"Female Addicts" Missing Women

The famous feminist theorist Laura Mulvey once wrote in her art criticism article "You Don't Know What You Are, Right, Mr. Jones?" "(You Don't Know What You're Do You, Mr. Jones?, published in 1973 Spare Rib) pointed out that the "female" image as a woman is missing in Jones' artwork. In fact, in the research on feminist art theory that emerged in the 1960s, especially in the theory of female film, many theorists pointed out that although female characters flooded the screen, women themselves almost disappeared from the screen, and they more often It only exists in the movie as a subsidiary gender related to men. Since then, in film creation, feminism has gradually taken a place as a rising ideology, which has changed the screen world dominated by male characters, and even "overcorrected" has formed a powerful and almost ubiquitous "censorship" of feminism. The “self-censorship and self-censorship” mechanism supervises the display of female images on the screen. In this context, only by examining the new film "Female Addict" by Lars Van Thiel in 2014 can we understand the huge impact that these four hours of screen time have brought to the audience: removing a lot of eroticism, sadomasochism and violence In addition to the description of "Sex", the film is full of a lot of ambiguous and symbolic content related to "sex". Although on the surface, women are the main role throughout the story, but it seems that people can see the squeeze. Going to the side put her in the original intention of being dominated or even exploited.

Since the 1960s, "sex" has been one of the weapons used by feminists to liberate their bodies. Not only has it been frequently used to challenge the taboos of women's moral concepts, it has also become a "battlefield" for men. Fighting for the initiative of "sex" from men has become one of the signs of the rise of women. In "Female Addicts", Lars Van Thiel portrays such a female image: her life is closely connected with "sex", from curiosity to desire to dependence and finally to abuse. Unlike the usual rendering of "sex" carnival in Western movies, the "sex" portrayed by Lars van Thiel has brought endless trouble and pain to this woman, and she has not He was liberated by constantly mastering the "sexual initiative", but became increasingly depressed, drowning in his own desires and unable to extricate himself, and was finally abandoned and betrayed by everyone—husbands, friends, and lovers. The whole movie is actually a history of female "sex" struggles. The heroine Joe seems to be stuck in a cannibalistic swamp. Every time she feels the danger of sinking, she struggles hard on the axis of "sex", and This large-scale movement will only make her sink deeper step by step, and eventually be swallowed by the mud. This is a suspicion of "sex" as the functional liberation of the mind and body, and in the end it was led by Lars van Thiel to question the methodology of feminism: at the end of the film, he was always a listener. Seligman suddenly asked Joe, if the protagonist of all the stories she told was not a woman but a man, would her experience be the same? Or in such an environment, when Qiao started to fight for the initiative like a man with "sex" as a breakthrough, is she still performing social behaviors from the standpoint of a woman? This is actually directly questioning the starting point of women's pursuit of their own independence and liberation advocated by feminism in the past 40 years. "Sex" is only one aspect of feminist methodology, and more of this attempt to fight for power with men will make women lose their gender and misplace them? Ironically, Seligman suddenly changed from a listener to an immoral attacker at the end of the film. The premise that he can listen is the same as he said because he is "a sexually impotent." But even such a person who is therefore called the "only friend" by Joe will be bewitched by his inner sexual impulse in the dead of night and become a beast trying to rape Joe. The spiritual and moral meaning of "sex" is minimized by Lars van Thiel here, and the corresponding subtext is actually feminists in such a meaningless "sex" that does not contain any moral human values ​​and only reflects human animal desires. "Sex" has been written for forty years, and it’s really a large-scale nanyuan Beizhe. Joe's final reaction was to shoot and break with this instead of continuing to whirl in this unsolvable vortex. Here, by denying the meaning of "sex", the potential irony and even contempt for feminism jumped on the screen.

Lars van Thiel’s argument against female “sex”ism and gender inversion may seem attractive, but the argument he uses to support his argument is the “innocent abuse” model he is accustomed to creating: From the beginning of the film "Breaking the Waves", to "Dancers in the Dark", then to "Dogtown", and finally to "Depression", he has built a "virtual" malicious surrounding for the seemingly innocent, pure and fragile protagonist. The environment, the physical and mental prisoner suffered by his protagonist character seems to be so worthy of sympathy and indignation for the audience who sinks into the plot, but the observer who calmly withdraws from the scene of the film can find this being. The sorrow and anger stimulated are closely related to the "malicious" world he constructed in the film. But for a character in a fictional and harmless play, is the "world" really such a unilateral "demonization"? This seems to be a huge question mark. Especially when he attempts to use the fictional character's encounter in the dark world to reflect reality, the setting of this dark environment as a prerequisite should arouse viewers' vigilance. This is also the question that can be raised for "Female Addicts": When the director attempts to question the feminism in reality in the film, is the environment he portrays diverse and three-dimensional? Did he use reality as the basis to outline the scene of the film, or did he directly start from the argument and created a "sex" hell for the heroine Joe as an argument, and fell into a paradox of circular argument? From a logical point of view, with Lars van Thiel’s iconic "concept first" as the leading one, he seems to have handed in a paper with an inner texture inverted and confusing.

The film "Sodom" shot by Italian film master Pasolini in the 1970s marked a new area for the role of "sex" in the film. Through it, people realized for the first time that "sex" can be separated from its main body and be endowed with multiple political ideological meanings during the film's creative stage. "Female Addict" continues Pasolini’s methodology in methodology. On the surface, it seems to portray the entangled difficulties between women and their own desires and "sexual" instincts. Teal has always been skeptical of the political and social motif of "sex" in the feminist ideology. From this perspective, "Female Addicts" has once again fallen into the vicious circle of "women disappearing from the screen" pointed out by Laura Mulvey and others in the 1970s-the female characters themselves lack of thoughts, emotions and feelings and become hollow. , She became an inanimate tool to criticize a certain ideology from the standpoint of a third party. All this makes us feel the need to begin to re-examine the core ideas that have guided Lars Van Thiel’s creation for many years, recalling the condemnation he received as a “Nazi” at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, and this inner connection. It seems more intriguing. At least in terms of the presupposition of the presupposition of "the pure suffer innocently" and the self-justified consciousness of "the rise of the victims for revenge", there is a clear similarity between the two.

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