Despite industry claims that no one will pay and audiences aren’t interested in seeing a superheroine-led film, the dazzling success of series like ‘The Hunger Games’ and ‘Divergent’ prove that the world is ready for women to take charge and lead. While we’re seeing movement in response to growing demand for female superhero representation, there is still a long way to go before we reach parity.
Our theme week for May 2016 will be Superheroines.
There has been such a resounding call for superheroine leads on the silver screen that both DC and Marvel finally caved to give us, respectively, a 2017 release of Wonder Woman and a 2019 release of Captain Marvel. On the small screen, CBS — which co-owns The CW, home to Arrow and The Flash — released Supergirl in 2015, and it’s a hit. Not only that, but the gritty Netflix original anti-superheroine series Jessica Jones has also gained incredible popularity, acclaim, and even serious critical analysis for its representations of race and rape culture. Despite industry claims that no one will pay and audiences aren’t interested in seeing a superheroine-led film, the dazzling success of series like The Hunger Games and Divergent prove that the world is ready for women to take charge and lead. While we’re seeing movement in response to growing demand for female superhero representation, there is still a long way to go before we reach parity.
Why is superheroine parity so important? The documentary Wonder Women: The Untold Story of American Superheroines tells us that superheroines give little girls and even adult women the invaluable ability to envision themselves as heroines and champions. All women deserve a role model who represents attributes like strength, kindness, righteousness, and teamwork.
In fact, Gloria Steinem views superheroines in our culture as critical:
“Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys when you come right down to it because 90% of violence in the world is against females. Certainly women need protectors even more, and what’s revolutionary, of course, is to have a female protector not a male protector.”
Tell us about your favorite superheroines. What are your favorite superheroine representations? Show us how film and TV have gotten superheroines wrong and right. Which superheroine deserves her own franchise?
We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which topic 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, May 20, 2016 by midnight Eastern Time.
Certainly, teenagers strain against authority and exert their independence. This doesn’t mean they’re immune to other big issues that plague society – issues such as sexism and racism. If the novels being written for this demographic want to call themselves true dystopias based on a futuristic society in which our current way of living led to some global disaster, then the writers of the novels and the film adaptations shouldn’t shy away from some of the biggest issues in current politics and society.
If book sales and box office numbers are any indication, young adults love their dystopian fiction. So much so that the creative powers that be are intent on keeping the momentum going with more and more additions to this fairly recent genre phenomenon, for better or for worse. Unfortunately, the repetition breeds dilution of the initial idea of a dystopia as an opposite of a utopia, or perfect world.
The idea of dystopia takes into account basic and flawed human nature, hinging on the idea that power, political in this case, corrupts, leading to a small group of oppressors and a greater group of oppressed. YA dystopian fiction tends to present this oppression as a necessary sacrifice to save the rest of humanity after some global and apocalyptic disaster, often environmental in nature and with the clear message that we should take care of our environment now or suffer our own dystopia later.
The common element in a true dystopia is politics, but in these YA versions, the politics have become metaphors for the seemingly oppressive nature of adult and school rules under which teenagers often chafe. This conversion leaves the stories one-sided and shallow, expecting the reader to assume that, because this is a common problem within the young adult mindset, it is also the biggest problem facing young adults today. At best, such an assumption stems from laziness, and at worst, it’s insulting.
Certainly, teenagers strain against authority and exert their independence. This doesn’t mean they’re immune to other big issues that plague society – issues such as sexism and racism. If the novels being written for this demographic want to call themselves true dystopias based on a futuristic society in which our current way of living led to some global disaster, then the writers of the novels and the film adaptations shouldn’t shy away from some of the biggest issues in current politics and society. It’s not realistic to assume that these issues would simply fade into the background as society crumbled.
Take The Hunger Games, for example. Society is divided by geography and profession as each of the 12 districts supplies the capital city with a specific product or skill. The districts live in various extremes of poverty and deprivation. While some would argue that such suffering would bring out the best in some people, the situation is also ripe for the desperation that leads to an irrational fear of other, a prime motivator of racism. And yet, while the author created a diverse group of characters, including Katniss who was described as “olive-skinned,” the discrimination based on this diversity is simply missing.
The same could be said for TheMaze Runner series (the first film is available on demand through Google Play and DirecTV), which provides representation of various races to include Asian and African American and yet never a hint of racial tensions either in the grove or once they’re out of it and into The Scorch Trials, the second installment of the book and movie trilogy. Possibly the worst offender of recent offerings, however, is the Divergent series, in which society is divided by faction only, with each faction based on a particular character trait. Not only is there no hint of racism anywhere in any of the three novels of this trilogy, but sexism is gone, too.
This latter is particularly hard to swallow given that the domestically abusive and oppressive male leader of one faction (while actively opposing the female leader of another) never once makes a disparaging reference to her being deficient because she’s a woman, even after his true character is brought to light and his crimes against his own family are revealed to all. There is one comment made by a male to the lead female Tris when Peter tells her she has nice legs for a “stiff,” but this is a reference to her previous faction only. No reference to her appearance as a female, only faction.
Overall, if writers and filmmakers wish to reach the widest possible audience, they’ll need to take a harder look at more than struggles with authority. By leaving out other important problems faced by today’s young people, they leave a glaring hole in the message.
Maria Ramos is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy. You can follow her on Twitter @MariaRamos1889.
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.
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.
While the men are shopping, Francine is left alone to fend off a zombie with no means of self-defence. As she attempts to escape onto the roof, the others return to save her from the zombie and bring her back inside. She is dismayed to realize that they intend to stay there indefinitely. While the men enthusiastically describe the mall as a “kingdom” and a “goldmine,” Francine describes it as a “prison.”
