Ideology as Boundary Condition in Filmic Art

Those are really points. I felt that that Harlequinn movie, as well as the new Charlies Angels movie was a well were way too much about hammering "grrrl power!" down the audience's throat, rather than just let it speak for itself.

But why does Hollywood feel they have to make these overbearing pandering movies, when there have been all these girl power movies before that didn't do that, like The Silence of the Lambs, Set It Off, Thelma and Louise, Alien, etc...

Why does Hollywood think that his girl power is a new revolution thing, when it's been done before and better? Why does Hollywood not realize that they are just preaching to the choir by making preachy girl power movies that do not speak for themselves, compared to ones in the past that did?

The cynical answer would be that it's a business oriented around making as much money as possible and they figured that working the girl-power angle on certain films is a good way to do that regardless of how well said films are actually made. It's not "preaching to the choir" so much as hitting target demographics.

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That makes sense, but why is it that before they are more concerned about making the girl power movies good compared to now? Like with The Silence of the Lambs for example, they hit a target demographic and the movie was good.

My take on a lot of this is that it depends on the times...an obvious truism. You can go into any period of movie making and even when there's no deliberate attempt at explicit politics, nevertheless, politics can rear its ugly head years later when the issues and battle lines shift and something in a plot or character, all of a sudden finds itself sitting on a fault line. We seem to be in a period where fault lines are deeper than other times, but even that changes all the time.

One of our current cultural stereotypes is that thing called "toxic masculinity". In other periods, it was a heroic, masked hero, using his six-shooter to being peace to a lawless West, or a cop who brings in the bad guy by whatever means are necessary. It was heroic then, "toxic" now. Toxic even extends to masculinity itself, which is, in some views, a hormonal disorder.

I could ramble on all day about the conventions and stereotypes that you see in movies, but that would be too much "mansplaining". What I see in much of this is that a movie plot, like it or not, is quick and dirty. As a script writer, you have 90 minutes, or if you're lucky, 2 1/2 hours to introduce characters, situation, setting and plot line, establish a visual environment and then have a conflict and resolution. The pace has to be slow enough that that the audience can keep up with what's going on and be able to walk out of the theater and feel OK at the end.

Everything in a movie has to be a cardboard cut-out, even the moralisms. You have to be able to have a character walk on to the set and be immediately obvious as the bad guy or whatever.

None of this lends itself to subtlety in plot or depth in characters, but it's a basic limitation of the genre.

I think people are complaining about ideologies that stick out like a sore thumb Most of which are just pasted on so the soulless corporation that made the film can say see I heard you and gave you girl-heroes. Now shut up and give me your fifteen bucks.
Most don't seem to be considering the blatant ideologies that are like the air we breathe and mostly only noticed by those affected by them.

Have any of you seen Slavoj Zizek's A PERVERT'S GUIDE TO IDEOLOGY?
This film addresses the elephant in the room that we can not see because we are deep inside the interior of the elephant.

I think there's more to making a good film than simply hitting a target demographic - I think it's also a question of what film is being made. You can't exactly make a 1:1 comparison between a gritty and realistic procedural like The Silence of the Lambs to a colourful superhero action-comedy like Birds of Prey, to say nothing of all the various individual pieces that have to come together to make any film work in the first place (let alone work well).

Blackburn writes, "one of the marks of an ethical climate may be hostility to moralizing, which is somehow out of place or bad form." Likewise, in art, there are periods in which it is bad form politically to mention the political and other ages in which it is politically correct to be very political, even in a story which does not appear to invite it. But we're always doing it, implicitly or explicitly, either on the front burner or back burner.



Kuhn, writing about scientific revolutions marks the distinction between normal science and revolutionary science. In the former, matters are rather boring and people are adding footnotes to an established theory-set or "paradigm." In the latter, science is tumultuous, as the foundations of the present worldview are in conflict, the new view clashing with the old. The same is true in art. In times where a culture has a, more or less, settled worldview, change is more incremental and there is a sense of continuity, values are agreed upon, so they can safely operate in the background. In times of cultural unrest, on the other hand, there will be more explicit messaging, on the nose (shovel to the head) preaching, ad hoc emplotment, subtext-becoming-text, background-becoming-foreground.





Indeed, the reconfiguration of masculinity is fascinating to watch. There is still a space for it as a kind of "guard dog" or "trusted minion" -- the powerful male who isn't in charge, but who is summoned to protect (attack!). A strong man, but a good man. A reluctant hero. A hero who feels guilty about his old toxic ways. An ally.



We saw this pattern in old Western movies as well. The potent male of the west, the gunslinger, would have to move out of the way for the domesticating influence of civilization moving west. John Wayne shoots Liberty Valance, but it is the civilized (more rational, but less coercively capable) Jimmy Stewart who gets the credit and who carries society forward.



Civilization has always been a process of domestication, of making man fit for society. Perhaps the end of the process is to simply be done with man entirely? But will Homo-Wall-E be the soldier we really want to call up when we fight the next war?



We spent long centuries in an uncomfortable relation with the feminine, the Whore-Madonna complex. The womb of chaos, productive of life, "seducing" with "emotions," but threatening careful masculine order and rationality. "Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em!" The "solution" for femininity was "domestication." Man in charge, woman a bit like a child, cherished and protected, but never entirely trusted. Today, it's the men who are fundamentally suspect.When it all fits the fan, everyone wants Big Daddy to show up with overpowering violence. When times are peaceful, however, it feels like one has a Pit Bull (a bad dog) in the home (can we really trust the breed?).



