A Very Long Post About Women in the Summer Movies
This year has had a good number of movies with female lead action characters. It has also, therefore, had a bad number of stupid criticisms about female lead action characters. Since I keep starting to write and rewrite my thoughts on the topic, I thought I'd just give up on making it coherent and drag you along on my experience. My thoughts on the topic, let me show them to you.
First, some sexism 101 for people who aren't familiar with the topic. You know, just in case you are new to the party:
If you want to keep women out of a profession, here are some easy methods for doing so:
- Deny that women can do the job now
- Deny that women have ever done the job
- Deny that women doing the job are actually doing the job (or, alternately that the women doing the job are actually women)
- Deny that the job is important if women are doing it well
So, some of my favorite examples from the non-entertainment world-
Back in college (a small, women-only-by-residence-at-the-time liberal arts college), my calculus profession used to read biographies of female mathematicians as part of the classes. When one of the other students asked why we were covering that material, she told us about Emmy Noether and Sofia Kovalevskaia, and the famous quip made by a male mathematician, in reference to them, saying "There have been only two women in the history of mathematics, and one of them wasn’t a mathematician, while the other wasn’t a woman".
It was a joke, she said, that too many male mathematicians still thought was funny. So she wanted us to know about female mathematicians, so we'd know better when someone tried the joke on us. Because someone would.
(I was still horrible at calc. Not actually pertinent to this essay, but I thought I'd mention it.)
In my own family, my mother (who is awesome) had to go through a lot of poor treatment in Australia in the 1960s to get established as a veterinarian. She lost her university scholarships because women couldn't be vets, and everyone knew that. So she put herself through school. One of the reasons my family emigrated to the US was because even after she had her degree and years of work, no one would promote her- a female veterinarian? As a large animal pathologist? Absurd! That's man's work.
These days, veterinary studies are largely female dominated. My mother says that while it's great in most respects, she's also seen the decrease in prestige for the profession, and she's been head of departments and organizations enough to know- well, if women are doing it, it must be fluffy and soft. It's not the rugged job of the guy who comes out to handle the stocks on the range, it's the sweet and nurturing profession of women who play with kittens and puppies.
(which, first of all, having seen vets wrestling with feral cats and aggressive dogs, I wouldn't insult vets who work with companion animals to start with, and secondly, having personally watched my mother perform a necropsy on a tiger, I'd really question the disparaging tone of anyone who wants to call my mother's work 'girly'. Thirdly, she's very good with a knife and knows where to cut, so shut up.)
It takes very little study of history to see these general patterns over and over and over again. Women can't do X. If a woman was said to be doing X, there's some reason it's not really X, so we can leave it out of the history books. See, women have never done X. Okay, okay, so maybe some women did X, but they were probably freaks or special cases or no longer women or something, so we can leave them out, too. We can't? Well, they weren't doing it right. Fine, okay, so maybe they were, but then X can't be all that important after all. Sheesh. Look at all the fuss women make over something as trivial as X.
So, now, having put down that groundwork, let's talk about female action movie stars.
So far this year*, I've seen three movies with strong female characters, two of which had the female character as the lead. There was Katniss in The Hunger Games, Black Widow in The Avengers, and Snow White in Snow White and the Huntsman. I'm looking forward to Merida in Brave later this summer. Yay! Four entire movies in less than a year where a female character gets to kick butt and defend herself and has agency and all that good stuff.
Except-
Well, except where I'm seeing all this really irritating backlash.
Katniss (spoilers for 2nd and 3rd books)
Katniss gets criticism because she's not really a strong lead. She's not choosing to fight. Heck, in the second and third books she's practically dragged along by events! She's a bad role model (I had a guy actually say this to me at a party recently)! She's so passive she's not worth the bother (accusation by Feminist Frequency, whom I normally like or at least respect)! She doesn't count.
To which I'd like to say- okay, she's not your ideal, and I have sympathy for people who wish it had gone differently, but I can't agree with criticism based on the fact that she doesn't tie on a rambo-style bandana and go out and defeat her enemies by sheer force of will. You know what? I actually loved that about the books. I truly loved that Collins had, as a running theme, that it is fucked up and wrong to expect a child to fight your wars for you. It is wrong to expect someone to come through horrors unscathed, or to endure horrors in order to make them into your symbols. It is wrong and it screws people up and sometimes the best you can do is come out on the other side alive. And not everyone does, which does not make them weak, or expendable, or dismissible as the cost of getting what you want.
