Dystopia – Page 2 – Bitch Flicks

‘Mockingjay – Part One’: On YA Dystopias, Trauma, and the Smokescreen of the “Serious Movie”

Though we get a sense of District Thirteen’s manipulations in the novel, Katniss savvily negotiates with them, resists their orders, and remains distrustful of their motivations, in contrast to her comparatively slight unease in the film. While these changes leave most of the major plot elements intact, they undermine our sense of Katniss as an intelligent political actor who is connected to and moved by the revolution itself, rather than just her personal stake in the events.

This guest post by Charlotte Orzel appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Mockingjay: Part One, the latest instalment of the massively popular Hunger Games series, begins with a terrified Katniss Everdeen huddled in a corner, muttering frantically to herself in a tearful fit, before being dragged off and sedated. Even for a series whose subject matter is children killing each other for sport, from its opening moments the film presents itself as noticeably darker than its predecessors. Director Francis Lawrence paints a grim portrait as the film explores the consequences wrought by the earlier events of the series, touching on torture, the large-scale destruction of warfare, violent suppression of insurrection, the mechanics of war propaganda, and the trauma the series’ violence has inflicted on its characters. But Mockingjay’s dark trappings mask the way the film foregrounds Katniss’ desperate romantic plight at the expense of both other aspects of her character and coherent dystopian critique. In doing so, Lawrence spins the illusion of a gritty, realistic criticism of war and propaganda headed by an independent, emotionally complex female character without truly providing the substance of either.

In Mockingjay, Katniss is at the centre of a political maelstrom, being urged by District Thirteen, the military leaders of the rebellion, to help create the propaganda material it needs to incite a revolution against the totalitarian Capitol. Katniss is suffering from PTSD and distraught about the capture of Peeta Mellark, her partner and love interest from two previous rounds in the Hunger Games. But when Peeta is forced to broadcast his demands for a ceasefire by the Capitol, Katniss concedes to take on the role of the revolution’s figurehead to ensure his immunity should the rebels win. Desperate to protect him from harm, Katniss must negotiate both District Thirteen’s subtle machinations and the violent retaliation of President Snow as she becomes entangled in the representational politics of a national war.

This is a significant departure from the way these events play out in the source material. In the first half of the novel, Katniss makes several decisions that within Lawrence’s film, are influenced or made for her by the rebel government and her handlers. For instance, the novel opens on Katniss having chosen to return to return to her firebombed home district against the wishes of President Coin’s strategy team. What she witnesses there causes her to react passionately against Peeta’s coerced call for a ceasefire and willingly adopt the role of Mockingjay. She does this not to ensure Peeta’s immunity, but to do what she can to strike back against the President Snow’s regime after the violent Capitol oppression she has witnessed and experienced. After witnessing a strike on the hospital in District Eight, it is Katniss who actively seeks out the cameras to make a speech to inflame the districts against President Snow’s regime. In the film, these events are reframed as ideas conceived by the rebels and their propaganda machine to maneuver Katniss into furthering their cause. Though we get a sense of District Thirteen’s manipulations in the novel, Katniss savvily negotiates with them, resists their orders, and remains distrustful of their motivations, in contrast to her comparatively slight unease in the film. While these changes leave most of the major plot elements intact, they undermine our sense of Katniss as an intelligent political actor who is connected to and moved by the revolution itself, rather than just her personal stake in the events.

But the most important difference from the novel is the absence of Katniss’ voice from Mockingjay. The novel, told in first-person, gives the reader a clear sense of Katniss’ desires and emotional state. Both verbally and cinematically, the film often fails to articulate her feelings about the proceedings, outside a sense of generalized trauma, vague unease about District Thirteen and her mounting concern for Peeta’s well-being. Part of this problem is the reduced role played by Gale Hawthorne, who is not only a love interest to Katniss, but her best friend since childhood. In earlier films and the novels especially, Gale’s function as a character is not only to create romantic conflict, but to also advocate for the necessity of the revolution and articulate the violence enacted by the Capitol, including how it extends beyond the Games to the oppression of the districts. By cutting down his role and changing the content of his conversations with Katniss into arguments about Peeta, Mockingjay squanders a valuable opportunity to allow Katniss to voice her perspective on the political environment she finds herself caught up in. It also seems to do so to up the romantic stakes at the expense of portraying a more nuanced relationship between these characters that includes but is not limited to romantic love. Without allowing Katniss to express her viewpoints on these broader issues, through her relationship with Gale or another character, the film feels directionless except in moments where Peeta’s safety is at risk.

Mockingjay appears to justify this shift in narrative purpose through Peeta’s capture itself. The choice to continuously orient Katniss’s decision-making around Peeta suggest that it is his capture that is the major source of her trauma, the trauma that pulls her attention continuously away from the political scene. As other reviewers have argued, it’s refreshing that Katniss is permitted to show emotionally vulnerability as the heroine of a major action film. But not only does much of Katniss’ trauma stem from issues unrelated to Peeta—growing up in the Capitol’s oppressive society where she lived on the edge of starvation; being subjected to violence and forced to perpetrate it within the Games; witnessing the violent repression of resistance to the regime; the destruction of her home district—these traumatic events are precisely the reasons she should be (and in the book, is) compelled to fight back against the Capitol. It would be remiss not to mention that these aspects of her history and the film’s political themes would have also have benefitted by portraying Katniss as a woman of colour, as she is strongly implied to be in the novels. In this volume of the series, doing so would have drawn our attention to the powerful social and psychological effects of racism, and the way its violences intertwine with capitalism. This choice would have also given more potent, layered meaning to Katniss’ newfound position as the “face of the revolution.” Ignoring these important elements of Katniss’ experience and the way they affect her decisions diminishes the particularity of her pain and the complexity of her character. And framing the progression of events in this way suggests that even if we do see more political action from Katniss in the next film, it will be incited by Peeta’s victimization by the Capitol and not her own experiences of oppression and violence.

To a certain degree, Katniss is also incapacitated by Peeta’s capture in the novel. The key difference, however, is that Katniss’ mounting fears about Peeta’s torture lead to a direct conflict between her personal and political goals: any action she takes to spur on the revolution will be met with physical harm to the boy she has grown to love. This internal struggle makes Katniss feel like a whole person with a range of concerns, but it also generates the kind of narrative momentum that drives effective stories.

Making Peeta’s capture and rescue Mockingjay‘s central concern also considerably deflates the film’s dystopian themes. Mockingjay purports to have something interesting to say about capital, war, propaganda, and trauma, but without Katniss’ perspective on these issues to anchor us, they lack both nuance and coherence. Lawrence draws parallels between the propaganda produced by District Thirteen and the spectacle of the Hunger Games, but while this gives us a broad sense that we should distrust President Coin and understand that war propaganda is bad, it fails to articulate this connection in a meaningful way. The film treats Katniss’ trauma as a cue that the film is dark and serious, while simultaneously using it as an excuse for avoiding a clear stance on its political issues. Unfortunately, these problems prefigure similar issues in the final half of Collins’ book that will likely make their way onscreen in the next film.

The problem with Katniss’ detachment from the political action becomes most acute in the last portion of the film, when the rebels launch a risky mission to rescue Peeta from the Capitol. In an effort to distract the Capitol forces, Katniss speaks directly to President Snow via video feed, telling him she never asked to be in the Games or become the Mockingjay, and that she only wanted to save her sister and Peeta. She begs him to release Peeta, offering to give up her role as figurehead and disappear. Then, conceding that he’s won, she pleads to let her exchange herself for Peeta. These statements seem like fundamental betrayals of the struggle Katniss has been growing into throughout the series, but film makes Katniss’ sincerity disturbingly unclear, especially in light of the ambiguity of her political stance earlier in the film. Is she just telling Snow what she believes he wants to hear, or is she truly so desperate to save Peeta that she will sacrifice the revolution itself for his safety?

No matter which is the case, Snow’s answer – “It’s the things we love most that destroy us.” – comes across as an interpretation of the outcome of Katniss’ efforts that, strangely, the film seems to validate. Pushed by Capitol torture into a distorted reality where Katniss is a dangerous enemy, the star-crossed lovers’ reunion results in an extended, disturbing sequence where Peeta wrestles Katniss to the ground, violently choking her. She escapes the encounter, and in a final sequence, watches him in a psychiatric ward, her reflection imposed over his thrashing body on the glass that separates them, as President Coin announces the successful outcome of the rescue at a political rally. This final, ghostly image of Katniss’ tortured face is a far cry from the expression of defiance that closed Catching Fire.

This sequence might have played differently had Katniss’ efforts to protect Peeta been only part of her focus in Mockingjay: Part One, or if this plot point had only been the midpoint of an adaptation of the entire novel. But as an ending, even to a film that promises a sequel, it seems bizarrely punitive and, frankly, horrifying. The film has spent two hours leading its audience alongside Katniss as she gives all her energy to Peeta’s rescue, only to tell both her and us that not only have her efforts been useless, but her loving sacrifices have only served to weaken her against her enemies. Of course, part of the rationale for this is to set up challenges for Katniss and Peeta to overcome in the next instalment. But the film should be able to offer a narrative experience that stands on its own and can thematically justify its existence, particularly if we’re meant to pay upwards of twelve dollars to see it. Obviously, we are not supposed to agree completely with President Snow, who is essentially the embodiment of pure evil in the film’s universe. But the story’s mixed messages offer us little alternative to conceding his victory.

The success of The Hunger Games’ franchise and its dystopian imitators such as the Divergent series or the CW’s The 100 seems to suggest that Hollywood is catching on to the idea that young audiences are willing to pay to see complex female leads and meatier social criticism. Mockingjay’s marketing implores us to embrace it as a gritty critique of oppression, propaganda, and war, and a feminist blockbuster led by a powerful teenage girl with more on her mind than romance (think about both propaganda-inspired posters and Jennifer Lawrence’s press tour pullquotes about how Katniss has too much on her plate to worry about who her boyfriend is). The problem with Mockingjay is not that either Katniss’ trauma or her love interest make her an uninteresting or weak female character. It’s that the film hypocritically champions its own success as female-driven, serious social critique, while in reality treating both these aspects with little depth or care.

As Mockingjay: Part Two looms on the horizon, we should remember that Hollywood’s willingness to deliver stories packaged to appeal to certain kinds of social consciousness does not mean filmmakers will engage beyond a surface level with the issues they use to sell their films. Teenage girls, as much as any audience, deserve complicated female characters, coherent and responsible social criticism, and well-crafted narratives in their media. As critical-minded viewers, we need to continue to demand and support substantive stories within and outside mainstream Hollywood and continue to identify those movies that only lay trendy glosses over empty promises.

Charlotte Orzel will take KA Applegate over Suzanne Collins any day of the week. Her interests include YA war stories, film exhibition, marriage dramas, and making fun of True Detective. She is a Master’s student in Media Studies at Concordia University in Montreal and tweets about life and film at @histoirienne.

‘Advantageous’: The Future is Now

“Are women really going backwards going forward?”

