Spoiler alert: don't read this if you don't want to know what happens in the film.
Ron Howard's "The Dilemma," with Vince Vaughn and Kevin James, can't make up its mind if it's a drama or a comedy, and it ends up feeling like failed attempts at both. Although Vince Vaughn does have a quintessential Vaughn moment -- his absurd toast at an anniversary party -- all in all, if you have a choice, see "True Grit" instead.
The reason we are mentioning "The Dilemma" on this site is that the dilemma in the title largely stems from the threat of a false claim of a sexual nature.
Ronnie (Vaughn) sees the wife of his best friend and business partner, Nick (James), kissing and carrying on in public with a much younger guy who looks like a model. Ronnie is faced with a dilemma: to tell Nick or not to tell him. Ronnie decides he has to tell, but first he goes to Nick's unfaithful wife, Geneva (Winona Ryder), to give her the chance to tell Nick so he won't have to.
Geneva spoils Ronnie's plan, and creates the "Dilemma," because she threatens not only to deny any accusation that she's having an affair, but to tell Nick that it was Ronnie who's been coming onto her for the past 20 years or so, even becoming physical of late. Her claim will have the ring of plausibility, she suggests, because she plans to tell Nick something true that Ronnie has never told him: she and Ronnie had drunken sex once in college before she ever met Nick. Geneva then gives Ronnie a demonstration of how she will lie, in a tearful, and completely believable outpouring of grief. Then she turns off the tears the way normal people shut off a spigot, and smugly asks Ronnie who Nick will believe. Nick, and the audience, know full well that Nick will believe Geneva's lie.
The scene made me uncomfortable, and I had a flashback to the MSNBC report about the woman who falsely accused a police officer of rape after he pulled her over for a traffic stop. If the traffic stop had not been videotaped, I suspect most people would assume the woman's subsequent tearful rape allegation was 100% accurate. My flashback was all the more chilling because it dawned on me that the woman in the MSNBC story was not an "A" list actress like Winona Ryder, yet her tale would have destroyed the life of an innocent man.
It underscored for me the power that women hold over men when it comes to sex lies. Men are fortunate that relatively few women choose to exercise that power. But the real power isn't in actually telling sex lies, it is in having the ability to do so, if "necessary." I suspect that most men, deep down, are aware of that power, and temper their behavior accordingly.
If you want to see another film still in theaters with disguised misandry, check out Mark Wahlber's "The Fighter," where a woman violently hurls dishes and pots at her defenseless husband, and, of course, he doesn't, because he can't, defend himself. It is played for comedic effect.
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9 comments:
Misandry runs through the movies, and Hollywood's great trick is disguising it.
BS of ALL types wanders through most mainstream media, literature, so I don't think that's much of a revelation.
A movie, though, about a false claim exposed might be an interesting change.
Has there been one, whether for theater release or made-for-tv that someone here knows about?
Good post. It shows how widespread the problem is.
I saw it, and the crying bit disgusted me. I don't think I would have been disgusted if I was not familiar with your blog.
Films are actually an ideal avenue for exposing some of these issues to a wider audience. Because script writers and producers constantly need to come up with new ideas that will keep the public interested, they inevitably have little choice but to start exploring themes that are un-PC and unpalatable.
After all, there are only so many films that can be made about poor, victimized women eventually taking control of their lives and exacting justice, before the theme is done to death.
Another good film along these lines was released in about 2003. I forget its name. It was about an academic (Kevin Spacey) who is a prominent campaigner against capital punishment. He is eventually executed for a murder he did not commit, but deliberately suppressed the evidence that proves his innocence until after his execution. That way, he chooses to be a martyr for the cause, by offering irrefutable evidence that innocent people can be executed. Anyways, in that same movie Spacey is also falsely accused of rape by one of his students. He is never convicted, as the student decides to run away before giving evidence, thereby making it look as though she is too scared to even testify. But the stigma of guilt remains over the rape, and this contributes to public hostility towards him when he is on death row.
Hello, my name is Daniel MartÃnez. I have a Men's Rights Activism Blog in spanish and I would like to translate this article and to publish it in spanish.
Please give me your permission.
I will be waiting for your reply.
Anonymous said...
Misandry runs through the movies, and Hollywood's great trick is disguising it.
Jan 16, 2011 4:07:00 PM
The same holds true for the main stream media law enforcement, the courts and, politics.
Daniel, you have our permission to translate anything that appears here.
Thanks, and do a good job!
It didn't seem to me that the actions of Mrs. Ward in The Fighter were meant to be comedic. They were just another demonstration of how thoroughly self centered and self obsessed the character was. Easily the least sympathetic in the entire film, save for perhaps Micky Ward's ex-wife.
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