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?