Hollywood, meet my Catwoman
July 31, 2008
I saw it. I liked it. I think it’s about 45 minutes too long…
But, as you would have expected that scenario to play out, my husband, like a little boy in jammies stumbling downstairs on Christmas morning, brought me to one of the first screenings of The Dark Knight in Manhattan.
There were crowds. There were long lines. But the end result was that two satisfied superhero junkies boarded a bus back to New Jersey and had plenty to talk about.
On that bus were a man and a woman talking “Batman.” And yes, almost every cliche was invoked. I said, “Christian Bale is soooooo dreamy!” He said, “Those action sequences were awesome!” I said, “The love triangle was dynamic.” He said, “The three-way chase scene was exciting and funny!”
Not really. But I’ll admit to enjoying the film as one might expect a heterosexual female to: I wanted good looking men in couture to fall all over themselves when vying for the affections of a complicated, heroic female character.
But wait? Christopher Nolan, the director, wouldn’t know a complicated female character if she bit him on the ass. His idea of female depth is upgrading from a sweet and pretty lobotomized actress (Katie Holmes) to a less than beautiful, somewhat quirky and slightly more intelligent one (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Maggie is great, but she needs more to do, more to say before she gets shuffled into the category of “whole characters.”
Come to think of it, Nolan has a history of marginalizing female characters. In Insomnia, he gave us the thoroughly good, lapdog cop Hilary Swank. And, there was also the bland yet mysterious hotel manager Maura Tierney. There was potential for both characters to develop into someone more than a pushover (Swank) or a quixotic shadow (Tierney)…but they didn’t. The same thing goes for the cardboard cutout of Bruce Wayne’s mom we’re given in Batman Begins (I bet you didn’t even notice her).
You start with curiosity, Nolan, and then develop your director’s vision into one that is courageous enough to look women in the face. Like the caped crusader himself, we’re complex…much more so than a miscast Scarlett Johansson’s version of a Cockney vagrant in The Prestige.
Gyllenhaal’s Rachel is definitely more interesting than the previous love interest. But it will take a lot more thought and respect from the filmmakers if The Dark Knight team is to resurrect the franchise for a third installment involving Catwoman: respect for the long and diverse history of this character. She’s been everything from an amnesiac (one who doesn’t know her own identity) to a thief (one who steals herself a new identity). She’s been a vamp, a helpmate and a sensitive lover. Catwoman is an important female figure in this mythology because she’s been able to transcend the role of love interest and become a force of her own in a man’s world.
Historically, Catwoman has represented everything from pent up female aggression to not-so-cleverly disguised anatomical innuendo. Tim Burton managed both extremes with Michelle Pfeiffer in the vulgar 1992 Batman Returns. Pfeiffer’s anti-heroine has an agenda: avenge her own human death at the hands of a sadistic tycoon (Christopher Walken). But she’s also out for a roll in the hay. And the film’s predictable script wouldn’t be complete without the words: Just the pussy I’ve been lookin’ for!
I’ve been thinking about Catwoman for days now. I don’t even like her as she’s existed. But here’s a thought: since the new Batman franchise is rooted in reality (ha!) with a gritty, human drama at its core, why not keep to that standard with the execution of one of the only enduring superhero women? How about if all the cat-themed adornments and leather really stand for something? And Catwoman can have a past that’s as dark and affecting as Batman’s. She can be a villain and a heroine at the same time.
What if Catwoman is a prostitute? Don’t play at being shocked. Her cat ears and rubber tail, her slender physique loosely shrouded by black rubber…all of this spells S.E.X. And sex sells…in Hollywood, in brothels and on the street. Catwoman can then be a real woman, prowling the night looking for prey; first allowing men to prey on her and then subsequently punishing them. Maybe she’s a prostitute from day one…or maybe she’s a woman who was raped or saw a rape in progress and decided to intervene. Whatever her back story, Catwoman has the potential to be both heroine and anti-heroine, good and bad, sexy and chaste. In other words, she can be complicated.
