Yeah, okay, I get it, people like Pacific Rim and are entirely incapable of acknowledging anything possibly problematic about it.
And every movie I've seen this summer fails, soundly, the Bechdel Test. Which, in case you don't know, asks if there are a) two female characters who b) talk to each other c) about something other than a man. As this is something I do EVERY DAMN DAY, it is a wonder to me that we seem to never see it on film.
But here's a thing. Making up a new test so that you can call Mako Mori a feminist is just....eurgh.
Here's what I'm talking about. In case you're too lazy to click, as I often am, here's WORD FOR WORD from the Tumblr post: "The Mako Mori test is passed if the movie has: a) at least one
female character; b) who gets her own narrative arc; c) that is not
about supporting a man’s story."
Wow, it's like NCLB has come to mass media. Test too hard? MAKE AN EASIER TEST. Halve the number of females required, and make her something other than stage dressing.
The irony is, of course, that Mako Mori fails the Mako Mori test.
Because I'm too lazy to scroll down, let me recap Mako Mori's 'narrative arc'.
She has no agency other than what men (Pentecost, Becket) allow her. She doesn't put herself on the candidate list because Stacker wouldn't like it. She fights in the trials anyway, when Becket calls her out, but only when Stacker agrees. Even then, she doesn't suit up until...Stacker gives her permission. Even in the climax of the film, she meekly does what Raleigh wants, leaving him alone to face the danger of arming the reactor, not even putting up a word of protest.
She's the Damsel in Distress for both Stacker (when she's a child) and Raleigh (in the drift when she needs to be rescued from her own memory of...being rescued by a man...it's like damselception). Her 'honor' 'needs' to be defended (sorry about all the airquotes) fistfight style between Raleigh and Chuck Hansen. And she even delivers the Damsel Kiss reward to Raleigh.
So, looking at the Mako Mori test, her narrative arc is...what? I could maybe, in a very generous mood, see her move from scared little girl to fighter...if she had any real fight in her. Compared to Sasha Kaidanovsky, though, she's a silent partner to Raleigh's control of Gipsy Danger. If she'd resisted being sent away at the end, I'd buy it a lot more. But let's just say, cranky old feminist is cranky and old and let's give her an arc.
Which brings us to the third requirement: that her story isn't about propping up a man's story.
This is a solid, resounding, sonic-boom of a fail. She exists to give Stacker an angsty/tender side, she exists as the Love Interest for Raleigh. She exists to show us how dangerous drifting can be, and how Nice a Guy Raleigh is. Everything she does in the movie is to prop up the emotional depth of a male character. EVERYTHING.
I'll take a step back to look at Pacific Rim Tales from Year Zero for a moment, because we have several female characters....who also fail the Mako Mori test.
Caitlin Lightcap, the scientist who invents PONS (drifting) has a clear, identifiable, hands-down narrative arc, going from shy science hottie to confident fighter. But...her story is only told to give Schoenfield depth--he's telling her story to the reporter to highlight his own epiphany. Tamsin Sevier and Luna exist to give depth to Stacker. And Naomi? Oh god. Naomi. The perky, driven Lois Lane style reporter who gathers these stories. She has minimal narrative arc, but serves the (pointless) function of creating drama in the Becket Brothers by being, well, a bit promiscuous. She comes off as a bit of a groupie, just wanting to fuck a jaeger pilot, contrasted with Raleigh's (pure?) interest.
W-wow. Okay, so even when we lower the bar, we can't pass it.
Sidenote: I've become a little obsessed recently with Elysium and so just to be fair, let's poke at that as we wrap up: Elysium: fails the Bechdel test. HOWEVER, believe it or not, Delacourt passes. She has a narrative arc, that doesn't exist to give emotional oomph to a man's story. Yes, she activates Kruger. Yes, she sends him after Max. But it's not personal. A man would have complicated Max's life the same way. Frey fails, but even then, she has agency. The problem is, of course, Delacourt is a stone cold bitch and not a pretty, Asian moe stereotype (yeah, guess who's NEVER going to forgive Del Toro his idea that she can stand in rotorwash and not have that umbrella torn out of her hands.)
