Issue #89: Kicking and Screaming 🦈

_{Kicking and screaming? Just the working agenda for the week. In the interim, reviews of two of the season’s buzziest films. First, Zosha on Rose Byrne’s turn (heh!) in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Then, Cate on the delightful chaos of One Battle After Another. Enjoy!}

It’s hard to really translate a proper mental breakdown. Even when you’ve had one, being on the outside of someone currently experiencing one can feel like trying to toss a tin-can phone to someone across a moat: even if you go for the plunge, you’re still not much closer to really connecting. When the walls close in it’s really tough to let anyone’s voice in, let alone get a bit of breathing room to really get some equilibrium. And yet, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You comes about as close as anyone ever has to dragging you into the headspace of a panic attack, peeling back layers of protection until you’re sure you’re well past skin, pulling your head so deep underwater you’re not sure which way is up.

Linda (Rose Byrne) has already lost some literal and metaphorical support when the movie kicks off: with her husband away for work for 8 weeks, it’s up to her, alone, to try to care for their daughter through a mysterious illness that requires her daily attendance at a special program, all while Linda is also working a full-time job as a therapist. And then her apartment’s roof caves in, flooding their apartment with water, and, she believes, toxic substances. This leaves her weeks later, living out of a hotel, with Linda fielding calls from her husband (about how she’s not doing enough for their apartment or getting their daughter to eat), contractor (who hasn’t patched the hole and has to stop work, sorry!), while dealing with patients (who don’t seem to listen to her much either). Even her own therapist seems drolly tired of listening to her endless problems, and in the meantime her daughter continues to not put on the weight she needs to.

In the history of cinematic breakdowns — your Streetcars Named Desire or Mulholland Drives, or even the ones that provoke them more in the audience, a la Uncut Gems or Climax — there’s typically a sort of steady build to the breaking point. Not so with If I Had Legs, where writer/director Mary Bronstein starts Linda off with the unrelenting, if charming, patter of a daughter’s steady stream of consciousness, and runs right into a literal torrential downpour of toxicity. Is it any surprise that Linda can’t catch a breath? Or that her mind keeps being drawn into the liminal space of the hole that for some reason no one will — can?? — fix?

Bronstein’s toolbox is often unfussy and unnervingly effective, keeping the scope of If I Had Legs almost claustrophobically close on Byrne’s face, and always holding its subjects tight within the frame. It’s only when she has a few moments of freedom — often with a bottle of wine and a joint — that the camera gives her any space for peace. When Linda is alone with her daughter we never see her daughter’s face; she exists as a body and a voice.

The effect is disarming, creating an almost physical sensation of being restrained in some way, and all adds to the general confinement of the narrative. There’s little sense of how life exists beyond this moment, whether Linda is a good therapist who’s lost her center or regularly has her life under control. Whatever was or could be exists beyond the ever-mounting limitations of this moment. Byrne lets Linda twist herself into all sorts of shapes to cope. She lets loose on a man who hits her car; she begs her therapist to listen to her or at least tell her what to do; she’s careful and calm when attending to her daughter. She plays curdled control and bone-deep exhaustion equally well, showing every step of the way her caring side is ground down and trapped.

Not to waste time anticipating reaction too much, but frankly I’m gonna do exactly that: No doubt much of the discussion of this movie will fall too closely to justifying or condemning Linda; for many, I have seen how the success of the movie to teeter on how Linda could’ve handled things, or the choices she made that locked her in; even people supportive of her might (or, to be frank about what I’ve seen: have!) want to whitewash her choices because she’s trapped. Maybe it’s not smart for a mom to try to order drugs off the dark web with her next door neighbor, or to yell at her therapist, or hang up on her husband. I’d argue that’s beside the point. On a good day in life it’s hard to know what to do, and on the worst days in life a wrong choice feels like a pox upon your household, forever condemning you to misery.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is full of people who want Linda to be one way or another, who hope that they can crack through her darkness and who, one way or another, add to it. What I found most intriguing about the film is how its forced perspective keeps everyone at arm’s length — how a husband’s call hits like an emotional creditor, a therapist’s distance feels isolating and dehumanizing, and a daughter’s wonder becomes just another voice impinging on your peace. It’s no surprise that Linda projects some ethereal element to the hole, it’s the only thing that actually feels open to her. When you’re going through hell, everything hits like a sad metaphor. Only you get to decide what you want it to say — an agony If I Had Legs I’d Kick You knows all too well.

As an act of creative critical hygiene, I try not to read reactions or reviews of films I plan to cover until I’ve written my own. In the constant churn of light-speed online chatter, it can be easy to fall prey to consensus. I prefer to take my time to sit with a film, muddle through my own critical perspective, and form a conclusion I can support with the text. Sometimes you need to take a second to metabolize what a story is trying to communicate, and director Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is exactly the kind of film I developed this process to tackle. Because amidst all the chatter and praise, it seems that very few people are bothered by the fact that the narrative thrust of this film turns on the racist depiction of a Black woman. 

