Surprise!

Bret Easton Ellis is a misogynist.

Okay, that's not a surprise at all, but I never figured he'd be so nakedly and uncreatively misogynist:

What are your thoughts on women directors? After you saw Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, you tweeted that you might have to reevaluate your preconceived notions about them.
I did. And after I saw [Floria Sigismondi's] The Runaways, too.

Really?
I loved it.

I wish I'd loved it.
Well, I wasn't looking forward to it. I avoided it, and then I was with some people and they said, "It starts soon at the Arclight. Let's go." So yeah, I do have to reevaluate that, but for the most part I'm not totally convinced, [except for] Andrea Arnold, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola…

Not Mary Harron?
Mary Harron to a degree. There's something about the medium of film itself that I think requires the male gaze.

What would that be?
We're watching, and we're aroused by looking, whereas I don't think women respond that way to films, just because of how they're built.

You don't think they have an overt level of arousal?
[They have one] that's not so stimulated by the visual. I think, to a degree, all the women I named aren't particularly visual directors. You could argue that Lost in Translation is beautiful, but is that [cinematographer Lance Acord]? I don't know. Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn't a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don't know. I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility. I mean, the best art is made under not an indifference to, but a neutrality [toward] the kind of emotionalism that I think can be a trap for women directors.

Yawn.

I can't even muster the energy to get angry when I read someone saying something as blatantly stupid as "[Film] is a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility." All I've got in response is a low chuckle of reverberating contempt.

[Via Melissa.]