Paranoid Housewives
Like a Lifetime original movie, Netflix’s Gerald’s Game is a work for the paranoid housewife set – women whose psyches spin round in a crushing centrifuge of wandering husbands, daytime fantasy, and the six o’clock news.
In this world, the man only exists to kill the woman’s dreams, if not literally murder her and chop up the body. If the woman lives to see the end of the story, she remains a dupe and dullard till external events draw out some inner strength – sometimes equated to the ordeal of childbirth – transforming her into a wise old “survivor.”
Gerald’s Game, true to its source material, adds a Stephen King twist to the formula. The setting is an isolated house in the woods and our heroine, Jessie (Carla Gugino), is bound to a bed. Unlike in the wonderful Misery, however, her legs are not broken. She is merely handcuffed to some pretty thin-looking bed posts by Gerald, her husband (Bruce Greenwood), in a bid to revive long quieted passions with rape fantasy. Rejecting his attempt, our heroine stares indignantly and asks “who exactly did I marry?” – an unintended nod to the Investigation Discovery channel’s “Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry,” a “documentary” series that follows the same tried-and-true formula of boy meets girl, boy turns out to be psychotic abuser. Seeing where this is all going, Gerald has the good sense to cash out in a violent heart attack, leaving us alone with Jessie, still handcuffed to the bed. Lucky bastard.
Do you see the subtext here? We’ll give you a hint: the strongest shackles of all are those wrapped around Jessie’s mind by a series of abusive men. That’s the premise of the movie. And that’s why Gerald’s Game is lauded by both The Verge and Vox as being among the best Steven King adaptations ever made.
But wait a moment – let’s put that claim in context: other Stephen King adaptations include The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, It, The Dead Zone, and the aforementioned Misery. Believing themselves duty bound to champion the movie’s feminist veneer (no matter how thin), we could understand how reviewers might convince themselves that Gerald’s Game is pretty decent for a straight-to-Netflix movie. But to suggest that it could be in the same league with films by Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, and Rob Reiner is the height of insincerity.
For a moment, it seems Gerald’s Game is going throw us a bone, or rather a twist, when Gerald himself, having died moments earlier, rises from the floor and begins strutting around with the cocksure manner of a man too privileged and arrogant to just die. What sort of sick and twisted game is this? We sit, disarmed, waiting for the twisted truth to emerge. In other words, we sit expecting Kathy Bates.
Unfortunately, we get only Gerald. And not even the real Gerald. The man in front of us is actually just a figment of Jessie’s imagination. The man himself is still dead as a doornail, and soon-to-be dinner for hungry dog that wanders in from the autumnal chill.
It’s a dangerous thing to let a character’s imagination take control of a story line, particularly if that character is the most unimaginative person in the story. The movie sets up a dialogue between Jessie, fake Gerald (who gives voice to her own internalized low self worth) and another imaginary character in the form of Jessie herself, who gives voice to her long dormant empowerment and ingenuity.
“Oh goodness,” we begin to think. “She’s going to spend the entire movie talking to herself.”
And she does. The movie is all talk and, worse, completely lacking in scares. Even chills.
And what else did the filmmakers think they had to offer here? The thrill of waiting for Jessie to realize that “she can do it”? A bunch of lazy two dimensional feminist pablum? Surely, there are other works that deliver deeper treatments of almost every single theme found in Gerald’s Game. The horror genre is brimming over with self-realized survivors from The Innocents to A L’Interieur. If you want insight into the place of women in society, go read Don Quixote, written 400 years ago, and work your way up to any movie with Isabel Huppert. Gerald’s Game smacks of an old liberal’s attempt to inject himself in a discourse that has moved far beyond his grasp of the subject matter. There is no nuance. All is either black or white, good or bad, male or female. The game may be Gerald’s but it’s rigged from the start.