Did anybody else think that Colossal was incredibly misandristic?

I haven't seen the film and have no opinion on its alleged misandry, but this...

...was quite explicitly not his rationale. It was this:

Reiterated here (which you just responded to):

Pretty important distinction between "it's misandristic to depict a male as a bad guy," which is what you claim he said, and "it's misandistric to depict all the males as bad," which what he actually said.

And your response to this was "Bad men exist in reality," which sure doesn't seem like the kind of response you'd accept if the roles were reversed.

I'd say there's a pretty important distinction between "most people are decent and to think otherwise is to believe the worst about people" and "if you aren't a brainy good person with a spine then you aren't a real human being", yet here we are.

As for the "bad men exist" comment, it makes sense in context if you've actually seen the film in question - namely, the idea that one bad man emotionally abusing his friends does not automatically make his friends bad, yet by Theophile's black-and-white definition it does.

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I'm not sure how that explains or addresses the misrepresentation I was talking about.

It's pretty clear from the earlier comments that he's allowed for this in talking about portraying them as "dumb," which in this case I assume is a reference to how gullible or easily manipulated they are.

Again, I think the sex-swap hypothetical is instructive: a film where every female character was either bad or blatantly obeying someone bad (particularly if the lead were male and not as subject to that manipulation) would, I feel fairly certain, raise some red flags.

"X exists in reality" is something you can say about any type of person you care to depict, however generalized or uncharitable that depiction clearly is to any demographic.

Because his definition of a "decent" person starts off broad ("most people are decent") but gets even more specific as the discussion progresses (to the point where anyone who doesn't meet the "brain/spine/good person" requirement doesn't count as a "complete human being", which is in the second part you quoted), so I'm trying to illustrate how absurd his definitions are becoming by extrapolating from his latest definition.

You assume wrong - the character in question is just a simple guy who the protagonist has a one-night-stand with while she's still being a dysfunctional alcoholic, yet Theophile describing this as straight-up seduction makes it sound very different.

And Get Out would raise red flags if it was about a community of black people kidnapping and brainwashing white people. Such is the nature of basing narrative conflicts around systemic power imbalances.

The part where I wrote "Bad men exist in reality" was part of a larger paragraph about how I was making the case that the other male characters were actually more decent (relatively speaking) than Theophile thought - as I've noted repeatedly, his interpretation of the characters hinges on a simplistic good-versus-evil binary where anyone who isn't actively trying to stop the villain might as well be on his side and I maintain that the characters are more complex than that.

Ding ding ding. Exactly.

If your position ultimately rests on the premise that these sorts of generalizations are less important (or perhaps totally unimportant) when they're used against a privileged or more historically powerful group, then that is your real reason and you should simply say so, rather than argue some point downstream of that premise.

No, I've been constantly trying to point out how Colossal takes this approach as a means of addressing different themes and issues but Theophile wants to boil it down to a simple yes/no answer to his original question (and it's not like me just flat-out saying "no, it's not" would've gone over much better) and interpret whatever I say to fit within that limited framework (e.g. me saying "it's not saying all men are bad, it's saying toxic masculinity is bad" yet he still interpreted that as "all masculinity is toxic"). It's good to know that my arguments are the ones that need dissection from someone who hasn't seen the movie, though.

I'm not leveling an opinion about the film or the larger debate, and I'm not sure why I'd need to in order to point out that saying "your rationale is" followed by something which is not his stated rationale is probably not a fair thing to do.

Also not sure why my more specific points and questions keep getting met with broad condemnations of other things Theophile is saying, though that seems related to the implication that I'm somehow being unfair to you in pointing this stuff out, as if it shouldn't matter because you're right in a more general sense (which very well may be).

Here I was thinking that the whole point of that particular phrase was to demonstrate that I understood the logic he was putting forth enough to be able to extrapolate in a way that outlined its flaws - I mean, I had already pointed out how his rationale had shifted considerably so as to justify that particular extrapolation before doing so (recapped above in posts addressed to you). I do have to wonder if trying to challenge the specifics of my arguments isn't your means of doing that - on that note, I think I already went ahead with the "society favours men" line on the last page so it's not like you can gotcha me over that anyway.

If the idea in restating things back to him that way was to demonstrate an understanding of them, I...don't think that comes across. Happy to take you at your word as to the intent, though.

Regardless, this is not a pedantic detail. The ability to repeat the other person's position back to them in a way they would agree with should pretty much be a prerequisite for disagreeing with them. In broader contexts this is called the Ideological Turing Test, and it's a rubric I find myself using pretty often these days.

