Little Red Riding Hoodlum Does Time

[freckles_and_doubt]

It's another in the ongoing series of Weird And Unlikely Movies I Watch Because It's My Job, Dammit! Tonight, Freeway! Or, Reese Red Riding Witherspoon Does Big Bad Kiefer Sutherwolf. Someone, I forget who, it may have been Phlp, warned me I'd hate this movie. How right he was. (Or she, if, in fact, it wasn't Phlp or anyone else of the masculine persuasion. My memory is bad at the best of times, and with this cold it's dribbled completely out of my ears).

Red Riding Hood, as fairy tales go, is generally a heaving cesspit of sublimated sexuality, violence and patriarchal Lolita-fondling dodginess (and that's even before you get into the New-Agey cosmic interpretations which insist that Red Riding Hood is Spring, Spring! or possibly Summer, emerging eternally from the belly of the winter-Wolf). RRH herself is a strange combination of childhood innocence and nascent sexuality, with that whole suggestion (see Gustav Doré) that she strays from the path because - gasp! - she's both terrified and fascinated, and ultimately wants to be devoured by the Big Bad. (A pause while I have sudden Spike flashbacks)...

No-one captured this edgy, sexy dualism better than Angela Carter, but I have to say, while I loathed almost every moment of Freeway, which is violent, grimy, grotesque and more than somewhat bleak, it does some dashed interesting stuff along the same lines. Reese Witherspoon's RRH figure, while sporting red hood and frankly incredible cutesy basket, is also a fascinating combination of street-wise ignorance, pragmatic violence, feisty self-reliance and the kind of bad-upbringing emotional and intellectual starvation which almost passes for naivety. Casting her as illiterate trailer-trash escaping from the attentions of her drugged-out whore mother's child-molester boyfriend is an extremely interesting light shed on the inherent sexualisation of Red Riding Hood's girl-child: she's no innocent, but in a sense her high degree of sexualisation makes her even more of a victim to the serial-killer wolf.

I like the way the film explores the Roald Dahl version of an empowered RRH, who does, in fact, at the psychological moment whip a pistol not quite from her knickers, and defiantly mark the wolf with the outward and visible sign of his inward grotesqueness. She's no pushover, this kid, and while you can't quite believe that the world has anything good lined up for her given the incredible deprivations of her upbringing, the wolf himself becomes a much smaller and less terrifying thing in the face of her defiant refusal to be victimised.

Interesting little film, all round. Of course, tomorrow I have to watch the sequel, which by all the rules can only be bad. On the upside, once I've thrashed out 500 words on the two films, I'll have - gasp! - only one more encyclopedia entry left to write! The end is nigh! *exits waving placard and predicting the apocalypse*

Comments

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

For a film you hated, you (inadvertently?) end up making this one sounds quite unmissable. :-)

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

I agree! You make it sound clever and quite fascinating. I want to see it now. You talk a lot about RRH, but not about the wolf. How was he? Wolfy?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Aargh! I really don't think you want to see it, w-n, although wytchfynder might - it was violent, bleak and rather nasty in parts. It was definite discomfort-watching, and more than somewhat B-movie, but was also interestingly issue-driven and played a very knowing riff on the RRH story.

I forgot about your Kiefer Sutherland fixation - and me the one who bought you the poster! I wouldn't see this movie for him - his performance is outstanding, as is Reece Witherspoon's, but he spends the first part of the movie playing a slightly creepy nice guy, and the second part as a horrible grotesque.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Well, you know me :), so I'll take your word for it. I do tend to find violence disturbing. Silly me! How unadult, uninformed and naive. Better stick to calculus and stay out of film and media.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Film and media studies nothing, I found it disturbing; as I keep saying, it's absolutely not a film I'd watch for purposes of enjoyment, given how much I dislike screen violence and ickness. Not silly, unadult, uninformed or naive at all. I sometimes have to watch violent stuff in critical mode, but I'm buggered if they're going to force me to like it.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

:)
I found Sin City, for instance, *very* upsetting. It was astoundingly good in its imagery and cinematography and stuff, I could really admire the artistry, but I spent most of the film doing something else, and only keeping up with the story with brief glances up at the screen.

There is so much out there that combines violence with art that it gives the impression that artistic violence, or well acted violence, or creative violence is something to be appreciated, instead of flinched from and avoided. That to not actively enjoy violence-as-art is akin to not having tutored one's palate to like red wine.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

patriarchal Lolita-fondling dodginess

I misread that as "patriarchal Lolita-fondling doggyness".

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Is that the movie where Reese Witherspoon is manually stimulated while riding a roller coaster to the tune of The Rolling Stone's Wild Horses? Because that scene alone almost ruined Wild Horses for me, and made me hate Witherspoon for life.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Good lord. No, the film I watched rejoiced in no such scene, I am pleased to say. Either the South African censors removed it in order to preserve the country's mental health, or it's in some other movie.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

OK, curiosity won. Googling "Reese Witherspoon rollercoaster" reveals that, in fact, the film to which you refer was Fear, with Mark Wahlberg.