- 1 Lin Waterhouse, “Daniel Woodrell: Voice of the Other Ozarks,” Ozarks Magazine, March 2007,
https:// (...)
1Explaining how she and her producer, Anne Rosellini, became interested in adapting Winter’s Bone, a “country noir” novel by Daniel Woodrell as he subtitled it1, independent film director Debra Granik said that after reading a lot of scripts, she found that:
- 2 Imogen Carter, “Women directors: the new generation, Debra Granik, Nanette Burstein and Sanaa Hamri (...)
A lot of the stories featuring women were truly disheartening. When I’m passed a script that deals with women involved with sex work, it’s like, “OK, what are you going to do to shed new light on this way of earning money?” It’s too familiar. There’s been so little room to do something new with these archetypes. So, all of a sudden to get this kick-ass female, who embodied a western hero in a girl’s body… she was immediately appealing.2
- 3 Daily Motion, “Debra Granik Interview: Winter’s Bone,” accessed May 5, 2023, .
2The genesis of the film and the description of the female protagonist as “a western hero in a girl’s body” reveal a desire to go against the grain of conventional representations of women. They also suggest the film’s engagement with at least two Hollywood genres, the western and the woman’s film, which are usually pitted against each other rather than combined. In another interview, Granik mentions the influence of still other genres: “it’s been said it’s a country noir. I thought it was a neo-realist drama… I’m very open on how it’s described but I would say that it’s the tale of a girl’s journey with suspense.”3
- 4 Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home is Where (...)
- 5 Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Stud (...)
- 6 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: MacMillan, 1984), 81-83 and (...)
3These statements are indicative of Granik’s personal appropriation of Hollywood genres through a generic hybridity that defies the conventional genre divisions along gender lines first posited by Thomas Elsaesser in his famous essay “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama”4 and given a feminist dimension by Christine Gledhill5 (1987) in the wake of the theoretical approach developed by Teresa de Lauretis, which includes Hollywood genres among the technologies of gender in that they “correlate sex to cultural content” and produce “cultural conceptions of male and female”6.
- 7 de Lauretis, Technologies,” 2.
4The feminist dimension of such a transformation seems obvious, especially since Granik has repeatedly asserted her feminist leanings. She is fully aware of the hegemonic power of Hollywood and the need to change the place of women in the film industry in order to redress the imbalance in representations, and to engage in a “feminist rewriting of cultural narratives”7 as she acknowledged in an interview with Lisa Durand:
- 8 Durand, “interview,” my translation.
I feel that a lot of great literary stories have been written from a male point of view, with a male gaze. But there are a lot of female novelists as well as male novelists who try to inject female subjectivity into their novels.8
- 9 Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (London: IB Tauris, 2005), 166.
- 10 Janet Staiger, “Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History,” Film Criticis (...)
- 11 Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2 : L’image-temps (Paris : Editions de minuit, 1985), 281-291.
5This transformation is in line with Geoff King’s thesis about the generic identity of independent features where “familiar genre location is sometimes abandoned, complicated or undermined”9. It also exemplifies Janet Staiger’s thesis about the use of generic hybridity in the independent sector as a practice of “minority or subordinated groups” that consists in creating “internal hybrids” by resorting to “genre mixing or genre parody to engage dialogue with or criticize the dominant”10. Genre mixing practices belong to what Gilles Deleuze calls “the minor cinema,” a cinema that “deterritorializes” dominant film language in order to express the voice of the oppressed11. What these observations have in common is their emphasis on the fact that films made outside the dominant film industries are corrupted forms, in the sense that they represent subversive attempts to undermine the established system of genres. A minor film, however, is not simply an oppositional work. Rather, as William Brown explains:
- 12 William Brown, “Minor Cinema,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward Branigan an (...)
