Master of the House (Du skal aere din hustru)

Master of the House



dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

TW: discussion of domestic abuse, sexism

So this is going to be, as ever, kind of a different commentary. I'm not so much interested in attaining a consistent formula to these reviews of movies, though. A lot of times they are meant as sounding boards of my recent thoughts and ways for me to air out my thoughts on different topics which I see crystallized in film. In this case, I'm going to talk somewhat about internet sexism today, but I want to use the movie as a way to frame that.

Now about the film itself; I've never seen a Carl Theodor Dreyer movie, although I hear he is considered one of those all-time great directors alongside folks like Tarkovsky or Bergman or Rosellini or Godard. I recognize that those folks all came along in drastically different contexts and their movies probably shouldn't be so flippantly compared, but for now it's just a point of saying that Dreyer is considered one of the greats--which is why this film is a bit odd. From what I understand, Dreyer's work is largely concerned with the numinous, the religious, the ecstatic; none of which are present in this film. I hear this film's one of those works included in the Criterion Collection more out of a way to trace a director's history than anything else, and maybe that's something to do with it. I do not mean that to sound as diminishing as it does, but Master of the House just hits that key for me where I can see some of the story work being done but it just falls flat for me in some ways.

The plot goes like this: Ida Frandsen (Astrid Holm) is an entirely too beleaguered housewife whose husband, Viktor (Johannes Meyer) has recently lost his job "turning him into" an abusive shithead. Seriously, this guy is just relentless and I might move past it if not for the fact that it's the central conflict of the movie. Viktor is just the most constantly demanding, belittling, and denigrating piece of shit I've seen. He complains about every minor inconvenience in his morning routine, and when Ida sets about fixing one thing, he complains that she is not fixing something else. He has the audacity to ask her what she does all day right before it's made clear to the audience that Viktor has no job, prompting the obvious question for me: "What do you do, ass?" The first half-hour or so of this movie is just a constant barrage of Viktor's abuses, only eased up in the reproachful glares given off by the character of "Mads" (Mathilde Nielsen), an old nanny who used to be Viktor's nanny as well, but now primarily helps Ida with the children and attempts to condemn Viktor for his treatment of his family. This portion of the movie ends when Ida, frazzled to the point of nervous collapse, decides to retire to her parent's home after Viktor places one too many absurd demands upon her. Mads assures Ida that, given some time alone with Viktor, Mads will be able to set him to rights, stirring up the old fear of her that she knows Viktor developed in his childhood.

So it goes then, that Ida leaves the house and leaves Mads alone with Viktor and the children. At once I do kind of worry that the children are subjected to more of Viktor, who, while most of his abuse was directed at Ida, was not exactly anything close to a decent parent either. However, with a variety of cutting words and sharp observations about his character, Mads is able to bring Viktor around and reform him, making him do most of the chores which he had previously demanded that Ida attend to. By the end of the movie, Viktor is changed, Ida returns home, and they are presented a check by Ida's parents with the hopes that they will use it to buy an optometrist's shop and move on. The End.

But wow, do I hate Viktor.

It's not like the movie is unsubtle about who's the villain here. Viktor is flatly awful at the start of this movie and I don't know why the characters need to suffer so that he can have his transformation and become the good guy that he was all along. It's like an ugly duckling story in which the duckling needs to make everyone around it suffer in order to learn that it was beautiful all along. Thing is, this isn't exactly uncommon even in media today. Guys are given much more of a pass (in western media, at least) when it comes to the assumption that there's some hidden good within them; or that their awful behavior is a result of having fallen on hard times.

I guess this strikes me particularly within this movie because much of the domestic life portrayed seems similar to the one some online neoreactionaries advocate for in their own politics and commentaries. Ida, Mads, and the daughters stay inside and tend to the home while Frederik, the young son of the couple, is allowed to play outside and Viktor spends his days doing who knows what. This plays out only for Viktor to come home and complain about the unpaid labor being performed for his benefit in the home. It's gross to see the narrative play out almost entirely for Viktor's benefit--he is "degraded" through his treatment by Mads, yes--but it's all for his benefit, and the narrative forgives him at the end. It's kind of similar to The Phantom Carriage really.

