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[rusty_halo]

Clarissa: What a nauseating, joyless monstrosity of a movie. In fact, it reminded me most vividly of the nightmare that was Buffy season six.

*shudder of absolute horror*

On the plus side, Sean Bean was awesome in his role, and way hotter than James Marsters. But like S6, the hotness was ultimately not worth the preachy, moralistic, self-righteous crap.

(PS: Men are evil and they exist solely to consume and destroy women. In case you were wondering. :P)

Comments

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

2000 pages, written entirely in epistolary format

Eeek!

I know, I have terrible taste, but I'll stick to shorter books with way more explosions. ;)

Seriously, though, I was having flashbacks to S6 Spuffy. You couldn't pay me to re-watch that season. The gender politics of it are just so damn creepy.

[chase820.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't feel bad about not wanting to read Clarissa. It's defeated many a hard core academe.

Author Samuel Richardson's original theme was that all these romance novels where the heroine reforms a hardcore womanizer are inherently false (yup, they had novels like that back then, too.) Womanizers are misogynist assholes who should be avoided at all costs. Not that all men are bad, but some men are, and a girl needs to learn to tell good from bad or she ends up like poor Clarissa. A rather smart point, really. I don't remember much about the film since I last saw it 15 years ago, but it sounds like they lost Richardson's idea.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it was written by Xander: "Choose the boring nice guy, because the dark interesting guy will RAPE YOU OMG!!!1111!"

Also bothersome: the association of "virtue" with "chastity." I suppose it's my 20th century upbringing, but I fail to see the connection. Why's Clarissa better that everyone else just because she doesn't want to have sex? And why is every sexual woman in the movie (Clarissa's sister, the whores) a cruel monstrosity of a human being?

And, and ... "womanizer" != "rapist." One can enjoy sex and shrug off society's reservations about it without being a sadist who gets off on hurting people. And why's there never any acknowledgment at all that maybe a woman could enjoy sex too? (Oh, right, 18th century.)

I mean, I could totally sympathize with Clarissa's wanting to remain independent and not get married, and it sucks that she lived in a society that treated women like property. But I guess most of the underlying ideas about the nature of gender and sexuality (and morality) just creeped the hell out of me.

[chase820.livejournal.com]

Well, in a time when your husband had complete legal, personal, and financial control over you, the nice boring guy was the best way to go.

In the book, Clarissa has a best friend who isn't a scheming oversexed harpy and who tries to help her, to no avail. I don't remember if she's in the movie.

As you say, much of this is difference between 18th and 21st century values. Considered in the context of the time, Richardson has a point. Though many people--even people at the time--thought he was laying it on a bit thick.