Woman of the Hour

dir: Anna Kendrick

2023

This is, admittedly, not the kind of flick that I usually like watching, and, lo and behold, I did not enjoy watching this flick. ‘True crime’ is not a genre I’m that interested in that much anymore, whether it’s in films or podcasts. Especially stuff about serial killers. Man, am I burned out on serial killers…

But there had to be something important for me to watch this and break my prohibition on reviewing stuff from America since their last election showed how truly unworthy of our continued attention they were, and how irredeemable there are as a people. Luckily for me this flick does my job for me: it argues that misogyny in general, and The Patriarchy as experienced in its sparkling American form allows serial killers to go on doing their despicable thing because so many men there don’t really see women as being human. And as such, when they get murdered by a complete stranger, eh, whatcha gonna do? It happens. Like shark attacks or lightning strikes, it just happens.

Though this is based on a true story, about a serial killer who killed heaps of women in the 1970s in the States, and about the fact that the jerk was so arrogant and self-assured that he once went on a show called The Dating Game, it’s really about something more complex, and more depressing. in the hands of the director Anna Kendrick, who also stars as Sheryl, the woman who wasn’t killed by this jerk, she has repurposed the story to magnify her point, arguing that the overall cultural mentality that allows such a monster to evade capture for so long isn’t that different from how Hollywood, or show business, treats women generally. The killer kills women who won’t be missed, at least in his estimation. Hollywood, casting agents, producers etc treat women like they’re livestock, grading their physical qualities in front of them, like they’re meat, and therefore utterly consumable and disposable, and so who will even miss them when they’re gone?

Sheryl has been struggling to get roles because she’s not blonde and not whatever flavour of feminine the casting agents want in the late 1970s. She has to listen to two ugly jerks as they talk about her body like there are parts of it they wish they could sell and others that they could replace. To her face. Right in front of her. Also, the eternal pressure to do nudity, which they insist on not because it’s required, whatever that means, in a specific scene, but just to make Sheryl feel worse about herself.

She has a neighbour who’s also an aspiring actor, and he respects none of her boundaries and, since he’s played by stand up Pete Holmes, we know he is a friendly and manipulative jerk. Where other brutish men bully and threaten women into having sex with them, others mope and guilt them, using women’s inherent politeness against them. There is a scene so gutting where Sheryl, so concerned with having deflated that jerk’s ego, essentially continues drinking with him and ends up sleeping with him despite not wanting to at all. At all.

But women don’t even have the illusion of choice or safety in this world. When Sheryl, not being able to make rent, is offered a ‘role’ to go onto The Dating Game as the ‘girl’ for whom the three bachelors have to compete (thus ‘earning’ her as a trophy) for, she feels like she doesn’t have much choice. She doesn’t choose what she wears, she doesn’t choose how her hair is to look, and she is told by the oleaginous host (Tony Hale, great as always, as a horrible parasite of a host in a terrible hairpiece) to tone down her intelligence, because no-one wants to hear or see that.

Two of the makeup ladies, who you might think would be allies, and they are, of sorts, give her terrible advice not just for the show but for life. And yet one of them nails the premise of the entire film, being the question beneath all other questions a woman must ask: Which one of you will hurt me?

I have to admit, while watching this flick that was already a very uncomfortable watch, that line of dialogue hit me like a punch in the gut. It emphasises something we prefer to ignore, one of those realities we (men) don’t think about too much, in order to be able to go on with our daily lives, that whether women are on their guard or not, it doesn’t always make a difference, because #notallmen but #yeah it’s always men.

It’s the way all these men feel so comfortable, so entitled to Sheryl’s time, attention or her body. They feel like at any time, barely knowing her, they can of course in public or private paw at her or lay a possessive hand on her shoulder, the small of her back, neck, wherever. Why not, who will stop them. Sheryl feels compelled socially to put up with it, both for her professional aspirations and for general “go along to get along”. But also she’s been socially conditioned to accede where she might prefer to demur, or risk enraging any chump’s ego.

Who benefits from this? Men, only men. Ah patriarchy, makes everything better but only for the worst people.

