Watching Walk the Line Will Teach You How Not to Treat a Woman
By Anonymous

Walk the Line is the life story of American hero Johnny Cash, and as with Ray Charles in Ray , as with most American heroes, the movie shows how his path to fame and fortune was constructed of women's shattered lives.

The movie opens portraying the recording of the risk-taking hit record Live at Folsom Prison . Moves like this, writing about the criminal life, and his “the Man in Black” outlaw image gave Cash, a country musician, a crossover appeal to the rock and roll crowd. He was supposed to speak for the powerless in society. But then the movie flashes back to his childhood, and moves quickly to his young manhood. This is where the man-of-the-people thing falls apart, because while he might speak for rapists and murderers, the film shows here demonstrates his inability to ever speak for some of the most victimized in America: women.

For instance, Joaquin Phoenix playing Cash shows that while he got his wife pregnant three times, he was so obsessed with making “a real record!” that he failed to do his job as a door-to-door salesman and sell anything. So, they got an eviction notice from the landlord. In real life, this is not heroic behavior, and from a woman's perspective, he just gave her 25 years of hard labor. Oh, but he does get a record deal with Sam Phillips' Sun Records, home of Elvis Presley. Eventually Johnny Cash is enough of a hit on tour that he buys his wife and children a new house and appliances, but he's never home. On the road, he commits adultery with groupies and fellow singer June Carter, played by Reese Witherspoon. In the film, Cash has the thoughtlessness, callousness, and cluelessness to start tacking up portraits of his sometime mistress Carter in his wife's house. Eventually, she takes one of the pictures and smashes it, so he knocks her to the ground, holds her down and roars into her face, “You think you're perfect? You think you're perfect?” His three daughters watch, sobbing, from the doorway. As I was watching this domestic drama unfold, none of his famous songs seemed to matter, because all I could think about was my mother. My mother married my father, who got her pregnant with me and my older brother, and then cheated on her right and left, at times beating her black and blue and attempting to smother her with a pillow. He was not the hero of our story.

One of the themes of the movie is Cash's pursuit of Carter as the love of his life. But even had he not been under obligation to another woman, this, too, is hopelessly jacked-up. Knowing as he did that she was raised in the showbiz life, Cash in the movie uses her please-the-crowd instincts to get them singing duets while she is also married. After her divorce, this manipulation gets raised a notch when he tries to get her to duet with him on a sexy song she used to sing with her husband. She firmly says no several times, but eventually, hey, the crowd are all waiting, darling. This occurs after a neighborhood Christian woman has already condemned her, saying, “Divorce is an abomination.” The movie shows her watching from the crowd. Against Carter's will he kisses her during this song, and she runs off, outraged. Finally, after Cash asks her to marry him a million times and she says no with rising anger, he coerces an “Okay” out of her with this same crowd-psychology pressure. This was the highpoint of the narrative. When the screen went black, a bunch of hipsters in the audience raised a howl of triumph. But I walked out of Walk the Line thinking about how their hero, how America's heroes, treat women so badly.

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