Comments | koganbot: Gender reverse?

koganbot

Gender reverse?

Dec 25, 2013 01:38

Finally saw The Hunger Games.* Had the thought that it would not work to gender reverse the two main roles. By "not work" I mean "not work for me as a viewer of a current American or Western European movie or TV show, as opposed to in life where it may well come reversed and 'work' as such." And "not work for me" doesn't mean I wouldn't accept it ( Read more... )

walter brennan, westerns, the searchers

Comments 15

koganbot December 25 2013, 08:43:00 UTC

I.e., it's the guy who sensitizes the girl, paradoxically making her stronger and better able to win.

SPOILERS koganbot December 25 2013, 08:58:54 UTC

SPOILERS (a little bit):

In Red River, Walter Brennan sort of takes on the sensitizing role of the absent woman, but it's not enough to soften the John Wayne character.

In The Searchers, the absent woman I'm referring to is Ethan's sister-in-law, though there's another absent female whose absence motivates the action, kind of as an echo of the first woman's absence.

Both movies suggest that the female's absence is caused by the man going absent originally, and The Searchers throws in an echo by making a plot point of whether another male will end up absent and thus provoke another woman to absent herself.

And both movies give us a surrogate son who also tries to soften/save the protagonist.

And whatever you think of westerns, you really need to see these two movies.

petronia December 25 2013, 18:07:04 UTC

A gender-reverse of Katniss and Peeta wouldn't work for me either. But I have trouble thinking of anything in the 2500 years of Western lit between Antigone and The Hunger Games with that particular combination of core genders/personalities (the Snow/Creon role becomes more important in part 2), though 2500 years is a long time. And the Katniss/Gale side of the triangle is more conventional to storytelling -- the hothead idealist boy versus the more cool-headed, pragmatist girl, where the idealism/pragmatism split applies both to the politics and the personal relationship ( ... )

koganbot December 26 2013, 05:28:13 UTC

Rue would be the girl in the fridge, though I don't know if that's a good way to look at it. That is, I don't know if "woman in the refrigerator" is, in general, the right concept. I think that, at least potentially (depending on what you mean by it), it conflates two different roles: the Damsel In Distress, on the one hand, and Someone Dies Helping The Hero, on the other. Except I don't think the term "Damsel In Distress" is all that accurate, either. For there to be a plot, something has to be imperiled, preferably a number of things, from the hero's psyche and strength of character and moral sense on the one hand to womenfolk and community and civilization on the other. And while the latter tend to vaguely code "feminine" in the American mind, the specific characters (not to mention actors) who embody it don't have to all be female. But a crucial plot feature (I'm thinking of westerns and action/adventure in general) will often be that, early on in the story, good people are threatened or killed owing to the hero's misjudgment or ( ... )

koganbot December 26 2013, 06:27:32 UTC

A quick glimpse at "social class": while the hero might be poor or belong to a marginalized social group (white trash, often enough), he (and now she, e.g., Buffy, Katniss) is a natural aristocrat, and is often preternaturally competent: at drawing a gun, say, or in martial arts. But he often befriends an old prospector, or a cripple (Walter Brennan walked with a limp, which he used to his advantage as a second banana), or an alky, or a renegade whore.* In a sense there's a class difference between him and them (even if some of then were once in his league, before they got hurt or took to drink). As I said, they're in the pool of people who potentially get popped.

But they've got a converse role too; not just to be imperiled or killed, and on the way there to represent the lead character's warm heart.

He's taking care of them. But his need to be humanized requires that at some point he allows them to take care of him, too (and allows that they're taking care of him, though this recognition might only be subterranean). There are ( ... )

koganbot December 26 2013, 06:51:38 UTC

As for The Hunger Games: I don't know what I feel about it. It was good enough to see again. Very good acting. But in the movie, at least, its world and its bad guys just aren't all that interesting, and the script makes far less than it could have of the fact that all but one contestant has to die.

The reason I don't think the genders are reversible is that I don't think we as a culture believe anymore in the strong guy or in the wild guy, either, as a hero. Difficult to start with him that way as anything but a jerk. Would have to be a comedy.

It might work in music (still on my list of things to do is to read your Libertines week; they're a band I know almost nothing about). The first two Eminem albums work very well, and they're not that old or out of date. Or even out of date at all. But the protagonist there isn't Eminem or Slim Shady as a character(s) in his songs, but the actual artist Eminem/Marshall Mathers himself. And he's got a sense of everything problematic about what he's doing. I don't attribute his subsequent ( ... )

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