Jacqueline Kim co-wrote the screenplay for Advantageous and also stars as its lead, Gwen Koh. — Jacqueline Kim co-wrote the screenplay for *Advantageous* and also stars as its lead, Gwen Koh.

A version of this post by Leigh Kolb previously appeared at Bitch Media and appears now as part of our theme week on Dystopias. Cross-posted with permission.

“Are women really going backwards going forward?”

Advantageous, the new film by Jennifer Phang, paints a dystopia that shows a version of the future that is regressive for women. Perhaps one of the most poignant aspects of the film is that it barely seems futuristic at all; when daughter Jules asks her mother, Gwen, “Are women really going backwards going forward?” we can’t help but involuntarily nod our heads yes, bombarded with the realities of the fictional world in front of us.

In the film, Gwen Koh (played by the incredible Jacqueline Kim) is a single mother to Jules (who is played with remarkable talent by Samantha Kim). Gwen is a corporate spokesperson for the ominous Center for Advanced Health and Living. As she pitches their new technology, she says, “So many of us enter this world with disadvantages beyond our control.” The Center for Advanced Health and Living isn’t limited to face lifts and breast augmentation. Its slogan—”Be the you you were meant to be”—doesn’t merely mean an enhanced you. Instead, this vague empowering message means their technology is ostensibly meant to give you control over your physical disadvantages.

The film—which was awarded a special jury prize at Sundance and started streaming on Netflix June 23—features stunning cinematography, excellent acting, and beautiful writing (albeit sometimes heavy-handed, which I’d prefer to writing that does not attempt to say anything). Advantageous tackles a laundry list of feminist concerns. Gwen is told that she has aged out of her role as a spokesperson, especially considering the “new you” technology they want to sell. It’s noteworthy that the head of the corporation—and the one who seems to have made the decision about letting Gwen go—is a woman of a similar age. Ms. Cryer (Jennifer Ehle) pulls the strings, which shows that it’s not just male forces that destruct and construct the feminine ideal. The world in Advantageous is one that has been designed by women, too, but it’s still a capital of misogyny—radio broadcasts reference the rise in child prostitution, middle-aged women are homeless due to unemployment, and employers prefer to hire men lest they dangerously roam the street. Gwen’s single motherhood is a source of sharp judgment from her peers and her parents. Many of these examples aren’t futuristic at all (see here, here, and here) and Advantageous does a compelling job of showing how while we may advance technologically, we have a lot of social progress to make.

Samantha Kim plays Jules, whose mother faces hard choices about how to give her the best opportunities.

Advantageous is billed as a science fiction film, but it doesn’t feel sci-fi much of the time. Every once in a while, a drone or flying vehicle will jet past, the buildings will look futuristic, or the person on the other end of a phone conversation is a hologram. But for the most part, Advantageous is that kind of chilling dystopian science fiction that looks incredibly familiar. One scene that felt like it could have been any period in the past or present comes when daughter Jules asks Gwen, “Are women really going backwards going forward?” We can’t help but involuntarily nod our heads yes, bombarded with the realities of the fictional world in front of us.

As Gwen is let go from her job and has difficulty obtaining any new prospects (except for selling her eggs, since fertility rates have sharply declined due to pollutants—another not-so-futuristic plot point)–she asks, “Am I too old to be of use?” Again, we nod our heads, agreeing that in the world she lives in—a world that looks much like ours—the answer is yes. The Center also tells Gwen that they are looking for a more “universal look” to be their spokesperson. We assume that means “white” (and young), and director Phang addresses this in an interview with The L Magazine:

“In my mind the phrase ‘universal look’ wasn’t exactly a euphemism for ‘white’ (though it often goes that way), but for a non-specific, multi-racial look. … Jacqueline Kim is Korean-American. The subtext is that Gwen’s look was a benefit to the company for a moment, but that moment had passed.”

This “universal” look that Gwen is supposed to embody is an interesting end game of beauty standards: while beauty ideals may move toward a multicultural aesthetic, they’re still impossible to obtain without the winning genetic lottery ticket. We can hope that whiteness equaling “universal” will eventually change in the future as our population changes, however, Advantageous suggests that almost everyone will always be born at a physical disadvantage in a society that worships the unattainability of eternal youth and beauty.

It’s important to note that in Phang’s created world, “otherness” is highlighted mostly through age, gender, and beauty, and less about ethnicity. At The Verge, Emily Yoshida points out that “Advantageous also happens to have a mostly Asian cast without overtly being about Asianness, which makes it some kind of rare unicorn.” Phang critiques the desire to conform to a universal ideal while at the same time providing an excellent example of how storytellers and filmmakers don’t have to cast white actors for a story to be universal.

Gwen’s ethnicity isn’t what is most disadvantageous to her—it’s her age. How can a naturally aging woman convincingly sell a technology that promises to stop aging? The “ideal woman,” then, is seen as incredibly young and ethnically ambiguous.

Gwen must change so she can save her career and afford opportunities for her daughter. In the film, a woman’s sacrifice and a mother’s sacrifice are woven together to reveal that society continually sacrifices women—older women especially—at the altar of “never good enough.” While Phang beautifully addresses so many issues facing women in our society, she has highlighted her focus on women’s pressure to change. She says:

“One of the deeper concerns that I wrestle with in my work is how women around the world are encouraged to change themselves in many ways to carve out a place and survive. But it was also important to me to investigate, through Gwen, whether the act of choosing to change your surface appearance somehow altered your inner qualities. I wondered whether our self-respect might become altered for better or worse after we commit to a surface change. And does our respect for others increase or decrease if they don’t follow our example? And then… is this a world we can be at peace with? Can we accept a world in which these concerns occupy so much of our energies and potential for productivity?”

In Advantageous, Phang asks many questions, not only of the characters, but also of our own culture. Can we accept this world? Advantageous—and certainly feminists—would resoundingly answer “no.”

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Learn from the Future: ‘Battle Royale’

This guest post by Belle Artiquez appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

We have all seen dystopian futures represented in film and literature: desolate landscapes with survivors of some war-torn/zombie apocalypse struggling to live their bleak lives under the rule of brutal and selfish dictators who are only out for themselves. It’s a theme we are well-accustomed to, and there are numerous examples of different dystopian futures: zombie apocalypses are in full swing at the moment in TV and film (The Walking Dead, The Last Ship, World War Z), but then there is also the fall of religion (The Book of Eli), the loss of fertility (Children of Men), and the loss of resources such as water and oil (Mad Max).

The examples of how humanity could fall are in such abundance that when we get a film that doesn’t necessarily look that different to our own current world, it may not be the harsh dystopian world that we are so used to seeing on screen. Battle Royale (2000) is that film, and yet its reality is somewhat harsher than these other dystopian themes. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, and adapted from a book of the same title, the apocalyptic film portrays a totalitarian government that rules Japan, where communication with the western world is forbidden, and every year one school class is chosen to be pitted against each other in the ultimate fight to the death as a way of controlling the young generations and reminding them that they cannot rebel, they cannot be free, and they will only ever be restrained by their government.

The actual Battle is set on a highly guarded, isolated island, and the chosen class (a ninth grade class) is brought to it and ordered to fight in a zero sum game of death in a highly publicized slaughter game where there will be only one winner. The children are given one weapon each ranging from sauce pans to rifles and survival gear with maps and other necessities as they navigate through the island, of which there are interchangeable “forbidden zones.” Around their necks, a collar with the power to instantly kill is fitted to make sure any student disobeying the rules or being in a death zone at the wrong time will be killed. It appears to all to be a completely unfair setup, but this is a harsh dystopian world, so what do we expect?

9th grade class photo, looking like students not murderers — Ninth grade class photo–all looking like students, not murderers.

Not only does the film portray existing anxieties for Japan, it also represents the severe landscape of our current era–the fact that people struggle to survive already, that some are unfairly given better opportunities regardless of value (portrayed through the weapons the students are given) and are almost set up for failure. The fact that a ninth grade class is always the chosen class depicts the hardship and suffering of actual ninth grade classes in Japan currently. Up until that grade, students need only be in attendance to proceed to the next grade, but suddenly at ninth grade they are faced with extremely difficult exams in order to get a placement in a more prestigious school, putting immense pressure on students who are suddenly pitted against each other for these few places. Apart from this obvious nod, the film also suggests that we are already currently set up for failure worldwide. Our banking system for instance is the biggest fraud of our time, where people are given loans of money that doesn’t actually exist only to have to work even harder to repay the non-existent money back with actual hard cash. We are told that we need to earn a living doing jobs that we hate, instead of living and doing what makes us happy. We are born into constant monitoring, not being able to move around the world without asking permission or being watched. Governments may not be totalitarian, authoritarian ones but they certainly act in similar ways under the guise of protectors. These are all aspects of what the students of Battle Royale have to cope with. They are watched not only by the controllers of the battle, but by the entire country, as if nothing more than a reality show.

The “Forbidden Zones” also illustrate the ways in which laws are put in place. We know that most laws are put into place for our benefit–murder, theft, and abuse are all illegal for the good of the people–so that we feel safe in our day-to-day lives. However, governments have been known to create laws for their own benefit, take for example the new law created in Australia that states it is illegal for detention centre workers to report child abuse, rape and human rights violations. Or the American law that states it is illegal to film and report animal abuse on farms, establishing severe criminal sanctions for those who would report the abuse as opposed to those causing the abuse. These laws are not in place to protect the people, they are conceived in order to protect the corporations in charge, the authorities. This use of law-making is of course related to the “Forbidden Zones,” which are set up so the game will run within the three day time limit, and also for the entertainment of viewers watching from the safety of their homes. The students have not only to fight and kill their classmates with whatever they were given but they also have to worry about where they go, at what times.

The leader and man in charge of the battle is also the representative of our current powers/governments/politicians. Kitano is the man who tells the students the rules of the game, as well as handing them their weapons and survival gear, and who likewise has no problem killing two students before stating it is actually against the rules for him to do so. By breaking the rules in such a nonchalant manner Kitano shows the class that they must obey a hypocritical generation in order to survive. He even goes as far as asking the students to be friends with him, establishing a false sense of security, the contrast between being friends with this man and then witnessing him kill two of them is stark and also conveys the same governmental control that most countries understand, the “We are here to help you” attitude while they only ever help themselves. Another facet of this dynamic relationship refers to the fact that the classmates are all friends with histories and memories together and now they must let go of all of that and slaughter each other. However, not all students have the ability to do this and end up committing suicide as a way out of this and also as an escape of the imminent betrayal they will face.

Kitano threatens a student, and shows the hypocritical nature of authority. — Kitano threatens a student and shows the hypocritical nature of authority.

And just as the film articulates these contrasting attitudes and dilemmas with regard to controlling powers and zero sum attitudes, so too does it address these issues within themes of gender, sexuality and authority. Battle Royale does stereotype its female and male characters to conform to society’s ideas of femininity and masculinity. Most of the women are rendered weak, helpless, and in need of protection. Where some girls need the help of their male friends to survive (Noriko, whose protection is passed on when her initial protector is killed), others cling to each other in the hopes that some sort of sisterhood will unite them and make them strong enough to survive, showing a kind of stupidity on their part since there can only be one winner. These united girls end up in anarchy as one of them eats a poisoned dinner meant for a male classmate and suddenly they are all slaughtering each other without even trying to overcome the misunderstanding. In total contrast to this we see male students working together in perfect harmony even with a few moments of misunderstandings as a few of them work together to get the death collars deactivated. The male characters do their best to protect the female students, but only the ones that have strong emotional relationships with the men.