I truly love that Katniss doesn't come through it as a shining example of triumph over adversity. I love that she still comes through, and that her success is that by the end of the series she gets to be left alone to make her own decisions, find her own path, and to have her own form of comfort. The world is better because of what she did, but she pays a hell of a price, and the books don't try to make that okay, or glamorous, or comfortable- they make it the way it had to be, because the world is damaged. Understanding the difference makes all the difference in understanding the books.
No, maybe she's not a role model of ideal behavior, but since when was that the standard that male action leads are held to? How many of them are sold as 'bad boys', how many of them are shown as pretty damned near unrepentant killers, womanizers, destructive, nearly sociopathic, and is this the ideal that she fails to meet? When are male leads held to that kind of standard? I'd argue that Katniss, breakdowns and flaws and bone-deep damage, is closer to a real human response than the standard action hero response, and I like that. It meant a lot to me that Collins said that getting through with your sense of self intact when everyone is trying to sell you is important.
But mostly I just resent that a female lead character has to be any kind of role model at all. Can't she just be interesting and complex? The way people actually are? Can't it be a great story where the characters are flawed and broken in realistic ways?
I'm fairly sure that if Katnis HAD behaved exactely like a standard issue male lead action hero, she would have been dismissed for acting like a male. Or they still would have said that she didn't count for some other reason.
Case in point-
Black Widow
Natasha Romanov was one of my favorite parts of The Avengers. I adored her, want to know more about her, and just felt she hit her character notes dead center. She was strong and clever and brave as hell, and did a wonderful job at hinting at the complex, contradictory, and fascinating backstory to her character. For one of the few characters without her own introduction movie, she did a very good job of being integral to the team and fully developed in the movie.
So it was a little frustrating - by which I mean holy hells what the fuck is WRONG with you- to read folks like Joe Quesada saying that there weren't any female characters or female actors of stature enough to justify a female-lead comic book movie. Or GRR Martin saying of Black Widow "Scarlett Johanssen looked great in that outfit, but she seemed to be there only as eye candy". She doesn't count.
So the character who can outsmart Loki, who can pull the lost member of the group back when he falls, who, as one of the few non-super-powered members, is nonetheless willing to go into battle and do things like get flung onto an alien vehicle and control its driver by digging knives into its back- that's eye candy? The character who can beat up a room full of men while tied to a chair, the person that they call in when they need to handle someone dangerous and unpredictable (a compromised team member, a scientist who is occasionally a rage monster, a captive god of lies), and still keep her cool and control of the situation, that's a waste of time?
(You know, it didn't actually occur to me until I wrote this that Black Widow is considered the most stable member of the group. The person whose ledger is dripping with red is the person who keeps them in balance. Ha Ha oh god I want her to have her own movie. Now.)
Reducing this to eye candy is willful blindness. Yes, she looks awesome doing it, but that's because she actually IS awesome.
(as yet another side note, one of the criticisms I've heard of some of the other female action leads is that they are often seen using ranged weapons, such as bow and arrows, and that this is somehow further indication that they aren't 'real' heroes, because they don't get up next to the bad guys. Natasha uses knives in her enemies' back and she has multiple hand to hand fights, which she mostly wins, and she's still dismissed as 'not real'. Can't win when the rules are set against you.)
She isn't doing it for her man or her child (nothing wrong with those stories, as they are often deeply developed and amazing [Sarah Connor, I love you], but traditional Hollywood movies have sometimes felt the need to give even the strongest female fighters some 'traditional' feminine motivation for their actions). She isn't doing it because she got dragged in against her will. She isn't doing it because she needs to be rescued. She's doing it because she's good at it and she enjoys it. She's really good at it. She'll smile, with a split lip, and say "It's gonna be fun.", with only her guns and her stubbornness and her will, and she will win.
And if you look at that and all you can see is eye candy, you are an idiot.
But hey, maybe some people aren't comfortable with women who step outside the traditional roles. Maybe something a little more old-fashioned would make them happy, and able to see the value of female lead characters?
Oh wait-
Snow White (okay, this is more of a review, but still)
In a darker take on the old fairytale, The evil Queen's reign brings a blight on the land, and Snow White is held captive in the tower of the castle until she comes of age, when the Queen can drain her power and pure heart in order to fuel the magic that keeps her eternally youthful and powerful. Snow White escapes, and the hunstman sent to capture her takes pity on her, and escorts her to the castle where the last rebellious factions of the old King's armies are awaiting a signal to rebel. Speeches are made, castles are stormed, and the good guys win. Apples, dwarves, kisses, etc.
