Barbie has been called a feminist film, but as far as I’m concerned it was nothing more than a confused pink orgy trying too hard to cram in so many big ideas about women and girls and their relationships with men that it failed to make any real point at all. It looked cool and the dance sequences weren’t bad, but beyond that it’s a mediocre film by a mediocre director. If you’re interested in exploring some well-made films by excellent female directors check out the work of Jane Campion, Lynne Ramsay, and Ava DuVernay for starters. But forget about Greta Gerwig, she sucks! Sorry, that’s just like my opinion man.
In the meantime if you find films which explore the male/female dynamic intriguing, but want to see it done in a focused and intelligent fashion, watch Alex Garland’s Men. Men uses the classic “final girl,” or in this case only girl, horror film framework to investigate some of the more disturbing aspects of masculinity.
First and foremost this is a film about men. The title says it all. It does not purport to reveal anything about women and the female experience despite the fact that the protagonist, Harper (Jessie Buckley), is a woman and the plot revolves around her torment at the hands of men. But I think an argument could be made for just the opposite. I think we could imagine all the men of the film as the collective protagonists and Harper as their antagonist–including the husband who kills himself when Harper, who has announced her intent to divorce him, refuses to pander to his wounded ego.
Harper seeks reprieve in a quiet village after the horror of her husband’s gruesome death–he jumps from an upper-floor balcony of their building and is grotesquely broken and impaled on the iron railing below. Arriving in the village she encounters a series of men who are all played by Rory Kinear. They all have the same face, even the malicious little boy she meets outside the church who calls her a “stupid bitch” when she refuses to play hide and seek with him. And that’s just the trouble with these men: they all want something from Harper, nay expect it from her, something unspoken yet ubiquitous, and when she fails to deliver they lash out with violence both psychological and physical.
But what is it that they want and why?
There is a scene in the first act of the film in which Harper approaches a dark, dank tunnel. She is alone. We have seen this trope in horror films before. We’re meant to be filled with terror for her vulnerability in this enclosed space, but there’s something else going on here. This is no ordinary horror film tunnel. The camera moves in on her as she stands before the yawning opening framed in black. Just prior to this she has been wandering through the forest in a moment of peace which may have been her first in some time. She looks around her with reverence and joy, taking it all in and even frolicking in the rain. This spirit of playfulness remains with her as she gazes, not without trepidation, into the tunnel and calls out into the darkness, her voice echoing off the tunnel walls. She continues her game as she moves further into the tunnel, stopping about midway and using her voice to build a layered chorus of echoes. She giggles in amazement at the sound. And just then at the very moment she begins to drop her guard, we see a male figure rise at the end of the tunnel. He lets out a caw, very much like that of a crow, and begins running toward her.
Though the tunnel Harper encounters is a place of potential danger where she is vulnerable to attack, this symbolism is both more obvious and more complex than that of your typical horror villain feeding ground. The tunnel is a vaginal symbol which will be echoed throughout the film in the form of the Sheela-na-gig hidden on the reverse side of the Green Man pillar which sits at the front of the village church. The Sheela-na-gig sits staring with snake like locks, holding open her gaping vaginal canal. She is both inviting and repulsive, a far more visceral symbolism than that of the male eyes and face peering out from between leaves which opposes her. In fact, the Green Man symbolism incorporates the natural and therefore the feminine. The male face is as an intruder in the forest, seeking where he ought not to seek, looking where he ought not to look. The film’s literal Green Man–a homeless nude man who stalks Harper throughout the film–is seen cutting a slit into the skin of his forehead and placing a leaf inside the opening. He does not possess the creative force, thus he must seek it through unnatural means.
Men is a film rich in symbolism and there are many threads we could follow here, but there are two encounters in the film which are pivotal to understanding its themes. Each of these involves the Vicar with the first taking place at the church. Harper has just escaped the nude stalker who will transform into the Green Man as the film develops. He’s been arrested, and for the moment she feels she can relax and perhaps seek solace in this place of refuge. But refuge is not what she will find here. Her experience will be something more akin to threat. From the moment the Vicar appears to her it is clear he wants something from her.
“You’re in pain, yes?” he asks with an almost dismissive tone. She is taken aback. In the previous scene we saw her in the church, crying out in a tearful wail after a flashback to her husband and his gruesome death. There is a flash of the Vicar in the background, but nothing more. Now he’s decided he wants to help. He says “You’re tormented,” then explains his regret for having neglected to console her in the church: “I didn’t approach, but I should have. So, I am now.” Instantly she is met with his need for her validation. The Vicar has shirked his duties out of fear over the emotional nature of Harper’s outburst and is now putting it on her to restore his sense of worth by allowing him to fulfill the role of confidant.
But there is something antagonistic in the Vicar’s desire to play the role of advisor and protector. He is disturbed by Harper’s outburst in the church. He believes that she is “tormented,” though she assures him she is not. Something about Harper’s emotional independence is unsettling to the Vicar. He needs the vindication of her trust to restore his sense of purpose.
Harper and the Vicar sit down so that he can “help” her. Harper relays her story about how her husband hit her then killed himself by jumping off the upper balcony after she kicked him out. She says that what haunts her is that she felt as though they could see each other for a moment as he fell past the window. That moment of contact in which she saw him and he saw her and they both knew something terrible was about to happen was their final moment together. What could this mean for Harper? Does she wonder if in this moment he felt an instance of regret? Did she perhaps feel relieved, vindicated, freed of the burden he had become to her? We will never know, because Harper is not given a chance to express her own feelings on the matter.