It's not clear what "that" means from the preceding sentence, but I'm guessing based on similar past fisking-bristling that you think I'm trying to find some roundabout way of supporting his position. I'm not, though if you're willing to believe that based on so little, then I can't imagine you're going to find this denial all that convincing, so oh well.

Not trying to. I'm not suggesting this is a trick or a deliberate obfuscation. But it is fairly common for people to advance an argument that sounds as if it's based on a shared, neutral premise, only to reveal after some back-and-forth that it's actually inferred from a broader unshared premise.

This is something people do a lot, and something I've learned to look for, and something I usually point out when I see, if only because a depressingly large amount of debate occurs downstream of the actual point of contention.

No.

Sometimes I think some movies can come across as misandristic or sexist, even if they do not intent do. I remember when I saw American Reunion, I thought it was sexist against men, cause the female characters were trouble makers that the men kept having to suffer for, even though it was all done for laughs, but it was probably not intended to be sexist, and just meant to be good dumb fun.

1. I am still thinking about and considering this point; you have given me food for thought here.

2. To me, one of the parts of a good movie is that I have somebody with whom to empathize, to understand and to feel for. If a movie does not give me somebody to care about (unless it is a comedy, then this can sometimes be circumvented), then I will like the movie a lot less. (This is one of the reasons that Episode I was so bad.) With so many characters and only the woman even partially likeable, it made the movie much worse to me. I have never seen Reservoir Dogs; I can't stand Quinton Tarintino. His movies are violence for the sake of violence, language for the sake of language and the glorification of basically evil people. I don't like any of those things. I have seen two of his movies and I thought that they were both really, really bad.

3. "Ask President Trump." What in the world does that mean? As to the rest of it, you don't address any of the many and large inequalities which wholeheartedly favor women in this country. Either defend your "society that has developed in favor of men", properly dispute my points and/or concede this point.

4. Most people are decent. The fact that they chose only to put one decent person in this movie does not disprove that point. It only proves the lazy and/or skewed writing of the screenwriter. Of course every person qualifies as a human being to me. I am talking in overall terms, especially regarding movies, in that sentence. Don't try to take my discussion of the movie's characters and then insinuate that I don't think that cowards or idiots are not human beings or real people. That is lowbrow for a proper discussion at best and slanderous at worst.

5. The Bechdel test in reverse would be "Do two men have a conversation in the movie without talking about a woman". Both Bad Mom movies and the Annihilation movie all fail that test. Who cares? They were great movies. The test is insipid; it is incredibly flawed. In a porn which denigrates women, if two women talk about their hair for thirty seconds, it passes the "pro-woman" Bechdel test. However, in a movie about Margaret Thatcher, where she only talks to men because the rest of her government (and her husband, of course) were all male, it is not a pro-woman movie according to the test. It is a stupid test. I only brought it up to point out that, if a movie is good, I don't care about the gender of the characters. I only notice it if the movie is bad and/or the division of good/bad to female/male is so skewed as to get my attention. For example, Black Panther was a decent movie. However, men were about half good/half bad (or outright evil). There was only a single woman who was bad (the girlfriend of the villain, who is an incredibly minor character). Every other woman, up and down the line, is a good guy. That bugged me. Hundreds of women and none are fighting for the bad guys (save the one)? Really? What are the odds?

I don't mind male bad guys; in fact, I expect them. However, it is a nice surprise once in awhile to have some parity. One of the nice things about Kingsmen II was that the main bad guy was female (and she did a great job in that role). In that movie, there were good men, good women and bad men and bad women. I just can't stand the double-standard that says that all/most women are good and that also says that all/most men are bad.

actually the movie is accurate because all women are good and all men are bad

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While I don't get sarcasm, I do believe that you are using it in this case. However, if you are not, then you are wrong.

It just goes to show bad boys get little pussy while good boys get plenty of pussy, that's unfair. It must be capitalism at work.

I can certainly see why a self-identified conservative would want people who disagree with his personal ideology to at least be able to understand said ideology enough to disagree in a way that doesn't just resort to simply lumping him in with the willfully ignorant bigots who have become so commonly associated with the term. In any case, it's certainly something to keep in mind.