What's really funny (or depressing, depending on how you look at it) is that passing these tests didn't USED to be a problem. Star Trek: The Next Generation NAILED both the Bechdel test and this Mako Mori test. Even characters like Seven of Nine (who is the first time I heard the word 'fanservice') had agency, they had their own stories to tell, and their stories WEREN'T subsumed to showing the emotional growth of a 'more important' male character.
My question is...what happened? And why are we lowering the bar instead of insisting we go back to what we used to do so well?
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Friday, August 16, 2013
Elysium, Politics and of course liminal humanity
The predictable: Straight White American Guy saves the world. If
you've
seen the trailer, you've figured that part out. It also, predictably,
failed the Bechdel test. Again, it has a
LOT of company there: I haven't seen a movie this summer that passed.
So bashing it for either of those? Kind of pointless unless you also
plan to froth about Pacific Rim, Star Trek Into Darkness, Iron Man 3,
World War Z......
However, it was also the best movie I've seen this summer. It's not the best movie ever made, and it certainly has its flaws (some below but just one--how the hell does Max wear that rig with a t-shirt UNDER it when he was bareskinned when they drilled it into him?) but it passed my personal test of "I didn't know 75% of the details of the ending after the first ten minutes". Unlike Pacific Rim, I wasn't writhing in my seat at the gender and race stereotypes.
NOT that there aren't stereotypes. Julio, Max's best friend, is your typical Latino gangbanger, as is most of Spider's crew. Oh boy, Hispanic gang types, covered in weird facial tattoos and wifebeaters and bandanas. I have never seen this before. :|
And there's Frey, Max's love interest. Single mom in a caretaking job who would do anything to save her daughter, who plays nurturer, helper, love interest, and damsel in distress, and the Girl Back Home (the female character for whom the male exposes himself to danger and sacrifice so that she can be safe and happy).
But there's also Max himself, an Anglo guy who is bilingual, an orphan raised by nuns, criminal and tattooed, the working class stiff who gets stiffed by his uncaring corporate job and is compelled, in desperation, to allow himself to be fitted with the exo-suit (truth: I could watch him walk in that thing all day for prurient reasons hnnnnngh). Max straddles the line, then, of criminality/legality, Anglo/Hispanic (Max De Costa isn't the WASPiest name ever and even his name 'from the coast' implies a liminal status, not land or ocean, but the line between), and human/machine.
So there are stereotypes, but even the two above are complicated in interesting ways, similarly, by straddling boundaries: the thug gangbangers are in a sense the techno-elite of Earth--Spider is the one with the real power in Max's life. They have computer and surgical knowledge, as well as combat skills. And Frey? Well...she walks away in the beginning, from Max. He's bad news from her past and she wants no part of it. And there's wonderful UST between them but it is entirely chaste: Max is actually pretty upset to find out she has a daughter. She's too damn good for him, and he knows it, and it's really a nice change. (Looking at you, Pacific Rim, Iron Man, etc etc).
It's obvious that Earth is brown and Elysium is white, except for their token 'President' Patel, who accomplishes very little and is handily hamstrung by Delacourt, who is the 'ice queen' bitch stereotype (which Jodie Foster can pull off in spades).
Which leads us to the political stuff. The Right Wing has launched a virtual campaign against this movie, saying it's pro illegal immigration propaganda, and pro Obamacare propaganda, to which I say....whaaaaaaah? Yes there are themes of citizenship and exclusion and access to health care, but though the access to the medical pods is a central goal in the narrative, it's a maguffin, really, symbolizing healed humanity, instead of some sort of documentary for health care.
Yes it's certainly a metaphor: the rich white elite hogging the best for themselves and destroying anyone trying to climb the ladder to get their share. I think any American knows that--it's nothing new to see on film: we see it every damn day all around us, with the Washington plutocrats. Have some relevant reality: you guys HAVE heard that those politicians who were so gung ho about Obamacare recently passed legislation that exempts THEM and their staffs from having to abide by it themselves? Yup. There's your Two Americas right there. There's your Elysium and Earth. What's good enough for you and I, 'universal healthcare', the Washington types think is not even close to good enough for them, right now, today, 2013.