The movie centers on Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson — a former revolutionary with the French 75, raising the teenaged daughter of his former lover Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Sixteen years prior, Perfidia turned state’s witness to testify to the crimes she helped orchestrate, went into witness protection, then disappeared from custody entirely. Now, her former handler Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) is hunting Bob, and has kidnapped his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) as part of his attempt to gain membership to the white supremacist group, the Christmas Adventurers Club (yes, really).

Perfidia is a frustrating character. Domineering, aggressive and insatiable, she is a walking, talking Jezebel stereotype of the worst kind. Taylor throws herself into the character admirably, and the film would likely be much worse without her in the role. But everything she does is framed through the lens of sex. Perfidia is depicted as being sexual to the point of distraction, often literally. Not even her own escape frees her from the film’s forced vulgarity.

In the opening set piece at the immigration center, Perfidia encounters Lockjaw for the first time. While holding him hostage, she forces him to become erect while she points a gun at his head. She makes it clear that she’s getting off on the power of the sexual dynamic at play. Later, when Lockjaw tracks her down and spies on her from afar, the camera shifts to tight closeups of her body, lecherously regarding her breasts and ass while he begins to masturbate. And as the French 75 continue their activities in montage, Perfidia is repeatedly seen becoming waylaid by a desire to have sex, or turn a situation sexual. There are several scenes of her more or less trying to swallow Bob’s face whole, including trying to have sex in the middle of the desert, while pregnant, mere feet from where they’ve just planted an explosive device. 

There is nothing wrong with a Black female character who is sexual. Scandal, Greenleaf and Being Mary Jane made sure to cover that ground. But sexuality is fraught for Black women too, and it’s clear that PTA did not bother to engage with that reality. The Jezebel stereotype is a pernicious, racist idea with roots in slavery. It asserts that that Black women’s sexuality is wild, untameable and unending — that all we want to do is fuck everything that moves and be imprenated. During slavery, Black women’s fertility was controlled by their white slave owners. They were regarded as little more than brood mares tasked only with making more slaves to exploit. This stereotype served to normalize the idea that this practice was not only acceptable, but biologically determined.

In the film, Perfidia… tries to fuck everything that moves and ends up pregnant with a white abuser’s child. And when that child is born, she abandons her, choosing a life as a revolutionary over settling down with the daughter she admits to envying, because she resents the attention her baby steals from her. She’s depicted as having no discipline, no self control, and no loyalty to the people who love her.

In another world, that would be the basis of an exquisite character study. But despite being the engine of the plot, we know next to nothing about Perfidia’s inner life. We know very little about her actual life. We get tidbits here and there: we know she comes from a long line of revolutionaries for example. But outside that, there’s very little there. How does she feel about carrying a child whilst in the midst of preparing for revolutionary violence? Why did she turn on her comrades? How did she feel about being held hostage by a man who wanted to own her?

It was notable to me too that rapper Junglepussy retains her own stage name for the film. To the best of my knowledge she isn’t playing herself, so one might expect a character name that indicates that. But in choosing not to, PTA adds to his crimes of misogynoir. “Junglepussy” is subversive precisely because it’s the kind of thing white people shouldn't say. (See also, rapper Latto’s stage name, updated from “Mulatto.”) And though Junglepussy has much less screentime, PTA manages to make the two dark-skinned Black women in the film oversexed by virtue of existing. And to make matters worse, they’re both punished in the narrative for their activism. At no point does the movie meaningfully engage with the experiences of its Black female characters (including Deandra (Regina Hall) and Willa.) To PTA, Black women — dark-skinned Black women — are nothing more than sex and violence. 

It’s part of what made the naked racism of the Christmas Adventurers Club so uncomfortable to watch. Not because it was unrealistic or even unnecessary — but that casual slurs are freely included about characters who aren’t given a sufficient inner life to counter those stereotypes. The Christmas Adventurers Club, led by Tony Goldwyn’s Virgil Throckmorton, is as explicitly racist as it is possible to be, talking about non-white characters in terms of their “breed” and “purity.” As the Overton window has shifted in the last decade, these are ideas that have all come roaring back into the public conversation. And I’m glad that Anderson refuses to pretend they haven’t. But violent language like that isn’t just something to play with. The point is taken, but I do miss the days when all we needed to establish a character’s racism was an errant “nigger” here or there. Less is more.

Anderson is doing very interesting work here and it’s exciting to see a filmmaker tackle our current political moment with full force. But there are no cookies for acknowledging the reality marginalized people have been living in for decades. Especially not while replicating the very same stereotypes that marginalized us in the first place.

_{Poptimism ate itself :(. IMAX tickets are making a race for louder, bigger, better cinema — does it truly mean theatrical perfection? My friend’s lovely piece about how Silksong’s newest release can remind us all to take better, gentler care of ourselves. An old appointment reading newsletter installment, but one I haven’t stopped thinking about and learning from. Revisiting Katie Holmes’ introduction to Tom Cruise, and the gossip mags. The art of the impersonal essay.}

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Zosha + Cate <3