But action movies aren't about average people.
Of course they are bout average people. We require heroes with whom we can identify, with whom we feel at home. Our heroes are just inflated images of ourselves.
If I was rich. If I was daring. If I were strong. If I were a little more gifted.
We see Conan's village get pillaged.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. His father worships Crom. He was born in an age of high adventure. We see Conan taken to the great wheel and see him brutally trained and imagine ourself reliving our own childhood in such stark conditions. We are the child. Conan is the lion that roars in the breast of every man.
We've run so far with such imagining today that some people actually believe that they're cats or vampires, (or even kitty vamps as I recall from a furball in this forum a while back, cough, cough). There were some people who so strongly identified with Avatar that they wanted to become blue cat people and live on Pandora. Remember that?
Or at least they seldom are (a few action movies are about hitchcockian heroes suddenly becoming hardened sharpshooters, fencers and brawlers when the circumstances demand it). They usually imply that, unlike the goons he faces, the super agent spec op military spy cop archaeologist hero spends -or has spent before retirement- all his time training in all kinds of combat discipline as well as diving and driving and horseback riding and helicopter jet plane space shuttle piloting (and also guitar, because the Hong Kong Cavaliers won't sing a cappella). A few of them just going for semi-supernatural gifts, depending on how serious they pretend to be (I have a fondness for Trinita movies where the hero, the fastest and most accurate gun in the west, as well as its most agile gymnast, while simultaneously being its laziest and perpetually idle cowboy), but most rationalize the hero's expertise and abilities. And his difference from you and me.
The difference is not substantive.
You are Buckaroo Bonzai. You are the poor capitalist who believes he is a temporarily frustrated millionaire. What is crucial is that you identify with that hero so that you may have the emotional release of that difference (i.e., to actually be a hero yourself, when, in fact, you suck like the rest of us).
Now whether the public takes cues from it, and infers from the movie that they can improvise a roundkick, smash headfirst through a window and dive into a waterfall is a broader question. The sum of fiction-fueled misconceptions are infinite, be them medical, historical, geopolitical, social, psychological, astronomical, etc. Mythbusters only scratch the (physics) surface.
Oh, but they do take cues from it. The public stupidly thinks that silencers make firearms whisper silent (because they've seen it in the movies). They think that the purpose of a defibrillator is to restart a "stopped" heart (because they've seen it in the movies). They think that the police are required to give you exactly ONE phone call when you are taken to jail. Even Ronald Reagan asked to see the "War Room" after he was sworn in.
People see it. It looks real. It is raw visual experience, so on some level, the is processed as reality (I saw it). An when "facts" are shared, we may conflate this with common knowledge, or worse, fall into the belief that writers really do their homework. Cinema is a kind of magic in this regard.
But you seem to argue that combat training makes zero difference in outcomes simply predetermined by corporal mass. That you or I would defeat anyone smaller or lighter than us (male or female, no reason to focus on gender), no matter their rank in no matter which combat discipline.
And you seem to be enamored of strawmen. Again, we're speaking of the average person. The average person is not trained nor are they a physical outlier. They're just average. And an average man will have an advantage over an average woman.
This advantage is so great that we have very few battered men's shelters and very many battered women's shelters.
That would sure spare law enforcement and military institutions some time and money. In my eyes, that's just as naive as what you pretend to denounce.
And if I actually claimed that, I suppose you'd have a point. Shrugs...
Think about it that way : if you agree that, at equivalent mass, an overly trained killer would beat you by a large margin, than you can assume that a smaller overly trained killed would beat you by a lesser margin. Or do you think that the efficiency differential is nullified by the slightest milligram of difference ?
It depends. An average man would be slaughtered by Serena Williams on the tennis court. Then again, she would not even rank on the top 200 for male players. The world's best female gymnast can tumble and run and perform miraculous feats. But there are many millions of adult males who will be able to bench press more.
We're not talking milligrams (LOL). In the U.S. men outweigh women by thirteen kilograms on average. If weight didn't matter we wouldn't have weight classes in boxing and wrestling.
