X
- 2016
- TV-14
- Gravitas Ventures
- 1 h 48 m
- 2016
- TV-14
- Gravitas Ventures
- 1 h 48 m
Summary When feminist filmmaker Cassie Jaye sets out to document the mysterious and polarizing world of the Men’s Rights Movement, she begins to question her own beliefs. Jaye had only heard about the Men’s Rights Movement as being a misogynist hate-group aiming to turn back the clock on women’s rights, but when she spends a year filming the lea...
Directed By: Cassie Jaye
- 2016
- TV-14
- Gravitas Ventures
- 1 h 48 m
- 2016
- TV-14
- Gravitas Ventures
- 1 h 48 m
The Red Pill
Metascore
Available after 4 critic reviews
8.3
Summary When feminist filmmaker Cassie Jaye sets out to document the mysterious and polarizing world of the Men’s Rights Movement, she begins to question her own beliefs. Jaye had only heard about the Men’s Rights Movement as being a misogynist hate-group aiming to turn back the clock on women’s rights, but when she spends a year filming the lea...
Directed By: Cassie Jaye
Top Cast
Cassie Jaye's The Red Pill is clumsy and frustrating in many ways. But it demonstrates enough sincerity and openness to challenging ideas — letting representatives of this problematic movement make their case clearly and convincingly — that one wishes it were able to look at multiple sides of this debate at the same time.
Jaye acknowledges in the opening and closing minutes that MRAs sometimes spew nasty garbage online, but she never presses them on this in her many interviews. Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016.
User Score
Universal Acclaim
Based on 79 User Ratings
8.3
84% Positive
66 Ratings
66 Ratings
4% Mixed
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
13% Negative
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
User Score
Universal Acclaim
Based on 79 User Ratings
8.3
84% Positive
66 Ratings
66 Ratings
4% Mixed
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
13% Negative
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
Jaye never gets to her original question about rape culture, and ultimately twists herself in knots to justify the movement’s misogynist rhetoric.
At the beginning I was thinking, oh **** another woman making a film about herself instead about the issue. But after 30 mins the scenes, the stories of the people, the arguments were so touching and sad...I am still sad about, what I saw and I know they are true, because I am informed about feminism and mens right since many years.
The 3 "professional" critics shows exactly what mainstream medias are: liars
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Ultimately, the documentary was disappointing. My main gripe was that the narrator, Cassie Jaye, wasn't particularly inquisitive or analytical. While the viewer does hear from male and female MRAs –
in a more temperate, controlled environment – about the issues the movement alleges to advocate (e.g. custody, parental equality, mental issues), these efforts are actually occluded online by a reactive victim complex and constant women-bashing (e.g. Return of Kings, A Voice for Men). Not once did Cassie call them to task on all of that, which was rather alarming especially given that she was a self-proclaimed feminist.
There were a few countering views from feminists but I felt more platform was given to the MRAs to lament that men's issues are being 'ignored', 'shouted down' or 'obstructed' by 'male-bashing' feminists [a pretty ironic accusation, given that online MRAs are doing exactly the same thing to women]. That isn't even the case, for reasons explained previously. Overall, the reasons put forward for the men's rights movements were either commonplace (i.e. already recognised within gender identity studies) or irrational, collectively making for a rather unconvincing conclusion that made me dubious as to how and why they were enough for Cassie to swiftly denounce her support of feminism. Then I read somewhere else that The Red Pill was a Kickstarter job heavily campaigned by A Voice for Men and many MRA subreddits and it all made sense.
I would recommend this documentary if you're not aware whatsoever that there are social issues unique to men (which seemed to bowl over Cassie Jaye in a questionably jejune way), otherwise if you have some fundamental awareness, you won't learn anything from this and – perhaps – will become irritated by its construction more than anything else.
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It's very one-sided propaganda. Funded by MRA and 95% of MRA ideas, views, opinions, and stories go unchallenged.
