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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 even if it were done well, but rather that I don't believe it could be done well. It wouldn't click emotionally or aesthetically. I'll also say that this is a mostly untested hypothesis on my part, as I've seen very few 21st century movies and little 21st century TV. So I don't know how the roles are frequently gendered these days or what's done well or not.

Won't say more about Hunger Games in the main post so as not to spoilerate it on the small chance that someone is reading who hasn't seen it. But anyone who wants can have at it in the comments. Sixty years ago such roles likely would have been the opposite in gender and often enough would have worked very well.**

Not that the two movies are all that similar to The Hunger Games — and they're far better in a whole number of ways — but in both Red River (1948) and The Searchers (1956) there's a woman who appears early and whose subsequent absence is felt extremely. Whereas now I don't think you could cast the main character as a guy, or that the gender of the absent person would be definitive. Well, you could cast the main character as a guy, but I'm hypothesizing that it wouldn't work.*** Ditto East Of Eden (1955). You'd likely have to gender reverse James Dean and Julie Harris. I don't think you could have a guy equivalent to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, though again you may well get one in life. And for all I know you're getting them in movies and on TV and I'm not seeing it; but my hypothesis is that when you get them they don't work all that well.

I realize that this post will be quite confusing for someone who can't correctly guess my reasons for not thinking the Hunger Games roles are gender-reversible.

Fwiw, I don't think it works to gender reverse Miranda Lambert's "Kerosene" or "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" or "Gunpowder And Lead," but I'll add that in fact Tyler Farr's "Redneck Crazy" (2013) is a gender-reversed "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," and it went country top ten. But it doesn't work for me. And again, "doesn't work for me" doesn't mean "it couldn't conceivably work for me given my own attitudes," since all sorts of shit works for me (Rocko's "U.O.E.N.O." is on my end-of-year long list). Just that it has nothing like the depth and excitement of the Lambert tracks.

[EDIT: And Red River, The Searchers, and East Of Eden still work for me fine, better than the Hunger Games, and I don't think that's merely because I'm able to put them in the context of their times.]

Unrelated to this: is anyone else not getting email notifications from livejournal? I'm still getting notified via livejournal messages, so I don't think I'm missing anything. But lj comments aren't even showing up in my EarthLink spam filter, which I've instructed to hold messages and not to automatically delete anything.

*First installment. Haven't read the book. Btw, I have all sorts of issues with how the thing was plotted in regards to who gets to kill whom and how we're supposed to take it. It panders. But it works pretty well, 'cause the two main characters work.

**"Opposite" deserves scare quotes but I decided that sticking 'em in would be too much of a speed-bump. I can't problematize everything that's problematic.

***Unless maybe they were gay?

Date: 2013-12-25 06:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] petronia.livejournal.com
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.

Interestingly, while there are still lots and lots of "women in refrigerator" stories where a wife/girlfriend/daughter/mother is imperilled or killed in order to provide impetus and emotional turmoil to the main male character, I can't think of many recent stories in which the girl sensitizes the guy and makes him stronger. These days they either start off emotionally open (even James Bond is), or there's nothing in the premise that suggests it would help them to be more so.

Date: 2013-12-27 09:47 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] petronia.livejournal.com
Well, the issue is one of proportionality, in several respects. Firstly, the actor playing best male friend or old white mentor who gets killed will have his day as the hero in another movie, or will have had back in the 80s or what have you. Not so the actress playing the girlfriend; she's mostly never getting the lead in the equivalent sort of storyline. Secondly -- the media studies folks have done the count -- speaking roles for female characters in a Hollywood movie hover between 17% and 28% of the whole. That's a hoary trope anyway: the gang of five, with roles, and one of the five roles is Girl. So say the hero is male by default, he has three buddies, one girlfriend. The girlfriend and one buddy dies, so three men and no women (out of the characters who "matter") survive the movie. If it's extra egregious, the one buddy that dies is brown-skinned, or fat or something.

It's a feminist issue because men watch a lot of movies in which three guys out of a group of five survive the movie, and women watch a lot of movies in which zero women out of a group of five survive the movie, and it's never the other way around. I don't believe this is one that *can* work the other way around, for that matter, because there's an underlying assumption that the *worst* thing you can do to a man is to undermine his ability to keep the women (and other lessers -- friends, children, society) in his life safe. And oddly enough, no one deeply believes that's the *worst* thing you can do to a woman.

My own view of this is that it was pointed out to me some time ago, and I've confirmed the bias for myself via observation, and now find this plot mind-numbingly boring, as most cliches are once you realize they're cliches. Maybe one time out of five, the female character(s) or the relationships are developed organically enough that it doesn't feel like cliche. The rest of the time it just doesn't work for me anymore, the way that the humanizing of the "strong guy" that we're talking about wouldn't.

Date: 2013-12-27 09:54 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] petronia.livejournal.com
This is mostly movies, by the way. Comics are actually better, at least the indies and Marvels I'm reading. TV is supposedly demonstrably better, though I don't watch TV mostly. (Agents of SHIELD did have a "friends/society/mentor/girl humanizes hotshot strong lone wolf guy" as a subplot, and it was played as comedy, with the guy as a competent but somewhat self-deluded asshole.) Books have never been as pat as Hollywood, even genre lit.

Date: 2013-12-27 09:56 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] petronia.livejournal.com
Cannot edit but should add for clarity that in the above scenario, presumably the Hollywood filmmaker sees nothing problematic about how the movie is plotted, because he's killed one man and one woman out of the core group -- perfect gender equality.

Date: 2013-12-29 08:09 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] petronia.livejournal.com
Identification: I don't think that's necessarily true. I suspect a lot of women never even learnt that identification with the protagonist was at all required in order to "get into" the story. I rarely identify with the main character myself.

Why would Hollywood etc.: the prevailing theory is the opposite -- women go to movies regardless of whether the protagonist is female; perhaps because they do not feel like identification with the protagonist is a requirement for good storytelling. Hollywood is afraid that men/boys will not see movies with female protagonists, due to inability to identify. This seems to me like a severe underestimation of the men/boy audience, but I also think all this is slowly changing as it comes to light.

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Frank Kogan

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