The radical notion that women like good movies
While watching ‘The Maze Runner,’ I couldn’t help thinking, wouldn’t this story have been so much more rich and interesting if it had been told from Minho’s or Teresa’s perspective? Why not feature a girl or a boy of color as the protagonist?
Certainly, teenagers strain against authority and exert their independence. This doesn’t mean they’re immune to other big issues that plague society – issues such as sexism and racism. If the novels being written for this demographic want to call themselves true dystopias based on a futuristic society in which our current way of living led to some global disaster, then the writers of the novels and the film adaptations shouldn’t shy away from some of the biggest issues in current politics and society.
Unfortunately, I don’t think these four “cold, intelligent women” are illuminating “problematic mechanisms of power” at all. Rather, they are expressions of the persistent distrust of female authority in our current culture. These characters serve as a type of sexist shorthand for a society gone terribly, terribly wrong.
# 50/50 5 Broken Cameras 500 Days of Summer 45 Years The 40-Year-Old Virgin 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days 9 to 5 1971 101 Dalmations 127 Hours 10 Days in a Madhouse 10,000 km 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets 300: Rise of an Empire 12 Years a Slave 28 Days Later A Abuse … Continue reading “Film Directory”
White men are background players in the world of ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ (and, of those who do appear, there’s scarcely a one who isn’t either comically inept or flat-out evil). As the lyrics of the theme song state, “White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes, but females are strong as hell, unbreakable. They alive, dammit!” The show is fundamentally about the collective trauma of growing up female in a woman-hating world.
