(Watch out for spoilers!)
Hello blogosphere! I apologize for being away for so long. I got a new job in June and so even the minuscule time I had put aside to build this blog was flushed away. Hopefully things will even out and I'll get back to posting on a semi-regular basis.
So, the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World movie has come and hopefully will still hold on in theaters for another week or two. Personally, if it doesn't, I say "que sera." Some seem to be upset about the low box office, but I'm not. I don't really see why the low box office is such a tragedy, at least for fans. Sure, it's upsetting for everyone who made it, but I don't think there's anything fans have to lose by it. It's not like Serenity, where the low box office meant the fans wouldn't see the story continue (at least not with real actors moving around and stuff - there's always comic books), or with The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, where the low box office meant the later books in the trilogy wouldn't be adapted. The Scott Pilgrim movie adapted the entire comic book series. The story is complete in book and movie form. There's nothing more to wait for. The only thing it could possibly affect is O'Malley's chances to get another work adapted if he makes another work worthy of adaptation, and I think by that point there may be enough X factors that the movie gets made, anyway. (I think Edgar Wright is popular enough not to be affected in the long run by this.)
Anyway, I liked the movie very much. I started reading the comic book series after the first trailer hit, but I had heard good things about it previously. It's a lot of fun. It's a series that takes the standard everyplot of a video game - male character fights baddies to save female character - and overlays it in an indie-comic style romance to awesome effect. Also, despite its plot's origin as a chauvinistic trope, the comic book has awesome female characters.
O'Malley makes a huge step toward mitigating the sexism of the original trope by not having the only female character be "the princess." We see all of Ramona Flowers' (said girl) ex-boyfriends and her ex-girlfriend, who Scott has to fight. Yet Scott also has his own exes to contend with (albeit not in a battling way) in Envy Adams and Lisa Miller, both of whom have unique goals and personalities in addition to their story function to throw Scott's hypocrisies in sharp relief. There's also ex-girlfriend and Scott's bandmember Kim, who is the character in the series I would have wanted to be a few years ago: not at the center of attention, but nevertheless a sarcastic commenter on the action -- the one who has the clear picture of the whole situation. Sister Stacey Pilgrim has a similar role, but nevertheless a different personality and she remains distinct from Kim. The series also doesn't stop from having a lot of minor women characters who don't do much and have more one-note personalities, like Julie Powers, but no more or less than characters like Joseph or Kim's friend who Scott can never remember. At any rate, there are many women "outside" the standard video game plot, many of whom are retained in the movie and ensure Ramona isn't "the girl character, so naturally she must be rescued."
And there are also two main characters in the movie and comic I haven't even discussed: Knives Chau, Scott's most recent ex/sometime stalker, and Roxy Richter, because even in the 90s you usually had at least one female villain in a video game. Both of these female characters are crucial to the plot, and deserving of full blog posts on their own.
Of course, there's also Ramona, who isn't just a princess ... or much of a princess at all. In addition to helping fight some of the evil exes herself, both in the comic and movie, she also has her own emotional journey to go through. Ramona is my favorite character in the series, and the one I, in the end, find I relate to the most. I like how in the comics one of the main points is how she's revealed to not really be a perfect dream girl, but sometimes an ordinary person who has to go to work and has annoying roommates and sometimes an outright bad person who makes hurtful decisions. Scott has to forgive her, but, just as Scott has a bad self to defeat - literalized in the nega-Scott, Ramona has her own past to get over - literalized when she breaks the shackles holding her to Gideon. Her victory is Scott's victory, but also their victory, and something that cements them as a couple. It is, unfortunately, something I believe the movie muddles at the end where Knives fights Gideon with Scott, but some of it at least gets in, and the movie does a good job at bringing out Ramona's good and bad sides.
I hope what I'm getting at is coming through - this is a franchise that isn't perfect, but it has a lot to offer to female geeks in its characters. So it's mystifying, and somewhat frustrating, to see this "Twilight for Boys" comparison to come up.
It's tempting to scream out, "But Scott Pilgrim is good and Twilight is not!" but these things are, of course, relative, and that's not helpful. It's not even why the comparison irritates me.
It irritates me because even if you go by the basest, broadest stereotypes of what male and female readers like in comics, Scott Pilgrim is for boys AND girls.
Before any Twilight fans jump on me for this (any more than they would have for saying the series is bad), I just want to say that yes, I know Twilight has some male fans - my brother likes the series far more than I ever will (and yes, he recognizes the problematic elements of the series). Yet, going by broad stereotypes, most males won't read a heavily romance-based story with a female protagonist where the men do most of their fighting off-stage.
On the other hand, let's look at the broad stereotypes of female comic geeks. First, most girl geeks read manga. Hey, Scott Pilgrim is in a manga-sized format! Most girls like romance. Scott Pilgrim is about romance! Girls like pretty clothes. O'Malley said in an interview with the now-defunct Comics Foundry that he puts a lot of care into how his female characters dress, and most of them wear hip, trendy clothes that usually aren't all about showing skin. Girls' first introduction to anime was usually Sailor Moon. Scott Pilgrim has a reference to Sailor Moon!
Honestly, there was a reason that when Dave Lizewski in Kick-Ass first got his blank-slate girlfriend into comics he did it with Scott Pilgrim. It's the type of comic - like Sandman or Blankets or Strangers in Paradise or any other popular comic without superheroes - that is traditionally considered girlfriend-bait. This status is so well known it was used in a movie that, while I disliked it, had a larger box office than Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and the reference to it was intended to send a specific message to its adolescent audience: "girls will like this comic."
