feminist blogs

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Thursday, Aug. 26, was Women's Equality Day, marking the day the 19th Amendment was certified, officially giving (some) women the right to vote. As with last week's roundup of 19th Amendment stories, there were a number of stories this week related to Women's Equality Day (and if you have written something, leave a link in the comments!):

• Associated Press: "Gender gap in U.S. politics remains despite gains." Here's something to consider, from the article: " Worldwide, women hold 19 percent of the seats in national legislatures, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Its rankings of 186 nations – based on percentage of women in the single or lower chamber of the legislature – has the U.S. tied for 90th with Turkmenistan."
• Womanist Musings: "Not All Women Won The Right to Vote Today."
• Presidential Proclamation: "Women's Equality Day, 2010"
• Truthout: "Aniston-O'Reilly Tiff Mirrors Gender Disparities on Women's Equality Day."
• Hello Ladies: "Six Ways to Honor Women’s Equality Day." This is a great list, and I'd like to say thanks to the author for including me!
• Miami Herald: "90 years after women's suffrage, equality issues unresolved."
• TBD: "Suffragettes return, rally for D.C. voting rights." It boggles my mind.
• Daily Camera: "Unused freedom to vote."

In other news:

• ESPN: "Hall of Fame honors Chelsea Baker." I love this story. The Hall in question is the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and Chelsea is a 13-year-old Little League player who has pitched two perfect games -- against boys.
• New York Times: "How Power Has Transformed Women’s Tennis." Also check out Antonia Zerbisias' article, "Grand Slam," on Broadsides.
• USA Today: "Wal-Mart wants women's pay class-action suit thrown out." No way!
• Bitch: "Mad World: The Huffington Post's Sexist Linkbait Strategy." Love this, because it's so, so true.
• Ms. blog: "Newsflash: Colorado Prisons’ 'Labia Lift' Policy." If you're thinking "what??" you are not alone. I had no idea either.
• The Frisky: "In Defense Of 'Angry' Feminists."
• Daily Kos: "Want a raise? Wash your vagina."
• Fair and Feminist: Check out the posts for the "This is What a Young Feminist Looks Like" blog carnival.
• The Angry Black Woman: "The Dark Side of Being Pretty."
• The Guardian: "Disabled people do have sex lives. Get over it."
• Ms. blog: "Who’s Afraid of the Single Black Woman?"
• Huffington Post: "Is (Black) Beauty Still a Feminist Issue?"
• CNN: "Muslim women who wear the hijab and niqab explain their choice"
• Racialicious: "Another day, another apology – this time to Inuit for high arctic relocation."
• Afghan Women's Writing Project: "A Bold Step For Afghan Women Journalists." Three journalists are creating Afghanistan’s first Women’s Journalism Center. Love that!
• MSNBC: "Some 200 women gang-raped near Congo UN base."
• RH Reality Check: "Haitian Women Fight Sexual Violence."
• Medill Reports: "HIV/AIDS prevention gel gets standing ovation."

LGBTQ:

• The New Republic: "Disgrace: Obama’s increasingly absurd gay marriage position."
• New York Times: "At West Point, Hidden Gay Cadets Put in Spotlight"
• The Atlantic: "Bush Campaign Chief and Former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman: I'm Gay." This article at first infuriated me, but ultimately it's just sad.
• Philadelphia Inquirer: "Transgender rules on driver's licenses changed."
• Memphis news station: "Former Memphis Officer Pleads Guilty in Transgender Beating Case."
• Bay Windows: "Transgender woman pleased with hospital’s response."
• The Atlantic: "Transgender Candidate Receives 22% in GOP House Primary." While I don't hold the same political views (at all) as Donna Milo, this is still important.
• The Advocate: "Bogotá Warms to Gay Marriage."

