It is probably more an American thing than an Australian one, so maybe I don’t fully understand it. But why this obsession with finding morals in movies and TV shows?
I have long noticed this. Some people seem to get a bit too involved with a TV series, for example, and start to let it be a guiding light for their life. And then when the show takes the wrong turn, they get terribly upset.
I lost interest in Game of Thrones a while back, mainly because I found the increasingly graphic violence upsetting. But apparently an important female character got raped in the latest episode and a lot of people are very upset. One feminist SF and fantasy site, called “Mary Sue” or some such name, has decided to boycott the series as a result.
At the same time, there has been an incessant feminist cawing about the latest Mad Max movie, Mad Max: Fury Road. It is unclear how well it is doing at the box office, but a lot of this puffery misses the point. If it is a good action film (or a funny comedy, for example) people will enjoy it. But if it is too obviously preachy and not very good, they won’t. Simple.
I enjoyed Terminator 2, including its “strong female character”, played by Linda Hamilton, because her character was generally well-integrated into the movie; and she had believable motivation and looked plausible as an action woman. Likewise, I am not a big fan of Sigourney Weaver, but she has strong screen presence and was good in the Alien movies.
But the problems come when people try to derive a moral or slogan from such examples. There is a strong tendency to want to claim that some role is ground-breaking, when it isn’t really (we have seen “kick-ass babes” for so long now, that the trope is perfectly familiar). Not every appearance of a woman on screen is automatically “empowering“. Nor is it clear that the average man or woman wants it to be.
The other problem comes when “role models” go astray and disappoint their fans. But if you invest so much psychological capital in an imaginary character and depend on the whims of capricious writers, what can you expect?
Posted by genericmum on May 19, 2015 at 12:01 pm
I think movies and books should include the transcendent: beauty, truth and goodness; since they have the power to influence culture. Characters should be consistent and heroes should have integrity. If we want to see immorality and superficiality, we could read the celebrity news trying to catch our eye on most serious news sites. But, morality is harder to come by, and movies that offer that have more appeal for me.
Posted by Jim on May 19, 2015 at 1:37 pm
“One feminist SF and fantasy site, called “Mary Sue” or some such name, has decided to boycott the series as a result.”
They don’t like being reminded of how vulnerable they really are.
As for Mad Max, I’ll skip the leftists tripe. I don’t like most of today’s shit anyway and I have better things to do. The kick ass babes thing has always been laughable and eye-rolling to me anyway (with extremely rare exceptions). lol.
Posted by Julian O'Dea on May 19, 2015 at 1:42 pm
Yes, I think there is some truth to that. Feminists seem to most mind anything that reminds them they are female. Depictions of rape are the most potent reminders.
I have often found that movies touted as making some progressive point can actually be pretty good, if you ignore the preaching. In many cases, it is not really there much anyway. People tend to see what they want to see.
Posted by Jim on May 19, 2015 at 1:58 pm
Actually, most of them seem very heavy handed to me. I’m not giving my hard earned money to nutcase leftists anyway. Especially with how high things like food prices have become. Besides, the internet has kind of replaced movies for me.
I’m amazed at how far the internet has come unlike when I first got on it years ago. You can find almost anything you want these days. Wish I had all this info available to me when I was younger.
Posted by Julian O'Dea on May 20, 2015 at 5:01 am
This is precisely the kind of overreaction I am referring to:
http://www.ew.com/article/2015/05/19/senator-quitting-game-thrones
Posted by Jim on May 20, 2015 at 5:17 pm
Yeah. It’s funny how no one makes a big deal out of even the most graphic or sadistic violence committed against males in movies or TV shows (hell, even real life!) but somehow one act of violence against the little women occurs and everyone starts having seizures. How fucking political can you get? lol.
Posted by Anonymous Reader on May 24, 2015 at 3:00 am
It’s diffferent when it happens to women. It’s that simple. Test this, watch Idiocracy with a woman, see if the “Ow! My balls!” segment is offensive to her or not. Odds are it won’t be.
Women are precious and men are expendable for biological reasons. Unfortunately women now can eat all their cake and expect to have it, too.
Posted by Julian O'Dea on May 24, 2015 at 3:31 am
Yes. There was a Facebook headline in an Australian newspaper yesterday that read “Drunk Driver Loses Left Nut.” I asked if they would ever write “Drunk Woman Driver Loses Left Tit”?
It was the Northern Territory News. But still …
Posted by C H on June 6, 2015 at 4:30 pm
It Is also interesting how this mindset prohibits the ability to recognize the deeper symbolic aspects of film; that the writer just might be (intentionally or not sometimes) communicating something about the end result of a characters behavior in a larger context. I lost interest in Game of Thrones early on myself; too much violence and gratuitous nonsense. But the episodes I did see said less to me about the show’s period style. It was, to me, talking more about today. More about what we are willing to overlook in those we idolize or serve in order to keep up our own charades.
Without seeing the symbolic elements for what they symbolize, we tend to just pick a side and rationalize our position until truth is just subject to the requirements of servicing our rationalizations of our side.
Posted by Julian O'Dea on June 6, 2015 at 4:50 pm
Yes. What is also forgotten is that writers and directors may have genuinely mixed or nuanced motivations. And that these may be hidden, certainly from the plain view of the less perceptive viewer and perhaps even from the author himself.
My favourite example of this is the very unfeminist character of Rachael in Blade Runner. The director himself seemed to be unaware of what he had done. I have written about this case here:
https://davidcollard.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-sexual-politics-of-blade-runner/
Some people are “irony-challenged” and these are perhaps the same people who want to see their favourite characters always clearly “on message”.