The Red Pill

Gravitas Ventures | Release Date: October 7, 2016

8.3	USER SCORE Universal acclaim based on 75 Ratings

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ChrissinhoMar 12, 2017

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,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 feminazis, 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. Honest.The 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 about.The 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.… Expand

7 of 37 users found this helpful730

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KublaiKhanJun 6, 2020

It's very one-sided propaganda. Funded by MRA and 95% of MRA ideas, views, opinions, and stories go unchallenged.

0 of 1 users found this helpful01

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