The major criticism I've seen of this movie is that it didn't do enough. Okay, granted, as my summary above might indicate, I wasn't swept away by it- I knew the story going in, and I've read enough stories-based-on-fairytales (you think?) that it would take a lot to really surprise me. That said, I thought it did its job quite well. The movie was gorgeous, the acting was solid, the storyline was faithful enough that the source was recognizable, but with enough new material (Queen's backstory, Huntmans' backstory) was added that I kept paying attention to see what would happen next.
(As a side note, I have to agree with Roget Ebert's criticism that while the actors playing the seven dwarves were well-respected and established actors that did their parts well, it would have been nice to see actual dwarf actors in the roles rather than using CGI to shrink Ian McShane and Bob Hoskins. But this is a relatively minor quibble, or at least off topic to this rant)
So, good story, good acting, good movie-making, more than one female main characters (I suspect this one did better on the Bechdel test than the other two movies put together Scratch that, HG did awesome with the Bechdel test as well. Odd, isn't it, that putting a woman in charge puts more women in the story overall?), and what's the major response so far? That it didn't do enough. That having two female leads squaring off against each other is anti-feminist. That it is too old-fashioned.
This one doesn't count because it doesn't do anything really remarkable. So they did a good action movie with multiple female leads, and this isn't a good movie because they didn't do anything new. Nothing to see here, Snow White has been done before, please move along.
Did you know- I loathe and detest the traditional Disney princesses with a burning hate. One of the many reasons is because up until something like 1990, they weren't allowed to make 'unpleasant' expressions, just look serene, or possibly confused, rather than, say, angry or disgusted or sad. Because strong or negative emotions aren't feminine. If you pay attention in the older movies with this in mind, it becomes downright creepy. I also just pretty much hate the idea that the biggest skill a woman needs is to be beautiful and find a prince to marry them, which Disney continued doing well past 1990.
So a version of Snow White in which the women scream (screamed down a troll, which I thought was wonderful, somewhat for reasons outside the movie) and yell and cry, where Snow White leads an army as her big moment (as opposed to looking dead and getting kissed) is not nothing special. Where she confronts the Queen and wins in a physical fight on her own is not about female cattiness. A movie where the princess is crowned Queen without a prince or a king, but in her own right, is not a throw back.
Well, I'm glad they found a way to dismiss this one too. Okay, I didn't find the movie to be the best ever, but I have to say, for a re-telling of a traditional story, it did a pretty good job at giving the main character a lot more of a sense of agency than most such tales. It made her the lead in her own story, and it didn't reduce her motivation to passive victim or love-stuck idiot. She escaped on her own. She saved the day. She even did most of it in practical clothing and/or while looking grubby. Yes, she was still billed as 'the fairest in the land', but she wasn't afraid to do hard work to prove it.
It would almost be reassuring to see people using 'nothing special' about this movie, if it wasn't for the fact that so many of them are using it as yet another way to dismiss a movie with a female lead.
Because you can't have a movie with a strong female lead. Because women can't do that.
***
So, I wish I could give you a great wrap-up to this very long and rambling post, but I sort of hope you've followed me on this journey without needing a great conclusion.
But here's a walk away message- equality isn't about achieving a particular goal in this or any other context- women aren't going to have 'made it' as female lead action characters because someone finally made a movie where one female character did X, Y, or Z (because the critics will dismiss it as not really counting), or because the critics can't find anything to complain about in particular female lead action character (because they can always find something, even if they have to make it up). We will have made it when women are portrayed with the complexity of any male character, allowed as many flaws and ways of being as anyone else, and the critics stop paying attention to the fact that a character is female as a justification for reducing her to a single trait that defines her moreso than any of their actions or choices, or for dismissing her entirely for failing to meet an unreasonable standard.
Which counts outside the world of entertainment as well.
* this is a fairly good year for movies with female lead action characters, but it's not in the least like these are the first. I grew up with Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, for example. I may have hated the Kill Bill movies, but they sure as hell had a female lead action character. Heck, Elizabeth may not have had the virgin queen beheading anyone (I assume there will be a zombie reboot at some point that may change that), but the main character was certainly not waiting for a man to hand her a destiny or trying to get by on looks and a sweet demeanor. So it's not a new arguement, but I'm getting really annoyed by it this summer.
