I’m not a film studies person, but I was thinking about Jupiter Ascending and The Matrix. Just the first Matrix, I have no time for the other two.
”Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they’re faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly The Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clarke is really Hyperman.
“Now, little girls, on the other hand, have difference fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the King and Queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they’ll be happy for ever and ever.”
– The Cuckoo, A Game of You by Neil Gaiman
I read those comics over and over when I was younger. There were a few bits that really stuck with me. This was one of them, because for me it was definitely true.
I saw Jupiter Ascending over the weekend. I enjoyed it immensely, although I don’t think I would ever go so far as to call it a good movie. But it got me thinking.
The Matrix is an archetypal boys’ story. Neo is the Chosen One. He goes from being boring and ordinary to knowing kung fu, being able to fly – when he becomes The One, he is literally limited only by the scope of his own imagination.
Jupiter Ascending is an archetypal girls’ story. I’ve seen it referred to over and over as a well-made big-budget equivalent of a writer’s first fic: the terrible Mary Sue self-insert princess with the alliterative and meaningful name who falls for a gruff loner space werewolf named Caine Wise (really? Not Caine Nine?). People threaten her and she is rescued, because she is precious and worth rescuing – initially only for their promised reward but eventually for her own sake. She is declared to be space royalty in a faintly ridiculous but apparently incontrovertible fashion, and she runs the gamut of clichés (including an interrupted wedding and a kidnapped family) on her way to an ultimate sacrifice that still somehow results in a happy ending where the major difference in her life is that she is content with it (and also she has a sexy space-werewolf boyfriend and some hover-skates).
I guess what I’m trying to say is, The Matrix and Jupiter Ascending are two sides of the same coin. They take the childhood stories associated with each gender and mix them with impressive cinematography and costumes. (I do wonder about Lana – if perhaps she has always identified more with the Jupiter Ascending storyline than with the Matrix, and now that she’s out she can put her childhood myth on the big screen along with the more stereotypically male one. If so, I hope she enjoyed making it as much as I enjoyed seeing it.)
Coming back to what I said earlier.
I enjoyed it immensely, although I don’t think I would ever go so far as to call it a good movie.
Why not? Is Jupiter Jones a dumber name than “Neo”? (Yes, I know he was originally Thomas Anderson, but he goes by Neo throughout the movies.) Is Caine Wise a dumber name than Trinity? Is Laurence Fishburne a better mentor than Sean Bean? (Okay, maybe I would pick him if I got the choice. Hanging out with him and Gina Torres would be awesome. But that’s more or less a matter of taste.) Does it make less sense for humans to be processed into fountain-of-youth goo than turned into giant batteries? (IMO it actually makes more sense, because while it is highly implausible it at least doesn’t necessarily violate thermodynamics.)
But The Matrix is lauded as a sci-fi classic. It has 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. Jupiter Ascending has 22%. I’ll admit the main points of its plot could be presented slightly more coherently at the start, but that’s really not enough to account for the discrepancy.
So what is? Why did I start this by saying I wouldn’t call it a good movie?
I really meant it when I typed it, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it was my own internalised misogyny causing me to distance myself from any presentation of the “girly” archetype. I don’t know if I’ll have time to see it again at the cinema, but I want to see it with this thought firmly in place:
Jupiter Ascending is a female equivalent of The Matrix. Visually impressive, couple of holes in the plot, definitely a lot of fun. But I (and who knows how many others) have held myself at a distance because I don’t want to be associated with girly things. Even if you dress it up with spacesuits and dogfights and occasional ladies in lingerie, this film draws its inspiration from the stories little girls tell themselves. The stories we are ridiculed for, and eventually pushed back from, so that we can be respected.
In the past decade, superhero movies have enjoyed a resurgence. I love them, and I’m not going to stop going to them. But wouldn’t it be nice if these female monomyths were given the same space and cultural acceptance, so that girls didn’t need to be ashamed of them?
I think it’s also pretty important that in this one movie we were given a RANGE of female fantasies. If you can’t identify with everygirl wide-eyed Jupiter Jones, you had conniving Kalique, or single-minded laser-shooting-motorbike-rising Razo, or coolly-in-command Diomika Tsing, or hyper-competent-close-to-power Famulus, or cranky-but-loving-mom Aleksa, and each of these characters is a fully-realized character with her own NAME and backstory that you can dream of developing further for yourself. There were a huge number of Really Cool female characters to work with which I rarely see in other SFF films… usually we get one or two.