It is a work that “speaks” – at least in part – the “major” language, but in such a way that it troubles it, makes it “stutter.” Furthermore, the major language is not rejected for the sake of some “return” to a prior existence (which would be to root the minor in the past), but it is reappropriated by the minor such that the minor exists within the major. This reappropriation helps, after Deleuze, to express the impossibility of living under domination.12
- 13 King, American Independent Cinema, 166.
- 14 Martine Beugnet, “A Mediology of Corruption: Film, Corporeality, and Productive Impurity,” Film Jou (...)
6What is suggested here is the transformative potential of minor cinema to create new forms, rather than to destroy dominant forms. Similarly, while it may be argued that Winter’s Bone abandons familiar genre location/resorts to genre mixing in order to deterritorialize mainstream cinema, it cannot be denied that, like many independent features, the film also “trades on clearly marked genre location”13. In this sense, I will argue that Winter’s Bone’s free appropriation of the generic conventions of Hollywood cinema unleashes a creative potential and provides the ingredients for a “productive corruption”14.
- 15 Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen (Cambridge, MS: Da Capo Press, 1981), 167-197.
7To show how Winter’s Bone productively corrupts Hollywood genres, and how Granik thus makes her own contribution to this highly conventional edifice, I will explore the strategies of generic hybridity that blur the distinction of genres along gender lines. I will first show how the heroine of the woman’s film is endowed with the agency of two of the archetypal noir anti-heroes identified by Foster Hirsch15, the “non-professional investigator” and the “noir victim,” an ordinary man unwillingly confronted to the criminal world. I will then explore the place of domesticity compared with action genres where scenes that stage domestic life are mere foils to advance the criminal plot, and show how Winter’s Bone corrupts the conventions of both women’s films and action genres in two ways: by making domesticity the locus of action, and by making violence the locus of emotion. These transformations will ultimately allow me to consider the generative effect of corruption, which helps to make the film an overt feminist critique of patriarchal neoliberal capitalism.
8The film tells the story of seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) who has been acting as a surrogate mother to her two younger siblings Sonny and Ashley in their rundown property in the Ozark Mountains, Missouri since their mother became mentally ill and since Jessup, their crystal-meth-cooking father, disappeared. She teaches the children to shoot, cook and survive in this geographically and socially hostile environment. The film follows her nightmarish search for her father, who has failed to appear in court after using the family home as bail, to prove that he is dead in order to avoid forfeiture of the bond on the house and be able to keep the family property. In the course of her investigation, she comes face to face with the criminal activities of cattle farmers involved in the production and trafficking of methamphetamine, and understands that her father was murdered on the orders of Thump Milton.
- 16 Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf (...)
- 17 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana Universit (...)
- 18 Doane, The Desire to Desire, 3.
- 19 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 82.
9By focusing on the domestic predicaments of a young woman, the film seems to be in keeping with the descriptions of the “woman’s film” given by feminist film scholars Mary Ann Doane and Jeanine Basinger. It fits Basinger’s definition of the woman’s film as “a movie that places at the center of its universe a female who is trying to deal with the emotional, social, and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the fact that she is a woman”16, and Doane’s description of women’s films as films that “treat problems defined as ‘female’ (problems revolving around domestic life, the family, children, self-sacrifice…”17. Ree, like the heroines of the woman’s film, be they “unwed mother,” “waiting wife,” or “abandoned mistress”18, is confronted with the predicament of raising children on her own, with an absent father/breadwinner. She also faces the risk of homelessness and of losing the custody of her brother and sister, putting her in the position of “anguished mother.” So, as a teenage surrogate mother, the Ree character fits all those categories, potentiating the melodramatic impact of the woman’s film. However, the film differs from the woman’s film through the introduction, within a domestic universe, of a criminal plot that “disrupts the masculine-feminine polarity” characteristic of film genres19.
- 20 Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991),
10Ree’s search for her father has much in common with the investigation of the lone private eye in noir adaptations of hard-boiled novels such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, or Murder My Sweet and that of the “personally implicated investigator” who is “in a position of marked inferiority, in regard both to the criminal conspirators and to the police and seeks to restore himself to a position of security by eradicating the enigma” as Frank Krutnik posits about The Dark Corner and Out of the Past20 in his monograph about masculinity in classical film noir.