So why don't the book's critics get that? Older critics can be excused from not knowing the intricacies of fandom but younger, geekier critics have no excuse. It's frustrating, and I feel like it's another sign of how female members of fandom are often unacknowledged by the mainstream at large. Even something that has all the stereotypical signs of being ours is not any longer.
Yet now that I've covered the "for Boys" aspect, it's time to go back to the "Twilight" aspect. I've talked about this a bit with MadMarvelGirl on Twitter and, yes, I can see it in the broadest sense. There's a love triangle at the center with one character who the protagonist perceives as perfect and another, younger character who the protagonist will never be in love with but doesn't want to hurt their feelings. There's wish fulfillment involved. It may be hard to see what the perceived "perfect" character sees in the rather ordinary protagonist.
Yet I still find these comparisons rather superficial, and more based in the fact that we as a culture have Twilight on our minds than anything else. It's like how fanfic writers somehow seem to draw connections between their favorite character on a television show and the latest Top 40 hit. The world gets colored by our obsessions, and whether we like or hate it we're obsessed with Twilight as a culture.
I do not think the biggest criticisms of the Twilight series apply to Scott Pilgrim at all, anyway. Twilight has been criticized for not being conscious of its genre ("Stephanie Meyer hasn't read Dracula! The vampires sparkle!"), whereas O'Malley is a consumer of comic books, manga and video games and peppers his work with references. Twilight has been accused of not treating the appalling actions of its characters as abusive or controlling and rather as "just fine" or not the big deal that they should be, whereas Scott's dating of a high schooler is criticized by all his friends and most of the characters have to deal with the consequences of their poor actions. Twilight usually fades out before any action scene but Scott Pilgrim revels in the action scenes and usually expends most of the creativity on them. Plus, both stories deal with very different types of inner angst - Twilight is about the rush of first teenage love whereas most of Scott Pilgrim's early twentysomething characters have all been burned by romance in some way, and all the characters in the triangle - Scott, Ramona and Knives - reach the end of their journey when they earn self-respect. Twilight's characters win when they find the only one for them - their victories are contingent on another person and Scott Pilgrim's characters' victories are contingent on themselves.
So to critics from a girl geek fan: Scott Pilgrim is not Twilight, and Scott Pilgrim is for us, too. Although that doesn't mean all girls like Scott Pilgrim ... or Twilight, for that matter.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Iron Man 2 and the Hype Letdown
I hadn't been extremely excited about the first Iron Man movie when it came out -- my previous experience with the hero was some crossovers, a few of the old comics I'd read off a CD of the first 10 issues of all of the major Silver Age titles and the '90s cartoon, which was just okay. (I mostly watched it for the Julia Carpenter Spider-Woman, who was incredibly dull.) Plus, I was cynical about comics in general at the time. Nevertheless, I ended up loving the film and, temporarily, became an enthusiastic comics fan again. I even found myself raising my hands and making a "wooo!" noise when the after-the-credits scene ended.
Not many feminist comic bloggers at the time agreed with me. While not a female-focused movie, I thought it made some strides in the right direction. Love interest/secretary Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) had the willpower, intelligence and wit to match the hero/her boss Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and she was crucial to multiple elements of the crusade to save the day. I also appreciated greatly how the female journalist who Tony Stark loves-and-leaves in the beginning is not just dismissed as a stupid floozy but is the one to call Tony Stark out on his attempt to sell Iron Man as his bodyguard and not his alternate identity. I thought it undercut Stark's sexism from earlier in the movie. Others, though, thought the movie didn't do enough in that area and that Stark's sexism was still celebrated, and thus condemned the movie. I respect the opinion, although I'm still mystified why Iron Man was given the thumbs-down for something that might be a parody but The Dark Knight's use of the most cliched plotline for girlfriend characters (i.e. kill them for maximum angst) and shunting aside of a young potential Barbara "Batgirl/Oracle" Gordon in favor of a son who doesn't exist in the comics was pretty much ignored.
Anyway, I get off track. While I suspected I wouldn't like Iron Man 2 as much as I liked the first -- no hype can replicate the surprise of the first movie -- I nevertheless thought the women would continue to be awesome. So I'm sad to say I came away a bit disappointed.
Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie. It's fun. Downey is fun. Paltrow is fun. Cheadle is fun. Rourke is fun. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the highest order -- I don't think anyone really believes a billionaire's spectacular super-suit would bring peace to the Middle East -- but the original comics require a large amount of suspension of disbelief as well. (I remember talking to a non-comics fan about the first movie and she told me she couldn't get past the terrorists letting Stark build his super-weapon right under their noses. I couldn't argue with it.) Overall, I liked it.
Still, I couldn't help but feel that Pepper lost a lot of her edge in this movie. I very much hated the last scene, when Pepper in full freak-out mode tells Tony she can't continue to be CEO because she worries too much about him and can't take the pressure. Then they kiss.
This came as a shock, and at the time I wondered where it had come from. Whenever I remembered Pepper in the previous scenes, particularly the one where Tony tries to win her favor with strawberries as apology for when he got drunk, made an ass of himself and fought with Rhodey. To me, it seemed like her curt refusal was evidence of her staying tough with a guy who hasn't quite done the right thing yet, even if she may be a little regretful about having to do so. Was I supposed to have seen it that way? Was that scene actually supposed to be about how she is clearly cracking under the pressure? Did I have an expectation of Pepper as a strong woman that perhaps did not exist?
I don't mean to say that Pepper isn't allowed to have moments of weakness. Far too often, lazy writers often try to show women are strong by making them flawless, and that doesn't make them compelling heroes. In fact, I'll admit it, I don't quite know who won that argument in the last scene. She did go through a lot -- maybe is deserving of a little bit of a freakout, and if she stays on as CEO for Iron Man 3 I really don't have much to complain about. Still, I found the last scene left a bad taste of my mouth.
