Reese Witherspoon (centre) walks onstage with fellow cast members of Big Little Lies, Shailene Woodley, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, and Zoe Kravitz, during the 69th Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on September 17. Pic/Getty Images

Last evening, to distract myself from hunger (not the kind that is the result of not eating, but of not being satisfied because of the soft-food diet you're forced to be on because of an upcoming medical procedure), I settled into the 150-minute long film my sister recommended we watch. When we signed up for streaming it, we weren't sure what genre Anatomy of a Murder (1959) fell into, whodunnit or courtroom drama, and the film's trajectory clearly straddles both. James Stewart plays a bachelor lawyer, ex-district attorney, and takes on a case of an army lieutenant accused of murdering a man who allegedly raped his wife. The draw, for me, was the fact that the soundtrack had been composed by Duke Ellington. But soon enough I found myself fixated by the character of the wife, Laura Manion (Lee Remick). What was meant to strike you, as a member of the audience, was how she seemed to be the opposite of a rape victim. Sure, she was hiding her black eye under thick sunglasses, but beyond that she didn't seem to play the part of either a battered wife or a dishonored woman. She was relentlessly flirtatious and conscious of her seductive potential, in fact, it seemed as though she was using her sexuality as a way of claiming agency, given that beyond her status as a restless housewife, she had no other identity.