And she can, and should, be sexy. There’s nothing wrong with sexy. Sex is good. I like sex. If they cast Shane from The L Word, they would kill two birds with one stone: Catwoman would appeal sexually to both sexes.
Of course, Nolan probably won’t face any of these suggestions from male studio heads. After all, the next film, like all the others, is designed for and marketed toward men…and The Dark Knight is making everybody rich. Just ask Entertainment Weekly: “The conventional wisdom about superhero movies to be sure, is that they attract teenage male nerds and older male nerds who think they’re still teenage nerds. But a reported 48 percent of The Dark Knight‘s audience was female, and that number probably would have been even higher had so many women not flocked to Mamma Mia!” (“Knight Fever” Aug. 1)
Wait: 48 percent of the audience at The Dark Knight was female? (That’s like the percentage of Democrats who voted for Hillary in the primary, almost half.) According to EW columnist Mark Harris, Hollywood has a history of undervaluing the female reception of movies. This year, Sex and the City was a “surprise” hit for the money men. And so were Waiting to Exhale (1995), The Princess Diaries (2001), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and this past January’s 27 Dresses: all profitable, and all clearly marketed for and received by women. There’s a trend here.
Nobody’s about to fix something that ain’t broke, however. Chris Nolan, should he choose to recreate Catwoman, will probably be allowed to do whatever he wants. And because nobody in Hollywood has picked up on the information that “chic flicks” can be and are lucrative, in addition to the “surprise” female turnout for recent superhero fare, nobody’s about to force the issue.
I’m really part of the problem. I would have gone to see The Dark Knight even if the hubby hadn’t insisted. And whatever they do to Catwoman, I’ll be there to receive her. My money, combined with the cost of admission from the other 47.99 percent of the girls in line to see Batman III, is just as good as any man’s money.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I think Catwoman has potential…and I wouldn’t mind it one bit if she showed us a little more than skin.
All the world is a sandbox
July 24, 2008
I resent post-feminists. Really, they should be called anti-feminists. I don’t like people saying there’s no need for a feminist movement anymore. It’s just not true.
If you insist, you can be critical of the third wave of feminism because it lacks a central goal. The first wave yielded suffrage and the second got us equal opportunities in the workplace and abolished legal sex discrimination…allegedly. But the reason that we have a third wave of feminism is because the second wave didn’t finish it up. And while I am grateful for “equal opportunities” at work and laws that punish sex discrimination, I know there’s still more to do.
The goal of third wave feminism, however ambiguous, is to make the world a place where women can acheive happiness in whatever form it may come. If you object to calling feminism as it exists today a “movement” or even a “wave,” I’ll oblige and call it…er…a “party.”
And at this party, I’m not asked to leave anything at the door. I don’t give up my girlish whims when declaring my feminist ideals. I’m married…to a man. I have men friends. But when I look around and see how some men are treating some women, I know that I am right to be a feminist. (It has perhaps become a dirty word, like liberal…I’m that too.) Ultimately, I just want women – all women – to be happy, bra or no bra.
Case in point: CNN.com just posted an article about sexual assault on American female troops. See?
It starts when we’re young. Little boys often resent the little girls who can run just as fast as, if not a bit faster than, they can. Some boys believe that they’ve inherited the Earth. They have a role to play – a gender role – and that involves them always being stronger, faster and smarter than girls. That means that little girls are supposed to be smaller, softer and more ignorant than boys. And little gay boys…well, the Earthlords don’t quite know what to do about them.
So the arrogant little straight boys set up shop in the sandbox on the playground, around which they build a feeble fortress that signals “keep out” better than it poses a physical barrier. Bucket of sand after bucket of sand are stacked at the box’s approaches, and little girls and little gay boys know that they aren’t welcome.
Well, I would have none of that, I imagine. I can picture me (a tall, chubby bruiser of a girl) sauntering up to the fortress and slamming a fist into the sand wall, sending shards of course dirt everywhere…into their eyes and up their noses. It makes them cry. I shattered that gender barrier in more ways than one.
