Friday, August 13, 2010

Some Femist Critique on "Inception"

Reading
Feminist Music Geek's review on Inception
brought to light a slight issue I grappled with whilst watching the movie. The way in which the wife was represented. It smacks off that quintessential crazy male author's and directors tend to create within their female characters. Note: Laura's mother in The Glass Menagerie. Friend of mine thinks Tennessee Williams might have had some "mummy issues" - I think so. I always hear statements uttered by chauvinists around the order of "Women are crazy."  Well, I wonder where they've been getting these thoughts from. Back to the Inception commentary:

Rather, she plays as a manifestation of feminist film theory’s complaints against cinema’s conception of women and its applications of psychoanalytic thought via the scopophilic gaze. Cotillard does what she can with the role, but it feels like she’s representing, say, Tania Modeleski’s criticisms in The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. This may have been Nolan’s intention, but by rendering Mal as an archetypical femme fatale who Cobb must overcome, he only enforces the notion that female movie characters are not fully realized as complex people but instead mere ideations from the auteur’s mind.

My thoughts exactly. Well almost exactly.

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