Lise's Diatribes

The discussion around this film has probably come and gone in the time it took me to write this (my laptop crapped out on me mid-sentence and took a week to fix! seriously!!) but I can't stop thinking about it.

Cross-posted to substack.

Her Private Hell is by far the most interesting (although not the most well-crafted nor well-written) film I’ve watched so far this year. NWR’s new piece is ripe with symbolism and visual metaphor. While it seems to tick a lot of “film-girl” classic boxes, the movie was generally received quite negatively. It’s not difficult to imagine why–Her Private Hell deals in some challenging subjects, and fails to approach them with much sensitivity. It’s far from a quiet meditation on the emotional effects of abuse. Still, having come back for a second and now third rewatch, I find that if one is willing to walk with the film to its pier, it has quite a lot to dissect in the way of symbolism.

Private Kay, Jonny Thunders, and the Leathermen

Although the relationship between Elle and her father is never made overtly incestuous, Johnny Thunders’ emotional abuses originate from the same place that causes him to threaten acts of horrific violence, that causes Leatherman to slaughter girls, and that causes Private K to go on Rambo-style killing sprees in the name of his missing daughter. Private K and the Leatherman, the savior of girls and the slaughterer of girls, are two sides to the same entity. The “Leathermen” in the film–the monster himself, Private K, Johnny Thunders, the séducteur Nico–promise suffering and death upon anyone who dares violate “their” women. To a man who would “turn the seas red with blood” for his woman, a man who would kill anyone to keep safe his woman, the only end is to kill the woman, too. The monster in Her Private Hell cannot even remember the daughter he is avenging until the mist returns, empowering him to penetrate and violate the young girls he sees as alike to “his” woman. Aimless violence disguised as love and care, a reduction of the daughter to mere dolls to be molded, shaped into a reflection of oneself, and kept safe in a tower. Failure to protect the masculine “property” is a failure of masculinity itself. As Private K is emasculated and humiliated, beaten and literally belt-whipped by men much less fit and attractive than himself, his hyper-masculine appearance becomes even more extruded and grotesque, as if compensating. He walks into a room where a young woman has already castrated her would-be-assaulter, and looks at himself in the castrated man. Following his failures, he returns with newfound shame to the girl-doll store, where he must confront these darker aspects of himself. It is only by rejecting the idea of a girl as a plastic object that he can confront himself in the leatherman and reunite with his daughter as she is.

Elle

When the Kingmakers offer Elle the leather gloves at the end of the film, they are offering her solace in the same violent male identity. Elle, textually, is a parallel of K’s insecure masculinity. Her relationship to men is fairly Freudian–she seeks to embody her own father, and is violently disgusted by women close to him. Donning K’s leather jacket allows her to retreat into a masculine role, while her relationships with both Dominique and Nico force her into a more feminine role. Her unreciprocated desire to (ironically) dominate Dominique is shifted onto Nico–if she cannot have Dominique, she can at least possess that which she wants.

During Nico’s “uniform night”, a literal representation of the performance of a role, Elle is illuminated by dramatic lighting strobing pink and blue, each both obscuring and revealing. Her moments of submission or subservience are compensated for with products and symbols of masculinity. A pin-up lighter, a hatchet, a leather jacket: shields to outwardly perform one’s power. She performs the feminine role with the same superficiality, with collars and makeup and being dressed up like a doll. At the end of each night she “removes her face”, peeling back the roles obscuring her own lack of identity or direction. The adoption of a gender identity protects the lack of a self. When Dominique exposes this truth, Elle breaks down and regresses to violence, seemingly the only language she knows as “herself” beyond the performance. Her ultimate fate is to become alike to her father and the other Leathermen, seeking refuge in his/her gender to the end of oneself.

Hunter

Unlike the monster’s other victims, Hunter seems to feel no fear in the hands of the monster.. She is initially presented as the designated ingenue of the three leads, but she is subtly more worldly than her own archetype. She describes herself as “a victim of the mist”. She is the first to familiarize herself with the monster’s lore. She appears to take great pleasure in violence and danger. Hunter, right down to her name, is a subversion of the innocent virgin who is desecrated by male violence. The effectiveness of this subversion is questionable, as Hunter’s ultimate fate is little more interesting than a slasher splatter-cut, but her presence as a foil makes Elle and K’s brooding insecurity more interesting and less exhausting.

The Kingmakers