[ad_1]
In one of Netflix’s opening scenes “I Care A Lot”, Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), a professional legal guardian, sits behind her desk as Mafia lawyer Dean Ericson (Chris Messina) threatens her not so subtly. The Messina character wears three-piece suits and appears to be pulled from the pages of GQ, albeit with a few days of stubble too many for a male model. He exudes masculinity.
Marla doesn’t want him there. In collusion with a doctor, Marla has just been given the guardianship of a woman named Jennifer, whom she sent to a nursing home (without her consent) when she took control of all of Jennifer’s assets. Dean introduces himself to Marla as Jennifer’s lawyer and insists that there was a mistake regarding Jennifer’s weakened status.
Marla lies to Dean and tells him that Jennifer’s condition suddenly deteriorated two weeks ago. “That’s just not true, Mrs. Grayson,” Dean urges. “You know it, I know it. If the doctor wrote a note, he knows it too.”
“She,” Marla corrects quickly. “The doctor. It’s a her.”
This bitter retaliation is at the heart of Marla’s worldview: Men, as she puts it, want to defeat her. Rightly, her colleagues – or henchmen – are almost entirely female, as is the doctor she works with to subjugate unwitting elderly people.
The asterisk of Marla’s feminist ethos is that this great girl power cabal does extremely bad things. The Doctor helps Marla track down innocent elderly people and legally kidnap them in court, depriving them of control over their assets so that Marla can profit as a guardian. Indeed, those who try to get in his way are often men – often lawyers and family members of the defrauded elderly. But his view of the man against woman world is a serious misunderstanding.
And this is where the politics of the film get interesting.
Marla embodies the modern ideal of a “girlboss”: the female entrepreneur whose success is defined in opposition to the male business world in which she swims upstream. The term, often written with a hashtag, gained popularity around 2014 with the publication of the eponymous book by Sophia Amoruso, the founder of retailer Nasty Gal. In a retrospective on the neologism published in The Atlantic, Amanda Mull described the # girlboss-ism philosophy as a kind of “convenient incrementalism.” Writes Mull: “Instead of dismantling the power that men had long wielded in America, career women could simply take it for themselves in the office. She continues: “As Sheryl Sandberg’s helping hand hit ‘Lean In’ before her, ‘#Girlboss’ argued that the professional success of ambitious young women was a two-pronged type of activism, one stone: their quest. of power could be rebranded as a fair pursuit of equality, and the success of women managers and entrepreneurs would raise women below them. ”
This describes Marla to a T: convinced that her relentless scam of elders is some kind of just quest for equality. Yet contrary to the platonic ideal of a girlboss, Marla’s business is deeply immoral. And her “clients”, the people whose lives she destroys, are both old people and women. It seems some women can have it all – but only if other women have nothing.
An entire wall of Marla’s office displays photos of all of her “quarters,” which she flairly marks to indicate particularly lucrative brands. And while she exploits senior equality of opportunity, it’s a bit of clever scriptwriting that the senior who turns her whole plan upside down is also a woman (played with aplomb by Dianne Wiest).
Marla’s evil face – and ultimately, her comeuppance – is a scathing indictment of the female race of feminism, and a surprising policy for a Netflix movie as well. “I Care A Lot” complicates the neoliberal feminist message in a surprising way that I have never seen on film before. Specifically, it highlights the immorality of capitalist feminism, the way it is based on exploitation.
Take away Marla’s borderline legal industry, the world of guardianship, her message and her policies are indistinguishable from so many other feminist capitalist CEOs in the world. Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg became a household name when she published “Lean In,” a hybrid business book and feminist manifesto. The 2013 book was a bestseller, praised for its empowerment message and Sandberg’s egalitarian vision for a post-gender world. “A truly equal world would be one where women run half of our countries and businesses and men run half of our homes,” Sandberg writes.
A laudable vision, certainly. Then, years later, the reality of Sandberg’s day-to-day work at Facebook was revealed: routinely letting partners violate the privacy of his users, obscuring Facebook’s role in election propaganda, and hiring research companies from the campaign. opposition to shore up the filth of the business. critics. This included the use of a public relations firm to attack George Soros using anti-Semitic whistles.
Sheryl Sandberg and the compartmentalized ethos of the fictional Marla Grayson are so similar that it seems impossible that Marla is not at least partially based on Sandberg or perhaps Amoruso too – who sported a haircut eerily similar to Rosamund Pike in film, and whose company went bankrupt a few years after the famous publication of “#GirlBoss” which praised her business acumen.
The point of “I Care A Lot” is that it illustrates how the exploitation of other humans (regardless of their gender) is the key to much of capitalism. Of course, Marla’s parent company is an extreme case, but it serves as a metaphor for capitalism as a whole, as it’s a means to an end for Marla – who desires power and money more. that all. Never is she happier in the film than when she reveled in her wealth or her success – “success”, in this case, unwillingly stripping another senior of her freedom and tearing her apart. assets for the extraction of Marla.
It’s a fascinating counterpoint to another recent film, “Promising Young Woman,” which had a clearer feminist message in that it explained how men – even so-called “good” men – can be accomplices. the culture of atmospheres that allow sexual assault and rape. The men in this film have sometimes apologized, but never redeemable.
But in “I Care A Lot”, Marla is irreplaceable. As if stripping the assets of their charge and handing them over to a prison-like existence weren’t horrible enough, she treats Jennifer even worse when she finds out she has a lawyer by her side: pick up the phone. of Jennifer and ask the nursing home staff to take drugs. mentally torture her. Come on, girlboss.
I see “I Care a Lot” as a warning against this kind of “defused feminism,” as Dawn Foster calls Sheryl Sandberg’s ethos. Stripped of any broader structural understanding of its role in a larger universe of exploitation and work, the barbarism of Marla’s “business” is horrific to behold. Thus, Girlboss Marla is a deeply abominable character – a warning for what happens when feminism is insular and detached from any larger moral universe.
[ad_2]
Source link