something is sentimental when it attempts to provoke feeling that is not
merited by what is happening; when it is contrived or unrealistic; and
when it is “the enemy of emotional complexity.
To reveal or not to reveal—this is a core question for many writers. This business of women not suffering in public, of having a gag order when it comes to personal drama, such as a break up, connects back to larger histories of suppression, such as the literature of victimization, women not daring to speak of rape or incest [… ] and somewhere buried in there is the history of the wife being owned by her man and therefore she better keep her trap shut, and bourgeois notions of suffering with dignity—or dignity itself, how oppressive a value is that?
.... a common manoeuvre is to emphasize worship of women: claiming to identify with them, exalting them, or being drawn to strong women in what amounts to a deferral of emotional responsibility and viewing women as sites of respite, what I might shorthand as a womb wish. Beautifully, one reviewer wrote of Love: “as an example of its writer/director’s obsession with rewinding time—back to more blissful early romantic days, if not all the way back to the womb (note its, and Enter the Void’s, views from inside a woman’s birth canal)”.
To reveal or not to reveal—this is a core question for many writers. This business of women not suffering in public, of having a gag order when it comes to personal drama, such as a break up, connects back to larger histories of suppression, such as the literature of victimization, women not daring to speak of rape or incest [… ] and somewhere buried in there is the history of the wife being owned by her man and therefore she better keep her trap shut, and bourgeois notions of suffering with dignity—or dignity itself, how oppressive a value is that?
.... a common manoeuvre is to emphasize worship of women: claiming to identify with them, exalting them, or being drawn to strong women in what amounts to a deferral of emotional responsibility and viewing women as sites of respite, what I might shorthand as a womb wish. Beautifully, one reviewer wrote of Love: “as an example of its writer/director’s obsession with rewinding time—back to more blissful early romantic days, if not all the way back to the womb (note its, and Enter the Void’s, views from inside a woman’s birth canal)”.
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