Noriko hides behind male student for protection portraying the fragile nature of the class's female students — Noriko hides behind a male student for protection, portraying the fragile nature of the class’s female students.

The only strong female character also happens to be presented as the villain of the piece (as does the previous winner of the game who happens to be a young girl, although we only see her briefly at the beginning), and this is possibly because she is independent, sexual, and in control. Mitsuko is violent, she quickly becomes a killing machine in order to survive, and even uses her sexuality to do so. A loner in her class before the slaughter, a victim of sexual abuse and a murderer at a young age (in self defense against the man who was going to abuse her), she now just “doesn’t want to be the loser anymore” and uses everything at her disposal to win. This includes her obvious sexuality, which she uses in ways similar to a Venus fly trap. A good deceiver, she entices a two male classmates and while they feel at ease, happy to be getting any sexual action, she kills them. Now who’s at fault for this? The girl who was just playing the brutal game like all the other students in order to survive, or the boys who stupidly thought that sex was worth the risk? Yet Mitsuko is the villain, which may actually just be another acknowledgment of current gender expectation in Japan, which is where the film and book are based on after all. Gender roles are an important part of Japanese society: men are expected to work hard, and housewives are considered valuable for their child rearing abilities; this could be why we see the group of girls acting in ways similar to the housewife, while the male students work to either outright win the game or fight the authority by breaking the collars. Traits associated with individualism such as assertiveness and self-reliance is not seen in high regard, which is why we are shown Mitsuko in a negative, villainous way. So for a film that nearly entirely describes our current living situation, it could be said that the gender roles and stereotypes too are another way of acknowledging existing gender positions and expectations in Japan.

While the strong, independent female characters are shown in negative lights.

This is certainly a terrifying film; we are presented with a nightmarish portrayal of a hyper-violent, dystopian, totalitarian world we would be afraid to be a part of, yet we are also delivered a unique depiction of the word we are already a part of and that in itself is the most nightmarish aspect of Battle Royale. The film is an acknowledgment of not only the world we live in right now but also of the human condition and the gender roles that are currently prevalent in a society that is supposed to be based on equality; however, it is anything but. We need to look to such films and recognise that although they are fictional, and depictions of a harsh dystopia, they are also reflections of our present issues in society. They are showing us how bleak and grim our own realities are without the slaughter games and authoritarian powers that make the Battle Royale world so frightening.

Congratulations for being chosen to take part in this horror game called life!

Death and Dating: Love, Hope, and Millenials in ‘Warm Bodies’

This guest post by Emily Katseanes appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

George Romero’s 1978 zombie flick Dawn of the Dead opens in a newsroom. As the world descends into chaos, darkness and violence, two talking heads are deadlocked into an intellectual debating about the causes of what’s killing so many people and then bringing them back. The theme of humanity’s utter banality and pettiness is backed up as we meet our main character, Francine, who is trying to get her boss to stop broadcasting inaccurate shelter station locations at the bottom of their screen. Even the 2004 remake of this movie repeats this cynicism. Zack Snyder’s film of the same name includes a particularly gruesome scene in which a human husband restrains his pregnant, zombie wife, keeping her alive to birth an undead child, which of course, causes the outbreak to take down the rest of the remaining humans.

The message in both cases is overwhelmingly clear: the post-apocalyptic zombie landscape is one in which the violence of the undead’s feasting is small potatoes compared to man’s inhumanity to fellow man. It’s a familiar theme in both dystopian and zombie genres.

And that’s what makes Warm Bodies such an interesting dystopian flick: The film deftly defies expectations by presenting a world gone to hell that’s still full of humanity and, dare I say it, romance. The 2013 film centers around a charmingly vulnerable and mostly decay-free Nicholas Hoult as R, a zombie with a heart of gold and a reluctance to resort to the monstrous behavior normally associated with the undead. Partway through the film, he encounters Julie (Teresa Palmer), a tough, tender, and fully alive human girl. The two form a friendship and, later, romantic relationship. The star-crossed lovers’ relationship sets off a chain reaction that ends up rehabilitating most of the undead and uniting them with the living against the malicious, more-decayed Boneys.

The film first defies the genre by blending the zombie gross-out factor with a teenage romance, as if George Romero and John Hughes collaborated on a script. But beyond that, Warm Bodies stoutly rejects the pessimism that haunts the hellscapes that are Romero’s zombie America and Hughes’ Shermer, Illinois high schools. Instead, the film fully embraces all the messiness of the Millennial and manages to make an argument for hope in that most maligned generation.

Hoult’s character R is the narrator and driver of the plot. He’s a deadpanned young dude, given to quips such as this introduction to his best friend Marcus, played humorously by Rob Coddry: “This is my best friend. By best friend, I mean we occasionally grunt and stare awkwardly at each other.”

R’s blend of irony and sincerity—he really does count Marcus as a friend even as he pokes fun at the concept—registers well with the Millennial attitude. Hoult, who’s even Millennial enough to be the subject of a Buzzfeed listicle, is outfitted as well as any Brooklynite or San Franciscan can be who’s cool without trying to be too cool. He wears a red hoodie with skinny jeans and lives in an airplane bedecked with a record player and other irony-heavy objets d’art, such as a bobbleheaded Chihuahua and an old-fashioned viewfinder.

R, as befits the stereotype of the Millennial hipster, is sensitive almost to a punch line. He laments the loss of the pre-zombie world not for its safety or conveniences, but for a population that “could express themselves, and communicate their feelings and just enjoy each other’s company.” (In that most-Millennial blend of irony and sincerity again, the movie plays off a visual gag, showing a world of everyone sucked into smartphones, even as R’s voiceover remains serious.)

Julie, on the other hand, reads as a woman of the new Millennium, albeit differently. Although she’s not the bespoke-wearing, Zooey Deschanel, quirky girl who handcrafts and bakes, she’s a woman in the vein of Scandal’s Olivia Pope or The Mindy Project’s Mindy Lahiri. She’s traditionally feminine and yet stoic, independent and able to hold her own against any men (including her dad, played by John Malkovich). Whereas R is the perpetually awkward, sensitive boy, Julie is cool, competent and clad in plaid.

He may be undead and falling in love with someone alive, but like teens the world over, R still can’t pick up his clothes.

Beyond aesthetics, R and his fellow fresher zombies, called “u,” increasingly follow Millennial markers. They’re more listless than ravenous, underwhelmed rather than driven by rage and seem, more than anything, bored by the routines of middle-class life. R and Marcus meet to hang out at an airport bar and other zombies are seen going through the motions of their pre-death jobs. But, again echoing Millennials and the fraught economy they came of age in, it’s a middle-class lifestyle that’s no longer accessible to them. In an economic recession that renders a 9-to-5 with a travel expense account almost as mythical as a zombie, the lifestyle that Marcus portrays of the traveling businessman is as far away for Julie and R as it is for most 18- to 24-year-olds.

R and Julie also tap into the somewhat aimless creativity of the hipster/Yuccie generation. They’re creative, but it’s geared toward no particular endeavor. Julie and R aren’t poets, painters, or revolutionaries. Their creativity expresses itself as curators: of clever one-liners, tastefully decorated rooms, and arty Polaroids of each other. They’re lifestyle bloggers for the post-apocalyptic youth.

All of this makes the dystopia of Warm Bodies at once threatening and not threatening at all. While the zombie threat is a plot catalyst, the actual undead shamblers often take a backseat to the interactions between the two leads. And that’s where Warm Bodies’ genre subversion really takes off. Like all dystopian flicks, it’s a commentary on our current world. The difference is that while most films in this genre present characters who are oblivious or somehow unaware of the lurking catastrophe humanity’s bringing upon itself, Warm Bodies presents characters who are well aware the world’s already gone to hell. They’re just not going to buy into all that negativity, man.

“I guess I’ll improve the world or…whatever.”

And that’s not just a twist on the zombie dystopia. It’s a twist on how R and Julie’s generation is painted throughout media.

In addition to being the main characters, R and Julie are the happiest. In a world that’s fraught with danger and starvation, most of the other humans and zombies on screen seem to experience only fear and grim determination. In one of their early scenes together, R and Julie drive a red convertible. It’s a familiar scene of carefree enjoyment, whooping and hollering as they speed around.

But even beyond that, Julie and R are successful. They’re the ones who enact change in the world, creating a “cure” for zombie-ism by getting the undead creatures to feel love again. And they do it by proving the Millennials’ critics simultaneously right and wrong. R, Julie and their allies end up shifting the world by doing…not much of anything. It’s Julie and R’s simple affection for each other, born of those afternoons taking Polaroids and dancing to records, that gets the zombies feeling, dreaming and living again.

R and Julie have opted out of the capitalist conveyor belt that turns humans into braindead zombies and or war-mongering huddled masses. While it could also be read as a fundamental laziness to even stand up for themselves, the two succeed by not fighting. It is the peaceful revolution hippies of the 1960s might have wanted or it’s the ultimate move by a generation of wimps.

But whatever it is, it works. It changes the world, for the better. And that’s a narrative that’s not only missing from most dystopias, but from many depictions of the current generation. Of course, like a lot of narratives about Millennials, this remains problematic. The world of Warm Bodies is overwhelmingly white and the characters read as upper-middle class. In a film arguing for optimism for the youth, it’s both telling and disappointing that the youth included are white and affluent. There’s still a long way to go to get our representations to actually reflect the demographic of the world they exist in. It’s also easy to blow off the movie as teenage fluff and in a way, it is. It’s a cutesy romance that uses Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a skeletal structure and adds a killer soundtrack and a budding romance to flesh it out. But like R, who (mild spoiler alert), becomes human by the end of the film, it’s a vision of humanity that grows less not more fetid as it goes on.

A native Nevadan, Emily Katseanes has degrees from the University of Nevada and New Mexico State University. She has done everything from cleaning houses to filing fatality information at a gold mine to reporting on city council meetings in rural Idaho. Currently, though, she works her favorite job of all: teaching English at Louisiana State University.

Failed Revolutions in Imaginary Cities

How do you solve a problem like dystopian science fiction? It’s been around for about as long as the film industry and yet, politics and society still won’t stop producing warning signs for the decay of humanity, providing directors, writers, and “artists” with almost inexhaustible opportunities for critiquing the current state of the world community, or showing what the present state of things might turn into if not handled consciously and carefully.

