Quotessence
Home / Authors / Molly Haskell
Molly Haskell

Molly Haskell Quotes

Film critic

Filter quotes by topic

AllHaskellFeminismWomen In FilmFilmArtAttributesChaosGivingHarmonyHighs And Lows

Famous Molly Haskell Quotes

“We lied and manipulated and pretended to be helpless and were guilty of conspiring in our own idealization – and our own oppression. For whatever else may have been our goals, we still assumed that the need men and women had for each other, and its satisfaction, was indissolubly linked to their roles as conqueror and conquered, and we accepted all the implications that followed from that first parsing of human nature into active and passive…. The yins and yangs of heterosexual romance, the power differential between the ‘stronger’ and the ‘weaker’ sex… (xv).”

FeminismWomen In Film
Book:From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies
Create image

“In the dark melodramas of the forties, woman came down from her pedestal and she didn’t stop when she reached the ground. She kept going – down, down, like Eurydice, to the depths of the criminal world, the enfer of the film noir – and then compelled her lover to glance back and betray himself…. But for all her guts and valor, and for all her unredeemable venality…she hadn’t a soul she could call her own. She was, in fact, a male fantasy. She was playing a man’s game in a man’s world of crime and carnal innuendo, where her long hair was the equivalent of a gun, where sex was the equivalent of evil. And where her power to destroy was projection of man’s feeling of impotence. Only this could never be spelled out; hence the subterfuge and melodrama. She is to her thirties’ counterpart as night – or dusk – is to day. And the difference between their worlds, between the drawing room of romantic comedy and the underground of melodrama, is the difference between flirtation and fornication … or rape” (Haskell 191).”

FeminismWomen In Film
Book:From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies
Create image

“Movies both reflect and create social conditions, but their special charm is to offer fantasy clothes as virtual reality, a world where people consume without the tedium of labor. Characters float in a world where the bill never comes due ... and we wonder why we're a debtor nation!”

PeopleWorldCharacterRealityNationsSocialWonderFantasySpecialConditionsOffersClothesLaborBillsDuesMovieCharmFloatsVirtual RealityTediumDebtorsSocial Conditions
Author:Molly Haskell
Create image

“But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.”

LoveGivingArtPoetryOrderLowsArt IsHarmonyChaosLandscapeFlatsAttributesInspirational LoveIntroducingVariationHighs And LowsHaskell
Book:From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Third Edition
Create image

“The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behaviour that merely to recognize it is to risk unravelling the entire fabric of civilization.”

IdeasBigsLyingSocialRiskCivilizationWesternBehaviourFabricInferiorityWestern Society
Book:From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Third Edition
Create image