gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss

movies about ladies, and my book club report

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE FILMS “EMILY”, “CORSAGE”, AND “SPENCER”

There’s been a recent spate of movies that I suppose could be called fantastical biopics. I’m thinking of three I recently watched, those mentioned above.

In Emily, Emily Brontë has a secret love affair that ends tragically and inspires her to write Wuthering Heights. In Spencer, Princess Diana ditches the royals and drives off in her convertible to eat KFC with her sons. In Corsage, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, aka Sisi, makes her lady-in-waiting pretend to be her in public, then, freed from the need to stay skinny, indulges in bonbons and cream cake, and, at the end of the film, jumps into the beautiful blue Adriatic.

Corsage and Emily came out last year, Spencer the year before. All three focus on women with independent spirits who struggle against and suffer under strict social regimes, and each film lets these women escape (sometimes just briefly) from the regimes, and soothes the audience with this imagining. Spencer plays with surrealism, dream sequence, and hallucination (Anne Boleyn semaphorically appears); Corsage makes ample use of anachronism, which builds throughout the film; Emily employs plain old speculation: what if Emily Brontë did drugs and had sex and got a tattoo?

The third act of Corsage is a liberatory corrective to real-life Sisi, who starved herself to fit into her corsets and was eventually stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist. Emily’s steamy love affair is a fun, maybe comforting what-if. The yearning and passion in Wuthering Heights is real on the page, but irl, Emily lived and died without ever experiencing its fleshy equivalent. Everyone knows Diana’s story.

There’s something sad about the idea that we need this fantastical element—akin to the “revenge fantasy” genre, something more like “escape fantasy”—to feel happiness and triumph about these women’s lives. Their similarity—the fantastical biopic whose fictional elements have a therapeutic effect on the viewer, made stronger by the dramatic irony of our knowledge of how their lives really went—makes me wonder whether it’s possible to make a film that sticks to what we know happened to a famous(ly) unhappy woman without losing all of the cathartic joy we get from the made-up parts. Of course it’s possible, but would it work? Would it be successful? Is it what people want?

gaslight

gatekeep

girlboss

Corsage perhaps has the most overtly feminist themes, and its director and leading actress have also discussed feminism in the context of the film. But what about an unadorned portrait of Sisi, still being bitchy but sans girlbossery, never giving a middle finger to a room full of dignitaries, but just as restless and depressed? Or a movie about Emily Brontë that plays up her weirdness, which we got hints of in Emily, and explores her artistic process, and the fact that she wrote such great poetry and prose without having experienced romantic love, rather than a film that suggests she was just doing an autofiction. (To be clear, I really enjoyed Emily, and the other two films as well, and I recommend watching them all.)

These aren’t criticisms of the individual movies—I think the fantastical elements are what make them good, and they worked well—but rather an observation of the broader tendency, the fact that much of the fantasy, in each film, serves the same purpose: to make us feel better for a moment, imagining that these women experienced moments of freedom or love that they, in all likelihood, did not, at least not in the specific ways we see imagined in the films.

Book of the month

Earlier this year I started an online book club with my friends Jacob and Stephanie (shoutout to Steph for the idea). We’ve been reading The Spider’s House by Paul Bowles, Jacob’s pick (we all submitted ideas and then very democratically deliberated on which book we would read first). I finished the book but we’ve not yet done our final meeting about it, so I won’t go into too much detail in case Jacob and Steph are reading this, but it was good, and I like Bowles’ style.

I’ve read a lot of colonial/postcolonial Anglophone novels, but mostly ones set in Asia, and never Bowles. The book club has been great because it delivered me a book I might not have otherwise read, and because it’s wonderful to talk about reading with friends. These are not exactly groundbreaking insights, but I’ve never participated in a book club before okay! We squabble over which characters we find annoying and meander into discussions of religion and expat syndrome and globalisation and force each other to delineate our own personal ethical codes. Sounds fun, right?

Soon I’ll read The Sheltering Sky, which has an amazing Wikipedia description.

Thanks for reading!