But wait! I lie. Not about being a big little girl, but about shattering the wall. I desperately wanted to play in the sandbox but they wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t make them let me in, and I didn’t make them cry. I cried. I ran away.
Because I did – because many little girls ran away – the sandbox got bigger and bigger over the years until it contained practically the whole world. And we feminists are starting from scratch as adults, trying to shatter the gender roles, while the next generation of Earthlords is conquering new sandboxes and declaring it a straight boys’ world.
Feminism will always be a necessary tedium, whatever the post-feminists say.
The United States military is one such expanded sandbox that requires the attention of the feminists. It has kept the fortress intact for many years, unwilling to evaluate the quality of life for female soldiers. The article states: “But the large number of women serving today in Iraq and Afghanistan is forcing the military and Department of Veterans Affairs to more aggressively address (sexual assault and harassment).”
This begs the question: why weren’t they addressing it before?
It’s not enough that one woman claims to have been raped or abused by a fellow soldier, it must be many. So now we have: “Of the female veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have walked into a VA facility, 15 percent have screened positive for military sexual trauma.” And: “In January, the VA opened its 16th inpatient ward specializing in treating victims of military sexual trauma.”
Did you know this? I didn’t know this. Our military keeps the sand walls strong and high so nobody can peek.
The article tells the stories of a woman harassed by a U.S. soldier – that would be like “friendly fire” – and one who was raped by Iraqi enemies. All told, the 2006-07 fiscal year saw 131 reported rapes and assaults in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s probably less than the actual number of occurrences. A 2006 military survey found that of those women surveyed who indicated they had experienced “unwanted sexual conduct,” only 20 percent said they reported it.
I guess it really doesn’t matter what the final tally is.
It doesn’t matter because one rape is too many!
We get it. The Earthlords don’t want us in their sandbox, and they sure as shit don’t want us in their military, on their police force, in their law firms or at their construction sites. The problem is that, now that they know how to wield their anatomical differences (i.e. superior physical strength, penis, and raw testosterone) to do maximum damage, they’ve decided to hurt and abuse those women who encroach on their play space. And that’s not to mention what they do to gay men and women, which is in some cases worse: the violence against Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena resulted in their deaths. In the case of Shepard, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney didn’t want Matthew in their bar. And as for Teena, John Lotter and Marvin Nissen didn’t want Brandon (nee Teena) in their (read: men’s) pants.
Is it possible to identify the factors that make little boys point and shoot imaginary guns before they’ve ever seen one on television? My brother, the psychologist, has explained to me that the point and shoot mechanism is a display of aggression common to both sexes in the first years of life. “Give a group of kids one toy, and they’ll either share it or fight over it,” he says. But more often, they fight.
On the playground, kids are prone to organize themselves according to their relative levels of aggression. It’s called “social stratification.” They have a caste system, but instead of basing their peer assessments on money or beauty, they look out for and align themselves with kids wielding the same level of aggression. And psychologists haven’t yet finalized the answer to the question: Is it nurture or nature? This means that they haven’t decided whether kids behave as they’ve observed their parents do, or in a way that their minds and bodies compel them to.
It’s probably a little bit of each. But this makes it almost impossible to solve. Trying to get the Earthlords to let us lowly girls into the sandbox is like trying to get an egg inside a bottle: you have to change the climate. Heat in the bottle reduces the pressure inside it enough to let the egg slide through an opening that was previously too small.
So that means that the weaker caste should throw firecrackers into the sand fortress.
Yeah…more violence! Won’t that solve everything?
No, it won’t. The Earthlords will just build higher and stronger walls of sand.
And that’s why we still need a feminist…party.
Chew on this
July 17, 2008
Teeth is a movie about a teenage girl who, while desperately trying to maintain her “purity,” discovers that she has some special anatomy beyond her chaste cherry. Let’s just say that the title of the movie doesn’t beat around the bush (no pun intended).
I feel justified in calling this film a comedy. My husband laughed uncontrollably during all four of the movie’s “vagina-bites-off-something-phallic” scenes. I too giggled, but I also crossed my legs. I don’t have a penis and I wasn’t reacting squeamishly to the idea of having one severed, but I tensed up nonetheless.
