This page is referenced by:

• 1 2015-12-10T17:56:42-08:00 Critical Analysis of the Film 30 plain 2015-12-11T17:56:54-08:00            Moving beyond intertexuality there are numerous other incidences in the film of problematic representations of women including portrayal of female and male jealousy, archetypal visual representations of "good" and "bad" female characters, use of the "not like other girls" trope. This is, however, not to say the film is not without nuance in its representation: there are arguable instances of women supporting women, the instances of which I will describe.
  
              It's worth noting that Crimson Peak is a very visual film. Films, by nature are visual (as well as audible, narrative events), but the extent to which the film celebrates the visual is clear.
  From lavishly dark sets to extensively detailed costumes the film takes each chance to frame  a striking image. But there's no room for morals such as "don't judge a book by its cover" in this film. That is not to say there is no deception in the film: certainly there is plenty of falsehood. But to an audience who is rather used to "black equals evil" and "white equals good", the film can seem a tad predictable. Crimson Peak plays these tropes absolutely straight, and specifically, it uses such archetypes in its portrayal of the two main female characters Edith and Lucille.
  
  Edith spends a significant amount of time in the white sleep dress with her hair let down. She especially wears this costume during the night scenes where she  encounters the ghosts of Allerdale Hall. This outfit, the one Edith is first introduced wearing, and the one she wears during the climax and end of the film, harks back to one she wears as a child. 
  
  
  
  In this scene Edith recounts her first encounter with a ghost, as well as her first encounter with "Crimson Peak", in this case, in the form of a warning. That Edith herself in these and encounters with the ghosts looks like the cliché image of a ghost, white, pale, with loose fit flowing robes and hair, is no mistake but there are other implications of her costume. For one thing, it fulfills the "white equals good" trope. Secondly, the association between white, wedding gowns, and  implied virginity comes into play. Additionally, Edith's nightgown is very modest, covering her entire chest and neck again associating white/good with the modest/virginal woman. Alone the colour and style of the gown do not particularly mean much: most nightgowns are white and it is actually somewhat refreshing to have main female characters dressed in a non-sexualizing manner.  However, when Edith's character and clothing is juxtaposed to Lucille's the associations between white/good and the modest woman become clear.
  
  
  
              Lucille wears, for the first part of the film, high-neck, corseted dark coloured dresses, either black or red. That she is hiding a dark secret and keeping a carefully constructed facade of herself is in line with her dark appearance and rigid style. When her secret, her incestuous relationship with her brother, becomes revealed, her appearance changes, and remains such for the rest of the film.
  
   She also now wears white, but her dress notably reveals her chest, and for a time, loosely hangs off her shoulder, with a green robe wrapped around. Her figure, like her personality, has been revealed. Her half-dressed appearance reflects the sexual nature of her secret.  She and Edith are dressed more similarly but differ in the sexuality of their outfits. The similarity of their dresses also works to make the difference of their hair colours, blonde, and black/brunette, starker, as that is now one of the few colour cue differences between them.
  
              The set up of their respective costumes harkens back to age-old stereotypes about women, namely the Madonna/Whore complex, less so in the Freudian sense, than the roles available for women. However, this complex is not a perfect fit. Edith is certainly not asexual and the consummation of her marriage to Thomas is played out in a perfectly respectful way that highlights her pleasure and, unlike most films, the man's body. So sex and sexuality of women does not seem to be a problem: still, Lucille's character is certainly dressed in a more provocative  manner and this costume is linked to audience's knowledge of the incest taboo, as well as all the acts of violence we come to know she has committed, or see her commit while dressed in this costume.  In this sense her sexual dress, sexual secret, become linked to her 'bad' deeds, whereas Edith's white modest dress becomes linked to her 'goodness' (her kindness, forgiveness, and naivety).
  
