Demy's an interesting filmmaker. Speaking with a friend about it afterwards, I realized that he may have intended to make fun of certain things. There's a funny song about slenderizing the fingers to fit the rings, and how each girl hurts herself trying to make her finger the perfect fit. Not unlike the women who no doubt binded their feet to fit Cinderella's slipper. Emily Praeger wrote a short story once about this practice called A Visit to The Footbinder's, which discusses the practice.
Genital Mutilation is somewhat different and less about beauty than control - although one could state that the way the beauty myth is pushed, maybe it is no different. I'd say it was just men doing this - but in the discussion after the movie, the analyst who said it was a decidedly female traite to look in the mirror and dress up and that women need to look pretty - was a woman. And it is interesting to note in the fairy tale itself it is women who make the proclamation regarding beauty: the wife tells the husband that he can only marry a woman more beautiful than she is. No, not only tells, demands it. The story is said to be one that was told by women to their children, not by men. Also in Africa, when Westerners attempted to interfer with the genitial mutialation, women, not men, stepped forward and angerily told them to back off. (There was some controversary around the time Alice Walker published her book on the practice.)
Regarding the incest - it is the lilac fairy who tells the daughter she is wrong to want the father and it is the lilac fairy's competition, the dead queen, who set up the father to want the daughter.
The analystes discussed your point about whether the filmmaker is pushing the Fruedian message and came up with an interesting counter-point: Throughout the film the daughter is shown fleeing her father's request. When she realizes it is sexual in nature, she flees to her godmother. And tells her father it is wrong, causing him to flee to a Wizard - who is the person that tells us that his daughter is repressing her feelings, "all daughters want to marry their fathers and all father's want to marry their daughters, in fact if I had one, I'd marry her." Does his words exculpate the father or both? The lilac fairy is the one who tells the daughter that she must leave, must wear the skin. Again it is the woman in the story who says it is wrong, not the man.
Very odd film. What's most odd about it is the feeling that the beauty myth and the horror of incest is not something being propagated by the men so much as the women?
no subject
Genital Mutilation is somewhat different and less about beauty than control - although one could state that the way the beauty myth is pushed, maybe it is no different. I'd say it was just men doing this - but in the discussion after the movie, the analyst who said it was a decidedly female traite to look in the mirror and dress up and that women need to look pretty - was a woman. And it is interesting to note in the fairy tale itself it is women who make the proclamation regarding beauty: the wife tells the husband that he can only marry a woman more beautiful than she is. No, not only tells, demands it. The story is said to be one that was told by women to their children, not by men. Also in Africa, when Westerners attempted to interfer with the genitial mutialation, women, not men, stepped forward and angerily told them to back off. (There was some controversary around the time Alice Walker published her book on the practice.)
Regarding the incest - it is the lilac fairy who tells the daughter she is wrong to want the father and it is the lilac fairy's competition, the dead queen, who set up the father to want the daughter.
The analystes discussed your point about whether the filmmaker is pushing the Fruedian message and came up with an interesting counter-point: Throughout the film the daughter is shown fleeing her father's request. When she realizes it is sexual in nature, she flees to her godmother. And tells her father it is wrong, causing him to flee to a Wizard - who is the person that tells us that his daughter is repressing her feelings, "all daughters want to marry their fathers and all father's want to marry their daughters, in fact if I had one, I'd marry her." Does his words exculpate the father or both? The lilac fairy is the one who tells the daughter that she must leave, must wear the skin. Again it is the woman in the story who says it is wrong, not the man.
Very odd film. What's most odd about it is the feeling that the beauty myth and the horror of incest is not something being propagated by the men so much as the women?