And we should remember that our wonder-chicks tend to be smaller than the average American female and that they are pitted against similarly trained foes, usually several at a time. Again, it is all ridiculous. It's just that some conceits are more ridiculous than others (e.g., Bond's "laser watch" is complete horse s--t, where it is entirely possible to make an old British sports car disappear in a cloud of smoke as it travels down the road--in fact they do this quite naturally).
Because, from then on, the fiction's fantasy is just a matter of expertise level. What apples compensates what oranges, knowing that some compensate some.
You could be the most theoretically expert person on the planet with regard to the game of soccer, but that doesn't mean that you will ever be able to play the game at a high level.
Physical attributes do enter into the picture.
Now, i'm not an expert at the art of harming people
Are you sure? Because your posts are giving me cancer.
Sorry, bad joke.
(an art I have a significant disdain for),
And yet you seem prepared to fight for the death of an equalitarian vision of women as death-dealers in our fantasy space of cinema. Isn't that just a little curious?
but as far as I know, the human body is covered with enough vulnerabilities (genitals are genitals, a nose is a nose, a carotid is a carotid) to ensure mutual destruction past a certain applicable force, given enough howto and abilities.
Tell you what. You raise an army of women. I'll raise an army of men. When the dust clears, we can revisit your hypothesis of mutually assured destruction as an equalizer for those with enough expertise.
No, there are movies meant for the public to take pleasure in identifying themselves to the goliath.
Indeed, we are puppies who lie to imagine ourselves as wolves. For David to beat a Goliath, however, is to grow a little in stature. Moreover, our Goliath heroes are themselves dwarfed by their opponents (Dutch fights the
Predator) and constrained by their morality (Dutch protests that he is operating a rescue squad and not a murder squad to Dillon).
That's a different power fantasy.
Different branches of the same tree.
Take all the classic bar scenes where some tiny guy provokes the Seagal/Schwarzenegger-built hero.
The guy is rarely tiny. And there are usually several guys who threaten our hero. For Arnold to kick the crap out of a fifteen-year-old wouldn't really be manly would it? Our baddie must be big enough, use an unfair tool (e.g., a knife), and will probably attack in a pack. Otherwise, it's like watching an NFL team play against a high school team.
And of course, many stories mix them, making the heroes themselves a couple of David and Goliath (Asterix and Obelix, Hill and Spencer, cake and eat it). And, to complexify things, davidness and goliathness can apply to different abilities, different fields in which the spectator's thrill doesn't come from identifying to an over-performing underdog, but to an obvious power's very obviously expectable crushing of his very obviously lesser opponent. People also like to identify to unambiguously dominant power. Economically, "people" love poetically satisfied paupers, love rising self-made men, and love established aristocrats. People are all over the place, with fluctuations through epochs and parallel subcultures, and art -like politics- reflects this. People cheer and vote for smug, dominant powers just as easily, if not more, than for the underdogs that resemble them.
People identify with many things, true. However, they must still identify with them.
I'm not certain in what sense you use the notion of "coding" here, it sounds very essentialist.
Norming at a cultural level. The attempted writing and re-writing of our collective conscience through art.
In fact I see reductionism in all the subjects of this discussion.
All explanation is reductive.
There is -as ever- an evolution of values, but no culture is homogeneous. Of course, good guys and bad guys fluctuate with trends : Bad guys used to be savage natives, then genocidary colonists. They used to be commies, then corporate capitalists. During the Gulf War (which France was critically reluctant to join), US's baddies were suddenly french in addition to arabic. Fictions mirror, illustrate and reinforce cultural values and social concerns (the reds, the atom, the yellows, the genes, the computers, us, them). And a moment's dominant scandal. And nowadays, baddies are often rapey white males (that used to be heroes). "Often".
I think I've said as much in this thread.
But it's always mixed, it always overlaps.
But there are also dominant trends that can be identified as such. Again, we're speaking of what is typical. You seem to want to use the atypical a disproof of the typical, the edges to disprove the average.
