on watching north country alone

We don’t own many DVDs around here but some time ago North Country found its way into our small collection and this weekend I finally had a night alone to watch it. This is NOT a kid film or even a teen film.

Hard watching. There was a point of identification with Josey, a single mom, raising a son, etc., but her world was so sordid compared to mine. Which leads me to realize the extent to which my parent’s wealth (they weren’t wealthy, of course, by today’s standards, my father was an engineer and my mother did not work) and my education (in 1980, tuition, room and board at Trinity College, CT, was about $8,000 – my father wrote a check) protects me from life’s seedier underside. I’ve had some low wage jobs in my life but in academic libraries, never in a mine, or factory. I’ve just never been exposed, except as passerby, to filth, lewdness, vulgarity. And I’ve never been sexually abused, harassed, or mistreated because I was a woman. I haven’t had to fear for my physical safety, ever.

On the contrary, my own experience inhabiting a woman’s body has been so benign, so un-threatened, that I have not always been sympathetic to the plight of people like Josey, and I’m sorry about that. I have the liberty of not being a feminist because I have no feminist battles to wage.

The movie is based on a real life lawsuit, a class action suit brought on behalf of the women working an iron mine in Minnesota. Lois Jenson, on whom the character of Josey is based, began working at the mine in 1975 and brought her lawsuit in 1985. According to the wikipedia article on the movie, the case dragged on for fourteen years!

I don’t know where she got her stamina, how she held on before seeking revenge, how she kept her secrets. I would not have survived as many days under the appalling, subhuman conditions, those women endured, in order to pay the rent, to feed their kids. Just watching the film was hard, there were scenes that made me physically ill.

My life is so sanitized.

That I could sit through such a movie means I am moving into a good (i.e. more stable) place. I’ve realized over the years that my capacity to watch certain movies is directly related to my psychological health at the time. This is because movies affect me in an immediate, visceral way. I am not someone who cries in real life, not easily anyway, so movies facilitate a certain emotional release, or catharsis. A good thing, but not if I’m weak, or depressed. Then I’ll opt for lighter fare.

I liked the character of Josey, a cool sort of person, with a deep inner goodness, and I liked the movie, an inspiring story of a woman who finds her courage and doesn’t back down.