A feminist film: Alexandra's project

The Intro to the movie sounded neutral enough: a man returns home to find a birthday present containing a video and it turns out to be unexpected. It is anything but neutral.

The movie begins in the bedroom of a well-to-do Australian couple Steve (Gary Sweet) and Alexandra (Helen Buday). Steve is a well-muscled white male of maybe 45 (illustrated in a couple of minutes of frontal nudity shot) and Alexandra looks like a Hungarian refugee woman who has never been to a beauty parlor (Buday is a Hungarian name, meaning someone from the City of Buda, the Western side of Budapest).

It is Steven's birthday and he is promised a surprise when he comes home. After a bit of an enthusiastic hug for his daughter (feminist hint #1), Steve leaves to work. The Board of his Corporation promotes him. He is shown having lunch with a female coworker (feminist hint #2) then Steve returns home.

Steve finds that his key can not open the lock of his front door, but the door is open, he walks in and closes the door, which locks shut. The house is dark, the light bulbs have been removed, his family is nowhere to be found. He finds a birthday present (a tape wrapped like a present) and puts it in the video tape machine. The TV shows a coquettish Alexandra who soon launches into a somewhat clumsy and amateurish strip tease. Steve likes the show, especially after Alexandra's shirt and bra come off and she stands in her panties. That's when Alexandra tells Steve that she has breast cancer and has to undergo bilateral mastectomy. The horrified Steve then is told that this was a sham, that the cancer does not exist and Alexandra's small patch on her breast is not left there from a biopsy, but is a fake.

Here begins the feminist declaration, hot and heavy, no longer hints and symbols. Alexandra accuses Steve of having made her breasts into objects and that those playful things they used to do were in fact unwelcome to her. Soon, the panties are off too and Alexandra tells Steve "you never loved me, you were in love with my body." She accuses Steve that all his sexual attention to her was in fact unwelcome, done without asking her (i.e. rape, the standard feeling of feminists about sex between a man and a women).

//I interrupt this review here to point out what every married man knows because he experienced it. Women do not behave like robots, who can be turned on by a switch and a command. The time leading up to sex is rife with body language broadcasting desire and willingness which sometimes elicit responses like "not tonight," "I am too tired" or the traditional "I have a headache." The idea that a man does not ask his wife to have sex is absurd.//

The rest of the movie is devoted to Alexandra's project, which is the humiliation and emasculation of Steve. Steve is told that he will never see his children again, because his wife has lots of money that she has earned being a prostitute and that she and the children will be never found. Steve can not open the doors or windows because of the security devices installed by his neighbor on Steve's house. Steve is told that he can no longer turn off the tape, because the broadcast is live and we see Steve's neighbor having sex with Alexandra (she calls it a freebee). Then Steve breaks open the door leading to the attic and falls through the ceiling to his neighbor's living room (they live in adjacent town houses) that has all the electronic equipment used in making the tape where he is confronted by his semi nude neighbor wielding a gun. Steven's ultimate humiliation is very reminiscent of the final scene of 1984 (where the victim shouts "I love Big Brother"). Steve is forced to drink till he is drunk and is being pawed by his neighbor, who promises to give him new keys to his house.

FemiNaziism that runs through this film is built on the lie that marriage is really rape of the woman. The solutions FemiNazis offer (lesbian love or prostitution) needs to be commented on in a wider context. In a number of ways, we are reminded that when God is not in an activity, that activity fails. The French Revolution offered an overthrow of God with Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The outcome was the exact opposite: terror, tyranny and class warfare on a grand scale of extermination. Socialism claims to offer equality and prosperity, but in reality it offers serfdom for the many and rule by the whims of the elite that decide how much misery the rest of us must endure. Environmentalism elevated the Earth to Godhood at the expense of humanity and causes other miseries besides. So, we are not surprised that lesbianism offers women not true love but a perversion of it that strips women of motherhood. And Alexandra, who complained about not being asked by her husband who made her body into a sex object, had made herself into a sex object, because prostitution does just that. In the end, all these "isms" that exclude God are pretty similar to what Satan offered Eve: to be like God by disobeying Him. Reality did not turn out that way.

One final thought using the earthy expression I was told: if you think that sex is a pain in the a$$, you're not doing it right.