To start “The Bride!”, the ghost of Mary Shelley (played by academy award winner and hot indie sensation Jessie Buckley) decides she’s tired of ghosting it up, so she’s going to possess the body of a random woman (who happens to look like her, so maybe not so random) and kind of share the body as ‘they’ embark on a kind of split personality adventure. This asks the question: Did Mary Shelley invent this person, thus presenting a movie created entirely in her head, or is her vessel actually “real”, which means ghosts can possess people and alter their thoughts? In simpler terms, does the universe arise from consciousness, or does consciousness arise from the universe?
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There’s a technical term for a movie that starts with this kind of existential question, and it’s a long term: Arthoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooouse.
While I’m not usually here to issue warnings (I’m here to pump you up), I’ll warn that the movie doesn’t let up after that first scene, as far as not being fully comprehensible goes. The dialogue is full of allusions and metaphor, and *not* strictly what I would call “conversational”, and things aren’t helped by the ‘schizo’ bride who frequently has tourette’s-like tics where she yells out a bunch of gibberish. We get references to “The Thin Man”, “Bartleby”, “Bonnie and Clyde”, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers... Heck, even Harley Quinn. I’m sure there are tons of allusions that went over *my* big head, which means I would classify “The Bride!” as not especially accessible (especially to younger viewers). However, sometimes being movieshyte is less easy than pimpin’, because the more inaccessible the film, the more I want to access it! So, dear reader, we go into the breach of “The Bride!”
The first order of business would be to find a lens to start viewing the movie through. Hopefully, even arthouse movies will provide at least a clue, and we get an obvious clue here. We started the movie with Mary Shelley; this is clearly related to her masterpiece “Frankenstein”, so we’ll start there.
“Frankenstein” is the ultimate poster child for the “nurture” side of the “nature versus nurture” argument of how people develop their perspectives. This is accomplished by eliminating the “nature” out of the equation entirely. Frankenstein’s monster (who characters in “The Bride!” refer to as ‘Frank’, even though he’s NOT doctor Frankenstein, he’s the monster. I feel like he should be ‘Mons’, or ‘Big Ugly’, but since everybody else calls him ‘Frank’ I will as well) is completely unnatural, he’s a bunch of corpses stitched together and reanimated via nature’s antithesis: Technology. Having no ‘nature’ means that Frank is a completely blank slate. All his behaviors are learned. Sure enough, in the original “Frankenstein”, the hubris and obsessive nature of Dr. Frankenstein rub off on Frank, and he starts killing chumps. Nurture triumphs over nature. So, we’ll take this “nature vs. nurture” dichotomy, and apply it to “The Bride!”
After our opening scene frame up with Mary Shelley, we are introduced to the monster, Frank himself (played by academy award winner Christian Bale). It’s been over 100 years since his creation, and we’re in the roaring twenties in the united states. Frank is no longer a ‘blank slate’, as he’s had over a century to figure out what he wants, and he’s decided that he wants to be the star of a Judd Apatow movie (I talk about this in my Veronica Mars review, check it out!). He wants a monogamous romantic relationship and a steady source of income. Which is to say... He wants to be ‘normal’. Blech. I shouldn’t judge, being a monster is probably more easy than pimpin’, but still not easy. Frank finds a new mad scientist (the funnest character in the film, played by Annette Bening). They dig up a dead woman (the possessed woman from the first scene), use SCIENCE! to reanimate her, and we’re off.
Since Frank isn’t our ‘blank slate’, his new Bride! must be, right? She is indeed. She doesn’t remember her mortal self. She knows nothing. What will our ‘nuture triumphs over nature’ test subject tell us about the culture she is absorbing? How will this cultural indoctrination reflect back on us? This is it! This is the lens we’ll use to decode our dense arthouse movie.
Turns out, she absorbs... Nothing? Turns out... The Bride! is incapable of creating long term memories. Basically every day, she wakes up and whatever she’s learned is gone. Her status as a blank slate remains perpetual. She doesn’t absorb any culture, and so she’s not reflecting the darkest impulses of humanity back at us. What the heck? What’s going on? Does this mean that we should be paying attention to Frank? It doesn’t seem like it. Frank seems narrowly focused on his Apatow goal, and is more interested in getting The Bride! to like him by telling her what he thinks she wants to hear rather than telling her the truth. In that sense, Frank is like an AI chatbot for The Bride!
As it turns out... “The Bride!” does something pretty cool. It shifts the focus from “how is The Bride! absorbing society?” to “how is society absorbing The Bride!?” It’s not about what parts of the culture will be etched onto the blank slate, it’s about what happens when your society already has a rigid set of rules in place, and now you introduce a character that ignores the rules entirely because they have no idea what the rules even are. The Bride! doesn’t care about the rules (because she doesn’t know them and is incapable of learning them). She plays by her own rules! Does that make The Bride! a sigma grinder? Can women be sigma grinders? I am going to say the answer to both those questions is YES, because I completely understand the youth of today and their lingo. I ain’t no square, daddy-o, and you’d best get hip to the fact that the kiddos think I’m totes fab. Back to our main thesis: How will people react to our non-conformist Bride!?
Turns out... By treating her like a monster. Because, according to their rules, she IS a monster. We’ll start with her appearance. Her clothes are ragged, her hair is a mess, and worse, the gunk used to reanimate stains permanently, so she’s got permanent stains on her face, hair, and clothes. Women were expected to maintain a standard of appearance in the twenties (and now). The difference is, *now* we have perspective. Women might be expected to keep it tight, but we are aware that is a rule, a pressure that they can push back against or ignore. In the twenties, people weren’t using terms like “patriarchy” or “objectification”. Eating salad and spending hours on your hair and makeup wasn’t ‘a rule’, it was just how things were. If you wanted to pound a box of cookies and not bother with your makeup at all, you would keep it to yourself. Women didn’t do those things. It’s pretty hard to fight against systemic oppression when nobody is even acknowledging that it’s oppressive.
But... That *changes* when you actually see somebody who completely ignores the system. The Bride! isn’t actively fighting the system, even if she had an inkling to do that she would forget about it the next day... But it turns out that *passively* fighting the system by opting out is a pretty damn powerful idea. The men and women around The Bride! start to take notice. Women smudge their faces to mirror The Bride!’s blemishes. Men start to believe that women can be more than secretaries, they can be, say, police detectives. Exposure to the blank slate starts to change the culture it’s failing to absorb, while the slate remains gleefully blank. Opt out. The catchphrase of the aforementioned Bartleby, “I would prefer not to”, is spoken many times during the film. Don’t fight the system, ignore it. Trust me, world systems don’t want to be ignored, so the fight WILL be coming, but opting out at least gives you a way to deal with a crushing status quo that you might not even realize is crushing.
That’s pretty damn cool. While I think it’s great that we have the option of, say, going on substack and calling out the patriarchy (this never happens. I’m just kidding, it’s every other post, including this one?!?), I think there is something... Elegant about sigma grinding it (I am DEFINITELY using that term correctly) and just... Preferring not to.
Turns out, the destination at the end of an arthouse road might be worth finding after all.
2/10