Pop culture:

• Ms. blog: "True Blood Cast Gets Sexy And Bloody–Remind You of Anything?"
• Vanity Fair: "Vampire Weekend’s Mutinous Muse: Ann Kirsten Kennis says her face appeared on the cover of a No. 1 album without her knowledge or consent. Does she deserve compensation?"
• Pop Candy: "Raggedy Ann prepares to turn 95 years young." Included because as a child, I loved Raggedy Ann and Andy. And I so want the commemorative dolls!
• Spinoff: "Marvel Reacts To 'Runaways' Race Bending Accusations."
• Entertainment Weekly: "Original Blue Power Ranger reveals that he was harassed on set for being gay."
• USA Today: "Heart gets thumping again with new album, tranquil attitude." Consider this: Ann Wilson is 60 years old, and Nancy is 56. Bad ass.
• Jezebel: "In Defense Of Lady-Terrorizing Horror Movies." I love horror movies, even though they're so often problematic.
• Huffington Post: "Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner Speak Out On Franzen Feud."

Last month, I predicted for Jeff Yang’s summer blockbuster round-up that The Expendables (co-starring Jet Li) would be the best movie of the summer. Although I planned to see the movie on opening night, I only managed to make it to the theatres last Monday night — which was all the better since the movie’s first two weekends were jam-packed.

And yes, it was well worth the wait. The Expendables was fuckin’ awesome.

The incredible thing about The Expendables was how it knew exactly who its audience was — 25-34 year old males — and adapted itself accordingly. The Expendables is best described as a campy eighties action flick with post-millennial special effects.

Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) is an aging special forces-type guy who heads a gang of mercenaries, along with his lieutenants Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and Ying Yang (Jet Li — yes, his name is a play on yin and yang). Sure, they’re mercenaries, but they’re “mercenaries with morals” — they apparently only get hired to save innocents from bad guys with big guns. The movie establishes this point clearly within the first few minutes of the movie: the mercs are hired to save some hostages from some pirates. Shortly after Stallone and Statham ruthlessly execute five pirates (using handguns and knives respectively — it’s a running gag), they are aghast when Gunner (Dolph Lundgren) wants to hang one of the pirates from a noose.

“We don’t do that,” says Stallone’s character, moments before Jet Li attempts to stop Lundgren with his fists. After the dust settles, Gunner is fired from the crew for being too cold-hearted. And, so we know that the Expendables are “good mercenaries”.

What follows is some completely meaningless events to get the team of Expendables to the final, climatic fight scene. We can’t really even call it a plot — it’s more of an excuse to move the characters to the fight scene. It had something to do with Angel from Dexter leading a massive army of faceless soldiers (aka cannon fodder for the Expendables) to take over a small South American island, and working with Eric Roberts to rule it with an iron fist and a ton of cocaine. Angel’s daughter is Stallone’s love interest, and she needs a-rescuing. But who cares, right? Within fifteen minutes, we know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and all we care about is how the good guys will destroy the bad guys.

Much like the “A” Team, the Expendables each have a silly name, a field of expertise, and a personality quirk. Stallone is the strategist (yes, that is probably ironic) and the gunner, Statham is the knife expert with a superfluous white knight subplot, and Li is the stealthy martial artist who inexplicably wants more money. Hale Caeser (Terry Crews) is the heavy weapons expert (AA-12 baby!) who names his weapons after women, and Toll Road (Randy Couture) is the MMA specialist who preaches the virtues of psychiatric  therapy. Mickey Rourke plays Tool, Stallone’s mentor and retired war buddy.

On the villain side, we have Angel and his army of red shirts. Eric Roberts is his business partner, an ex-CIA agent turned drug kingpin; Gary Daniels (kick-boxing champ) plays The Brit and Stone Cold Steve Austin plays Paine, Roberts’ bodyguards.

Just like ’80’s action flicks, The Expendables doesn’t concern itself with race consciousness or stereotypes. Yes, the black guy is a fast-talkin’ brutish dude with biceps bigger than my thighs. Yes, the Asian guy is money-grubbing. Yes, the plot involves White guys saving brown people from other White guys. Yes, the only Expendables who even remotely get a nod at character development are the White guys in the lead. Yes, none of the women have agency, and are little more than props to help the boys demonstrate the size of their cojones. And the movie can be justifiably criticized for these points — this was, after all, a problem with all 80’s action flicks.

In fact, I was disappointed in the treatment of both the female characters in this movie. Charisma Carpenter’s entire point in the movie was to suffer domestic violence and be rescued. Giselle Itie spends most of the movie captured and being tortured, or otherwise powerlessly angry. And there’s really no excuse for this — even 80’s action flicks had powerful heroines. Why couldn’t there have been a sexy but bad-ass female Expendable?

