io9 has a great interview with Brit Marling, the writer and star of low-budget sci-fi movie Sound of My Voice, which, as I told y’all on Friday, I liked very much. I wanted to pull out part of the interview where she talks about how frustrating it is to come up against the same obstacles and challenges for female characters—particularly the tendency to use sexual assault as a default major obstacle for a dramatic heroine:

When Zal and I write [the two wrote Sound of My Voice together] sometimes you find yourself in a passive position. And you have stop yourself: “I set out to write a story about a strong woman acting with agency. And now here I am having her be sexually assaulted by somebody so she can achieve something else.” You have to tell yourself to stop.

And you realize that so much of this stuff is the same narrative being recycled over and over again, because a lot of it is happening unconsciously. We consume, we watch, we take it in, we create, it’s this negative feedback cycle. When I see things like Bridesmaids I get really excited. That film was really subversive and widely consumed and entertaining, but also saying really interesting things on female friendships and weddings. It was making fun of it all, that was refreshing, I hope we see more of that…

As an actor, that’s why I started writing. I came out to LA and I would read these things, you are hard pressed to find a script where the girl is not sexually assaulted or raped or manipulated or a sex toy — an object of affection. It’s always about the way men are looking at her. And cinema, traditionally has been about how men are looking at women. I do think we’re breaking that up now with more female directors, I think we’re starting to see the female gaze.

I think this is right. I should say that I have no problem with works that deal with women getting raped that are explicitly about examining the consequences of sexism. One of the reasons that the arc of Sons of Anarchy where Gemma is raped is so powerful is that it’s about the way she and everyone else around her deal with their internalized sexism: the men who rape her think she is a weak spot for the motorcycle gang she’s affiliated with, Gemma thinks her husband will put her off because men need to “own their pussy,” and her husband seduces her back to disprove that assumption. Similarly, as I argue in this book chapter I have coming out about A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, I really believe a lot of that series is about tying together sexual assault and monstrosity.

But rape doesn’t only happen to women, and it’s not the only thing that happens to women. You can lose your job, your house, your car, your kid, your best friend, your business, your family, your faith, your following, your office. If men are reaching for the worst thing that can happen to women and choosing rape out of a deficit of imagination, then that’s having a character be sexually assaulted for shock value. If you want to tell a story that’s about the worst thing that happened to a specific woman character, you should be thinking very specifically about her and less about your and the audience’s default answer to a question.

As Hollywood’s tackled the recession, it focused first on Ponzi schemers in the mode of Bernie Madoff, villains whose schemes were easy to explain, and whose evil didn’t require a thorough examination of the financial system. Slowly but surely, though, we’re seeing financial crisis movies that are structured like mysteries or heist films, where the action — and heroism — are to be found in understanding precisely what financiers got away with behind our backs and the full extent of the damage they’ve caused us. Half of Arbitrage, the financial thriller that premiered here at Sundance, is that kind of movie.

Arbitrage stars Richard Gere as Robert Miller, a hedge fund titan who is on the verge of selling his firm at a very high price determined by the success of his predictive model. It should be a windfall for his family, including his wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon), a dedicated philanthropist, and his daughter and Chief Investment Officer Brooke (a very good Brit Marling), who would prefer to hang on to the firm given its growth. But it quickly becomes clear that Robert is selling a company that was decimated by a bad bet he made on Russian copper, a giant hole that’s been papered over with a loan from a friend so Robert can pass an audit and offload the company at a price that will let him pay back the debt and make his investors whole.

That ought to be enough for one movie, as it was in J.C. Chandor’s justifiably Oscar-nominated Margin Call. But Arbitrage throws another factor into this deal-making stew, giving Robert a French gallerist as a mistress — and having him kill her when he falls asleep at the wheel as they head out for a lost weekend. Robert flees the scene with the help of Jimmy (Nate Parker, who is having one hell of a beginning of 2012 between this, Red Hook Summer, and Red Tails), the son of his late driver, who comes under the eye of angry working-class detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth).

The question becomes, then, whether Robert can play the information imbalance — his knowledge about the truth about the state of his fund and his mistress’s death — to his own advantage, or whether Det. Byer and Brooke’s investigations will move fast enough for them to expose him before the deal with an irritatingly elusive mogul (played, in one fun scene, by Graydon Carter, who director Nicholas Jarecki credits with commissioning the financial journalism that inspired the movie) closes. Jarecki makes the mistake, however, of thinking that the murder investigation is more interesting than the financial one. Roth is always fun, and gives Bryer a nice insolence in the face of authority, and there’s some appeal in listening to him rant about how men like Miller “outmanuver us, they outbuy us. I’m fucking sick of it. He did it! He doesn’t get to walk just because he’s on CNBC.”
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