The Vicar completely ignores what she has told him about the moment that haunts her and turns instead to what haunts him: her scream. In the church when she lets out her wail he runs and hides in fear. There is something in the raw truth of that visceral scream that disturbs his sensibilities. He returns to it here telling her: “It’s the screaming.” She replies that her husband was not screaming when he fell, but the Vicar corrects her: he is not talking about her husband he is talking about her and her scream, the scream he was just subjected to in the church. He decides that the reason behind her scream must be her guilt over how she “drove him to it.” He crafts an apology for her husband: “Men do strike women sometimes. It’s not nice, but it’s not a capital offense.” He then lays the blame with her for failing to allow her husband the chance to apologize, even going so far as to ask “Might it be true that if you’d given him the chance to apologize he'd still be alive?”
The Vicar’s intent is not to help Harper, but to hold her accountable for the wrong she has done. But what is this wrong? How did she “drive him to it”?
Harper’s crime is that of Eve in the garden. There is no shortage of imagery to reinforce this in the film. There is an apple tree in the yard of the house where Harper is staying, the owner, Geoffrey, chastises her for taking one at the opening of the film calling it “forbidden fruit.” She is the temptress, the siren that seduces sailors to their death. But there is something larger at play, which dives deeper into the terror behind such tales of feminine malice.
In the third act of the film, we meet the Vicar for the second time. Harper is under siege in her rented house. She has just been chased up the stairs by a nameless man. She runs into the bathroom and slams the door behind her. As she backs away from the door and into the room, the Vicar calmly enters as though he has been invited. After a dramatic entrance in which he recites poetry, he asks Harper at what age she lost her virginity:
“I’ve been thinking about it. I have pictured you legs open, vagina open, mouth open. I have decided that you are an expert in carnality, someone who has explored all the things that they can do and have done to them. These things now exist in my mind. This is your power. This is the control that you exert.”
Sexual temptation is what the Vicar accuses Harper of. It is she who put these thoughts in his head, not the other way around.
“You are singing to me” says the Vicar as he drops to his knees before her, grabbing her dress suggestively, “…to dash me to pieces on the rocks of this. These rocks. This cave. This slit. What is it?”
As he asks this final question Harper raises the blade she’s been holding to his throat to which he responds: “Yes, exactly, it’s the tip of the blade.”
It is this last line that hints at the deeper psychological terror which haunts the male psyche. Men are looking for validation from their female counterparts. In fact they are desperate for it. Sexual desire is a part of this need. Woman must grant man access to her physical body, lest he resort to rape, and contrary to what some may believe, most men are not interested in rape. There is little satisfaction in forcibly taking what could be freely given. Rape is a violent and desperate act. Men desire love, the same as women. When man is granted access to the female body he shares his seed, but in his act of giving he is simultaneously faced with his own obsolescence.
There is a quote from Carl Jung’s essay “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” which I believe helps to elucidate the problem of woman from the male perspective. Jung speaks of the mother archetype with a reverent and lyrical honesty, addressing our experience of the mother in her most integral form:
“This is the mother-love which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, loving tender and yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring giver of life–mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead.”
Our lives begin at the moment we are born into the world via the woman’s body: a painful and violent process in which woman and child scream and cry out. Prior to this moment we are in “the long silence.” If woman is our “portal” between these worlds this implies that she is transcendent in that she touches or reaches both worlds in the act of giving birth. She pries us from the darkness and silence into the light and sound of the thing we call life. This gives her an immense power which men fear both because it is beyond their understanding and because they do not possess it. It creates within the masculine sensibility simultaneously the reverent sense of homecoming and shelter Jung speaks of, as well as a consummate terror. It is interesting that Jung specifically says of the mother that she is “cruel like fate,” because there is a sense in which woman chooses who will be brought into the world, and therefore has a hand in fate that no man does. Men are left to earthly methods alone. They can attempt to touch the other side through violence and the taking of life, but in the act of killing we cannot achieve transcendence as all we are left with is the mute indifference of a cold corpse. Man may convince himself that he can reveal something about the secret knowledge woman holds by taking life, but he is inevitably left disappointed, no closer to understanding the great void from which all life emerges than ever before.
The Vicar and the Christian tradition which he represents, are arguably the most fully realized of hostile reactions on the part of the male psyche to the terror he feels at the mercy of the feminine. Jung speaks of the violence done to women in the removal of all viable female symbols from the Christian church, replacing the humanistic mother of the Trinity with the confounding Holy Spirit.
When the Vicar gets down on his knees before Harper, in a gesture that is more fitting of a supplicant than a marauder, he is desperate to understand her enchantment and his inability to escape that allure. Though the blade is typically a phallic symbol, here the Vicar proclaims the vagina to be “the tip of the blade.”
It is the passage way through which all things begin and end. As Jung says: “mute impalpable portal which closes upon the dead.” Woman is the beginning and the end and when man shares his seed with her he simultaneously loses the only power he has in the act of procreation. He is now expendable, obsolete, a bag of bones which may be cast aside. Only in the regard of woman can he regain and maintain his purpose. He can fulfill the role of confidant or protector, but only if he is needed and this is why he is so desperate for female validation. Man needs woman to restore his lost sense of purpose.
In the final segment of the film’s climax Harper asks her husband what he wants and his reply: “Your love.” But it’s not the whole truth. He wants to have her power. He wants to transcend the earthly realm as she transcends it, he wants to be capable of giving life and thus be released from his perceived bondage to woman. All those stories about women the film alludes to–Eve, the sirens, even Clytemnestra and Helen of Troy (the Vicar recites lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem Leda and the Swan)–are stories about men ensnared by the seductive powers of women.
Man feels inferior to woman. She is the gatekeeper to a knowledge he will never possess and this fills him with awe, terror, and finally rage. Man lashes out in violence at that which he cannot understand. He attempts to control and to possess. But for all his efforts, he never gets any closer to revealing the secret that woman holds.