And speaking of women who are shown to be strong by not having any flaws and being amazing law student/underwear model/trained in all manner of fighting arts/computer hacker/super spies ...
There is a lot to like about Natasha Romanoff/The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), but as my friend Kayleigh said after we both saw the movie the same day, her character was mostly just "boobs and asskicking." I (and she) appreciated how the movie ended up beating the famous Bechdel's Law and had Natasha and Pepper work together and talk in a non-competitive manner, yet I felt a little let down. Even her big fight scene wasn't too much more than we already saw in the trailers. I'm happy she'll be in the Avengers movie, I suppose, but at this point that's only because the filmmakers seem to have no interest in adding The Wasp onto the roster.
I guess in the end, when it comes to women and this movie, I remain feeling let down, albeit not in a manner I expected. There were elements of the first movie that I could defend in contrast to Tony having stripper flight attendants in his jet, yet I don't know if I could totally argue that Pepper and Natasha redeem the sexy Iron Man dancing girls in this one. Oh well, at least War Machine only improved from his first appearance.
Not many feminist comic bloggers at the time agreed with me. While not a female-focused movie, I thought it made some strides in the right direction. Love interest/secretary Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) had the willpower, intelligence and wit to match the hero/her boss Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and she was crucial to multiple elements of the crusade to save the day. I also appreciated greatly how the female journalist who Tony Stark loves-and-leaves in the beginning is not just dismissed as a stupid floozy but is the one to call Tony Stark out on his attempt to sell Iron Man as his bodyguard and not his alternate identity. I thought it undercut Stark's sexism from earlier in the movie. Others, though, thought the movie didn't do enough in that area and that Stark's sexism was still celebrated, and thus condemned the movie. I respect the opinion, although I'm still mystified why Iron Man was given the thumbs-down for something that might be a parody but The Dark Knight's use of the most cliched plotline for girlfriend characters (i.e. kill them for maximum angst) and shunting aside of a young potential Barbara "Batgirl/Oracle" Gordon in favor of a son who doesn't exist in the comics was pretty much ignored.
Anyway, I get off track. While I suspected I wouldn't like Iron Man 2 as much as I liked the first -- no hype can replicate the surprise of the first movie -- I nevertheless thought the women would continue to be awesome. So I'm sad to say I came away a bit disappointed.
Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie. It's fun. Downey is fun. Paltrow is fun. Cheadle is fun. Rourke is fun. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the highest order -- I don't think anyone really believes a billionaire's spectacular super-suit would bring peace to the Middle East -- but the original comics require a large amount of suspension of disbelief as well. (I remember talking to a non-comics fan about the first movie and she told me she couldn't get past the terrorists letting Stark build his super-weapon right under their noses. I couldn't argue with it.) Overall, I liked it.
Still, I couldn't help but feel that Pepper lost a lot of her edge in this movie. I very much hated the last scene, when Pepper in full freak-out mode tells Tony she can't continue to be CEO because she worries too much about him and can't take the pressure. Then they kiss.
This came as a shock, and at the time I wondered where it had come from. Whenever I remembered Pepper in the previous scenes, particularly the one where Tony tries to win her favor with strawberries as apology for when he got drunk, made an ass of himself and fought with Rhodey. To me, it seemed like her curt refusal was evidence of her staying tough with a guy who hasn't quite done the right thing yet, even if she may be a little regretful about having to do so. Was I supposed to have seen it that way? Was that scene actually supposed to be about how she is clearly cracking under the pressure? Did I have an expectation of Pepper as a strong woman that perhaps did not exist?
I don't mean to say that Pepper isn't allowed to have moments of weakness. Far too often, lazy writers often try to show women are strong by making them flawless, and that doesn't make them compelling heroes. In fact, I'll admit it, I don't quite know who won that argument in the last scene. She did go through a lot -- maybe is deserving of a little bit of a freakout, and if she stays on as CEO for Iron Man 3 I really don't have much to complain about. Still, I found the last scene left a bad taste of my mouth.
And speaking of women who are shown to be strong by not having any flaws and being amazing law student/underwear model/trained in all manner of fighting arts/computer hacker/super spies ...
There is a lot to like about Natasha Romanoff/The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), but as my friend Kayleigh said after we both saw the movie the same day, her character was mostly just "boobs and asskicking." I (and she) appreciated how the movie ended up beating the famous Bechdel's Law and had Natasha and Pepper work together and talk in a non-competitive manner, yet I felt a little let down. Even her big fight scene wasn't too much more than we already saw in the trailers. I'm happy she'll be in the Avengers movie, I suppose, but at this point that's only because the filmmakers seem to have no interest in adding The Wasp onto the roster.
I guess in the end, when it comes to women and this movie, I remain feeling let down, albeit not in a manner I expected. There were elements of the first movie that I could defend in contrast to Tony having stripper flight attendants in his jet, yet I don't know if I could totally argue that Pepper and Natasha redeem the sexy Iron Man dancing girls in this one. Oh well, at least War Machine only improved from his first appearance.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
This Comic-Book Related List from a Mainstream Magazine Surprisingly Does Not Suck
Yesterday, Darren Franich of EW.com published an article titled 10 Comic Book Heroines We Want to See in Movies! and I have to tell you: it's really great. The choices are excellent -- from the obvious "Why didn't we get this five years ago?" Wonder Woman movie to the obscure-but-no-less-amazing Fantomah movie starring Lady Gaga! (Can she act? Does anyone care?) -- and the list is clearly written by someone who knows and loves comics.
