Why Marjane Satrapi’s serial killer comedy falls short

Ed. note: This post was originally published on the Community site.

Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian-born graphic novelist, writer, painter, and now film director, stormed the world of French comics with her autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis. Persepolis documents both Satrapi’s survival of the Iranian Revolution as a child and her turbulent assimilation into Western European culture as an expatriate teenager. An English translation of the novel arrived in the U.S. between 2004 and 2005. By 2007, the film adaptation of Persepolis was in the running for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars.

It is possible that Satrapi’s darkly humorous meditation on the Middle Eastern Muslim expatriate female identity gained cultural traction so rapidly because of timing. Almost no women artists of Middle Eastern descent have managed to capture the French (or, for that matter, American) popular imagination and thereby retain meaningful political attention. Persepolis reached the U.S. during the Bush presidency, three years after 9/11 and just one year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Persepolis responded with unapologetic candor to a pervasive, largely unacknowledged struggle: modern-day xenophobia directed at Middle Eastern refugees.

Satrapi’s work generated light within an expanding vacuum. But as the ambiguous legacy of Charlie Hebdo’s comics and the twenty-six attacks on French mosques in the wake of the Hebdo shootings indicate, xenophobic — specifically, Islamophobic — tension in France has reached a new fever pitch. This climate requires clearer, more direct cultural leadership than Satrapi’s retrospective commentary provided in the past.

Marjane Satrapi’s new film, The Voices, does not provide this leadership.

The film opened in American theaters on February 6. Critical responses have ranged from politely appreciative to indignant. While the provocateur merit of Satrapi’s gory directorial vision is up for debate, the subject matter of the film is not worth shedding much blood over.

The Voices cleaves faithfully to a staple of the horror genre: it fetishizes the hunting and murdering of women. The trailer boasts a negligee-clad woman running bustily through the woods with a dagger-clutching man in hot pursuit. The main character, Jerry, is portrayed as a humbly hunky, sweet, innocent avatar who inadvertently carries out the homicidal biddings of his talking cat. As Satrapi herself explains it, “this [script] had the comedy” [sic] because Jerry “doesn’t plan anything, which leads him to be overwhelmed. That’s why he’s so likable—things just happen to him.”

Jerry stores the chunks of his former love interests in tidily stacked towers of Tupperware and carries their (still pretty, perky, and sentient) heads around with him, eventually plopping one victim’s head in front of his captive (female) therapist who is trying to save him from himself. He’s a hapless bachelor, working a humdrum job in a stultifying Midwestern town, surrounded by women, and he can’t stop himself from…shudder…listening. The scariest part? In this town, women are even more outspoken once they’re dead. Maybe he shouldn’t have killed them all. But it was the cat’s idea. Hah! Cats.

Comedy.

If Satrapi believes that Persepolis wielded meaningful political influence to combat senseless violence and warmongering (as she explained in her 2008 appearance on The Colbert Report), then what message does Satrapi believe she’s sending when she uses her artistic talent to tell a story that she immediately recognized as “fucked up and immoral”? Why go to assiduous lengths to “make the serial killer a lovable man…like an innocent child in the body of a 34-year-old”?

Sifting through her public appearances and interviews, I found that Satrapi has routinely resisted interviewers’ attempts to analyze her work. Apart from endorsing the subversive power of laughter and declaring herself an individualist, Satrapi refuses to expound on what her work means. Her October 17, 2014 interview in the New York Public Library’s LIVE from the NYPL series exemplifies Satrapi’s resistance to interpretation.

Asked to share her thoughts on the opening images of Persepolis, Satrapi declares: “I do not have any analytical approach of my own work: None. I never intellectualize nothing [sic] that I do, I just do it.” (60:31). This authorial stance is familiar; many writers are loath to comment on what their work means to them personally for fear of muddying its intended effect on readers.

Understandably, Satrapi may be tired of talking about a work she wrote fourteen years ago that has enjoyed over a decade of exhaustive coverage. Satrapi explains that after she published Persepolis and co-directed the film interpretation, she received waves of offers to direct other stories: first, children’s stories (because Persepolis focused on her childhood), then stories of the Muslim world (because of her Iranian origins), and finally stories of women (because she is a woman) who “don’t work, like Sex and the City…don’t have a husband, and they aren’t prostitutes but they can pay $5,000 for a bag” (77:03).

When she received the script for The Voices, which was blacklisted and passed over by many directors before it reached her, Satrapi explained her relationship to the material: the film has “nothing to do with what I do.” (76:38). She elaborates. “I would never say, ‘Ok, what am I going to write about today? Let’s talk about a serial killer who kills women and talk with its [sic] pets.’ […] The movie was very immoral, very subversive…and I said ‘This could be so fucked up I have to do it.’” (78:00). It becomes apparent from Satrapi’s later responses that she didn’t intend to send a larger political message with The Voices.

The professional strategy behind Satrapi’s decision to direct The Voices is a familiar one as well: many artists who become well known for exploring the inherent politics of their own identity are subsequently pigeonholed into creating derivative works that rehash their identity politics. Satrapi has adamantly protested against such labeling, as demonstrated by a 2004 interview with Bookslut in which she clarified that she was “not a feminist.”

I don’t fault Satrapi for resisting the pressure of her industry; I respect it. I only wish that she had directed a film that expressed a more pointed, explicit opposition against the reduction of her identity.

How fascinating would it have been to see Satrapi apply her skills to a film about her present dilemma? After making Persepolis, which helped her to at last define the identity stolen from her by political upheaval and expatriate wandering, her new identity is parsed into mutually exclusive labels (“woman,” “author for children,” and “Muslim”) by corporate entertainment hoping to profit from her name. How does she manage to retain her self-constructed sense of self despite the misguided demands of her new community?

Instead, The Voices feels like an assertion of individuality at the price of social responsibility. In the NYPL interview, Satrapi associates analysis with dictatorship: she believes both lead to the deprivation of individuality and the intellectual freedom to hold contradictory beliefs (78:52). But analysis is not dictatorship. It is a necessary entry point into grappling with a point of view that may run contrary to your own. Analysis is the cerebral extension of empathy.

Satrapi hedges the discussion of her work in the Now: present day, as it relates to current events and what she can accomplish in one lifetime. Yet, when speaking about her career goals, Satrapi also says: “My life is short, I am going to die pretty soon…but in this short life I have left in front of me, I want to do whatever I like…all this knowledge will not serve anything, because I am going to die.” (83:40).

Even though Satrapi knows she will die one day, she does not entertain the idea that the world will continue without her. The self-knowledge and lessons she infuses into her art and shares with the world will live on; they might be of use to those who survive her. I would hope that, for a politically engaged artist, “doing whatever you like” is not mutually exclusive from having an analytical vision of your work’s message.

Satrapi was lucky enough to escape living under a brutal regime; others are currently suffering and dying within its grip, as I write. Every survivor has the right to move forward with her life, create a new identity, and generate work she is passionate about. But non-preoccupation with the past does not excuse indifference for the future. I would hope that someone as vehemently outspoken and culturally influential as Satrapi would view her art as an analytical catalyst that spurs social change.

Header image credit: WN.com