Potted Plants and Benevolent Sexism: "The Devil All the Time"

SPOILERS AHEAD

CONTENT WARNING: SUICIDE AND RAPE

The Devil All the Time is a sprawling commentary on faith and the dangerous place where it intersects with human shortcoming - fragility, failure, and dare I say it, delusion. There’s much to be discussed on this core theme, but I’ll leave that to critics with a more philosophical constitution than mine. I went into the film fully intending to be interested in nothing other than Tom Holland’s performance. While the cast didn’t disappoint, the rest of the film did. Instead of the performance of a much-beloved actor, what gripped me about TDATT and stuck with me long after I finished watching was the way it treated its female characters.

Before I get into it, I do want to briefly say that I appreciated that the plot’s central relationship - not counting the father-son relationship that serves as the film’s thematic foundation - was one of platonic love between a male character and a female character. The intense love Arvin has for Lenora is palpable, and is compelling enough that we root for Arvin unwaveringly even as he takes justice into his own hands and executes morally dubious vengeance on bullies and rapists alike. Since they’re not technically related, it would be all too easy for their relationship to take a romantic bent, especially given that Lenora is constantly victimized by rapey male characters and Arvin is constantly defending and avenging her honor; this sort of intrepid male protector / meek female protectee relationship is one of the most staple tropes of the classic Americana romance. I found the choice to maintain the platonic nature of that relationship to be one of the film’s most winning elements.

And now, about the role women are given in this story. Please note that I intentionally use the phrase “the role women are given” versus “the role women play” because the first, like all the female characters in the film, is maddeningly passive. Let’s start with Lenora. Actually, let’s start with the potted plant law.

In brief, the potted plant law (a close cousin of the sexy lamp law) states that if you can replace a female character with an inanimate object such as a potted plant without putting a dent in the plot, then that character has no bearing on the story and functions more as a passive device or object than as a character. While I’m defining my terms, I should also remind you about fridging: when a female character’s only purpose in the story is to be killed, kidnapped, violated or otherwise maligned in order to motivate a male character’s plot-driving actions.

To set the stage, here’s an exhaustive list of the female characters in this film. First, there’s Lenora. Then there’s Haley Bennet’s Charlotte, Riley Keough’s Sandy, Mia Wasikowska’s Helen, and Kristen Griffith’s Emma. We’ll also count Preston’s wife (according to the credits, her name is Cynthia and she’s played by Lucy Faust, in case you were wondering) and Abby Glover’s Pamela Reaster (only referred to by male characters as “the Reaster girl”). Calling these two “characters” at all is a bit of a stretch, since neither has any identity in the movie - but every film has minor supporting characters like that, so if the conclusion of my analysis is that the other female characters can hold their own, I won’t hold Cynthia and “the Reaster girl” against the film.

Back to Lenora.

While, as I said earlier, Arvin’s intense love for Lenora is palpable, Lenora’s love for Arvin seems much more insipid, passive and flat - as does everything else about Lenora. She’s a weak person, but that could be forgiven; weak people can make for strong characters. Lenora, however, is not a strong character. Here’s what she does in this story: she is taken in by Emma, becomes the object of Arvin’s affections, is mistreated by boys at school, is abused by Preston, and dies, which sends Arvin into a grief-stricken, vengeful rage. Now apply the potted plant law. If you replaced Lenora with a succulent, would the plot be in any way fractured? In this case, no - the film’s events could transpire just the same. Lenora has no active will or agency; she just floats passively on the currents of male characters’ actions.

Passively, inexpressively, Lenora acquiesces to Preston’s advances - and while I don’t think it would have been more in character if she’d kicked up a scene, I do think the film failed, as so many of its predecessors have done, to do its abuse victim the courtesy of acknowledging and delving into her emotional experience. The film doesn’t bother to show the psychological undercurrents anyone in Lenora’s place would experience - the doubt, trauma, confliction, guilt. TDATT fails Lenora the way countless films before it have failed their female characters: a woman is victimized, but the film cares more about the trauma her victimization causes a male character than it does about the trauma the woman herself undergoes.

I guess this is a good time to state a rule that should be obvious, yet has eluded countless storytellers: sexual violence should never be commodified or trivialized. Casual depictions of rape and abuse are far too frequent on screen; these are deeply grave subjects, and the way they’re so often thrown about flagrantly and dismissively on screen not only desensitizes us to something to which we should be very, very sensitive, but also perpetuates rape culture in a very serious manner.

