The Cheap Tricks of Me Too Thrillers

09/05/2024 07:00 AM

One night at a party, a woman meets a charismatic man. She's smitten; he is too. Their attraction is exhilarating, but just as they get more deeply involved, our heroine realizes that her paramour is actually evil — an abuser, possibly a killer. Newly aware — and filled with righteous rage — she decides to escape, enacting retribution against the monstrous man on her way out. This is the plot of Zoë Kravitz's directorial debut, Blink Twice, which follows a struggling caterer, Frida (Naomi Ackie), who absconds with a toxic tech billionaire named Slater King (Channing Tatum) to his private island, where he repeatedly assaults her; in time, she gets her revenge.

But let's be honest, we've seen this film before. By that I mean the Me Too social thriller, now a veritable 2020s subgenre, which also includes Emerald Fennell's 2020 rape-revenge flick Promising Young Woman and Olivia Wilde's dark take on domesticity, 2022's Don't Worry Darling. And by now, we've heard what the genre has to say about feminism. It's a simple message: Rape culture hides in plain sight. Of course, any conscientious consumer of these movies already knows that. So, by simply reiterating that truth with no other insights, these films leave on the table many other complex and urgent emotional questions that face those of us who have experienced sexual trauma, not to mention our culture at large. On a personal level, how can survivors of sexual violence reclaim ourselves in its aftermath? And on a societal level, now that we have been awakened to the omnipresence of sexual abuse, what should we do with this knowledge?

Part of the reason Me Too thrillers cannot begin to answer these pressing questions is that their high-concept premises turn their characters — especially their women — into modern mythic archetypes rather than people. Blink Twice's Frida, a working-class Black woman wooed by a hard-partying tech CEO, stands in for women who are exploited by powerful men; Promising Young Woman's Cassie (Cary Mulligan), a med-school dropout obsessed with the rape and subsequent suicide of her friend, is the Ur-traumatized woman who can't just "move on"; Don't Worry Darling's Alice (Florence Pugh), a surgeon whose husband traps her in a computer simulation that makes her believe she's a 1950s housewife, represents careerwomen saddled with unsupportive partners.

But in making their characters so nonspecific as to appear universally relatable, Me Too thrillers shortchange the women whose stories they're ostensibly telling. We never know these women before they are sucked into the Rube Goldberg plots of the Me Too movie. The filmmakers, of course, have justifications for why their female characters are so hollow. In Blink Twice, Frida's abuser repeatedly wipes her memory after assaulting her — a plot point designed to demonstrate cycles of abuse, but which has the knock-on effect of making it impossible for the viewer to understand who Frida is. Similarly, Alice in Don't Worry Darling spends most of the film unaware that she's in a simulation; she doesn't know who she is, so we don't either. Cassie in Promising Young Woman has the opposite problem: Her sole defining characteristic is that she remembers one thing too well — her friend's rape — which erases the rest of her personality. A deft film might linger on what's most compelling in these premises: their commentary on the way trauma renders selfhood slippery, making it hard for us to know who we are in the throes of abuse, and difficult to understand ourselves long after.

But Me Too social thrillers are not deft, nor are they interested in the specifics of anything their characters have been through. These are parables with one goal: to get us to the epiphanic moment in which their heroines become aware of patriarchy, in painful and reality-disrupting fashion. In Don't Worry Darling, Alice presses herself against a glass wall to exit the Matrix-esque simulation in which she's imprisoned. In Blink Twice, Frida drinks snake venom to snap out of her haze (like Eve in the Garden!). As a rule, these thrillers do not venture past such moments of consciousness-raising. Instead, after the heroines discover the truth of their oppression, they enjoy a few cheap thrills of boss-bitch revenge (which stand in for actual self-knowledge): Our protagonists psychologically torture sleazebags, kill their husbands with whiskey glasses, stab rapists with corkscrews.

Then, having pointed out injustice, Me Too social thrillers refuse to engage with what follows a given revelation of abuse or assault, for either their characters or for society at large. Instead, they substitute rushed, pandering empowerment for self-realization. "I loved working!" shouts Don't Worry Darling's Alice, when she discovers that she's not a housewife but a surgeon. (The viewer has no idea what Alice likes about medicine.) Moments later, Alice's fellow imprisoned wives turn on their husbands spontaneously, one of them declaring, "You stupid, stupid man. It's my turn now," as she knifes her spouse. (Her turn … for what? The Me Too thriller doesn't seem to think that's a worthwhile question.) "Success is the best revenge," says Frida, who by the end of Blink Twice has become the queen of a tech empire, fulfilling an unironic arc from victim to CEO that neatly summarizes the moral of these stories: The body keeps the score, but Girlbossing will set you free.

It is extraordinarily difficult to say anything original about sexual abuse. Groomers and rapists and their colluders are fundamentally unoriginal. They follow patterns: They love-bomb, they gaslight, they victim-blame. It can be illuminating to articulate these repeatable patterns — to identify them as patterns at all. But good art should do more than just faithfully render the real world. It should surprise us, even as it shows us what we may already suspect. The power of genre conceits, in particular, is that they can reintroduce us to the known in startling ways.