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First, some sexism 101 for people who aren't familiar with the topic. You know, just in case you are new to the party:
If you want to keep women out of a profession, here are some easy methods for doing so:
- Deny that women can do the job now
- Deny that women have ever done the job
- Deny that women doing the job are actually doing the job (or, alternately that the women doing the job are actually women)
- Deny that the job is important if women are doing it well
So, some of my favorite examples from the non-entertainment world-
Back in college (a small, women-only-by-residence-at-the-time liberal arts college), my calculus profession used to read biographies of female mathematicians as part of the classes. When one of the other students asked why we were covering that material, she told us about Emmy Noether and Sofia Kovalevskaia, and the famous quip made by a male mathematician, in reference to them, saying "There have been only two women in the history of mathematics, and one of them wasn’t a mathematician, while the other wasn’t a woman".
It was a joke, she said, that too many male mathematicians still thought was funny. So she wanted us to know about female mathematicians, so we'd know better when someone tried the joke on us. Because someone would.
(I was still horrible at calc. Not actually pertinent to this essay, but I thought I'd mention it.)
In my own family, my mother (who is awesome) had to go through a lot of poor treatment in Australia in the 1960s to get established as a veterinarian. She lost her university scholarships because women couldn't be vets, and everyone knew that. So she put herself through school. One of the reasons my family emigrated to the US was because even after she had her degree and years of work, no one would promote her- a female veterinarian? As a large animal pathologist? Absurd! That's man's work.
These days, veterinary studies are largely female dominated. My mother says that while it's great in most respects, she's also seen the decrease in prestige for the profession, and she's been head of departments and organizations enough to know- well, if women are doing it, it must be fluffy and soft. It's not the rugged job of the guy who comes out to handle the stocks on the range, it's the sweet and nurturing profession of women who play with kittens and puppies.
(which, first of all, having seen vets wrestling with feral cats and aggressive dogs, I wouldn't insult vets who work with companion animals to start with, and secondly, having personally watched my mother perform a necropsy on a tiger, I'd really question the disparaging tone of anyone who wants to call my mother's work 'girly'. Thirdly, she's very good with a knife and knows where to cut, so shut up.)
It takes very little study of history to see these general patterns over and over and over again. Women can't do X. If a woman was said to be doing X, there's some reason it's not really X, so we can leave it out of the history books. See, women have never done X. Okay, okay, so maybe some women did X, but they were probably freaks or special cases or no longer women or something, so we can leave them out, too. We can't? Well, they weren't doing it right. Fine, okay, so maybe they were, but then X can't be all that important after all. Sheesh. Look at all the fuss women make over something as trivial as X.
So, now, having put down that groundwork, let's talk about female action movie stars.
So far this year*, I've seen three movies with strong female characters, two of which had the female character as the lead. There was Katniss in The Hunger Games, Black Widow in The Avengers, and Snow White in Snow White and the Huntsman. I'm looking forward to Merida in Brave later this summer. Yay! Four entire movies in less than a year where a female character gets to kick butt and defend herself and has agency and all that good stuff.
Except-
Well, except where I'm seeing all this really irritating backlash.
Katniss (spoilers for 2nd and 3rd books)
Katniss gets criticism because she's not really a strong lead. She's not choosing to fight. Heck, in the second and third books she's practically dragged along by events! She's a bad role model (I had a guy actually say this to me at a party recently)! She's so passive she's not worth the bother (accusation by Feminist Frequency, whom I normally like or at least respect)! She doesn't count.
To which I'd like to say- okay, she's not your ideal, and I have sympathy for people who wish it had gone differently, but I can't agree with criticism based on the fact that she doesn't tie on a rambo-style bandana and go out and defeat her enemies by sheer force of will. You know what? I actually loved that about the books. I truly loved that Collins had, as a running theme, that it is fucked up and wrong to expect a child to fight your wars for you. It is wrong to expect someone to come through horrors unscathed, or to endure horrors in order to make them into your symbols. It is wrong and it screws people up and sometimes the best you can do is come out on the other side alive. And not everyone does, which does not make them weak, or expendable, or dismissible as the cost of getting what you want.
I truly love that Katniss doesn't come through it as a shining example of triumph over adversity. I love that she still comes through, and that her success is that by the end of the series she gets to be left alone to make her own decisions, find her own path, and to have her own form of comfort. The world is better because of what she did, but she pays a hell of a price, and the books don't try to make that okay, or glamorous, or comfortable- they make it the way it had to be, because the world is damaged. Understanding the difference makes all the difference in understanding the books.
