So I’ve been thinking about the women in The Irishman. A thread: 1/

I was inclined, at first, to be resentful, even before I saw the film, of their exclusion from the story. Yet another man’s story without women. I was suspicious of the argument I saw that, “No, really, Peggy is actually very important!” I’ve heard that one before. 2/

But after sitting with the film, letting its weight hang, I think I was wrong. Not wrong that women are excluded--they are--but wrong in what I presumed about that exclusion.3/

Take our 1st significant intro to the wives--Frank’s&Russell’s. They seem frivolous.Their immediate desire to stop right as the road trip begins.They insist on smoking so the men have to pull the car over, stop the important business they are on. Make them wait. Make us wait 4/

On these stops, the women are kept in frame. Sometimes centered, sometimes not. But in frame. We know they’re there. They talk to each other. We can’t hear what they say. Women-things that aren’t important to our story, presumably. 5/

There’s Peggy & her watching eyes. Eyes the camera tells us hold a world of thought Frank has decided to ignore. But even Peggy didn’t really convince me--not at first--that this wasn’t just one more film where a woman acts as an impossible god-like conscience figure -- 6/

-- the moralizing Victorian Angel in the House. The reverence half of Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies. 7/

The beautifully shot and edited scene where Jo Hoffa sits in her car afraid to turn the key didn’t convince me either: 8/

Gangster movies do often show the toll men’s violence on women--a grapefruit smashed in her face (The Public Enemy 1931), or her beloved new husband killed, point blank (Scarface 1932). Women do suffer. But the films aren’t interested much in these women. Not really. 9/

It wasn’t until Frank’s daughter (IMDb says she’s called Dolores), someone who has been ignored for 3 hours, sits across from Frank, her face crumpling in a real emotion that is wholly absent from the world of men, & she says, “you have no idea what it was like for us” that-- 10/

--the film’s exclusion of women hit home. It makes us *feel* that exclusion. We feel the loss of their stories, their perspectives. The loss of what Carrie and Irene were saying to each other on that car trip. 11/

The loss of Jo Hoffa’s story, and, of course, of Peggy’s, who, right before Dolores’s scene, puts a “Closed” sign in Frank’s face and turns her back.

Frank, at the end of his life, cannot go back and learn what the women said to each other nor what Peggy’s life was about. 12/

As audience members, too, film goers who’ve been watching gangster films for years on end, we may feel the years and years of the weight of film, the loss of women’s stories and voices and there is no going back in time to hear them. They are dead. 13/

As much as Frank sits in the dead weight of his own empty life at the end, the film sits, too, positioned in film history, in loss. A loss I think we are supposed to feel. 14/

Am I glad, then, that the film essentially excludes women in order to make a point about excluding women? Can a film make that point if it participates in the thing it’s regretting? Is it perpetuating the thing in condemning the thing? I don’t know, actually. Maybe. 15/

There is no excuse, no elegy mournful enough, for the exclusion of women over the course of film history, and a film that acts as that kind of elegy cannot ever make amends. 16/

It’s something though, the acknowledgment of loss. And if there is any power in the meaninglessness that is Frank’s dead life, that power is takes part of its terrible strength from the void we’re made to feel, the void that is a world without women. 17/17