If a story includes sexual violence, then it needs to be handled with the full and appropriate gravity. This means, first and foremost, that the trauma an abuse victim has to deal with should be appropriately addressed. Game of Thrones is one of the most notorious examples of mainstream trivialization of sexual violence. When rape, assault and abuse are portrayed as virtually everyday happenings, it is no surprise that the psychological consequences that resonate throughout victims’ lives long after the occurence itself are all but completely overlooked.

But GoT isn’t the only show that fails to show the fallout abuse victims experience. Countless other shows and movies have casually, carelessly turned women into victims without bothering to explore their experiences. And the Devil all the Time adds itself to this long list.

Here’s a very simple guideline to keep in mind: any time a film focuses more on the trauma a man goes through when a woman he knows is raped than it does on the trauma the woman herself goes through, that film is doing it wrong. This is a hill I will die on.

So here’s the question: why is it so consistent an occurrence for films to fail their female survivors like this? I postulate that it’s because the majority of the voices telling these stories are male voices, and it is very difficult for most men to fully wrap their minds around the psychological experience of a female rape victim. So instead, they focus on what they are better able to imagine: the psychological experience of a man who loves a woman who is raped.

Anyway, let’s get back to the point; we’re still not done with Lenora.

However, there's not much else to say about her. Once she’s been loved by Arvin and abused by Preston, she’s fridged via a sort of accidental suicide - which, obnoxiously, is the closest she comes to having any actual, active agency (spoiler: she still ends up falling passively victim to the whims of the universe). Take this as a dark and twisted perspective if you will - I’m certainly judging myself for thinking it, so you may as well join me - but the act of killing herself would have been the only active decision Lenora made in the film, if she’d done it. It would have been horrible and heartbreaking, but it would have been agency on her part, albeit agency for the worse. But instead, she dies by an unintentional slip after second-guessing her intended suicide.

Then, from her six-foot-under fridge, she serves the purpose of motivating Arvin in his righteous, loving wrath to avenge her. Arvin defends her honor in death like he always did when she was alive, because even being dead couldn’t make her any more spiritless or any less capable of taking care of herself than she already was.

What about the film’s other women? Surely somewhere among the bunch there’s a female character with agency and independent identity.

Well, it’s certainly not Charlotte, Arvin’s mother. For the profound influence his father Willard has on him throughout the events of the film, you might expect Arvin to carry some echo of his mother’s influence as well. But no; Charlotte serves briefly as the object of Willard’s affections, hovers reticently in the background of Arvin’s life for a couple of scenes, and then passively and abruptly succumbs to a random illness and passes away. She’s fridged to drive Willard into the frenzied, heartbroken spiral that leads shortly to his own suicide (an actively chosen death, unlike Charlotte’s passive, arbitrary one). And it’s that spiral on Willard’s part that profoundly impacts Arvin, not the death to which the spiral is a response.

Okay, what about Sandy? The sister of Sebastian Stann’s sheriff, Sandy falls in with serial killer-slash-partner Carl (Jason Clarke) and quickly grows disillusioned; she doesn’t enjoy his whole shtick of kidnapping young men, taking photos while he forces them to hook up with Sandy, and then killing them. I’m getting tired of using the word “passive” in this article, but once again I find it to be the most applicable: over the years the film encompasses, Sandy passively follows Carl’s lead, hating the life he has brought her into but taking no action to get herself out of it.

If Sandy had actually run out on Carl midway through, not just thought about it and then given up, maybe she’d have seized some agency for herself. As we approach the end of the film, she drifts in the direction of making an active, plot-driving decision - but she never arrives. Arvin kills her - he thinks it’s self-defense, but it turns out she was never even a threat to him: Carl had emptied her gun of bullets, which I can’t help but see as a very direct metaphor for him removing her once chance at doing something to impact the plot.

Coming to the same conclusion about one character after another is boring, so let's be brief on the last few.

Helen, Lenora’s mother: an insipid, meek woman who, after exerting no pull of any sort to affect the story in any way, is murdered by her husband and used as the object of a (failed) attempt at resurrection. She too is nothing but a flaccid victim of men’s decisions.

