Mad Max: Fury Road: We Are Not Things.

Warning: Spoilers.

Mad Max is a film that I’ve been waiting for for a long time. As a woman who loves action films they end up being disappointing - full of unexamined toxic masculinity, unnecessary violence, and women being nothing more than a sexualised backdrop. It would be easy to not watch the film and from afar judge its violence as gratuitous and its scantily clad woman as objectified but that would not do justice to the film. It is a loud, exciting mess of a film that saw the car chases in Blues Brothers and wanted to steal their shine. But more importantly it was one that treated women as capable people and that, in the ridiculous day and age we live in, is something to be admired.

In preparing for this review I have read around to see what other people thought of the film; I’ve heard many call it feminist and those who have tried to argue that it’s not. What people need to understand about this film is that first and foremost it is a Mad Max film. It seems a crazily obvious thing to say but it’s important to remember because that is what causes any non-feminist failings in this film. Miller didn’t set out to write a ‘feminist masterpiece’ he set out to write a fuck long car chase, with women escaping from an oppressive douche, led by a woman because it would have been a different story if they were led by a man. Its Miller’s understanding of women as Actual Human Beings and him hiring a female activist to help give context to sexual violence and slavery that is what led to the vast majority of the film being good for women.

We live in a world full of beautiful women on television and film and often they are objects, they are dismissed, and they are assumed to be useless. Yet in Mad Max that is not the case at all. Each wife contributes to the story in their own way, they all have their moment where they help save each other, and they are constantly supportive and loving to their fellow wives. It is rather misogynistic to shrug off these women, as actresses and as characters, simply because they are beautiful. It assumes that the objectification forced on them by the world we live in and the world they live in is one that is deserved due to their attractiveness. Rather than focusing on their looks or their lack of clothes I would prefer to focus on how they were immensely protective of their sisters, of how they were smart and cunning and used their status as ‘things’ to trick men into helping them break free.

Rather than trying to dismiss Charlize Theron’s shaven head and painted face as something that does little to hide her beauty I’d rather focus on her incredible acting. I want to focus on how awesome and badass her character was, and how Max was simply there to take her place in case she got murdered in the name of helping save the wives. I would love if we could talk more about how her only having one arm was not her defining feature and how it was not even remotely an impediment for her and what that means for women in the audience who have been told their disability will always limit them. I want there to be more praise for the fact that Theron’s character was simultaneously competent in battle and fierce in her driving whilst being a constant loving character for women, a character who is full of hope even in a Wasteland, and who fought so hard in the face of death that it almost won and took her.

I will even throw in a few lines about how great of an ally Max, and Nux, were. How he barely questioned the women’s leadership, their skills, and their decisions – bar one time where what he said made the most sense and that Furiosa being a leader and doing what was best for her group didn’t mean she gave her power over to Max. This is how male allies can be for women – unquestioning in their support. His character has had his film, he’s told his story, and so this film was another where he was just happy to help and be along for the ride – leaving Furiosa to have the final glory.

With incredible practical stunts – all credit to the brave stunt people in a ridiculously dangerous film – the film is more a dramatic piece of art; its bright colours and in your face characters make for an intense film, especially for action lovers like me. But what it wasn’t was violent where it didn’t need to be violent. The deaths were what you’d expect from people fighting across cars during car chases – and the women who died did so because they were fighting as much and as hard as the men were, and died just as much. More than that though there was no unnecessary displays of violence against women. In one scene a dead/dying woman’s pregnant belly gets cut open with a knife to check if the baby is still alive; now in a lot of films misogynistic directors would milk it for all the gore that it’s worth but instead it is completely off screen – in its place is a shot showing the woman who had cared for her holding her hand as she lay there dying.

On top of that the film centres around wives that were used specifically for breeding – misogynistic patriarchal wasteland that it is – yet none of the rape and impregnation is shown on screen. Again women are used to seeing rape used as an unnecessary plot device, shown in excruciating detail purely for shock value, and yet here, where it is a large part of their stories, we start the story After. We follow them shortly after they’ve escaped because that’s what’s important. The focus is on Furiosa’s bravery in rescuing these girls, and Max getting caught up in it, not on their rape and slavery. Even when there is a fully naked women in the film she is only ever seen from a distance and again a more misogynistic director would have happily aimed to get close up shots of her sexualised body. Here it is matter of fact because she is there as a gauge of how female friendly passers-by are.

