It’s Hard Out There for an Audience

This has been a record year for disturbing images on film. I won’t soon forget the torture scene in Pan’s Labyrinth, in which the awful build-up — as the fascist army officer menaced the stuttering young rebel with a hammer — turned out to be milder than the aftermath, in which we actually got to see the dying man’s pulpy, mangled limb. Likewise, the first scene in Children of Men, in which a woman stumbles out of a bombed café holding her severed arm, was brutal, but every moment in which pregnant Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) stumbled around the refugee camp while in labor struck me as infinitely worse.

I wonder, though, if Children of Men is harder to watch if you’re of the childbearing sex. We’re all supposed to identify with Clive Owen’s urban functionary Theo, the guy who goes to work in a big office every day while the world collapses around him. But I kept feeling a (perhaps misplaced) affinity with Kee, the way I do for any halfway realistic female character around my age. Seen through her eyes, the movie’s plot becomes much more horrifying. Theo may be sprinting around the English countryside barefoot on a mad quest to save humanity, but at least he’s not the one whose battered body is responsible for producing the last baby left on earth.

Then again, why should you find Kee’s plight more upsetting just because you’re female? I’ve never been pregnant; I can’t really imagine what it would be like; and even if I had, or could, isn’t the whole point of fiction that it takes you to places you couldn’t otherwise go? Surely you don’t need a uterus to understand why it’s no fun to deliver a baby while hiding from people who want to kill you.

Which brings us to Black Snake Moan, the movie by Craig Brewer (director of Hustle & Flow) in which Samuel L. Jackson chains a recently-raped Christina Ricci to his radiator to cure her nymphomania. At Slate, Dana Stevens says the film is exploitative and thoughtless. At Salon, Stephanie Zacharek thinks exactly the opposite. Stevens says it’s wrong to chain someone to your radiator; Zacharek says it’s wrong to write off Jackson and Ricci’s characters as flat, sensationalistic stereotypes. I almost always disagree with Zacharek, but in this case she won me over by defending Brewer’s first film, specifically the scene in which DJay, the pimp protagonist, kicks out one of his hookers along with her baby:

The moment is horrifying, but it's also a challenge: Can we — or should we — feel any sympathy for this guy? What does it say about us if we do? I remember reading my colleagues' reviews of "Hustle & Flow," after I'd written my own, and being baffled by many of them. Some had decided the picture was misogynist because it asks us to feel something for a guy who exploits women, as if compassion were the same thing as approval, a response I could understand on some level even if I didn't share it.

Exactly. DJay isn’t a hero. He’s a deeply flawed character acting out of desperation, and what makes the film so interesting is its ability to make us empathize with him in spite of ourselves. Hustle & Flow succeeds exactly the way The Queen does: We’re used to seeing both pimps and monarchs as blank slates onto which we can project our fears (and fantasies), but both Brewer and Frears’ films take us past that, humanizing these stock figures and making them complex.

But while good cinema can get us to empathize with people utterly unlike us, it can’t always do the opposite. I’m not going to be able to watch Black Snake Moan without identifying strongly with Christina Ricci, kind of the way I couldn’t stop thinking about Kee’s labor pangs in Children of Men. And while Zacharek’s review makes it sound unskippable, I can’t get past one moment in Stevens’ critique. She writes:

Ricci's character spends days in nothing but a cut-off Confederate-flag T-shirt and white panties—the outfit in which Lazarus found her, raped and beaten, by the side of the road. If Lazarus is supposed to be so concerned with Rae's well-being, not to mention immune to her sexual appeal, wouldn't he insist she change into one of his clean shirts right away?

You don’t have to know much about rape to know that its victims always want to shower afterwards. Denying a survivor of an attack the right to change her clothes is possibly as cruel as chaining her to a radiator. There’s no shame in appreciating how Ricci looks in her underwear (though everyone who’s worried about her Richie-fication has a point), but I can’t imagine any way that the film could present her in that costume without being borderline unwatchable—unless it can convince us not to care about her suffering. And if it can do that, then maybe Stevens is right when she says it’s just cheap exploitation.