But, when it comes to the race stuff, there’s something a little charming and tongue-in-cheek about how it’s done. The stereotypes are there, without a doubt. But, Terry Crews’ Hale Caeser steals every scene he’s in, and I guarantee that he will be considered the most bad-ass of the characters by anyone who watches the movie. Racebending’s review suggests that Crews doesn’t get his own characterization, but I would argue that none of the Expendables excluding Statham and Stallone, get any real chance to develop a personality. Crews is forgettable for the first hour, but so is Couture — and, unlike Couture, Crews is unmissable in the last thirty minutes.

Racebending notes that Jet Li’s Yang never wins his own battles (even though the other Expendables get their own fight scenes) — however, I think this was a running joke of the movie. Yang complains several times that the other Expendables keep stepping in to ”rescue” him — when he was perfectly capable of taking care of the fight himself. The other Expendables think of Li as weaker, but Yang repeatedly disputes this point and even gets angry at Stallone for saving him in his first fight scene.

Further — and hopefully I don’t get flamed for this — the one scene where Li makes short jokes about himself was hilarious. Offensive, but hilarious. Jet Li is smaller than the other Expendables (and we see Crews make a quip about that in the trailer), but Li’s character actually runs with it. He argues to the effect that because he is shorter, he has to work harder than the other Expendables, and therefore should be paid more money. To me, this was using a stereotype, but also reappropriating it to the benefit of Li’s character — we end up appreciating Li’s good-natured humour about his stature. Further, I also liked how Li’s money-grubbing was contrasted with his character’s integrity — Yang is the one who goes toe-to-toe with Gunner at the beginning to save the pirate, and he’s the first mercenary to join Stallone on the suicide mission to the final fight scene.

And how about that final fight scene? I’m not going to give away its awesomeness, but let’s put it this way: if you grew up on vintage 80’s action movies (and you miss them now), and liked the recent Rambo sequel, than you will love this movie’s action scenes.

In summary, The Expendables was total schlock — and that’s what made it so damn awesome. Fuck, yeah!

How long until the sequel?

by Amanda Marcotte

It’s August.  People are grumpy.  It’s time for extremely silly blogging based on this kick-ass article from Cracked about why a zombie apocalypse would fail. I’m a big fan of zombie apocalypse as a story, and I doubt many of these objections would reduce my enjoyment of these stories, since the answer for a lot of them is, “Magic, bitches.” (Such as why zombies can fend off maggots, injury, heat, and the cold, and why zombie viruses would spread through bites.) But I have to admit, I laughed out loud for #2 and #1.  Number 2 is basically, “It’s not nearly as fucking hard to find zombie-proof spaces as the movies would have you believe.” And number 1 touches on a reality that zombie stories basically all have to ignore.

As we touched on briefly above, if Homo sapiens are good at one thing, it’s killing other things. We’re so good at it that we’ve made entire other species cease to exist without even trying. Add to the mix the sheer number of armed rednecks and hunters out there, and the zombies don’t even stand a chance. There were over 14 million people hunting with a license in the U.S. in 2004. At a minimum, that’s like an armed force the size of the great Los Angeles area.

Remember, the whole reason hunting licenses exist is to limit the number of animals you’re allowed to kill, because if you just declared free reign for everybody with a gun, everything in the forest would be dead by sundown. Even the trees would be mounted proudly above the late-arriving hunter’s mantles. It’s safe to assume that when the game changes from “three deer” to “all the rotting dead people trying to eat us,” there will be no shortage of volunteers.

The number one cliche of zombie stories that makes me bananas is the, “Oh noez we’re running out of supplies!” gambit.  I’ve been reading The Walking Dead series, which is a very scary, very addictive horror comic.  They get a lot of things right about what would happen if most of the country was wiped out by a zombie attack.  For instance, I notice that many zombie flicks assume that we’d still have electricity for weeks and possibly months, when in fact there are actual people who keep power plants running, and so electricity would be the first thing to go.  And right on the heels of electricity would be running water, since most water systems rely on the electrical grid.  Robert Kirkman includes all these kinds of things, and he thinks of cool shit like holing up in gated communities or better yet, prisons. 

But then he pulls out the card that makes me go nuts, the “oh noez, we don’t have food or guns!” card.  This is bullshit.