Not even from a feminist perspective but simply from a woman’s perspective it was lovely to see strong women, capable women, women protecting other women from violent men, and women doing all they can to help other women, especially in the face of danger. It made a point to explain that any violence from the women was solely down to necessity, survival, and that if and when they reclaimed their world it would be a peaceful one. It was an anti-capitalist film, an arguably anti-violence film, anti-rape, anti-greed, and so much more, joy of a film. Yes, it could have been more feminist. Yes, it could have been less violent. But it was a huge, giant, happy leap towards a better type of action film, and for that I am very, very glad.

DogHouse: The Unoriginality of Bird Flu

Warning: Spoilers.

Doghouse was a flop at the box office, making only £56K and it shows that if you want to make an openly sexist film that even misogynists have standards. As zombie films go it can be a difficult genre to crack – whilst the zombies in this film are certainly unique and vicious the humans have to be ones you want to see saved. Having a cast of laddish blokes who are openly sexist and two dimensional makes this film one where you’re kind of rooting for the zombie women to win, and not just because I’m a ‘man hating feminist’ too.

The film opens showing each male character getting away from their nagging other halves; they are going away to help a friend recover from a divorce and obviously us women never want our boyfriends to spend time with their friends. Dyer’s character alone leaves a one night stand, not remembering the woman’s name, and saying she’d make a good prostitute and leaving on a ‘that’s a compliment!’ note, and that is about as original as his dialogue gets. The friends meet up, disrespect a few women on the way – renaming their female driver Candy – and head to the quiet town of Moodley.

Once there the film uses the usual zombie film cliché of the main characters not noticing that something is very off. However this lack of awareness, we find out, is due to each main male character being an absolute idiot. They often make very obvious mistakes, cause most of their own problems, and generally are stupid throughout. Whether this is to justify their view on women or not it just makes for characters that you are more than happy to see leave us. This then encompasses the entire film because the reasoning behind the zombie women is one that doesn’t really make sense.

The origin of the zombification is that it was a failed experiment by the government to infect women through washing up powder – yes, really – and turn them into mindless beasts to use as an army. The army man who explains the virus to them on the one hand explains that it was luck that the virus only affected women but also that it was a genius plan to use half the population to kill the other half, only they forgot that that also included the men who created them. It is a plan that forgets that turning women into violent creatures designed to kill men would be a bad idea in a patriarchal world; this is because as we find out they do not discriminate between the army men who were guarding them, a local politician, or your local shop owners – basically meaning that the world would very soon stop being a patriarchy and one run by manic zombie women.

It could be argued that actually they do have a way of controlling these wild beasts as later we see them using a device to emit a high frequency sound that only women can hear – ignoring the fact that age is a big factor in hearing high frequency sounds and that deaf people exist this is a really poor plan. If it was their only way of controlling them then it can fail, as it does in the film, or it could be used by the enemies they face to easily subdue them. It wouldn’t be too hard to recreate the noise needed to stop them. It also ignores the fact that in the film it is shown that the noise only works when they evolve into phase two – meaning phase one zombies are uncontrollable but also not as efficient at killing. Whilst I’m all for giving zombie movies a bit of leeway when it comes to their virus origins – it is fiction after all – if you’re going to attempt to explain it you better do it right, especially if you want to justify your misogyny.

Whilst the film breaks some gender stereotypes, such as having a female politician who survives, a female butcher, and a female dentist, it happily reinforces others. There is a zombie who twirls her hair, a zombie hairdresser, and even an obsessive overweight zombie who crushes one of the main characters. Schaffer, who wrote the film, attempted to create self-aware characters by having some mention respecting women, using their actual names, and not objectifying them – though that was mostly left down to the gay character to be their moral compass; though even he failed in a comic moment by pointing out that calling their driver by her actual name after she’d turned was not the ‘right time to stop objectifying women’.

The film also made sure to have another staple of laddish culture, it was only missing racism from what I could tell, which was homophobia. During the character introductions we see the character Graham is gay; his boyfriend is protesting to him going out on a lad’s weekend and his objections are met with the line ‘sorry, no girlfriends allowed’. This camp stereotype character helped the film pretend it was ‘PC’, as Dyer’s character mentioned, whilst giving them an outlet for their homophobic comments. However homophobia to a bloke is entwined with a fear of being more feminine than masculine and this again is shown later in the film. To get past the zombies a few male characters dress up as women and again there are many joking comments about their sexuality, about their identity as men, and the usual panic if any man is seen to be anything less than Manly™.

