"Men need to control women's sexuality": Black Swan, romantic comedy, noir, etc.

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal as Maggie and Jamie drinking beer in "Love and other drugs" (2010)

"Mind you, when it comes to Gyllenhaal as Jamie, a fast-talking rich kid and lady-killer who drifts from selling mid-range electronics to a fast-track entry-level gig at Pfizer, there's nothing to forgive.Poster of Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess as Emma and Dexter in "One day" (2011)

Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher drinking champagne in "No strings attached" (2011)

(I'm aware that Ivan Reitman's upcoming Ashton Kutcher-Natalie Portman movie, "No Strings Attached" involves a similar FWB-gone-wild plot. Prepare yourself for a wave of thematic essays about Hollywood's relationship to sexual reality and the decay of feminine morality.)" Source: www.salon.com

In "The Killer That Stalked New York" (1950), Evelyn Keyes plays a jewel smuggler who has brought a case of smallpox from Cuba

Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir:Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze, first published in Screen in 1975, was central to feminist discussions of film noir’s potential misogyny. Such insights contributed to larger conversations about cinematic structure, gender representation, and film noir, circling around issues of identity, identification, fantasy, and objectification, and focusing on the extent to which film noir is a “male sphere” and the “femme fatale” figure a projection of male desire and anxiety, an expression of misogyny best expressed by Janey Place in her essay in the first volume of E. Ann Kaplan’s Women in Film Noir (1978): “Men need to control women’s sexuality in order not to be destroyed by it” (reprinted in 2nd edn, Kaplan, 1998, 49). The view that film noir addresses or critiques patriarchy is shared by other feminist film critics, and evolves out of feminist claims in the 1970s (and since)

"Aronofsky's movie "Black Swan" brings into sharp relief society's expectations of perfection in women and the price they pay for trying to attain it.

Spoiler alert: please read this commentary after watching the movie.
I have a friend who is a professor of women's studies who steadfastly refuses to go to the opera or the ballet, maintaining that both are profoundly misogynistic. Her oft-repeated comment is that "the girl almost always dies at the end" (think Tosca, Carmen, Mimi, Thais, Cho-cho-san, Giselle, and of course the White Swan). She will not be going to the movies to see Black Swan any time soon.

"I just finished watching Black Swan and it made me wish that I had followed her example. I had heard from many sources that the movie was "dark" -- but "dark" does not even begin to describe it. Dark I can take, but this was beyond dark: it was a horror movie in ballet shoes. One reader's comment in the New York Times was humorously apt: he called it "Rosemary's Tutu". And beyond that, I found the movie shockingly misogynistic, as horror movies often are.Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis as Nina Sayers and Lily in "Black Swan"

Winona Ryder as Beth Macintyre in "Black Swan": -'What did you do to get this role? He always said you were such a frigid little girl. What did you do to change his mind? Did you suck his cock?'

Nina: -'Not all of us have to'
Black Swan only reflects the misogyny that already exists in society: What you are reading here is not meant to be a review so much as a commentary. A review would have to acknowledge Natalie Portman's brilliant, claustrophobic performance as Nina, and tell you how Vincent Cassell once again chewed up the scenery as a not-so-charming French cad. I would have to lament about the miscasting of the beautiful Wynona Rider in a truly horrific part and comment on Mila Kunis's earthy allure and the well-played creepiness of the Barbara Hershey character, Nina's mother.
We all know by now that Natalie Portman plays Nina, a repressed, perfectionist dancer with the New York City Ballet, who is given the opportunity to play the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and crumbles from the pressure of having to dance both the parts of the pure White Swan and the evil Black Swan. We know that her mother, played by Barbara Hershey, her artistic director, Thomas, played by Vincent Cassell, and a rival dancer, played by Mila Kunis, all contribute to her descent into madness." Source: www.suite101.com

"Hollywood is currently buzzing about Winona Ryder’s small role in the Oscar-nominated “Black Swan.” But remember when the actress represented an entire generation? By the time she appeared in the 1994 flick “Reality Bites” (spouting lines such as “I’m not going to work at the Gap, for Chrissake!”), the then-23-year-old had already established herself as an angsty-cool actress, smirking through cult classics such as “Heathers,” “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands.”
The more mature Ryder appealed to casting director Jane Jenkins. Her firm put the actress in Ron Howard’s “The Dilemma” (in theaters now), 21 years after casting her as the brooding teen in Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice.”
Regardless of her professional plans, Ryder’s “Black Swan” role seems to be the opposite of a swan song. “It is,” says Childress, “the starting gun for the rest of her career.” Source: www.nypost.com