April 07, 2008
Sex & Death 101
Screwed
Where to begin with a movie as bad as Sex and Death 101? The flat, painful dialogue? A cast of unlikeable characters? The rampant offensive portrayals of women, or the smirking, condescending attempts to excuse its own misogyny? The fact that, as someone who doesn't normally consider herself a feminist, I've already used the words "misogyny," "offensive," and "portrayals of women" in the first paragraph alone?
The film begins when slick businessman Roderick Blank (Simon Baker) receives a mysterious email containing a list of names: every woman he’s ever slept with, and ever will sleep with. Almost immediately, he dumps his fiancée (don’t worry— like so many women in the film, she’s cold and superficial) and gets to work. After noticing that the first name on the future list is a nude model, Roderick explains his decision in a speech illustrative of the film’s sparkling wit: "Pardon my fucking French, but we’re talking about a fucking centerfold here. Fucking a fucking centerfold, if you will, and believe me, I will." What follows is essentially an extended sex montage, or, more accurately, a breasts montage.
In the non-sex scenes, director Daniel Waters phones it in with plots like this one: at the centerfold's mansion, Roderick finds her room and has sex with her, only to discover the next morning that since the lights were out, he accidentally got the wrong room and shtupped her grandmother instead. If that sounds familiar, it's because your suspicions are correct: it is, in fact, the punchline of one of the oldest Borscht belt dirty jokes of all time. Toward the end of the film, at a point when we’re just getting to that locker-room-anecdote excuse for a comedic setup, Roderick has a bike accident in the woods and is found by a busload of Catholic school girls, who decide that since he’s incapacitated, this is their collective chance to lose their virginity, so they take turns mounting his prostrate body as he lies there on his back. I’m not making this up.
Waters's premise is embarrassingly clear: a woman who's a "sure thing" is the only woman worth pursuing. See the scene in which Roderick bumps into an attractive woman, asks for her name, verifies that it’s not on his list, then promptly shoves her aside. See the turmoil caused when Roderick falls in love with Miranda (Leslie Bibb), whose role as "smart woman" is clear only from the fact that she's actually given lines beyond a barstool come-on. Miranda doesn’t appear on Roderick's list, which is so not fair that, after she dies, he seriously contemplates bedding her corpse. Waters should go back to protagonist school if he thinks a guy who, after careful consideration, zips up his pants and walks away from a dead body still wins our sympathy.
As if this plot weren't troubling enough, a lady–serial killer enters the mix. Played by Winona Ryder, "Death Nell" seduces men, then puts them into comas, supposedly exacting revenge on the male race for continued rape and abuse. Thanks? The fact that a murderer provides the only voice remotely resembling a woman's perspective is telling, as is the story she tells of a husband who raped her every night, which is treated lightly, almost comedically: we see Ryder in a flashback montage, hobbling and stumbling like a cartoon character, dressed in an array of fairytale gowns that her fetishistic husband forces to wear. When it comes to bringing a subject like rape into his movies, it seems that Waters has yet to learn the lesson most of us heard from our parents when we were children: "The fact that you’re not taking this seriously tells me that you’re not ready to talk about it."
This is the first time Waters has worked with Ryder since his 1989 film Heathers, a teen cult favorite which starred Ryder as an outcast disgusted with high school politics who goes on a killing spree with her boyfriend, played by Christian Slater. It’s tempting to see her role as Death Nell as a reprisal of that independent spirit of taking matters into one’s own hands, but Sex and Death 101 is a distinct, enormous step backwards. Using a killer as a symbol of strong femininity strikes me as the same sentiment as the old racist who insists he’s not intolerant because he thinks African-Americans make excellent musicians and ball players. Waters shouldn’t expect a gift basket from the feminist community: in the end, like Roderick, he saw the opportunity to get women naked, and he went to town.