Why?  Because the one thing you can be assured there would be plenty of if the vast majority of Americans ceased to exist would be a steady supply of canned beans and Doritos.  The second thing there would be more than enough of would be ammo.  This is because you and your small band of survivors would not be competing with a whole lot of people for these precious commodities.  But in Walking Dead, they always seem to run across empty cupboards, and even though most of it takes place in the South, no one seems to think about stopping at a sporting goods store to wipe them out of literally more guns and ammo than you could ever use. 

But they do seem to always get enough gas at the pump, a strange oversight because gas pumps also don’t work without electricity.

I will say that in this sense, I really enjoyed the movie “Zombieland”, because even though they incorrectly portrayed a working electrical grid, they were well enough aware that reducing the population by 90% would mean that you would literally never run out of Twinkies or guns.  Or cars.  (Though, of course, they, like basically every other zombie story out there, seem to have no problem pulling gas out of pumps even though the entire infrastructure that makes that possible would collapse.)

While this is all very silly, I do think there is an interesting political observation to pull out of all this.  Zombie stories are a product of a society where most people literally do not think about, much less comprehend, how complex and interconnected everything is.  Or huge.  We have dark fantasies about what it would be like if that infrastructure collapsed, but it is so big and so complicated that even people writing stories where they have to imagine what that would be like struggle to really capture all the details.  We don’t think about stuff like, “If there weren’t people at the power plant, I couldn’t actually flush my toilet or pump gas.” But nor do we consider how much food a grocery store really sells in a day compared to what any individual family’s needs are.  Trying to wrap your mind around all these different cogs and details about even just the way life runs in a mid-sized city is more than most people can really manage.

by Amanda Marcotte

Spoilers.

Scott Pilgrim!  Yes, I saw it.  I’ve already engaged in some media about it, by being a guest on Overthinking It, where I contributed by being the person who’d had the opportunity to read all the way through book 6 of the series.  But I thought I’d go ahead and post on it, because I want to expand on my sadly cliched opinion that the books were ultimately more satisfying.  I really, really liked the movie.  It was entertaining as fuck, and perfectly pitched to people like me.  As we discuss on the podcast, the movie is supposed to take place in present times---the technology and a couple of cultural touchstones indicate that---but the fashion, attitudes, and majority of cultural references had a 90s era feel to them.  Scott even wears a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt.  In this, they’re basically like the books, and that makes sense, because the writer Bryan Lee O’Malley is playing with the idea of past and memory, so it feels right to invoke the era when people our age (he’s two years younger than me) were actually the ages of the people in the book. Between that, the video game stuff, and the loving rendering of the indie rock scene, this movie was bound to be exactly as fun as it is for someone my age.  I don’t know if it has much appeal beyond that, which is why I think the box office wasn’t as great as it should have been.  Too bad, because it really is a funny movie.

But I really hope people read the books, because there’s a depth to them that simply wasn’t in the movie.  I ran into Sarah Jaffe last night, and she put her finger on exactly why, noting that they basically had to save time in the movie by writing out Ramona’s character. I mean, she’s still there and she’s still cool, but the entire story line in the book where Ramona has to struggle with her past and get over it isn’t really in the movie.  The many layers of Ramona are just lifted out of the story.  Scott is also rewritten somewhat to fit a more standard Hollywood narrative where the meek guy gains courage.  In the books, Scott is never what I’d call meek.  His journey is more that of a self-centered guy who has to stop thinking of himself in black-and-white heroic terms, and choose instead to be a human being.  The books are hilarious and clever, but ultimately they’re a meditation about the nature of love and the past and what it takes to go forward and take the leap of faith that is committing to love after you’ve had your fuck-ups.  And for that, the more in-depth portrayal of female characters like Ramona and yes, Knives and Envy is a critical element. 

