and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
Also, hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
-----------------------------
Jane Got a Gun – Movie 2016 USA Available on DVD or Netflix
Not a great western, but an "oddly" satisfying one
Jane and her “husband” Ham live in an isolated farmhouse with their five-year-old daughter Katie. One day Ham rides home with several serious bullet wounds. As Jane is attending to his injuries, Ham tells her that "the Bishop Boys are coming". Jane goes to organise a cowboy to help protect them.
There is so much wrong with most westerns that it seems almost churlish to criticise any western that is watchable – this is actually a story about the place of (white) women in the (white) west – at least women aren’t irrelevant or merely decorative in this western as they usually are.
Okay, I’m in my 60s and possibly a bit cynical, but it’s hard to buy the idea that any (white) bloke in 19th Century U.S. would not know that women were seen as sexual objects/commodities by some (white) blokes in that time and place. But this seems an essential assumption behind this story. What, was he naïve? Stupid?
So we have a script written in the 21st Century by 3 (presumably all white) men (one is definitely a white Australian) explaining that a (white) bloke went to war for four years in the 19th Century and needed a woman to explain to him that his fiancée – with whom he had sex before going to war (cos when hasn’t it been a good idea for some bloke to get an unwed girl knocked up and bugger off for four years leaving her in poverty to fend for herself?)… that his fiancée
a) needed men to protect her from other men when travelling west
b) might have been taken advantage of by the men protecting her from other men
c) that the next bloke what she eventually shacked up with/had a child with might have actually been protecting her from other men.
At this point in the review writing process I am about to tear my hair out, which is not a good idea for a little white lady with my crap hair genes and at my advanced crap hair stage of life...
But does anyone even have a clue any more about the history of contraception, the regulation of contraceptive information by those in charge (not women) the treatment of STDs and their ENORMOUS impact on the history of the treatment or life options available to women over time????? Is it time for someone to make a doco putting this into perspective?
Naturally there would be an added LOT of input required from women of colour...
It’s the 21st Century and this is still the go-to syllogism peeps:
“All men are good.
Good women only need one man.
Any woman shagging more than one man in a lifetime is ipso facto a slut.”
(Cos equal pay and opportunity and all babies come from god and stuff, so just say no cos they’ll believe you mean it …) Got it?
(Well… there might have been women in this story who were not white. I doubt they had as much fun as Jane. We certainly do not hear from them.) And if this sounds like a tired, jaded rambling rant that makes no sense, well, shame on you for not understanding. It’s not my responsibility to 'splain it to you – if you give a damn you will work it out, and if you don’t give a damn, well, float you then.
Okay… rant finished but only because really, where do I even begin… ?
Did I say that as far as Westerns go this actually not a bad one? Here's a little summary of the story... with spoilers...
The bad guy what took sexual advantage of Jane (the woman who turned out to be a not-really-slut/ victim) actually gets revenged on by Jane (the not-really-slut/ victim). She takes in her stride the haste with which the former-fiancée judged her/believed what some other coalhole (the bad guy) said about her, and I will forgive her for forgiving him because… this is so much better than the average western.
Sort of.
I enjoyed the moment when she shot the extra bad baddy so much I wound the DVD back several times so I could enjoy shooting him over and over. THAT’s what made it satisfying. The ONLY thing.
FMG, if I were not a privileged white lady living in a world where “bad man” is a relative term, I guess this sort of story would really piss me off.
But do yourself a favour and just watch Godless instead.