The zombies in this film are vicious, they evolve claws and they wield weapons and yet in true illogical sexist style they are played down at every turn. In a way reminiscent of Shaun of the Dead – “They’re not all there” – the film treats them like walking brainless idiots; whilst this is usually what zombies are in films it is a line that they shouldn’t have crossed when making all of their zombies female. The women regularly, and easily, get distracted and more than that they often turn on each other; it happens many times but most significantly it is used to save Dyer’s character when he falls into a bedroom filled with three female zombies. As Dyer’s character often repeats “women love me” and whilst that probably isn’t true it is for the female zombies who would rather fight each other for his body than simply go for the prize.

In the town of Moodley, next to a toy shop, is The Burning Witch – a place to buy Occult merchandise from a large breasted women in a black dress who wields an eye patch. This particular zombie, in a move of staggering unoriginality, gets set on fire; though she later returns to kill a main character with her sword before being killed herself. This constant image of a witch and the fact that the zombies have largely communed in the woods lends to the film the idea that women are, and have always been, evil witches.

Whilst ‘witch’ mostly gets used nowadays as a veiled way to call someone a bitch or to refer to a woman who does something someone doesn’t like it has a disgustingly misogynistic history. Nine million women were routinely and legally murdered for being ‘witches’. A witch was anyone who was deemed to fit some arbitrary idea and list of features that people had come up with. It was a pointless and sexist genocide that is now reduced to a cute Halloween costume for children; with very little teaching of what happened in schools, little mention of the true scale and horror in popular culture, and now it’s being used to get a cheap gag in a boring, unfunny film with a dull cast and sexist jokes. It’s more insulting than it is humorous.

I went into Doghouse knowing I would be met with a misogynistic premise and sexist jokes and I wasn’t disappointed. Its shred of self-awareness felt a little too late next to its insistence that people wanted to see ‘proper blokes’ and found lad humour funny. As a lover of zombie films it couldn’t even hold up there as it repeatedly underutilised them for cheap gags. The ending is one which clearly implies a bad fate for their protagonists is one I never cared about due to the fact that their insistence on aggressively driving through a Gillette billboard cost them their only means of escape. Whilst I clearly wasn’t the intended viewer it seemed it didn’t even care much for any audience.

The Anomaly: The Sexism in the Science Fiction.

Let me start off by saying this film is just bad: badly written script, quite a bit of bad acting, and a messy plot that could have been improved in the hands of a better, and maybe more experienced, writer. It’s a film about an ex-soldier, Noel Clarke, suffering from PTSD who wakes up to find that he’s only conscious for 9 minutes and 37 seconds at a time. As the plot unfolds we find out *spoilers – though I’m saving you hassle here* that his treatment for PTSD was a cover to use his body for a dying professor, Brian Cox, to live in as his own body dies – with the help of his ridiculously posh son, Ian Somerhalder. This then develops into a bigger conspiracy about a disgraced company who thinks humanity can’t be trusted to look after itself so instead should be ran by two egomaniacal men controlling the world population’s minds instead. Go figure.

The film is set in the near future which means the London Bridge is still standing but that London’s sky scrapers are now even more towering, more metallic and more, well, futuristic. There are also blimps with adverts on them flying around like Blade Runner or Fringe or… what is this obsession with blimps being some missed out on genius advertising method? We tried, they failed, let it go science fiction. There were amazing advances in genetically modifying and weaponising diseases, there were DNA encoded guns so only certain people could fire them, and there were plenty of the usual holograms and other futuristic givens. But there was also another aspect of the future that makes me glad I won’t be there for it: misogyny.

Whilst some like to pretend we have ‘equality’ amongst men and women we actually still have a long way to go. So when I look to science fiction I look for a different world, one where there are no longer arbitrary ideas about the abilities of men and women or their roles in society. Yet here is a future of amazing technological advances and women are still no more than ‘whores’ or dead wives and mothers. It’s not only disappointing but it adds to the really bad writing that the film generally shows. If you can’t write in a way that does 50% of the population justice then maybe it’s time to admit you’re really just not a good writer.

For instance, some see prostitution and the sex industry as inevitable, as necessary and heck some even see it as empowering for women but I think it is none of those things. I think men are not entitled to sex, they are not entitled to buy consent, and their penises will not fall off if they have to go without having sex with a woman, who wouldn’t be doing it were she not paid. So why is it always still a staple of future worlds? Why is it in adult science fiction and fantasy it is used as a sign of the darker, seedier aspects of the world and not one we’ve eradicated? Surely it’s a sign that the future for most men is one where we still live under a patriarchy, where women are still objects for sale, and honestly that just sounds really dull.

