Pay No Attention to the (Wo)man Behind the Curtain

Some Personal Thoughts.

Michelle Pfeiffer in Married to the Mob (1988)

Today I want to go off-piste. 

I think that every writer must be forged in the fires not just of what they’ve read and watched, but also by what they’ve experienced. For culture and film criticism, that’s typically more of a sublimated element of your work. Unless you’re really entrenched in a particular kind of personal essay-writing (what X film means to me, how it paralleled my experiences as X type of person, etc), you try to keep certain things at bay.

It’s interesting, though, because with writing - especially if you do it professionally, or regularly - eventually, there are no places to hide. If you write about your interpretations or tastes in film for long enough, believe me, readers will figure out your preoccupations. It’s why the separation between Film Criticism and Personal Essay has always been a weird false dichotomy to me. Although I dislike the personal essay industrial-complex, and the total ‘me me me’ obsession with seeing oneself in a work of art, I’ve always liked the idea of imprinting yourself on your work with your subjectivity and your voice. I feel that film was a vessel for me to scratch away at the same couple of questions. So I guess this is me trying to talk about my own preoccupations, and why they’re there, in a slightly more direct way. 

I’ve always felt drawn to depictions of underworlds, secret little societies of people with their own lexicons and behavioural codes. I like the clubbiness of them, the sense of (often fractured, let’s face it) loyalty. That’s familiar to me because the seeds of it have been around me for a large portion of my life. I don’t talk about any of it much, but I’ve had a glancing relationship to crime. I’ve been caught in the middle of a police raid ft. dogs and battering rams; a street brawl with tire irons; A&E waiting rooms; witness stands for the defense. There’s little more than an eye-roll for people whose delicate sensibilities are offended at the thought of a smack in the mouth or a short prison term. The rules here are different. They are: ‘no comment’. They are ACAB if not in name than certainly in nature; they are seeing the sneering racism of high-ranking police with your own eyes. They are knowing on some occasions men will continue their cycles of violence and the best thing you can do is to get the fuck out of the way and have a cup of tea until they get it out of their systems. 

And so I’ve felt drawn to the ‘tough guys’ and ‘femme fatales’ that operate within those worlds on our screens, too: James Cagney, caged dynamite personified, his bouncing walk, his tenement growl. Or Joan Blondell, effortlessly ladylike until she hikes her leg up like a showgirl and clenches her cigarette between her teeth like a coal miner. Often in crime cinema, men and women are pushed to the brink of typified gender roles, to the extent that - unwittingly or not - their attitudes and falsehoods and contradictions appear, their ‘types’ cracked open like breakfast eggs in the cold light of day. Inevitably, it’s why the often tiny gestures and sideways looks of women in male-centric crime movies interest me so much. Maybe I’m looking for ways where people find and hold onto one another in the midst of chaos, where love and hate stitch together in strange ways, where I can make sense of human behaviour under duress, in moral ambivalence. 

In the crime movies I love, people are never exactly what they seem. (I’ve seen some of that in life, too: the generous, elegantly-dressed auntie who’ll gossip with you one moment and the next entreat you to help hide jewellery under the sofa before the cops come; the Christmas-loving softie with a police record as long as your leg.) In movies, these subtleties are blown up into genre-worthy scale. There’s the gum-smacking trophy wife in Married to the Mob (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1988): actually a bright, ambitious woman who wants to break out and make it on her own. Anjelica Huston, a smooth conwoman, is revealed as an abusive and broken matriarch in The Grifters (dir. Stephen Frears, 1990); Paul Bettany is a closeted gay hoodlum amidst the glamour of Sixties London in Gangster No 1 (dir. Paul Mcguigan, 2000); in John Woo’s masterpiece Bullet in the Head (1990), heartless Hong Kong black market smugglers are turned inside out by trauma when they get caught in the middle of the Vietnam War. 

I once passionately described my interest in all of these sneaky, stolen moments in masculine genres, and a critic I know looked at me straight and said frankly: ‘That’s not enough for me.’ Maybe that sounded harsh in the moment, but in retrospect I understand where they were coming from. As a woman, why satisfy yourself with looking for scraps? Why not forge into a more progressive future rather than try to sniff around the margins of machismo?

I guess my reply is: I’ve lived in the margins of machismo. It’s not always a bad place to be, but the point isn’t really it’s relative goodness or badness; it’s simply that it is an experience, and it’s one that I’m interested in seeing meditated on. Without judgement, without hand-wringing: just as it is. Yes, crime films as they’ve been (mostly) constructed have been about and by men, but that has never meant they didn’t have interesting things to say about and to women. 

John Woo’s Bullet in the Head (1990).

Although Sisters Under the Mink is concerned with the relationship between women and crime, that also inevitably touches on the men they interact with or are connected to within those worlds. So maybe there has always been something like a hidden urge underneath the interests I’ve cultivated and the stories I want to tell, something about the sticking points under the veils of traditional ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, something about the performance of each and also of how ‘performance’ is both the perfect word and also not at all, because some things are too deeply-lived, formed without a choice, to count as performances at all. It’s why the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ - correct as it is when we talk about gendered violence, among many other things - has always needed far more underpinning for me, why it also contains vast wells of vulnerability. I will always be fascinated by these stories because unanswerable questions are swimming around in my brain, about men and women, secrets and crimes, the danger and the thrill. The best art is not neat or beholden to neatness, in form or thought, in feminism or in morals, as far as I can tell. 

I’ll come back to one of my favourite films (yours too, probably). One of the most interesting scenes in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) is when Karen Hill, a newlywed, meets all the mob wives for the first time at a get-together, and regards them with confusion and fear. ‘They had bad skin and wore too much make-up,’ Karen says in her voiceover. ‘They looked worn out.’ She’s looking down the barrel at her future, one of endless strain, and she’s right to be terrified. She comes home to ask Henry what will happen if he goes to prison; he assures her it will never happen. Of course, his confidence is unwarranted. Prison visits, complete with smuggled goods and young children in tow, will take up years of her life. Crucially, though, we are made to understand - through her voiceover - her thinking every step of the way. Karen likes beautiful things, nights at the Copacabana, special treatment, a handsome and charismatic husband who can - and will - pistol-whip someone to defend her honour. After all, she has to admit: it turns her on. Should she apologise for it? Maybe. But not to me.

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