Feminism in movies: refreshing or overplayed and extreme?

Well to address that point, I don't think it's that people are mad that movies like Captain Marvel exists, it's just that I think a lot of people are mad that so many movies are like that, where Hollywood just doesn't seem concerned with telling a good story anymore. Not only are so many movies coming out that are superhero movies, it's just that they are often bad superhero movies.

So I thought people were just disappointed that there is so much of it now, compared to just a couple of movies.

There has always been a ton of garbage coming out of Hollywood. It's just that no one remembers the garbage from forty years ago unless it was so bad as to be memorable. The same year that Star Wars came out studios were pumping out blatant Jaws knock-offs like Orca and Tentacles. An ill-received sequel to The Bad News Bears came out. Hollywood has never been above a blatant cash-grab.

We look back at older decades and it seems like there were just gems, but that's because the crud around it has been forgotten.

Yes, it's easier to make movies these days and so it's possible for more junk to make its way into the world. But last year alone gave us Knives Out, Parasite, The Lighthouse, The Farewell, Dolemite is My Name, Body at Brighton Rock. These were all, in really different ways, interesting and good stories.

There are just so many good movies around these days. Either new stuff coming out or old stuff that's now at your fingertips thanks to streaming services. From where I sit it's a great time to be a fan of film.

Oh okay. Well is that the good stuff is not being advertised as well lately, that I am missing a lot of it, or why is it that it seems to have fallen under the radar for me?

Yes, that’s fair enough. I suppose people have a tendency to pay more attention to things they dislike. Also, I suspect they don’t really want to support female characters of any kind, but don’t want to say so. That is, indeed, annoying. At least try to have a balanced argument before whining, I agree with you there. Personally, I’m very ambivalent on the issue. It might take me some time to phrase it better, as I’m now working. I’ll think about it some more and hopefully be more specific when I get back.

Of course, but as many people have said, the very fact of newer films pushing an agenda (feminist agenda in this case, though it’s not just that) often takes away from the quality of the plot and result in improbable behaviour. They center on men, but they seem to metaphorically stop in the middle and make a point about women. Anyway, that was a point about my personal experience and I’m making no claims as to its universality. I do feel that the Bond franchise has been going downhill after ‘Casino Royale’ (‘Skyfall’ was great too, but not as great in my opinion) partly because of the conflicting priorities of the producers. I can give arguments of sorts, but they won’t resonate with everyone. Also there’s this: it’s one thing if someone tried to make a balanced well-written film and just flat-out failed, but it’s more of a shame if they failed because the feminist agenda jarred with the rest of the context/fictional world.

‘Kill Bill’, of all things, works very well as a feminist statement, regardless of what one may think of Tarantino. Everything had a reason in that film. The Bride’s quest for revenge is rooted in her femininity and her objective is to find her child. I’d also argue it is implied Bill had some sort of sexual relationship with all the Vipers. The Bride is just the youngest/most recent victim. That is realistic for who he is, and her reaction to it is also realistic. But it’s very hard for other films to have that impact, because feminism is simply not always relevant for the plot. And if it doesn’t inform the plot, why is it there? In the very simplistic films you refer to where the male protagonist’s wife/girlfriend was raped/killed/[insert action here], it at least serves to advance the plot.

I admit I may have internal prejudices that affect my experience. But so does everyone.

i think people in this thread are confusing "girl power" films with female centric fims and this thread was made to discuss how annoying feminism can become in movies where it is the centre of the plot and the characters.Birds of Prey is all about girl power while Lady Bird is female centric and wonderfully written with an excellent cast.When i watched it, i wasn't cringing like i was in Birds of Prey sometimes, because, while it is a generally feminist movie, it is not focused on that.It is a coming of age film.It is a great film and that's that.

Also, i'd like to say that what bothers me with overplayed feminsm in certain films is that it can really ruin a good film.I watched and rewatched Birds of Prey and i really liked it, but if it hadn't been so focused on girl power etc, i would have enjoyed it much more.

Finally i will add that there are tons of good female characters which i admire and enjoy to watch like Wonder Woman,Tris Prior in Divergent, Lois Lane in Man of Steel and the cast of The Help.But a lead female character in a film does not make it feminist in regards to the plot, therefore the movie is not affected by feminism cliches etc.The Help was both a film against racism and a film about feminism and women speaking up.It was very good, structured and meaningful.This tells me that feminism, if handled well, can be part of a film and not be extreme or overplayed but recently many directors and producers just don't get that and ruin their high budget films for themselves and the rest fo us.

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Fully agree.