Why? Here’s what I think: not only is the vagina a mystery to men (the vagina dentata myth has infected many cultures over the past two to three thousand years), but the vagina – my vagina – is also a mystery to me. A man’s sexual anatomy is external; and until the clitoris was “discovered” in or around 1559 and even after that, doctors thought that female genitalia was either less productive than the visible male genitalia, or simply inverted male genitalia. And as we well know, human beings tend to fear what they don’t understand.
That’s not to say that I have feared my vagina. But until I discovered my clitoris, I too thought it useless. (And I do know for sure that I don’t have any teeth down there.)
What is perhaps the funniest element of Teeth is that it depicts a scenario wherein a seemingly problematic condition is desirable. In other words, I should want a toothed vagina because it would give me a position of power: the power to castrate. What the heroine discovers about her carnivorous cunt is that she can control it; she can chew at will. And that makes her a kind of superhero. Rapists and even less physically offensive misogynists beware: you don’t want to make it angry!
Now here’s the really funny part: men are actually offended by this movie. It seems that some men find the idea that multiple characters abuse our heroine and put her in the defensive position of having – or just wanting – to use her special gift offensive. They think the movie hates men.
To be fair, Dawn goes through a difficult sexual awakening. She’s date raped. Then, her gynecologist fondles her without rubber gloves. She finds out the sensitive boy is really an asshole with a bet that he could bed her. Finally, she castrates her insensitive stepbrother for ignoring her dying mother’s calls for help while, yes, he was fucking his girlfriend du jour. Oh…and the movie is a cliffhanger: Dawn hitches a ride with a dirty old man who makes sexually suggestive face and tongue movements. She smirks at the camera. Cut to credits.
This is obviously satire, and the entire film is done with a wink and a smile. But some have taken it seriously as if it’s a condemnation of men as a whole. Here are a couple quotes from the film’s forum on the Internet Movie Database:
According to this movie every single guy is either a rapist/molester or is a weakling. Only self-loathing men could possibly like this movie. My beef is with the way ALL men are portrayed in this film. Again, nearly every single one was a rapist. The lone man who wasn’t portrayed as such was so ridiculously weak that he couldn’t even handle his own son.
If a movie was made about a man killing women and he was the hero for doing it, I guarantee you feminists would explode like the next atomic bomb. This movie is garbage.
So let’s talk about the film as if it were serious. I’ll address these concerns. Yes, it seems Dawn knows very few strong, yet decent, men. A teenage couple who are abstaining from sex offers up one example of a nice, well-adjusted male. He doesn’t follow his dick around with a voracious appetite for abusing or demeaning women. And the film does not present him as a weak character.
Yes, Dawn’s stepfather has not disciplined his son effectively. When the father tries to evict the young man at the end of the film, the son commands his Rottweiler to attack. But let’s face it: the son was a nightmare from day one. And the father was a compassionate man struggling with a sick wife. Since when do love and compassion signal weakness of character? According to these writers, men can either be good or bad with strength but not without. Deemed weakness doesn’t compute. It is unacceptable.
Some men are weak, as are some women…it’s a relative assessment in each case. The same goes for cruel and inhumane behavior: it’s performed by both sexes.
As to the assertion that cinema has never glorified male killers of women, I give you The Manchurian Candidate, Misery and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (a partial kill). Each film contains a loathsome female whose downfall comes from a man’s hand, a downfall which is anxiously and resoundingly applauded by men and women alike. We justify the violence against women because the victims have hurt or killed people.
Come to think of it, women have been routinely victimized in horror movies for our relaxation and enjoyment. Many feminist thinkers believe that the slasher genre of motion pictures is a direct rebuttal to the feminist movement. Many of the ways women die in these movies are sexual (a phallic weapon through the mouth or abdomen, a simultaneous rape and act of cannibalism, etc.). And many of the villains represent sexual or reproductive power (the mother in Psycho, the queen/mother alien from the Alien franchise, and of course the cast-off concubine in Fatal Attraction).