This guest post by Olga Tchepikova appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Many dystopian stories are set in urban environments: early films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) address the issues of class structures and technological progress in the urban sphere and novels like John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925) put emphasis on the city as a space inhabited by masses, where anonymity and lack of compassion or interest in community prevails over civic solidarity and consideration. In urban spaces, it is really not that hard at all to be “alone in a crowd” both literally and figuratively. The city as a space for the display of pessimistic future narratives works well because that’s where all types of processes are accelerated, and there is a plethora of productive and destructive forces turning urban existence into an organically evolving chaos—a disease to the city’s body that needs to be cured continuously, by any and all means necessary—and the most subtly pervasive one is surveillance.

There have been a few particularly disastrous examples of state surveillance. Some are a bit dated (the East German Stasi and its many filmic representations) while others are fairly recent. So is it, in fact, a dystopian future we are talking about when it comes to spying on citizens? Not really. We have kind of embraced it in “western” urban culture and now are encouraged to accept its humoristic potential (I’m talking about the “Smile, you’re on CCTV” – smileyface stickers everywhere). At the same time, it comes at us in disguise, as a communicative necessity for the progressive human that wants to be harder, better, faster, stronger. Yet, here we are, on camera in public spaces and feeding the world wide web (and feasting on it, too).

If you can’t beat them, join them, right?

… said no film hero/ine ever. If anything, do it for the purpose of infiltrating authority, like Queen propose. If you can’t (and you shouldn’t “can”) join them, beat them. That’s what hero/ine/s do, and by watching them we are reminded that we too often don’t, although we should. They connect the dots and look back on the ones voyeuristically observing them. They resist and are sometimes punished for it—just like in the real world. Take for example Brazil (1985), straight out of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, where protagonist Sam Lowry tries to escape the imperative of bureaucratic regulation of his environment and ultimately is lobotomized for his efforts. Here, punishment of disobedience is an almost accepted, public ritual, while disobedience itself is both overt and covert—there are terrorists in the city, but also underground freedom fighters (Tuttle).

Slightly different, but similar enough to include here is Dark City (1998), with a seemingly more happy ending, showing how John Murdoch battles an alien species, the Strangers, who are in complete control of the temporal flow of the artificially created environment, constantly change the geography and impose identities on individuals without their knowledge, all for the “good” cause of filtering out the humanity in the human. Here, no one is who they “really” are and no one (except the hero Murdoch, the traitor Dr. Schreber and the crazy person Walenski) cares because they don’t know (a friendly nod to Last Thursdayism).

Scary, right?

In Brazil, the opening sequence is most illustrative of the scattered condition of society or the discrepancy between ideal and reality: floating above the clouds, we find ourselves “somewhere in the 20^th century”—a noplace (not in to utopia-etymology sense) and everyplace of the past 100 years. This type of insistence on universality is a prime example for cinematically mediated ideology as it kills any slightest bit of hope for change no matter whether the circumstances are positive or negative. Besides, speaking of ideology, Triumph of the Will opens with a very similar cloud sequence. Coincidence? Do I need to answer that? But actually, it’s just Lowry’s dream, the one where he’s a hero and saves the girl, which means procreation, which means return to nature, which means return to the Garden, which means happiness. It’s a good thing. But it’s not real. The idyllic heavens change into a shop window full of TVs showing an advertisement—because this is the reality of the 20^th century: it is simulated on screens now—and a few seconds later…

In your face, media propaganda, capitalism and consumer culture!

Before we meet Lowry roughly 10 minutes into the story, we see the Ministry of Information violently arresting the wrong guy (Buttle the generic citizen instead of Tuttle the infiltrator), and the only difference between the aftermaths of the exploding shop window and the destruction accompanying the Ministry actions is that the latter procedure has a piece of paper authorizing it. Because processed information is power, and the lack thereof makes you an easy target, or victim. Or, actually, maybe just a normal human being living your life, as is the case in Dark City.

Everything quiet on the neo-noir scifi front — Everything quiet on the neo-noir sci-fi front

In a similar way as Brazil, Dark City is set in a temporally patchworked environment. The mise-en-scène completely lacks coherence in its references to historical space and time—there are too many of them at once. As Mr. Hand explains, “We fashioned this city on stolen memories: different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one.” They have the whole world in their hands, if you know what I mean. The Strangers’ invisible puppeteering activities result in our perception of the narrative as dystopian only via, again, the power of knowledge. In Murdoch’s camp, however, knowledge means to reflect, to detect inconsistencies, and to suspect. Suspicion causes paranoia and paranoia ultimately leads to “real” power, at least in his case. Contrary to Brazil, where the productivity of suspicion is actively promoted by the same authority that benefits from it, and therefore, prevents any actual change.

Dark City ends with Murdoch’s victory over the Strangers and his rebuilding of the city on his own, seemingly “freer” terms. Does he end autocracy? Yes. Does he bring about liberation? If this is about humanity and idiosyncrasy and “everyone needs to be who they really are”… the answer is no, not really. Murdoch dislikes processes no one else appeared to suffer from and makes the world better for only himself. Murdoch wanted Shell Beach; he got Shell Beach. In the process, he may have played around with the parameters of the formula and put it to sleep, but he did not bother sharing knowledge (and thus, power). They’ll just have to live a lie forever. But it’s only a lie if you know there is truth, right?

Guess it didn’t happen then.

While we’re at it, let’s talk about truth some more. Truth is like gender—there is an essentialist take on it, relying on facts, things that actually exist in the world (things that you can touch… like genitals for example), and then there is ideology: things invented but holding the same authority as the essentialist prove (similar to the assumption that these genitals you can touch magically make you desire certain things and hate others). With gender, it’s complicated. With truth it’s the same, unless someone forces it to be simple. For example, in Brazil, ink holds more “truth” and authority than interpersonal communication. Information printed on paper is more than just power as an ideological concept—it is the physical manifestation of power, like your genitals.

Where there’s truth, the “human” aspect of interaction becomes irrelevant—no other physical authority as such is needed to maintain law and order. Indeed, surveillance “somewhere in the 20^th century” is not an overt action taken out by identifiable people (they just reinforce the authority of the paper print) but, rather, emerges in forms of indoctrinations mingling in the environment, promoting a tautological and unquestioned acceptance of bureaucracy. All over the city, there are posters reminding the citizens to “Be safe – be suspicious,” or “Don’t suspect a friend, report him” and finally, that…

One might say that the organization of the depicted society relies on a form of decentralized panopticism. Panopticism is the unverifiable threat of surveillance turned into self-surveillance—it used to be a prison thing but now we have, you know, cameras in our laptop screens and are you sure it’s not broadcasting just because the light is not on? Is it paranoid to think it might? In Brazil, the decentralization of surveillance means that the possibly watching body is not only the state authority but also, people just like you. Somewhere in the 21^st century, the decentralization of surveillance means that the possibly watching body is not even a body anymore. So, this demands an even more rigid need for self-discipline—in order for everyone to be a suspect, everyone needs to suspect.

Now it appears that these two films could not be farther apart in the presentation of their citizens—in Brazil, everyone suspects everything; in Dark City no one suspects anything. However, both are built on the same conditions: individualism, transparency of authoritative activities, and the privacy of citizens are sacrificed for a harmonious communal existence where the illusion of egalitarianism depends on the withdrawal of authority from direct visibility. By explicitly encouraging paranoia but not presenting the population with these messages in a spectacular manner, the Ministry of Information creates a paradoxical community that is bound by mutual distrust, and therefore, establishes a structure where the public does not aim to overthrow authority because everyone is too busy suspecting each other. With a similar effect, the Strangers in Dark City look down on their lab-rat citizens without permanently appearing in the continuity of their world. Both cases are a witch hunt: if hero/ine/s drown, they’re innocent; if they survive, they’re guilty and die anyway.

Unless they evolve.

Lab rats outsmarting their “owners” is always a moment of pleasure, but is their personal victory over authority solely driven by their position as heroic victims, or did they have to become more evil than the evil in order to prevail over evil? This is something I was toying with during Ex Machina, and also the aspect that made Dark City a lot darker than it might seem in the first place. Sometimes we forget that every hero/ine drags along a body count, too. But at the same time, some change in the dystopian routine of the film is better than no change, or the wrong side’s victory.

That’s why Brazil is so soul-crushing. Lowry is irreversibly kicked out of reality into a non-existent, eternal, utopian dream—he got the Garden, the girl, the happiness. But he didn’t win. There are other films that thrive on this idea, and most of them also don’t have a happy end.

Attempts at improving the “situation” through distraction are very close to our reality that significantly lacks a routine of epic, heroic gestures. Could it be, though, that it’s mainly because there are too many causes worth fighting for and it hurts to prioritize? You wanna make a donation for homeless puppies, children, or grown men? Or would you rather watch Hobo with a Shotgun?

What we cease to see is how that off-screen world of ours sugar-coats outrage with sensationalism and throws it back at us in the form of film, so we can at least be entertained by the sad realities we live in while reality itself becomes secondary, invisible, almost unreal. Do we simply not start revolutions because most of the successful ones are fictional, or do we not feel entitled to actually complain and be outraged because this reality is not that bad? We are not ignorant but aware—after all, we share on Facebook and hashtag on Twitter. Only those spaces are the Garden, not the reality. But since we are not lobotomized yet, we could still evolve.

Olga Tchepikova has lived, studied, and worked in various places in Europe and just left the US after finishing her MA there. Her mind in free time, as well as in research, is mainly occupied with films about and critical theory on various sub-cultural spheres, sex, porn, horror, violence, death and their ramifications.

‘Terminator Genisys’: Not My Sarah Connor

Sarah Connor teams up with the Terminator

This guest post by Liz LaBrocca appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Terminator Genisys, the fifth installment in the Terminator franchise, reminds you how much you loved Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day while simultaneously destroying everything that made the first two movies exciting, scary, and romantic. In particular, Sarah Connor, damsel in distress turned warrior, has been reduced to a quippy, bland plot device instead of the powerful ready-made warrior she could have been.

The greatness of Sarah Connor’s character (as played by Linda Hamilton) between T1 and T2 was her transition from a frightened young girl to a self-made soldier. Within the first movie alone, we see her transformation from a terrified waitress in need of Kyle Reese’s (Michael Biehn) protection to a woman who is learning that she’s more capable than she ever believed. As their brief love is budding, she bandages one of his wounds. He compliments her field dressing and she, knowing now what her future holds, sadly replies, “Thanks, it’s my first.” By the end of the movie she is trying her best to save his life, commanding him (“Move, Soldier!”) to get up and keep fighting with her. In the end, he sacrifices himself in his best effort to save her and she is left to carry his child, future resistance leader John Connor, and the heavy burden of preparing both of them for the coming nuclear apocalypse.

Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in The Terminator calls the police to come to her rescue. — Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in *The Terminator* calls the police to come to her rescue

In T2, we jump ten years into the future where John Connor is a wayward teenager, living in a foster home while Sarah is institutionalized for paranoid delusions. She has spent the past decade living with various men in order to learn as much as she can about arming and defending herself. We’re introduced to her in the institution as she does chin-ups on her overturned bed frame to keep herself physically primed for the coming war. While John and the reprogrammed Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) are coming to rescue Sarah from the T-1000 in the psych ward, she has already mostly broken out on her own. Hamilton’s T2 Sarah Connor was muscular, sweaty, and terse. She looked like someone who had spent a decade physically and emotionally preparing for a nuclear war. At the same time, it was clear that she deeply cared about her son and was struggling with how to be a mother in a world that only she knows is destined to be destroyed. She reflects that the Terminator, ironically, ends up being the best father figure John has known in the absence of Reese.

