Feminism in Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises"

I thought this was interesting...

Over at the blog Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte discusses one aspect of David Cronenberg's new Russian mob film, Eastern Promises, that stands out from a feminist POV: it's frank portrayal of prostitution.

Most movies about organized crime eventually conclude that it's wrong and terrible, but they dance around some of the uglier bits to keep the characters sympathetic enough that the audience hangs in. The notion that there’s a masculine glamor to the gangster life is not really challenged in most movies. Not so in this movie. In this movie, the gangsters are portrayed as morons and thugs, absolute creeps who only get by on brutality, and more to the point, whose ridiculous claims to hyper-masculine glamor are pathetic graspings of people who need fantasies to stay in denial of the monsters they’ve become.

But more important than even that is that the story shoves in your face what most gangster movies try to hide—the lives of the women who are kept in slavery to maintain this gangster life. Yes, the prostitutes. Most gangster movies have no idea what to do with the prostitutes. We get small glimpses of them, dancing in the background looking bored, getting slapped on the ass by a crime boss, basically being props. We don’t see them getting raped again and again, one rape after another, racking up the money for those who hold them in captivity through actual force or just hopelessness. We can’t see the gangsters raping women and selling the women to other rapists in most movies, since that bit of information will make the audience hate them too much to care about who kills who and who gets power over who. So this reality of the sexual trafficking of women is politely concealed.


Cronenberg rubs your face in it and it’s a relief to see a movie maker finally address it straightforwardly. We see the prostitutes and we hear at least one tell her story. We watch 12-year-old girls dance on stripper poles with just enough fake enthusiasm to stay out of trouble. We watch a teenage girl get raped, her john banging her body around like it’s a limp rag doll while she wears a bored look on her face, trying to empty her mind of the non-stop nightmare that is her life. We see a girl tossed out to die because she’s too pregnant to be much use anymore. Cronenberg doesn’t let you pretend that prostitution (at least the kind that’s run by men) is anything but what it is: a rape factory.

In the comments, you'll see that Marcotte also wrote about feminism in Quentin Tarantino's Deathproof a little while back. Also an interesting read.