To what are we escaping?

Like most good lesbians of a certain age, I have a thing for Jodie Foster. I find her androgynous strength, intense focus, and her Clint Eastwood-like aloofness sexy. Consequently, even though I’m not a fan of violent movies and I compulsively read reviews before picking a film, the other night I went to the new Foster flick, Brave One, knowing next to nothing about it except that Foster had a great new haircut.

Foster delivered. The age lines magnified on a too-thin body only added to her appeal. She looks better now at 44 than she did 10 years ago. Walking down gritty New York streets with her phallic signifiers about her--microphone, cigarette, gun--she was simply hot!

Nonetheless, the pleasure of watching Foster was marred for me by a realization that her sexiness was packaging an all too familiar script about violence and commodification. I went to the movie after a long work week. I wanted something easy to digest and pleasurable to watch. I wanted an escape. But I left troubled, wondering what kind of damage movies like this do over the long haul to our collective psyche.

For those who haven’t seen Brave One, it tells the story of Erica Bain’s (Jodie Foster) transformation into a vigilante killer after she and her fiancée are brutally attacked by strangers. The movie left hanging a number of themes that if explored could have been interesting: the way tragic loss to violence often reproduces violence, or how “righteous” killing offers a sense of power and control after a life-crushing tragedy.

What we get instead is a movie that anesthetizes us to death and relies on stock caricatures of urban criminals to do so. We "know” these victim/victimizers; they make up our country’s collective narrative of “the bad guy.” They are the Latino thugs roaming the parks, the young African-American hoodlums on the train, the greasy elderly pervert/pimp in a beat up car, the mafia man who lives in Park Heights. Their social circumstances are never explored. Their lives are the sum total of their brutality. They are disposable. As Erica Bain continues to kill, we as an audience become anesthetized to her as well. Despite Foster’s good acting, the more she kills the easier it is to focus on her as a film icon—the sexy, slightly butch woman—rather than on the complexities of her character. She in a sense also becomes disposable.

The escapism this film offers up doesn’t take us out of our lives, it simply reinforces uncritical messages we receive daily. From code red warnings, to criminal profiling, to the propagandistic promotion of preemptive strikes, we are told over and over again to be anxious, prepared, on the offensive, and to never forget that it is a violent, lonely world where the vulnerable and soft are sacrificed. I’m not drawing a conspiratorial parallel between Bush’s war propaganda and the movie Brave One, but I am suggesting that so often our escapism—whether packaged through Brave One or Brave Heart, whether staring Jodie Foster or Mel Gibson, whether marketing a lesbian subculture or a heterosexual male demographic—is really only reinforcing old tapes of perpetual anxiety and set stereotypes of what to fear, all made palpable by the allure of a sexy star.

I’ve been intrigued lately by a Quaker pamphlet on the history of spiritual discernment which makes the case that a good way to know if the Spirit of God is with us is to pay attention to the characteristics of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Galatians 5:23. While it may be too much to ask of a Hollywood film to embody all of these characteristics, I think we ought to ask whether, after seeing a film, our humanity has been touched or whether we've been pushed even further away from what makes us vulnerable, requires our engagement in community, and demands a complex and compassionate look at life.

I went to this film with friends and anticipated going for a drink afterwards, but we all ended up just going home instead, a little more tense than when we came.