The Pretty Problem
Demonlover's rejection of pornified visuals.
This piece builds on ideas previously discussed in Hurt Women Hurting Women.
Watching Demonlover (2002), I was underwhelmed. It was overt about its attempts to genre-bend, its winding script rode random tides, the theme was more or less simplified. Most of all, though, it was visually unstimulating. I have not watched such an ugly film in a long time. And yet, a week later, I find myself still within its homogenous grey walls. The feeling of the film remains, and its message remains ever-present in an increasingly pornified visual landscape. Perhaps where Demonlover succeeds is in its visual blandness, its refusal to cater to the fickle attention span. Because after everything, what I remember are not the faces of Chloe Sevigny and Gina Gershon – what I remember is the disgust.
One of the first pieces I published on Retrograde was the slightly unfocussed Hurt Women Hurting Women, in which I discussed the reductive use of the then-popular ‘female rage’ category exploding across the internet, particularly in regards to its use of aesthetics.
“Female aesthetics are utilised throughout these films, juxtaposing the beautiful with the violent. … But after a thousand scenes exploring the grief of femininity in this way, the commentary starts to feel empty, and the homogeneity sets in. I start to wonder whether we are truthfully continuing to explore womanhood in a meaningful and daring way, or if we are simply being sold the same old narrative by filmmakers who were supposed to save us.”
Dominant visual culture treats femininity and femaleness as an aesthetic object. The peppy (or sardonic or coy or naive – there are only so many types of girl) female sidekick exists to be pretty so that the audience and male lead get to enjoy watching her throughout. The only difference between the two is that the lead gets to kiss her at the end. This has been long since recognised and contested across film communities, and in special cases, female characters are now permitted their inner lives. Feminism has been solved.
Slowly, though, and insipidly, the same rhetoric is dripping even into our own feminist movies that we consider so sacred. Now, instead of considering femininity to be an aesthetic object, we opt instead to slight towards femininity as an aesthetic experience, wherein we consume, analyse, and regurgitate the female experience in terms of something that is visual and reproduceable. We talk in existing analogies and metaphors. Flowers and mirrors in Cassie’s case, bows and glitter in Barbie’s. It feels as though mainstream feminist filmmakers of today are desperately binding themselves to the sinking patriarchal ship of beautiful meaning, in hopes of reconciling their beloved livelihood with their feminist sensibilities.
Perhaps there is something in making feminism marketable via visual culture. We all hate the bedazzled H&M hoodies emblazoned with the words ‘#feminist #girlboss’. Is this reliance on a visual culture that historically has been used to oppress not the filmic equivalent?
Demonlover is ugly, and its monotonous approach to visuals featuring bland costuming (excluding Gina Gershon’s ‘I Heart Gossip’ T-shirt) is a blatant refusal to play into this kind of visual culture. Although Demonlover is not a commentary on femininity, it discusses violence and exploitation within porn, which we know as a phenomenon that disproportionately affects and disenfranchises women. There is nothing glamorous or visually exciting or appealing about this movie. Stills will not go viral across Pinterest, and fashionistas will not try to recreate the looks within the film. This film is cold and hard and unwelcoming, and it opens its mouth to say so with its blue and grey tones. It reminds us constantly in its visual language that it is nothing if not painfully real.
Particularly in the age of the 30-second video, we see visual culture becoming increasingly pornified, even in cases when the content itself does not rely on sexual over- or undertones. Video platforms including TikTok seem to utilise techniques used in porn to manipulate and maintain the attention of the viewer, with similarities in aspects of the sensory landscape of the video, such as camera angle, line delivery, and use of shock value. It has become a game to guess which craft videos function as covert fetish content.
Watching Demonlover in this landscape of video culture twenty years after the film’s release creates an experience that I can only liken to withdrawal symptoms. Demonlover gives no hook to the addict of booming contemporary visual culture – that is, until the moments the film plunges into unabashed pornography. Here, I finally got what I wanted: a shocking, defining visual. But I didn’t want it anymore. I was sickened by this exploitative decadence, and by all of its meaning, after hours of purposefully bland shot design.
Of course, I see the power in subverting symbolism traditionally used to define femininity, and I see the temptation to focus visual language in feminist cinema around these existing signs. Perhaps there are certain points that cannot be made without first making unbearable the symbols used across the patriarchy. Certainly, it would be remiss to say that works of the likes of the prominent Sofia Coppola are somehow non-revolutionary or that operate from a non-feminist stance, and I claimed only weeks ago that it is far too early to declare a state of postfeminist society in which these traditionally feminine symbols are not culturally loaded.
I struggle to reconcile this dichotomy between the urge to subvert the existing oppressive symbol, versus the necessity to ultimately reject it once and for all. There is a reason Demonlover received such mixed reviews, and why upon first viewing I couldn’t enjoy it – it’s a hard watch from start to finish, due in part to its disruption to our understanding of how a film should look.
Where Demonlover succeeds for me, though, is as an answer to my call for a rejection of shallow visual culture in Hurt Women Hurting Women. It is an ugly film, but it has to be. It removes the filmic devices and filters through which we make themes such as violent pornography consumable. At the end of the film, there is nothing left to consider but the repulsive reality of the porn industry.