@Jacinto Cupboard said:

Sad that women are still fair game for these sorts of depictions. The lesser of two evils it seems.

And yet you said you wished they'd done it with a young man.

@CountJohn said:

@Jacinto Cupboard said:

Sad that women are still fair game for these sorts of depictions. The lesser of two evils it seems.

And yet you said you wished they'd done it with a young man.

I am saying that aspects of the story don't make much sense if the character in question is female. Depicting women as orbiting men is low hanging fruit and intellectually lazy unless there is some kind of critical commentary or over arching justification.

Some critics go further. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/why-phantom-thread-is-propaganda-for-toxic-masculinity

Some viewers think that Alma's character repsresents the rise of women's influence in the post-world war two period of the 50's going into the 60's... A precursor to the womens movements and sexual revolution... That she starts off as submissive, but increasingly asserts herself, in their relationship, in the workplace and sexually...

Paul Thomas Anderson has used political/social allegory in his other films, e.g. There Will Be Blood as a metaphor for the competition and collusion between riligion and capitalism in the creation of America...

If it were two dudes in Phantom Thread, then the allogory and metaphor wouldn't work as it does. It would change the meaning of the movie significantly... It would be abput something else entirely.

@Renovatio said:

Some viewers think that Alma's character repsresents the rise of women's influence in the post-world war two period of the 50's going into the 60's... A precursor to the womens movements and sexual revolution... That she starts off as submissive, but increasingly asserts herself, in their relationship, in the workplace and sexually...

Paul Thomas Anderson has used political/social allegory in his other films, e.g. There Will Be Blood as a metaphor for the competition and collusion between riligion and capitalism in the creation of America...

If it were two dudes in Phantom Thread, then the allogory and metaphor wouldn't work as it does. It would change the meaning of the movie significantly... It would be abput something else entirely.

The idea that this movie depicts the transition of female 'influence' towards empowerment, is, to my mind, outrageous. This is a character that has NO existence whatever outside of Woodcock. Being some kind of enabler, no one seems really sure what to call this, isn't progress of any kind.

The idea that this movie 'works' is also out of left field. By what criteria? It was a box office failure, and outside of accolades to DDL and praise for the costumes, the latter hardly an intellectual approval, there seems to be no critical consensus as to what this movie even means, let alone if it was successful at some allegorical level. And, as I noted earlier, there is an emerging critical response to the movie. I have no doubt that when the thrall of DDL's performance has left people and a more settled perspective has arrived, this derivative, sexist and meandering mess will be seen for what it is.

And I still stand by my original assertion. This is a story that probably started out as being about gay men, and someone lost their nerve and took the easy option.

@Jacinto Cupboard I said "some viewers" see it that way, which I think is as valid as your view of it as originally being intended as as story about gay men, especially since there is no consensus...

Personally, I think it's a story about accepting to love someone they way they need to be loved (the mirrored S&M/patriarchal nature of their relationship, sexually/professionally respectively)... As well as a story about the process of artistic creation, what it involves anf the toll it takes on the artist...

I think this is a film where a portrayal is not, necessarily, an endorsement. The critical community tends not to appreciate this whenever they have a consensus (they often confuse the two, e.g, Starship Troopers)... And the critical consensus also tends to be literalist and to miss a lot of nuance and metaphor in movies. They're better at locating these themes when there is less of a consensus.

I think your view is interesting, even though I don't share it. It isn't unprecedented, as Sicario is a movie where some think it was meant to have a male protagonist in the Emily Blunt role... Having Emily Blunt makes the movie a portrayal of misogyny (to some extent), whereas having a man in that role would make it a betrayal of young men, by older, more powerful men, which would be a potentially more interesting and less conventional route to take. It's still an excellent movie, but makes one wonder about the alternative casting...

Some of the problems with this movie arise out of things that are omitted or simply assumed. There is a point where these editorial decisions or oversights tell us less about the characters in the story than they tell us about the author. The unexplained, and to my mind improbable, attraction of a woman in her 20s to an elderly man for example. Some people have argued to normalise this, but the more obvious conclusion is that this panders to a male fantasy. And in particular a male power fantasy. Real life rarely works like that. And is it an accident that Alma's occupation when we first meet her is waitress? Isn't this the very epitome of Hollywood's idea of what people do before they truly arrive? (One Hollywood bigwig reportedly called for service at restaurants by shouting out Actor!)