- 21 Hirsch, The Dark Side, 168. He explains that “The Big Sleep is arranged as a sequence of interviews (...)
11Ree’s investigation is shown in a chronological sequence of repeated, failed attempts to discover the truth. She walks the barren paths of the region to interview potential witnesses who might know something about her father’s whereabouts, only to be violently rebuffed and sent on red herrings, or warned to leave the situation alone. When she refuses to comply, she suffers a terrible beating by the women of Thump Milton’s clan, and wins a Pyrrhic victory when the women finally decide to take her to her father’s body in a murky swamp, where they cut off his hands with a chainsaw as proof that he is dead, which ultimately allows her to keep the family home. Ree’s investigation is similar to the obstacle course run by Marlowe, the noir anti-hero of Howard Hawks’s adaptation of The Big Sleep in which the strictly linear narrative, as Foster Hirsch shows, paradoxically highlights the lack of structure, the randomness, of the hermeneutic quest, and the failure of the male protagonist to maintain control over events21.
12Ree is also in the position of “the noir victim”, whose domestic bliss is threatened by the intrusion of crime and who is forced to take the law into his own hands to compensate for the inefficiency of the institutions: in order to keep her home and look after her siblings, she must contend with a blind judicial system, a dysfunctional local police force, and criminals who are organized in a network. In the classic noir Kiss of Death, and The Big Heat for example, the moments of domestic bliss experienced by the male protagonists are interrupted by an element linked to the criminal plot: the romantic confession of Nick Bianco’s new wife that she has been in love with him all her life is interrupted by a phone call from the district attorney, announcing bad news; his joy at sharing a privileged moment with his roller-skating daughters, who happily run up to meet him on their way home, is spoiled when he picks up the newspaper on the front porch and reads that his worst enemy is about to be released from prison. Likewise, Dave Bannion’s congenial steak dinner with his wife, during which they sip beer from the same glass, and discuss the joys of companionate marriage is followed by the murder of his wife, killed by a bomb planted in their car. In these films noirs, the world of crime is thrust into family life, forcing the male protagonist into action.
13Similarly, in Winter’s Bone, several scenes of everyday life are interrupted by bearers of bad news who, in one way or another, are connected to the criminal world. For example, the arrival of the sheriff with the bad news of Jessup’s disappearance, interrupts Ree and Sonny who are busy splitting wood and collecting the logs to take to the house (06:45-10:02). The same pattern emerges with the arrival of Blond Milton, who brutally interrupts the preparation of dinner by banging on the door and shouting loudly and angrily and forcing Ree into his truck to take her to a burnt shack and convince her that her father blew himself up cooking meth inside (00:28:04-00:20:10). Another interruption occurs when her uncle Tear Drop arrives to break the bad news of her father’s death (00:41:26-00:43:57). He stops the engine of the wood splitter Ree is operating and advises her to sell the timberland before the bail bondsmen seize it. He then pulls a bag of crank from his pocket, scoops some out, snorts it, and offers her some, this time showing not only the disruption of everyday life by the arrival of criminals but also the conflation between the criminal world and family life.
- 22 Basinger, A Woman’s View, 17-18.
- 23 Doane, The Desire to Desire, 135.
- 24 Doane, The Desire to Desire, 36.
