Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power: Inconvenient, by David Bax

Pretty much as soon as sound became a component of cinema (or even earlier, if your definition is elastic enough to include things like Man with a Movie Camera), people started making essay films, pairing montage and narration to explore or detail a topic. At a glance, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power would seem like a perfect candidate for the form, especially with a renegade formalist like Nina Menkes—who, in films like 1996’s arresting The Bloody Child, displays an adeptness with wielding repeated and sustained imagery—at the helm. Alas, that’s not at all the movie she made.

Following in the footsteps of Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth or Agnès Varda’s posthumously released Varda by Agnès, Brainwashed is more of a recorded and visually annotated lecture. By being so blatantly, not to mention literally, at center stage, Menkes positions herself as a sort of crusader against the sexist and misogynistic visual language used to depict women throughout the history of cinema. The dramatic music only adds to the sense of self-aggrandizement. This is the kind of thing we expect from Michael Moore, not an accomplished film artist like Menkes.

Since Brainwashed is a movie that cannot be separated from its thesis, we’d better get into the work’s content, not just its presentation. Menkes arguments and conclusions seem perilously dated; it all feels like something that might have been made twenty years ago with an audience of first year film students in mind. Her assumptions come across as hopelessly binary and heteronormative. By indiscriminately aiming her critiques at all directors, regardless of gender (thus putting Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola and Patty Jenkins, to name a few, on blast), she leaves no room for the possibility of women enjoying looking at each other. Pleasure gained from gazing at female bodies is presented as wholly male and always predatory.

That’s not to say that Brainwashed doesn’t raise some worthwhile questions as well. Menkes argues effectively for the power of cinema, which means the question of responsibility can’t be far behind. But, unlike Laura Mulvey, who popularized the term “male gaze” as it relates to cinema and who appears here as an interviewee, Menkes is ultimately not engaged in a work of film theory. This is a presentation about rape culture using cinema as its frame.

That’s not a bad thing. In fact, in intention, it’s pretty clearly a moral good. But, to return to the film’s form, its potential impact is dulled by its lackluster presentation. Again, this is beyond surprising coming from the director of Queen of Diamonds, one of the best and boldest American independent films of the 1990s. But Brainwashed feels above all like it was made for a classroom, not a movie theater. And, let’s face it, school sucks.

By the time Menkes gets to Maïmona Doucouré’s Cuties, the backlash against which was driven by superficial, bad faith, ignorant, conservative culture warriors, and then fails to say anything more nuanced than they did, Brainwashed is beyond redemption. Concluding with opposing examples, films where the images pass Menkes’ muster, the film’s lasting impression is one of condescension and distrust toward its audience.