Eileen
This psychological thriller and character study offers a vision of a patriarchal social system in which men abuse themselves and others, and that women are implicated in maintaining.
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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warnings: Domestic abuse; Alcoholism; Violence; Murder.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, Eileen is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
Eileen’s eponymous protagonist, Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie), is a seemingly introverted and unsatisfied young woman. She lives unhappily with her father, alcoholic ex-police officer Jim (Shea Wigham), and works in a correctional facility for teenage boys in a small Massachusetts town during the mid-1960s. Her life is transformed by the arrival of a glamorous new psychologist, Dr Rebecca St John (Anne Hathaway), at the facility. Eileen becomes besotted with her new friend, while Rebecca recognises something more behind Eileen’s apparently unassuming appearance. Yet their relationship is thrown into far more dangerous territory by Rebecca’s interest in the case of one of the inmates, Lee Polk (Sam Nivola) – incarcerated for the brutal murder of his police officer father – and his estranged mother, Rita (Marin Ireland).
Patriarchy and criminal justice
One of the things that really struck me about the film was how it slowly built up a vision of a patriarchal society in which domestic violence and the criminal justice system are intertwined. The latter moves from being a source of indicative though incidental detail, as Eileen focuses on the quiet desperation of its titular character’s life, to an unexpectedly central position in its plot.
Thus, Jim Dunlop’s abusiveness to his daughters is mirrored in and exacerbated by the harm he does to himself through his drinking. His sense of entitlement and authority as a former officer, which shapes his identity even in retirement, leads to his continuing to menace his neighbours. And all of these forms of violence are enabled by the status he still holds within a local society, from the shopkeepers who continue to supply him with alcohol, to the young policeman who treats him with kid gloves.
Simultaneously, the juvenile correctional facility punishes violent young offenders like Lee Polk by disciplining them with violence, in which physical force is the final step in a broader system of authoritarian control. And as we come to learn, the violence committed by young offenders is itself a response to earlier violence visited upon them, which is itself parallel with and of a part with the harm that Jim has inflicted on his own children.
Women’s work
The film also captures the paradoxical position of women within this system, not only as its victims, but bound up in its maintenance. In the correctional facility, women earn an income as well as experiencing sexism. They perform menial disciplinary labour that accompanies the more explicitly violent work of male prison guards. Even in the case of Rebecca, who has a more humane approach and epitomises the twin trajectories of women’s and scientific advancement, is simultaneously rewarded by the specialisation and expansion of this carceral complex.1
Likewise, women’s domestic labour, and acquiescence to men’s desires, renders them complicit in the violence that exists in the home and wider society too. Eileen has taken up the role vacated by her late mother and absent, married sister, in maintaining her father and, in the process, quietly enabling the worst of his behaviours. As the film progresses, we can recognise this as a microcosm of the wider way in which women who witness evil in their home lives feel compelled to choose a path of least resistance rather than challenge it.
It is the latter work that Rebecca explicitly rejects and in doing so stands for a generational break that she also recognises the perennially, dismissively infantilised Eileen as capable of. Their disruptive desire for each other is accompanied by spiralling violence both deliberately directed in retribution against the patriarchy, and yet also a warped product of it.
Fantasy, place, and escape
‘Everybody’s kind of angry here — it’s Massachusetts,’ Eileen explains to Rebecca at one point. Sparse, wintry New England offers an environmental manifestation of the harsh austerity of its inhabitants lives. West Coast-raised, peroxide-blonde Rebecca laments its realness.
On the surface, Eileen with her unmade-up face, thick local accent, and earnest response to Rebecca’s provocations might seem to epitomise this quality. Yet we as the audience also witness Eileen’s propensity for vivid sexual and violent fantasies. These fantasies are rendered real through her mirroring of Rebecca’s sexuality and sophistication, and Eileen ultimately demonstrates an ability to embody and exert control through her fabrications that surpasses her seemingly more assured companion’s.
This capacity for change, for the contradictions of a particular set of conditions and relations to eventually prove transformative, is also evident in the film’s treatment of contemporary motoring culture. Eileen’s car, in which she spends much of the film, is both a symbol of her isolation and confinement, and of her economic independence, personal mobility, and agency. Likewise, the roads conjoining those two violent spaces she circulates between and participates in, home and work, also offer, as with her dreams, the promise of catharsis and freedom.
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The overall size of the population of American facilities for juvenile delinquents increased by 32.6% between 1960 and 1970, when it accounted for 184 out of every 100,000 persons aged between ten and 20 years old. Margaret Werner Cahalan, with Lee Anne Parsons, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850–1984 (Rockville, MD: US Department of Justice, 1986), pp. 104–105.