When I heard, back in 2019, that Armie Hammer was to play Maxim de Winter in the much-anticipated Netflix adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, I was sorely disappointed. No, I thought, he won’t do, he won’t do at all. Armie Hammer seemed too blah, too boring, too boy-next-door to play Max. Not brooding enough, not enigmatic enough, not enough danger lurking behind those dull blue eyes. Max DeWinter is a craggy Cornwall cliff in the middle of a lightning storm, and Armie Hammer, so it seemed, was a sunny summer holiday in Italy.
Let’s consider how du Maurier, via her narrator-protagonist, describes Max when we first meet him in Monte Carlo:
He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown. Could one but rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long distant past—a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy.
Max DeWinter, after all, is the quintessential gothic leading man; he is supposed to be kind of (or perhaps quite) scary. It isn’t simply that he is violent and abusive (which we can read in du Maurier’s text), it’s that he embodies the potential for violence. What makes Max so frightening is the uncertainty, the not-knowing when or how or even if he might turn against our protagonist, his new wife. The mysterious qualities that make him seem complex and compelling also create unease. The question marks surrounding the demise of his last wife, the titular Rebecca, are red flags, but he knows how to turn on the charm just enough to assuage his new bride’s trepidation.
If this sounds chillingly familiar, it’s because the gothic romantic tradition was depicting emotional manipulation and domestic abuse long before the term “gaslighting” entered popular vernacular. The whole draw of gothic romance, for many women, is that it represents and illuminates the terror of patriarchal violence as it manifests within domestic and intimate spaces. The gothic employs exaggerated settings and heightened circumstances to speak to the horror in everyday lived experiences. Even if your husband doesn’t, say, keep a secret blood-stained dungeon in the basement with an array of torture devices, sometimes maybe he is a monster.
So if I’m thinking Max DeWinter, I’m thinking someone like Laurence Olivier, who played the role in Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation: mature, serious, calculating, intimidating. In du Maurier’s novel, as in the Hitchcock film, Max is clearly an older, darker, predatory figure who targets our young, naïve, shrinking violet of a protagonist. Armie Hammer, in his youthful, California-tan, polo-shirt-wearing, generically handsome Armie Hammer-ness, seems an odd choice for the role, and indeed, his performance is practically devoid of tension. Hammer, with his cheerful mustard-yellow suit and limited range of facial expressions, embodies a mildness that strips Max de Winter of his essential, unpredictable, simmering menace. This could have been an interesting cross-type character exploration, revealing the ways in which patriarchal violence is normalized and obscured by the construct of “wholesome” idealized white masculinity. Alas, director Ben Wheatley does not dig so deep, and neither does Hammer.
In Wheatley’s iteration, the character’s relationship with the protagonist is somewhat passionate, but without the creeping threat of danger that characterizes the novel, or the gothic romantic more generally. Feminist literary and cinema scholar Tania Modleski remarks that in this adaptation, Wheatley has “prudishly resisted confronting the dark undertow of this classically female text,” all but removing the terror of patriarchal violence that is central to du Maurier’s book and turning it into a “tepid Cinderella story.” As one who was always compelled much more by Bluebeard than by Cinderella, I was frustrated at this happily-ever-after reimagining of the disturbing, complex, subversive, thrilling novel.
Now this past week, of course, we learned that Armie Hammer is apparently no Prince Charming. Leaked private messages, allegedly from Hammer, indicate violent sexual fantasizing, including cannibalism. To be crystal clear, these messages, on their own, within the context of a consensual BDSM exchange and/or relationship, would not necessarily indicate abuse. But then came allegations from a number of women that speak to Hammer’s abusive and manipulative behavior with former intimate partners—and this is the real issue. An ex-girlfriend, Courtney Vucekovich, went on the record with an interview describing his emotional and sexual abuse and manipulation, which she says has left her with psychological trauma.
Another former girlfriend, Jessica Ciencin Henriquez, has supported these accounts, tweeting, “If you are still questioning whether or not those Armie Hammer DMs are real (and they are) maybe you should start questioning why we live in a culture willing to give abusers the benefit of the doubt instead of victims,” then “It takes an army to hide a predator…Behind every abuser is a team of people working hard to cover up the trail.”
When I learned of the alleged abuse, I was disturbed, but I was not surprised. Armie Hammer may be too blah to play a gothic hero-villain, but as we know all too well, plenty of blonde boys-next-door in polo shirts commit violence. Hammer could be the poster child for American white male privilege, which traditionally enables and begets violence with little consequence. I was far less surprised at Hammer’s alleged real abuse than at his casting as a fictional abuser. Riddle me that, folks.
I was musing over this observation when a friend asked me who I thought should have played Max de Winter in the new Rebecca. Believe me, I’ve been pondering this since I first read the book at age 14. By now, most of my choices would be too old for Max (who should be in his 40’s or so): Gabriel Byrne, Antonio Banderas, Pierce Brosnan. Maybe Christopher Walken. The best current casting idea I have is Jon Hamm, who would actually be amazing as Max. I wonder if they asked him.
Crucially, I noted to my friend, I wouldn’t want a Max de Winter who has a reputation of being abusive and violent in real life (so no Ed Westwick, who otherwise would theoretically be a good Max de Winter if he were a little bit older). This was an important point for me to articulate.
The reason we love the gothic genre is because it gives us a safe pretend venue to grapple with real fears and real pain. Max de Winter is an exaggerated character type, an easily-identified Bad Boy, an embodiment of patriarchal violence and of the terror bound up with it. We know, in real life, that we can’t spot an abuser by his craggy dark countenance or his craggy dark seaside estate. We absolutely know that an abuser can look any way, live anywhere, be anyone. But, speaking for myself and my personal taste, I don’t want my gothic horror to get too real. Aside from my not wanting known abusers to get more jobs in Hollywood, I also don’t want the feeling that I am watching a person who is reputedly abusive IRL be abusive onscreen. It takes away the feeling of empowerment and catharsis that I get from engaging with and processing a fictional horror story, particularly one that speaks to my own lived experiences. If I know that what I’m seeing is not just an imagined representation of real truth, but possibly an expression with facets of real violence, it’s no longer a space where I can safely engage with terror and then disengage. It’s too real.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, and I re-watched Rebecca on Netflix, to see how I might view Armie Hammer’s performance differently, knowing what we all know now. Hammer’s Max de Winter seemed as mild as ever, but I realize now that this is a function more of Wheatley’s direction and storytelling than of Hammer and his performance. Wheatley presents a version of Rebecca in which patriarchal violence is not recognized as a pervasive threat, where the glistering Armie Hammer-ized Max de Winter is gold, even though he (spoiler alert) actually did kill his first wife. The director dials up the himpathy, presenting Max as the real victim—of Rebecca’s tyranny, and then of a series of unfortunate circumstances. Wheatley undermines and insults du Maurier fans and gothic aficionados who knowto be suspicious of Max in spite of Hammer’s milquetoast performance, insisting that there was never anything to worry about, and that Max really is the man of all of our dreams. For Wheatley’s vision, Armie Hammer is the perfect accomplice, the perfect Max de Winter.
Wheatley demonstrates that an average, boring, generically-good-looking white guy can literally get away with murder and come out looking like Prince Charming, but that’s not du Maurier’s Rebecca. That’s not happily ever after, as Wheatley suggests. That’s just white patriarchy in a mustard-colored suit.
