I liked Jurassic World, but I would have liked it a lot more without the sexist, workaholic-mothers-are-destroying-society subplot/tropes
I MEAN ALRIGHT (spoilers ahead)
Claire’s a ‘cold’ workaholic manager who can’t remember her nephew’s ages. She seems like a nice enough person, and competent, but we’re meant to judge her and judge her and judge her for…what, exactly? Not wanting kids? She’s referred to at least once as “the mother” of the park/the Indomitus Rex, the implication being that she’s a bad mother and it’s all kind of her fault, but she’s not a mother! And she doesn’t seem bothered about being one! And that should be fine! But the message we keep being hit over the head with is, “Women who place their work commitments above having children are selfish and will cause dinosaurs to run amok’ I mean, Claire isn’t remotely actually cold to her nephews – she’s just too busy to take them out to the park, so has her assistant do it. On the scale of likes-kids to hates-kids, she’s not even an Alan Grant! Yet her whole story revolves around Defrosting the Ice Queen (with as many sexist tropes, including an unasked-for kiss in the heat of the moment, as possible thrown in) and making Claire into a maternal figure worthy of a relationship with the alpha male Owen. Who likewise expresses no interest in children (actual children, not his raptors) but that’s okay cos he’s a dude? I guess? Anyway,
IT GETS WORSE
You’ve also got Karen, Claire’s sister and mother of the aforementioned nephews, who is going through a divorce. This is making her younger son unhappy and her teenage son a total jerk. In one scene, we see her calling her sons from her office only to be hurried into a meeting, implying that her devotion to her work is causing her family problems. And yet in all other respects she seems like a good mother, so we’ll take this one as a ‘maybe’, but
IT GETS WORSE
Claire leaves her nephews with an assistant, Zara (played by Katie McGrath! Hi there!) who like her boss seems competent enough but is clearly not interested in kids. (I can’t remember if she’s even seen actually antagonising them, but I don’t think so.) They give her the slip to go and explore the park. The next time we see her, she’s running towards the boys when she’s grabbed by a pterodactyl, tossed around as she screams, dunked into the Mosasaurus tank and eaten. She’s the only character to get such a gratuitous death scene, and – for why? I’m reminded of Gennero from the original movie, but he actually ran off and left the kids in danger; Zara just…cares more about her Blackberry than the kids she’s watching? (Who at that point aren’t in any danger at all.) Not exactly a crime, certainly not one deserving of GRATUITOUS DINO VIOLENCE. Her character’s presented in such a misogynistic way – attractive young woman stuck to her phone and not interested in children; therefore killed. You can’t imagine a man playing that same role, can you? I can’t.
Um, basically – pretty much every woman in this film is judged by their attitude to children and family, and/or their ability to be a caretaker, and if they don’t want one or don’t have that ability then they’re judged or punished in some way. I was so disappointed by that.
I… strongly disagree, and I’d seen a fair amount of this commentary before I saw the film, so I couldn’t help watching for it.
The first Jurassic Park movie was about a workaholic man who had to protect two young kids, that weren’t his, under extreme conditions. This movie was about a workaholic woman who had to protect two kids, that weren’t hers, under extreme conditions. I’ve had (self-identifed feminist) friends decry Claire’s character as ‘careerist bitch’, and I honestly think this says SO MUCH MORE about the audience than it does the character. Claire is business-minded and competent and obviously very clever, and her narrative is similar to the defrosting the ice queen trope, but I STRONGLY DISAGREE that this is to make her a maternal figure. Claire’s biggest moments – luring out the T-Rex on her own, which had nothing to do with the kids; saving Owen by shooting the pterodactyl off him (the context of what you describe as ‘an unasked for kiss’ which seemed pretty mutual to me) again had nothing to do with the kids (bar them seeing her and asking in awe, ‘Is that Aunt Claire?’. I.e., ‘DAMN, she a BADASS.’) In fact, that last moment specifically positions Claire as the hero defending Owen (which is not the case throughout the whole film, no, but then again Claire is not a character trained in action. The film only has one trained ‘dinosaur wrangler’ and it’s Owen, making Claire all the braver to my eyes). THAT’s the context in which the kiss takes place; after she saves him. You know, like every single male action hero who saves a woman and gets the climactic kiss as a reward.