@Takoma11, in your second list, did you mean Joe from 2013 or 1970?

Yes, and that's who I was talking about.

I am really struggling to think of action movies from the last 15 years where the feminist agenda was so jarring that it ruined a movie that was centered on a male character. In Raiders of the Lost Ark (a film that's been referenced in this thread as being an example of a "good" Hollywood film) there is a sequence where a female character beats a large man in a drinking contest. Is this the ugly feminist agenda rearing its head and showing an improbable outcome? It's a shorthand for establishing her character as strong/tough. It's not asserting that all women can outdrink men--it's setting up expectations about her character.

It's hard to discuss this without naming specific films. What is a film from the last 10 years that injects "feminism" that is plot-irrelevant?

A poster earlier said that in these films a "woman has always been hurt by a man in the past". I'm saying, yeah, that's how a lot of action films work! Women are hurt by men! The difference is that with a female lead she is often avenging her own crime as opposed to a male lead avenging a crime that was done to a woman he loved. Women being hurt by men is not a new idea in film--the newer idea is what if we actually followed the woman who was hurt instead of the man who was upset about it?

2013, the one with Nicholas Cage.

I would love to hear, in your opinion, the top 15 Hollywood films from the last 3 years that were ruined because feminism was made the center of the film.

I'm not saying these movies don't exist. I'm not saying that "cheap seats" feminism isn't a thing that studios do. But I think that it is constantly widely overstated how common it is. Maybe it's just that I don't tend to watch a ton of big box office movies, but to me it feels like there's a lot of generalizing happening. When I skim, for example, the 100 top grossing films of 2019, I see maybe a handful that you could say center "feminism" (ie "You go girl!" movies).

Overplayed anything in a film is annoying (and frankly condescending). I'm just not convinced that blatantly feminist Hollywood movies are the scourge they're being made out to be or that for every one film that is "feminist" in the way you describe there aren't 10 other male-centered films as an alternative.

You’re right that I should give examples, but my mind was half-bogged down in office mayhem at the time of writing. My bad. I agree with @mudwater’s point about Birds of Prey: it would have been a better film if it hadn’t banged on about strong women so much. I’m not talking about bad plotting or bad filming here: I mean the sheer amount of screen time girl power gets almost makes it a character in its own right.*

The scene from Indiana Jones that you mention did not jar with me. Marion is an avid drinker and participates in that contest regularly, why shouldn’t she be prepared and have tolerance?

Some examples. In Thor (sequels included), there is nothing wrong with Jane being a smart successful scientist. Even the fact she is clearly more intelligent than Thor plays well. But the part where she gets Thor’s hammer is, in my view, unnecessary, irrelevant and bizarre. Superheroes have attributes (like ancient Gods - the Thor-related section of the Marvel universe comes from Scandinavian mythology, specifically, sources like Snorri’s Prose Edda and Poetic Edda). Giving Jane Foster, who is not even super-human, Thor’s hammer is, in my view, not a logical plotting decision to say the least. That coming from someone who is no Marvel fan. I realise the female Thor thing hasn’t yet officially happened, but still.

Spy (2015) was all about providing a vehicle for an ‘unconventional’ female character. I know it’s not a film to be taken seriously anyway, but it’s just beyond the kind of suspension of disbelief one can reasonably hope for. The character had spent years behind a desk, yet she miraculously surpasses men within days of starting work as a field agent.

Wonder Woman (2017) - Gal Gadot is great, but the Amazon set up seemed artificial. Let’s look at it this way: how many films about men living in a colony without women are there? I don’t think prison films count, as that’s enforced celibacy, rather than one that the characters imposed on themselves. Why do they have to live without men? It’s too extreme and draws attention to itself. The historical Amazons, while unlikely to have amputated their breasts as a widespread practice, did in fact intermarry with neighbouring tribes.

Atomic Blonde (2017) - I love Charlize Theron and it’s not a bad film, but why does she have to be the best MI6 agent? Why can’t she just be a good one? It is also a strange idea that there can be a ‘best agent’ in any secret service organization. The Bond franchise distinguished between 0s, showing how the 00 agents were the top tier and the 0s were second best. It’s the superlatives. Why does a woman have to be the best? This is what I have in mind as the feminist message ‘jarring’.

