Art from the Artist / Part 2

It just struck me that the positioning of Linda Blair's hand in the above image is extremely odd.  And extremely telling.  In fact, the more I look at it, the more it looks like what I think it's meant to be.  Later in the scene, Linda grabs the man behind her, quite aggressively, by his genitals.  Of course, she's possessed by a demon in the narrative and I'm pretty certain it is not Linda's hand that grabs the doctor's crotch; but the overall effect is that a twelve year-old girl is in fact fondling (or should we say groping?) an older man. Linda was not twelve when she filmed this. She was fifteen.  Not that it makes a difference.  
The Exorcist is another movie that I find questionable.  It has not been officially placed on the cancel culture short list and I can't understand why.  It's really the worst of the bunch.  Not that I think anything, really, should be cancelled.  Times change.  Mores change.  What is acceptable at any given time changes over time.  It's called the pendulum.  I admire The Exorcist mostly as a piece of filmmaking.  It is a masterpiece of cinema. One of the most fully realized mise en scenes ever captured on film. However, it's also about ninety minutes of watching a little girl get tortured.  And let's face it, the infamous crucifix sequence is a violent rape scene.  I can't watch that scene.  Yes, the head spinning dummy is kind of cheezy (and some of the clothing dated) nearly fifty years later but the film is so expertly, violently and convincingly realized I feel like I'm watching an actual sexual attack.  It crosses a line.  Part of why the movie is so affecting is because Linda Blair is actually going through an ordeal in front of the camera nearly as traumatizing as the possession and exorcism in the script.  "She doesn't remember any of it..." Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), Regan's mother, says at the end of the movie.  That's great for Regan; but Linda Blair doesn't get to forget.  If anyone deserves a retroactive apology for the way they were treated on a movie set, it's Linda Blair.  Burstyn too.  They both suffered back injuries during production.  Guns were being fired over people's heads.  Linda was trapped in a refrigerator car in nothing but a nightgown for weeks.  I think both women should be given honorary Oscars for their work in this.  They were both nominated but didn't win that year.  And they were clearly the best performances.  Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class?  Nobody remembers that.  Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon?  That wasn't acting.  That was being a brat.  Linda is good even when she's doing the demonic voice before it was dubbed by Mercedes McCambridge.  It's on Youtube.  But Friedkin, in a way, had to pay the devil his due.  He never made a very good movie after The Exorcist.  So I guess that's his comeuppance.

So, let's talk about Roman Polanski.  Again, another famous case.  He raped a thirteen year-old girl. The late 70's again.  He did it.  He was caught.  He was in the process of being prosecuted.  He fled the United States to avoid the consequences of his actions.  Ironically, those consequences would've probably amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist due to his fame and wealth.  But he was a coward.  He really was the little weasel he resembled. Still is. I have no respect for Mr. Polanski.  So can I separate this artist from his art?  Well, it may be rationalizing; but Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown were both made before his crimes; so yes, I can still watch them without wondering what crimes he was committing while making them.  And again, after making Chinatown he never did anything that approached the grandeur of that movie.  I have not sought out anything he's made after that.  I have not seen The Pianist, nor do I plan to.  He won the best director Oscar in 2003.  How the fuck did that happen?  I think he needs to come back to the states and answer for what he did.  If anyone needs to make ​some retroactive apologies and reparations; it's Roman Polanski.

Here's Mia again.  It's strange how these issues seem so interconnected.  How things seem to keep looping back from the past.  In Rosemary's Baby Mia plays a young housewife who's pimped out to the devil so her husband can make it in showbiz.  She's raped by Satan, no less.  At the time, Mia who was in her early twenties, was married to Frank Sinatra who was nearly thirty years older than she.  This is another movie that I can watch a zillion times and will often just have playing in the background.  I can recite the dialogue along with the cast.  This film too is like having old friends that I love come over to hang out.  Even Guy Woodhouse.  He's an actor...I get why he did what he did (just joking here).  But seriously; I'm seeing a theme in all of these films and it makes me question my own motives as to my attraction to these stories.  These collections of images I consider great art.  The theme that most of these films share is rape.  What does that say about me?  Why do six of my favorite movies have sexual violence/power dynamic abuse against women as a theme?  In writing this, I think I've been trying to figure that out.