So while I agree that a portrayal isn't the same as an endorsement, sometimes things which are absent or go unexplained or unremarked point to a lack of understanding, empathy or awareness in the author themselves.

I don't believe this movie has anything to do with love. Obsession and dysfunction, sure. The movie focuses on pathology. My point in all this is that a movie depicting a gay relationship as pathological would have been instantly decried as perpetuating a negative stereotype, however well intentioned the movie meant to be. Make the inferior character a woman and it becomes a love story? Where is PTA's head, and the hearts of those who applaud this movie, that this can pass without critical commentary?

Nor does it have much to do with 'artistic creation' either. The fashions serve as a backdrop, but we see no genuine creative processes on screen or even discussed except in the most passing, glib way. The story would have been the same had it been set in an auto workshop. That it is set in a fashion house ought to point to something, but doesn't, which is where I came in with this thread.

As an aside regarding Starship Troopers, the problem there arises out of the movie being satire but the the source material being anything but.

I know women in their 20s who have dated and slept with men in their 50s... in the past decade, i.e. the 2000s, not in the 1950s. Social status, daddy issues, the mentor/teacher dynamic, convenience, modern loneliness and promescuity, etc... Make this a possibility. Is it "normal", "common" or ideal? No. does it happen? Yes. Is it kinda sad? A bit... We can have movies about rare interpersonal dynamics...

The power relationship between Alma and "Wood-Cock" is key to their relationship... Both in their economic sense, where she is dependant on him as a child would be (her daddy) and in the private sense, she is the mother he lost who takes care of and nurses him...

Is he closted and simply using Alma and maternal care as a surrogate for sexual fulfillment? Maybe... He is a dressmaker after all (although that is a retrograde view, isn't it?)...

Is Alma an innocent victim, trapped in sexual slavery to a powerful man, or is she a self-actor, who is using her sexuality and her ability to fulfill Reynolds in order to get what she wants? The movie clearly portrays her as the latter, the sentimental narrative you say some critics read in this suggests the former...

Or maybe they are a couple in a modern world, trying to connect, to find a way to satisfy their deep, unfulfilled needs in an unconventional way...

I don't think viewing the movie purely through a Weinstein, or gender lens does it justice. We should be able to engagge with the film on it's level as well and see Alma & Reynolds as human characters and not just archytypes...

As an aside, a more recent version of the Starship Troopers dynamic is the underrated satire, Gamer (2009)... Critics saw it as a celebration of gamer aesthetic as spectacle and completly missed it's Cassandra-esque warning about the dangers of the dominance of gamer culture, social media and technologically intermediated living and it's insightful deconstrcution of the political economy of the same... Gamers themselves saw it as a personal affront to their identity (it has an iconic portrayal of a grotesque morbidly obese man, hurling food at his screen in full gamer rage), but they didn't recognise the humanist message of the movie, that there is something sacred in what is real, in relating to one another as human beings... Check the reviews, hardly any of them "get it".... It would be an instructive double feature to contrast with Ready Player One...

We can have movies 'about rare interpersonal dynamics' but what we can't do is extrapolate from the specific to the general, and in so doing make a movie that says something representative of the development of women's roles in the 1950s. The specificity, the peculiarity of it, prevents such a generalisation, at least without some other qualifying material.

You ask a series of questions about whether Alma 'gets what she wants'. You have decided the movie 'clearly' suggests that she does. But the fact is we know nothing about Alma. Do we even know what she wants? She exists ONLY as a vehicle for Woodcock to act out his pathology. Are we to believe that Alma, while waiting tables, secretly dreams of such a future? It is simply incredible. As the story is framed, Alma realises (I truly do not know the proper word here) her future only by an acceptance of the perverse reality of Woodcock. It is almost as tho Woodcock has conjured her out of air. Subconsciously or otherwise, PTA has created a female character who is mere vessel. On the face of it, it is misogyny, and nothing I have seen or heard in the movie, or in commentary about it, leads me to believe there is a deliberate 'other level' at which we might step outside of the story and examine it in the light of dramatic irony.