Linda Hamilton transformed for Terminator 2: Judgement Day’s warrior Sarah Connor — Linda Hamilton transformed for *Terminator 2: Judgement Day*’s warrior Sarah Connor

We were given so little of Sarah in the preview of Genisys, I was holding onto a little hope that she wouldn’t be totally stripped of her mettle as a result of losing her original character arc. In Terminator Genisys, Sarah (played by Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones) has been raised by the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) since she was 9. He was sent back in time to protect her from a T-1000 that had been sent to kill her and her family. There are plenty of reviews that discuss the convoluted time problems and horrifyingly dull plot in Genisys, so I’ll spare you.

Sarah meets Reese (Jai Courtney) knowing that she will need to have sex with this man, regardless of how she feels, to save the human race. It’s an awkward problem that’s dealt with in Schwarzenegger one-liners about mating and a weak attempt at a narrative theme of free will versus destiny. Her dialogue is full of jokes and one-liners instead of the brusque, efficient speech patterns you’d associate with a woman who spent her formative years with a Terminator who has still, several decades later, not mastered the art of smiling despite his detailed files on human anatomy. What was once a heated, passionate romance in the midst of a life-altering conflict, is boiled down to a silly comedy subplot: how does Sarah tell Reese that he’s the father of his best friend and mentor? This problem is further compounded by the painful lack of chemistry between Clarke and Courtney. The one upside to this forced romance subplot is that Sarah’s need to be impregnated is nullified by the vilification of John Connor. The film ends with her ability to choose to be with Reese instead of needing to be with Reese. But perhaps a more interesting, and more feminist, ending would be her choosing to not be with Reese at all.

Emilia Clarke wearing the iconic leather jacket as Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys — Emilia Clarke wearing the iconic leather jacket as Sarah Connor in *Terminator Genisys*

The problem of Sarah’s character also lies within the casting of Emilia Clarke. While Courtney is a big, hulking man, who looks like he’s been slamming protein shakes in his post-apocalyptic future wasteland home (in T1 children hunt rats for food), Sarah looks as though she’s barely run a mile in preparation for the impending war she’s about to fight. Sure, they arm her with a bunch of guns and she looks really cool. She even looks a bit like Linda Hamilton. But she doesn’t look strong the way Linda Hamilton looked strong in T2. She doesn’t look like she has spent her youth and early adulthood physically training to be a fighter.

What it boils down to is that Courtney was cast in the traditional image of protector, even though the intention of the storyline was to subvert that role and have Sarah be the savior. It didn’t matter that he looks absolutely nothing like Michael Biehn because his perfectly chiseled abs looked great during naked time travel. He can even be hit by a car on the freeway with barely any consequences. In contrast, Biehn’s Reese was cut but lean; he was dirty and on edge. He looked like someone who came from a nuclear wasteland where meals were scarce and the threat of death was constant. He could be injured and killed. Had both actors been cast more appropriately in Genisys, she and Reese could have at least stood side by side as a team of equals ready to fight Cyberdyne via Genisys.

Jai Courtney (left) and Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese respectively

There was potential for this character to be extremely interesting. She could have been a darker, off-beat female heroine. She could have been the result of a human who spent her life training to be a warrior by an emotionless robot. But because the studio chose to play it safe and go for mass appeal and a PG-13 rating, we’re left with a watered-down version of the original character. Sarah Connor’s character was exactly what I was afraid she would end up being: a shallow plot device who is only there to make sure we know what’s happening in the new present and to fret over her impending romance with Reese. She is a shadow of an action hero, saying her lines but never embodying the role.

Liz LaBrocca is a freelance writer and editor living in Northampton, Massachusetts. She’s Co-Editor in Chief of The Soapbox, an online platform for amplifying the voices of female-identifying creators. You can follow her writing, cooking, and very important opinions on Twitter and Instagram.

Call For Writers: Dystopian Landscapes

Our theme week for July 2015 will be Dystopian Landscapes.

The Oxford Dictionary defines dystopia as “An imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.” Literature and pop culture are brimming with examples of dystopian landscapes because they serve as a vehicle through which we can follow certain ills in society to their potentially logical and tragic conclusions. Common themes explored include: the stratification of wealth, dwindling resources, race relations, patriarchy, criminalization of youth, environmental concerns, consumerism, and totalitarianism.

Though sci-fi representations of dystopian landscapes are probably the most common with classics like Soylent Green (where the last remaining source of nutrition is humans) or the more recent comic book-based Snowpiercer (where the last of humanity lives aboard a train because the world was destroyed in an attempt to combat climate change), other genres also have a their own excavations of dystopian themes. Horror films are particularly fruitful with their varied examination of the zombie apocalypse. Zombies throughout time have articulated fears of everything from consumer culture (Dawn of the Dead) to the military (28 Days Later) to medical pandemics (World War Z) to class warfare (Land of the Dead).

Then there are action/sci-fi genre hybrids that take on dystopia. 1990’s action-packed Total Recall (loosely based on a short story by legendary sci-fi dystopian writer Philip K. Dick) imagines a future in which capitalism and colonialism run rampant, leading to the privatization of air and water on colonized Mars. The recent Mad Max: Fury Road is an excellent example of an action movie tackling the dystopian landscape, in which all the world is a desert, and the remainder of humanity struggles over natural resources like gasoline and water. The line, “Who killed the world?” encapsulates the film’s accusation that patriarchy and toxic masculinity are the cause of great misery and, perhaps, the end of all life on earth.

There are also more literary dramas like The Road that depict dystopian landscapes in an effort to articulate what becomes of the nature of humanity when all the rules and trappings of society are lost. Another literary drama, The Handmaid’s Tale (based on Margaret Atwood’s eponymous feminist novel), investigates a future in which religious totalitarianism has laid claim to the female body.

What does the end of everything show us about ourselves? What will the end of everything look like? What lessons can we learn to avoid these dire outcomes?

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, July 24 by midnight.

The Road

The Handmaid’s Tale

Snowpiercer

Mad Max

Dawn of the Dead

Day of the Dead

Return of the Living Dead

Terminator

The Giver

Interstellar

Planet of the Apes

Land of the Dead

Reign of Fire

I Am Legend

Dr. Who

28 Days Later

The Last Man on Earth

Mad Max: Fury Road

Battle Royale

The Hunger Games

Children of Men

Road Warrior

Star Wars

Jericho

The Matrix

Soylent Green

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Firefly

A Clockwork Orange

Total Recall

Escape from New York

Elysium

Blade Runner

The Walking Dead

When Women Are the Bad Guys in YA Dystopian Films

This is a guest post by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains big spoilers if you have not seen the films Divergent, The Maze Runner, and The Giver. If you have not read the Hunger Games novels, it contains a major spoiler for Mockingjay Part 2.

Almost 100 years after first-wave feminists secured American women the right to vote, there is still a massive gender gap when it comes to political power in the United States. Consider our new 2015 Congress: a whopping 80 percent of our elected leaders in D.C. are men (oh, and 80 percent white and 92 percent Christian). That paltry 20 percent is ginormous compared to female American CEOs and top executives—5 percent at last count. Then there’s my personal favorite, the enduring tendency among college students to automatically give their male professors better evaluations than female professors. When it comes to wielding real political, economic, and cultural authority over other people, many Americans still seem to assume that the person in charge should also wield a penis.

Popular culture reinforces, and challenges, the notion that if a woman achieves a leadership position, there must be something suspect, something unfeminine, about her. TV and movies remain chockablock with depressingly conventional depictions of women in power: bitchy and/or oversexed bosses, ball-busting iron maidens, and professionally-successful-but-personally-a-mess singletons. However, at the same time, women are also far more equally represented alongside men in cinematic offices of power than in real life. Catch any random Law and Order episode and you will see successful and influential female attorneys, detectives, police officers, judges, politicians, doctors, and business professionals in action. Heck, on TV women are not only Secretary of State, but also Vice President and even POTUS. I, for one, would immigrate immediately to any nation where Alfre Woodard is giving the executive orders.

Of all the genres that could envisage a world of more complete gender equality, science fiction seems like our best bet. After all, life has got to be better a few hundred years from now, right? Not according to American entertainment, where the future is always dystopian, not utopian. In our movies, TV, and fiction, the world to come is inevitably a hellish urban wilderness or a post-apocalyptic badland plagued by vampires, viruses, aliens, malevolent robots, or ecological disasters.

YA dystopian fiction in particular is having its moment right now. Last year saw the release of at least four dystopian films based on young adult fiction containing some pretty dire visions of future societies. All four featured an almost identical female leader character. She’s coldly calculating, middle aged, icily beautiful, and a villainess—or, at the very least, a highly misguided leader whose blind devotion to a rigidly depersonalized or somehow “perfected” world forms the basis of the conflict with the main characters. In Divergent, Kate Winslet plays Jeanine Matthews, Erudite faction leader; Ava Paige is the head scientist of W.I.C.K.E.D. and played by Patricia Clarkson in The Maze Runner; Meryl Streep plays the Chief Elder in The Giver; and President Alma Coin is played by Julian Moore in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and Part 2 (coming in 2015).

Now, on the one hand, you gotta admire a movie employing any one of these talented actors. Even though they are all A-listers, because they are over 34 years old these four women will earn less and be offered fewer parts in Hollywood than their male counterparts. Also, there’s something to be said for simply seeing a powerful female character in a leadership role. As Amanda Rodriguez writes in a Bitch Flicks post about Julian Moore’s character in Mockingjay Part 1, “this embodiment of a nontraditional representation of matriarchy in Coin is refreshing. She is decisive, smart, calm when under attack, and always thinking about the greater good of the people.”

President Coin, rocking an awesome hairdo that celebrates the gray.

But on the other hand, there’s a troubling trend here, because four movies in one year definitely counts as a trend. All of these future worlds are shaped and influenced by beautiful but heartless middle aged women who rule over a dehumanized dystopia with an immaculate but totally iron fist. In Mockingjay Part 1, Julian Moore’s President Coin is leading the rebellion and although she’s ruthless, she’s one of the good guys. But WARNING! BIG SPOILER HERE in the final chapters of the novel Mockingjay we learn that in her own grab for unlimited power, Coin callously facilitated the death of Prim, Katniss’s beloved sister, and blamed it on the Capitol. Presumably, Part 2 will include this big reveal, and Coin will then join the ranks of dystopian female fanatical leaders depicted in The Giver, The Maze Runner, and Divergent.

Meryl Streep’s Chief Elder character in The Giver is not as overtly evil, but her insistence on the rigid eradication of human individuality and free will to maintain peace and order in “the community” is definitely creepy and makes her the very bad guy in charge. In one pivotal scene, we learn that the policies Chief Elder enforces are so mercilessly conformist that even a young infant who fails to live up to certain standards of behavior will be dispassionately dispatched down a bad baby chute to oblivion.