It’s hard not to see this as a comment from Kendrick and her screenwriter on her experiences both in life and in her career beyond this particular story. There’s no doubt she’s successful in her many endeavours, and probably particularly loved by obsessive fans of the Pitch Perfect movies, but none of that success changes the fact that she knows how often she’s been made to feel like shit by men and women in the industry, how it continues even when she’s in a stronger position to not be exploited or demeaned, and how every day she tries to get by and survive in an industry and a frankly insane country where her safety and her bodily autonomy is not held to be as valuable or sacred as that of any given man.

It’s hard to watch a scene, where someone who was in the audience at the filming of that episode of The Dating Game, recognises the piece of shit who most likely murdered her friend a year ago, as one of the contestants on the show, and tries to tell someone, anyone who’ll listen, and no-one does. She tells her stupid longhaired boyfriend, and, with absolutely no reason to defend this chap he doesn’t even know, essentially tells her she must be wrong, with absolutely no evidence to the contrary.

He tells her to doubt the evidence of her own eyes and ears, and memory, because wouldn’t it be terrible if this other guy didn’t get to murder more women and children?

Why? Why the automatic, default, business as usual setting that prompts men to protect other men even when there’s indications that they’re predators? Why would that happen in a society? Who would want that?

Different people might have different interpretations, hot takes, ill-informed opinions, but we know, deep down, why: Because they like maintaining a system that protects predators, in case one day they get the opportunity themselves. They, too want to benefit from a society that looks away when women are abused, a police force that pursues these murders in a half-arsed manner, that thinks domestic violence isn’t a crime, that reluctantly prosecutes perpetrators only to have juries vote not to convict obvious crims, because then the law and society would have to treat women as actual human beings worthy of bodily autonomy, and that’s just not sexy to the pieces of shit that want them to continue as long as they somehow benefit.

Trying to convey all this, by an accomplished woman and actor who herself has endured an abusive relationship and strives to transform that awful trauma into meaningful movies/arguments about how contemporary society is failing women and must change, is no mean feat. It’s a complicated and precarious path to take, and I think she nails it insofar as I don’t ever want to watch the movie again, but I feel like I understood what she was trying to say. The dialogue is painfully razor sharp at times, like in the conversation about being looked at versus being seen; there’s the male gaze, there’s that gaze self-applied, there’s the (admittedly anachronistic use of the term) of actually being seen, as in, genuinely acknowledged for personhood, who someone really is versus what someone wants to get out of them. And then there’s the advice from a serial killer advising that a person (woman) needs to be comfortable with herself, and not perform, in order to really be seen.

Just like, presumably, he sees his victims just before he photographs and murders them.

I am not now nor am I ever going to use the name of the person that the actor is portraying here, but I will use the actor’s name. His cold psychopathic stare is something that stays with me in painful ways, and he deploys it here, frequently, but I already experienced it when I watched the Apple TV series Station Eleven a few years back, where this guy Daniel Zovatto played a different longhaired psychopath, being Tyler. I was freaked out by his character back then, because he came across as one of the coldest, most inhuman forms of that kind of character. But I’ve seen him in other stuff, and he wasn’t a monster at all.

Here he’s full monster, unrepentant, charming yet reptilian. And stupid, so fucking stupid. How could they not catch him sooner? And Sheryl senses immediately that there’s something deeply wrong with him, but that’s mostly because the thing that’s wrong with him is wrong in too many men. One chap, even though he’s a piece of shit himself, senses that there’s something even more wrong with Contestant Number Three than the ‘system’ allows for, and thankfully gives her a warning. I’ve never felt so fucking relieved. That, and the moment when a bartender notices Sheryl’s tentative shake of the head and changes her tack about serving more drinks at the tiki bar, are standout, quiet moments that show how deftly Kendrick puts together this movie.

She’s not saying “don’t get killed by serial killers”, as we unfortunately watch too many women get murdered or nearly murdered here, she’s saying “do we have to live in a society where they expect us to accept that we can be murdered randomly or by someone who just thinks they’re entitled to do it to us, without trying to at least alert other people to how horrible it is for all of us, and maybe do something about it?”

8 reasons why I hate that movies like this need to exist out of 10

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“That signals the end of our game. Well, Sheryl, it's time to make a decision!” – I can’t understand why every woman in America doesn’t have a gun in order to shoot #mostlymen - Woman of the Hour