Chinatown​ has at its center a rape.  The villain, Noah Cross (played disturbingly by John Huston) has sired a daughter/granddaughter with his own daughter, Evelyn (Faye Dunaway).  When this is revealed during the film's denouement, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), after having slapped it out of Faye, asks: "He raped you...?"  Her response is ambiguous.  She shakes and nods her head at the same time.  Faye makes this gesture heart-rending; but you can't help but think she's doing it under the suggestion of the director.  Here again we have this kinky age disparity.  When Noah raped Evelyn, she had to have been a teen-age girl; he, already almost an old man.  Robert Towne's original script had something of a happy ending.  Evelyn is the one who triumphs, pumping her freaky father full of hot lead.  Polanski rewrote it so that Evelyn is the one who dies.  She gets shot through the eye and daddy gets away with not only the rape; but control over his comely young daughter/granddaughter.  Polanski thought this ending was more in line with the way of the world.  Who knew he meant it quite so literally?

Interiors, the most sedate movie out of all of them, includes a rape scene.  Or rather, an attempted rape scene.  Why?

Interiors is the story of an un-surnamed family living in the Tri-State Area.  Somehow fabulously wealthy (I mean, even with the combined salaries of a successful lawyer and interior decorator, could they really afford that summer house in the Hamptons?  Not to mention all those apartments with views of Central Park, but I digress) they are all miserable.  Except youngest daughter Flyn (seen above).  She is played by Kristin Griffith, who does her best with the most thankless and cliched role in the film.  She's an air-headed actress who only talks about her clothes and her weight and for some reason does lines of cocaine before going to bed.  While doing one of these lines, her brother-in-law (played by the late, great Richard Jordan) joins her in the garage.  He has been making condescending remarks about her from the start of the film.  She is just an empty vessel; a shiny bauble.  The only thing she's good for is looking at; because, naturally, all she wants is to be looked at.  So I guess this means she deserves to be raped.  Which he then attempts to do.  That she's been bestowed with the title of "sexy little girl" by her own sister makes the scene even grosser. Luckily, Frederick is too drunk to "F"; so Flyn escapes pretty much by accident.  Yes, Frederick is quite literally impotent (not just artistically); I guess we can assume that's the reason for the scene.  But is it?  Why is it in the film?  It sticks out like a sore thumb.  That scene has never seemed organic to me.  It has no repercussions in the plot.  Even Flyn herself seems completely un-phased. There's a shot of her sleeping like a baby. In the still above, it's mere hours after she's been attacked.  She seems rather calm.  She never tells her sister her husband is a would-be rapist.  It just seems to me that Woody wanted to film a scene where a beautiful young woman is attacked.  It's that simple.  And it's that disturbing.
I can't really separate the art from the artist in this case.  He is so often a part of it, literally, on the screen.  But then, he's always been kinda creepy.  It's a shame though, personally.  My older brother and I never had much in common; but we both loved comedy and Woody Allen.  Now that pleasant memory is tarnished.  There's a scene in Annie Hall where young Alvy (really, Woody) is talking to an uncle, "Joey Nichols."  He's doing a bit about nickels; that people call him Joey Nickels! Nickels! Nickels!  Joey Five- cents! Or something like that.  Young Alvy walks past the camera and mutters: "What an asshole..."  My brother and I found this hilarious.  Now, I can only think that Woody is Joey Five- cents.
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I think I have an inkling into why the rape theme runs through many of my favorite movies (even Disney's Sleeping Beauty, where our heroine is given a kiss that she has no say in).  At the risk of sounding like an armchair Freudian, I think it's because I identify with women.  The world is run by men, isn't it?  Straight men.  We live in a Patriarchy (note the capital "P").  Heterosexual male oppression is a real thing.  For women and also, I think, for gay men.  In most of these films, women are dealing with this oppression which is symbolized by the rapes and attempted rapes and the warped power dynamics (despite the motivations of the male filmmakers).  I sympathize with these women. I want to see how they deal with this unfairness. I have felt the shaming of being the feminine; the weak; the lesser sex.  I am always rooting for these women in these movies.  I love it when Flyn knocks Frederick into a canoe.  I love it when Mariel basically tells Woody to bug off at the end of Manhattan (even though it's supposed to be Ike's reckoning).  I'm happy that Regan can't remember anything.  It's cathartic when Rosemary spits in her husband's face. 
​But, I am devastated when Evelyn Mulwray dies at the end of Chinatown.  I wish Robert Towne had insisted on at least filming his original ending.  It might've ended up on the blu-ray and I could cheer when Faye plugs her disgusting pig of a father and drives off into the night with her daughter/sister.  She could just leave Jack Nicholson at the curb as far as I'm concerned.