Rebecca Solnit | Yes Really Titley

Sleeping with the Enemy, the 1991 sequel to Pretty Woman, is rated R for “wife abuse terror and a sex scene.” Said sex scene is itself a piece of wife-abuse terror, coming as the nauseating post-script to the violent beating of Julia Roberts’ Laura, a young, reluctant housewife, by Patrick Bergin’s Martin, an older, finance-psycho husband. (Richard Gere was unavailable to reprise his role.) After retiring from the sex trade and volunteering for her local library, Laura appears to be employed as a performance artist improvising scenes of domestic bliss with Martin at cocktail parties and sailing trips hosted by their Cape Cod neighbours. Away from the floor-to-ceiling windows of their modernist beach home, Martin is a cyclone of physical and emotional violence in which Laura is barely surviving.

The menu items of American cinema’s romantic fairytales often cross over into the stuff of nightmares. Lavish gifts are a form of economic coercion. Spontaneity is a campaign of chaos making and alienation from support networks. One partner’s wealth serves as a gilded cage for the other. ‘Princess’ is not a title granted by birth, but a debasing, infantilizing pet name. The handsome prince is a depraved, misogynist turd.

On top of everything else, Laura’s asshole ex damaged her gorgeous bathroom.

Sleeping with the Enemy takes elements grounded in reality and sculpts them into a taut woman-in-peril terror picture. The establishment of danger at the hands of Martin is mercifully short and effective, making some of the hows of Laura’s flight irrelevant. (She surreptitiously jumps from a sailboat during an unexpected storm, appearing to have drowned. How did she know her neighbour would invite them out under circumstances she could take advantage of at the exact right timing to catch the greyhound bus leaving town?) The point is that it is time to leave, and she does, escaping to the gold-dappled idyll of a leafy college-town in Iowa. Martin, however, discovers her tracks and chases her down, cutting through bright groups of late-summer revelers in an all-black, billowy trench that flutters behind him like a fart he can’t outrun.

One can appreciate a queasy feeling upon learning that the facets of domestic violence have been sculpted into a genre deeply intertwined with exploitation. However, Sleeping deploys its genre tropes to nimbly bypass common and frustrating cultural diversionary tactics from what should be the true focus of intimate partner violence cases: the victim. The film accepts Martin as a monster and does not siphon off our emotional investment in Laura at any time by getting into the hows and whys of who he is. The usual interrogation of victims’ reasons and timelines for staying are neutered for a practical reason: she had to learn how to swim before making her escape! In fact, Laura’s terrorized gaze is the storytelling lens of the film and it rarely lets its guard down.

If we agree real-world nightmares share DNA with the plot details of romantic fantasies, then it fits that we would also lose sleep over the implications of the grand gestures made by male romantic heroes. Going back to Sleeping’s preceding film, Pretty Woman, we can find some chilling examples of subtle, unquestioned male entitlement. At the beginning of the film, a female romantic partner accuses Edward (Gere) of requiring her at his “beck and call,” a charge he denies, though he has only just previously requested she fly from New York City to Los Angeles at a moment’s notice. How will it be different for Vivian (Roberts) after he “rescues” her at the end of the film? Edward has changed his business practices for the better, but his intimate relationships have retained a similar pallor and are, in fact, beyond the realm of forgivable during the events of Sleeping.

Those threadbare jeans should have scored a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

Upon arrival in Iowa, Laura finds a love interest in her next door neighbour Ben (Kevin Anderson), a professor of theatre at the local college. Amy Gentry, in a critique of Sleeping for The Paris Review (which makes many of the same points made here), describes him as the following:

“His idea of a magical first date involves leading her, blindfolded, into the drama department after hours, setting her up on a pitch-black stage, and then watching from the audience as he turns on the spotlight. She fidgets nervously, unsure whether she’s about to be filmed, or possibly murdered; it’s all very romantic.”

Ben has a habit of surprising Laura from the periphery of her vision. He also intuits that Laura has escaped horrific violence and assists her in finding work in her new town under her false identity. He puts his stage skills to good use in concocting a gender-swap masquerade for Laura in order for her to visit her elderly mother, free from Martin picking up her scent. He could have accompanied her to bear witness, to provide protection and run interference if needed. His reasons for not doing so are unexplored. It also must be said that he has an ass that belongs in a remote location so admirers can make arduous, spiritual pilgrimages to it. A question for Laura looms over Ben: is her lingering terror understandably running a vein through what could be a sweet and tender relationship or is it alerting her to a pattern similar to the one Martin previously laid down? Sleeping leaves this unresolved.

He is doing his best to help.

If Martin’s wealth created a gilded cage for Laura, Ben’s ‘help’ constructs a shrouded one for her to occupy. Based as it is on a lie, Laura’s freedom from Martin is precarious. To live life underground is to accept another form of instability and robs Laura of the dignity of fully participating in her community. Rebecca Solnit, in her essay “A Short History of Silence,” writes of misogynist violence,

“Many women are refugees in their own country; many women are forced to disappear from their own homes and lives and take up secret lives in secret locations.”

Women fleeing violence are forced to trade their voice for their security and Sleeping exploits this truth while also avoiding the administrative details necessary to make sense of it. How, specifically, did she plan and fund her escape without Martin figuring it out? How, specifically, did Ben get her a job in a new town without her social security number nor her references? That there are no real-world specifics to tone and shape the narrative allows us the luxury of thinking that this story is an exaggeration, that the details we are given are to outsized to fit with what we know happens in ‘real life.’ This, too, is silence.