The Chief Elder will eliminate pesky human individuality and free will.

Patricia Clarkson’s Ava Paige in Maze Runner is a hazy figure in the main characters’ flashbacks, until LAST WARNING, I MEAN IT, SPOILER AHEAD a scrappy band of teenagers escapes the maze and discovers that Paige is the head scientist/leader of the sinister scientific organization that imprisoned them in the maze in the first place. Paige claims that she did it in order to test a possible cure-all for the disease/ecological apocalypse threatening human existence. For a minute it seems that Paige is the ruthless but brilliant scientist who stops at nothing to save the world, even shooting herself at the end of her video message in the ultimate sacrifice to the cause. But no. She appears in one last scene, calmly wiping the fake blood off her face and announcing the commencement of…Phase Two. Bwahahahaha!

The Divergent villainess played by Kate Winslet is similarly cavalier with human lives, orchestrating a takeover by the relentlessly logical Erudite faction that begins with a planned mass extermination of all men, women, and children in the peace-loving Abnegation faction. Because, um, nothing’s more bloodcurdling than an intimidating perimenopausal woman in a chic suit who values brains more than abnegation? So it seems. Rodriguez writes in her Bitch Flicks post reviewing Divergent: “I’m frankly so tired of the cold, fanatic female villain trope.” (She also points out that this trope is not unique to YA-based dystopias, citing Jodie Foster’s 2013 turn as Delacourt in Elysium.) Rodriguez rightly asks of Divergent: “Is it claiming that cold, intelligent women are the problem? Are they the purveyors of this dysfunctional culture? If so, for which real world social ill is the post-apocalyptic world of Divergent a stand-in? What problematic mechanism of power does this sci-fi series seek to illuminate?”

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. Though not necessarily the sole “purveyors of this dysfunctional culture,” their pitiless rule symbolizes just how bad it’s gotten, because when women hold the kind of power and authority that renders them coldblooded killers, there’s something awfully amiss. But it’s essential to note that we’re talking here only about the power and authority of older, non-motherly, women. In these films, it’s perfectly all right, nay, imminently laudable, for women to kick ass and flex their muscles and be all empowered—as long as they are teenagers. If your boobs are still high and firm and your skin youthful and dewy, why, there’s nothing more attractive than leading the rebellion or fighting your way to freedom.

Snark aside, two of the youthful female protagonists in these films are pretty great. Calling attention to some of the problematic aspects of these films certainly doesn’t erase the positive features. Katniss is one of the most interesting female pop culture characters in recent years and is played by an extremely talented young woman who has chosen a range of nuanced roles—all hail Jennifer Lawrence! Shailene Woodley’s protagonist in Divergent is not bad either, casting off her namby-pamby Abnegation name “Beatrice” for gender-bending “Tris”; doggedly training at bare knuckle fighting; and eventually bringing a mad conspiracy to its knees (kinda with the strength of her devoted love for the young hero, but it’s YA, so they get a pass there). Even the tiresome helpmeet-to-the-hunky-hero female teenage characters in The Giver and Maze Runner are relatively strong and capable and not particularly cringe-inducing (though in her Bitch Flicks post Megan Kearns accurately points out that The Maze Runner exemplifies the Smurfette Principle).

So what’s with those other female characters, the Ice Queens of the future? If the teenage women can be heroes, why do the militant extremists running these four YA dystopias have to be older women? The novelists who created these characters and the filmmakers who brought them to the screen are demonstrating that despite the many gains we’ve made toward gender equality, we’re still stuck with rigidly defined ideals of femininity for women over 40—and those ideals do not include attaining professional positions of power. That old favorite, the Madonna/whore dichotomy, takes a contemporary dystopian twist here. The older female characters embody a mom/megalomaniacal dictator dichotomy, in which the acceptable roles for middle aged women appear to be limited to either the mother of the protagonist or deranged antagonist, drunk with power and out for world domination.

In my book Housework and Housewives in American Advertising I discuss how the “new momism” (identified by Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels in The Mommy Myth) shapes contemporary gender norms and advertising, and I wrote about it in another Bitch Flicks post. Although Americans have long idealized motherhood, the new momism of our era is the basis for a freshly insidious ideology that subtly but persistently demarcates parenting as women’s (unpaid) work—in fact, women’s best and only really valuable work. The villains of these four dystopias are the antithesis of good mothers. They are a direct and active threat to the teenage protagonists. And, it’s very clearly implied, what could possibly be more disconcerting? More dystopian? These disturbing versions of future dehumanized societies suggest that a middle aged female head of state is particularly chilling.

Interestingly, the mothers of the main characters do appear in The Giver and Divergent and throughout the Hunger Games. In The Giver, Katie Holmes plays the mother character, who’s an emotionless adherent to the dehumanizing rules that govern “the community.” Paula Malcomson as Katniss’ mother in The Hunger Games is not such a stooge of the regime, and joins the rebellion in the capacity of a healer, but when the trilogy begins, she’s willing to comply with the requirements of the Hunger Games and offer her daughter for possible sacrifice. She has virtually no impact on Katniss’ life by the end of Mockingjay—she’s just a minor character.

Ashley Judd’s mother character, Natalie, plays a bigger role in the plot of Divergent. The piously humble Abnegation paragon Natalie reveals at a crucial point that she is divergent like her daughter and possesses all the fighting ability and fearlessness of the Dauntless faction. But Natalie exercises this power in a completely mom-appropriate way. Natalie only reveals her abilities in order to save daughter Tris from certain death at the hands of the Erudites. Then Natalie sacrifices her own life in a gun battle to keep Tris safe. She’s the total and complete opposite of Jeanine Matthews. The casting and wardrobe is instructive as well, with baby-faced Judd as the mom in sackcloth serving as a dramatic contrast to chilly blonde razor-edged power suited Winslet as the anti-mom.

This is what a good mom looks like. — This is what a *good* mom looks like.

It’s no coincidence that the laws of these four dystopias, which are led by four really scary bitches, trash the most sacred of familial bonds. Quite literally, in the case of the baby chute in The Giver. These worlds feature dehumanizing regulations, brutal power regimes that keep the masses broken and victimized, and/or rigid emotionless policies that heartlessly separate mother and child. They conform to the most exaggerated stereotypes of what will happen when women who don’t know that their real place is in the home caring for their children start prowling the halls of power. What happens when women take charge? What happens when moms can’t be moms? Or, worse yet, choose not to be? Just the end of the world, that’s all.

Obviously, the scenario of mom-aged women not being good moms holds particular significance for a YA audience. I’m no Freudian but as a college teacher, the mother of a fourteen year old son, and a former teenager myself, I can attest to the fact that many adolescents and young adults experience a mostly unconscious fear of/highly conscious burning desire to be on their own and to do it without parental interference. It’s a pretty standard stage of emotional development, and the source of a great deal of conflict between parents and their teenagers. Not that I’ve been reading any parenting advice books about this or anything.

To some extent, this may help explain the almost identical villainesses in Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Giver, and Mockingjay. In the YA dystopian landscape, the cruel mom-aged woman in charge adds to the terror and thrill of fighting your way to freedom. In Divergent, the teen protagonist Tris defeats Kate Winslet’s Matthews in hand to hand combat, finally defeating Matthews with—oh irony!—the same mind-control drug Matthews used to enslave the Dauntless faction to do her evil bidding. In Katniss’s case, the betrayal of Julianne Moore’s President Coin is the final push Katniss needs to instigate the climax of the Hunger Games series. To truly free her people, Katniss must defeat this cold surrogate of a mother figure. Meryl Streep’s Chief Elder in The Giver, a softer villain, is moved to tears by the new knowledge she gains of human connection. Her crying clearly shows her evolution toward a more appropriately female emotional responses. Meanwhile, we have to wait and see what’s to become of Patricia Clarkson’s Wicked Witch of W.I.C.K.E.D. until the next installment in The Maze Runner franchise.

But although the defeat of the powerful anti-mother may appeal in some developmental, metaphorical way to many teenage consumers, it is also clearly infused with broader social and cultural fears about women in power. These characters markedly reinforce our wider unconscious and consciously accepted assumptions about who should be in charge in politics, in business, in the college classroom, and just about everywhere else. To solely see these dystopian villainesses as archetypes in the psychosomatic journey to adulthood doesn’t take into account the specific time and place and culture that produced them and the very real ways gender bias shapes actual power distribution in today’s United States. A fictional world depicting a powerful female leader as an unfeminine antifamily power-hungry bitch looks way too much like our real world, where powerful female leaders are often depicted as…you know.

I’m not saying the bad guys in dystopian fictions should always be, well, guys. Nor am I arguing that all evil female fictional characters should be subject to rigorous feminist deconstruction. Sometimes a villainess is just a villainess. But I do want to suggest that we have a problem when the bad guys in four widely read and viewed YA dystopias are, across the board and uniformly, supposed to be especially frightening because they so blatantly contradict what women of a certain age should be. They reiterate and reinforce the notion that nothing could be more dystopian than a mother-aged woman who doesn’t act motherly. Fear of the future? No, the same old fear that still shapes how Americans vote and learn and hire and live: fear of a woman in charge and in power.

Jessamyn Neuhaus is a professor U.S. history and popular culture at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the author of Housework and Housewives in American Advertising: Married to the Mop (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I’ and What Makes Katniss Everdeen a Compelling Heroine

While watching ‘Mockingjay Part I,’ I had an epiphany. I asked myself why Katniss Everdeen is such a compelling heroine to audiences and why other heroines modeled after her are popping up all over the place? There’s no denying that audiences (especially young women) are hungry for strong female representation on screen. We love to see Katniss use her wits and her bow to save the day, but in ‘Mockingjay Part I,’ there is very little action (Katniss uses her bow only once), and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is still riveting. Why, do you think, that is?

Written by Amanda Rodriguez.

Mild Spoilers Ahead

First off, let’s get the unpleasant part out of the way. Serious fans of The Hunger Games series will likely hate me, but we’ve all got to face the truth. The third installment in the series, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I should not have been made. Splitting movies into two parts is an ever-growing trend in Hollywood’s never-ending quest for more money. Over the course of the two-hour film, not enough happens to warrant its existence. There is little moving the plot forward, and the ending itself is anticlimactic as our heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) isn’t even involved in the ultimately uneventful final showdown mission to rescue the captive tributes. The vital events that do happen in Part I could have easily been condensed into the first 20 minutes of the finale of a legitimate trilogy.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about what does work in Mockingjay Part I. There are a lot of women involved in the film itself, from the writer of the novels, Suzanne Collins, who adapted her books for the screen, to Nina Jacobson, the producer of the entire series, to our tenacious heroine Katniss, played by the increasingly popular, amazing performer and feminist Jennifer Lawrence.