I'm surprised at how good this article is because in my experience mainstream articles on comic books, even if they're not the obvious "Bam! Pow! Comics Aren't for Kids Anymore!" type, are usually written by people without a knowledge of the genre. Thus we get articles where Mark Millar can say he sets his comic books in the real world and the journalist will just write it down and Maxim can declare Robin the lamest superhero ever. Yet when you read the article you can tell it's by someone who has a knowledge of the original stories and who is thinking about these female characters as characters and franchise starters, not as a way to get a sexy actress into a skintight suit.
I also find this article significant because it's by a mainstream source and it naturally assumes that audiences want to see good movies about superheroines. Since Warner Brothers apparently can't, this is also something remarkable.
Some years back, I was interviewed by a Canadian newspaper about superheroine movies, and why they didn't do well. Is the public not interested? the reporter asked. Is it sexism? I told the reporter the reason why most superheroine movies don't do well is that they are bad. It's not that nobody wanted to see Catwoman, Elektra and Supergirl fighting bad guys, but Catwoman, Elektra and Supergirl were not good movies, so nobody went. Unfortunately, that's never the message studio executives get.
I unfortunately can't see that mentality changing any time soon. Even when women turn out to be the big spenders for a franchise, like the unavoidable Twilight series, Hollywood tends to be tone deaf. Still, it's nice to have an acknowledgement that yes, the audience for superheroine movies is out there, and from such a major source as Entertainment Weekly as well.
Also, I don't know about Franich but I want a She-Hulk movie. Preferably a meta-one where our heroine teases Edward Norton about Fight Club and breaks the fourth wall. Hey, I can dream, can't I?
I'm surprised at how good this article is because in my experience mainstream articles on comic books, even if they're not the obvious "Bam! Pow! Comics Aren't for Kids Anymore!" type, are usually written by people without a knowledge of the genre. Thus we get articles where Mark Millar can say he sets his comic books in the real world and the journalist will just write it down and Maxim can declare Robin the lamest superhero ever. Yet when you read the article you can tell it's by someone who has a knowledge of the original stories and who is thinking about these female characters as characters and franchise starters, not as a way to get a sexy actress into a skintight suit.
I also find this article significant because it's by a mainstream source and it naturally assumes that audiences want to see good movies about superheroines. Since Warner Brothers apparently can't, this is also something remarkable.
Some years back, I was interviewed by a Canadian newspaper about superheroine movies, and why they didn't do well. Is the public not interested? the reporter asked. Is it sexism? I told the reporter the reason why most superheroine movies don't do well is that they are bad. It's not that nobody wanted to see Catwoman, Elektra and Supergirl fighting bad guys, but Catwoman, Elektra and Supergirl were not good movies, so nobody went. Unfortunately, that's never the message studio executives get.
I unfortunately can't see that mentality changing any time soon. Even when women turn out to be the big spenders for a franchise, like the unavoidable Twilight series, Hollywood tends to be tone deaf. Still, it's nice to have an acknowledgement that yes, the audience for superheroine movies is out there, and from such a major source as Entertainment Weekly as well.
Also, I don't know about Franich but I want a She-Hulk movie. Preferably a meta-one where our heroine teases Edward Norton about Fight Club and breaks the fourth wall. Hey, I can dream, can't I?
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
The Kick-Ass Movie is Not Feminist (and Neither is Hit-Girl)
(In-depth spoilers for the movie follow.)
I do realize I'm late in discussing this, and the reason is because for a long while I didn't want to see this movie. I'm not a fan of Mark Millar. His Marvel Knights Spider-Man was okay but he never seemed to get the character's voice completely right and I really hated Wanted (although, to be fair, more of that has to do with the art than his writing) . I haven't read the Kick-Ass comic, either.
Yet I eventually changed my mind after I read essays and exclamations proclaiming Hit-Girl as a feminist character. This did not sound convincing to me: a young girl who is superheroing because her "Big Daddy"has groomed her to be a killer is inherently a character without agency and thus not feminist. Still, I decided to see the movie for myself and found my opinion changed from "That's not feminist" to "No, really, that's not feminist."
I can see why people would want to think it is, and why people would like Hit-Girl. She beats up a bunch of bad dudes, does it better than most of the male superheroes in the story, makes semi-clever quips while doing it and does it (ostensibly) wearing clothes that don't sexualize her. I can see where that appeals to the id brain of most female superheroine fans, and I will admit I'm not totally immune.
But as I said in my last post, sometimes the way to tell if a work is feminist is not how the story treats its heroine, but how it treats the other women in the story. So we're going to talk about them before we even get to Hit-Girl.
The movie begins on a bad note for women. It starts with our hero, Dave Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson), describing his life as a comic book-reading loser who can't get girls and who masturbates all the time. Dave gets explicit about the latter point, describing how he fantasizes about his teacher: an older, buxom white woman. The film then shows Dave's fantasy wherein the teacher urges Dave to touch her breasts, and then takes off her shirt and unhooks her bra. The film cuts away before she can take reveal her breasts, but has no compunctions about cutting to a photo of two topless African tribal women on Dave's computer. In his voiceover narration, Dave explains his interest in the black women by saying, essentially, that he'll masturbate to anything -- with the clear implication that for anyone to find such women sexy is unthinkable. Essentially it's anti-feminist on two levels -- for one, it upholds the offensive double-standard that "white women's breasts are pornography, black women's breasts are anthropology" and also specifically codes an interest in black women as less desirable than an interest in white women.