The coming decades will wrestle with "the problem of men," and it will be interesting to see the knots writers tie their plots into trying to thread the needle. The easiest way to enjoy a classic "strong man," will be to just punt on the problem, and substitute a "strong woman."

That's a good point, that both are different movies, but I guess I just feel that Birds of Prey tried to hit me over the head with it's idealogies compared to The SIlence of the Lambs.

When it comes to action movies to come and they have strong female heroes, if they want to introduce romance or love interests, how would they go about it? Would they have a male character who is less masculine and less strong, that needs the heroine to protect him, and the heroine falls for him and saves him and they end up riding off into the sunset together, so to speak?

I think Michael Beihn and and James Cameron already solved this one for us. The protector-man helps the protagonist "level-up" during the movie so that they may take over the main action in the 3rd act. Hicks backs up Ripley at some key moments so that she may take over leadership from Lt. Gorman. He shows her how to use the pulse rifle. Reese goes back in time to protect Sarah Connor, telling her about her role in history, the vulnerabilities of the machines, and how to make improvised weapons. In the 3rd act, however, he falls away like a booster rocket, and Connor finishes off the Terminator, now transformed into the person she needs to be.



You could argue that Sarah's role is still dominated by patriarchy (she is giving birth to the man who will defeat the machines), but this is solved in Terminator: Dark Fate where the future hero who will now save the future of the human race is a female. The last man standing in the new film is a very old Arnold Schwarzenegger, basically a robotic guard dog.



Or consider Titanic. Jack literally kills himself to save Rose, tapping into old-school gender norms (women and children first!), but also reflecting new norms regarding hierarchy. Jack serves as her springboard and she lives a full life. He is there to serve her needs on the trip, the romantic counterpart to the manic pixie dream girl. How would Jack's life have turned out if he'd met Natalie Portman in Garden State?

Oh, but recent action movies with strong female heroines do not want the heroine to level up though. They want her to be just as strong right from the start with the recent ones so far.

In that case, consider the cases of male counterparts. Think of those super-macho manly heroes of the past (e.g., Shaft, Inspector Callahan, Conan, etc.). How were love-interests handled in these films? Conan fell in love with a strong woman. If so, our strong woman could fall in love with a strong man. Shaft wasn't really tied down to anyone, right? Thus our heroine could be like James Bond and just be with the "boy of the moment." Bond even used women has human shields and left their corpses behind. Turnabout is fair play. As for Dirty Harry, he didn't ever seem to need a woman. Thus, our heroine may not need a man either.

The "thinness" of our female heroines (as characters) bespeaks a restrictive political orthodoxy. Our writers have to thread the needle carefully, lest a contingent character detail be read as a political statement. It seems that every film is now read as offering a generalization of every demographic depicted, rather than a particularization of the human experience which involves contingent demographic representations.

Oh I see. I would actually like to see a female James Bond type have multiple guys per movie, like Bond did with women. But Hollywood seems to be afraid of showing a heroine who is promiscuous, at least they haven't so far.


I suggested the idea to my gf and she thought that would be a terrible idea, and who's wants a promiscuous heroine she said. So she's not on board either.

Some of the comments are reminding me that I have a curiosity to go back and watch In the Cut "someday." A movie that was mostly panned at the time, but to my understanding, people have been revisiting and basically saying, "yeah, we just didn't appreciate what you were going for at the time."


Granted, I also have never seen Basic Instinct nor Fatal Attraction because I was too young for them when they came out. So, I might be lacking the context of what In the Cut is in response to.

I will also make the observation that a lot of the complaints seemed to be about rah-rah girl power superhero movies. Maybe because I'm not a big consumer of them, but I'm under the impression they aren't exactly known for being subtle in the tone they're trying to convey.

well when it comes to Birds of Prey, I read the Batman comics as a kid and they did not have these kind of in your face themes the movie was trying to portray.


However, I haven't read the Wonder Woman comic. And in the Wonder Woman movie, or at least the first one, they make comments about how men are dangerous and possibly evil it. The movie seems to have possibly an anti-male stance. But were the comic books like this with these themes?

Who is saying this about In The Cut?

Eh, critics I listen to/follow on podcasts. Something I heard pop up a couple of times in the past year or so in either lead-ups to The Power of the Dog or revisits of The Piano. Things start to blur together in my memory.

Right, political boundary conditions, in part, determine what is "behind the times" or "ahead of the times." The contingencies of fashion also come into it, but if you're looking for a "logic," I'd say look to the political background. Myself, I'd rather not be so ahead of the times as to be burned as a witch or to not see my work profitable until after my death.



Good comedians (IMO) are in tune with the zeitgeist for a number of years. When they fall out of fashion, I think it is because they're no longer "in tune" with the culture's sensibilities -- they're no longer that prism through which the light of culture is divided into various spectra. Most comedians seem to be solid for about a decade before they're out of touch. And indeed a good joke is premised on being ahead of the listener, but not too far ahead of the listener. The joke has to land with the "snap" of the listener catching up at the punchline. A cutting edge movie is in the same predicament, no?

Not if they're cutting edge in a truly progressive way, instead of being "cutting" by just being offensive, like the gender dynamics I've talked about in Die Hard, which still hold up very well, even over thirty years later, as opposed to the portrayal of the same thing in a lot of Bond movies (hey, they were just as sexist in the 60's as they are now; it just took a while for more of society to realize it).