† For those wondering what homo acerbia is from, see here.
So last night I'm watching The Guest, the okay but not amazing movie about a man who shows up at a family's door claiming to be the best buddy of their recently deceased soldier son. In time he gets involved in all the family drama, disrupts their lives, and goes on a killing spree only to magically survive like Mike Myers at the end. Oh, right, warning: spoilers.
The point is for the first part of the story David appears to be what he claims to be, if perhaps a little demented. Things start falling apart when the dead soldier's sister (the very sexy Maika Monroe who I'm mentioning to shamelessly post her photo) gets suspicious and calls the army base who directs the call to a shady corporate HQ where an executive in a military haircut orders them to "stick with the cover story". As a result, the base tells Anna that David died in a fire two weeks earlier. Meanwhile, the executive starts making suspicious calls.
"Shady". "Suspicious".
You may notice those specific words I used above: at this point in the movie we don't know as an audience what's really going on. I didn't know what was going on, the woman next to me didn't know what was going on.
I understood this was something we didn't yet understand. She refused to accept this and demanded I explain everything to her. Right then and there. All the way to how the movie would end (despite her knowing ahead of time that while I had watched the first 40 minutes or so before, I fell asleep during it and didn't know how it ended). She wanted everything explained to her. Painstakingly. Because she's stupid. Because she's a stupid woman.
She's not alone either. They're all like that. I can't tell you the number of women I've had ruin a movie by demanding (even pausing to insist) that I explain what's going on. The moment they receive imperfect information they get very very upset and refuse to allow the movie to give you a mystery followed by the resolution.
What's up with Captain Ramius killing Putin at the beginning to The Hunt for Red October? Is the daughter at the start of Heredity possessed? Why is Kevin Spacey talking about a barbershop quartet instead of telling us what happened on that boat? Why did Bruce Willis kill that guy in the airport/train station at the start of Lucky Number Slevin? What's going on behind the restaurant in Mulholland Drive? Who or what did Charlie shoot at the beginning of Straw Dogs? Who's this guy in the black suit demanding to know what the rebels did with their stolen plans?
Every one of these movies explains the mystery at some point during the runtime (yes, even the David Lynch movie that does leave a bit of the circumstances abstract). Some movies like The Usual Suspects are all about the mystery and it isn't resolved until eight seconds before the closing credits. Others like The Hunt for Red October setup the mystery in Act One and by Act Three that mystery has been resolved and the story has progressed from that original tension into the dramatic stakes that fuel the rest of the story. Darth Vader is explained halfway through Star Wars to your satisfaction in that story (future stories expand on his relationship with the other characters but if you only watch the 1977 movie you know everything you really need to know about him).
Men understand this. Women, being stupid, do not. They seem to think it was some failure (on the filmmaker's part, not theirs, obviously!) to properly explain things and that you, as the man who by default are smarter and more insightful, might have pieced together the answer and can therefore explain it all to them.
The worst thing is that it's usually true. We usually have, and we usually can. We sometimes get it wrong (I had theorized in The Guest that David actually was their son and he had undergone some sort of special Face/Off style surgical procedure, maybe mixed in with a bit of RoboCop to explain his strength and "shutdown" scene earlier) but we've always at least pieced together part of the story. And we were all paying enough attention to know what's happening and the likely outcomes.
This is, of course, the "mansplaining" conundrum: men actually do need to explain things all the time because we're smarter than women are. Then we get chastised for it, typically about 45 seconds after the woman herself either explicitly or implicitly required us to do so. Because they're really that stupid.
