Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Jurassic World

Though the main appeal of Jurassic World is obviously its very special effects, its sense of irony and its awareness of its tradition make it especially intelligent — and witty.
Before the two lads go off for their adventure the younger is dallying — he’s looking at an old View Master reel of dinosaurs. Of course he’s grabbing a preview of his imminent trip. He's looking back to see ahead. More broadly, the film that flaunts state-of-the-art 3-D and more convincing dinosaurs than clog the senate pauses to acknowledge its primitive roots. The film reflects on its origins just as the wiser characters acknowledge their connection to even primeval animal life. 
The plot adds a touching human concern to the battlefield. As in so many disaster films, the cataclysm restores a fractured family. Here the boys’ parents tacitly decide not to divorce after all, and their strictly-business Aunt Claire is shaken into an emotional openness and the resolve to settle with the handsome dino-maven, Owen, “for survival.”
In small ways the film reflects back on the conventions of American film. When the boys manage to animate a dead jeep the improbable scene draws on the simple mechanics that all the Andy Hardys could muster, to build or revive their old jalopy. Owen’s communications with the raptors and the heroic intervention of the overthrown king, T-Rex, draw on the tradition of man-horse bond and understanding in the old westerns. Even the villain is as familiar from old movies as from the current Republicans — amoral and ruthless in his desire to weaponize anything whether natural or synthesized.
      Finally the film works up to a feminist revision of the genre. In all the hoary B-films the heroine would always break a heel, hindering the hero’s flight from the monster du jour. Women were ornament and the man’s burden, even when they were the scientist’s daughter — or the rare as hen’s tooth scientist. Aware of that brutal fact of life, Owen reluctantly lets Aunt Claire come along — but only if she “loses those ridiculous shoes.” Only at the end, after we have watched her run full throttle, show great ingenuity, courage and stamina, and even kill the beast about to gobble Owen, do we see she’s still wearing those heels. Against the genre’s grain, here a woman can be heroic with compromising her womanhood or complying with the man’s demands. This futuristic exercise of an old genre catches the healthier spirit of our time.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Mad Max: Fury Road

George Miller’s return to Mad Max is — who would have expected? — a great feminist film.
The landscape is unrelieved aridity and machinery, the dryness of the sterile male. The monster machines are technology without humanity, so they represent male power at its worst. The horde of pale bald humans connote another kind of sterility. The men’s only skin growth are boils and tattoos.  
Hence the evil kingpin’s obsessive pride in having impregnated one of his “breeders” and his determination to recover the harem when they are swept off by Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). The ruler is a pustular ruin who’s encased in a shell of medals and plastic armour to conceal his venereal decay. He survives on a breathing machine. He monopolizes the water and doles out occasional spates to keep his subjects dry, enslaved and grateful, awed by his pretence to immortality. That Imperator will disprove.The tyrant’s son Ritcus Erectus bears another name redolent of futile macho power, as he celebrates his stillborn baby brother “perfect in every way” — but dead. The society’s emblem is a stark grinning skull.
Theron plays the heroine bald and flat-chested, eschewing the conventional heroine’s beauties. The women she saves are young, insecure, their nipples outlined flat behind the white wisps they wear. In contrast, the tyrant’s production line of milking mothers are swollen grotesques. In a world sans water the characters live on mother’s milk, a reminder of the — but here abused — natural primacy of the feminine. 
As the heroine’s name suggests, she is both angry and driven — an imperative fury. Her character’s name provides the film’s subtitle. The narrative road is the woman’s fury. She is enraged at the male power that reduces woman to milking machine and breeder. There is no indication of sexual pleasure, except for the one girl’s loving caress of the reformed thug. Imperator resolves to save what girls she can from their strictly reproductive service.
Hero Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) is maximum hardrock but he starts imprisoned, both caged by the villains and boxed in by the trauma of having failed to save his wife and child a few films ago. His fights with Imperator are even. As their relationship grows away from their initial distrust and violence there is not a single word of sentiment or romance. Necessity breeds a tentative trust, which eventually grows to include his initial enemy, Nux. 
     The film ends with the hero and heroine exchanging a wordless nod across the distance between her settling in as new ruler of The Citadel (a reference to the brutish male military academy) and his disappearance in the crowd, off to seek his own solitary redemption. Miller eschews their romantic coupling because these women don’t need to depend on men. Imperator’s home community may have lost the green and richness she remembers from childhood but its women are tough, competent survivors. The oldest carries a satchel of seeds that will bring a new fertility to the blowing sands once Imperator frees the water the first ruler hoarded.  
     Of course this is a very violent, loud, sensational film. But at its heart is the reminder of the feminine upon which our species’ survival is far more dependent than upon male power. That lesson justifies this sensational fable — and compels us to overlook its pervasive improbabilities: the characters’ survival without food and water, the monster technology they have somehow managed to construct post-apocalypse, and the characters’ rebounding from such violent assaults. It’s a fable, a feminist fable, nestled within the strut of macho blockbuster.  So Max washes a killed foe’s blood off his face with mother’s milk. Our feminine is the great cleanser.

