Since then, I’ve utilized an analogous method to the lives of different vilified girls: Katie Hill, a former consultant who resigned in a revenge porn scandal; Paula Broadwell, the onetime mistress (a phrase that has no male equal) of Gen. David Petraeus; Amanda Knox, who a decade in the past was cleared of the sensational homicide of her roommate however has struggled to search out her footing since. These girls had been at occasions sympathetic characters and different occasions not, however loads of nuance was disregarded of all their tales.
So I’m not resistant to the enchantment of this redemption arc. And but …
There’s a time period I discovered not too long ago: “scopophilia.” It means “the love of trying.” It might discuss with pornography or perhaps a automotive crash, however it’s typically utilized in movie to explain the best way we take a look at girls who’re portrayed onscreen. It’s no secret that people love consuming spectacle — and we doubly love a spectacle when it includes girls and intercourse. However at what level does the fictional depiction of that spectacle, and our viewing of it, turn into simply as dangerous as watching it within the first place?
Ursula Macfarlane, the director of an upcoming Netflix documentary about Anna Nicole Smith, the troubled actress and mannequin who died of an unintentional drug overdose at 39, stated when the mission was introduced, “Now seems like the appropriate time to re-examine the lifetime of yet one more lovely younger lady whose life has been picked over and in the end destroyed by our tradition.”
Maybe — however at what level do such re-examinations merely perpetuate the tropes that made them worthy of making use of hindsight within the first place? Who will get to inform such tales, who ought to revenue from them, and when does all that speak about reframing and about upending the male gaze turn into extra in regards to the efficiency of redemption than in regards to the lady on the middle?
The author Kathryn VanArendonk has known as this current style “empathy tourism”: an try to take viewers on a voyage to a previous that’s current sufficient to be recognizable however distant sufficient to really feel weird. Because of this, some efforts — and, maybe much more so, the best way that folks speak about them — can tip right into a form of smugness.
We will nonetheless devour these tales, however by the lens of enlightenment. We get to be ok with the place Ms. Lewinsky is as we speak (she’s a producer!) however we nonetheless get to gawk at her flashing her thong to the president of america — a scene that, as she informed me, she reluctantly signed on to.
We will nod alongside to heavy-handed dialogue — for instance, “Sluts,” Ms. Anderson’s character declares after a disappointing courtroom ruling, “don’t get to determine what occurs to footage of their physique.” However we additionally get to take action whereas her.
Supply: NY Times