It’s boring to go to a world full of immense possibilities and see those same old tired clichés of two dimensional female characters played out again and again. Two reviews of this film both called Alexis Knapp’s character Dana a ‘tart with a heart’, or a variation of it, and it turns out it is a fictional trope; from films like Pretty Woman to Moulin Rouge it is a character who is a prostitute but yet manages to be kind – the idea that those things are mutually exclusive is already terribly misogynistic.

But seems as I tend to see women are actual human beings I try and give them the credit they deserve, and Dana deserves more than the film, that trope, and the many reviews that don’t even mention her give her. I missed the very beginning of the film but I’m glad because in the trailer is the shot from where we first see her – just after she has slept with the lead, after he paid her, and after he wakes up out and becomes his real self again. In the trailer we see her lying fully naked on her front on her bed, her backside framed for the men in the audience; the person who made the trailer then followed through and used this same shot of her for the frame that displays her name as though she is only there to be a pretty naked body. So already we’re starting from the bar being on the floor.

As the film develops she is abducted by a vicious Russian pimp and is forced to hamper our protagonist, for which she later apologises. In his attempt to rescue her we get a long, drawn out slow motion fight sequence that felt more staged than anything; but, during that scene Dana is left holding a gun up, aimed at her cruel pimp. Ryan, the protagonist, tells her which code to use to fire the gun and she promptly kills her pimp who was attempting to kill Ryan. So from there they are relatively equal, they have both helped save each other’s lives and yet she is told to scurry away, with a bag of money, so she doesn’t get hurt through whatever Ryan is involved with.

The climax of the film is where we get into what could have been a more interesting character than Ryan or in fact any of the other characters, for me at least. After stopping Ryan from committing suicide she helps him get to his potentially last switch back to his real self, after fighting a losing battle against Cox’s character taking over his body. So she locks him up in a crate and waits out the three days until he comes back so the ending of the film can begin. But the film glances over this part; it brushes past it and treats it like simple exposition and filler. As we are coming at the film from Ryan’s perspective, needed to follow his confusion of drifting in and out of consciousness, we lose out on what could have been an interesting side of Dana’s obviously impressive character.

Due to the short time that Ryan is conscious each time Dana has to hide out right next to the abandoned building where the Evil Masterminds in this film are playing out their plan, and keeping a kidnapped child that our leads are randomly trying to save after his father was killed for their grand plan. So already we’ve got immense skill from Dana to get to the building, set up a base, and to do so all in complete secrecy from the people who want Ryan dead. Then she needs to look after Ryan, keeping him physically alive, all the while he’s not himself - while he is taken over by the arrogant villain of this film. We know that at the start of this film he, the professor, had hired her for sex and we later find out that it’s because she happens to resemble the his late wife; as creepy as that is it also creates tension for the three days that she looks after him. Whilst Ryan is in the box she has given him a phone so he can answer the question “What is my son’s name?”, her dead son, so she can know that it is actually Ryan who is conscious. So during those three days she must go over to the body of a man she knows, knowing his mind and consciousness are not there; she has to try to convince a man who was in love with a woman who looks like her to eat and drink so Ryan doesn’t die and has enough energy for the climax. When Ryan unlocks the phone we can see many messages have been sent between the two, I find it hard to believe that after three days their conversations didn’t drift away from his ‘let me out’s and her ‘no’s.

So then Ryan finally wakes up, and out she comes all prepared for battle, even ready with weapons – for a tart with a heart she is very prepared and clearly resourceful. Once in the building we get the usual shrugging off of her character as she is later held hostage by Somerhalder’s tweed wearing character Harkin. She has once again reverted back to simply being a damsel in distress and stands there simply waiting for her death. As she is saved by the film’s lead she is thrown aside, and promptly pretends to be knocked out. Later during the fight between Ryan and Harkin she gets up and saves him by beating Harkin over the head, and that’s… kind of it for the rest of the fight. Her skills in battle, despite having killed a man earlier in the film, are reduced to saving the lead and then taking a back step so he can finish saving the day.

After the battle is won and the world is saved from mass mind control we find Ryan waking up in a weirdly white building, fresh cuts on his neck and then Dana walks into the room. She explains, as that is what she’s there for, that she did surgery on him to remove what was controlling his mind, rescued the boy, and bought them a house to hide out in. So then there’s a joke about her taking control of him in the bedroom and the film ends.

Wait, what?