I particularly liked that Mockingjay Part I also sets up the opposition between patriarchy and matriarchy with the introduction of Julianne Moore as President Coin of District 13. Under the patriarchal tyranny of President Snow (Donald Sutherland), the districts of Panem suffer as the people are used for their labor and their districts’ resources while fear and capital punishment are the norm. His Capitol, however, is rich, fashion-obsessed, and completely self-serving. The matriarchal President Coin, on the other hand, represents revolution with a strict focus on democracy and a socialist emphasis on the sharing of resources. District 13 is a militaristic, utilitarian underground compound that eschews fashion in favor of function (as evinced by the monotone uniforms all residents wear). Those of us who have read the books know that a lot will shift before the series concludes, but for now, this embodiment of a nontraditional representation of matriarchy in Coin is refreshing. She is decisive, smart, calm when under attack, and always thinking about the greater good of the people.

While watching Mockingjay Part I, I had an epiphany. I asked myself why Katniss Everdeen is such a compelling heroine to audiences and why other heroines modeled after her are popping up all over the place? There’s no denying that audiences (especially young women) are hungry for strong female representation on screen. We love to see Katniss use her wits and her bow to save the day, but in Mockingjay Part I, there is very little action (Katniss uses her bow only once), and Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is still riveting. Why, do you think, that is?

Two words for you: emotional range. While there are a plethora of limitations and stereotypes by which female characters are plagued, audiences are getting tired of the limited range of emotion that male heroes are allowed to exhibit due to the strictness of masculinity within our culture. Women are increasingly allowed to showcase a greater range of emotions without it damaging their perception as a strong, good leader.

In Mockingjay Part I, Katniss is suffering from intense PTSD. She has flashbacks, night terrors, uncontrollable bouts of crying, and dissociates from her surroundings. Throughout the film, she is an emotional wreck, as she should be after what she’s gone through, from being hunted and forced to kill for sport, to having her home of District 12 genocided as a result of her actions.

We watch Katniss go through an emotional roller coaster as she experiences shock, horror, terror, guilt, sadness, loss, anger, grief, and devastation. She is overcome with love for her family, Gale, and Peta, and, at her core, we are the most compelled by Katniss’ compassion and her instinctual drive to protect others. Katniss is sometimes wrong and often rash in her actions. In truth, it is her vulnerability displayed on screen like a raw wound from which we cannot look away.

This is the stuff of heroes. We see her experiences nearly break her time and time again, but she won’t give up. Carrying on is so hard that it nearly destroys her, but her sense of what is right is so strong that she cannot turn her back on her fellow oppressed district dwellers.

Like Katniss is the symbol of revolution as the mockingjay, she’s also the symbol of a movement that values women as nonsexualized leads with rich, complex characterization. We’re increasingly bored with the stoic male hero and instead crave the strength and vulnerability of the growing number of female sci-fi action heroines that are emerging thanks to the success of Katniss Everdeen and The Hunger Games.

Aside: The United States IS the Capitol. The storyline of The Hunger Games is so popular in the US, but we’re missing the point if we don’t confess that we are the oppressive world superpower that tyrannizes the rest of the word, exploiting the labor and resources of others so that most of us can live in relative wealth and comfort. End rant.

Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. Her short story “The Woman Who Fell in Love with a Mermaid” was published in Germ Magazine. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

‘The Maze Runner’ Suffers from the Smurfette Principle and White Savior Trope

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?

Written by Megan Kearns.

Like most Hollywood films, The Maze Runner — the latest young adult (YA) novel set in a dystopian future adapted for the screen — revolves around a white male protagonist. While mildly entertaining, rather than exploring new ideas and themes, it suffers from gender and racial tropes.

Echoing themes in Lord of the Flies (boys in the wild creating their own society) and The Hunger Games (dystopian setting, a treacherous obstacle course and adults manipulating children for a supposedly greater good), The Maze Runner follows Thomas, whose memories have been erased, as he’s transported into a community of boys living in a forest, called the Glade, in the middle of a fluctuating maze.

It’s a decent film. Nothing special, nothing great. Just fine. I couldn’t care less who lived or who died because all of the characters possess gossamer personalities. The beginning opens with disorientation dropping you right into the story. But beyond that, it didn’t really contain much suspense. Plus I was able to predict pretty much the entire plot about 20 minutes in. Despite a few similarities, The Maze Runner lacks the stellar acting, character development, gravitas and social commentary that helped catapult The Hunger Games to blockbuster success.

The racial diversity of the boys in the Glade pleasantly surprised me. Not only do we see multiple boys of color (who talk! who matter as characters!), it was fantastic to see boys of color in leadership positions: Albie, the group’s leader and the very first boy ever sent up, and Minho, the Keeper of the Runners. Now, I want to applaud this film for its diversity. However, the film (and the book too) can’t resist centering a white male protagonist who is considered “special” and “different” because he’s curious about things and asks questions. Of course, Thomas can figure out everything better and faster than everyone else, even the people who have been in the Glade for years. Sure, you could argue that perhaps that has to do with his repressed memories resurfacing. But I think the real reason is that heaven forbid we have a hero who isn’t white or male, aside from a few notable exceptions (Katniss in The Hunger Games, Tris in Divergent).

Even though there are white boys in the Glade, The Maze Runner feels akin to a White Savior narrative. Now, the White Savior trope is typically reserved for movies about Black people and slavery or Indigenous people, who need to be “saved” or “civilized” by a lone white hero. Yet it still parallels the trope as the boys in the Glade need the new white guy to teach them about the maze and to attempt an escape. Minho has been mapping out the maze for three years, no small feat since the maze changes every night. Yet it’s Thomas, not Minho, who figures out how to kill a Griever and the code to use at the end of the maze. It’s Thomas who motivates the others to try to escape when the others have become complacent.

Thankfully, Thomas doesn’t play a role in “establishing order and peace,” which Albie says they have achieved after the “dark days” of panic and fear. Author James Dashner was inspired by Lord of the Flies to write a series about boys depicting how “instead of killing each other and being animalistic, they would form a brotherhood and do whatever it took to protect each other.” The boys do all work cooperatively together. But Thomas is the only one who breaks the rules and enters the maze as it’s closing to try to save Albie and Minho. While Thomas doesn’t civilize the boys, he does demonstrate a sense of bravery and morality the others seem to ignore or repress. The film’s message seems to be that we should question things, not passively accept them, which Thomas’s presence in the Glade embodies.

So where are all the girls? The movie never explains that. And no one seems to ask that question. The boys are shocked to see a girl, Teresa, come up the elevator the day after Thomas arrives. She is the only girl to ever arrive in the Glade. Aside from an extremely brief performance by Patricia Clarkson, Teresa is the only female character we ever see.

One nice change from most YA movies is the lack of a predictable love triangle or the emergence of a love story. With the presence of one girl, the film could have easily fallen into that trap. Love stories aren’t in and of themselves bad. In fact, I love them. It annoys me how often media denigrates love stories, typically because women and girls are the primary intended audiences. No, I’m glad no love story exists because it usually reduces a female character’s role to nothing more than an object of desire for the dudes in the film. It also typically reifies heteronormative relationships, also queer diversity would have been great to see here.

Teresa is the epitome of the Smurfette Principle. She is the only girl amongst 50 or so boys. Lacking true agency and personality, Teresa’s sole purpose in the film appears to be to potentially create confusion and chaos amongst the boys and to inspire Thomas. Sure, we see her acting feisty as she throws items off of a tower and tosses a torch at a Griever. But ultimately, her role only matters in how it relates to and impacts the male characters. Yes, Teresa tells Thomas that maybe there’s a reason they’re both different. And she encourages him that they should escape. But that’s about it. If I had any hopes for Teresa’s growth in the subsequent films in the trilogy (four books if you count the prequel), this article on the sexism in the books dashed that.

The Smurfette Principle remains so problematic because it reinforces the notion that “boys are the norm,” only their perspectives matter and society values girls only in their relation to boys. Talking about the film adaptation and gender, The Maze Runner author James Dashner said, “It’s refreshing to have the main character be a male for once, seems like there’s been a lot of female leads.”

Ummmmmm, pardon me? No, no, no. Just. No. That’s an extremely problematic statement. So because there have been a few female-centric film franchises based on YA novels it’s “refreshing” for the main character to be male? Uh oh, lady movies have been doing well at the box office. Gasp! BRING BACK THE BOY MOVIES.

No, there is nothing “refreshing” about having a male protagonist. We are inundated with media revolving around cis, straight, white men and boys. Lest you think books overflow with female protagonists, they don’t. In fact, a chasmic gender gap exists in children’s literature. In YA-adapted films, for every Katniss, Bella and Tris, we see myriad male protagonists — Harry Potter, Ender’s Game, Eragon, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I Am Number Four, Hugo, The Seeker: Dark is Rising, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Giver. Not only does a dearth of female protagonists exist in films and TV overall, but also in films geared specifically towards children and television programs for children.

It matters that girls (and all genders) see diverse representations (gender, race, sexuality, age, body size, people with disabilities, etc.) on-screen. It matters that girls see themselves reflected in media.

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? Even though it’s framed as a male-centric story, it still could have contained complex, nuanced fully developed female characters. It could have made an intriguing commentary on constricting, stereotypical gender roles or the toxicity of hyper masculinity. It could have explored how gender and race impact social structures and people’s experiences. Maybe I expect too much from my movies.

Despite its racial diversity, instead of forging a new trail, The Maze Runner follows a fairly formulaic and familiar story filled with tired tropes.

Megan Kearns is Bitch Flicks’ Social Media Director, a freelance writer and a feminist vegan blogger. She’s a member of the Boston Online Film Critics Association (BOFCA). She tweets at @OpinionessWorld.

‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes:’ My Dear Forgotten Cornelia

‘Dawn’ lacks strong female characters. How much more interesting the story could have been if Ellie had taken the lead in negotiating with Caesar and restoring the dam! Likewise, a fighting female ape could have provided interesting contrast while either avoiding or spotlighting appearance-based tropes about violent women.

Written by Andé Morgan.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) is an artful and visually appealing summer blockbuster, and it almost makes up for Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014). Unfortunately, like that movie and almost every other recent film in its genre, Dawn has a dearth of significant female characters.

Dawn was directed by Matt Reeves and written by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. It is the sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011).

Featuring much less James Franco (thank you, Noodly One) than Rise, Dawn stars Andy-Serkis-in-a-digital-monkey-suit as Caesar, Gary Oldman as Dreyfuss, leader of the surviving humans, and Jason Clarke as Malcolm, an utterly unmemorable white male lead. Keri Russell plays Ellie, a former CDC doctor and Malcolm’s companion.

The introductory news montage dovetails with the end of Rise. The Simian Flu, unleashed by Franco’s character, has killed almost everybody. A clutch of genetically-immune humans has outlasted the violent first 10 years of the apocalypse. Like characters in a late ’70s sitcom, they’re scraping by and doing the best they can in the bottom of a San Francisco high-rise.

In contrast the apes, led into the Muir Woods by Caesar in the previous film, have built a cellulose utopia. No cages, no electricity, no artisanal cat videos, no bullshit. Reeves and company do an excellent job of establishing a believable community, and of illustrating the depth of the inter-ape relationships. The father-son drama between Caesar and Blue Eyes is particularly well done, both in movement and in dialogue (such as it is), and was my favorite element of the film.