I agree with you here, and that’s why I brought up Kill Bill. But films also work by exploring connections between people and how what happens to one person affects another. We can follow a woman who was hurt, no problem, but then it’s a one-sided film, whereas in Quantum of Solace, for example, it’s not so much that we explore how Vesper’s death affected Bond, but how his self-esteem was affected by the realisation she had never loved him and was working to save her Albanian boyfriend all the time. The Destroyer (2018) is a fine film that shows a woman avenging her love interest’s death, thus flipping the above formula. But also, women are less likely to react violently to the death of a loved one than men (unless they are SAS), it’s to do with hormones, societal expectations, and a number of other factors. I think a director has to be working triple-hard to ‘sell’ the idea that a woman would really do something violent in response to a crisis, as there are objective reasons why that’s uncommon (even brain chemistry and testosterone vs oxytocin). Not impossible, but uncommon. Hence when it’s done it seems more forced and jars more than it could have.

In any case, I do not mean to be antagonistic. You are quite right that one can choose what to watch and not to watch and that everything has a right to exist.

Will definitely watch ASAP. It has been on my radar for a while.

Well I think some movies like this also seem to have misandry in, or hatred for men. Two movies that felt that way for me were Death Proof (2007), and Teeth (2007). In Death Proof, every male character was either a serial killer, or an idiot that the female characters hated and all they could talk about how frustrated with men are in their conversations.

In Teeth, every male character is a sexual predator of some sort, either a physical assaulting predator, or a psychologically manipulative one. So I have trouble liking those movies, where they seem to be misandrist.

Where as a movie like Thelma and Louise, their still is one good male character to balance things out more (the Harvey Keitel character). Some rape and revenge movies are the same way, where every male character is a bad, like I Spit on your Grave, or Ms. 45. Is it a bad sign for a movie, where the female protagonist, who is about 'girl power' has no male ally characters, and all the men are bad people?

I daresay in Death Proof it’s intentional as Tarantino is probably being tongue-in-cheek, but there’s also that, yes. In any film where a man randomly walks around killing many women, he is branded - and actively sold as - a serial killer. When women randomly kill many men, they are... to be applauded.

The rule of the hammer seems to be kind of vague, sometimes relating to strength and sometimes being referred to in terms of "worthiness". It sounds like Jane is picked by the hammer and it transforms her. To me it sounds akin to She-Ra and her sword.

I just watched (and enjoyed) Guns Akimbo, a film in which a man who has been behind a desk for years (not even related to spy/action stuff!) manages to survive being hunted by dozens of ruthless killers. An average person stepping up to be a hero is a common narrative. The main character of Wanted is an accountant who basically overnight becomes an expert killer. In Spy, part of the point that it was making was that the main character had been underestimated. But it was really clear throughout that both male spy characters were just as talented. And she distinctly wasn't good at a lot of things, up to and including throwing up on a dead body. I haven't actually seen the film I'm about to name drop, but how is this much worse or improbable than something like Paul Blart: Mall Cop?

The Amazon society is adapted from Greek mythology much in the way that the entire society of Asgard is adapted from Norse mythology.

And male-only spaces do exist in a ton of films, ie most films about the military. In fact, many male-only spaces (such as mines or ships) will explicitly say that it's bad luck to have women around. If you're saying why aren't there male-only *societies*, that's pretty apparent, isn't it? Gender, for men, is rarely an impediment to power or autonomy. A man doesn't need a male-only society to join the army. But in this country, women needed written permission from their parents to join the military for a long time. A woman-only society is an extreme--and the movie is really clear about that. It's part of the whole point of the film. Diana comes from a place that is extremely isolated. It's what makes her a fish out of water. And the movie is also explicit about the fact that the benefits they get from isolating themselves come at the cost of not intervening in suffering in the rest of the world. I don't think that the film is arguing that a female-only society is better (witness the massacre on the beach, consider the cost of hiding in terms of people they could have helped), and the character of Steve Trevor (both his nobility and the bond he forms with Diana) speaks to that. Does Diana return to the island at the end? Nope.

Action heroes are often referred to as being the "best" in their field. Why is Bruce Willis in Hostage the best hostage negotiator in the field? Why not just a good one? I agree that the odds of a woman being the best M16 agent are low, but the odds of many things in action/thrillers are low. What are the odds that someone would end up having a showdown with a former mentor? What are the odds that the police detective grew up knowing the serial killer? These are all low-probability events, but I don't think that they involve so much suspension of disbelief that it ruins a film.

But most action revenge scenarios are already incredibly unlikely. Please someone point me to a real story about a man whose wife/daughter was killed and then he took about a whole gang of bad guys. The gap in action/violence between men and women is LESS of a logic issue for me than the idea that an average person could assemble an arsenal and take down a slew of baddies.

