In an early scene in Netflix’s “I Care A Lot”, Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), a professional legal guardian, sits behind her desk while mafia lawyer Dean Ericson (Chris Messina) does not so subtly threaten her. Messina’s character wears three-piece suits and looks off the pages of GQ, though with a few days too many stubble for a male model. He grinds out masculinity.
Marla does not want him there. Through contact with a doctor, Marla had just obtained the guardianship of a woman named Jennifer, whom she sent to her nursing home (without her permission) when she took control of all of Jennifer’s assets. Dean introduces himself to Marla as Jennifer’s attorney, and insists that there was an error regarding Jennifer’s impaired status.
Marla lies to Dean and tells him that Jennifer’s condition suddenly deteriorated two weeks ago. “That’s simply not true, Mrs. Grayson,” Dean admonished. “You know it, I know it. If the doctor wrote a letter, he knows it too. ‘
“She,” Marla quickly corrected. The doctor. She’s a she. ‘
This bitter riposte is at the heart of Marla’s worldview: men, as she puts it, are out to defeat her. It is fitting that her colleagues – or henchmen – are almost entirely women, just like the doctor she works with to subject ignorant elderly people.
The star for Marla’s feminist ethos is that this big cabal of girl power is doing terribly bad things. The doctor helps Marla locate innocent elderly people and legally kidnap them through the courts, thus depriving them of control of their assets so that Marla can benefit as guardian. Indeed, those who regularly try to get in her way are men – often lawyers and relatives of the elderly elderly. But her worldview between men and women is a serious misunderstanding.
And this is where the film’s politics become interesting.
Marla embodies the modern ideal of a ‘girlboss’: the lady entrepreneur whose success is defined as opposed to the male business world in which she swims upstream. The term, often coined with a hashtag, became popular around 2014 with the publication of the book of the same name by Sophia Amoruso, the founder of retailer Nasty Gal. In a look back at the neologism published in The Atlantic, Amanda Mull described the philosophy of #girlboss-ism as a kind of ‘comfortable incrementalism’. Wrates Mull: “Instead of breaking down the power that men have had in America for a long time, career women could simply take it to office.” She continues: ‘Like Sheryl Sandberg’s self-help hit’ Lean In ‘before that,’ #Girlboss’ argued that the professional success of ambitious young women was a type of activism with two birds: their quest for power could be renamed as a just search for equality, and the success of female managers and entrepreneurs will increase the women among them. ‘
It describes Marla to a T: convinced that her relentless admission to the elderly is a kind of just pursuit of equality. But contrary to the platonic ideal of a girl boss, Marla’s affairs are immoral. And her ‘clients’, the people whose lives she destroys, are old men and women. It seems that some women can have it all – but only if other women have nothing.
An entire wall of Marla’s office displays photos of all her ‘wards’ that she flair to indicate particularly lucrative points. And although she’s a seniors operator for equal opportunities, it’s a bit clever script writing that the senior who inconveniences her whole plan is also a woman (played with aplomb by Dianne Wiest).
Marla’s evil face – and ultimately her appearance – is a provocative accusation of the girl boss of feminism, and also the surprising politics for a Netflix movie. “I Care A Lot” complicates the neoliberal feminist message in a surprising way I have never seen on film. It specifically points to the immorality of capitalist feminism, the way it relies on exploitation.
Remember Marla’s border legal industry, the guardianship world, and her message and politics cannot be distinguished from so many other feminist capitalist CEOs in the world. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, became a household name when she published ‘Lean In’, a hybrid business book and feminist manifesto. The 2013 book was a bestseller, praised for its message of empowerment and Sandberg’s egalitarian vision for a world after generation. “A real equal world would be a world where women run half of our countries and companies and men run half of our homes,” Sandberg writes.
A commendable vision, certainly. Then, years later, the reality of Sandberg’s daily work at Facebook was revealed: to regularly violate partners’ privacy of users, disguising Facebook’s role in spreading election propaganda, and to employ opposition research firms take to lift the company’s filth. opponents. This included using a PR firm to attack George Soros using anti-Semitic dog whistles.
Sheryl Sandberg and the fictional Marla Grayson’s departmental ethics are so similar that it seems impossible that Marla is not at least partly based on Sandberg or perhaps Amoruso – who had a similar hairstyle in the film as Rosamund Pike in the film and who ‘s company went bankrupt a few years after the celebrated publication of ‘#GirlBoss’ praising her business acumen.
The brilliance of “I Care A Lot” is that it illustrates how exploitation of other people (regardless of gender) is the key to so much capitalism. Of course, Marla’s guardianship industry is an extreme case, but it serves as a metaphor for capitalism in general, as it is a means to an end for Marla – who wants power and money more than anything. Never has she been happier in the film when she reveled in her wealth or success – ‘success’, in this case, which means another unconscious parent is stripped of their freedom and their assets robbed of Marla’s exploitation.
This is a fascinating counterpoint to another recent film, ‘Promising Young Woman’, which had a clearer feminist message by digging up how men – even so-called ‘good’ men – can be involved in cultivating atmosphere that enabling sexual assault and rape. The men in that movie were sometimes apologetic, but never redeemable.
But in ‘I Care a Lot’, Marla is irreparable. As if that’s not horrible enough to deprive her of the assets of her complaint and turn it into a prison-like existence, she treats Jennifer even worse when she finds out she has a lawyer by her side: around Jennifer’s phone away and instruct the staff of the nursing home to take drugs. her in ways that would torture her spiritually. Are you going, girl boss.
I see ‘I Care a Lot’ as a warning against this kind of ‘defanged feminism’, as Dawn Foster calls the Sheryl Sandberg ethos. Stripped of any greater structural understanding of its role in a larger universe of exploitation and labor, the barbarity of Marla’s ‘business’ is appalling to behold. Girlboss Marla is thus a deeply undeniable character – a warning of what happens when one’s feminism is isolating and separate from any larger moral universe.