Dana was a nurse and yet she is apparently skilled enough to do careful surgery on his neck, not cutting any arteries, and keeping him infection free for the time he’s recovering; all whilst doing this and looking after him she looks after a traumatised young boy and buys a house and maintains it and feeds everyone. I know the film has a disrespect for women and them being autonomous human beings but what she has done single handedly was not only very impressive but it is used as nothing more than a throw away reason that Ryan happens to stay alive long enough to have his happy ending. Considering Dana was initially shrugged off its amazing what she does throughout and it is baffling how the writer insists that she is nothing more than a way to help move the plot along.

I could go on about how in the film it’s ridiculous to equate cars and records as deserving of equal nostalgia in any form of near distant future, I could go on about how boring it is to use dead women purely as sources for men’s pain, and I could go on about how insulting it is to control the entire human race to stop wars that are caused by men, and not by women and children who would suffer through this plan but I won’t. This film simply represents a long existing problem that science fiction has of being utterly unimaginative; it is meant to be a genre outside of the present day, outside of a patriarchal structure, and even outside of Earth – so why just copy it? Why just replicate a tired old world that is run by men, mostly white men, one where women are inconsequential props, and where people of colour apparently don’t exist (if Noel Clarke hadn’t directed, produced, and slightly written this then the diversity of the cast is woeful). It shows a complete lack of imagination, it is a sign of a writer who is unable to step out of the culture he lives in and see something more, and most importantly it is the sign of a writer I want nothing to do with.

Avengers Age of Ultron: The Strings on Black Widow.

Massive spoilers, obviously.

Joss Whedon described writing and directing this film as “exhausting” and that is also a perfect word to describe watching this film. It felt a lot more like a film that exists to set up the next hundred Marvel films that are scheduled rather than a stand-alone film or the end of the journey we followed through the Phase 1 films. It is a long film and apparently the DVD will feature a much longer directors cut which baffles me that this is the shortened version of that. As a result it is a bit chaotic, some bits feel lacking, and it seems more like a collage of Avengers characters a child might make in school.

It also suffers from what makes Marvel films Marvel films: Puns. It is full of them and they kill a lot of moments in the film. Everything is a joke, every character tries to be witty, and the worst thing is the villain even makes jokes; yes, a newly built robot has a sense of humour, despite him wanting to murder all humans. It honestly just made me roll my eyes the entire way through and made for annoying not enjoyable viewing. I can just imagine Joss, whose ego is so big he won’t even pay attention to the continuity of a show written by his own brother, sitting alone where he writes patting himself on the back at his incredible wit.

Moreover, there were a lot of plot points and character development that felt really out of place. The whole storyline of Hawkeye, making him a father with a hidden family and attempting to make him the glue behind the entire group, felt extremely awkward; it was trying to answer why out of all the avengers he was even there and it just felt like it really wasn’t a good enough answer. On top of that was the main thing I wanted to address: Shrek and Fi- sorry Hulk and Natasha. According to reports Joss argued that the love interest storyline was put in at Marvel’s request, because we all know we all watch superhero films for their romance. But I still feel like it had a big part in making the film less than stellar. Their relationship was not something set up in any other film; yes she went to get him in the first film but that was because that is her job, not as the film tried to shoe-horn in that it was always going to mean they got together – I cringed when Black Widow asked Fury if he knew all along.

There was as much chemistry between her and Banner as there was between her and all other avengers – which is a fair amount considering her flirty character. Being the only female in the group it seems very bad writing to make her flirt with every character, or to be the slight love interest with each character. It also doesn’t help change anyone’s view of women considering Renner, Hawkeye, has gone to great lengths to defend calling Black Widow a slut. You can try and argue she’s a fictional character but when those fictional characters reflect people’s attitudes on women, when they are one the woman in a group of five men, and when little girls and boys look up to this character then I will kindly tell you to fuck off and pay her more respect.

Each scene that tried to paint them as love interests distracted from high paced scenes or from Black Widow doing the things that make her the kick-ass woman she is. For instance, during a fight scene she pulls Banner out of harm and his face lands in her breasts. All I could think was how this film took two years to write, it presumably went through editors, and through none of that did so-called-self-professed Feminist Joss Whedon decide to give the only female avenger a bit more fricking respect. When the uncharacteristic words “I adore you” came out of Black Widow’s mouth did he stop and think that maybe she wouldn’t say that, especially not so soon. When she was stuck in a frickin’ jail and Bruce, in a sweatshirt, came to rescue the damsel in distress did he stop and think maybe this is really crap writing.

