Movies and Society

Cripes, a lot of stuff.

I'll return shortly to talk more in-depth, but my most immediate thoughts are that I agree with Yoda on relaxing to accept temporary subdiscussions on more specific issues and Tom, I think you misinterpreted something I said about women in movies.

Yeah, the nature/nurture question is probably where the discussion gets murky. My inclination is that it's not either/or, and that the "nurture" part takes the "nature" and merely amplifies it, and that this makes it easy to mistake culture as the source of these things, rather than something which just codifies and reinforces them a bit. I certainly can't prove this, but I think the fact that some general tendencies seem to hold across wildly different cultures at various points in time is strong evidence pointing in this direction.

I wasn't trying to say that conflict is more inherently interesting, but I will make a related argument: that overt conflict makes for more efficient storytelling. Creating subtle dramatic conflict, say, in a movie about a ruptured family or relationship, takes a lot of time and empathy. You have to invest an hour in character building and relationship building before someone else is going to be in the right frame of mind to care about these made-up people and their interpersonal problems. But every human being will immediately and intuitively understand the stakes if a character's life or livelihood are in danger.

I think this is one of the reasons blockbusters have grown increasingly simplistic: it's not that other cultures (or even our own) have no interest in subtler storytelling, but that broader conflict leads to broader audiences. It's kind of like food: if you have to cater to one person, you can probably find some bizarre dish that they love, but most people don't. But if you had to make one food that millions of people would find at least enjoyable, you'd make a pretty simple dish.

It's a fine line, too: great stories inevitably involve classic dramatic building blocks. Conflict between parents and children, conflict between lovers, conflict between nations. You can do these things well, or poorly, but they recur because it's not really a story without drama, and overt conflict creates drama quickly and effectively in a way that is very difficult (and slow) to manufacture in subtler ways.

With the caveat that I'm generalizing pretty heavily, I think women are just, on the whole, a lot better at empathizing with others, regardless of how similar they are to them.

I think most movies are behind the times.. If you can name me a few current films that accurately depict modern society, please let me know!

Hi Tom,
What Yoda said.

Interesting.

Can't I? I'm speaking about adaptions in general.

Depends on the story. Expanding certain elements can improve a story across an adaption. The inverse is also true.

I'm reminded of Ender's Game which dropped it's taking-over-the-world-through-phony-internet-critics-building-social-justice-movements-against-each-other subplot, which I appreciated because it was really friggen' boring.

But then they also took out the combat which was the what made the book interesting.

On a side tangent, it's interesting to note that the Ender's Game adaption was a target of boycotts due to the author's outspoken homophobia.

...even though Ender's Game has nothing to do with homophobia and even serves as another example of sci-fi presenting a progressive intermingling of the sexes.

That's your call. I would call Watchmen "extremely tedious and grating".

Oh, I know. I just don't often see it done right.

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Omni, do you have a few examples? I didn't quite understand how it wouldn't be distinguishable? There's all the artistic freedom with the writing, etc., and there's no reason for lack of greatness. If you can give me many examples, it would increase the likelihood of finding one of the movies.... Anyone could tell you here that most of the movies I watch are from recommendations here, and many have been great, and I thank you all for that. It's a wonderful gift I'll have for life from even a single viewing.

I'm kinda the wrong person to ask here, because I don't really get into real life dramas for the very reason I gave.

That said, Locke is a great movie that incorporates modern technology like hands-free car phones to tell a story that involves playing with our modern interpretations of infidelity.

Ummm... Tokyo Godfathers... it's an animated comedy, but it's a very bleak presentation of homelessness set in modern day.

...also, again, even though it isn't a movie... Paranoia Agent.

That is, of course, exactly my point: people intuitively understand that each gender is going to be disproportionately represented in some things. They've just decided (unconsciously, to my mind) that entertainment can't be one of those things, even though when you look at the nature of it there are several significant ways in which it's like other male-skewed activities.

These are just statements, though. They may be right, but what's the argument? I've made my reasoning pretty clear: performing for lots of people is exactly the kind of adrenaline-fueled, high-stakes affair that disproportionately attracts men in other walks of life. What's more, any pursuit of fame is essentially a zero-sum game where the overwhelming majority of participants don't get very far. Men have always been disproportionately attracted to these kinds of risks.

I'm also not suggesting that "entertainment is a guy thing." I'm simply disputing the idea that anything less than a 50/50 split in a given field is prima facie evidence of sexism, especially when that field has a lot of the characteristics that disproportionately attract men in other contexts.

Sure I do: I acknowledge it in my response to the nature/nurture question. I just don't come to the same conclusion re: its effect.

Something is only a double standard if it applies different standards to things which ought to have the same standard. I don't accept the premise that the relationship a boy has with his mother is a mirror image of the relationship a girl has with her father. I don't think they can really be compared this way.

I'm happy to elaborate, but it'll almost certainly have to be in an entirely new discussion.

Because they don't have annoyingly high levels of testosterone, which are routinely shown to correlate with increased and amplified conflict.

I kind of hate giving this answer, because most people who talk about these things use these differences in biology to be really glib about complicated situations, and they downplay human agency a lot more than I'd like. So just know that this response is meant to be taken at face value, and not the start of some Red Pill diatribe.

Human cultures as opposed to...animal cultures? If so, guilty as charged: I'm talking about the differences between male and female humans. If someone asks me a question about male and female cicadas, I'll probably have a different response.

Saying cultural interdependency can reinforce some things is all well and good, but there's no way this works as a total explanation that "nullifies" all of observed human behavior, two at least two big reasons:

First, this is thousands of years, across otherwise highly distinct cultures. Think about the argument here: even if we decided it was reasonable to think every society got its mores from a centuries-long game of cultural telephone, these are still places that weren't interdependent enough to worship the same number (or types) of God, or eat the same food, or dress similarly, or have the same political systems, or even share the same levels of technological progression...but they're still using makeup because it was someone else's idea?