Then there are the girlfriends in the story, Dave's girlfriend Katie and her Asian-American friend, who becomes a girlfriend for one of Dave's friends. Neither of these girls are real people, but are a male geek-specific fantasy of how some male geeks hope girls will act when they start dating them.
Katie is a beautiful blank slate of a girl, the type imagined by the myriad and maligned "How to Get Your Girlfriend Into Comics" essays. Her one unique interest (if you don't count "lattes") -- working at a methadone clinic, only serves to code her as "kind" and to connect her to the main plot of Dave fighting the mafia. Other than that, her role is to breathlessly state how amazing it is now that Dave is introducing her to the amazing world of comics. "I love Scott Pilgrim," she says breathlessly, "but I'm not into that superhero stuff." Although it's okay, after she's read what are considered the "girlfriend bait" comics, there's a scene later where she tells Dave "I really enjoyed those Ditko-era Spider-Man comics you gave me" as he rubs self-tanning oil onto her nearly-naked body.
An aside: There's a subplot too complicated and offensive to explain right now about how Dave is able to hang out with Katie because Katie thinks he's gay. Yet no intelligent straight woman who has respect for her gay male friend would ask him to rub tanning oil onto her body. Most gay men will see it as a cheap, titillating ploy for a girl to get an attractive guy's hands on her but make it "okay," and will ditch her for a woman who sees him as a real person and not as a handbag or a living slash fanfic fantasy posthaste.
Anyway, eventually Dave tells Katie he's straight and he's Kick-Ass, and unlike in the comic they get together. In their first love scene, Dave and Katie share a kiss, and then, like a romantic, he goes straight for the tits. Because that's what geek romance is really about, right? The guy finally getting to touch the breasts that have eluded him for so long. You may think I'm being pedantic or a prude about this, but nothing else happens in the scene. Katie doesn't try to touch him -- she just basically smiles like she's doing him a favor. The scene is not about two people who love each other getting together. It's about how Dave gets to touch tits -- that's its entire point.
About Katie's friend, all I can say is she and Dave's friend get together, even though Dave's friend sniffs her hair like a creepazoid when she's not looking. Later, he says "I'm going to explain comics to you" and she sits next to him and listens with wide eyes as if she's a five-year-old. Later she's hanging off him.
So, really, that's how the Kick-Ass movie treats its adult women: as blank objects of desire to be filled by geek males with their own interests, or freaks.
And now (finally) Hit-Girl. As I mentioned earlier, she's capable and strong. I liked her. She and her father are the best parts of the movie, and Chloe Grace Moretz and Nicholas Cage put in really funny performances. If the tone of the movie didn't wildly vacillate between a humorous dark parody of superheroes and a "serious" exploration of what superheroes would be like in the real world, I might have liked them better. But the movie wants you to see Hit-Girl's story as one of a child who isn't allowed to be a child by her revenge-driven father who makes killing a game to her, but also be gleeful about a child brutally murdering mobsters. It wants to eat the cake and have it, too.
Some will say I don't get it, because they mistake this hypocricy of tone Millar employs as satire or a joke on the reader. No. It doesn't work. This movie doesn't work. You can't claim this is a realistic movie and then have the hero fly in to save Hit-Girl on a jetpack.
Defenders of the movie have also said critics of the movie are only offended because Hit-Girl is female, and they would be fine if a young boy was brainwashed by a parent or parental figure into being a superhero. For one, I would not be. For two, the problem for me does not lie so much in the concept but, as I mentioned before, how it's presented. One of my favorite DC characters is the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, who was raised by her father to be a killing machine from a young age, but that story had a consistent tone -- Cassandra's upbringing is explicitly exploitative in the text, and her father is considered a supervillain, not a superhero like Big-Daddy. Also, what makes Cassandra a superheroine is how she eventually struggles to be independent and have her own agency (consider that her father took away her power to speak and she has had to fight to win it back). Hit-Girl does not have this agency.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that Hit-Girl has to become traditionally heroic to be a good character. I also do not necessarily need every superhero to be a good person -- I love Watchmen's Rorschach. If Hit-Girl were just an exploited child with an incomplete set of morals and that was seen as a horrifying thing, I'd probably be fine. But, like I said, the movie thinks what happened to her wrong but also thinks she's the coolest, and that's just messed up.
I also want to address a common claim I've heard: Hit-Girl is feminist because she's a child and thus can't be sexualized. I've heard this a lot and it is ridiculous. How low are our standards for superheroines that "she doesn't show cleavage" is the dealbreaker? And how does having a character too young to have cleavage solve that problem? It's like slash fanfic writers who say what they write is feminist because they can have romance without women characters and thus without gender differences. It's not solving or fighting the problem, it's sweeping it under the rug.
And it's not even true. Society has certain expectations for what little girls are supposed to look like and how they are attractive to adults, and Hit-Girl meets those expectations. Her superhero outfit has a skirt. When not in costume, she wears her hair in pig-tails with bows. She's constantly smiling and speaks in the cheerful, adoring voice of a good little girl. At one point, she dresses up to fight bad guys wearing a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.
I am not saying that any of those things in of themselves are bad or that this movie is somehow obscene or pedophiliac for presenting Hit-Girl this way, but I would also argue that cleavage and women looking sexy in of themselves are not bad, obscene or pornographic. I'm just saying it's there, and it is what it is.
One could also say that Hit-Girl defies these expectations by being tough and using profanity, but while I like pretty, dress-wearing warrior princesses (Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie is underrated), you could argue that buxom women in spandex beating people up is also defying some expectations. Honestly, they're both rather ordinary at this point.