Some might argue that she was pregnant during filming so therefore she needed a way to be in the story less but I’m here to tell you that a quick read of this film’s trivia will tell you why that’s bull. Firstly, because she was pregnant when they started filming they tried to do as much of her scenes as possible. Secondly, they used three separate body doubles for her stunts so she could still be in the fight scenes that a trained assassin should be in. Thirdly, they used CGI to take out her baby bump for other scenes. Fourthly, did the apparently great Joss really not have any better ideas to write out a trained spy/assassin other than she gets captured so she can leads the Avengers to the villain? Could she not have gone on a mission to track down Fury? Could she not have gone to track down others to help? Could she not have gone to find what was left of Shield to help? I could keep going but you get the point.

Before I get onto the best female character in this film, largely written in for her cool powers, I will explain how this film deals with other women. A new character we meet is Helen Cho, an Asian scientist who is there to help Hawkeye and other stuff. She’s presumably a genius considering the technology she is working with but I want to mention her role in two fight scenes. The first one is at a party and as a doctor she is unprepared for fighting and so she gets saved by a male avenger and the next one when she fights back against Ultron she is erm saved by a male avenger. Empowering, no?

Then there’s the return of Maria Hill. Yes she fired her gun a few times but she was mostly there for exposition and once again, military trained and badass, was saved by… Nick Fury. Oh, Joss. We women really do just need men to help us even when we train for years to fight without them. During a party there was a cringe-worthy line about which woman is better: Pepper or Jane; but in the context of the film and it’s lack of respect for women it felt more like men trying to argue which model of car was more superior, and which one was better because they owned it.

Then there is Hawkeye’s wife. Through the film she is understanding, patient, and yes whilst she’s unhappy that her husband leaves her with the potential to die at any moment she is still respectful of his decision. But honestly? Fuck that. She has two children who are quite young and she is pregnant with yet another child; she lives in a remote place, who knows if her family or friends know where she is? She pretty much seems to live in witness protection raising two, soon to be three, children on her own. As much as the film tries to argue otherwise Hawkeye is the glue that keeps the team together, the actions he has done through the films could easily be replaced with someone else and he was even an impediment in the first film after getting his mind controlled by the ever annoying Loki. So instead his poor wife, as we see, gives birth to a little boy – who is weirdly named after a character Hawkeye met two seconds ago – and presumably she is left to raise him pretty much on her own; she has to get up on long nights to feed him, after going to sleep alone, and after struggling to put two loud, energetic children to bed.

So then that takes us onto motherhood and the Avengers universe. Let’s go with Black Widow who as the only female avenger up until Scarlet Witch, Wanda, was the film representation of women in a world of superheroes. So firstly let’s just take a quick look at how the male avengers have and might deal with children. So we’ve seen Hawkeye who put his family under protection but ultimately abandons them. It’s unlikely Tony would have kids as he is still pretty much a child himself. Captain America is still mourning the loss of Peggy enough to meet any potential mother of his children. Thor is busy dealing with his childish brother to have kids. Banner apparently can’t have kids because as we see in The Incredible Hulk, which IS canon, if his heart races too much he Hulks out which it does if he tries to have sex – let’s not get into what damage that would do to a woman shall we. So then we get back to Black Widow and the potential for children.

Sadly it is a potential that was long robbed from her by those who made her into an assassin; they felt that sterilisation was necessary and compulsory because children would be too much of a distraction and it would mean one less complication that might interfere with their murdering. So of course we learn about this in a sensitive talk, where her emotions about it are dealt with, where she is comforted by the person she tells, and in a way that doesn’t upset any infertile women who went out to the cinema to casually watch a film. Does. It. Fuck. In a very rare moment of telling someone about her personal life she explains that she is infertile, in response to Banner saying that he can’t settle down and have kids to abandon like Hawkeye has. She explains how she didn’t choose it and she, again in comparison to Banner saying it, calls herself a monster – then this goes unaddressed. The next thing after that is Banner suggesting they run away together. So she’s spilt her secret, said that it makes killing people easier, and compared herself to the Hulk, the part of him that he hates and his response was nothing.

