I re-watched 10 Cloverfield Lane today (my hands are still shaking in fact!) and god I still don’t have words to describe how much I LOVE that movie. It’s a woman-overcoming-abuse narrative where everything is done right. Michelle’s brutalization at the hands of Howard doesn’t go over the top, and there’s no sexual violence, just implications. She uses skills mocked for their femininity – sewing and fashion design – to build the environment suit that ultimately saves her life. Her agency and her abilities are front and center all the way through.
And then the surprise ending happens and Michelle just turns into A. GODDAMN. POWER. FANTASY. A lesser movie would’ve ended the film just after the bunker escape, with Michelle staring out in horror at the alien spaceships destroying her world. (That actually was the original ending, if I remember rightly. I’m so glad they changed it.) Meaning damn! Her abuser was right all along! She should have stayed in the bunker with him and been the object of his creepy paternalism all her life!
That’s one fuck of an unfortunate ending, and it then immediately Doesn’t Happen. A alien comes for Michelle and she just FUCKING KILLS IT, brings down its whole ship in fact, using nothing but the tools she has on her. She’s not even particularly injured in the fight. Then she gets in her car, hears the broadcast about the military base, and heads off LIKE A BADASS to join the resistance. (Such, you can argue she may not have made it far, but I like to think she did, and I think the movie thinks so too.)
I don’t know much about horror movies (I went into 10 Cloverfield Lane not actually knowing it was one) but it just seems to subvert so many cliches? And do it so well? Basically if you think the 10CL ending was “stupid”, as seems to be a common conception, I will Fight You. Watching Michelle take down that alien put me in the mindset of “shit, this is how men feel watching movies all the time, isn’t it” and it still does.
This is from 2012, obviously, but I thought it was still relevant. Turns out the story about him hating Star Wars may not have been true after all. The Sun, a trashy British tabloid, liars? WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT.
I did find the same 2012 ‘Anakin Skywalker disowns Star Wars!’ story on the Daily Mail, and I imagine they probably stole it from the Sun. But they’re the Daily Mail, so I’m not going to link to them.
Oh wow – there was also a thing about this on Cracked, but they might have sourced the Daily Mail or the Sun, not knowing their reputation because the writer was probably American
Oh god, yeah, the British tabloids are TERRIBLE. Literally everything they publish involving a celebrity is pretty much either highly exaggerated or completely made up. (To give a recent example, George Clooney once called them out for publishing lies about Amal Clooney’s family)
Hey, my final Thunderbirds Are Go fancast is finally…um….go! Here they are:
Tumblr fave Sebastian Stan as Scott Tracy Why-the-hell-didn’t-I-think-of-her-earlier Sarah Jane Adventures star Anjli Mohindra as Tanusha ‘Kayo’ Kyrano Presumably natural redhead Domhall Gleeson as John Tracy My eternal fave George Blagden as Virgil Tracy Cheerful blond Graham Rogers as Gordon Tracy X-Men guy Lucas Till as Alan Tracy Bewilderingly-hot-without-glasses Dev Patel as Brains The borrowed-from-the-actual-voice-cast Sandra Dickinson as Grandma Tracy The also borrowed-from-the-actual-voice-cast Anjoa Andoh as Colonel Casey The spookily-unchanged-since-2005 Katie Leung as Professor Moffat
Annnnnnnd returning from the 2004 movie, which had terrible writers/producers but a good casting department:
One-time Doctor-lover Sophia Myles as Lady Penelope One-time Doctor-botherer Ron Cook as Parker The endearingly-enthusiastic-about-the-original-movie Bill Paxton as Jeff Tracy And Ben Kingsley as The Hood, except in Sensible Mode rather than Dubious Cold War Asian Stereotype Mode
Eventually I gave up on the Mary Sue test, the Sexy Lamp test et al and invented a new one I like to call the “Fuck It” Test: can your female character be said to have had a positive effect on anyone, anywhere? If so, she’s a good female character, fuck it.
