The publicity copy for the documentary boasts the inclusion of 175 clips, which in itself is a clue as to the shallowness of Menkes’ insight (after all, the film runs just a little over 100 minutes). If you’ve seen even a handful of movies from recent years, it will not take you long to realize that context has no place here. The inclusion of Vicky Krieps modeling a dress in Phantom Thread as Daniel Day-Lewis looks on omits that it’s essentially a story of her tipping their unequal balance of power in her favor. We’re shown J.Lo pole dancing in Hustlers with no mention that the whole movie is about a group of strippers actively using the male gaze against leering men. We see Agathe Rousselle grinding scantily clad on a car at the beginning of Titane with no reference at all to… well, the various ways in which she spends the rest of the duration very much as predator, not as prey. Because Menkes has excised context so thoroughly, there’s no room for any nuance: Women are treated as a homogeneous mass of delicate flowers who wither away under even the briefest glance from a man.
Using these excerpts in such a shallow, wrongheaded manner takes agency from the female characters who actually possess it. It enforces victimhood on women who are anything but victims. And undergirding much of Menkes’ argument is her apparent opinion that a woman being looked at is a woman being inherently degraded, with clips of powerful women clearly enjoying controlling the gaze of men indiscriminately interspersed with clips that drip solely with male lechery.
That a significant portion of this specious list of wrongdoers are female directors’ feminist films is even more galling. Of course, being a woman director doesn’t prevent you from falling prey to the male gaze in your own work, but Menkes’ frequent use of decontextualized clips to unfairly condemn women who’ve had to battle a patriarchal system to get their female-driven stories made is quite infuriating. Moreover, the frequent poor choice of illustrative excerpts devalues those rare sequences where Menkes does consistently choose appropriate examples to make a worthwhile point, as in the section which looks at movies that present sexual encounters where an ardent “No!” becomes an enthusiastic “Yes!”—and how damaging a message that sends about consent.
You might well be wondering: What does doing it right look like? Who does Nina Menkes think is doing the best job at standing tall against the male gaze? According to Brainwashed, the answer seems to be…Nina Menkes. Throughout the documentary, she uses clips from her own films to illustrate how she thinks things should be done; while there are other female directors lucky enough to get on her good list—Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda both get a well-deserved two thumbs up—Menkes’ own work is by far the most commonly featured in a positive light. Considering that the bulk of the features included are mainstream movies, and Menkes’ oeuvre sits squarely in the art film bracket, this is a somewhat misleading “apples and oranges” choice. More than that though, the sheer self-aggrandizement of Menkes positioning herself so glowingly becomes almost comical as Brainwashed progresses—no prizes for guessing who directed the clip that serves as the documentary’s grand, forward-looking conclusion…
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