more but other complaints

We watched Girl with a Pearl Earring last night, after coming home from Molly and Erik's party.

Afterwards I couldn't fall asleep because I kept trying to make an ending to the movie. Afterwards I couldn't fall asleep because it was just like having finished reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles back in high school. It's like reading this or this or this. I could keep adding, but what's the point? Plus ca change, plus ca we continue to be fucked. The movie that wouldn't let me sleep last night is just one more addition to the Sisyphean pile of representations of women and realities of women's lives that depict women as powerless or jealous or heartless. Powerless: Griet. Jealous: wife/mother and daughter. Heartless: mother-in-law.

One could say, I suppose, that my inability to sleep is a good sign, that the movie kept me awake because it, oh let's see, revealed how women have been treated for the sake of art and power and money. But that's not how the movie gets reviewed. The movie gets talked about as though it is a contemporary recreation of a Vermeer painting, and the reviews treat Scarlett Johansson in exactly the same way as her character in the movie is treated, as something lovely that will incite others and so bring power to those who control her representations. Johansson is described by one reviewer as a woman "who could ignite celluloid in a jiffy with that face"; another reviewer is in "thrall to [Johansson's] ripe, sensual beauty and emotional instincts". In its own creations of beauty and in its own partaking in the systems of how women are made to be seen and tasted, the movie doesn't undercut any of what it shows about how Griet must bend to others, must be represented by others. Scarlett has a better life than Griet, duh, but women are still making less, working more, and and and.

Nothing new, but it sure was a pretty movie, a sweet little intellectual exercise showing once more how when form and content are composed separately the content does not do what its makers might hope and the form does its insidious work shaping how and what we can see and think.