"That" as in "the same thing I was doing, namely extrapolating", but now I figure that your whole Turing-test practice involves trying to keep the conjecture to a minimum. Anyway, I already figured that you're less interested in agreeing with either one of us on the actual discussion (especially since you haven't seen the movie so you couldn't do it anyway) than on pointing out the rhetorical flaws by themselves. I almost want to take that as a compliment that you're taking the time to offer constructive criticism, but it's a bit distracting.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think it might come down to miscommunication on the parts of the individuals, though.

That is legitimately good to hear. I know that it may sound like a phrase that just labels all men as bad for no good reason, but it's ultimately better to understand that being a man doesn't have to be about thinking and acting badly just because it's what everyone expects being a man to involve.

I imagine that wanting to empathise with good characters is true of a lot of people with a lot of movies, but then it becomes a question of what happens if (in the case of Colossal) a movie gives you character/s that it explicitly wants you to empathise with and care about and you simply don't do that - is that necessarily the film's fault? Sometimes, a film's strength lies in how it gets us to understand (or empathise with) characters who are flawed so as to better understand those flaws as they exist in ourselves, even if those characters are ultimately bad. That's even true of Tarantino films, which I generally don't consider to be glorifying evil people - most characters who make it out of his movies alive are closer to good than evil anyway.

This was a joke of sorts referring to how Donald Trump, a businessman/celebrity with no political experience whatsoever, won the presidential election over Hillary Clinton, a woman who had decades worth of political experience. While I'll admit that this is simplifying that particular situation a bit, I thought that the concept of a game show host becoming leader of the free world was an especially extreme (but rooted-in-truth) illustration of how much society can allow a man to succeed despite his personal shortcomings.

I addressed a few of them already, though (rape allegations/the draft/domestic abuse) as examples to further my point, but like I said before, the numbers only tell you one side of the story. I couldn't argue against the numbers by themselves if they are accurate, but the context is what's important - what if the emphasis on women being more likely to get scholarships and go to college reflects how much men are encouraged/favoured to do work that requires neither of those things (and what if the 93% of job deaths happens because the most dangerous jobs are being done by men so that inflates the average)?

Sorry about the misinterpretation then. I don't want to get the wrong idea about what you mean either because, as noted by Yoda, it just drags the conversation out for no good reason. That being said, you still haven't addressed my point that a story doesn't need "decent" characters just because "most people are decent" and it seems like we're going in circles over this exact point (especially since you've got such a high standard for what's considered a decent person, "human being" comments or not). I certainly don't think that calling the writing lazy and skewed is fair because it implies that the writer simply didn't think it was worth the effort to accommodate this particular assertion even though I argued that a) the film doesn't need to do that and b) it technically does this but it doesn't meet your particular standard.

Like I said before, the Bechdel test isn't necessarily meant to reflect a film's actual quality (there are bad films that pass it and good films that don't) so much as draw attention to a certain blind spot in how women are (or aren't) represented on film. It's supposed to show how weird it is that roughly half the population is female yet most movies only show female characters in limited roles that ultimately revolve around their relationships to men - the point is that the test sets such a low bar to clear and yet so many films don't clear it. That's why it's absurd to talk about a reverse Bechdel test - because there are so many films where men don't talk about women that there's no need for a test. Even in my current top 10, only one film passes the Bechdel test. It's always good to at least pay attention to whether or not a film's passing or failing the test to make a greater point - Colossal fails the test but that's because it's about an abusive relationship between a man and a woman, while Black Panther's skewed nature is justified in-story because the villain only has a small crew of people to work with (and him being willing to shoot his own girlfriend underlines his villainy) as opposed to the hero being the king of a country that has had an established all-female warrior unit for ages.

Yeah, well, that's your opinion, I guess. I just figure it's worth asking yourself if there's a point to that kind of narrative choice or not rather than just straight-up disliking it because of some basic personal preference or standard that you think isn't being met.

I'd answer with my usual granularity, but you've got a big discussion going on already and it sounds like we understand what the other's saying, so I'll spare us both the effort and say thanks for the response.

I have never heard of this movie and I dont know why but it sounds interesting if it encourages this sort of conversation and I do like Anne Hathaway a lot. Thanks for the headsup up, guys.

I have been thinking about this. I understand that there are certain parts of gender stereotypical actions that a person would abhor. However, I wonder, where is the movement against Toxic Femininity? Why have they not been called out the way that masculinity has?


