movie misogyny
09/13/2026
There’s film programming drama right now, not that the particulars of it really matter. Last night and this morning it got really under my skin. I kept drafting nasty posts and deleting them in a way I haven’t in a while. One of the first things that made me really sad about moving to Chicago when it was still something I felt sad about was going to a screening at the Music Box and experiencing the classic Music Box Misogyny Laughter for the first time. Ultimately the thing about schlock obsession (which I am obviously not exempt from) is it’s very common to get so lost in the obscurity sauce that you forget that the paradigmatic quality of the films is violence against women. And then to see someone “uninitiated” have something like a proportional reaction to it can feel threatening or humiliating. I feel sad that the most common response to this scenario is making fun of (mostly) women for expressing (reasonable) distress and crying about censorship. The field of rep screenings being pretty small means that losing any one gets treated as a huge deal, and any conversation about bad programming is reacted to as if you personally intend to repress all historical cinema.
It’s funny that I have an intense relationship with this medium to such an extent that it has dictated the structure of my adult life, and I still persist in this belief that I don’t take it as seriously as I might. I don’t think I have the encyclopedic grindset that characterizes most of the programmers I know, and I don’t like that the way to be able to program is to either develop it or (probably more importantly) develop an effective performance of it. I’ve watched people lose respect for me when I make a lukewarm suggestion that films by women tend to be programmed with less care, never mind a hint of a notion that trigger warnings aren’t something to radically agitate against. At a certain point it’s a little freeing to see people willing to say publicly if you have PTSD you shouldn’t go to the movies: usually it takes a little more probing to get someone to cop to that belief, and they’re surprised by encountering it in themself.
I like how readily I am distressed by cinema: I think it is meaningful to be profoundly open to being acted on by a work of art. Sometimes this openness is oblique or uncontrolled. I don’t know what a different relationship to cinema would look like: it’s the only one I’ve ever had. Last night Loren and I finally got around to watching New Rose Hotel, which we’ve been planning on doing for most of the time we’ve been friends. Lots of directors get accused of shooting with their penis: Abel Ferrara is kind of the GOAT in this field. As a chaser we watched this compilation of his commentary on King of New York. If there’s an extra with a great ass you better believe he’s letting you know. He thinks it’s so cool that Christopher Walken got paid to touch a breast.
Loren is one of my favorite people to watch movies with because she really reacts. When she’s showing me something she loves, I always know when something exciting is about to happen: when she’s watching something new, I always know which moments are lighting her up. Watching a film with someone, or a room full of people, is about opening your reactions out to each other. Every programmer knows and loves the ways the text changes when it’s collectively experienced. It seems to me restrictive to characterize some of those reactions as fundamentally anti-cinema rather than developing some empathetic curiosity about why women will only come to one of your shows.
I wish I didn’t feel trapped by my own cinephilia into making excuses for things that I know to be wrong. I don’t think there’s any other way to love movies and I worry that’s me letting myself off the hook. I will probably spend the rest of my life going through cycles of finding it more or less distressing: right now I’m finding it hard to resist the desire to keep scores. The Siskel’s splashy 25th anniversary series has 5 films by women, comprising less than a fifth of what they’re showing in an effort to highlight their “long-standing commitment to diverse and innovative curation.” If I let myself do this kind of math I’ll never stop, just like I’ve tried to unmemorize the list of people who signed the Polanski petition, just like I’m working on getting better at lying that I haven’t seen something instead of being honest about it making my skin crawl. The fact remains that the ability to be undeterred by rank misogyny, interpersonal or aesthetic, is a professional asset for any kind of film work. It’s hard to blame anyone for experiencing that as the humiliation it’s intended to be.
I don’t want to litigate the particulars of this drama because I want the details of it to exit my brain. Some people I don’t respect have been wronged, and in jumping to their defense many people have seen an opening to be misogynistic and joyfully taken it. I continue to feel immensely grateful to live in a city with lots of rep programming. Multiple times a week I get so excited or disappointed by a film that I cry. Oh well!
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