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.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
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.
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