Monday, February 25, 2019

Are We Allowed Not To Like Movies With Women Main Characters?

This author thinks we should be:
I love me some butch female characters.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with more traditionally feminine characters. As a matter of fact, I think our popular culture nowadays needs to get over its fear of girly-girls and wrench its representation of womanhood into more of a My Little Pony-style balance. But since I've always been a bit more masculine in outlook, I've always felt greater affinity for the tomboyish sorts. Thus, when I took up a passion for Star Trek in junior high, for example, I basically ignored Counselor Troi but fell insanely in love with Major Kira.

What I'm trying to say here is that I'm the audience for a female superhero like Captain Marvel. And yet - and yet! - I have no interest in seeing her new movie because her marketing campaign has been a trash fire of epic proportions.

First of all, there's the deeply stupid year-zero mentality. Captain Marvel, you see, is a Very Important MovieTM because it sends the message that Girls Can Be Heroes TooTM! Okay: I was born in 1979 - the deep, dark Stone Ages, I know - and I've been hearing this message my entire life. Ripley appeared in theaters for the first time in my natal year, and Sarah Connor was a bad-ass before I hit my teens. Then there are my best girls on the small screen - the aforementioned Kira, of course, but also Susan Ivanova and Delenn on Babylon 5, Aeryn Sun on Farscape, and etc. - who accompanied me through high school and beyond. The upshot? Female heroes have been around for forty-freakin'-years (at least); they are not ImportantTM, nor are they GroundbreakingTM. Do you want to see more of them? Fair enough, but don't pretend that your generation is the first to come up with this genius idea -- or that, if not for Captain Marvel, rough-and-tumble girls would be bereft of cultural role models...

Captain Marvel is a popcorn flick, but Schoolmarm Larson is making it sound like homework. (Yuck!) Instead of the sourpuss complaining about "white male misogynists" on the internet, why not show some genuine excitement for the movie itself? Tell us - while avoiding spoilers of course - why this movie will be a joy to watch, and try to do so without referencing Captain Marvel's naughty bits. As it stands now, the constant retreat to "you just hate wahmen" makes me suspect that you put scant effort into making Captain Marvel a quality superhero film -- that, like many SJW's before you, you are using identity politics to cover up your deep mediocrity.
She goes on to mention Wonder Woman, which skyrocketed to big bucks.  And while I myself couldn't stand The Last Jedi, I thought Rogue One was excellent.  Did anyone, even women, go see the Ghostbusters or the Ocean's 11 remakes?

There's a long list of strong women characters/heroes in the comments to the post linked above, as well as this comment, "[S]o no I don't have a problem with powerful women. What I have a problem with is performers who feel the need to make watching their work a test of morality."

1 comment:

Pseudotsuga said...

Well, since history has imploded as a discipline (studying the development of Western civilization), the next thing to go is popular history.
Pop culture pundits (of today, especially, in spite of the Internet) seem to think that if they haven't seen it in their own lifetimes, then it doesn't exist. Hence their ignorance of Strong Wymyn(tm) in the past. They are also trained to argue from woke guilt, instead of actual reasoning.