              So the film employs a couple visual clichés or tropes regarding women and appearances (and oh, the relationship between women and appearances). It rather works to the film's advantage. As said, Crimson Peak is a very visual film: why not make characters' appearances representative of who they are? Why shouldn't it use their appearances act as part of its set?  If the house can built upon a red oxide mine that oozes bright red sludge that is not blood, but representative of the blood that has been spilled, why shouldn't Edith and Lucille's clothing and hair symbolize their characters' personalities? In this sense the use of these clichés work becomes it makes the film coherent—the character's appearances coincide with who they are just as the mansion's creepy appearance reflects the horribly things that have happened inside it. Still, clichés about women's appearances reflecting who they really are is still by all means a toxic sentiment to hold about women.
  
              Another trope employed by the film is the "Not like other girls trope" as demonstrated best by the following scenes.
  
  
  
  In the next clip Edith has just had her manuscript rejected:
  
  In these scenes we see the film attempt a kind of feminism in its portrayal of Edith. Edith is certainly by no means the stereotypical woman: she reads, believes in a kind of social activism, and is not preoccupied by girly day dreams of romances with baronets. She defies the publisher's recommendation that she ought to write love stories, acknowledging and denying expectations of women's writing.  However, the scene where Edith encounters the "clique" run by Mrs. McMichael problematizes this representation. Edith might not be the stereotypical woman, but other women are. The women of Mrs. McMichael's clique are catty, shallow, and the quintessential mean girls. Unis, we learn, hasn't notified Edith of Alan's return from overseas as he expected, and her mother happily doles out gendered insults (the implication Edith will never find a man). The women of the clique fawn over the mysterious baronet, a member of aristocracy which Edith progressively views as oppressive. So Edith herself may be presented as feminist and progressive, but other women really are vapid and vain: Edith becomes the exceptional woman, special to the audience because, she's not like other girls, the idea being that most girls do obey the stereotype.
  
              Edith's exceptionalism is further emphasized in her isolation from other women. She has no mother figure, no female friends, and spends a significant portion of the film in harm's way via her sister in law's plan to murder her.  The men in her life are by contrast, loving and supportive, including her father, Alan, and even in the end, Thomas. But every significant female character Edith encounters, save for maids whom she only shares brief exchanges, is one tainted by animosity. Women, it seems, just cannot get long, and often as shown in the clique scene and in Edith's conflict with Lucille, the focal point of conflict between these women, is a man.
  
              Which brings us to the next point: the representation of female versus male jealousy.
  
  
              The clips depicting Alan and Thomas show a number of their scenes together and in each there is a kind of mutual respect. First the dance scene: The crowd moves back slightly partially isolating Alan and Thomas which the 'dancing space': they make eye contact. Thomas gives the slightest small nod and receives one in return from Alan. The funeral scene proceeds similar. The two men, well dressed, standing straight, make eye contact and exchange nods, symbolizing a kind of mutual respect between them despite their competing affections for Edith. The only physical confrontation between them is staged.  
  With men, it is implied, jealousy is muted, or at least acted out in respectful fashions.
  
              Just as Alan and Thomas are foils, Edith and Lucille are also foils, the  but their romantic relationships to the same man, Thomas, spur violence between them, and is in fact, the central conflict of the film.
  
  One may argue that Edith, in her fight scenes with Lucille, is fighting for her life and not Thomas—which is absolutely true. However, that does not mitigate that the instigating event between them, the event that makes Edith Lucille's newest target,  is Edith's romantic interest and marriage to Thomas. The crux of their conflict is still their romantic relationships to Thomas, which is, in a generalization, a violent power struggle between women over a man. Jealousy, it's also worth noting, is why Lucille also kills Thomas.  When he admits he has fallen in love with Edith she kills him in a fit of passion. Her emotions at that moment overwhelm her ability to think logically. 
  
  
  When contrasted with he portrayal of Alan and Thomas, who both  share affection for Edith, none of the violence or power struggle between them is evident as it is between Edith and Lucille, suggesting that men, have no problem managing their emotions: Women however...
  
            So Crimson Peak employs several harmful stereotypes about women including the idea that they are catty and unintelligent, get violently jealous over men, are to blame for men's behaviour, and just generally do not get along. Whereas "Blue Beard" and Macbeth portray physical violence as a ultimately male activity, Crimson Peak seems to subvert gender roles in that it is women who perform physical violence to resolve conflict; a closer look however, shows that more modern stereotypes about women are instead used, in particular, the belief that women cannot get long and will be become physically violent when men and romance are involved. 
  