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Spy

In addition to being hilariously funny, Paul Feig’s Spy is a brilliant feminist response to the James Bond genre. The opening scene, the exotic locales, the plot, the music, the character types, all evoke the Bonds which spawned a cycle of international bed-hopping suave heroes saving the world and the hinge-heeled beauties who crave him. This female spy turns all those male cliches into fresh female successes.
The title works two ways. It obviously declares itself a spy film but more broadly addresses “the male gaze,” the theory that films assume a masculine perspective and make the female the object of their vision, not their own subject. As watchers we are the espyers, the spy, safely ogling the characters from our privileged privacy. When we watch Spy we are spying from the traditional male perspective — but here the advantage is given woman. Susan’s camera contact lens is an emblem of scopophilia.
Melissa McCarthy’s Susan Cooper is not the genre’s usual woman. But her bulk does not deter her from intelligence, stamina, energy, imagination, effectiveness in physical battle, and even winning the desire of all the macho men in the film. Her ample bosom is not maternal but sexy. The men by reflex find reasons to grab and ogle it. In Bond’s world she’d be Boobs Galore. She’s no Modesty Blaise. The lecherous Aldo’s flirtatious routine expresses the emotional attraction both male spies discover for her. When she ends up in bed with the ridiculous Rick Ford, she confirms her right to the sexual liberty — even caprice — usually reserved for the male stars.
Susan was inhibited in her early CIA career by male authority. Now she has a chance to fulfil herself, as she steps from directing spy Bradley Fine by audio remote control to flying into the field herself. She fights through every possible restriction. She even ploughs her borrowed motorcycle through a furrow of freshly poured concrete — as tough as surviving the CIA’s prejudice against women and the western culture’s narrow prescription of feminine beauty. Susan saves the world, saves her beloved Bradley, wins the career she always craved — but even in her post-victory her new undercover characters remain consigned to boring cliche.
She’s also a woman with a voice — as independent, aggressive, witty, profane, as any man in that world. In fact her rapid-fire coarse wit evokes the Veep tv series (and its clear advantage over the stodgy old-fashioned Tomlin-Fonda warhorse on Netflix). The substantial wit of the plot is deepened and enhanced by the dialogue, which is off-the-wall, inventive, and always funny. That extends into the case histories chronicled behind the end-credits (stay for them). 
Susan’s blossoming from clerk to action hero contrasts to the other three woman. The CIA unit director is the familiar woman administrator, brusque, officious, eager to subordinate her women charges to the men’s needs. Susan’s colleague and best friend Nancy (a brutally deglamorized Miranda Hart) is a plain-Jane Miss Moneypenny, who under Susan’s example comes into her own, saving Susan’s life, killing a villain, and even seducing rapper Fifty Cent. That’s qualitatively more money than the money penny. The CIA’s dazzling perfect beauty spy proves as false as the genre’s feminine allure, proving herself a traitor. Our admiration and empathy are invested in the beauty that’s conventionally denied.   
The evil Rayna is as tough, heartless and dangerous as all the Bond master villains. She is as independent and foul-mouthed as Susan, as worthy an adversary as Dr. Noh and Goldfinger. Like the conventional heroine, Rayna runs for her life — tottering upon her silted heels. The CIA director, Nancy and Rayna have an image-consciousness that underscores Susan’s deeply inculcated — and reductive — humility.
The male figures also undercut the genre convention. The Bond figure is suave Bradley Fine (Jude Law), a ladykiller brutally insensitive to Susan’s ardor for him — except to exploit it.  As Rick Ford action star Jason Statham caricatures his persona, a macho, strutting, mysogynous “hero” who goes rogue to solve the case. Here he proves absolutely incompetent. Here this male action star plays the usual female bimbo. Susan saves both macho heroes and in turn is saved by Nancy. 
     As Ford is a comic exposure of Fine, Susan exposes both. Thus the film exposes the traditional assumption that men command the proper authority and efficacy in solving the world’s problems. That assumption is our cultural bias and weakness not a reality.