My criticism isn't that the movie depicts a misogynistic viewpoint, or even that it fails to introduce any kind of redemptive arc or elements critical of human failing. My criticism is that the failure to give Alma a life says something by that very omission; and that it says something not about Alma or about women or about England in the 1950s, but about PTA. That doesn't mean I am buying into Identitarian politics. It means I care about well crafted storytelling with convincing characters.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, had the two principal characters been written as both male, or both female for that matter, my objections largely disappear, mostly because a same sex relationship in the early 1950s is, by definition, transgressive to begin with.

Alma didn't plan to find and seduce Woodcock, but she did seize the opportunity, to be someone's muse, companion, partner and lover...

I thought she was very much his match by the end of the movie and very much had a mind and agency of her own. Consider the dinner scene where they have an arguement about what she wants from him and from their relationship...

It seems you have more of an issue with her choices to stay with Reynolds and encourage his fantacies than you do with whether or not it works dramatically...

This is basically a high brow 50 shades of grey, is it not? Neither are particularly transgressive, but both work... One as a fantasy of older perverted men, the other of older perverted women... 😉

Yet in either instance you will have people who find that the story resonates in a deeper level, that it is more meaningful... Just as I know women, successfull, attractive women in their 30s who feel strongly about 50 Shades and identify with the central characters and see truth in their dynamic, there are people who see more in Phantom Thread then you do.

50 Shades of Gray would be truer if it were about an older woman trying to rediscover her sexuality than as it is, but it doesn't mean that the story as it is, with a young virginal central character, cannot be generalised and has not resonated with hundreds of million of women around the world...

I fear we're going around in circles, but I do understand your point and do think it has some validity, even though I view the movie differently.

@Jacinto Cupboard said:

Apart from the absence of a coherent story, I was perturbed by things that didn't make sense about the Alma character; not the least why a young woman would be instantly attracted to an elderly, unmarried dressmaker.

What? A young woman being attracted to an older handsome rich man with a big house and his own dress making business? All jokes aside, she was a poor waitress and by getting him elevated her lifestyle 1000%.

The plot, as it were, is that all the attributes that made her attracted to him are all the attributes she grows to hate as it prevents him form showing her the love an affection she desires. This is a man who is obsessed with his work, his art, and puts that first above all else. Women are very much attracted to men like this.

But then she wants him to change and put her before his work/routine, and that's where the conflict of the story is. She's trying to get him to change, as a sign that he loves her more than his work, but he won't change. She even goes so far as to poison him just to break him from his routine. And, crazily enough, this works, to the point where she poisons him a second time with his full knowledge.

That said I didn't like the movie either, though it is very well shot.

Sad that women are still fair game for these sorts of depictions. The lesser of two evils it seems.

I don't think you understand most women. Thanks to Disney movies the idea of a poor woman being swept off her feet by a dashing handsome rich dude is the fantasy of a lot of women.

@Ask Me Anything

I think you contradict yourself. First you say 'Women are very much attracted to men like this.' and then you say 'Thanks to Disney movies the idea of a poor woman being swept off her feet by a dashing handsome rich dude is the fantasy of a lot of women.'

You seem unaware that you have accepted that it is a literary and dramatic contrivance. (The character btw is neither particularly rich nor handsome nor dashing. He is in many respects: repellant.) I think also the fantasy you reference is a male fantasy, not a female one.

Ftr, I would never have the balls the claim to know what 'a lot of women' are attracted to. But it isn't even the issue. The issue is that when storytelling a writer must provide plausible motivations for key characters. Your guesses about what women really want is neither here nor there. Nothing in my life experience is able to fill that gap, and since 99.99999% of all humans have zip experience of a relationship anything like the one depicted neither can most anyone else.

@Jacinto Cupboard said:

I think you contradict yourself. First you say 'Women are very much attracted to men like this.' and then you say 'Thanks to Disney movies the idea of a poor woman being swept off her feet by a dashing handsome rich dude is the fantasy of a lot of women.'

You seem unaware that you have accepted that it is a literary and dramatic contrivance. (The character btw is neither particularly rich nor handsome nor dashing. He is in many respects: repellant.) I think also the fantasy you reference is a male fantasy, not a female one.