Representation does matter, obviously, but at the same time I don’t think trying to remove someone’s – anyone’s – favourite character under the guise of ‘she’s just a sexy lamp! Find a better role model!’ or whatnot is going to help. If a particular character has a good effect on someone, who am I, or anyone, to take that off them?
OKAY I’M BACK FROM GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY LEMME ELABORATE THE SHIT OUTTA THIS
Representation matters on an almost primal level. (Other people have explained that concept much better than I could ever do.) I don’t think there’s anyone here reading this who hasn’t got at least one fictional character who’s theirs. Everyone deserves to be able to look at a fictional character and say ‘that’s me’, and feel good about themselves, everyone, and writers aren’t providing that and it’s endlessly, endlessly frustrating.
But I don’t think discourse about female characters on the Internet is providing that either. Has anyone here not had their favourite (or even their least favourite) female characters written off as ‘not really a person’, or whatnot? Black Widow isn’t good enough, because she wears a form-fitting outfit. Tauriel from the Hobbit isn’t good enough, because she’s only there to have a relationship with a man. ‘Manly’ female characters aren’t good enough. Hell, Mako Mori (…viewed through a white feminist lens…) isn’t good enough. Who the hell is? (Gingerhaze actually put this far better than I did: her list of female characters who’ve been said to have been sexistly written is eye-opening to say the least. There’s a lot of them.)
I’m not saying male characters don’t get similar things every now and again, but there are endless tests and examinations before a female character is declared ‘good’, tests that male characters don’t have to undergo. I know that this is because these tests are supposed to be weighing up whether the (almost always) male writer can write women, but – if a male character fucks something up, or behaves weakly, or does something terrible etc, people are happy to apply motivations to him as if he were a real, living person. Female characters just don’t get that in the same way – people just say ‘X cannot write women; this is not a character’ and carry on. (Sometimes they also say ‘[character] deserved better’ which puzzles me. How could she have deserved better when there was never a her in the first place?)
I think the difference between white-straight-abled male characters and all the other characters in the world is this: those characters can represent everyone. But female characters, for example, have to represent all females. And they shouldn’t have to, which is the crux of this argument, really. I remember when the Doctor Who episode Doomsday aired: people were furious at Rose Tyler’s assertions that she was going to be with the Doctor forever, feeling that her character arc had been reduced to her pining over a man. I definitely remember one comment that’s stuck in my mind all this time – (paraphrased) “This selfish child, this is meant to be us?” And maybe Rose was meant to be us, and if so she definitely failed in that regard – as any character would: no character can represent everyone, no matter how well (or not, even) they’re written. But some people clearly did see themselves in that selfish child – Rose has a massive fan following to this day – and I don’t want to tell them their admiration isn’t valid. Because it is.
Ideally, I want people to recognise that just because they can’t see themselves in a character, the woman next to them might. Just because they think Amy Pond/Jane Foster/Abbie Mills/Brienne of Tarth/Joan Watson/whoever isn’t a character or a person, that doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t thank god for them every day. I don’t want there to have to be a bar at all, but until then – until everyone gets to look at a character and say ‘that’s me’ instead of (though the two aren’t mutally exclusive) ‘that’s us’…
Generally when I say ‘I ship E/R’ I mean ‘it was a sad, ambiguous little unrequited love story about the power of placing another person above yourself, and it makes me cry, and I love it’ rather than…
…well, than anything else really. I sort of like the ambiguity- was Grantaire more in love with Enjolras the man or Enjolras the idea, did it really matter since they were practically one and the same, would they have ever been able to have a healthy relationship under other circumstances (probably not, but you never know), what did Enjolras think of him in their last moments…
So half the time it’s not even a requited love when I read or write about it, but that’s okay, because I always figured the…well, the point of that whole tiny little subplot was basically ‘even if you’re about as lost and low as a person can get, if you love someone enough to die for them that’s all you need’. (You sentimental old bastard, Hugo, you pulled that trick a lot…)
I think for me, the ‘count me in’, the last request, the handgrasp and the smile is all I need, I like it best as a love-as-redemption story rather than a they-lived-happily-ever-after story. Although that’s nice too of course…