But for those unconvinced, I offer up a scene with Dave's before unmentioned second friend. At one point in the story he sees a video of Hit-Girl fighting and declares, "I want to marry her!" When Dave's first friend reminds the second friend that Hit-Girl is 11, the second friend says, "I'm going to save myself for her."
Think about that scene and tell me again Hit-Girl isn't sexualized.
I do realize I'm late in discussing this, and the reason is because for a long while I didn't want to see this movie. I'm not a fan of Mark Millar. His Marvel Knights Spider-Man was okay but he never seemed to get the character's voice completely right and I really hated Wanted (although, to be fair, more of that has to do with the art than his writing) . I haven't read the Kick-Ass comic, either.
Yet I eventually changed my mind after I read essays and exclamations proclaiming Hit-Girl as a feminist character. This did not sound convincing to me: a young girl who is superheroing because her "Big Daddy"has groomed her to be a killer is inherently a character without agency and thus not feminist. Still, I decided to see the movie for myself and found my opinion changed from "That's not feminist" to "No, really, that's not feminist."
I can see why people would want to think it is, and why people would like Hit-Girl. She beats up a bunch of bad dudes, does it better than most of the male superheroes in the story, makes semi-clever quips while doing it and does it (ostensibly) wearing clothes that don't sexualize her. I can see where that appeals to the id brain of most female superheroine fans, and I will admit I'm not totally immune.
But as I said in my last post, sometimes the way to tell if a work is feminist is not how the story treats its heroine, but how it treats the other women in the story. So we're going to talk about them before we even get to Hit-Girl.
The movie begins on a bad note for women. It starts with our hero, Dave Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson), describing his life as a comic book-reading loser who can't get girls and who masturbates all the time. Dave gets explicit about the latter point, describing how he fantasizes about his teacher: an older, buxom white woman. The film then shows Dave's fantasy wherein the teacher urges Dave to touch her breasts, and then takes off her shirt and unhooks her bra. The film cuts away before she can take reveal her breasts, but has no compunctions about cutting to a photo of two topless African tribal women on Dave's computer. In his voiceover narration, Dave explains his interest in the black women by saying, essentially, that he'll masturbate to anything -- with the clear implication that for anyone to find such women sexy is unthinkable. Essentially it's anti-feminist on two levels -- for one, it upholds the offensive double-standard that "white women's breasts are pornography, black women's breasts are anthropology" and also specifically codes an interest in black women as less desirable than an interest in white women.
Then there are the girlfriends in the story, Dave's girlfriend Katie and her Asian-American friend, who becomes a girlfriend for one of Dave's friends. Neither of these girls are real people, but are a male geek-specific fantasy of how some male geeks hope girls will act when they start dating them.
Katie is a beautiful blank slate of a girl, the type imagined by the myriad and maligned "How to Get Your Girlfriend Into Comics" essays. Her one unique interest (if you don't count "lattes") -- working at a methadone clinic, only serves to code her as "kind" and to connect her to the main plot of Dave fighting the mafia. Other than that, her role is to breathlessly state how amazing it is now that Dave is introducing her to the amazing world of comics. "I love Scott Pilgrim," she says breathlessly, "but I'm not into that superhero stuff." Although it's okay, after she's read what are considered the "girlfriend bait" comics, there's a scene later where she tells Dave "I really enjoyed those Ditko-era Spider-Man comics you gave me" as he rubs self-tanning oil onto her nearly-naked body.
An aside: There's a subplot too complicated and offensive to explain right now about how Dave is able to hang out with Katie because Katie thinks he's gay. Yet no intelligent straight woman who has respect for her gay male friend would ask him to rub tanning oil onto her body. Most gay men will see it as a cheap, titillating ploy for a girl to get an attractive guy's hands on her but make it "okay," and will ditch her for a woman who sees him as a real person and not as a handbag or a living slash fanfic fantasy posthaste.
Anyway, eventually Dave tells Katie he's straight and he's Kick-Ass, and unlike in the comic they get together. In their first love scene, Dave and Katie share a kiss, and then, like a romantic, he goes straight for the tits. Because that's what geek romance is really about, right? The guy finally getting to touch the breasts that have eluded him for so long. You may think I'm being pedantic or a prude about this, but nothing else happens in the scene. Katie doesn't try to touch him -- she just basically smiles like she's doing him a favor. The scene is not about two people who love each other getting together. It's about how Dave gets to touch tits -- that's its entire point.
About Katie's friend, all I can say is she and Dave's friend get together, even though Dave's friend sniffs her hair like a creepazoid when she's not looking. Later, he says "I'm going to explain comics to you" and she sits next to him and listens with wide eyes as if she's a five-year-old. Later she's hanging off him.
So, really, that's how the Kick-Ass movie treats its adult women: as blank objects of desire to be filled by geek males with their own interests, or freaks.
And now (finally) Hit-Girl. As I mentioned earlier, she's capable and strong. I liked her. She and her father are the best parts of the movie, and Chloe Grace Moretz and Nicholas Cage put in really funny performances. If the tone of the movie didn't wildly vacillate between a humorous dark parody of superheroes and a "serious" exploration of what superheroes would be like in the real world, I might have liked them better. But the movie wants you to see Hit-Girl's story as one of a child who isn't allowed to be a child by her revenge-driven father who makes killing a game to her, but also be gleeful about a child brutally murdering mobsters. It wants to eat the cake and have it, too.
Some will say I don't get it, because they mistake this hypocricy of tone Millar employs as satire or a joke on the reader. No. It doesn't work. This movie doesn't work. You can't claim this is a realistic movie and then have the hero fly in to save Hit-Girl on a jetpack.