Mike Barthel at Awl really dug into this issue, making similar observations about how the movie simply doesn’t have time to flesh out the female characters, much less pass the Bechdel test.  Which isn’t to accuse the movie of sexism!  Like Michelle notes, it’s actually a really refreshing film in that the female characters behave like actual human beings.  They have actual personalities that are theirs and not some manifestation of some generic Hollywood assumptions about femaleness.  Even as Ramona is holding down the spot of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she’s really not, since she doesn’t have MPDG mandatory traits like being all-forgiving and accepting of the hero or being unattached to reality.  (She even has a job that she’s uniquely suited to perform!) It’s hard to blame the movie for not having the depth of soul of the books because it’s not a function of sexism or bad writing so much as just an issue of time.  Once you work in the seven evil exes and the video games and the battle of the bands and the love triangle, there’s not a whole lot of room to explore the issues the book ends up being most interested in, namely what it means to choose to love someone and to fight for that. 

So, see the movie but please also read the books.  It’s very rare to see romantic love portrayed so honestly and yet without losing any ability to be touching.  In fact, I’d argue that it’s more touching for all its realism.  As one of the podcasters on OTI said, the movie falls into the trap of talking up destiny when it comes to love.  The books are basically the opposite of that---they’re more interested in choice.  The person who thinks love is about finding The One that you’re destined for and living happily ever after in harmony is a fool, but I do think it’s a widespread kind of foolishness.  Moving forward and being able to choose to be happy is, in the books, a matter of dealing with the past not as something to ignore or as some kind of horrible baggage, but just being what it is.  It shapes us but it isn’t us. 

Plus, it tells this story with more than a little humor and cleverness. 

We have already discussed the imperialistic and racist dimensions of Eat, Pray, Love. Today, a movie based on this book is coming out and it is predicted to be a huge success. So why is there such a huge (mostly female) following the book and movie about what one reviewer calls a "pampered princess on constant display" with a "petulant, overblown ego"? Female life choices are still pretty

As if it weren't enough to be bombarded by incessant advertising for Elizabeth Gilbert's insipid Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Hollywood now made a film based on it that' starring Julia Roberts. Now one has to be persecuted by the pushy advertisement of both novelistic and cinematic versions of this cultural imperialist journey. If you are

by Amanda Marcotte

Marc and I went to see “The Other Guys” Friday night (it was fun, but not like earth-shattering or anything), and of course there were trailers. Many were fine, but this one made our jaws drop to the floor:

And Marc called it---the trailer, at least, is the ultimate in Nice Guy® fantasy.  On the surface, we’re supposed to feel a little sorry for this guy, as if it’s cute that he refuses to speak up instead of lurking around as a friend hoping that she just cracks one day.  But if you look even a centimeter below the surface, what you have is a story about a man who goes around a woman’s explicit non-consent to be impregnated by him and uses subterfuge to get what he wanted.  (At least from the trailer, but I don’t see a way around them featuring him asking if he can be sperm donor and her explicitly saying no.) Who knows how it ends?  They could whip out a “Chasing Amy” ending, where another reactionary male fantasy (lesbian converts for a man, and he basks in the chance to have a mature, sexually experienced woman he convince himself is somehow still a virgin) is shown to be a lie, and the guy who buys into it a fool who loses the girl.  Maybe the gravity of what he does is dealt with, and there are consequences (such as losing everything) for using deceit to get his sperm into the body of a woman who explicitly said no. 

But the likelier possibility is that there is some fight when she finds out, they separate, and then they get back together, because he’s proven himself to her by hanging in long enough and being a father figure to her kid.  (Even if there is an “out” built in where we find out that the kid is biologically that of the intended sperm donor.) It then becomes a charming tale about overcoming minor obstacles like a woman’s explicit non-consent to get what you want out of her.  I was kind of at a loss to even describe what kind of violation it would be to swap in your sperm for that of an intended sperm donor.  It’s not sexual assault as we commonly define it, and yet it still has much in common with traditional sexual assault, in that it’s using sexuality as a weapon to control the woman in question.  Just because the man who does it is really drunk at the time doesn’t change the fact that he deliberately set out to overcome her refusal with deceit.

I will say it lays the Nice Guy® fantasy bare.  The usual refrain is that women are idiots who go for jerks instead of the Nice Guy® (who is so Nice that he thinks women are universally stupid), and that this justifies the Nice Guy® trying to use underhanded tactics to get with the woman he likes, because she doesn’t know what’s good for her.  This preview shows how the end game of that thinking really is contemptuous of the importance of consent.  And even if the movie itself takes this betrayal seriously, the pitch---the preview---relies on the audience buying into the idea that it’s bad, but not evil, to foist your sperm on an unwilling woman so long as she’s already up for being inseminated.  Needless to say, that’s the same logic in play when victims of legally defined sexual assault are considered not-victims because they had a history of choosing affirmatively to have sex, especially with multiple partners.  If she’s up for it with one guy, the logic goes, then what’s the diff?  The difference is consent, of course, and I was thoroughly creeped out watching this preview with an audience that didn’t seem to share my sense that this is straight up creepy. 

by Amanda Marcotte

Spoilers!