In other words, what they have on Earth in the movie IS Obamacare! Max has free healthcare, and the overcrowded waiting rooms and almost robotic by-the-book care that is substandard while the wealthy elites get 'Cadillac' health care: no waiting, perfect care, clean and fast. That's what Congress just passed before their August recess. H-how can a movie be pro-Obamacare then?
That scene where Max is talking to his 'Parole Officer' and the robot offered him a pill got an uncomfortable laugh in the theater I was in, because we have all been there: where they'd rather throw medicine at you than actually, you know, deal with you at a human level.
Elysium, with its token dark president who is shunted aside as ineffectual, could just as easily be read as a critique of President Obama and his ineffectual policies and lavish life (isn't he on vacation right now, in fact? ). So for all the Righties wailing it's evil Left Wing Hollywood Propaganda, just saying, the government of Elysium is a real critique of our own. Mind you, for the record I don't think it's the main point of the film to push either to the right or to the left, I'm just debunking the whole 'Left Wing propaganda' hysterics by pointing out it's JUST as easy to read it as Right Wing ideology.
It's also an extension of the cyberpunk tradition. Your standard cyberpunk adventure pits one guy against a dispassionate corporation, which dehumanizes its workers, viewing, really, only other executives as 'real' and caring more about profit and safety of profit than justice or fairness or compassion or...(swap in any human virtue). Cyberpunk heros are male, who straddle boundaries between the human and the technological. And they work to bring down the system from within, even though they are outsiders, working with jerryrigged equipment, triumphing by sheer will and gumption and wits in the face of vast technological superiority.
Sounds like Max, right? Except with less 'cyberspace' and more 'punching'.
There's something to be said for the fact that Max's job is making the droids, the same kind that run elite society, act as police and enforcers. The droids do work, but they don't do the really 'dirty' work (except for the orange robot who pinch and drag pulls Max out of the bay after contamination). Dirty work is for humans, while they get the clean jobs like basic enforcement (again the dirty enforcement jobs go to a human, Kruger, and boy is he unsavory), body guards, serving drinks. He makes them, he becomes half-robot and then, well, let's just say that the point of the movie is that the human part of him is what's really important. It's hard for me to admit, but I cried, honestly watching this movie. Which is something I never thought I'd say about a Matt Damon movie.
However, it was also the best movie I've seen this summer. It's not the best movie ever made, and it certainly has its flaws (some below but just one--how the hell does Max wear that rig with a t-shirt UNDER it when he was bareskinned when they drilled it into him?) but it passed my personal test of "I didn't know 75% of the details of the ending after the first ten minutes". Unlike Pacific Rim, I wasn't writhing in my seat at the gender and race stereotypes.
NOT that there aren't stereotypes. Julio, Max's best friend, is your typical Latino gangbanger, as is most of Spider's crew. Oh boy, Hispanic gang types, covered in weird facial tattoos and wifebeaters and bandanas. I have never seen this before. :|
And there's Frey, Max's love interest. Single mom in a caretaking job who would do anything to save her daughter, who plays nurturer, helper, love interest, and damsel in distress, and the Girl Back Home (the female character for whom the male exposes himself to danger and sacrifice so that she can be safe and happy).
But there's also Max himself, an Anglo guy who is bilingual, an orphan raised by nuns, criminal and tattooed, the working class stiff who gets stiffed by his uncaring corporate job and is compelled, in desperation, to allow himself to be fitted with the exo-suit (truth: I could watch him walk in that thing all day for prurient reasons hnnnnngh). Max straddles the line, then, of criminality/legality, Anglo/Hispanic (Max De Costa isn't the WASPiest name ever and even his name 'from the coast' implies a liminal status, not land or ocean, but the line between), and human/machine.