Second, if the mere fact of there being any cultural interdependency automatically nullified any observed human behavior, you wouldn't be left with anything: just one big, speculative counterfactual. All observed human behavior would be tainted, including yours and mine. So this isn't really a rebuttal to observed human behavior, specifically: it's more a scorched earth argument that leaves us unable to really say anything.

You say rationalizing, but wouldn't it be just as accurate to say this makes gender roles correct/natural? After all, we're not having a theoretical discussion about whether humanity, in its infancy, should have had gender roles. We're having a discussion about the humans of today (and the relatively recent past). So if this is true, this would definitively end the argument in favor of gender roles, because it acknowledges that they're now a part of who we are on a biological level.

Exactly. I almost said something like this. Came close to quoting the semi-fictional Robert McKee from Adaptation. Movies are supposed to capture truths about life, but not just depict it. There's no point in that. Even when films go out of their way to depict the duldrums of everyday living, they're not really just depicting it: they're showing you it to make a larger point outside of it that just happens to be best illustrated by depicting it.

Originally Posted by TomNice

Yoda, I agree that in the case of nature/nurture it is not either/or.

This part does not appear to be related to this part:

Originally Posted by TomNice

I feel that society and culture is going through more and more changes, in regard to how different groups are treated. 200 years ago people didn’t feel it was inconsistent with the words of the Declaration of Independence to elect a President who owned slaves. Less than 100 years ago the US Constitution did not guarantee women the right to vote. Fashions change over time. Styles of painting change over time.

If it's neither nature or nurture, I don't know what you're intending these examples to represent.

Let's not do that.

That was just an example of what I meant. Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road is considered exceptional by today's standards because she's a non-sexualized woman performing in a typically male-dominated role in an action blockbuster.

K-On! The movie from 2011 is an excellent depiction of modern youth culture and mentality.

Interesting thread Tom, I do hope you will stick around MoFo and became an active member. I'll 'try' an answer your thread topic question.

You asked about how movies both reflect and have changed societal norms. You gave as an example how men in films now a days, can be portrayed as sex objects or beautified, just like women were traditional portrayed back in the day.

I noticed the same phenomenon in reserve talking place in the late 80s/early 90s. These days the portrayal of 'macho women' who are masculinelized in films, is common place. Many modern films have muscle bound women, who are aggressive, alpha types. One of the first films to show women in this new role was Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

This image of 'Sarah' probably looks common place to the young people here, but in 1991 it was one of the first times I seen a women in a film, have the lead and take on the traditional tough guy role.


The actresses, actually did an intense work out prior to the movie to get buffed. She then, muscle bound women have become much more common place in the media/society.

Interesting is, in the first Terminator film the same actresses/character played the atypical helpless, weak female. A role that had predominated in Hollywood since the first days of the silent films. Since this film came out other films have followed and the pigeonholing of women in society has become a thing of the past (mostly).

Men also seem to have been feminized too in film. You probably see a lot machisimo in men, but not much bravery. I don't see originality - special effects isn't original. I keep seeing/hearing the same kind of cliches..

I think there's been a discussion elsewhere on the forum about representations of masculinity in contemporary cinema. To my mind, you can look no further than Mikael Persbrandt in In a Better World (Hævnen).

I never saw that movie, but it sounds like it's happening all over the world!

There ya go.

I gathered that.

I don't think anyone will argue with you on that.

Hi Tom,
Well "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" as it's said, but yeah, "attraction" is a much more broadly applicable term, and I would argue that general forms of attraction could apply equally to both men and women if there weren't already social expectations in place that encourage a disproportionate amount of women to believe that they uniquely should make themselves appear "attractive".

But they're not just statements: they're reasons. "It's because of sexism" is a statement. "It's because they're high-risk, zero-sum industries and we know people with higher levels of testosterone are disproportionately attracted to such industries" is a syllogism. I can't really argue with your statements, but you can absolutely argue with my syllogism, by disputing the premise and/or the consequent.

If you agree it's a given that anything short of a split isn't automatically evidence of sexism, then my natural follow-up is: what's the evidence?

Well, again, without elaboration this can't really be argued with. Though I can't even really imagine, even hypothetically, what the argument could be. There's no reason to expect the influence of each parent to be identical if the parents (and children) themselves aren't.

You would argue, but I don't think you have. And of course you don't have to. Bu I can't really argue back unless/until you do.

Dig.

Okay then. Why?

Then how do you define it, exactly? It seems to me any state of humanity you care to choose as "normal" is going to be arbitrary. If we've evolved into our gender roles, biologically, there's no basis for saying some earlier state was more "normal" than what we have now, or more normal than what we had a thousand years before that state, and so on.

And even ignoring this arbitrary demarcation, I don't see how this really reconciles the problem: if you admit that our nurture has manifested itself biologically, then you're admitting that we really are suited to some things more than others at this particular time in our development. You're just saying you don't like that it's happened, which isn't the same thing as saying it isn't real and/or doesn't explain any cultural disparities.

So at best, the argument would be "let's fight uphill against our own biology for hundreds of years so that at some point in the distant future our biology is different."

It's not like that at all, because we're not talking about subjugating people based on their gender. We're just talking about whether biology can help explain gender disparities in some industries.

Correct, we are not remotely justified in telling women they're not allowed to be entertainers. Mercifully, I don't think anyone's suggesting we are.

I wasn't actually saying we should accept anything. I was pointing out the logical implication of your position. You can't say that gender roles are made-up, but then say that they only exist because we've evolved into them. If we've evolved into them, then they're now real biological differences and not things we're fabricating.