who starts off as innocent, responsible and diligent, has his life pulled down around him one piece at a time. Any sense of sympathy for his character, however, is ultimately expunged when he plays dirty, ensuring that Emily is sequestered to a medical facility where she can be medicated and observed. Yet together these acts by women against men exemplify the film’s pessimistic perspective on the sanctity of marriage, the dissolution of the family unit, and the fallibility of all forms of human relationships.

Trance

The way the film unsettles its noir triangle of seeker-hero, femme fatale, and villain is one of its more pleasing experiments. The reframing of Franck as seeker-hero and Simon as monstrous villain is - like the film itself - well executed, if troubling. This “troublesome” quality derives from the way the film uses its femme fatale. While the male roles are interestingly flexible (if not exactly revisionist), Rosario Dawson’s Dr Lamb is stuck as manipulative, vengeful, and dangerous, using her sexuality to get what she wants and leaving destroyed men in her wake. She at least gets a better deal than Young Woman in Red Car (the IMDb.com credit for Tuppence Middleton’s character) who appears reductively as dream, victim, and corpse. Say what you like about femmes fatales, at least they have agency.

The figure of the femme fatale is the focus for much of generic reworking taking place in Trance and Side Effects, but in comparing the two films it becomes clear that Emily is a far richer and more satisfying inflection of the character type than Dr Lamb. Emily is a dynamic figure, protean and manipulative; as her performance changes so does the very nature of the film. Side Effects explores how the noir Woman is interpreted, the shifting genres signalling each new reading, each change of perspective. Jonathan is a psychiatrist and thus supposedly fairly adept at reading people. Seen in this light, the plot of Side Effects becomes Jonathan’s hermeneutic quest to interpret the mystery that is Emily. For much of the film Jonathan fails in this attempt, so convincing is Emily’s performance. In this way, Side Effects conforms to the well-known pairing of Man as truth-seeker (the “penetrator” of the veil) and Woman as simultaneously truth and concealment of truth. Side Effects engages with the patriarchal overtones of this pairing in a self-aware manner, dramatising the overlap between Masculine quest for truth and its counterpart, the quest for mastery. Jonathan utilises the combined institutional might of Law and Science (medicine) to punish these transgressive women, and he becomes morally repugnant in doing so.

It is through the interplay between the characters of Dr Lamb and Simon that much of the film’s “nastiness” plays out. This is true both in the revelation of the depths of unpleasantness of which Simon is revealed to be capable (chiefly, but not exclusively, his violence towards women) and the “misogynistic” representation of Lamb. The word misogynistic appears in scare quotes not because I endorse the way Lamb is represented, but rather from fear of the power charges of misogyny have in shutting down discussion. If the representation of Lamb is misogynistic, it needs to be understood how, and why, and what that means. The representation of Dr Lamb is a particularly rich seam to explore in discussing Trance, so intertwined is it with the film’s central concerns of subjectivity and self-reflexivity. These concerns are, rather predictably, dramatised chiefly through a male character.

Trance is almost exclusively told from within Simon’s subjectivity. There are some scenes that would seem to qualify as exceptions, such as Nate’s tortured hypnosis induced nightmare of live burial. The scenes following Simon’s death, too, would appear to be tied to Franck’s subjectivity, signalled by a shot of Dr Lamb that corresponds with Franck’s point of view from the river and the subsequent transition that matches Franck’s submersion in the river to his re-emergence in his private pool. This transference of subjectivity completes the repositioning of Simon and Franck on the hero/villain spectrum. There are other scenes that are not so easy to account for, however. The montage introducing Dr Lamb, for example, cannot readily be mapped to Simon’s subjectivity - unless we are to interpret it as Simon’s idealised vision of her as a healer. The scenes between Franck and Dr Lamb could be read as the manifestations of Simon’s lust and paranoia, but if they are they are not only this. That Simon acquires Franck’s gun would seem to suggest the reality of these scenes, but then Simon is first led to the gun by Dr Lamb in one of his trances (her direction to look in bottom draw is one of the indications that the sequence is unreal). The proliferation of subjectivities and confusion of realities and unrealities all contribute to the film’s ontology of suspicion (or suspicion of ontology). It also prevents the viewer or critic from adopting the position of safety that viewing the misogyny as purely Simon’s would allow. To elaborate: if the film were uncomplicatedly tied to Simon’s subjectivity, the misogyny could be said to be entirely Simon’s. Instead, the proliferation of possible subjective positions (Simon’s, Franck’s, Lamb’s) means that the misogyny is harder to contain or limit to a single source. We have instead a sort of free indirect misogyny, and with it the problem of whether Trance is a misogynistic film or a film about misogyny.

As noted, however, this misogyny in is not limited to Simon, but permeates the film. This is particularly notable in the scene where as soon as Franck leaves Lamb with his henchman, where it is heavy-handedly implied that they will rape her. Tellingly, this occurrence doesn’t substantially disrupt the logic of the film, it seems unremarkable that these characters would act this way - it’s what gangster henchmen do. That this manner of thinking is even possible suggests that some sort of misogynistic logic is at work. It’s tempting to read this scene as another of Simon’s trances, one that lets him come in all guns blazing and reassert his masculinity by rescuing Elizabeth. The scene certainly plays out that fantasy, complete with Simon’s visceral unmanning of his adversary. Unless we count its hyper-masculine excess, there is nothing that marks this sequence as unreal however, and so we are unable to safely bracket it off as “Simon’s misogyny” and have to question whether it instead belongs to the film.

It is therefore possible to read the use of self-awareness in Trance as something of a devil’s advocate device. It raises an issue that it doesn’t agree with in order to test arguments against that issue. Therefore, the self-reflexivity of Trance is what shifts the film into the relatively safe realms of being a film about misogyny rather than a misogynistic film. Or rather it would be, if Trance’s self-reflexivity ever granted the viewer something like an objective space exterior to the film. Take the opening sequence of the film: Simon sits in an empty auction house, directly addressing the audience and lecturing them on the fine art of Fine Arts theft. There are a number of self-reflexive moments in this sequence, most notably the use of direct address, but also the cutaway to the black-and-white sequence that illustrates the simplicity of a heist in the sixties. This sequence alludes to a less convoluted filmic past, and signals that Trance will be a departure from this form. The staging of the sequence is also suggestive of a cinema: the rows of empty seats, the light emanating from behind Simon recalling the cone of light from the projector behind the audience. At the very least, the opening sequence of Trance foregrounds the act of storytelling.

By reintegrating this opening sequence into the main diegesis, the film denies the viewer the safe objective perspective that self-reflexivity creates. Instead, the viewer is made complicit, an effect heightened by the early identification with Simon. As with Side Effects, Trance is a film with no objectively good or moral character; there is no Atticus Finch or Jefferson Smith to tell the audience what is right and what is wrong. Instead the viewer must rely on their own moral compass. This is made harder through the denial of objectivity - through being drawn into the film - but it also forces the viewer to acknowledge that there is no moral outside, no pure utopian space outside the system from which we can make moral judgements. Finally, both Trance and Side Effects deny the distinction between being about misogyny and being misogynistic - they are both and neither. The distinction is not made by the films, but by the viewer.

This article was published on May 21, 2013.