Just saw the extended version of The Handmaiden and it was worth every single minute. It wasn’t always easy to watch, as per @jewishcomeradebot’s warning, particularly when the story moved to Hideko’s viewpoint. But it was a beautifully crafted story with a happy ending and I loved it.
Spoilers abound from this point onward. TW sexual abuse, suicide
Sook-Hee and Hideko’s first night together was both heartrendingly moving and hilariously funny--funny, in large part, because they had to rely on the paper figure (in so many ways) of Count Fujiwara to initiate sex at all. Of course, the humor works only because of a darker underlying truth; that women are so socialized to see themselves as objects of pleasure and not agents in their own pleasure, that these women had to invoke the male gaze and male pleasure in order to fulfill their own desire for each other.
Having her sexuality subsumed by the male gaze was especially and brutally true for Hideko, of course, who was groomed and abused from childhood to perform the fantasy of men against her will. As Fujiwara points out jocularly to Kouzuki, but with deadly seriousness, she was so well trained she had no desire of her own left. Isn’t her treatment just a grotesquely amplified version of how women are “trained” under patriarchy, though?
This is one reason Hideko’s masturbating before Fujiwara on their “first night” shows how she has changed by claiming her own feelings and desire with Sook-Hee. Rather than perform Fujiwara’s fantasy for him as she had before, she invites him to be a spectator of her own sexual pleasure instead. Hideko’s flashing the knife at Fujiwara before she gets into bed has several layers of meaning. Korean audiences would recognize the symbolism immediately, because highborn Korean women traditionally carried silver-decorated knives to kill themselves with in the event of threatened rape. Much like the act of refusing sex with him, the knife was symbolic of her fidelity to Sook-Hee--though that symbolism would have been lost on Fujiwara and likely on Hideko herself, who was not a Korean woman. She and Fujiwara would have intended and received it as a threat to him if he tried anything. And, of course, it was a continuation of the ruse on Fujiwara, that Sook-Hee was still their unknowing mark.
There’s another level of the masturbation scene that really gets to me: In addition to being a power move on Hideko’s part, it was also an act of intimacy toward him. It was revealing in a way the sex shows she was forced to perform for him and the other guests never could be, because as abusive as those performances were she also revealed nothing of herself in them. As Fujiwara himself commented, she was trained to the point of being dead inside. By refusing to do his desire but instead showing him her own, she had revealed herself more fully to him than she ever had before--as a person with her own will and her own pleasure that had nothing to do with him. If he had realized what it meant and taken the gesture as offered, if he had accepted her as an equal human being and not an object for possession, then his story could have ended very differently.
On that note, I’ll discuss the tragedy of “Count Fujiwara” in the next reblog.