The capacity to say something wonderfully revelatory about something horribly familiar was the great achievement of the second-wave ancestor of many of these Me Too movies: The Stepford Wives, the 1975 satire-horror flick (not to be confused with the tonally confused 2004 remake) about men who kill their spouses and replace them with housework-loving robots, which also influencedGet Out. The brilliance of Stepford and Get Out is that, rather than trying to lay out a case proving why sexism or racism are real and evil, they assume we already got the memo about injustice. They then satirize their respective subjects — fatally boring men in Connecticut, hypocritical white liberals in upstate New York — before making a horror turn.

Unfortunately, there is rarely anything approaching comedy in Me Too social thrillers, nothing like The Stepford Wives scene when the robots join a consciousness-raising circle but can only discuss cleaning products,or that Get Out shot of Rose (Allison Williams) malevolently sipping milk as she hunts for her next victim. Instead, the more sophomoric Me Too thrillers seem hung up on convincing us that patriarchy exists instead of commenting on the lived experience of patriarchy. Promising Young Woman is a case in point: As Cassie systematically torments everyone complicit in her friend Nina's death — the university dean who dismisses Nina's accusations; the frenemy who slut-shames Nina; the lawyer who badgers her into dropping her case — one gets the sense that Fennell wants us to take notes at home.

To be fair, Blink Twice tries to acknowledge the fact that, six years after the Me Too movement began, no one is shocked to learn about men's misbehavior. We meet Frida as she sits on the toilet, watching a video that's meant to refer to our "post"–Me Too Zeitgeist — an interview with the disgraced yet apparently contrite tech CEO, Slater, who is recovering his public reputation after committing some kind of impropriety. Minutes later, we witness Frida chastising her friend for continually going back to a shitty guy; shortly after that, when Frida finagles a meeting with Slater, she jokingly asks the man Slater introduces as his therapist to "blink twice if I'm in danger." The therapist blinks twice. It's all out in the open: We know Slater is Bad, and Frida knows Slater is Bad, and yet — for reasons Kravitz and her co-writer, E.T. Feigenbaum, neglect to elucidate — Frida and her friend still accept an invitation to Slater's Jeffrey Epstein–esque island. The plot demands of the Me Too thriller leave no space for the film to get hung up on why.

It's a disappointing omission, because what's most interesting here is precisely these gaps in the storytelling: What did Slater do, and how does Frida explain his misconduct away? Why do we trust powerful, obviously Bad Men when we know better? What exactly is Frida drawn to about Slater? How does her inner life change as she comes to suspect something's wrong? How does she relate to herself, her friends, other men, other women? We never learn, because the genre is pathologically allergic to specificity, and because the Me Too social thriller's job is not to render a portrait of how one woman gets entrapped by one man; it's to show us all women, trapped by all men. Why spoil the thrill of revealing the patriarchy with the messy details of an actual woman's life?

One recent movie that does actually take a sincere interest in a specific woman's life after trauma is Yorgos Lanthimos's 2023 film Poor Things,about a young woman named Bella (Emma Stone) who embarks on a sexual awakening. Perhaps more than any of the women in Me Too thrillers, Bella could be nothing but a traumatized body: Though she appears to be a 30-something young woman, she actually has the brain of a fetus, which a Dr. Frankenstein–style mad scientist implanted into her as part of an experiment in reanimation. To make matters worse, when Bella seems roughly adolescent-brained, and with the partial blessing of her semi-paternal figure, she absconds on a world tour with a known womanizer, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo).

What follows is a surprisingly complex portrait of agency, consent, and curiosity, not to mention an example of a richer path forward for Me Too storytelling. Where the Me Too social thriller hollows out its women, refusing to let us know them beyond their experiences of abuse, Poor Things takes a genuine interest in Bella's becoming: Her defining characteristic is not her traumatic genesis, but rather a thirst for knowledge. Poor Things also carries on the semi-satirical traditions of Stepford and Get Out better than the straightforward Me Too thriller can, because it mocks its villains even as it critiques their social power. When Bella, whose brain is evolving at a rapid clip, grows out of Duncan, he goes comically mad, unable to respond to her rational arguments with anything except repeated howls of "Cunt!" before ending up in an asylum.

Like Me Too thrillers, Poor Things indulges in escapism; but instead of having its heroine physically attack men in justice- and adrenaline-fueled rages, it offers a more emotional hypothetical: What might happen if disempowered girls and women could face down their groomers and abusers with the advantage of rapidly evolving brains and a grown-up body that knows its own desires? The answer is that we might see terrible men as, ultimately, buffoons. A little-discussed truth about abusers is that they are terrifying in one light but fools in another. Of course, it's almost impossible to notice their idiocy in the throes of trauma, but art is a safe place — perhaps the only safe place — where we can turn rogues into jesters, and in that way defang them. (Greta Gerwig's Barbie also creates an alternative, fantastical universe in which we can afford to see patriarchy, embodied in Ryan Gosling's Ken, as ludicrous.)

One portrait of an abuser is not inherently more accurate than another, but it seems a shame that so many Me Too stories have obsessed over men's power instead of finding other ways to see them. Abusers might be clichés, but movies about abuse don't have to be. The inner lives of sexual-assault survivors, not to mention our relationships with each other, with friends, with family, and with institutions, are infinitely wide-ranging. But if we want to hear those varied stories, we have to keep the camera rolling after the awakening instead of cutting to black.