Women who can’t have children deal with the loss of what having children might have been for them, that loss is a pain I can’t imagine. Then there is the added stigma that they face of being women who never have children, they deal with seeing children and mothers all around them, and any other complicated emotions that they go through. For instance, recently there was an article by a gay man about comments made about gay men having children through IVF and nowhere in the article was even a passing thought to women who fail to conceive through IVF and the pain that causes them. So now on top of all that an apparently Feminist Joss, someone who is very vocal about his support for women and feminism, has now called them a monster. You could try and argue that perhaps she meant that through not having a family she has more time to go and kill people which makes her more of a monster but considering the context & the conversation she says it in it seems unlikely. It was a huge revelation that was shrugged off and dealt with in a way that was, yes, pretty disgraceful.

On the other small, delicate womanly hand Scarlet Witch was amazing. She was complex, powerful and she brought a great female presence to the film. She stood on her own, strong and fierce, right up until the point where Hawkeye talked down to her – the whole film repeatedly called the Twins children one second and then had the Avengers hate and threaten to kill them the next – and told her to suck it up and fight. Yes, it led to an amazing moment where she began to fought for the avengers and honestly she really made an impact on the plot, *cough*morethanhawkeyedid*cough*, but it still didn’t stop a male avenger talking down to her. It also didn’t stop Tony referring to her as a Witch – meant to imply her nickname but was really just an excuse to veil calling her a Bitch. Thanks Joss.

We live in a world where Black Widow probably won’t get her own film; where Disney only put her on 2 out of 60 pieces of Avengers merchandise; where a handful of women exist in a film universe full to the brim of men. Representation is very important to how women see themselves in a world where they really do not see themselves as fully developed character on TV and in films. Not objectifying women is important in a world where we are bombarded with women’s breasts, long legs, and arses everywhere in a constant stream of reducing women to body parts. A feminist should know this, they should be painfully aware of this, and they should use whatever platform they have to work against this. As the outcry over Joss leaving twitter, ugh, showed he has a huge platform as a rich, white guy. So yes it was important for him to get this right and he really didn’t and it wasn’t a mistake, it wasn’t pressure it was being a man who still has misogyny in his bones; it was a man who likes to say he’s a feminist without putting the work in, and it’s a man who is not a woman and doesn’t recognise or experience the hundred and one instances of daily sexism women face. Get better, pay attention, and try again Joss. Unfortunately, women have to count on you.

Miss Congeniality: Learning How to Sing.

Congeniality: “People who have the quality of congeniality have a gift for getting along with others. They are warm [and] friendly…”