You're telling me women don't find Daniel Day Lewis to be attractive? I recently watched The Unbearable Lightness of Being and he basically plays a handsome ladies who sleeps with lots of women. In this film he's older, but when he meets Alma for the first time he still has his looks and is well dressed and drives a nice car. He smoothly asked her to dinner and she says yes. That doesn't happen if he's ugly and poorly dressed.

Now, later on he does turn out to be a prick, he's already brought her into his world at that point (his castle, so to speak) and she is not interesting in going back to being just a waitress again.

Ftr, I would never have the balls the claim to know what 'a lot of women' are attracted to.

I do have the balls, haha.

But it isn't even the issue. The issue is that when storytelling a writer must provide plausible motivations for key characters. Your guesses about what women really want is neither here nor there.

You're wrong. I already pointed out, the reason why she's interested in him and puts up with his dickishness is because he's a rich handsome older man with a nice house and a business that he is obessively invested in. She wants him to love her more than that. That is pretty much her entire motivation throughout the film, and by the end she succeeds. If instead things were easier and he changed without her having to go to such extreme measures she'd have lost interest and left him a long time ago.

This is essentially why women get into and stay in abusive relationships, because they are turned on by/attracted to the intense feelings that come with such a relationship, but deep down they are hoping he will change for her.

DDL was 31 for TUBLOB and 60 for PT. If you think attractive women in the early 20s are attracted to men in their 60s you probably have a surprise waiting for you when you get to that age (as I am). And don't confuse DDL, who is attractive for a host of reasons related to international celebrity, with the much, much, smaller character in the movie itself.

The attraction, and the relationship itself, is irrational. I think it's meant to be that way and you fan fictioning in a rationality is of no use to anyone else. I am satisfied that the writer wanted the thing to remain an enigma. Personally, I find dramatic puzzles that exist only to confound expectation, to be pretentious and lacking honesty. Clearly this sort of thing amuses a certain class of dilettante. I think art should reflect reality. And in the hands of a good writer a thing can be strange and complicated and still real. And this story isn't.

@Jacinto Cupboard said:

DDL was 31 for TUBLOB and 60 for PT. If you think attractive women in the early 20s are attracted to men in their 60s you probably have a surprise waiting for you when you get to that age (as I am).

Hugh Hefner had a dozen girlfriends that age for years through to his death at 91. I'm not saying every woman in their 20s is attracted to any man in their 60s, or that any man in their 60s can pick up a woman in her 20s, but accomplished older men with money and status most certainly can pick up women in their 20s.

And, again, the woman in this movie, though attractive, wasn't exactly a knockout. She was a very average woman working as a waitress, and this older man in his 60s lifted her up out of that mundane life and into life where she's wearing fancy dresses and going to parties and meeting new people. DDL is essentially the dress making equivalent of Leonardo DiCaprio in this movie. It's not that big of a stretch.

If you became famous tomorrow and maintained your weight and looks you'd have average women in their 20s looking to get with you. To quote Dark Helmet, "Druish princesses are often attracted to money and power". A lot of young women are willing to bone an older guy if he can elevate her lifestyle, and that's not a knock against women, it's smart. The older man gets a young woman and the young woman gets to live lavishly. It's a win-win.

But the uglier/fatter the old man is the more wealth he has to bring. Henry the 8th was a fat tub of lard, but he was the king so he was in no shortage of young women wanting to bone him.

Well, I think we are going to agree to disagree on this one. A dress designer in post war Britain is hardly the same level of wealth and celebrity as your example of Hugh Hefner, who was it needs to be said, basically running a brothel at the Hefner Mansion supplied by women who had already decided their sexuality was for sale. That's not a moral judgement btw, just pointing out that you are comparing entirely different worlds.

I don't see any suggestion that Alma is a gold digger, nor even that the attraction is based on any kind of material (excuse the pun) considerations. The drama is explicitly depicted as psychological and pathological. My objection is that the impetus to any of this is unexplained. I don't believe your assertion that some women are variations on the theme of 'gold diggers' goes even remotely close to explaining what is happening in the movie.