Why are mass media always obsessed with women's pain?(1/2) Spoilers

Why are mass media always obsessed with women's pain?

I know this issue may sound a bit abstract, but it is actually quite related to our daily lives. For example, concepts such as numbers, sex, violence, money, and women can all be used in headlines to increase click rates.

Of course, such phenomenon may be brought by the inherent human curiosity of peeping.

According to Freud's theory, humans have an innate desire to peep. During childhood, we may understand our own origins by peeping into our parents' privacy. This desire may gradually diminish as we grow up, but it does not necessarily disappear. When peeping into the privacy of others, some people subconsciously project their suppressed desires onto others, combined with their own imagination, to vent their desire, anger, or aggression, and obtain a sense of satisfaction.

However, the desire to voyeur can only explain part of the popular media's fascination with stories of pain, and cannot explain why it is always women who are placed in the position of being peeped at. Perhaps the characteristic of the male gaze in the mass media is the fundamental reason for the mass media’s obsession with women's suffering.

Next, I will discuss the movie "Blonde" and use it as a way to discuss the theory of film exploitation and the production of painful pornography. Ultimately, I want to answer a question I have posed myself: why is the mainstream media so obsessed with women's pain? How should we approach discussing and presenting female pain?

A woman from an unfortunate family background came to Hollywood alone. She was glamorous and beautiful, and she was chosen to become famous. However, this process was filled with sexual exploitation. Eventually, due to various reasons such as becoming outdated, a failed marriage, or drug addiction, she fell into madness and pain, and eventually perished.

Whether it's Nellie in "Babylon" or Marilyn in "Blonde", their fate is almost the same.

This type of tragic story of female celebrities is actually quite cliché. I am tired of this type of narrative and began to wonder if their stories are truly filled with a fateful sense of tragedy or if they have been exaggerated by later generations. So, I looked up some information and found some interesting things.

Firstly, both movies are plot-driven films that blur the line between reality and fiction, confusing the audience to varying degrees.

I think Babylon is okay. Although the characters have prototypes, it is obvious that they are adapted, and at least the names of the characters have been changed.

The modification in film creation lies in making the characters more tragic. For example, the female protagonist Nellie's final fate was to become outdated with the arrival of sound films, and eventually sink into drug addiction and gambling debts, dying of drug overdose in her thirties.

However, her real-life counterpart Clara Bow, the animated prototype of the Flapper Girl, did not have such a tragic ending. As a female star of the silent film era, she starred in the first Academy Award-winning film, "Wings". She also made 11 films after the arrival of sound films, some of which had good box office results. However, she realized that her Brooklyn accent was not an advantage in the sound film era, so she retired in 1933 and later got married and had a child. Although she did suffer from mental illness in her later years, she still lived for more than thirty years after retirement and died of heart disease in her sixties.

The endings of the other characters in the movie are also more tragic than reality. I can understand the adaptation of "Babylon", perhaps to create a nostalgic and sad atmosphere.

But the portrayal of Blonde is a bit too much. I always thought it was a biographical film, but it's actually an adaptation of a fictional fan fiction. Without checking the information or watching interviews with the director, you wouldn't be able to tell which parts of the plot are true, and you wouldn't notice that the movie spends a lot of time portraying Monroe's sex life, most of which are fictional fabrications.

For instance, the 3p relationship between Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin's son, two second-generation stars, is completely fictional. Monroe never had any romantic involvement with Chaplin's son, but in the movie, it was portrayed as a significant part of Monroe's life, with numerous scenes depicting the three engaging in sexual acts.

Overall, in the process of determining what is real and what is fictional, I deeply appreciate that proving something did not happen is much more difficult than proving that it did happen.

Furthermore, the mass media has a wide enthusiasm for spreading gossip about female sexuality. Sixty years after Marilyn Monroe's death, the gossip about her has inspired many conspiracy theories and even many people have made a fortune by spreading rumors about her.

However, if you say that this movie is spreading rumors about Marilyn Monroe, that's not right. Because the director has said in many interviews that this movie is a fictional adaptation. Some professional film critics also say that there is no need to criticize the authenticity of this film. It uses Marilyn Monroe's story to make a political satire, satirizing the hypocrisy of American leftists and Hollywood's sexual exploitation.

If it is mainly fictional, why not use intuitive name replacements like in "Babylon"?

Furthermore, the director clearly stated that he originally intended to make a story about a serial killer with childhood trauma, but after reading the novel "Blonde" about Marilyn Monroe, he decided to make a film about the actress instead because he felt it would evoke more sympathy. He is interested in Monroe's childhood trauma and psychological scars, hoping to make the audience feel her pain.

I interpret his photography as a way of analyzing characters from a psychoanalytic perspective, displaying the relationship between childhood traumas and destiny. However, the key point is that if the psychoanalytic material itself is false, then the analysis results of this false material should not be used as tags for real characters, which I think is misleading for the audience and irresponsible to Marilyn Monroe.

Especially, while saying that the movie is a fictional novel adaptation and not a suitable biographical film, they also make great efforts in reproducing the real image of Marilyn Monroe in terms of costumes, props, and scene effects. They even re-shot the scene of her death in her real home where she died.

This greatly confuses the boundary between reality and fiction, to the point where I was reading user reviews and saw some people saying that Marilyn Monroe was so pitiful, how terrible Hollywood is, how miserable female stars are…When I see comments like this, I feel very uneasy. Some people explain that the film is criticizing the male gaze in Hollywood by showing how Monroe was sexually exploited. In other words, using the male gaze to criticize the male gaze. If the audience feels Monroe's pain, then the director has succeeded.

But my intuition tells me that, compared to exposing the darkness, movie creators seem to have a obsession with Monroe's pain, especially her mental illness/daddy issues and the process of sexual exploitation. This obsession makes me, as a female viewer, feel instinctively uncomfortable, but it can please some male viewers.

This movie received a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival not because it was particularly well-made, but because people finally saw their sexual fantasies of Marilyn Monroe come to life on the big screen in high definition.

Not only does this movie sexualize her life, it also attempts to blur the line between fiction and reality. Continuously using the name of art and anti-exploitation, it openly displays explicit scenes such as frontal nudity, threesomes, upskirt shots, rape, and oral sex on the big screen. Apart from satisfying some viewers' voyeuristic desires, it also reveals the creator's obsession with female suffering.

This is another form of Pain Porn.

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