Sleeping With The Enemy was directed by Joseph Ruben.

WORKS CITED

Gentry, Amy. “Setting Boundaries.” theparisreview.org. November 25, 2016. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/25/setting-boundaries/

Pretty Woman. Dir: Garry Marshall. 1990.

Solnit, Rebecca. “A Short History of Silence.” The Mother of All Questions. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2017.

Sharon Stone’s Carly Norris – a Manhattan book editor – moves from ‘the village’ into the Sliver building, a ruddy coloured high-rise, thrusting its tip into the sky like it was asked to solve a math problem at the blackboard. We primarily see the building from the ground up, its length and width either exciting or intimidating. The truth, however, is this: it’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it.

The Sliver building can be limp and uninspired in key aspects: cramped, badly designed kitchens; no in suite laundry; mirrored, sliding closet doors-a tacky way to otherwise enliven a boxy master bedroom. The building can also pound away incessantly at you with its gauche aesthetic. Every bathroom has fixtures and layouts ideal for staging pornography scenes. The male tenants are leering creeps and are sometimes murderous on top of it. The overhead lighting cuts out just when you need it most (I.e. running for your life from a homicidal maniac in a steep stairwell.) The owner is disinterested in repairs while also surveilling his tenants via surreptitious spy cameras installed in their apartments.

Girl, put some tape over your webcam!

A new Baldwin is manufactured for every role the Alec model shows interest in but eventually turns down and Sliver‘s prototype is named William, who plays the building’s voyeuristic owner, Zeke. Zeke’s apartment suggests a certain arrested development with its student dormitory disarray, but a secret central command for his spy operation hiding within his apartment tells us otherwise. There is a control and attention to detail and a design sensibility (like if Batman commanded the bridge of the Enterprise) that betray the maturity and patience it takes to see through a project of such scope. His spy rec room is a sanctuary for his secrets. The residents of his building are not granted the same privilege of a private space in their units. Zeke oversees all as a passive watcher, content to label what he sees as ‘soap operas,’ scooping up knowledge about the private lives of his tenants, but only acting on what he see when it furthers his interests (sex, murder, preferred flower arrangements of potential dates).

Carly’s work as an editor of books personifies in her a belief in narrative, particularly in the activity of articulating and bolstering aspects of story that demand action. She is somewhat turned on by Zeke’s voyeurism, but is eventually sickened by Zeke’s insistence that they only watch. Carly eventually gains the pallor and disheveledness of an individual who has spent extended time in isolation with pornographic cinema. She has watched plenty of sex between consenting adults, but she has also witnessed secret addictions, domestic violence and a mother’s rejection of her daughter’s assertion that she has been sexually assaulted by her step-father. Her shame for her transgression of spying overwhelms her conviction that she should act on what she has seen.

Can’t stop nosing in other people’s business

In a March 2018 interview, Sharon Stone reminisces with invigorating frankness about the state of mind and motives propelling Sliver’s production:

“Well, frankly, most people making that film were nuts. They were trying to repackage me after Basic Instinct and I think they were just attempting to take that movie’s energy and squeeze another hit out of it. I think they kind of did it but they could have done a better job.”

Carly is scripted as a woman consistently surprised at the doings of others. Stone, however, radiates a vivid intelligence that shreds this enforced naiveté and layers nuances into material meant to be consumed superficially. Instead of being a separate entity we relate to via her motivation and choices, Carly, due to her embodiment by Stone, becomes an audience surrogate, lamenting the destructive ego of the surveillance state.

Joe Eszterhas, the writer of Sliver, Basic Instinct and other canonical works of A-list smut, liberally tinted his work with feminist flourishes. An Eszterhausian woman is equipped to rail against the paper bag authority figures who arbitrarily stand in her way. Clothing is optional. In Showgirls, a woman is prompted to violently fight the systems of oppression around her. In Basic Instinct, a man is drawn to a submissive relationship with a queer woman who is deploying her homicidal tendencies toward clearing out patriarchal excess. In Sliver, a woman destroys her means of seeing with a penetrative and intrusive gaze after being seduced then sickened by its soullessness.

Justice Judy

Earlier in the film, Carly’s assistant Judy (Colleen Camp) cheers on Carly’s move to the Sliver as an opportunity for “new adventures, new horizons, new lovers, new orgasms!” Carly has desires that are dangerous or benign depending on how they are acted out while Zeke’s gets off observing individuals crush themselves under the weight of their secrets. Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, relates a story of classical lore where Justice “stood at the gates of Hades deciding who would go in[. To] go in was to be chosen for refinement through suffering, adventure, transformation, a punishing route to the reward that is the transformed self.” Perhaps Judy, with her enthusiasm for “new adventures, etc.,” is Justice for Carly, gently guiding her towards the hell of dating Zeke so that a transformed version of herself might emerge. After Carly fires a bullet between the eyes of Zeke’s pervy control room she says flatly, “Get a life.” It’s an admonishment as much to herself as it is to him.

Sliver was released in 1993 and was directed by Phillip Noyce.

Originally published on January 17, 2019.

Updated January 22, 2019 to include new post category and tags.

WORKS CITED

Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Viking, 2005

Thompson, Simon. “Sharon Stone on Her First $100 Paycheck And Her Fight To Direct.” Forbes.com. March 7, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonthompson/2018/03/07/sharon-stone-on-her-first-100-paycheck-and-her-fight-to-direct/

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