Bianca Chatterjee reminiscences about The Menu and the brilliant, unbridled female rage present within Anya Taylor-Joy’s character.
As many of my semi-decent ideas typically come about, I found myself in a rotting slump, pursuing a YouTube catalogue of semi-decent video essays. In conjunction with watching The Menu for the first time, two years too late, I came across Anya Taylor-Joy’s BBC1 interview address of how Margot (her character in the film) should outsmart Chef Julian Slowik, to save herself from the horrors of Hawthorne.
It isn’t important how the trajectory of the movie was originally, and frankly – I don’t care. I loved The Menu because of Taylor-Joy’s suggestion to the film’s director: Margot needs not shed a single tear or ignore Tyler’s shitty, condescending comments about her having an unrefined palate or being too simple to appreciate the theatre of Slowik’s dining. Especially since she was hired as a stand-in for another woman he wanted to take to Hawthorne instead, knowing that she was destined to be killed.
She just needed to lunge at Tyler from across the table, grab him by his over-gelled hair, and beat his ass.
Taylor-Joy has stated that this scene was improvised, to Nick Hoult’s dismay, since it would be impossible to believe the narrative that one could produce a singular, romantic tear in a petrified stupor, in the event of being told that they were brought to an island to be used as bait in sick performance art. It’s not impossible to believe this reaction, sure. But I think she made the right call to choose the route that most women I know, and I, would’ve and should’ve taken.
So many possible experiences ignite a vengeful flame in women or femmes every day. Still, that flame is snuffed out by an institutionalised inner monologue akin to ‘this is how things are, so deal with it’. It gets me thinking of the fact that only a particular expression of rage is considered ‘tasteful’, ‘digestible’, ‘uncontroversial’ and maybe even ‘sexy’. Why is feminine rage in the real world so uncomfortable, and why does it have to be dressed up in a certain way, under certain manufactured circumstances, to be considered compassionately, or as deserving of empathy?
Being a ‘woman is a pain that never goes away’ as said by Greek dramatist Menander, and Shaniya, also known as Shanspeare on YouTube, who is an excellent video essayist and delves into this complex idea. Their essay titled ‘The Sad Girl to Female Rage Pipeline’ was an excellent inspiration for the bigger picture here, as they detail the layered intricacies of how a feminine person acceptably expresses rage and how that has evolved through zeitgeists.
Feminine rage is only acceptably expressed through a hot white girl’s soapbox in works of fiction, typically in the horror or thriller genre, in a visual medium and historically in a fetish-y, torture-porn way. Hot women in the West can only reasonably express anger if they’re the last ones standing in the final show-down against Ghost-Face. Otherwise, you’re being dramatic in most other genres and plotlines, babe.
Megan Fox played Jennifer, Natalie Portman played Nina Sayers, Florence Pugh played both Dani and Alice Chambers, and every film adaptation of Carrie has cast a slim, porcelain-skinned woman in place of King’s original Carrie who was described as a pimple-faced, overweight, average-looking young girl. All of these women endure being pushed to the edge in one way or another, and all happen to be on your Pinterest board in some shape or form too.
There’s a certain aestheticisation, or beautification that is applied to suffering. These harrowing narratives of reclaiming one’s body after sexual trauma through ultimate revenge – hurtling through to the darkest corners of your mind in pursuit of perfection, or being bullied to breaking point – are told through the shiny veneer of the ideal beauty standard. Not only that, but certain body types, socioeconomic backgrounds, family dynamics, and personal attributes are sprinkled throughout formulaically in many instances to package a more romantic portrayal of the sad woman or femme. Bisexuality is thrown in as a tool to make things sexier to sell the next box-office hit in many examples as well.
The point is that there is a big problem with how we have to package the concept of angry women to get the idea across that a lot in the world is profoundly angering and painful to women. That is, if this point is actually made, since half the time, we just get over-sexualised victims or vindicated martyrs – but at what cost? That’s not how real life works, unfortunately.
Shanspeare thinks of black women who die in birthing suites as they have their pain invalidated; they think of women and femmes who are prisoners in war, trans women who are denied gender-affirming care. I tend to think of Palestinian women and women who are victims of genocide all across the world, women who forcibly undergo female genital mutilation, women who are victims of gender apartheid, women who are victims of capitalism and patriarchy, and the list goes on. All of these thoughts make my blood boil; I’m sure it makes the women who actually experience these things secretly extremely angry at the world. Or maybe it doesn’t, who knows…
Movies and media are made for entertainment and as an escape from the harsh realities of today, but it is easy to overlook the effects of specific damaging themes or patterns. Not only does it feel like there is one dimension that rage can be expressed by women and femmes, but there is one lens to tell that story through because it is beautiful and/or does not carry certain stigmas that are unfortunately associated with certain intersectional identities or experiences.
Yes, Margot was played by the gorgeous Anya Taylor-Joy, but the sentiment behind her improvised scene was important and spoke to many women and femmes alike. The fact remains that; there’s little chance you as a person will have a truly uniquely angering experience, and there’s a special type of unity formed through the adversities, pain and general bullshit that come with being femme.
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