We don’t go to the movies as often in New York as we did in Austin for one simple reason: There isn’t an Alamo Drafthouse here.  It’s strange, because I think one would go over really well.  But like competent country-western bands playing in bars or nachos that are assuredly not made with baked beans, we’ve learned to let go with a smile in our hearts, because New York otherwise has so much on offer.  What’s funny is that one thing that New York does have that Austin doesn’t have for most---a solid 20-30 minute walk home in which to hash out the movie---was something we did have because we just so happened to live pretty close to the Drafthouse when we lived in Austin.  The measure of a really intriguing movie was that this walk home didn’t feel like enough to hash out the finer points of the film.  I mention this, because it took us about 30 minutes to walk home from “Inception” Friday night, and we spent most of that walking talking about the Christopher Nolan movie we’d wished we’d seen.

Don’t get me wrong; “Inception” was enjoyable, even though you could knock half an hour off to make a more interesting, tighter film.  But Nolan’s trademark ability to leave the audience truly wondering as they leave wasn’t in evidence, and was instead replaced with featherlight hints.  The ending with the top was supposed to be intriguing, but there was really no emotional weight.  The question, “Are you or are you not still in a dream?” left me saying, “Who gives a shit?” Contrast that to “Memento” or “The Prestige”, where the central questions you’re left with at the end of the film are truly unresolvable and haunting. 

In this movie, there was never a moment of real doubt that the main character’s struggle with Imaginary Wife was about him accepting his loss and moving on with his life, and since we get a big---admittedly moving---speech that resolves that question, all the oomph of the ending was taken out.  On the walk home, I decided that this could have easily been rewritten to make it more ambiguous and haunting.  Start with the question of whether or not Mal was right, something that Cobb basically rejects out of hand throughout the movie and, in the end, is shown to have been wrong about.  If Mal was right, then when she threw herself off that building, she would have woken up to find her husband sleeping there.  Is there any doubt that she would have gone back into his dreams to get him?  You could build a movie around this question---is the Mal he’s seeing flitting around real Mal or projection Mal?  To raise the stakes, have projection Mal trying to kill Cobb (instead of making questionable decisions like merely wreaking havoc for no reason), driving him and the audience to wonder if his subconscious is attacking him out of guilt or if she’s an actual person trying to get her stubborn husband back.  This plot would not have to interfere with the MacGuffin action plot about putting an idea in the businessman’s head.

With this, you can create an ending with way more emotional impact than the one we got.  Because Cobb never really makes a decision, because he never really doubts the existence he’s in.  But what if that wasn’t true?  What if he spent the whole movie doubting and fighting Mal while not knowing if she was real or not?  What if, at the end, he decides that he can never really know, so he decides on the world he knows with the kids but without Mal and not on a potential world with both Mal and the kids?  Instead of a final shot where we’re like, “Ooooooh, what if he’s still in a dream?” because he’s spinning the top, we instead have a final shot of him locking the top in a safe (another image used throughout the movie) to symbolize his resolution to pick this reality, leaving the audience to wonder, “What if his choice was the wrong one?” Obviously, there would have to be some conversation with Mal that gets this resolved, one where the audience is left to wonder if her acceptance of his choice is simply a projection of his imagination, or his actual wife deciding to give up the fight for her husband and move on.  You could even start the flick off, for maximum pretentiousness, with the quote from Albert Camus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