At the same time, I do wonder about the time period involved here. On the one hand, while Viktor's absurd treatment of Ida is viewed as something which can be reformed, at least it is viewed as something bad by the narrative, which contradicts a lot of that bullshit "every man a king in his castle" crap that MRA's spew. Similarly, while there is a bit of a "wacky hijinks" vibe that shows up when it's revealed that the central plot will revolve around Mads's correction of Viktor, she does not spare him any feelings and does bring him down from his tyrant status pretty much on her own, which could be seen as a major role for a woman to play in a film. I know that European culture has pretty much always been patriarchal, but I don't know to what extent early feminist thought had begun to appear in Denmark by this time. I guess it's really a matter of judging how much of an exaggeration Viktor's early behavior is supposed to be. If it's not that far off of the mark, this is at once a sad but perhaps more politically relevant film for its time. If it is a parody, then there is still value in its proclamation that this sort of behavior is wrong, but a bit dampened by the portrayal of it as parody.

Häxan

Häxan
directed by Benjamin Christensen




TW: for discussion of oppression, historical torture (inquisitions mostly), religious abuse, and coerced psychiatry.

How do we take a movie like Häxan? In some ways I feel like watching this is akin to watching DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation. On one hand, it's a piece of filmic history, on the other it's a reiteration of what were (and are) systemic injustices and violences done upon various marginalized bodies (women in the former and black people in the latter).

I'll grant that Häxan is probably not as purposefully inflammatory as Griffith's film. It takes its subject, the history of witchcraft and the treatment of women accused as witches throughout history, as a symptom of a bygone superstitious belief system supplanted by scientific insight and more modern medicine.... but that's.. well we'll get there.

The film begins with a recounting of various myths from throughout history, landing on how the conception of medieval Christianity conceived of the world as existing in spheres, at the top of which sat the Christian God and at the bottom of which was found Hell.




From here, we're informed of the belief that throughout history certain women were perceived as being particularly susceptible to the influence of the devil. It's interesting that the movie's portrayal of this history is very much of a double consciousness about this. On the one hand, these women are to be pitied and helped (oh the help...), but this is most often when they are in the company of men. When these women congregate together, they are feared. There are some really stunning shots during this part of the movie as the film shows the witches in flight across various nighttime foreground structures.



From this somewhat empowering view of the witch as an object of fear, the movie then moves us forward to a period where religious persecution holds sway. In this segment of the movie, we see that the movie does at least know that the treatment of women at this time was vile. Women are pressured into confessions under threat to their loved ones, and are routinely killed after enduring horrible torture at the hands of these monks and inquisitors. It's really at times some pretty brutal stuff, and there's a real sense of the injustice of the time.

After wrapping this up, the film begins its conclusion that's a bit... well, it's cause for reflection. The film was made in 1922, and I imagine was one of the very early documentary style films. The film has a very "look how far we've come" attitude about the attitudes toward women. Saying that what used to be called witchcraft.... is now properly known as hysteria....

The funny thing is, I think the film's a bit of a mirror. So many people still berate feminists with this idea that because women are now able to do X action (vote, work, have birth control), that we've somehow totally overcome sexist ideology. In this way, Häxan seems less like an opportunity to shake our heads at the ignorance and misogyny of these people in 1922, and more as an invitation to look at how this same sort of pattern of thought is ongoing and insidious, and that changes to ideology (such as the introduction of intersectionality to feminism) are needed as a fine-tuning instrument, lest we claim some action or movement as a panacea for oppression (as psychiatry is posited in this film).

Given this, I also think that the sympathetic portrayal of the witch is interesting. I have several female-identifying friends who associate strongly with various forms of witchcraft, paganism, and Wicca. I think that in some ways these are oftentimes counter-narratives that go against the patriarchal narratives instituted by Western Abrahamic religious hegemony. It's a subversive tactic, and the shot that I'm reminded of the most comes from the end of the witch segment of the movie. In it, it's explained that it was believed that witches would turn into cats and, with animal guards, sneak into churches and crap on the floor. I can't help but see this as another instance of the film discussing a sort of subversive tactic taken against oppression.



Also it has these hilarious costumes of the people dressed up as cats.... like, they could've just used real cats. But no, they made like, four or five of these costumes.