14The action scenes in which Ree is alternatively an investigator and a noir victim are all aimed at saving her family, thus blurring the distinction established by Elsaesser between action genres and family/domestic melodrama. Contrary to the heroine of the woman’s film who, according to Basinger, “on the whole […] is passive, internal, psychological in its story and characterization. […], action being the man’s prerogative and not the woman’s”22, Ree does not lack agency, but actively reacts to problems typically encountered by heroines of women’s films and by noir anti-heroes. She is endowed with “the investigating gaze […] delegat[ed] to [a] male figure who is on the side of the law” in the woman’s film23. As an active female protagonist, she finds herself emancipated from what Doane calls “the feminine condition –masochism, hysteria, neurosis, paranoia”24 of the woman’s film that involves reconciling the spectator with the terms of the given social order by activating a pathos embracing and celebrating loss. The film thus differs from Elsaesser’s, Basinger’s and Doane’s descriptions of the woman’s film in the methods that Ree uses to solve her domestic problem, which are closer to those used in action genres. The lines between the two genres are further blurred by the treatment of domestic matters as vital issues. They have the same dramatic intensity as scenes of action whose purpose is to save lives.
- 25 She Does Podcast, “Debra Granik How to Skin a Squirrel,” February 25, 2015.
15The film is composed of scenes that Granik calls “slices of life”25, which devote minute attention to the tasks of everyday life. Mundane activities such as hanging clothes, cutting and storing wood, feeding the dog, cooking, preparing meals, taking care of the children are foregrounded. As in film noir, these scenes are interrupted by unwelcome visitors who come in with bad or false news, to spark or keep the criminal investigation going on. Although the editing choice of intercutting domestic and criminal scenes is in line with the classical film noir idea that crime has invaded all the strata of society, in Winter’s Bone, the implicit hierarchy between the two spheres is reversed. Contrary to film noir where the criminal investigation is interrupted by transient moments of domestic bliss, in Winter’s Bone, it is Ree’s nurturing activities that are repeatedly jeopardized by criminal circumstances.
- 26 Chantal Akerman herself commented that such repetitive acts had something to do with the minute pre (...)
16Given that the plot is centered on the threat of homelessness, these activities are anything but mundane. Keeping warm and clean, finding and preparing food, caring for children are all vital life skills. And indeed, they are staged as moments of gripping action, such as when Ree teaches the children how to shoot, skin, and gut a squirrel to eat (00:39:15-00:41:25). These “slices of life” echo Chantal Akerman’s groundbreaking method in Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which consists in showing the daily chores of the eponymous character performed in real time and in full duration,26 while the murder takes place off-screen. The film pays tribute to women’s work, and reverses the implicit hierarchy between the criminal sphere as the realm of masculine cultural values and the feminized sphere of family and domesticity, unworthy of attention.
- 27 Doane, The Desire to Desire, 134.
17The reconfiguration of priorities between the domestic and criminal spheres is patent in a scene that turns what Doane calls “the paradigmatic woman’s space —the home” into the source of action instead of “yok[ing it] to dread”27 (00:34:20-00:39:25). In this scene, Ree Dolly returns from the burnt shack where Blond Milton has taken her. Believing he has convinced her that her father died there and pretending he wants to help her, he offers to take her brother Sonny and possibly Ashlee off her hands and raise them. She refuses very bluntly, and they get into an argument. The point of contention then shifts to the burnt shack: Ree explodes in anger and tells Blond that her father cannot have died there. She spits at Blond’s feet, shouts “God damn you! You must think I’m a stupid idiot. There’s weed growing chin high in that place. It must be a year since that place blew” and angrily marches back to her house (fig. 1).
Figure 1
Winter’s Bone dir. Debra Granik
© M6Video
The scene then cuts to a family scene where Ree teaches Sonny and Ashlee how to shoot a gun. They are interrupted by Gail’s arrival, carrying her baby in a car seat. Ree greets her friend and tenderly looks at the baby. This scene perfectly illustrates the intermingling of domestic and criminal matters.
- 28 This is even more striking in semi-documentary noirs such as The Naked City (Jules Dassin 1948) or (...)