As per my previous post, there seems to be a trend today where all men are perceived in movies as either heartless (evil), idiots and/or cowards (spineless). Let me call this The Wizard of Oz Syndrome (since the Tin Man was looking for a heart, the Scarecrow was looking for a Brain and the Lion was looking for Courage (a spine). All men are presented this way. I watched another movie the other night called Infinity Baby. Every male character in the movie was missing at least one of the components listed above (hence, they were flawed). The protagonist, Ben, had no heart and no courage. The uncle, Neo, had no heart. Fenton had no heart. Of the guys who took the baby, one had no heart and no courage and the other had no brain. No male in the movie showed all three of the traits to make them whole, good people. However, every female showed these traits. Why must men be degraded in this way, but women are not?


You mean how a man who was not part of the swamp and who had not committed multiple felonies defeated a woman who was part of the swamp and who had committed multiple felonies? How in the world does that boil down to gender? It is about who did what and who broke the law and lost the trust of the American people. Gender had nothing to do with it.

O.k... there were a lot of statistics in there which I don't mention (these posts need to be broken up into smaller ones for easier discussion, I do admit), most of which you don't address. However, it boils down to the fact that men, in movies and in society, are treated as expendable, while women are treated as something above men and their lives are treated, in film and in society, as more valuable.


O.k... I am getting lost here. Movies suck if there is not a person with whom I can identify. I don't like Quieten Tarintino films because of this and many other points. If I can't identify with a person in a film, then it becomes just a narrative to me and absolutely pointless. We may have to agree to disagree on this point because it is becoming too esoterical and theoretical. However, I stand by my point on it.


If something is to be applied to one gender, then it should be applied to both; what I hate most is double-standards. If the Bechdel test is to be held in regard then it should be looked at for the other way as well. I don't mind if it occurs, but the fact that it happens (and it happens both ways) should not be held against films in only one direction.

As for Black Panther, there are hundreds of people in the movie and on the battlefield. However, only men are on the wrong side whereas every single woman (except for the girlfriend of the bad guy) is on the good side. How is that statistically possible? How is there not a single bad woman except for her? Really? Every villain is male and every woman is good? Really? The damnation against men is astounding.

(Note: We need to break up these points into separate posts, but I am not sure that, even then, some of them would not be lost in the discussion. Be that as it may, thank you for the rational discussion.)

Because, assuming that it even exists in the first place, it is not nearly as much of a problem as toxic masculinity. As with the Bechdel test, not everything automatically requires an opposing counterpart to exist.

Because men can take it. Besides, I still get the impression that it's less a trend and more the result of you having some really precise requirements for liking a film and its characters that a lot of films just don't happen to meet for whatever reason.

[quote]You mean how a man who was not part of the swamp and who had not committed multiple felonies defeated a woman who was part of the swamp and who had committed multiple felonies? How in the world does that boil down to gender? It is about who did what and who broke the law and lost the trust of the American people. Gender had nothing to do with it. [quote]

Based on his pre-election promises and post-election actions, he doesn't even match your Wizard of Oz standard for a good man - and that was before he made the swamp worse and came under investigation for felonies himself. It'd be one thing if it had just been an unqualified man winning, but he has repeatedly shown himself to be worse than that.

I figure it's worth questioning why these concepts exist rather than just complaining about them existing. Maybe men get considered expendable because of the idea that only men are truly capable of doing dangerous jobs like fighting wars while the women have to stay home and raise families. This also brings into question exactly how women are treated as valuable in society, namely how much of that is dependent on what men want from them and how badly they can be treated if men do not consider them valuable (or even if they do).

That may well be your perception and I can't necessarily convince you to change that, but given what you've written I wonder what your criteria for a character you can identify with would be. A character doesn't have to be unambiguously good to be relatable - sometimes seeing parts of ourselves reflected in characters who are notably flawed or villains is meant to be part of what the film is trying to communicate. The characters in Colossal are all flawed to one extent or another, but I can still find reasons to sympathise with or even relate to some of them and I've made those reasons clear in answering this thread because I try to accept what the film is doing beyond whether or not it meets an arbitrary expectation of mine.

The Bechdel Test itself isn't a double standard, it was created in response to a double standard for reasons that I have already listed. You can't "look at it the other way" for the same reason you can't ask why there's no Straight Pride parades or no White History Month - because it would be completely and utterly redundant. As I said before, not everything needs a counterpart.

We've. Been. Over. This. Correlation does not equal causation. All the villains happening to be men is not meant to indicate that all men are bad. We are talking about a movie that's named after its male lead hero who has multiple male allies, after all. Is Star Wars prejudiced against men because its sole female character happens to be on the good guys' side? No, it is not.