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So, essentially, Cassie Jaye is to feminism what Alan Colmes is to leftism. The Red Pill is a subreddit that proports to promote men's rights activism. The name comes from The Matrix, the red pill representing painful, brutal, actual reality, while the blue pill represents a blissful illusion. For TRP, the normies have taken the blue pill while the red pillers face real truth. Quite how that manifests itself isn't really clear, though generally it seems the key is lifting weights and trying to pull as many women as possible. Or at least posting on an internet message board about doing such things. Cassie Jaye is a self-proclaimed ex-feminist, though it's not exactly clear how active she was in feminism. There is a brief segment of how she made video diaries about how long it took her to get dressed and how she attended feminist rallies but there's no actual evidence of her feminism.
The film starts with a brief overview of why she says she was a feminist. She then explains how she came across some MRA literature online and decided to talk to some of them in person, and then we get two hours of her talking to said men and a handful of sympathetic women, as well as the occasional token feminist to give the illusion of balance. We see a lot of Jaye. She's in front of the camera for most of the film despite offering anything beyond vague platitudes. Occasionally, she offers a meek counterpoint and then poses that to the interviewees for an unchallenged rebuttal, but even these counterpoints disappear quickly after the first part of the film, after her totally organic on-screen epiphany. We see a lot of her video diaries too, which would be relevant if the story was really about a genuine journey of a hardcore feminist meeting and challenging the men she opposes and her own views, but because of Jaye's robotic, passionless presentation, they just come across as entirely vacuous and unnecessary. Even when she cries in one of her entries, the result is entirely melodramatic and self-serving. Jaye says that she feels 'duped' by the MRA's incredibly strong, overwhelming pitch, even though it seemingly consists of a bunch of bearded dudes sitting around in nice houses whining about how discriminated against they are because of ****, using posters and flipcharts while the director sits as far away from the man as possible.
After said epiphany, the film basically descends into full-blown propaganda. A few issues are sporadically focused upon, though they aren't really given any serious attention or consideration though, and are all presented only to serve the overriding message that men are hard done by, because of women. Though that's a pretty accurate discription of MRAs in general, ironically. We also get to meet women involved in MRA, just to show that it's not really a bunch of moaning men blathering on about a range of disparate and unfocused issues. **** opponents of the MRA movement are portrayed as rabid and irrational thugs who will stop at no end to aggresively stop their more reasoned counterparts, even if they have to take civility and free speech down with them. Feminists in this film are either cartoon caricatures shouting angrily and incoherently, or else cardboard cut-out intellectuals. It's not that there aren't legitimate issues that men face. The main problem is that feminism came from a position of genuine inequality. Some saw that women were not treated equally in many areas and sought to rectify that. The MRAs have started from a position of being against feminism, and worked to find issues to complain about to back that position up.
It's also intertwined with politics. Feminists have traditionally been leftists. It's doubtless that part of the opposition to feminism is political, it's an opposition to the left as much as it as a promotion of men's rights. See how many MRAs you can find who are leftist. They don't actually care about or even fight for the issues that purport to believe in, they only talk about them in an attempt to score points. Ironically, feminism does far more to address the issues that they talk **** production values are mediocre, the score is particularly bad and quite distracting. The sound mixing and editing are pretty poor and even the camerawork is shoddy. The narration is robotic, entirely uninteresting, adds nothing to the debate and is horribly presented.
It's pure propaganda. It's worth remembering that it was predominantly funded on Kickstarter using donations from MRAs. All of this is a great shame as it might actually have been interesting to see a real documentary about the MRAs, to see how they arrived to the movement and to see their views actually challenged in a genuine way. This is a completely wasted opportunity to make an interesting documentary, though as propaganda, Goebbels would have been proud to make such a film.
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Production Company
Jaye Bird Productions
Release Date Oct 7, 2016
Duration 1 h 48 m
Rating TV-14
Genres
Tagline Down the rabbit hole of gender politics
Awards
Idyllwild International Festival of Cinema
• 3 Wins & 3 Nominations
Louisiana International Film Festival
• 1 Win & 1 Nomination
Digital Hollywood Conference
• 1 Win & 1 Nomination
