Geeks, Super 8, and Feminism
I don’t really know how to say this but ... I exist. Me. The me in question is mid twenties, white, and female. Oh, and a geek. Possibly even an uber-geek. I go to anime cons and cosplay in costumes I made myself, write fanfiction, and make fanvids. I play Six Degrees of Separation from Scott Summers to amuse myself sometimes. I own two gaming systems and a gaming friendly PC, and am on the edge of my seat for the release of Mass Effect 3, the third in one of my favorite series of RPG computer games - a genre I got into through Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate (I can recite entire scenes from Baldur’s Gate II I’ve played it so many times). I know exactly who the Doctor is, and how many there have been. Most of the movies I own and/or will shell out cash for at the theater ideally involve lots of explosions and people looking ridiculously cool while casually defying the laws of physics. I’m a fan of just about anything with “star” in its title. Me? GEEK.
I just needed to get that out of the way.
I just went to see a movie called Super 8. It was, for the most part, a good movie. All the reviews on Spielberg’s influence, on the shape and feel and atmosphere and plot of the movie were right - maybe not the best movie ever, but a darn good one. I can’t issue any complaints on that front. In fact, I rather liked it. The easy camaraderie and banter among our lead and his friends was enjoyable, the slow build of tension was genuinely gripping, and the plot even managed to mostly hold together except for some final act issues many reviewers have discussed elsewhere.
But …
It’s a boys’ world. There are precisely three female characters of any presence (four if you count the dead, which I don’t). There is the leading lady, Alice, a little older than our protagonist Joe and his friends, who is the object of desire and interest from their POV. There is the sister of Charles, friend of Joe. And then there is Charles’s mom.
(The fourth would be Joe’s mom, who exists only in photographs and home movie footage, having died moments before the movie begins. The emotional core of the movie revolves around Joe and his father coping with her death, which actually opens the movie in a really well done and poignant way. But still: dead mom.)
Got that? Three female characters. Only one of which has any substance, which you could probably gather from the fact that I only knew Alice’s name - everyone else is defined mostly by her relationship to a male character.
Of course, since Alice is the only female character of note, do you know what happens to her? If you guessed: captured by the alien monster in order to drive our heroes to action, you guessed right! Hurrah! Honestly, I should have seen it coming. I should count my blessings that this was kid-centric story, thereby ensuring Alice survived. Otherwise she might have died so Joe could take epic vengeance.
The only reason Alice was allowed to be a person in the first place was that Charles, budding filmmaker, decided the hero detective of his story needed a wife so that people would care about his problems. It seemed like a sort of meta commentary on her inclusion in the movie as a whole - she was there so we would care about Joe’s problems, and give him someone to rescue. Because that’s what girls are for.
::headdesk::
It’s not that these were bad story decisions, per se. It is a boys’ story, like I said. The movie’s strength comes from being filtered primarily through the perspective of Joe, twelve year old boy. Reportedly (not having been a twelve year old boy, I can’t confirm), this does involve a rather small and often limited worldview in which the opposite sex represents a mysterious Other species and therefore would not figure very much in the world as actual people. That’s POV, and that’s fair.
What annoys me is how much I see this as part of a pattern. Can anyone honestly tell me that there could be a movie about the Secret World of Childhood as filtered through a twelve year old girl’s perspective that would be full of magic and wonder and pondering the mysteries of the universe while saving the day? Without, mind you, massive amounts of mean girl bickering and gossip. Twelve year old girls can be vicious, but if I remember right, we could also be pretty nice and sometimes we even had best friends we would hang around with. I definitely had a primarily girl group of neighborhood kids I ran around wild with. And man, we totally knew how to have made up fantastic adventures. It would be awesome to see a movie about that. Or a tv show.
With only like one token boy as a background character, tops. Oh, that’s the other thing - if you’re telling me boys only play with boys, then I want my awesome girl centric adventure story to be about girls. But what’s that I hear? That’s no good! Boys won’t go see movies about girls having awesome adventures!
We are running into a slight problem with that statement. Now, you are assuming boys won’t see movies about girls. Okay then. Does this mean only boy money is valuable? Because it might logically follow if boys are so cootie focused that the same can be said of girls - why should we go watch a bunch of boys run around having adventures we don’t get to have? Except that we frequently do go see said movies, because we’ve had a lifetime of this:
1. I wanna see a movie /watch a tv show about having ADVENTURES!
2. Damn it, the boys are having adventures. It would be cooler if they were girls.
3. Well, those adventures are pretty awesome. I guess I can watch it.
4. Rinse and repeat
Strangely enough, we’ve coped just fine. I see no reason why boys can’t learn to do the same thing (hint: make the adventures really, really awesome). It would be good for everyone! The value of girl money will be discovered (protip: our money is as green as theirs, not pink), boys will have a chance to have some awesome girl heroines, girls get a chance to have girl heroines, everyone is happy!
If you have some concerns about source material, please research the following: Tamora Pierce, Robin McKinley, Patricia C. Wrede, and Gail Simone. Or just go browse the shelves at the local bookstore - thanks to these women and many others, we’ve at least managed to have literary adventures. I’d just like to spread the wealth around.