"How Many Ladies Have to Die to Make It Good?" - Surviving the Patriarchal Surveillance State of 'In the Cut'

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“You want to talk on the street? Never think it’s a good idea, putting your business on the street. You know what I mean?” Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) tells Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan), in In The Cut (2003), urging her to enter the back of his cop car for questioning about the recent murder of a young woman who was dismembered and discarded in Frannie’s garden. The New York City heat emanates off the screen; maybe his car has a working air conditioner. 

Reluctantly, Frannie gets in, knowing she can’t really avoid Malloy, who previously waited outside her apartment to begin his line of questioning. Frannie can’t avoid anyone, really — it seems she’s always being followed by strange and questionable men, ones that can get into her apartment when they please and track her down to any building she flees to.

In the Cut takes place in 2003 but the constant surveillance Frannie seems to be under is eerily relevant to today's unending digital scrutiny. Scroll on TikTok and you’ll find a myriad of people being filmed without their consent. Whether they’re students at FIT being ridiculed for their fashion or women gossiping at a restaurant just a table over from the original poster, any and all of us can become fodder for “content.” Even the fear of being watched, the paranoia induced by this surveillance state, is made into content itself, such as this woman filming a video about pumping her own gas alone as a woman.

We are all being watched, and being watched is the hallmark of the thriller genre. Voyeurism has come to define cinema in a myriad of ways, but it’s undeniably central to thrillers, erotic or otherwise. In the Cut uses the classic paranoia of voyeurism found in thrillers to critique erotic thrillers in particular, as well as the increased surveillance of our society. In looking at generic tropes and society at large, the film questions the status of women in these movies and writ large, wondering how safe we can be under the patriarchal eyes of our culture.

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Frannie, at first, maintains her distance from the murder case central to the plot. Although the victim was partially found in her garden, she never knew the woman. But she did, really; she caught a glimpse of this woman giving a blowjob to a mysterious man in the basement of a bar, herself mesmerised by observing the woman without her knowledge. 

One murder, though, is not enough to capture the attention of Frannie, a regular English professor, or even the attention of the public. When Frannie assigns a paper on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the students bemoan the work, stating it wasn’t interesting because all that happened was that an old woman died. 

“How many ladies have to die to make it good?” Frannie asks her students. 

“At least three,” one young man pipes up. Sure enough, it isn’t until the bodies start piling up that Frannie becomes embroiled in the murder investigation, and newspapers begin to wildly report about the serial killer who disarticulates and dismembers women, leaving behind an engagement ring on their fingers. 

“Frannie is always being watched, always observed at strange angles by the camera and the men in her life. We, as the audience, often find ourselves either too close or too distant from Frannie to feel as if we aren’t a fly on the wall.”

The focus, though, always remains on Frannie. Rather than centering a cop in this story, Frannie is an average everywoman, spending her free time learning slang from her student Cornelius Webb (Sharrieff Pugh). Frannie is always being watched, always observed at strange angles by the camera and the men in her life. We, as the audience, often find ourselves either too close or too distant from Frannie to feel as if we aren’t a fly on the wall: Malloy can only see her through the small frame provided by her opened door still locked with the chain; Detective Rodriguez (Nick Damici), Malloy’s partner, views her first through his rearview window; and when Frannie is alone on the subway, the camera feels at eye level with her, sitting on the seat next to her staring at her every move. She is our frame of reference for the film, the character we follow through every scene and the one we empathise with, while we are also her voyeur.

This is an erotic thriller, though, and while paranoia is key, it would be nothing without the sex. As Frannie becomes more embroiled in the serial killing spree, she becomes emancipated sexually by Malloy. She fantasises him watching her as she masturbates, the shaky camera ogling her every body part as if we’re watching a point of view porno. Before long, she’s knee deep in Malloy, or more accurately, he is tongue deep in her. 

To find pleasure and comfort in Malloy is new and exciting; he also, however, represents a growing fear and danger in Frannie’s life. Time and again, men are proven to be untrustworthy, as in her ex-boyfriend John Graham (Kevin Bacon) screaming at her when she rejects him or when Cornelius berates her after denying his sexual advances. She is even mugged on the street, the camera following her like it's her assailant, but unlike any other film, she’s not just the next nameless victim. 

In the Cut sharply places a woman at the centre of an erotic thriller’s murder case to expose the surveillance state at large. Frannie always seems to be the next victim, but she deftly never is. We must always remain suspicious of every man in the film, especially the detectives. After all, what better represents the patriarchal surveillance state than the police, whose purpose is to protect and serve each other? When we glimpse into Frannie’s point of view, we always see women who seem to be in danger, whether running on the street or in a bloody bridal gown on the subway.

Frannie is never the next victim — or is she? While Jane Campion’s film adaptation sees Frannie survive the misogynistic murderer at the centre of the plot, the Frannie of Susanna Moore’s original novel does not. In the film, we simultaneously identify with Frannie while also constantly aware of ourselves as viewers stalking her every move, but the novel is written in the first person, removing that extra voyeuristic layer that only a camera can provide. That is, until her death. “The dying sometimes speak of themselves in the third person,” she begins, then assures us this won’t happen right until it does: “I know the poem. She knows the poem.” Suddenly, Frannie becomes an object, the victim in a tabloid newspaper. 

Moore’s and Campion’s endings are markedly different, yet they comment on the same violent misogyny. Both understand that Frannie can lose her personhood in an instant as she becomes fodder for other people to watch. For Campion’s film, though, Frannie’s survival could inspire hope, but in reality it shows that, whether in life or death, women can never truly escape the surveillance state. The film’s final frame tells all: she hitchhikes back to New York and crawls back to Malloy, handcuffed in her apartment as she feared he was the killer, the wide shot of the two on the ground in her apartment reminiscent of the distanced gaze of a security camera. Their faces are obscured, even protected, but our gaze remains.

Words: Megan Robinson