I'm not reading anything you're saying as antagonistic. You're not being personally insulting and it's clear that you are reading what I'm writing and giving thoughtful responses. It's absolutely possible to discuss these topics in a civil way.

From my point of view, when it comes to the list of things that I wish Hollywood would change, too many "girl power" movies is way, way down on the list.

Oh okay, but the thing about Death Proof, is that it's not just the serial killer that is portrayed bad, all the guys are. The other guys in the bar are portrayed as idiots. The women talk about how bad their exes are for various reasons, etc. So it's not just the serial killer man who is portrayed as bad though.

@Takoma11 It comes down to personal feeling, which I’ve admitted from the start. In Wanted, James McAvoy gets a lot of training. I honestly don’t remember enough about Hostage, so I won’t comment.

I don’t want to get into politics because I don’t tend to, when talking about art. But agenda-selling films inevitably do get into politics. I was trying to explain why I personally don’t dig most women-centered films. It’s interesting as one has to get pretty deep into one’s own head to decipher that. I think that women becoming the best assassins/agents etc is less likely, and you have yourself conceded the point above. That is not merely due to prejudice.

I know this is likely to get me a lot of hate, but I do believe that violent action and so forth is in men’s nature and that it isn’t in women’s nature.

When I first watched Silence of the Lambs, I must have been about 11 years old, maybe 10. I then happened to watch it with my mother a few years later. That would have been my fifth or sixth viewing. She was horrified that I thought Lector was brilliant in his own way (intellectually). It took some time to convince her that I wasn’t a psychopath. I eventually got through and explained that I liked the way the character was developed, not him personally, but I have the same sense of inarticulacy here.

There’s also this: men have historically had a macho fantasy that filmmakers aiming at male audiences have always tapped into: hence why we have the action genre in the first place. I do not believe women have a macho fantasy, and therefore, female-led action films have less of a demographic to begin with. They don’t tap into that same area of the brain. Women do feel represented in such films, yes, but I doubt they can relate to the fantasy of punching someone in a bar to a pulp ‘just because’. In fact, most women would probably describe such behaviour as ‘stupid’.

It is true that young girls want to see role models and recognise themselves in film heroines. But I believe many aspects of the action genre are alien to women both as consumers and participants. The action genre often relies on protagonists being unreasonable, hot-headed, bloodlusty and overconfident, otherwise you cannot move the plot. These character traits pertain to men more than women for the most part.

Therefore, what happens is that the genre itself is being bent and turned into something it is not to accommodate behavioural patterns more typical for women than for traditionally male action heroes. This often turns action films into slow-burns that turn out like dramas if they are lucky. I believe that is indeed inevitable nowadays (hence why I used the term ‘irreversibly progressive’ earlier), but I simply don’t think that’s a good thing.

I don’t think I’ll be able to add much else that’s not repetitive.

Well when it comes to action movies, there does seem to be a push to try to get more women in action roles lately. This can work for some stories, like Wanted, but not so much for others. For example, I remember a few years go, there was talk about an all female version of The Expendables. But is there even an audience for that?

Yes, I know, but I think that’s Tarantino having a laugh. Open to debate, of course.

Are there movies where women heroically kill *random* men, though? Who is a female character who kills innocent men who is applauded by the film?

There are plenty of movies where the male protagonist kills innocent people (like Gross Point Blank) but is still the hero of the film.

Teeth (and, oh my god I can't believe I'm defending the movie Teeth because I don't actually like it) is making a point about a sort of ironic turn of events. The main character's gender (and specifically the opportunity to be sexual/have sex with her) is what leads to violent or manipulative encounters with different men in the film. So it's ironic when her sexual organs---the literal reason men come after her--becomes a weapon with which she defends herself. The main character's stepfather is seen as a good man, and the main character isn't just out to kill any man. In fact, in the final sequence she goes to get out of a car and the man giving her a ride locks the doors on her. The implication is that she's not just out to kill any guy, only those who are predatory.

Death Proof is a throwback to grindhouse films.There are very rarely good people in those movies.

If you think that the film was made for women, please consider that there is a long lap-dance sequence of a 30 year old woman grinding on a 58 year old man. Consider the foot fetish shots (a Tarantino signature). The women dress in short cut-offs and, if I'm not mistaken, a cheerleader uniform.

Death Proof is on a similar frequency to Faster Pussycat Kill Kill!. Yeah, on paper it's about a bunch of women beating up dudes who are idiots and perverts. But the costumes (and the shower scenes) make it pretty clear that it's intended for the enjoyment of a male audience. (Meyer, I think, had a better handle on this dynamic than Tarantino, at least in Faster Pussycat.)