Three girlbosses pictured here.
Morning time. You wake up, grab your corporate feminist #girlboss mug, and sit down to see what everyone’s watching so you can stay ahead of the zeitgeist. You take a sip and sigh, thinking about how great it is that women rule the world. The #metoo movement did it’s job, ladies!!! We ousted gentlemen, made the Golden Globes say “huh, maybe it IS bad men dominate every facet of Hollywood.” If pussy power did win, then:
Why in the ever living fuck are MEN creating female protagonists?
I do not like being included in any gendered conversation. Quite frankly, if both sides could keep my little nonbinary ass out of it, I’d be so smitten. I was comfortable being not trans enough to be trans and not cis because I’m absolutely not cis. But now, ya’ll dumb bitches had to bring lesbian propaganda into it so here I am, fired the fuck up over some stupid Rosamund Pike movie named I Care A Lot.
I Care A Lot is some hot Netflix garbage peddled to us with a relatively exciting Act 1 & 2 and a boring Act 3. Maybe I missed the mark or maybe the award ceremony did, but I do not understand the hype for this movie. Marla (Rosamund Pike), a seriously evil (badass??) state elder law attorney has figured out how to cheat the system so that she can make boatloads of money. She has a doctor friend who claims the elderly patients she sees are unfit to take care of themselves and thus, has them committed to a legal guardianship when their family is unavailable or unwilling to help. A lot of times, this family, as well as the defendant, are unaware these proceedings are underway.
Basically, it’s a really sweet way for the court to drain your estate for financial gain.
Marla and her extremely-hot-two-dimensional-lesbian-side-piece Fran (Eiza González) run into some trouble when they prematurely commit Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest) to a nursing home. Her son, Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage) is an extremely powerful Russian mafia drug lord who is feared for the right reasons. He kills Marla’s doctor friend to send a message that she’s next while Dianne Wiest laughs that little side smirk she’s so good at giving. “He’s going to get you next,” she says, all hopped up on pills.
Not even the plot cares enough about getting into the plot so I won’t be too heavy on it. Basically, Peter Dinklage tries to kill Rosamund Pike and hot lesbian girlfriend who has maybe four minutes total speaking time by blowing up their house. Rosamund Pike and prop retaliate by leaving Peter Dinklage naked and alone on some hiking trail(?) where he is then found and placed in the care of, you guessed it, Rosamund Pike. The two team up and become super rich scamming on the elderly before Rosamund Pike is shot by the guy who started it all: Feldstrom (Macon Blair).
About five minutes in is when I realize oh boy, I’m going to hate this fucking movie. Feldstrom, obviously upset because his mother just got committed to a nursing home without his permission, rushes out of court after Rosamund Pike’s restraining order against him is upheld and spits on her face which, hell yeah, fuck this bitch. In turn, Rosamund Pike whips off her glasses and says some bullshit feminist fodder that completely alleviates her from doing anything wrong, “yOu ThInK jUsT BeCaUsE yOuRe MaN iM sCaReD oF yOu? GuEsS WhAt.. yOuRe ScArEd oF mE bEcaUse… VaGinA,”
Ooooo Margaret Thatcher is quaking in her boots.
We have little instances of this pop up here and there, like when Rosamund Pike and Dean (Chris Messina) are talking terms and agreements about freeing Dianne Wiest from nursing home hell. When Messina brings up how Pike runs her operation by having a doctor falsify his documents for her she snaps “she… the doctor?? Is a she..” woaHh check your privilege there, Dean. I’ll have you know this poster of Gina Haspel is very displeased to feel you undermine our success. Didn’t you know women can be bad, too?
Surprisingly, this kind of bad dialogue a la female voices can only be written by *gasp* a man. Frustratingly, as women do gain more than a nod of knowledge that they exist, men are the ones STILL WRITING! FEMALE LED FILMS! This year I have already seen a lesbian film written by Casey Affleck that ends with him saying to his lesbian wife “just pretend I’m here” and it works, like a small bandaid over a gaping head wound. Now, with I Care A Lot, the writer drives home his point that Marla is evil by including a subplot where she also has a gay girlfriend. It’s a common thing in film, this depiction, to hit home that women cannot be healthy-balanced individuals due to the fact they have never existed under the male gaze. As Freud famously says:
“The psychotic lesbian has failed to properly go through the heterosexual attachments and substitutions to achieve healthy adult desire.”
No matter if we are minding our own business or not, lesbians are directly a missile hit to the heterosexual men’s ego. If we can exist without them, we are a threat to them. By not knowing us, they try to understand us by filtering us through some grotesque, emotionless lens that is pleasing to the male gaze. Men thrive off writing lesbians in power because we are others outside their control, it’s a means of manipulation and also submission. With lesbian bosses, you can call them a bitch and feel at ease because well, arent willfully dominant women kind of bitches? Isn’t Rosamund Pike kind of sort of a bitch already without the added subtext of a queer plotline?
Of course, that wouldn’t drive home her villainous drive. The Monstrous Lesbian, a combination term coined by feminist scholars Christine Coffman, Barbara Creed, and Marry Russo is what Marla has to be in order for I Care a Lot to work through the male lens:
“The Monstrous Lesbian is a combination of the psychotic lesbian that Coffman defines, the monstrous female that Creed argues is socially threatening, and the grotesqueness that stems from her power to be disruptive as Russo agrees.”
Considering queer representation has gone down in recent years, it sucks knowing we only have I Care A Lot to glom onto. In fact, according to GLAAD, in 2019 media representation of queer characters was at 10.2% and only 38 characters on television were trans. In 2020, the number of queer characters went down by 1 percent. In that small percent, we got Rosamund Pike, a lesbian pedaled by some male screenwriter.
Remember that thing I said earlier about hating including myself on gendered issues? Well, since I’m going IN on this movie, let’s include why this feminist male bullshit is contributing to a world for women built by men. Quite simply, why not have women write movies for women? Why not have lesbians write lesbians? Now, instead, we have a writer writing a lesbian film for men to review. We have artists like myself who can’t break into the industry because their faux-progressivism only exists as a facade. Hollywood only lets famous people already on the inside like Reese Witherspoon or Olivia Wilde create feminist art that doesn’t hit home with people who aren’t upper class. The people who have hit the ground running creating popular lesbian art are, as of late, men.
I don’t want to be dramatic, but I Care a Lot is a culmination of this newly dominate male world, where men cloak themselves as allies creating female art that is feminist because women are strong!!!! If they do face oppression, it is by men like Peter Dinklage, who’s height and weight are pinpointed in the movie for no reason other than to humiliate, that writer and director J Blakeson sends a message that “it’s not really women against men, it’s women against Peter Dinklage, who’s petiteness is pointed out frequently to other him from the male viewer audience.” I Care a Lot undermines itself by undermining the people in it.
Seeing this movie made me want to scream. Knowing the female, lesbian narrative is constantly widdled down to a man’s perspective feels exhausting, especially when things have progressed so far in 2021 to make room for creators who are anything but cis-het men. Give me two women cheating the system by existing, feeling, living. Give me lesbians who exist outside a male gaze by not ending heists with sex and “god, I love your ass.” Give me Rosamund Pike in a screenplay written by me, with more pantsuits and more scenes with her beautiful girlfriend.
Give me something that I can Care a Lot About.
If you need an engaging overview on how lawyers abuse elder law, I recommend this New Yorker article on it instead. I can’t believe this won a Golden Globe. What a slap in the face.