I can understand why people often shrink back from Lars von Trier’s portrayals of suffering women.  Because arguments in film take the form of characters, setting, and action, it’s a slippery line between say, making arguments about the position of women vis-à-vis society and reenacting those conditions in portrayals that amount to voyeuristic sadism.   Lots of spoilers follow this paragraph, but you seriously should not waste your time with this movie anyway.

Asylum blurs the distinction between historical accuracy and leering, giving us a film that takes the existential paralysis offered to pre-feminism women and turns it into the cinematic equivalent of burning ants with a magnifying glass.  The film follows Stella Raphael (Natasha Richardson) as the restless wife of a doctor in a psychiatric hospital who forms an obsessive attachment to an inmate that tortured and disfigured his own wife but is really good in bed.  She’s a lazily feminist figure, if at all, since her response to the stifling strictures of gender expectations is to find a marginalized man to take care of her and beat her.  One of the creepy aspects to the film was the suggestion that the viewer understand this obsession, partly as a product of her caged freedom and partly because of the absolutely anarchic passions of the orgasm.  Apparently, once you find a woman’s clitoris, there’s just no talking to her.

It’s not just the voyeurism that’s a problem in portrayals of women like this, it’s that the sloppily liberal critique of cultural institutions often seems to have a reactionary undercurrent.  Stella can’t seem to handle even the limited role she’s given, allowing her child to drown in a river because she was off daydreaming about the hot, crazy lug who kicked the crap out of her and almost killed her.  In the end, we see her husband sympathetically, since he only wanted the best for her when he was instructing her on the proper way for a woman to act.  I mean, it’s certainly better to bake cookies than kill your kid and end up the sex slave of a psycho with loose fists.  

As a study of obsession, the movie would be better off not tackling the gender dynamics of the era through Stella’s loathing of her lack of opportunity.  Because then it seems to simply reiterate all kinds of stereotypes of women as irredeemably emotional with masochistic tendencies.  By far the most irritating aspect of Asylum comes from the phony defiant suicide ending.  Yeah, if only every woman who felt unjustly treated by society had killed herself. I hate the defiant suicide.  In terms of statement, it’s more melodramatic but no more effective than mooning someone.  Asylum might, in the wreckage of its plot, have something to say about the lives of intelligent women in an era that kept them anchored in the home.  For me, like Lars von Trier, the movie articulated the suffering too well, becoming more conduit than catharsis.  

Terry Sawyer