When I wrote my review for Malcolm and Marie, I was gushing about the film, talking about how great the acting was and everything. But then I read more reviews about the film, and a lot of the reviews pointed out that the film depicts abuse, not a genuine loving relationship. Gloria Oladipo breaks down the abuse in the film in her film review “‘Malcolm and Marie’ is a Voyeuristic Exercise in Emotional Abuse and Misogynoir.” At the beginning of the piece Oladipo makes the point that Sam Levinson, the White director of the film, uses Black women’s trauma to shock and provoke audiences. She gives many examples in the film in which this occurs. While Malcolm is boasting about how successful his movie is and how the critics of his movie don’t know what they’re talking about, Marie is making him macaroni and cheese without saying a word. He doesn’t thank her for the macaroni and cheese and pushes her to tell him why she’s so sullen and won’t talk to him. She then tells him that he didn’t thank her in his awards speech, which Oladipo explains is problematic because as the movie continues, we learn about Marie’s struggles with drug addiction and recovery and that she is the reason he became so successful, because he based his character’s trauma off of Marie’s trauma without thinking about how doing this would affect her psychologically and emotionally. Malcolm hasn’t had to deal with the trauma Marie has; he gets to relax at the end of the day and eat her macaroni and cheese while she has to relive that trauma every day.
Oladipo also points out that Malcolm insults Marie from the very beginning of the film. He insults her throughout the movie, making insidious jabs at her struggles with mental illness, her insecurities, that she didn’t get as many acting and film opportunities as he did. He also brings up his past girlfriends to her to make her further feel bad about herself and says they, not her, deserve his thanks and his attention. When Marie tries to challenge Malcolm by pointing out his weaknesses, his ego, his superficiality when it comes to his “love” for her, he gets extremely defensive and lashes out at her to make him feel better about himself. He doesn’t care about her feelings, he doesn’t want to put himself in her shoes, he just wants to feel justified in putting her down.
Oladipo breaks down one key scene in the film; when Malcolm and Marie are on the couch, Malcolm tells her she shouldn’t have quit acting, but Marie makes the valid point that he wasn’t really there to support her in her ambitions the same way she has supported him all this time. He once again tries to win at an argument that he started in the first place by bringing up her suicide attempt and addiction, and this breaks her down in tears. Each time she tries to bring him down to earth and remind him of his ego, his pride, he tears her down, arguing that he can hurt her far more than she can hurt him. He also makes it seem like she had nothing to do with his commercial success as a filmmaker, when in fact, the protagonist of his movie, Imani, is based off of Marie and has the same struggles with mental health and trauma that she does. While Oladipo acknowledges that Marie has some insults of her own to deliver to Malcolm, her insults don’t cut as deeply as Malcolm’s insults towards her. I agree, because it seems Marie is giving Malcolm the opportunity to reflect on his ego and his inflated sense of self-importance, but he doesn’t appreciate this about her and instead sees it as a personal attack.
I don’t really even want to list all of the other cruel stuff that Malcolm says to Marie because after reading Oladipo’s piece, I am pretty sickened just thinking about all the abuse Malcolm put Marie through in that film. I should have listened to the little voice in the back of my head while watching the movie that said, “Hey, you know this isn’t a loving relationship right? You know it’s painful and draining to watch this narcissistic man tear this woman down.” Oladipo reminded me that the abuse Marie faced at the hands of Malcolm is not an isolated incident, and it’s a reality for many Black women, who face high rates of intimate partner violence, rape and homicide. According to a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy and Research, “in addition to physical violence, perpetrators [of domestic violence] often use psychological, verbal, and economic abuse to control, monitor, or threaten intimate partners (Buzawa and Buzawa 2013; Stark 2012). Breiding et al. (2014) estimate that 47.1 percent of all women in the United States experience psychological aggression by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetimes, including humiliation, insults, name-calling and coercive control (which includes behaviors intended to monitor, control, or threaten an intimate partner). Black women experience substantially higher rates of psychological aggression (53.8 percent) than women overall (Breiding et al. 2014).”(“The Status of Black Women”, p. 142) Now when I think of that last scene in Malcolm and Marie, where Malcolm goes looking for Marie and then finds her on top of the hill and hugs her, I don’t think I’ll look at it the same way again because as Oladipo points out, that wasn’t a happy ending. He most likely would probably continue to heap abuse on her well after the movie was over.
I also wanted to learn more about the misogynoir that’s depicted in the film. According to a piece titled “What is Misogynoir,” misogynoir is a specific type of sexism rooted in racism against Black women (misogyny + noir- “black”) and there are many ways in which this misogynoir has played out in society. Stereotypes about Black women stem from this misogyny: because of the Strong Black Woman stereotype doctors perceive Black women as having a higher tolerance for pain and thus treat them differently, Black women are viewed as angry when they try to speak up for themselves, Black women are viewed as strong, so many of them feel they are not allowed to show emotion, pain or distress and they often are perceived as being overly sexual even when they are girls. Malcolm tries to portray Marie as this angry, vindictive Black woman who is always tearing him down, but really his view of her is troubling because he’s making it seem like he’s perfectly justified in taking out his anger on her, but if she voices her opinion about his work or his personality flaws, then she’s angry even when she’s really just calling him out on his B.S. He somehow thinks that she will never know what it’s like to work in Hollywood, that she’ll never get the world of acting, but really that’s just his arrogance talking.
I’m actually really glad I read Oladipo’s piece because I myself have not experienced abuse or domestic violence, but now I realize I need to educate myself and to be more careful about celebrating movies that make that kind of abuse look ok. I actually regret lauding the film that highly in my review of it because at first glance, as someone who hadn’t educated myself much on misogynoir or domestic abuse, watching the film seemed harmless, but then when I wrote the review something told me that something was up and I needed to get my facts straight before gushing too much about this movie.
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