18First of all, contrary to classical film noir where the transitions from the criminal to the domestic spheres are signaled by a sudden visual change from low-key to high-key lighting28 or a fade-out (Kiss of Death), in this scene the transition is invisible, suggesting that the criminal and the domestic universes are one and the same. The absence of boundary between the two universes is suggested by the unchanging light and the profilmic movement of Ree as she walks from her investigative to her caring function. A shot of Ree walking away from Blond in anger cuts to a closer shot of Ashlee and Sonny running around, picking up empty cans and bottles from the ground, and placing them on a picnic table in their yard, preparing to learn how to shoot a gun. The function of the cut is purely spatio-temporal because its severing effect is mitigated by the continuity of the characters’ movements within the frame, which attenuates the distance between the criminal and the domestic universes. It suggests that Ree moves quickly from one universe to the other, and places her two missions as an observing investigator and as a nurturing surrogate mother on an equal footing. Both missions have to do with “survival” —a word she herself uses to describe her teaching her siblings how to use a gun.
- 29 “Having things that cannot be solved with a bullet, that’s ‘dark’ for American executives. It is ea (...)
19Secondly, contrary to generic expectations, the handling of guns takes place within a purely domestic environment since there are no guns during Ree and Blond Milton’s argument, otherwise extremely violent. The confrontation that concerns a domestic matter —the custody of the children— is staged like a classic Western showdown. It resorts to shot/reverse shots that get closer and closer to capture Ree’s mounting anger. It ends with Ree’s spitting at Blond’s feet, in sign of disrespect and disgust, in pure Clint Eastwood style. The escalating violence is backed up by a dissonant tremolo of string instruments reminiscent of tense Western scenes. Contrary to western movies, the argument remains purely verbal — no gun is drawn, no shot is fired, no “bullet of emotion” to use the term used by Granik to describe the tendency of Hollywood films to “solve things with a bullet” in order to get rid of emotion29. Guns, however, appear in the next scene in a domestic context, stripped of their adventurous connotation where Ree explains and shows her brother and sister how to use a gun, not to avenge oneself but to eat. Gun-handling is not a display of violence but a necessary technical skill to ensure survival.
20The confrontational shot/reverse shots and rapid editing of the previous scene stand in contrast with the congeniality of the family scene that resorts to two- and three-shot sequences. The closer shots are used to capture the children’s concentration, trying to do their best within the family unit. Along with the lateral tracking shot, they suggest the strong emotional ties binding them together. The colorful plastic stool they use to lean on is a reminder that they are children who still play and use props to help them safely learn skills and be independent. The danger of guns is highlighted first verbally when Ree tells the children it is not a game: “Come here, look at this Ash. Quit playing around. Come here,” and then sets out the elementary safety rules on operating a gun: “Now the most important thing is to not put your finger on the trigger unless you’re ready to shoot, you’re aimed at your target. And don’t ever, —both of you look at me— never point this at each other, not ever. All right?” Secondly, the danger is also signaled through her cautious gestures. She is careful to always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. Although the first gun is probably unloaded, Ree treats it like a loaded gun, in compliance with elementary safety rules. Realistically, when it lets out a blast, the peaceful, gentle characters are startled, including Ree who is used to gunshots. Contrary to action films and westerns where guns are commonplace props handled by unflinching shooters, the use of a gun is shown to be no trivial matter. It is a domestic skill to be acquired in order to be able to kill animals for food, not an instrument to display manliness. The scene perfectly illustrates Granik’s criticism of the “bullet of emotion,” the reliance on firearms to solve problems in commercial entertainment against which she has taken a stand:
- 30 Maria Garcia, and Debra Granik, “Thinking Her Own Thoughts,” Cinéaste 43, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 40.
The reliance on firearms to solve things in films becomes very difficult for me to participate in. It doesn’t mean that I won’t ever have a gun in a film. That would be a lie, but I want to make sure that it’s very complicated for it to be there, and its effects are known. What blindsides me is that I live in this time once again in America when gun violence is playing out so forcefully, and is dictating so much of what happens without our consent or participation30.