Defenders of the movie have also said critics of the movie are only offended because Hit-Girl is female, and they would be fine if a young boy was brainwashed by a parent or parental figure into being a superhero. For one, I would not be. For two, the problem for me does not lie so much in the concept but, as I mentioned before, how it's presented. One of my favorite DC characters is the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, who was raised by her father to be a killing machine from a young age, but that story had a consistent tone -- Cassandra's upbringing is explicitly exploitative in the text, and her father is considered a supervillain, not a superhero like Big-Daddy. Also, what makes Cassandra a superheroine is how she eventually struggles to be independent and have her own agency (consider that her father took away her power to speak and she has had to fight to win it back). Hit-Girl does not have this agency.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that Hit-Girl has to become traditionally heroic to be a good character. I also do not necessarily need every superhero to be a good person -- I love Watchmen's Rorschach. If Hit-Girl were just an exploited child with an incomplete set of morals and that was seen as a horrifying thing, I'd probably be fine. But, like I said, the movie thinks what happened to her wrong but also thinks she's the coolest, and that's just messed up.
I also want to address a common claim I've heard: Hit-Girl is feminist because she's a child and thus can't be sexualized. I've heard this a lot and it is ridiculous. How low are our standards for superheroines that "she doesn't show cleavage" is the dealbreaker? And how does having a character too young to have cleavage solve that problem? It's like slash fanfic writers who say what they write is feminist because they can have romance without women characters and thus without gender differences. It's not solving or fighting the problem, it's sweeping it under the rug.
And it's not even true. Society has certain expectations for what little girls are supposed to look like and how they are attractive to adults, and Hit-Girl meets those expectations. Her superhero outfit has a skirt. When not in costume, she wears her hair in pig-tails with bows. She's constantly smiling and speaks in the cheerful, adoring voice of a good little girl. At one point, she dresses up to fight bad guys wearing a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.
I am not saying that any of those things in of themselves are bad or that this movie is somehow obscene or pedophiliac for presenting Hit-Girl this way, but I would also argue that cleavage and women looking sexy in of themselves are not bad, obscene or pornographic. I'm just saying it's there, and it is what it is.
One could also say that Hit-Girl defies these expectations by being tough and using profanity, but while I like pretty, dress-wearing warrior princesses (Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie is underrated), you could argue that buxom women in spandex beating people up is also defying some expectations. Honestly, they're both rather ordinary at this point.
But for those unconvinced, I offer up a scene with Dave's before unmentioned second friend. At one point in the story he sees a video of Hit-Girl fighting and declares, "I want to marry her!" When Dave's first friend reminds the second friend that Hit-Girl is 11, the second friend says, "I'm going to save myself for her."
Think about that scene and tell me again Hit-Girl isn't sexualized.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Anita Blake, Superheroines and Why I Am Here
A couple of years ago, I asked a bunch of online friends to recommend some books that were easy yet solidly fun and not intelligence-insulting reads. My friends came through admirably, and I read a lot of great books out of this list -- like Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Terry Ryan's The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio and James McBride's The Color of Water -- and a few duds, like Max Barry's Jennifer Government. Yet what fascinated me the most about my friends' recommendations was that almost every one recommended Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, because the rest of the Internet had left me with the impression that those books were absolutely horrible.
Most of the complaints about the actual series (we'll get to the comic book series another day), centers around a superpower Anita Blake gets in the tenth book in the series, Narcissus in Chains, which requires her to have sex multiple times a day. For those of you who have never heard of this, yes, this is what actually happens. It's gotten to the point where people say if you pick up one of the later Hamilton books and flip to a random page, nine times out of 10 you will see the main character having sex. I'm bad at this game, (although I found it worked very well for this book, oddly enough) and I haven't read the later books, but I did read the first book of Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, A Kiss of Shadows, and thus I have no problem taking others' word for it.
Still, many of those who vociferously condemned the later books did so because they loved the earlier books so much. So I decided to give them a try. I've read six of the Anita Blake books now, and I have two general things to say about them.
1.) They're a lot of fun. Anita has a great character voice: a gee-whiz type of sarcasm that keeps the books funny and as grounded as possible for a series centered around an integrated human-monster society where vampires vote and have their own churches. Also, while I think most of Hamilton's vampires are slightly less scary than the guy wearing fake fangs at your parents' Halloween party, I really like her zombies -- The Laughing Corpse is easily the best book in the series -- and a lot of the worldbuilding in general.
2.) For a series with a female heroine that had some degree of good feminist intentions (or at least evening-the-score intentions) in its origins, as Hamilton describes here:
I started reading a lot of hardboiled detective fiction—Robert B. Parker in particular—and I read a lot of strong female protagonists. But there was one problem, a difference between the male and female protagonists of the different series—even the strongest of the women did not get to do some of the things the men got to do. The men got to cuss, the women rarely; the men got to kill people and not feel bad about it, if the women killed someone they had to feel really, really bad about it afterward and it had to be an extreme situation; the men got to have sex, often and on stage and very casually, but if the women had sex it had to be offstage, very sanitized. I thought this was unfair.
... the way female characters are treated in the series, and in the Merry Gentry series, is kind of messed up.
In Hamilton-world there are three types of women: 1.) the heroine, who is exceptional in the face of working against a sexist system perpetuated by bad men and women who hate her, and this exceptionalism is shown by her amazing superpowers 2.) the villainous women, who are not much different from the heroine except they're, y'know, evil and 3.) a mass of female victims -- usually ones who are in an abusive relationship -- who the heroine can feel pity for, mixed with some disgust because they do not work hard enough to escape their situations and/or fight the system and are basically not special like her.