I realize that you can argue that this choice is in fact made, but it’s made in a marginal way where the audience is left with no doubt, and Mal is left with no chance to make a decision of her own (because we’re to assume she’s dead---which couldn’t be true if this is a dream world!).  In fact, the struggle between husband and wife has no emotional pull, because it’s not a struggle between two people, but just a man coming to grips with his grief.  There’s no suspense and no intrigue.  Compare that with “The Prestige”, where the struggle between the two main characters is truly epic.  Nolan is very good at creating competitive relationships between men in his movies---that’s what really matters in “The Dark Knight"---but pulls away from struggles between men and women.  Is he afraid to paint female characters as having real emotional power?  It seems strange, because he has a lot of feminist instincts otherwise.  Consider, for instance, how Ellen Page’s character never has to go through the “by golly she’s a lady!” ropes.  It’s never mentioned, never assumed unusual, and she’s not saddled with a love interest to excuse her presence to nervous ninnies.  But I fear his intentions to not talk down to or objectify his female characters crashes into a fundamental fear of writing female characters, since they are so few and far between, and the real struggles are often between men.  The MacGuffin storyline, for instance, was about the projection of the dying father, but the struggle between father and son actually provoked suspense.  Who would win?  We never get this between Mal and Cobb; their resolution is easy to figure out the second we know what the struggle is.  At the end, Cobb even articulates it---she’s easy to conquer, because she’s not even real.  Leonardo di Caprio is a great actor, and moved me when he made this observation.  But upon reflection, I find it annoying. 

Did you see the movie?  What did you think?

by Amanda Marcotte

Update, to make it interesting: Can you think of movies/books/TV shows where there were obvious technology fails in the plot?  Or, conversely, what movies/books/TV shows would be completely ruined by being set a little later in history, when the characters would absolutely have things like cell phones and email?  No cheating with medieval stuff! 

Spoilers galore.

Years ago, I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about how disconcerting it can be to watch mid-century caper films, because there are routine situations in them where the introduction of the cell phone would clear up the problem creating all the tension.  Of course, they didn’t have cell phones back then, but that was the point---they’ve become so ubiquitous that the idea of not having one is becoming hard to imagine.  It was something that came to mind for me recently when something quite unusual happened on “True Blood”.  We’re only on season two of the wretchedly sick but deliciously campy horror series, and I think this was the first time I saw a character in these supposedly modern times actually do something most of us do all the time---receive a communication of some sort on a cell phone.  And of course, it wasn’t actually a communication of any real sort---Sam the shapeshifting dude gets a call from his restaurant Merlotte’s and it’s a hang up. 

It brought home something about the show that drives me bananas.  Oh, it’s not the fact that vampires, shapeshifters, telepaths, and demon goddesses all are drawn to this tiny little Louisiana town.  Frankly, I can’t think of a better place to get into supernatural mischief than Louisiana, which was practically made for it with its combination of swamps and tolerance for eccentricity.  Nor is it that Sookie is one of those Mary Sue characters, because Anna Paquin plays her with enough knowingness that I find myself not especially perturbed by the obvious wish fulfillment aspects of a character that every sexy male vampire seems to fall in love with at first sight for no particular reason.  I can overlook a lot in a show that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and “True Blood” absolutely does not.

But man, the lack of communication on that show!  It’s clearly set in present times---the first book came out in 2001---and yet no one seems to think to make a fucking phone call, much less send off an email.  I’ve been to Louisiana.  They may be different from the rest of the country in many ways, but they enjoy the use of modern technologies just as much as the rest of us.  But the characters on this show carry on like it’s some huge burden to pull your phone out of your pocket and make a phone call.  For instance, even though we know for a fact that Sam has a phone, he never stops to call Sookie for help or advice when he finds himself targeted for abuse by Marianne.  Even though, if that happened to me, the first thing I’d think is, “Who do I know that might also be a ‘supernatural’ that is impervious to Marianne’s spells, and also has a bunch of badass vampire friends who can kick some serious ass and are probably the only people I can think of to take on a demon goddess?” She may not be able to help, but it’s not like the cost of asking is that high.  Maybe Sam is watching his minutes, but even so, I’d say spending a few on saving your own life is well worth, especially if you have a bunch of rollover minutes in the bank.  Or what about all the angst Tara has about whether or not to let Marianne & Co. stay at Sookie’s place.  Perhaps you could ask her?  She’s in Dallas, not on the moon.  They have cell phone towers in Dallas.  Or what about Jason Stackhouse disappearing and not telling anyone?  I know Sookie’s head is deep in Bill’s ass, but maybe she could check up on her brother through his Facebook status?  I accept the whole thing where Sookie is kidnapped and trying to reach that other telepath, because you would have your cellphone stripped from you in that situation.  (In fact, if I were the director, I would have made a point of showing the kidnappers frisk the victims and take their phones.) But a lot of the time, it just doesn’t make sense.  The plot developments on the show rely far too much on a lack of communication that doesn’t make much sense in the 21st century.

