Feminism vs. Feminine Mystery in Film: ‘The Bride!’ and ‘Little Trouble Girls’

Take the rage of modern feminism, the scourge of pornography, and add classic Hollywood movie musical and horror elements, overlap with an insane storyline, sew them all together, give the resulting monster a jolt of pointless modern violence, and you’ve got the new movie The Bride! It is, quite possibly, the worst film I’ve ever seen.

Here’s the plot—and no, this is not a joke. The Bride! is set in 1930s Chicago. Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), or “Frank,” is living in the Windy City. Suffering from loneliness, he visits Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a surgeon who specializes in reanimating the dead. Frank is matched with a recently murdered woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley). Ida, it turns out, was murdered shortly after she was possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelly, the original author of the novel Frankenstein. The resuscitated couple go on a Bonnie and Clyde-style road trip, committing crimes that attract the attention of Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penelope Cruz). The couple gets caught, shot down—and then reanimated …  again. The Bride! is the kind of film where you sit in the theater, incredulous both about what you are watching and the fact that you are bothering to watch it.

The film is directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who, through this film, may be signaling that she needs professional help. The point of the movie, as far as I can tell, is that patriarchal society abuses women, kills them, and drives them mad. The only way to cope is to become a kind of punk rock mercenary (Buckley’s makeup and electroshock blonde hair is pure 1980s LA). The only acceptable male companion is an obedient monster who, like you, is an outsider—or “a non-compliant,” as Dr. Euphonious puts it. Gyllenhaal is a Hollywood A-Lister, so she was able to attract the best actors for her movie. Jessie Buckley switches between Ida, who has a Yonkers accent, to Mary Shelley, who was British, to the Bride, who falls somewhere in between. Buckley gives the performance her all. It’s just sad that her dynamic energy wasn’t put to use for something that makes sense. Ditto for Christian Bale.

There is something deeply disturbing at the heart of The Bride!, but it has nothing to do with the so-called patriarchy. It is more about the corrosive effects of our porn culture.