The current imbecile "culture war" making everything over-sensitive,
Imbecilic or not, it is quite real. Jussie Smollett faked an attack on himself to fight what he thought was the good fight in battling this war.
the slightest fluctuation is perceived as some total radical global apocalyptic inversion.
What can I tell you? There was a time when feminist concerns were dismissed for the same reasons.
This is just hysterical. You go too far. It's not as bad as all that. You're just over-sensitive. It's just a movie.
There are always fictions where the overreaching State is the enemy,
Is that really a fiction? What year is it, again?
And the examples of male/white heroes being replaced by females/minorities are still more marginal
On the contrary, they are quite typical. To say otherwise is to deny what is patently obvious, especially as regards this genre.
I remember a few years back when concerns about "wokeness" were dismissed with the claim that "It's just wacky students on college campuses. It won't spill out into society." Fast forward, and we're reintroducing segregation and racial essentialism. Turns out it wasn't just a marginal thing, but an emerging trend. So no, I will no longer pretend that this is not happening or that it is not significant. It was a noteworthy trend with people of color and women were suppressed in art. The inversion is also worth noting, whether it be for good or ill.
than their dramatic publicizing -positive and negative- makes it look like. That's still how many white male action heroes, for how many female/minority ones ? Does it reverse the over-representations yet ? Are white males factually as crushed/replaced/excluded as the masculinist moral panic makes it sound like ? "But but 100% of Thors are now female", yeah but what proportion of Avengers ? What proportion of superheroes ? What proportion of action heroes ? Of movie main characters ? Compared to actual society ?
It's enough to be a pronounced trend. It is too easy now to summon examples off of the top of one's head.
Why deny it? Why dimiss it as mere masculinist moral panic?
Why are not even willing to consider it?
There is not one signal, or one "coding".
Again, we're in agreement. But that does not mean that there are not codes or that some codes take up a lot more bandwidth than others.
That's my main issue with such kind of analyses. It feels great to summarize society, culture, or cinema production in one sentence, one narrative, one causality and one effect. But that is not how culture functions.
Well, the body certainly depends on its vital organs to survive, but that does not mean that a vital organ is not necessary to life. To be an expert in hear health is to be an expert in something important. And it would be ridiculous to pooh-pooh such expertise from the armchair of general systems.
We can observe, more or less, discrete trends in society and culture. They exist. We may comment on them.
Contradictory models coexist, remotely and closely.
Very often in the same artwork.
Virilism (the "real manhood" that is so dear to some forumers around here) is alive and kicking (Fast and Furiously) and simultaneously derided in various movies (and series, and comics, and games) of various genres - sometimes within the same movie, consciously or not.
Another attack on masculinity. Curious. This time couple with a subtle
ad hominem on fellow posters.
Those cavemen and they virile fantasies! If you cannot deny that it is happening, perhaps you can justify the notion that this is "a time for change?" Alas, you would have to reverse course and admit that the trend.
Alas, I am sure that the feminist was once told that movies were not all that misogynistic, but also the femininity needs to be put in it's place.
Because all of it is the product of a self-contradictory collectivity. There is no hegemony.
And yet there are dominant trends. Times do change, do they not? By your analysis they cannot and do not, because
"Hey, everything is always simultaneously true and there are all these contradictions, and who can really say what is happening in society?" And yet times do indeed change.
People just freak out about different currents in a wide sea.
If you were ever on a ship in the ocean, tossed around in a storm like a toy, you would better appreciate the magnitude of your own metaphor.
Exactly like religious/secular people freak out about society being totally secular/religious.
Sometimes they are right to do so. But you insist on deprecating this as a "freakout" an "irrationality, a "hysteria."
People confuse situations with trends, and also exaggerate the trends.
People also confuse trends with mere situations (the Titanic is merely taking on water, don't worry, this ship is unsinkable!) and underestimate trends (e.g., stock market collapses). The sword cuts in both directions. That there is one sort of bias does not really prove anything.