Over the next half-hour, we discussed how male journalists respond to female nudity, finding the movie’s pitch-perfect comedic tone, and the best (and weirdest) reactions she’s gotten from viewers so far.
Some of your most glowing reviews refer to the movie as expressing millennial angst or discontent. I’m curious how you feel about “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” being described as a generational portrait.
I think a lot of journalists talk about films that women make, especially about sexuality; there’s an unintentionally coded language that gets used. I hear a lot of words like “millennial,” “cringe,” “raw,” and comparisons to Lena Dunham. For a male director, they might use words like “powerful” instead of “raw”—“outsider art” instead of “cringe”—and not tag them to one specific generation that has a reputation as being self-involved. Some negative connotations there. I think that there’s a way, perhaps unintentionally, of othering women’s films about sexuality and diminishing their intellectual nature.
Other loaded words that might fall under that category of what you’re describing are “brave” or “courageous” in terms of depicting female nudity.
I’m proud of how this film uses nudity—I think it does so in a way that is right for the story and serves the narrative. I’m trying to use all the tools to tell the best story, to make choices that are right for this story, and to create the comedy and emotional response that I’m going for. However, I see headlines from publications that lead with “Joanna Arnow Bares All”—it seems so strange, in this day and age, that that’s the main take. [That] can be heartbreaking for a film I wrote, directed, acted in, and edited to be reduced [in that way]. I wanted to show nudity and sexuality in a very non-sensational way. To me, that’s not what the story’s about at all.
There’s so much discourse now about how sex has gone missing in modern movies. Was “The Feeling” an attempt to combat that—reminding viewers that sexuality is an important aspect of ourselves?
This is a film about a character wrestling with questions about sexuality, relationships, and self, and I think we all do that in some shape or form. I was excited to portray that comedically, which I hope leaves everyone feeling lighter about it all.
I think sexuality is such an essential part of the human experience. I think bodies and how we move through space can say so much about character and relationships—and it can be quite funny, the vulnerability of connecting with each other and trying new things. That’s really why I was interested in telling a story about sexuality, BDSM, and relationships.