So there are stereotypes, but even the two above are complicated in interesting ways, similarly, by straddling boundaries: the thug gangbangers are in a sense the techno-elite of Earth--Spider is the one with the real power in Max's life. They have computer and surgical knowledge, as well as combat skills. And Frey? Well...she walks away in the beginning, from Max. He's bad news from her past and she wants no part of it. And there's wonderful UST between them but it is entirely chaste: Max is actually pretty upset to find out she has a daughter. She's too damn good for him, and he knows it, and it's really a nice change. (Looking at you, Pacific Rim, Iron Man, etc etc).
It's obvious that Earth is brown and Elysium is white, except for their token 'President' Patel, who accomplishes very little and is handily hamstrung by Delacourt, who is the 'ice queen' bitch stereotype (which Jodie Foster can pull off in spades).
Which leads us to the political stuff. The Right Wing has launched a virtual campaign against this movie, saying it's pro illegal immigration propaganda, and pro Obamacare propaganda, to which I say....whaaaaaaah? Yes there are themes of citizenship and exclusion and access to health care, but though the access to the medical pods is a central goal in the narrative, it's a maguffin, really, symbolizing healed humanity, instead of some sort of documentary for health care.
Yes it's certainly a metaphor: the rich white elite hogging the best for themselves and destroying anyone trying to climb the ladder to get their share. I think any American knows that--it's nothing new to see on film: we see it every damn day all around us, with the Washington plutocrats. Have some relevant reality: you guys HAVE heard that those politicians who were so gung ho about Obamacare recently passed legislation that exempts THEM and their staffs from having to abide by it themselves? Yup. There's your Two Americas right there. There's your Elysium and Earth. What's good enough for you and I, 'universal healthcare', the Washington types think is not even close to good enough for them, right now, today, 2013.
In other words, what they have on Earth in the movie IS Obamacare! Max has free healthcare, and the overcrowded waiting rooms and almost robotic by-the-book care that is substandard while the wealthy elites get 'Cadillac' health care: no waiting, perfect care, clean and fast. That's what Congress just passed before their August recess. H-how can a movie be pro-Obamacare then?
That scene where Max is talking to his 'Parole Officer' and the robot offered him a pill got an uncomfortable laugh in the theater I was in, because we have all been there: where they'd rather throw medicine at you than actually, you know, deal with you at a human level.
Elysium, with its token dark president who is shunted aside as ineffectual, could just as easily be read as a critique of President Obama and his ineffectual policies and lavish life (isn't he on vacation right now, in fact? ). So for all the Righties wailing it's evil Left Wing Hollywood Propaganda, just saying, the government of Elysium is a real critique of our own. Mind you, for the record I don't think it's the main point of the film to push either to the right or to the left, I'm just debunking the whole 'Left Wing propaganda' hysterics by pointing out it's JUST as easy to read it as Right Wing ideology.
It's also an extension of the cyberpunk tradition. Your standard cyberpunk adventure pits one guy against a dispassionate corporation, which dehumanizes its workers, viewing, really, only other executives as 'real' and caring more about profit and safety of profit than justice or fairness or compassion or...(swap in any human virtue). Cyberpunk heros are male, who straddle boundaries between the human and the technological. And they work to bring down the system from within, even though they are outsiders, working with jerryrigged equipment, triumphing by sheer will and gumption and wits in the face of vast technological superiority.
Sounds like Max, right? Except with less 'cyberspace' and more 'punching'.
There's something to be said for the fact that Max's job is making the droids, the same kind that run elite society, act as police and enforcers. The droids do work, but they don't do the really 'dirty' work (except for the orange robot who pinch and drag pulls Max out of the bay after contamination). Dirty work is for humans, while they get the clean jobs like basic enforcement (again the dirty enforcement jobs go to a human, Kruger, and boy is he unsavory), body guards, serving drinks. He makes them, he becomes half-robot and then, well, let's just say that the point of the movie is that the human part of him is what's really important. It's hard for me to admit, but I cried, honestly watching this movie. Which is something I never thought I'd say about a Matt Damon movie.
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