No, maybe she's not a role model of ideal behavior, but since when was that the standard that male action leads are held to? How many of them are sold as 'bad boys', how many of them are shown as pretty damned near unrepentant killers, womanizers, destructive, nearly sociopathic, and is this the ideal that she fails to meet? When are male leads held to that kind of standard? I'd argue that Katniss, breakdowns and flaws and bone-deep damage, is closer to a real human response than the standard action hero response, and I like that. It meant a lot to me that Collins said that getting through with your sense of self intact when everyone is trying to sell you is important.
But mostly I just resent that a female lead character has to be any kind of role model at all. Can't she just be interesting and complex? The way people actually are? Can't it be a great story where the characters are flawed and broken in realistic ways?
I'm fairly sure that if Katnis HAD behaved exactely like a standard issue male lead action hero, she would have been dismissed for acting like a male. Or they still would have said that she didn't count for some other reason.
Case in point-
Black Widow
Natasha Romanov was one of my favorite parts of The Avengers. I adored her, want to know more about her, and just felt she hit her character notes dead center. She was strong and clever and brave as hell, and did a wonderful job at hinting at the complex, contradictory, and fascinating backstory to her character. For one of the few characters without her own introduction movie, she did a very good job of being integral to the team and fully developed in the movie.
So it was a little frustrating - by which I mean holy hells what the fuck is WRONG with you- to read folks like Joe Quesada saying that there weren't any female characters or female actors of stature enough to justify a female-lead comic book movie. Or GRR Martin saying of Black Widow "Scarlett Johanssen looked great in that outfit, but she seemed to be there only as eye candy". She doesn't count.
So the character who can outsmart Loki, who can pull the lost member of the group back when he falls, who, as one of the few non-super-powered members, is nonetheless willing to go into battle and do things like get flung onto an alien vehicle and control its driver by digging knives into its back- that's eye candy? The character who can beat up a room full of men while tied to a chair, the person that they call in when they need to handle someone dangerous and unpredictable (a compromised team member, a scientist who is occasionally a rage monster, a captive god of lies), and still keep her cool and control of the situation, that's a waste of time?
(You know, it didn't actually occur to me until I wrote this that Black Widow is considered the most stable member of the group. The person whose ledger is dripping with red is the person who keeps them in balance. Ha Ha oh god I want her to have her own movie. Now.)
Reducing this to eye candy is willful blindness. Yes, she looks awesome doing it, but that's because she actually IS awesome.
(as yet another side note, one of the criticisms I've heard of some of the other female action leads is that they are often seen using ranged weapons, such as bow and arrows, and that this is somehow further indication that they aren't 'real' heroes, because they don't get up next to the bad guys. Natasha uses knives in her enemies' back and she has multiple hand to hand fights, which she mostly wins, and she's still dismissed as 'not real'. Can't win when the rules are set against you.)
She isn't doing it for her man or her child (nothing wrong with those stories, as they are often deeply developed and amazing [Sarah Connor, I love you], but traditional Hollywood movies have sometimes felt the need to give even the strongest female fighters some 'traditional' feminine motivation for their actions). She isn't doing it because she got dragged in against her will. She isn't doing it because she needs to be rescued. She's doing it because she's good at it and she enjoys it. She's really good at it. She'll smile, with a split lip, and say "It's gonna be fun.", with only her guns and her stubbornness and her will, and she will win.
And if you look at that and all you can see is eye candy, you are an idiot.
But hey, maybe some people aren't comfortable with women who step outside the traditional roles. Maybe something a little more old-fashioned would make them happy, and able to see the value of female lead characters?
Oh wait-
Snow White (okay, this is more of a review, but still)
In a darker take on the old fairytale, The evil Queen's reign brings a blight on the land, and Snow White is held captive in the tower of the castle until she comes of age, when the Queen can drain her power and pure heart in order to fuel the magic that keeps her eternally youthful and powerful. Snow White escapes, and the hunstman sent to capture her takes pity on her, and escorts her to the castle where the last rebellious factions of the old King's armies are awaiting a signal to rebel. Speeches are made, castles are stormed, and the good guys win. Apples, dwarves, kisses, etc.
