Last month I saw the movie Uncut Gems. It was really good! But it was also essentially a 135-minute anxiety attack. Two hours and 15 minutes spent screaming internally for Adam Sandler to just not do that while he was very clearly going to do that over and over and over again. I think I have the beginnings of a stomach ulcer from that movie.
A few nights later I watched the movie Hustlers. It was also really good! It was not a 135-minute anxiety attack, because I was never for even one second worried about the women in that movie shooting each other. I worried about one or two people dying of drug overdoses, but at no point in any scene did I grind my teeth in anticipation of someone pulling out a fucking gun and firing it, as though that’s the logical conclusion of any conflict in a movie about crime.
I started thinking about the number of movies and TV shows I watched that treated violence as the logical expression or conclusion of conflict, most of which seemed to be written and directed by people who conflate conflict with violence. In these movies and shows, you know that at least a few scenes are going to escalate—sometimes from a mere disagreement—to some real shitkicking. So you spend most of these scenes waiting for the blows to start. What’s gonna set these people off? When’s the knife gonna come out? When do the bullets start flying?
It happens so often that when Hustlers went by with just a brief, barely-even-a tussle between Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez, I felt… elated. There was conflict aplenty in Hustlers—really engaging conflict, too. And no punches.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the movies and shows I’ve seen that feature compelling conflict with no (or barely any) physical violence are helmed by people who are not men.* I think about the worlds these people—all women, to my current knowledge—create. Can You Ever Forgive Me? A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Hustlers. Lady Bird. The intimacy, the deft construction of character and conflict, the lived-in worlds you just slip right into. The characters in these movies are so vibrant, and that’s in part because the director is never holding you at arm’s length in favor of using some Language of Cinema shots they learned from other similar directors. There’s tension in all these, conflict, a driving need to know what’s going to happen next. There’s actual, honest-to-god pathos at the end.
Little Women fits neatly among the ones listed above. It was such a relief, sinking into the theater seat on the Wednesday of an absolute bowel-tyer of a week and knowing that, whatever adaptational choices Greta Gerwig made, I wasn’t going to have to grind my molars into powder waiting for the sound of a gunshot. I was going to be able to just enjoy a movie for a couple hours.
And wow, did I enjoy Little Women! It was funny and warm and wise. It was beautiful. I experienced a whole lot of emotions and did a little cathartic crying. It was just an all-around lovely two hours.
“Uh, life isn’t lovely, Oriana.” Yeah, man. I know.
Conflict and violence surround us. If you’re not a white man, the potential for violence is something you probably think about every single day. It’s not an abstract concept, or something you experience only at a remove. So it makes sense that we would treat the depiction of violence differently; that some of us might be inclined to tell stories set in worlds where arguments don’t build inexorably to gunshots or stabbings or getting the everloving shit beaten out of you.
This isn’t me saying that movies and TV series should be devoid of lethal violence. That would be boring. But in a hell world, a world in which I run the risk of being stabbed for the crime of telling a man I don’t want to go out with him, it’s just nice to have the option of watching a movie where the violence is a manuscript-burning, instead of a bullet to the head.
*Shout out to Paul Thomas Anderson and Phantom Thread, though.