I chanced upon The Wife, Colette and Big Eyes in a serendipitous sequence and all films are about the complicated reasons women allow their life and work to be appropriated by men. And also because societal constructs do not easily grant them their autonomy as creative, complex beings.
The Wife is directed by Bjõrn L. Runge, written by Jane Anderson, and is based on the novel of the same name by Meg Wolitzer. It is about a man so obsessed with the validation that fame brings that he forgets to earn greatness or even the respect of the wife who creates the body of work that wins him a Nobel.
Among his many rewards are affairs with starstruck women, legions of adoring readers, critics and admirers. There are only stray moments when he is aware of his utter hollowness as when he panics while rehearsing his walk to the stage to receive the highest honour of his career.
But largely , he believes so ardently in the illusion of his genius that he dismisses even the writing ambition of his son and treats his wife in public as if she was nothing more than the shadowy love of his life who is singularly devoid of ambition. A self-effacing woman whose only job is to build a universe with just enough silence and enough noise to facilitate his genius.
At the root of why the more gifted wife allows him to take credit for her work, lies her inability to deal with the gendered nature of publishing politics that dismisses women more easily than men.
She cannot stop writing and in her weak-spirited husband she finds the perfect conduit to take her stories to the world without the heartbreak of the female author who once told her how in the end everything boils down to just this, “a writer must be read.” And women seldom were then.
But the cost of keeping up the charade is high. The ghostwriter continues to play the exhausted wife right till the end and barring a spectacular breakdown, does everything she can to protect her husband from not just his own failures as a human-being but the scrutiny of the world.
The protagonist played with restraint and insight by Glenn Close reminded me of so many women I have met who continue to put up with limitless, unearned pain just so they can shield utterly undeserving men from themselves. Women who make excuses for their abusers. And continue to enable toxic partners who belittle and dehumanise them and try to stamp out any sign of individuality, light, brilliance, autonomy. And Jonathan Pryce is everyman who covers his own inadequacies by denuding his partner of her strengths and by shaming her for enjoying the financial security he provides her with.
Colette is a similar story but with a more satisfying end. It is a biographical narrative directed by Wash Westmoreland and is based upon the life of the French novelist, actress, and journalist Colette.
Keira Knightley plays the titular role of a woman who in her eagerness to tell her stories and to prop up the sagging career of her husband Henry Gauthier-Villars , lets her first four novels be published under his name. Dominic West is the emotionally exploitative , occasionally aggressive and fundamentally pusillanimous man who knows , he owes his fame to his wife but behaves like a circus ringmaster in order to keep orchestrating more gasps from an ever growing audience. Even locking her in a room until she has produced enough pages for the next book and the next.
Colette finally wakes up to the full extent of his betrayal but the point the film makes is this. It is hard for women to stand in their own power and to claim it fully. If they do it, they are demonised, undermined , humiliated. And so many women never acknowledge the wrongs they have suffered because they cannot visualise any other way of being. They believe this is the way the world functions and the only way they can function in it is by conforming, playing small, compromising, erasing themselves into hidden figures who must never claim too much space and always make way for the bullies.
That so many women continue to buy into subservient roles in the story of their own lives till date says something about the pervasive nature of patriarchy.
The theme continues in Big Eyes, a 2014 biographical Tim Burton film starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. It is based on the life of American artist Margaret Keane whose melancholic portraits marked by big, haunting eyes are now part of American pop culture via thousands of reproductions and collectibles . Though dismissed by critics, she has bridged the gap between what is known as high art and accessible, relatable art .
Emotionally manipulated by her abusive husband Walter Keane, Margaret continues to deliver on demand and to build his iconography till she cannot anymore.
All films fundamentally ask the same question. What if women were not carrying the burden of the world, feeling accountable for everyone and everything, putting themselves last, undermining their own talents to remain as unthreatening as possible? What if they allowed themselves to be the women they were born to be? Without apologies, excuses, fear, guilt and suppressed rage? What if they were not afraid to take credit and not so eager to give it away? We would then hear their stories in their voices. And see masterpieces signed by them. And a society that would have to make space for them, first grudgingly maybe, but then as a matter of course because women would refuse to settle for less. They would not just be king makers then. Or facilitators. But would remake the world in their own likeness. And say, “That was mine. I did it.”
Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.