Little Red Riding Hoodlum Does Time
Tuesday, 25 July 2006 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtIt'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*
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*