This really is an ongoing problem for storytellers in our modern era.  For literary novelists, it’s not really a big deal---there’s an allergy in anything with literary aspirations to using cheap plot devices like lack of communication to create tension---but for people making popcorn entertainment, this problem is huge.  You don’t really think about how much lack of information and communication is the fallback technique until you see it shoehorned into a narrative illogically.  I love Harry Potter, but that was the biggest flaw in the books.  JK Rowling created tension by depriving the main characters of information by having the adults talk down to them.  It made sense initially, but after the kids single-handedly win a couple of big battles, you’d expect realistically that the adults start at least coming clean with them.  I will say that Rowling neatly sidestepped the cell phone problem by making the wizard characters ignorant of Muggle technologies, so that even if they would see the benefit in something like cell phones, it’s unlikely they would have the chance to learn about them. 

I’m continually fascinated by the ways that writers of popcorn entertainment find ways to get around the problem of instant communication and information, when so much of what drives their plots is lack of information.  “Lost” was smart in that the writers decided that the way to get around a world full of previously unthinkable modern convenience is to put characters in a situation where they’re completely deprived of it.  But you can’t do that on every show.  The writers on “Angel” knew that this was going to be an issue for them, and they hung a lampshade on it, by having Angel mutter darkly all the time about how much he hated cell phones.  I’ve seen phones cut out on TV shows and characters deliberately refuse to answer.  And in a brilliant move that just goes to show why David Simon is the shit, “The Wire” had a plot where the use of cell phones was the reason that the main characters were deprived of the information they needed, because the cell phones were being used to avoid a wire tap. 

And then sometimes they just ignore the issue altogether, and the writers on “True Blood” are the worst offenders.  I’m sure the justification is that the show is set in a kooky world to begin with, but I don’t accept that excuse.  The whole point of shows like that is to juxtapose the supernatural elements with the known world.  In fact, that’s what makes “True Blood” so fun.  Vampires are out because of advanced technology that makes them able to live without feeding on people, and their struggle is overtly analogized to the gay rights struggle.  Their world is full of HDTVs, innovative drug use, internet pornography (Lafayette makes money web-camming), and even the fundamentalist Christian church has all the markers of the modern day tech-happy megachurch.  But even though we know the characters have cell phones that they use when it’s plot convenient, they somehow seem to forget they have them when the plot needs them to not be communicating.  From what I understand, the show follows the books very closely, so it seems the original sinner in this regard is Charlaine Harris.  I imagine in genre fiction on paper, it perhaps doesn’t seem that strange to have characters not pick up a phone and call when they absolutely would in real life.  (Though even there, I’m going to say it’s a stretch.) But on TV, it’s absolutely jarring and I wish they would do something about it. 

I will say this---you hear over and over again from aficionados of genre narratives that they are absolutely the same thing as literary fiction and that making distinctions between the two is elitist.  And I’m often inclined to agree.  You see genre fiction that rises to the level of literary fiction, as I believe “The Wire” did, and you see overtly artistic works borrow heavily from genre tropes.  But in our era of heavy duty information overload, I think genre writers on all levels really have an opportunity to blur the distinctions by accepting that the same old plots that rely heavily on not knowing critical information just don’t work any more.  This burden can be reconstructed as an opportunity to start coming up with new plot devices that rely much less on cliche. 

Another recent post over at Change.org:

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Prince of Persia, Twilight, The Last Airbender, Karate Kid, Red Dawn — this summer’s blockbusters seem to have gotten the blogosphere humming more than usual, with many writers examining Hollywood’s relationship with race.In my experience, sardonic or critical posts focusing on the latest pop culture icons fare far better among readers than dry, data-heavy sociological analyses (which take about 23 times as long to prepare). Pop culture diatribes tend to be easy to write, widely read and more likely to go viral. For bloggers who live and die by pageviews and ad-clicks, this is our bread and butter.

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