Figure 2
Winter’s Bone dir. Debra Granik
© M6Video
21The relocation of guns within the domestic sphere not only allows the filmmaker to contribute to denouncing the pervasiveness of firearms in US-American society, but it also runs counter both to the conventions of action films and women’s films, and profoundly alters the ideological underpinning of the treatment of violence in Hollywood cinema, which Granik calls “the blood lust” (Jackson). It also illustrates what she means by the “content shift” she advocates as a means to reach “50/50 in the film industry for directors”. In her words:
- 31 Eve Jackson, “Debra Granik: ‘There aren't many women who love making films about blood and gore,’” (...)
The content has to change. Some of the blood lust has to change. I think the sanctity of life has to be regarded more in the film industry for many more women to want to be in the mainstream of the film industry31.
Winter’s Bone clearly relies neither on “the bullet of emotion” nor on “the blood lust” to advance the plot. Instead, the film dwells on the full process that allows Ree to finally keep her home, involving facing two highly emotionally trying and devastating ordeals: standing up to Thump Milton, and overcoming the dreadful horror of having to prove that her father is dead. In keeping with the content shift that Granik advocates in those interviews, the only actual scene of violence in the film, -when Ree is beaten by Merab and her sisters in retaliation for not giving up on tracing her father as demanded by the Milton clan-, is mostly kept off-screen, with the barn door slowly lowering after the women have forced her inside (00:52:39-00:52:51). Instead, the film devotes eleven minutes to showing the consequences of this violence (00:52:54-01:04:02) with recurring close-up shots of Ree’s bruised face, swollen jaw, and the marks of the beating on her forehead and on the lower part of her mouth, which remain visible until the last shot of the film, showing the long-term effects of physical violence. There are also a number of details that insist on the concrete manifestations of pain, such as when Tear Drop tears off a piece of his bandana and gives it to Ree to “chump down at it till the blood lets up,” or when Gail dresses and heals her wounds, offering her to “squeeze her hand” to bear the pain, or when Sonya her neighbor comes to give her some “real strong” painkillers “that are gonna kick in really quick,” which she advises her to take in “whatever number.” In all these moments the cinematography resorts to inserts to underline the reality of the effects of physical violence and to draw attention to concrete details: Ree squeezing Gail’s hand, the bloody water in the sink when Ree washes her mouth and spits out, the bag of frozen vegetables that Gail puts on her chest to use as an ice pack for the pain, Sonya’s hand handing out the painkillers, the glass of water where Sonny puts the tooth that Ree has lost. The violence of the blows she received and the seriousness of her condition are also conveyed through reaction shots of the children’s worried faces, and their caring attitudes when they come to her bed and cuddle up to her. Ree’s pain is also expressed in the black and white dream sequence of her delirious night, made up of squirrels, trees and the sky, a far cry from the violent beating she has just received.
Figure 3
The consequences of physical violence Winter’s Bone dir. Debra Granik
© M6Video
Figure 4
The consequences of physical violence Winter’s Bone dir. Debra Granik
© M6Video
Figure 5
The consequences of physical violence Winter’s Bone dir. Debra Granik
© M6Video
Figure 6
The consequences of physical violence Winter’s Bone dir. Debra Granik
© M6Video
- 32 Debra Granik, and Anne Rosellini, “’Winter’s Bone’ based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell,” accessed (...)
- 33 Gonzalez, “Definitions of commercial”.
- 34 Granik and Rosellini, “’Winter’s Bone’”.
