Aging Europe

Elle (d. Paul Verhoeven)

It’s bullshit, especially when it comes to what Verhoeven thinks is feminism, but there are other things in the film worth examining, like patriarchy, specifically the European kind with its (mass) violence, and a more multicultural Europe even though it’s an all-white neighborhood/ workplace/city—except for the baby and, as the camera suggests with a wink, the true baby daddy.

First, this isn’t feminism at all even though Verhoeven wants us to think some women like it rough and that some women permit men to be rough—to others. It’s the classic what men think what women want, sexually. It’s hoary. It’s cliche. It’s irredeemable. Also, that’s “old” Europe way of thinking about sexuality. So how about “new” Europe? Well, it frankly scares them, the older white people especially that’s why the race and paternity of the baby is a running joke in the film. The only way the movie can assimilate the black body, the stand-in here for all non-white people, is through falsehood. Old Europe can’t imagine how New Europe with its multicultural population can ever be without some hoodwinking by the colonized, the immigrants, the non-whites. This is why the baby story exists in the film. This is also why the movie is partly preoccupied with images of old neighborhood (where the violence took place) and the chic neighborhood of its protagonist. Attached to this is the idea of property. There can be bad occupants and those who have the choice and means to move away in a Europe with a growing multicultural population.

It’s also about patriarchy. Curiously the film has resemblances to another powerful film about the same subject with the same star: White Material. (Note how that too is about property but this time the violence is brought back home to the home country and to the protagonist’s home—and also to other people’s homes if we want to include to think about how video games as violent texts get played inside one’s home/psyche.) The inhumanity of the massacre is underscored by the unacknowledged death of animals where the protagonist cares enough for a dying swallow. The massacre is decades old but people seem to remember and react vehemently to its memories. But my question would be how about the massacre in the streets of Paris of demonstrating Algerians which was not acknowledged or spoken officially for a long time? How about the colonial violence in Vietnam and Algeria? No tears for them. Or that violence isn’t configured in the film’s logic about patriarchal violence. This is some white people shit: blindness, occlusion, misogyny.

#2019 #54