The major criticism I've seen of this movie is that it didn't do enough. Okay, granted, as my summary above might indicate, I wasn't swept away by it- I knew the story going in, and I've read enough stories-based-on-fairytales (you think?) that it would take a lot to really surprise me. That said, I thought it did its job quite well. The movie was gorgeous, the acting was solid, the storyline was faithful enough that the source was recognizable, but with enough new material (Queen's backstory, Huntmans' backstory) was added that I kept paying attention to see what would happen next.
(As a side note, I have to agree with Roget Ebert's criticism that while the actors playing the seven dwarves were well-respected and established actors that did their parts well, it would have been nice to see actual dwarf actors in the roles rather than using CGI to shrink Ian McShane and Bob Hoskins. But this is a relatively minor quibble, or at least off topic to this rant)
So, good story, good acting, good movie-making, more than one female main characters (I suspect this one did better on the Bechdel test than the other two movies put together Scratch that, HG did awesome with the Bechdel test as well. Odd, isn't it, that putting a woman in charge puts more women in the story overall?), and what's the major response so far? That it didn't do enough. That having two female leads squaring off against each other is anti-feminist. That it is too old-fashioned.
This one doesn't count because it doesn't do anything really remarkable. So they did a good action movie with multiple female leads, and this isn't a good movie because they didn't do anything new. Nothing to see here, Snow White has been done before, please move along.
Did you know- I loathe and detest the traditional Disney princesses with a burning hate. One of the many reasons is because up until something like 1990, they weren't allowed to make 'unpleasant' expressions, just look serene, or possibly confused, rather than, say, angry or disgusted or sad. Because strong or negative emotions aren't feminine. If you pay attention in the older movies with this in mind, it becomes downright creepy. I also just pretty much hate the idea that the biggest skill a woman needs is to be beautiful and find a prince to marry them, which Disney continued doing well past 1990.
So a version of Snow White in which the women scream (screamed down a troll, which I thought was wonderful, somewhat for reasons outside the movie) and yell and cry, where Snow White leads an army as her big moment (as opposed to looking dead and getting kissed) is not nothing special. Where she confronts the Queen and wins in a physical fight on her own is not about female cattiness. A movie where the princess is crowned Queen without a prince or a king, but in her own right, is not a throw back.
Well, I'm glad they found a way to dismiss this one too. Okay, I didn't find the movie to be the best ever, but I have to say, for a re-telling of a traditional story, it did a pretty good job at giving the main character a lot more of a sense of agency than most such tales. It made her the lead in her own story, and it didn't reduce her motivation to passive victim or love-stuck idiot. She escaped on her own. She saved the day. She even did most of it in practical clothing and/or while looking grubby. Yes, she was still billed as 'the fairest in the land', but she wasn't afraid to do hard work to prove it.
It would almost be reassuring to see people using 'nothing special' about this movie, if it wasn't for the fact that so many of them are using it as yet another way to dismiss a movie with a female lead.
Because you can't have a movie with a strong female lead. Because women can't do that.
***
So, I wish I could give you a great wrap-up to this very long and rambling post, but I sort of hope you've followed me on this journey without needing a great conclusion.
But here's a walk away message- equality isn't about achieving a particular goal in this or any other context- women aren't going to have 'made it' as female lead action characters because someone finally made a movie where one female character did X, Y, or Z (because the critics will dismiss it as not really counting), or because the critics can't find anything to complain about in particular female lead action character (because they can always find something, even if they have to make it up). We will have made it when women are portrayed with the complexity of any male character, allowed as many flaws and ways of being as anyone else, and the critics stop paying attention to the fact that a character is female as a justification for reducing her to a single trait that defines her moreso than any of their actions or choices, or for dismissing her entirely for failing to meet an unreasonable standard.
Which counts outside the world of entertainment as well.
* this is a fairly good year for movies with female lead action characters, but it's not in the least like these are the first. I grew up with Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, for example. I may have hated the Kill Bill movies, but they sure as hell had a female lead action character. Heck, Elizabeth may not have had the virgin queen beheading anyone (I assume there will be a zombie reboot at some point that may change that), but the main character was certainly not waiting for a man to hand her a destiny or trying to get by on looks and a sweet demeanor. So it's not a new arguement, but I'm getting really annoyed by it this summer.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. You can comment here or there, using OpenID if you don't have a Dreamwidth account.
If you have never posted at Dreamwidth, you may need to authenticate your OpenID account to comment there.
Commenting on LJ will eventually be disabled.