Emma, Arvin’s grandmother: since Emma is the one who takes in both Arvin and Lenora when their parents pass away, she seems to me like the perfect opportunity for a female character with some impetus in the film. But she is a negligible figure; she does some baking, gets her feelings hurt when Preston snubs her baking, and… I mean, yeah, that’s about all she does.

Cynthia? Negligible. She has no lines. Her name isn’t even mentioned in the film. She’s never even the subject of a shot; she’s only there as a piece in shots that are about Preston. I believe she makes two appearances - and by the way, she’s naked in one of them, which is relevant to our point inasmuch as there’s significantly more female than male nudity in the film.

“The Reaster Girl” (Pamela, if you’re not a male character who sees her as a plot device rather than a human) - like Cynthia, negligible. She’s pretty much an object in the film, a potted plant, a lamp. She’s just there to be abused by Preston and used as a chess piece by Arvin, and is even less humanized than Lenora.

It’s worth noting that, while all the women in the film are passive and weak, they are also generally good people. On the other hand, male characters tend to be depraved or at least complex and darkly conflicted, which I would argue is because they’re all more fleshed out and closer to real humanity than the women. I recently heard the term “benevolent sexism,” and I think it perfectly describes what’s going on here. In short, benevolent sexism is misogyny that takes the form of admiration and respect. Ironically, it often goes hand in hand with sexism against men. Putting women on a pedestal and admiring their “feminine touch” or how they “brighten up a room” (often, although not necessarily, in concert with talking about men as if they’re collectively bungling, heavy-handed and thick-headed): benevolent sexism.

But if it’s complimentary, why is it problematic? I’d break the issue with benevolent sexism out into two separate points. First, this sort of misogyny ingrains the subconscious idea that women are intrinsically other; as if they’re a different species, almost. Secondly, when women are put on a pedestal and given respect for their feminine qualities, it is amazing how immediately the flipside manifests: women are seen as incapable in all other areas, and their skill sets outside their femininity are overlooked.

Here’s an example of what this looks like in application. I’m an AD (which, for the laypeople in the audience, means I run/manage film sets to keep production on schedule), but I’m also a director. I can’t tell you how many times well-meaning male collaborators have praised my attention to detail and how well I manage people by saying something along the lines of “this is why we need a woman in charge! Us dumb guys would never be able to figure all that stuff out!” And then, when the same men are stumped on something technical like how to pull off a certain shot they want, they dismiss my suggestions over and over - until, fifteen minutes later, a less qualified guy puts that very suggestion forward as his own, and it is immediately applauded and successfully implemented.

The Devil All the Time conveys a very defined worldview: women are generally good creatures, but are weak and completely lacking independent identity and personhood; and they are constantly and immutably brutalized by a world in which men - who are exclusively the ones who get to decide what shape the world takes - are generally depraved.

But I’m not just here to complain, so let’s take a constructive look at the film’s shortcomings. How could these issues have been remedied? I’ve already mentioned a couple of ways by which women might have seized agency for themselves throughout the film, but here are some more.

It would have been painfully simple for one of the women - anyone - to have been the voice of good whose influence over Arvin was pitted against Willard’s and could be seen reverberating through his decision in the film. It could have been his mother, his grandmother, even Lenora. That would have been a mediocre form of impact on the story, but it would have been something. It seems to me that, since Arvin’s actions and decisions are all about Lenora, it would have been easy for her to have pushed him to be a better person and resist his vices when she was alive, and for him to remember and be impacted by that after her death.

I’d even have been happier if the female characters - even just one - had some personality! Helen could have been a flaming spitfire! Emma could have been a consummate bitch! I love female characters who are difficult, are assholes, are infuriating, because most women just aren’t written that way. Again, it’s the pedestal effect; there’s often this expectation on women in entertainment to be good, while no such expectation is placed upon men. Check out this article on how that concept has made all the recent gender-swapped reboots boring.

As always, I find myself at the end of a much longer piece than I intended to write, so I’ll spare you my additional reflections on this topic and finish with this abbreviated overview: The Devil All the Time takes place in a reality where women exist only as devices and objects in the lives and machinations of men; a reality where women have no agency, no independent identity, no active impact on the world in which they exist, no humanity or function outside that for which they are called upon by the men who move actively through the world.