              Here is the thing: the stories we tell about women matter. Every film, and every text really, is a cultural contribution that shapes and is our perspective of the world and the people in it. Many films still struggle solely with simply having female characters, so at least Crimson Peak did something right in that regard. While it is not without its positive representational elements, it "fails" in other places by employing stereotypes about women. But it also would not be hard to tweak certain parts of the story to avoid those stereotypes or employ them skillfully.
  
              Take the ghosts for example. All the ghosts save for one are of female characters. The first encountered is the ghost of Edith's mother who, although terrifying to Edith, is there to essentially warn her daughter about the titular "Crimson Peak". Essentially, what we see when we move past the frightening elements of the scene, is a mother who has "come back from the dead" in effort to protect her daughter. Likewise, the ghosts of the women murdered at Allerdale Hall seem, in retrospect, to also be warning Edith, and Edith likewise is reaching out to them.
  
  
  
  
  It is only by the encounter with the ghosts that Edith is led to the clues that let her discern the death of the previous wives as well as Thomas and Lucille's affair. The moans of one ghost leads Edith to the closet where Enola, the previous wife, left her recordings, and the subsequent encounter with the ghost of the late Lady Sharpe causes Edith to hide in the basement where she finds Enola's locked chest. The record player in the chest and recordings reveal to Edith that Thomas has been married and widowed many times before her. Yet another ghost points her to the upstairs room where she discovers Thomas and Lucille making love.
  
  
  
              Certainly, these encounters between Edith and the ghosts signify some kind of positive female relationships, where the ghosts of women past are trying to prevent the death of the women after them, even if their best means of communication seems to be ghastly moans, screams, whispers and pointing of red skeletal fingers. That said, while the ghosts are instrumental, they are not central characters: once we understand who they are (the wives and Lady Sharpe) and how they go to be there (murdered by the Sharpe siblings) and they are no longer a mystery or a threat, the focus of the film turns to the Sharpe siblings and the immediate danger they pose to Edith.  or Edith's desire to avenge them or make peace with them. So while the movie does have some, peculiar representation for positive female relationships, the ghosts are primarily there to be scary: once they are no longer frightening, they are forgotten.
  
              What this does show however, is that there is potential within the film, traces and elements, of feminist writing. And by all means, the film does not do everything wrong. Thankfully, the fight between Edith and Lucille didn't include any hair pulling or tearing at each other's clothes. The male characters don't commit any physical violence against women. Thomas doesn't end up running into sunsets with Edith singing "Ding dong the witch is dead".  But it remains crucial to critically analyze media and discern how it could be better in its portrayal of women.  Would it, for example, have been so much for Edith to have at least one female friend?  And if Lucille's supposed madness serves near no purpose in the film then could it not be tossed out entirely at least removing one problematic aspect? Part of any reconstruction of this film is limited by its central nature as a heterosexual romance: inherently, such stories are irreversibly about a woman's romantic relationship to a man, so there is a cap to how feminist films in this genre can really be.
  
  And if the story is to stay a romance, Thomas has to be allowed some level of redemption in order to be worthy of Edith's love, so Lucille still has to bear the blame for killing Edith's father and Lady Sharpe. What if the two were not siblings, so that the implication that Lucille manipulated Thomas since birth could be disregarded? Then Thomas could still bear more responsibility for their crimes, having done so of his own free will, but still be redeemable.
              Frankly, dealing with counterfactuals is a moot point for me and something for fanfiction authors to work with.  The film could have done worse; it could have done better. But it is only by critically analyzing stories that we can start to see the discord between their surface ideology and structural ideology. As mentioned Crimson Peak does seem like its trying to be progressive. Its protagonist and antagonist are women who are clever and resilient. Edith herself is socially progressive and looks to break stereotypes about women. But a film where the main female character's greatest conflicts are with other women and she never has any positive relationships with (living) women is a film that is limited in its understanding of feminist writing. Critical analysis, even if sometimes ugly, is that crucial for pointing us in the right direction towards better ways of writing and representing women on the big screen.
   
   
   
  Word count: 6,043