Gender reverse?
Dec. 25th, 2013 01:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2013-12-25 08:43 am (UTC)SPOILERS
Date: 2013-12-25 08:58 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-25 06:07 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-26 05:28 am (UTC)So good people do have to die to make the hero more interesting — that's built into the western and into action/adventure — but I don't think this imperative is as inherently sexist as your way of stating it seems to imply (or as I infer from it, anyway). Or, more accurately, the sexism (and racism) are that in the twentieth century the lead role in an action/adventure was almost always given to a white male, whereas the endangered citizenry and the retinue of hero's helpers could include women, Mexicans, Indians, eccentrics, and, as the century went on, blacks. And the citizenry and retinue provide the pool from which the screenwriters select their victims. But it isn't that the screenwriters are going, "Hey, let's find a likable black woman," say, "and kill her to make the white male protagonist more interesting," but rather: "Here's the main character. Here's whom we surround him with. And we need to kill some of them." It's not that your point is wrong (wives, girlfriends, daughters, mothers do get killed and imperiled), it's that it's part of something broader: for the sake of emotional and aesthetic richness, a lot of guys get popped too.
[I've only addressed the first part of your sentence, and I'm not even done with that. I haven't yet brought in social class, for instance — well, I did, but that was via the weird, cryptic word "eccentrics."]
no subject
Date: 2013-12-26 06:27 am (UTC)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 plenty of good reasons why the western is basically kaput as a genre; but it is my bias here. One thing it sometimes did especially well was to set up a dual relation between the hero and what I was vaguely referring to in my previous comment as "community" and "civilization."
(1) The hero may be a natural aristocrat, but that's in a world that's wild and dangerous, not in a settled society. He's a gunman, or something like it. He has to hurt people. And the people whom he's doing this hurting on behalf of don't necessarily appreciate him. And when he's done what they need him for, they'll often as not want to throw him away.
(2) Except it's the community, the imperiled civilization (or the civilization to be), that provides the people who humanize our hero. Even if it's a band of misfits keeping him humanized, what's connecting him and them is a basic social impulse.
*The terminology is important here: the Walter Brennan character calls himself a "cripple" in Rio Bravo.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-26 06:51 am (UTC)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 decline to his persona or to the gender role going obsolete, but just to the principle "Punks don't grow; they stop." And to his personal problems.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-27 03:46 pm (UTC)That said, and bearing in mind that I don't know much about comics, in regard to which the term originated, I think that feminism and the liberal/left in general hurt themselves very badly when they, e.g., fail to notice that a lot of white male supporting characters end up in the freezer, too. It's not as if it takes great acumen to notice the male bodies, or that there's nothing left for feminism and the left to talk about when we do. But in the meantime we've managed to make potentially supportive people in the mainstream think, "Oh, there they go again, dumbing us down in order to make us vulnerable to their feminist critique."
I realize that you made only a bare mention of "'women in refrigerator' stories," and I don't know your own views on this or related subjects. How The Left Shoots Itself In The Foot has been on my mind recently, and of course Hero Stories are neverendingly fascinating. Hence this long response.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-27 09:47 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-27 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-27 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 02:40 pm (UTC)--Glad that the media studies discussion does take account of the whole retinue. (The statistics of speaking roles is astonishing, since that's for everything, not just action/adventure.) Obv I'm not up on the media studies convo either.
--Do girls and women go to the movies far less than boys and men? (I'm assuming blockbuster audience is mostly teens. Not sure about the rest.)
--I presume Hollywood scriptwriters are not altogether obtuse, so the guy (presumably) writing the script notices the gender inequality in the overall gang, and if he finds this problematic the "balance" of whom he kills isn't going to erase his knowledge of the problem. I'm not watching many of the movies myself over the last couple of decades, so can't really chime in. But I believe some love-interest females made it out of some Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren, and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies alive. I actually did see a whole mess of those in the '90s but am really bad at remembering who lived through what.
--I'm assuming (incorrectly?) that the number of female leads in action/adventure is slowly increasing, and that this will change some but not all of the tropes.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 02:57 pm (UTC)Continuing to be cryptic, I'll say that Dylan and Jagger in the '60s were interestingly problematic and I don't think such problems are obsolete but that those two hit a wall in their interestingness and so did many of their interesting successors (punks don't grow, they stop). I don't think a current male singer can be interesting in such a way (though I keep holding out hope for The-Dream). But I don't know of female singers waltzing into that problematic role en masse. Courtney Love and who else?
no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 11:46 pm (UTC)So I assume that a female viewer of a typical action/adventure will identify with the same characters the male viewers do, but that if a lot of girls and women were watching these movies then a lot more women actresses would be in action roles, and women would grow up to produce and direct more of these movies than they do. That's why I asked that wondering question about whether girls and women go to movies far less than boys and men do. (Why would Hollywood risk losing so many viewers?) But I'm not assuming that female viewers are inherently averse to female characters getting killed. Or that males in the audience would never be interested in female characters living to do something interesting. And that a character like Rue gets killed isn't owing to novelists and screenwriters having it in for people of Rue's race and gender. It's that historically people of Rue's race and gender haven't generally gotten to be action protagonists.
*Not that point of view is simple or set: we're mainly seeing through Katniss' eye, but when Peeta makes his declaration in the interview we (or I, anyway, and I assume most other viewers) knew it was coming and knew it was sincere, even though Katniss knows neither. Believe it or not (stream of consciousness) this reminds me that Darcy's declaration in Pride And Prejudice is no surprise either, even though our point-of-view character, Elizabeth Bennet, is completely taken aback. Part of our knowledge comes from our understanding what Darcy is likely thinking at Bingley's while Miss Bingley is flirting with Darcy and Elizabeth is being herself, matter of factly. The rest of our knowledge comes from knowing what type of book we're reading.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-29 08:09 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-31 02:29 pm (UTC)