Malcolm and Ellie form a post-apocolyptic nuclear family with Malcolm’s son, Alexander (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Malcolm leads them and a small group of stock characters into the Muir Woods to locate and renovate a hydroelectric dam so that the survivors can power their peripherals. This quest precipitates the inevitable confrontation between the humans and the apes.

That's Ellie in the back. — That’s Ellie in the back.

Did I mention less James Franco? Also, the visual elements were excellent. Filming took place on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and Reeves and Michael Seresin (cinematographer) really sell the lush rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. The scenery works well with the CGI and motion capture techniques, and the scenes where Caesar and family hunt and fish are beautiful and seamless.

If only the humans could have been apes. I know the film was really about the apes, anyway, but it was hard to identify with the human characters enough to care about their fate. Speaking of humans and unsympathetic characters, Gary Oldman was woefully miscast as a former military special operations badass. Judging by his stilted and unenthusiastic delivery, he wasn’t sure what he doing there, either.

Also, dystopia, again. I know, the whole series is about the fruits of war and hubris, but I’m just feeling saturated. Lately, it seems like every wide release can’t wait to tell me about how humanity is so over. What’s more, the dystopia in Dawn is not dystopic enough (if it sounds like I’m complaining out of both sides of mouth, I am). It’s too shiny, and the humans are too happy and well fed. The survivors’ colony looks more like a saturday morning farmers’ market than the last remnant of humanity. Post-tribuation San Fransico actually looks more livable covered in vegetation and sans traffic.

Similarly, the ape community is shown as a bit too idyllic (at first, anyway), and initially conveyed a subtle look-at-the-happy-natives vibe.

The movie so badly wanted to be taken seriously, but the score did not help. It alternated between ineffective back ground movie muzak and hokey homage to the cheesiest riffs of the original films. The film was best in its dark moments, and it should’ve gone darker instead of relying on poorly-aged instrumentals and noble savage tropes.

As Kyle Buchanan notes, Dawn’s dystopia is similar to its contemporaries in one important way: women need not apply. Of the many female survivors depicted, only Ellie has any lines. Almost all of which constitute her comments on or validation of the acts of Malcolm and Alexander. For example, Sam Adams references a scene where Ellie marks Malcolm’s development by saying, “That was a brave thing you did.” What little we see of her trails off to nothing in the third act as Malcolm goes adventuring solo, as a man should, apparently.

The Muir Woods don’t fare any better. It’s a bit more difficult to tell, but I reckon that the only female ape shown on screen was Caesar’s spouse, Cornelia (Judy Greer). We meet her as she gives birth (it’s a boy!) in the first act. She spends almost the entire remainder of the film in the same place, suffering and shivering from an infection contracted during the birth. As a device designed to humanize Caesar and to foster a bond between the survivors and the apes, I guess she works. As a well developed, depthful character, not so much. In fact, no one even addresses her directly — you won’t even know her name unless you stay for the credits.

Maurice, a male orangutan and Caesar’s confidant, was played by female actor Karin Konoval (she also played Mrs. Peacock in the infamous X-Files episode Home). Unlike the other male apes, Maurice doesn’t seem particularly conflict-oriented. While he acknowledges that his experience as a circus ape exposed him to the bad side of humanity, he seems to understand Caesar’s sympathy for the survivors. In one of the best scenes of the film, Alexander looks up from reading a graphic novel in his tent to see an observant Maurice quietly sitting outside. He goes to Maurice, and they read together.

Dawn was sorely missing a strong female character. How much more interesting the story would have been if Ellie had taken the lead in negotiating with Caesar and getting the dam up and running! Similarly, a fighting female ape could have provided interesting contrast while either avoiding or spotlighting appearance-based tropes about violent women.

Some critics have posited that Dawn’s lack of female characters was justified due to the film’s supposed focus on “primal urges.” Primal usually means essential or original, but apparently primal means violent when we’re talking about hominids. And women, and stereotypically feminine values like empathy and non-violence, just aren’t primal. Except that they are. Indeed, even modern male apes aren’t universally violent or paternalistic. I wonder, where were the Bonobos?

Regardless, Dawn isn’t about primal urges. Instead, it is about the physical and mental frailty of humankind. Like most other contemporary blockbusters, it reflects our modern anxieties, including our feelings of helplessness and discord — feelings held by men and women alike.

Also on Bitch Flicks: Depictions of dystopias in television and film.

Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about film, television, and current events. Follow them @andemorgan.

‘Snowpiercer’: How Hungry Are You?

It becomes apparent that the characters are facing not just a disagreement over who gets to use the sauna, but also the prospect of being the last remaining humans on a dead planet, on a train, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Written by Andé Morgan.

Snowpiercer (2013) is timely, and in more ways than one. I live in southwestern Arizona, and it’s exploding-eyeballs hot. So I was all like, “Snowball Earth? We should be so lucky.” But, the premise…the film opens by tuning us into 66.6 FM The Exposition, which informs us that scientists have decided to fight gas with gas by releasing a chemical, the innocuously-named CWX-7, into the atmosphere to combat our global warming non-problem. Chemtrails, man…

Somebody must’ve misplaced a decimal point in a metric conversion factor, because too much of the chemical is released, and the Earth quickly becomes very Hoth-like. Just about everything and everybody dies. A train magnate, Wilford (played with creepy awesomeness by Ed Harris), quickly converts one of his luxury lines into a perpetual-motion Ark that circles the globe endlessly, completing a full circuit once a year.

Seems reasonable.

Wilford packs it full of rich people, support staff, and (because he’s a nice capitalist) a bunch of riffraff who were complaining about their juicy babies freezing solid or something.

The thing about trains is that they have two ends. The front cars feature hot tubs, mahogany, and club kids. The rear has roach-flavored jello and bed-head. And that’s the movie – a bloody, single-column metaphor for the ongoing clash between the haves and have-nots, wrapped in sheet metal and a plausibly implausible apocalypse.

Chris Evans plays Curtis, the White Male Lead, and early on he works his grungy antihero shtick to good effect. He’s first mate to John Hurt’s character, Gilliam, King of the Poors. In the first act, we learn that the train has been running continuously for 17 (almost 18) years since the big freeze. During that time, the rear passengers have attempted several uprisings, only to be viciously put down each time by Wilford’s security force. But Curtis and Gilliam have new plan, and this time It Just Might Work.

Director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, 2006) does an excellent job, particularly in the early scenes, of making the viewer feel claustrophobic in a large auditorium. The angles he chooses, the play of light and shadow, and the constant, subtle rocking make the audience feel as if they were on the train, too. As Curtis and crew move towards the front, each car is visually distinct, like the rooms in Willy Wonka’s factory. My favorite was the school car – bright, yellow, and eerily cheery.

Less subtle is the film’s exploration of its class struggle theme. The rear units are more like cattle cars than coach cars, and the haves take perverse pleasure is abusing the have-nots. Bong spares no expressions of pain, misery, and grief as Wilford’s goons rip children from their mother’s arms or engage in freestyle amputation. Much of this malice is directed by women, including Wilford’s moll, Claude (played by Emma Levie).

But Tilda Swinton steals the show as Minister Mason. I mean, she aced it. While her actions are deplorable, fascistic, and cruel, we never quite can tell if she’s inherently evil or if she’s merely been pushed to a place we all could go if we knew we were going to live out our days on the Polar Express. She presides over the bloodiest scene in the film, as Curtis leads his army of unwashed against a larger force of Wilford’s thugs, who are armed with wicked axes, sickles, and pikes.

The scene is blood-drenched with stylized hackery, and it’s actually quite good. We feel each blow of the axe and it takes, as it would, many blows to bring down an enraged prole. The scene also features Curtis performing some slow-motion, ballet-quality jugular slicing that actually feels fresh and not at all like a weak replication of the slow motion fight scene effects in the Matrix films.

But there’s comedy, too. The film develops a rhythm–an illustration of crushing inequality, some tension, and then some bloody ultraviolence punctuated on both ends by jarringly quirky humor or esoteric symbolism. For example, other critics have noted the scene where, while in the middle of the aforementioned battle, the train crosses a specific bridge that marks the new year. Each side stops fighting and stands in place during the crossing, both so as to not knock the train from the track and to observe the event. Wilford’s death squad, imposing and faceless in their black masks, turns en masse to the bloodied resistance fighters, counts down from ten as if they were in Times Square, and deliver an obscenely cheery and sincere “Happy New Year!” Then the carnage resumes.

However, my favorite discordant instance was the propaganda video played for the kids in the schoolhouse car. In black and white, with campy mid-century aesthetics, it details Wilford’s early obsession with trains. Young Wilford looks at the camera and says, “I want to live on a train, forever!” As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that the characters are facing more than just a disagreement over who gets to use the sauna, but the prospect of being the last remaining humans on a dead planet, on a train, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

There are several other interesting female characters in Snowpiercer. Octavia Spencer puts in a strong performance as Tanya, one of the rear car passengers whose child is stolen by Wilford. She is extremely believable, and the viewer clearly registers the grief and resignation in her eyes. Ah-sung Ko plays Yona, the daughter of one of the train’s designers, Namgoong Minsoo (played by Kang-ho Song). While her performance didn’t move me, her character is written well, and proves vitally important to the plot. But really, the film is too busy focusing its dark symbolism on human extinction to really comment very pointedly on the plight on women in the world, or on the train. In fact, aside from Mason, the female characters with speaking parts are fairly one-dimensional; either they’re victims of horrible injustice, or psychotic perpetrators of horrible injustice.

Bechdel? Nope.

Two scenes did give me pause: at one point, Curtis has the upper hand on Mason. She pleads, removes her partial dentures and, as I interpreted it, offers to fellate Curtis in exchange for her life. It seemed out of character, as if the directer really wanted to punctuate, in a spiteful way, Mason’s reduction in power at the hands of a man. In a later scene, one of the rebels kills a pregnant woman. Granted, she had just shot his friend in the head. When considered against the nihilistic, slightly insane tone of the movie, and some of the stories Curtis tells, maybe the act contributes meaningfully to the story. I’m not so sure, and I’ll level with you: I’m not a big fan of violence in film for its own sake, and violence against pregnant women just jerks me out of a movie and puts me in an uncomfortable place. Speaking of, if you haven’t seen Shoot ‘Em Up (2007) or Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), don’t.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed overall. The film didn’t quite live up to the hype for me, and I can’t really give it as glowing a recommendation as Rebecca Phale did at The Mary Sue. The dialogue was clunky at times, the theme delivery was sledgehammer-heavy upfront yet muddled at the end, and the third act suffered from ponderous pacing.

Still, Snowpiercer is a good film, and you should see it. The dystopia is very tangible, and you will appreciate the carefully crafted visuals and the tantric tension throughout. Swinton’s performance is worth the price of admission, if nothing else.

Note: Snowpiercer is based, loosely, on a French graphic novel.

Also on Bitch Flicks: Dude Bros and ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ by Amanda Rodriguez.

Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about culture, race, politics, and LGBTQ issues. Follow them @andemorgan.