None of these examples do I take seriously. It doesn’t make me think that all women are as cruel and sterile as Nurse Ratched just because there’s no overpowering alternative in the film. And Teeth doesn’t make me think that all men are male chauvinists or rapists. I think that these horror motifs reflect not what exists in actuality, but what we fear. Amusement helps us divert our fears. If my husband hadn’t been laughing with Teeth, as I believe the filmmakers wanted him to, he would surely have screamed or cried. And rather than think about what the filmmakers might have been saying about mean mommies in Psycho, I get a good chuckle when I picture Anthony Perkins wearing that ridiculous wig. And that shower scene…guffaw, guffaw, guffaw!
Men who fear movies about having their balls cut off by a toothed vagina, really need to grow a pair first.
(Almost) insurmountable odds
July 10, 2008
I have many a feminist topic to rant about. But today, I feel a bit under the weather…and that tends to put me in a sentimental mindset. During my usual a.m. news perusal, I came across the following video:
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-44263
The leatherback turtle is an endangered species, according to the United States government, which recently woke up to the possibility that we’ve destroyed the habitats of polar bears. Leatherbacks can grow to weigh as much as 2000 pounds. They are threatened by extinction owing to several human behaviors. They often become entangled in fishermen’s nets and drown. They have been known to mistake plastic bags and other discarded human waste floating in the sea for jellyfish and ingest the waste, causing bowel obstruction or choking. And their eggs, which they lay on the sandy beaches of Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, are often harvested for food by predatory egg poachers, human and animal alike.
There’s a certain amount of trust that is being betrayed it seems. Mother turtles lay their eggs in the sand and return to the sea. It’s an instinctive tradition. Once the eggs hatch, the hatchlings crawl toward the ocean – some inexplicable force calls them home. Both mother and child trust the world, trust the animals of the Earth and trust themselves to make the journey safely.
As I watched the video of the wee turtles flopping helplessly toward the water and then being swept away, I wept. Their behavior was so natural, so innocent, that I couldn’t help but want for their safety. I feel sorry that the leatherback turtle leaves so much to chance when human choice would have it that these docile creatures go with the flow and yet often find their flow obstructed. We may have the power to choose how we live, but it seems to me that the turtle does not make choices. The turtle simply behaves as its instinct dictates.
So while we may choose to eat the turtle eggs as a delicacy, the little ones struggle to travel what must seem an enormous distance despite what might have been an easier choice to nestle in the warm sand.
Somehow Pixar understands this. Its new film WALL-E is the toast of the critical world. And I loved it too but not because the animation is pristine – which it is – or because the expectation that humanity will destroy itself is so transparently available to viewers – which it is; but because WALL-E is just like the turtles in a way. He has religiously compacted our waste for 700 years, without stopping to consider his own fears, his own loneliness or his own mortality. It’s not the close shot of his inquisitive eyes that draws me in; rather it is a wider look at the little robot wheeling to and fro, doing as he was intended without fail…no matter what…
The robot does develop what we perceive are feelings. Pixar has made rather a blank canvas of the character onto which we project our own emotions. But there’s still the actuality of his preceding 700 years of repetitive behavior.
We think that our ability to choose makes us better than creatures of instinct. But what we fail to consider is that we have the choices we do because others do not. We can choose to eat turtle eggs now, and until we have eaten the last of them, because the leatherback instinctively crawls from eggshell to ocean and back again. We can choose to eat cow and pig meat and treat livestock cruelly on the way to the slaughter because the livestock cannot choose to fight us back.
But someday, all the eggs and polar bears and cows and pigs and fresh air and hope for a brighter day may be gone. And all because we abused our power to choose and looked upon harmless instinct with contempt. We can be so cruel.
Perhaps we should take a lesson from the giant sea turtle at large and the giant sea turtle Crush from Pixar’s other masterpiece Finding Nemo. How does Crush know when the little baby sea turtles are ready to swim on their own? “Well, you never really know, but when they know, you know, y’know?” he said.
And without making a conscious choice, the wee ones swam safely along.
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