22Likewise, the scene in which Ree is taken by Merab and her sisters to the swamp, where her father’s body has been dumped, does not show the gory horror of the act of sawing off his hands. The concrete details of Ree’s gestures and their effects on her are abundantly described in the screenplay, but the proper action is only evoked indirectly through a series of fragmented shots and the sound of the chainsaw in the water. The scene focuses on the concrete effects of the experience of horror on Ree through an insert of Ree’s arms as she rolls up her sleeves, plunges her arm into the pond, and gropes in the murky water, cutting to reaction shots of Ree, who “shivers, feels something and gasps, recoiling” but “goes back in, horrified but determined, grabbing a firm hold of an icy hand”32, showing that emotions cannot be resolved by a bullet — “emotion cannot be solved. It sits there”33. The sounds of screaming and gasping seem to be drowned out by the sound of the chainsaw, but when it stops no sound comes out of Ree’s mouth. She is stunned, too shocked to even utter a single sound, like Munch’s mute screamer in the famous painting. The scene further insists on the excruciating length of the act by showing the cutting of the other hand, rather than resorting to an ellipsis. As if filmed in real time, Ree is shown letting her father’s body “sink away from her grasp after the first hand,” and then we see her, at Merab’s command, “reach back into the pond, grab hold of her father’s body again and hang on”34. When it is over, she remains prostrate and there is nothing to show: the camera lingers aimlessly on a tangible consequence: the colored traces of petrol left in the water by the chainsaw.
- 35 Eric Lavallée, “Interview with Debra Granik for Winter's Bone - presented at the 2010 Sundance Film (...)
23The horrific dimension of these two episodes — the ruthless collective beating of Ree and the recovery of Jessup’s hands in the swamp — is perfectly conveyed without actually showing any “woundable body that was physically harmed, maimed”, which is in keeping with the goals Granik has set for her films, as she stated in an interview35. To replace the direct depiction of violence typical of action genres, Granik relies on the description of strong emotions, in the same way as in a melodrama or a woman’s film. This approach implies a direct confrontation with the painful, unbearable consequences of violence. Generic hybridity, understood as the introduction of the emotions of melodrama into the plot of an action film, thus allows Granik to integrate a full range of emotions to convey the violence of the action genres, thereby achieving the corruption of the two genres.
24In addition to offering an alternative representation of violence by focusing on its consequences, Granik denounces another kind of violence that, she argues, cannot be “shot away,” and which stems from the effects of neoliberal policies on the most vulnerable populations. Calling for a revision of representations of violence, Granik explains that cinematic gun violence is a way of masking real forms of violence caused by socio-economic hardship:
- 36 Jackson, “Debra Granik: ‘There aren't many women”.
Very satisfying for some people to see something solved very point blank by just eliminating the other person or eliminating the problem as if you could just shoot it away. You can’t shoot away being poor, you can’t shoot away not having a decent wage and being treated disrespectfully doing your job. You can’t just shoot that away. So, I do think it’s born out of a profound economic frustration36.
This statement is indicative of Granik’s left-wing politics, which implicitly links poverty and precariousness to the violence inflicted by the predatory practices of capitalism. In Winter’s Bone this is manifested in her choice to show that real violence is not confined to the criminal sphere but is omnipresent in the grim reality of everyday life during the cold winter of the Ozark Mountains, a region which has been ravaged by poverty following the depletion of its mining resources, and hit hard by the socio-economic crisis in the context of the post-2008 Great Recession. The film provides a strong socio-political commentary on the plight of the region’s inhabitants who suffer from the economic desperation that has led to methamphetamine trafficking and addiction. It presents a socio-realist view and an implicit critique of US neoliberal policies that have had a terrible impact on the daily lives of the inhabitants. The focus on lower-class female protagonists adds a feminist dimension to the socioeconomic commentary. By showing that the entire Ozark community, and especially its women, are subject to the rule of crime boss Thump Milton, the film denounces the excesses of neoliberal capitalism which it attributes to patriarchy.
- 37 Both genres have a social vein. Social neo-realist noirs indirectly evoke social plights. As James (...)
- 38 Films noirs can be viewed as indirect testimonies of post-war anxieties (see Richard Maltby, “Film (...)
