#the phantom thread

Finally got round to rewatching Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Phantom Thread, which I found much more engrossing the second time around: the three main actors are flawless, and Daniel Day Lewis in particular is, of course, riveting every second he’s onscreen. But I was still disturbed and, to some degree, disappointed by the ending, in which the Alma character keeps on poisoning DDL in order to weaken him so she can control him. The big twist of the film is that, upon discovering her plot, he embraces it so that he can let go and feel ‘mothered’ back to health again. It’s a film about two incredibly controlling people finding some twisted form of fulfillment through the woman’s monstrous and indefensible manipulations, which are really something very close to Munchausens-By-Proxy (imagine her feeding the same poisoned mushrooms to the child she gives birth to at the end).

So yes, that’s pretty unnerving and thought-provoking, but what is considerably more disturbing to me has been looking for writings on it online and only finding feminist puff pieces and reviews of the film which frame the poisoning in a positive light, claiming it is justified because of the main character’s “toxic masculinity” - i.e., being a moody but strong and successful (and therefore attractive) workaholic - and that the plucky heroine Alma ‘knows best’ what she has to do in order to keep her man, even if that means potentially murdering him.

Not one of those writers would ever pause to think how they would intepret that film’s message if the sexes were reversed: a broke barista wheedles his way into a gorgeous wealthy woman’s house and then begins poisoning her in order to keep her weak and docile and dependant so he can bend her to his whims: end of story. Can you imagine how different the feminist critique would be then?

We live in a time now in which many - most? - female audiences cannot actually recognize objective, irrefutable wrongdoing in any woman’s actions anymore, especially when situated in a work of fiction. It has become such a norm to identify with whatever female is presented to them on the screen that the feelings their innate empathy summons up in them prevents them from seeing any moral failings or wrongdoings in them, or any further reflection upon the wider ramifications of their choices.

I really worry these days about how openly oblivious of the need for actual ethics, applied equally across a culture (and across sexes) the average woman seems to be: I never hear the women I know or observe on TV or online talk about how an evil female character is a cautionary tale of what a woman ought not to be, because of the harm such a woman inflicts on others. Instead, it’s routine today to see irrefutably and irredeemably evil characters such as the Disney witches of the past reframed as ‘empowering’ role models to actually aspire to be like: so many women watching Cruella, say, just enjoy her pretty outfits and think how much they’d enjoy getting their way if they were in the same situation.

The message I’m repeatedly receiving is ‘Morality is for men: Women can do what  they like, and if you disagree with that, you must just hate women’.

Exploitation of others (most particularly when the ‘others’ are men) is today rarely, if ever, examined as a destructive act of wrongdoing, and  reflection upon the cost to others of a woman’s own actions is, I would say, actively discouraged by the media, the education system, mainstream political discourse, etc. And the net result of this is the promotion and acceptance of female sociopathy as an expected and normalized part of life.

I’m aware of how distressing this must sound to people deeply embedded in our present divisive identity politics-ridden culture, but I‘m not actually saying I believe women are incapable of thinking objectively and ethically, only that both evolution and our present massively gynocentric society have made doing so seem of little pressing concern for most. And that’s not good for society or even the women themselves, or the future that we’re all collectively making through our choices every day.