Miss Congeniality came out 15 years ago and marks a film we see few of these days: so called chick flicks. It was a film made for women, written by two women (and a man), and starring a woman. It was a feel good film for women and whilst it has it’s sexism like other films it critiques it and criticises it rather than letting it simply be another part of the world it is creating. On the surface it looks like a very superficial film perhaps, especially judging by its poster – Sandra Bullock sporting a pink dress with her leg poking out to show off her gun strapped to her leg because hey she’s an FBI agent as well as pretty. Yet the film stands out because it, like others such as Legally Blonde, takes the trope of dumb pretty women and smashes that stereotype into the dirt where it belongs.
Ever since men created the patriarchal society that we live in they deemed themselves the smart ones, the logical and rational ones; in contrast to that they decided that women were simply to be looked at, that they are over emotional and not rational, and that they are certainly not as smart as men could ever be. In amongst all that they failed to acknowledge that they had created a world where women don’t have the same access to education that men do, that rationality without emotions is impossible (try deciding what food you want to have without emotions, you can’t because feeling good about pizza is why you want to eat pizza), and that looking attractive doesn’t mean you can’t be intelligent. It is one of the many double edged swords men have hurt women with – you can be pretty or smart but fuck you if you want both.
So the writers of Miss Congeniality, I assume, saw that, saw how both men and women view beautiful women, and saw the epitome of pitting pretty women against each other: beauty pageants. Some argue that these pageants are “outdated and anti-feminist”, to quote the film, and that whilst I agree that putting women in competition with each other doesn’t help Feminism and that women largely being judged on their looks reinforces a world where women exist solely for the “male gaze” – but the film actively works against both of those points. The film understands the world it exists in and shows us that beauty pageants are about way more than Pretty Woman Versus Prettier Woman.
Bullock’s character starts off being cynical, she is masculine in her appearance – as is constantly commented on by her male colleagues, noting that they don’t see her as a woman – and she openly insults the women in the pageants for being dumb. When she is tasked with having to join the pageant as a contestant to help save the women from a bomb threat, part of her job as an FBI agent, she is very reluctant. Why would a woman like her, who has a punch bag in her bedroom, want to put on a bikini and parade around for an audience? She argues that she doesn’t even own a comb, so why would she all of a sudden want to care about her appearance?
Michael Caine’s character is tasked with ‘fixing her’, a task he thinks would surely be impossible in two days considering her unladylike walk, her propensity to say ‘yeah’ and not ‘yes’, and someone who is a woman yet drinks beer (gasp). The film is full of ideas about women having to be feminine, and it is full of male colleagues who happily sit by and mock the women and objectify them. But all of these ideas, I feel, are eclipsed by the rest of the film and the self-awareness of the writers; they create developed characters in the women and they show exactly how the women of pageants have turned showing off their ‘poise’ into trying to make a change. “World peace” – a line associated with beauty pageants that make many laugh and roll their eyes. It is seen as an obviously unattainable ideal, a naïve view of the world that we live in, and yet another sign that the pretty women who hope for it live in a bubble of their own beauty.
But I disagree. I fully understand the world we live in and whilst conflict is a nigh on impossible thing to get rid of I think it is a very lazy and defeatist attitude to accept the violence it causes. Male violence is a very real problem this world faces – from wars, to rape, to domestic violence and all in between; it is something that men commit regardless of their race or age. Women just do not commit violence in the same numbers, with the same propensity for sexual violence, and they are more likely to go to jail for fraud than physical abuse. Yes women commit crimes, and yes some of those are violent crimes I’m not denying that but I am saying that it is not unrealistic for women to imagine a world where talking, logic, rationality and discussing their emotions can be used to solve problems rather than murder, destruction, and punching people in the face.
Miss Rhode Island, Cheryl, in the film is portrayed as perhaps naïve, innocent and quiet – she is described as a ‘loner’ and an introvert; yet she is more than that, much more. She plays drums on stage at a club whilst covered in paint, she twirls batons that are on fire, and she has a welcoming heart for our clumsy protagonist. After being tasked with the mission of ‘girl talk’ Bullock’s character shows us that the pageant women are ready to party and let loose but more than that they are there to help each other, despite being in competition with them. In a loud club, covered in neon paint, and alone Bullock, or New Jersey, and Miss Rhode Island are talking and Cheryl tells a secret she has never told anyone before – she was assaulted by her ex-teacher. She shrugs it off as something that happens all the time, as though it’s no big deal and Bullock is quick to help her.
It’s this admission that shows us a lot about women and the world they live in, a world created by men and that benefits men. Her secret is something she is ashamed by, as we can tell by her never having told anyone before, but it is met not with disgust but with a reassurance that it isn’t normal, that it should never have happened to her and that as a woman Bullock is there to help her and teach her to protect herself. This self-defence aspect is revisited later on after Bullock needs a new talent at a moment’s notice; she brings her male colleague on stage and shows the audience a few handy tricks for fighting back against a male attacker who is bigger and stronger than you. This is where we learn to sing. S is for Solar Plexus (elbow to the chest), I is for Instep (stomp on the foot), N is for nose (elbow to the face), and G is for groin (fist to the dick).
With the rates of male violence against women from strangers, their friends, and the men in their family all women should be equipped with basic self-defence. Yet because male violence is the thing we are not allowed to name – try it and you will see that men do not like to acknowledge that they are the ones committing the vast, vast majority of violence – we are not taught how to deal with it. Women must seek it out, they must pay for classes at places they must find, they have to buy their own books on it and buy their own weapons to deal with a threat that they did not ask for. They have to prepare for an almost inevitable attack from men, they have to avoid dark places alone, and they have to change their lives to avoid something that men should be the ones avoiding – they should be choosing not to commit violence against others.
But men under a patriarchy will not stop committing violence because it is beneficial to them. Violence is seen as an answer, it is seen as a solution, one that is seen in films and TV across any genre. Murder of dehumanised women is fodder for unimaginative writers to move along the plot, to cause their male characters pain, or simply for no reason at all. There are many shows that are violent without criticism of it, they are violent without looking at its consequences, and there are many that never name it or its effect on women. The rare shows that do, such as the brilliant Top of the Lake, get labelled by people who miss the point as ‘hating men’ and women are once again left facing a threat from men.
Miss Congeniality is a film that takes the world of beautiful women and adds heart, it highlights the comforting nature of women, and it shows that women in a world of violence against them come together and help each other. It shows a world where men take credit for women’s ideas, where women aren’t listened to, and where they are even sometimes hated by the women who should help them. As the film ends I would hope men aren’t left only feeling turned on by the attractive women in bikinis but that they see women using a world that wants them solely for their beauty using it to make a change, to spread love and co-operation and, yes, trying to achieve world damn peace.