I honestly don’t understand why you mention Owen as not being interested in children ‘but it’s ok because he’s a dude’ when all the interaction he and Claire had with/searching for/defending the kids were exactly the same. In fact I think Owen had significantly more screen time huddled into a closet clutching two children in his arms and trying to keep them from being eaten.
Re: Karen – I was under the impression the ‘meeting’ she was hurried into was literally a legal meeting about the divorce, and that was why the kids had been sent away while the parents sorted that out. I could be wrong. She was also very obviously a committed parent, hence all the phone calls and trying to encourage Claire to spend time with the boys. At no point did the narrative either punish or reward her in particular for this.
Zara is literally the only female character in the film that I would agree gets punished disproportionately for her inattention. Is the character presented in a misogynistic way? Well, maybe. I think she was a character written to serve a specific purpose in the plot (’babysitter that gets distracted so the kids can wander off and the plot advance’). She was also one of the few secondary/tertiary characters that we saw much of. I would list the guy and the woman in the control centre, the Indian park owner, the warmongering villain, and the head scientist at around that level too. I don’t know what film you were watching if you don’t think those last three men got gratuitous dino-deaths too.
The pattern I’m seeing in response to Jurassic World is ‘it’s sexist because the female character was a workaholic and the hero was a white dude!’. To which I say, look at the lens through which you’re watching the film. Because there is absolutely zero question in my mind that the hero’s journey was Claire’s. The growth was Claire’s. The main character was Claire. Yes, Chris Pratt was very sexy, but he’s basically the hot girlfriend who the main character ‘earns’ when they learn to be a true hero. Claire isn’t learning to love children so that at the end she can settle down and churn out babies! She’s put in a survival environment and asked to protect two kids she has a responsibility for, and she does it despite it being established that she is WAY out of her depth. If anything, the end of Jurassic Park hints that Sam Neill’s character has learned to love children and might want some of his own. (This is dropped in the sequels, but). Jurassic World very carefully does not do this!!! At all!!!
You know what the pattern I’m seeing in the Jurassic World response? I’m seeing people holding the character and narrative of a woman to a much higher standard than the character and (almost identical) narrative of a man in the original. YES, I understand that because of the history of film, the context of these arcs is different when we see them performed by different genders. But there is so much hypocrisy in the criticism of this film, and it boils down to the same old message: that the story’s somehow not as good with a woman.
((I did not mean to write this much and this is not meant as a personal attack on you OP, I am just SO FRUSTRATED))
Well, I do want to make it clear that I like Claire…I REALLY like Claire, in fact, and most of my general crossness with this movie comes from my suspecting it doesn’t like her half as much as I did. I know the hero’s journey was hers, but I also felt like we’re not meant to like the person Claire was at the beginning of the journey, and I liked that person too, flawed though she was. And of course she’s not a bitch. No woman’s a bitch, because ‘bitch’ is a word intended to dehumanize a woman rather than say anything at all about her.
It’s true that Claire’s story is almost identical to Alan’s, but there’s so much baggage in a story about a childless woman learning to care for kids, baggage that a childless male’s story just won’t have. It’s not a case of double standards so much as the fact that those double standards already exist in almost every facet of society – men aren’t usually asked by the media when they’ll become a father, fathers aren’t asked how they balance work and child-rearing, companies rarely have policies about not hiring men ‘in case they want to have kids soon.’ (That last one, and worse, is still frequently thrown in the faces of women who dare to have a career.) It’s just…not a comparison I think works. At all. There are a lot of cases where you can transfer a story previously led by a male to one led by a female, and make it work. But this wasn’t one of them, because we live in a sexist society, because in the real world Claire’s choice to not have children would be seen as selfish and Alan’s choice to not have children would be seen as perfectly reasonable. That’s the crucial context that argument (that people are holding the character and narrative of a woman to a much
higher standard than the very similar character and narrative of a man) is missing.
I think this article and this post and this post kind of sum up what I think about the movie. I don’t even think it’s a particularly bad movie! It was loads of fun! (Gratuitous, strangely misogynistic deaths aside.) But it still features a scene where a woman tells her sister that her having kids is an ‘if’ and her sister replies ‘Not if, when!’ and the sister’s meant to be the one who’s right.