The Invisible Women
Leigh Wannell’s 2019 take on James Whale’s iconic 1933 horror film might be the most complex instance of corporatized feminism presented in this series. While the film does have a strong female lead (played by the inimitable Elizabeth Moss) and seems eager to flaunt its gender politics, its ideological backbone is very similar to the previous two Blumhouse productions.
Breaking the Mold
The original film, itself based on a novel by H.G. Wells, follows Dr. Jack Griffin (played by Claude Rains) as he deals with a descent into madness resulting from having turned himself invisible and not knowing how to change himself back. The film presents Griffin as a symbol of excess in that his aspirations have led to his ruin. His forced confrontation with his own intellectual abyss—i.e., his inability to figure out how to become visible—has transformed him into a monster. This theme is superfluous in this period of American horror, much like corporatized feminism is for the current era.
Griffin’s fiance, Flora (played by Gloria Stuart), is presented as a grounding force, though her characterization is hardly a model for female empowerment. Instead, her character serves two purposes. First, she is deployed as a force of nature that temporarily quells Griffin’s madness and brings him back to reality. Second, as the daughter of Griffin’s employer, she signifies one aspect of his anxiety towards domesticity and his self-made attempts to break the mold.
Griffin contends with this oscillation throughout the entire film and is eventually crushed by the fallout of his ambitions.
Technological Gaslighting
Wannell’s film takes a microscope to certain aspects of the original and sets it in modern times. Cecilia Kass (played by Elizabeth Moss) attempts to escape a violent relationship with Adrian Griffin (played by Michael Dorman). Where the original showed Griffin as a chemist, the remake shows him as an optics engineer and entrepreneur. The film shifts its focus from Griffin to Cecilia, who is another instance of a primary female character whose personality is obfuscated by a past trauma.
Rather than turning his concoctions inwards, as Griffin does in the original, Wannell’s version shifts technology in the opposite direction by utilizing a suit composed of outward-facing cameras to render himself invisible. Unlike the 1933 Griffin, the ultra-modern Griffin can become visible at will, it’s simply a matter of switching off the cameras.
This is a glacial shift from the original, as it supplants a key trope from the period in order to make room for another. Instead of falling victim to his anxiety and aspirations, Griffin 2.0 makes the rules. The patriarch is no longer a victim of society and its demands, he is the embodiment of it.
Like Laurie Strode and Riley, Cecilia spends the duration of the film trying to come to terms with her trauma. Her healing process is stunted when Griffin returns, albeit in an invisible form, and begins sabotaging her life. Since no one can see him, they think Cecilia is making things up and begin to view her as hysterical. This forces a confrontation with various state apparatuses designed to govern the human body.
Rather than a self-made monster, Griffin thus becomes the technological equivalent of patriarchal gaslighting. This association gives the film a localizable, distinctly masculine source on which to pin Cecilia’s trauma. Ideologically, the implications of his character aren’t that different from Green’s Michael Myers or Takal’s army of frat boys. All are crystalized masculine figures that meet a violent end at the hands of a traumatized woman so everyone watching can feel like they’re participating in feminist discourse.
And make no mistake, critics definitely got caught up in the hype. Tomris Laffly of RogerEbert.com praised the film as “sophisticated sci-fi horror that dares to turn a woman’s often silenced trauma from a toxic relationship into something unbearably tangible.” Reading reviews like these makes me wonder if I watched an entirely different film.
Richard Brody, writing for The New Yorker, offers a more sober take. Brody hones in on the film’s expository dialog and lack of character depth. He astutely points out that although the backstory is central to the film, Cecilia is a character fundamentally deprived of substance. This is a key component to understanding her orientation as an ideological vessel.
I would take Brody’s assertion further and say that the fundamental vapidness of the writing means the film will inevitably adhere to prevalent ideological tropes that align with the corporatist mindset. After all, there is no escaping ideology. In this case, as with 2018’s Halloween and 2019’s Black Christmas, the film renders its heroine as a signifier for trauma that can only be overcome through violence. Normalcy cannot be achieved until the masculine source of the trauma has been gruesomely murdered. How this aligns with the feminist mission of equality remains a mystery.
Conclusion
Each of the films examined in this series was the result of a different historical epoch. Paradoxically, the original films serve as progressive examples of human intersection. The original Griffin is a victim of his own hubris, the sorority house in Clark’s Black Christmas is filled with multidimensional characters, and Carpenter’s Laurie Strode has aspirations beyond escaping trauma. Clever screenwriting aside, these characterizations point towards broader societal concerns that aren’t merely distilled into a reactionary us vs. them mentality.
Conversely, each of Blumhouse’s remakes aspire to be a piece of #metoo fanfare—perhaps in a cynical attempt to piggyback off of public sentiment—but end up espousing a much more toxic, regressive ideology that does nothing to advance the feminist mission of equality. If anything, this ideological structure harkens back to the earliest days of narrative, where capitalist hegemony reigned supreme and the villain in a film had to be appropriately dispatched for the film to achieve dramatic and ideological resolution. There is nothing progressive or sophisticated about this approach and it has been done time and time again to supplant the interests of the rich and powerful onto paying customers.
This brings us to the reasons why. Why would corporations waste time distilling this kind of logic into popular media? Why are they merely reappropriating a tired ideological gesture, albeit with the roles reversed? In his 2020 book, Heaven in Disorder, Slavoj Žižek describes the manner in which meaningful social change is obfuscated in ways that obscure the driving factors behind exploitation and perpetuate distracted bickering amongst the lower classes.
For Žižek, the powers that be are hellbent on engineering relatability so they can sidestep any meaningful change to the underlying structure of things. He provides the example of the transition from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, pointing out that both share underlying commonalities but differ in terms of relatability. Despite this, the end goal is the same.
Does a similar orientation not also apply to the topic at hand? By churning out these faux feminist narratives, the cultural tastemakers can essentially have their cake and eat it too. Their false populism enables them to piggyback on the post-Weinstein backlash without actually accomplishing any meaningful structural change, which could adversely affect their bottom line.
Wage discrimination continues, rampant misogyny runs unabated, diversity remains little more than a box-to-be-checked, but people are ultimately docile about the topography of the modern corporate structure because they are encouraged to feel like meaningful change is occurring. Anyone who points this out can be ostracized and criticized as a misogynist or chauvinist, which can effectively negate their argument in the current public arena.