Zo? Kravitz's 'Blink Twice' examines the expectations for women to smile through trauma
Zo? Kravitz is not offended by descriptions of her directorial debut “Blink Twice” as “a ‘Get Out’ for women.” It is a thriller, she said, and like “Get Out,” it’s a deep cultural analysis. The difference here is that it centers women. Power, she told NBC News, is her main target.
“I wanted to explore power, not necessarily empowerment, but power as an entity, and what that does to us, what people will do to get it, and what people do once they have it, the abuse of power,” she said. “It’s oppressive by nature. In order to be at the top, someone has to be at the bottom or below you, and it’s something that we all want, but to want something that is oppressive is so complicated.”
The film, starring Naomi Ackie and Kravitz’s fiancé, Channing Tatum, follows Ackie’s Frida, a young cocktail waitress struggling to make ends meet whose fortunes seemingly change when she and friend Jess, played by Alia Shawkat, swap their server clothes for cute dresses and go from pouring Champagne to drinking it.
Frida and Jess join the orbit of Tatum’s Slater King, a famous billionaire. They meet at a fundraiser he is hosting, but the party spins off to King’s private island, where things get eerie.
The young women party under increasingly weird circumstances, drinking copious amounts of Champagne and consuming five-star meals. Because they are not used to being surrounded by opulence, it’s easy to understand why Frida especially brushes off the many unexplainable incidents.
In the background, viewers can see workers killing huge snakes and other machinations, with the film slowly getting creepier as it goes on. But that development doesn’t hit in the way we’ve come to expect from thrillers or horror films or both. Instead, Kravitz offers social commentary on how society views women as well as how women are expected — or forced — to behave.
“I also really wanted to highlight the absurdity of what women are asked to do in society,” Kravitz said. “Women are constantly expected to pretend like we don’t remember. We’re constantly expected to smile through our trauma and our pain, and we’re constantly needing to communicate to each other with just our eyes because we don’t feel safe to speak. I wanted to try and find a way to highlight the absurdity.”
Casting played a huge role in that mission. Because the Slater Kings of the world aren’t readily seen as predators, she turned to Tatum. “The character Slater King needed to be someone we felt comfortable with, someone that was charming, someone that felt safe,” she said.
Ackie was also pivotal to making the Fridas real to audiences.
“This character requires a lot of her. It requires her to display and feel almost every emotion at once, and she does that so beautifully. To go from drama to comedy to action to fierceness, it’s so many things, and she does it so well. She also has one of the most expressive faces I’ve ever seen. And because so much of the movie is not necessarily about what she’s saying, but about what she’s feeling, I knew that she’d be able to do that beautifully.”
It would be easy to liken Slater King to some of the most high-profile men accused of sexual misconduct or crimes in recent years, such as Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein, but Kravitz shuts down those comparisons. Instead, Kravitz said she began this journey with her own observations and experiences first as a novella, followed by a script with collaborator E.T. Feigenbaum that took nearly five years to complete. Once it was clear they could get financing to make it into a movie, she decided to direct it.
The fact that “Blink Twice” is so timely, however, speaks to the pervasiveness of the sexual mistreatment of women, Kravitz said.
“People so badly want to make this story about one or two people, and it’s frustrating because those are just two examples of people of power abusing it,” she said. “And I think that that’s, again, what power does. So it’s a bigger issue.
“This isn’t just about billionaires or rich men,” she continued. “This is about anyone that has power. It can be your boss. It can be the guy down the street following you home. It can be a family member. It can be anybody.”
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This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