25The film thus illustrates the social vein of film noir and of the woman’s film37 by overtly depicting the violent consequences of patriarchal capitalism in “slice of life” scenes that describe the deleterious effects of neoliberal policies on female teenagers from impoverished areas. Resorting to the techniques of minor cinema where “the private is political” and “the private element can become the site of an awareness, insofar as it goes back to the causes” (Deleuze 284), the film touches upon more general socio-economic issues faced by female teenagers, such as having to assume the role of caregiver in a dysfunctional family, as it is the case with Ree, or facing early maternity, as it is the case with her friend Gail. The scenes that dwell on Ree and her family’s everyday life, a scene showing a parenting class at school with students holding mechanical babies (00:04:10) and another scene where Ree and her friend Gail chat on the bed like the teenagers they are, but with a newborn baby in between them (00:11:30-00:14:27), however congenial and gentle, point to dysfunctional aspects of US society: lack of resources and support, limited educational and financial opportunities. These young caregivers should be attending school and learning instead of caring for their family members. Gail has to put up with living with her obnoxious teenage husband and his parents because they have nowhere else to go with their newborn baby. Ree herself cannot join the army because she has to look after her siblings. These depictions follow in the footsteps of film noir and the woman’s film, whose disruptive potential38 Granik fully exploits to express political ideas, and productively corrupt the two genres.
Figure 7
Winter’s Bone dir. Debra Granik
© M6Video
Figure 8
Winter’s Bone dir. Debra Granik
© M6Video
26As a generic hybrid, the film thus taps into Hollywood’s visual memory of genres and corrupts it in multiple ways: by changing the gender of archetypal characters of action genres, by giving agency to the female protagonist of the woman’s film, by reversing the function of domesticity, and by assigning a different function to violence. In doing so, it overtly pushes away the boundaries imposed by gender norms, and opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the portrayal of women on screen. The corruption of generic forms is fruitful in that it produces alternative representations of, and an innovative discourse on femininity, and gender roles. In this sense, Granik’s corruptive approach has much in common with De Lauretis’s idea that women’s cinema needs to be rethought in terms of a “feminist deaesthetic” because:
- 39 de Lauretis, Technologies,146.
[…] most of the terms by which we speak of the construction of the female social subject in cinematic representation bear in their visual form the prefix de- to signal the deconstruction or the destructuring, if not destruction, of the very thing to be represented. We speak of the deaesthetization of the female body, the desexualization of violence, the deoedipianization of narrative and so forth. Rethinking women’s cinema in this way, we may provisionally answer Bovenschen’s question thus: there is a certain configuration of issues and formal problems that have been consistently articulated in what we call women’s cinema. The way they have been expressed and developed, both artistically and critically, seems to point less to a “feminine aesthetic” than to a feminist deaesthetic39.
- 40 A reference to Monique Wittig’s famous metaphor to describe the role of writing as a war machine ag (...)
- 41 Marie Harrod, and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Women Do Genre in Film and Television. (London: Routledge, (...)
- 42 Harrod and Paszkiewicz, Women Do Genre, 25, quoting Barbara Zecchi’s chapter.
This is how Granik’s corruption can be understood: as a “feminist deaesthetic” that helps rethink women’s cinema, rather than as an attempt to undermine and subvert Hollywood genres. She herself explained in an interview that subversion did not suit her: she turned down an offer to adapt a screenplay of the Boston strangler, because she did not want to use the Trojan horse strategy40: “I thought I could get into the system with this Trojan horse ploy, but it didn't suit me, it wasn't me.” Thus, Granik’s intention to offer an alternative to Hollywood representations without resorting to the ‘Trojan horse ploy’ can be situated “within a potentially positive appropriative and generative framework of interpretation” rather than “the widespread fallacy of subversion” as argued by Harrod and Paszkiewicz in their volume on women and film genres (26). Like the comedy directors under study in that volume41, Granik productively “corrupts” Hollywood genres by making “an incursion into a discourse that belongs to her, a language she reclaims as her own without necessarily undoing its essence”42, but which, like each new film released, renews our understanding and definition of genres.