One of the most egregious examples occurs in A Kiss of Shadows, where Merry's evil male cousin Cel takes Merry's female childhood friend as a slave. While Merry feels sorry for her friend, the text also emphasizes that her friend's debasement is her friend's own choice because her friend is submitting to be Cel's slave to enter into faerie society. Basically, her friend is being abused and that is terrible, but she asks for it, and not in a BDSM sense, either, so Merry doesn't have to feel too bad about it. After the first book, the friend is never seen again.
These problematic elements could be dismissed as a writer's own quirks, yet I have read a number of other urban fantasy novels with female heroines, and found they had a number of problematic elements as well, especially with race and gender. This is perhaps surprising to some. Urban fantasy seems to be one of the only mainstream genres where women (white and of color) can write superhero stories about and for women, and yet they seem to have just as many problematic elements as male comic book writers writing superheroines, or comic book movies/TV series centered around superheroines.
Yet I find comic book and urban fantasy heroines fascinating, because the idea of a superheroine is one that has always held an appeal for me and still does. There's still a little six-year-old inside me who wants to run away and slay dragons, and I've been on the Internet and met enough other comic book, manga and urban fantasy fans to know I'm not the only one. Basically, urban fantasy and comic book superheroines are genres where I want to see women succeed in a fantasy/sci-fi/horror setting, and yet they often do not.
So the wish-fulfillment fantasy is a big draw and I know that among the seekers of superheroines we're always looking for something more, but I find I usually have a lot to say about where these stories -- whether written by men or women -- go wrong, as well.
Thus, this blog, where I try to look at the big, wide world of chicks killing (or maybe just beating up) things in the media. I hope you'll join me.
Most of the complaints about the actual series (we'll get to the comic book series another day), centers around a superpower Anita Blake gets in the tenth book in the series, Narcissus in Chains, which requires her to have sex multiple times a day. For those of you who have never heard of this, yes, this is what actually happens. It's gotten to the point where people say if you pick up one of the later Hamilton books and flip to a random page, nine times out of 10 you will see the main character having sex. I'm bad at this game, (although I found it worked very well for this book, oddly enough) and I haven't read the later books, but I did read the first book of Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, A Kiss of Shadows, and thus I have no problem taking others' word for it.
Still, many of those who vociferously condemned the later books did so because they loved the earlier books so much. So I decided to give them a try. I've read six of the Anita Blake books now, and I have two general things to say about them.
1.) They're a lot of fun. Anita has a great character voice: a gee-whiz type of sarcasm that keeps the books funny and as grounded as possible for a series centered around an integrated human-monster society where vampires vote and have their own churches. Also, while I think most of Hamilton's vampires are slightly less scary than the guy wearing fake fangs at your parents' Halloween party, I really like her zombies -- The Laughing Corpse is easily the best book in the series -- and a lot of the worldbuilding in general.
2.) For a series with a female heroine that had some degree of good feminist intentions (or at least evening-the-score intentions) in its origins, as Hamilton describes here:
I started reading a lot of hardboiled detective fiction—Robert B. Parker in particular—and I read a lot of strong female protagonists. But there was one problem, a difference between the male and female protagonists of the different series—even the strongest of the women did not get to do some of the things the men got to do. The men got to cuss, the women rarely; the men got to kill people and not feel bad about it, if the women killed someone they had to feel really, really bad about it afterward and it had to be an extreme situation; the men got to have sex, often and on stage and very casually, but if the women had sex it had to be offstage, very sanitized. I thought this was unfair.
... the way female characters are treated in the series, and in the Merry Gentry series, is kind of messed up.
In Hamilton-world there are three types of women: 1.) the heroine, who is exceptional in the face of working against a sexist system perpetuated by bad men and women who hate her, and this exceptionalism is shown by her amazing superpowers 2.) the villainous women, who are not much different from the heroine except they're, y'know, evil and 3.) a mass of female victims -- usually ones who are in an abusive relationship -- who the heroine can feel pity for, mixed with some disgust because they do not work hard enough to escape their situations and/or fight the system and are basically not special like her.
One of the most egregious examples occurs in A Kiss of Shadows, where Merry's evil male cousin Cel takes Merry's female childhood friend as a slave. While Merry feels sorry for her friend, the text also emphasizes that her friend's debasement is her friend's own choice because her friend is submitting to be Cel's slave to enter into faerie society. Basically, her friend is being abused and that is terrible, but she asks for it, and not in a BDSM sense, either, so Merry doesn't have to feel too bad about it. After the first book, the friend is never seen again.
These problematic elements could be dismissed as a writer's own quirks, yet I have read a number of other urban fantasy novels with female heroines, and found they had a number of problematic elements as well, especially with race and gender. This is perhaps surprising to some. Urban fantasy seems to be one of the only mainstream genres where women (white and of color) can write superhero stories about and for women, and yet they seem to have just as many problematic elements as male comic book writers writing superheroines, or comic book movies/TV series centered around superheroines.
Yet I find comic book and urban fantasy heroines fascinating, because the idea of a superheroine is one that has always held an appeal for me and still does. There's still a little six-year-old inside me who wants to run away and slay dragons, and I've been on the Internet and met enough other comic book, manga and urban fantasy fans to know I'm not the only one. Basically, urban fantasy and comic book superheroines are genres where I want to see women succeed in a fantasy/sci-fi/horror setting, and yet they often do not.
So the wish-fulfillment fantasy is a big draw and I know that among the seekers of superheroines we're always looking for something more, but I find I usually have a lot to say about where these stories -- whether written by men or women -- go wrong, as well.
Thus, this blog, where I try to look at the big, wide world of chicks killing (or maybe just beating up) things in the media. I hope you'll join me.
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