Though this happens in a future in which cosmetic surgery has become much more than a matter of lift and tuck, Koh’s struggle with whether and how to change her body for the sake of her daughter and her career, combined with the behind-the-scenes machinations of the corporation, casts a complicated light on the present struggles of women trying to succeed in both career and motherhood while facing the social pressure to stay young and be perfect.
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.
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.
And, although The Citadel is ruled by powerful men with disabilities, we understand it to be a fundamentally ableist society. Immortan Joe is questing for a “perfect” son and has clearly chosen The Wives for their beautiful, unblemished, able bodies in an attempt to breed one. We understand that this is a patriarchy in its most extreme form where women have no personhood at all.
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, at the end of the day—at the end of a lot of days—I’m tired of watching these shows and seeing women as props and symbols used to push the hero along his way. I’m tired of watching these shows and seeing the massive chasms between what they present, what they claim to represent, and what their fans insist they represent.
It certainly isn’t a feminist world she lives in, but she does her level best to undermine her husband in an enclosed space. As Noah himself veers away from his family tradition of life-supporting environmental husbandry, Naameh continues to practice what he (used to) preach, preserving her daughter-in-law, the animals, and the land once they find it again.
I can’t keep count of the number of times the fact that women menstruate has been used as a reason to render us incapable of doing something. However, the fact women can have children (while cis-men cannot) is arguably our greatest power in a time of crisis.
In rejecting Lexi, Anne perpetuates the false solidarity and universal acceptance Butler points out in the above passage. Anne sees Lexi as failing to perform the necessary gender of her body. Lexi is the very symbol of a failed body, the failed universal woman Anne has expected of her daughter.
I mean, she doesn’t wrap her arms around some guy’s waist to hold on for the ride of her life or even jump onto a Vespa or something weak. Nope, she’s a zombie-fightin’ shoulder-padded biker who escapes danger on her own and looks just as feathery-haired good when she gets to her destination as when she put down her attacker in the alley (although this was the early 80s while CFCs were being phased out, so big hair treated with a half-bottle of AquaNet always had some hold).
What helps ‘Evangelion’ continue to grow its popularity is not the focus on religious or sci-fi elements, but its commitment to showcasing the fragility of humanity through its flawed and destructive characters tasked with saving the world and themselves. And how does the franchise show this? By literally placing the future of what’s left of the world in the hand of dysfunctional and emotionally fragile children.
Maria essentially makes Freder the chosen one—she inspires him to go underground and gives him his purpose when he awakens to the dystopian system in which he lives. Without her, the story does not proceed and the system continues unopposed.
As she has an older brother, her birth was unauthorized and when she was discovered she was sent directly to the SkyBox. And so on. While some of the crimes are legitimate, many are the result of children growing up in a totalitarian state. So clearly it’s going to be better here on the ground, right?
Dystopia, in its futuristic escapism and its contemporary relevance, is an ideal genre for the young adult demographic. By pushing the boundaries of disturbing content and reflecting on youthful idealism, dystopian narratives trust the YA consumer to be both literary in their consumption of the book or film, but also socially and morally insightful in their view of the imagined world they hold.
In these moments, and in those unspoken moments when she savors placing long sweet kisses on Jules’s cheek, we see Gwen’s resistance. “Know your value,” Gwen tells Jules. It’s not found in good grades, not in getting into the best school, not in a newer and “better” body, but in sensory and emotional human pleasures.
When speaking over the phone, Sharon’s enthusiasm for this pioneering adaptation of a Caribbean Canadian sci-fi novel emanates as though this was a fresh and newly discovered idea. In fact, Sharon has been working on creating this film for the past 15 years (while also establishing herself as a published playwright, writer, actor and award winning director) and although the journey has been long, she strongly believes that now is the perfect time to transition this well-nurtured idea into tangible reality.
By creating her own worlds where she is a force to be reckoned with, Babydoll reclaims that very thing that was taken away from her by her stepfather and the hospital: her humanity.
Dystopia, in its futuristic escapism and its contemporary relevance, is an ideal genre for the young adult demographic. By pushing the boundaries of disturbing content and reflecting on youthful idealism, dystopian narratives trust the YA consumer to be both literary in their consumption of the book or film, but also socially and morally insightful in their view of the imagined world they hold.
This guest post by Rowan Ellis appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.
Dystopian narratives can generally be described as “An imaginary place where people lead dehumanised and often fearful lives,” which is accurate, but does not fully express key characteristics of the genre.[1]The Hunger Games, for example, is temporally situated in a future version of America, and this relationship between time periods affects the causes of the dystopian societies and the extent to which our own world is responsible for their making. In this way, and especially looking at The Hunger Games as a Young Adult series, we can examine how dystopian landscapes are an overwhelmingly apt vehicle for social awareness in the younger generation by interacting with their world and self-identity.
What Would Katniss Do?
The Young Adult label is a recent one, with a distinctive lack of research on the genre; even its definition is contentious as a mixture of both a self-styled labelling by authors themselves, and a marketing tool for publishing companies. Intended readership is perhaps the most useful way of understanding the Young Adult literature, with the genre then defined as those books, films, or TV written and produced specifically for young adults.
The contemporary relevance of YA protagonists ensure that the exploration of self-identity for characters within these films is inevitably reflected back onto the YA audience, helping to shape their own views of themselves and the world around them. By exclusively using protagonists who are young adults themselves, films like The Hunger Games are able to emphasise the need for social change, and the possibility of it, by giving power to its viewers; as the protagonists create a better world, so too can the audience. At a talk at Cadogan Hall, John Green asked for questions from the audience of young readers. On receiving insightful and pertinent questions, and reading aloud one on the pain of writing about unfulfilled lives, and another comparing the use of water in his book to that of James Joyce in Ulysses, he remarked “I wish all the journalists who tell me my books are too complex for teenagers could hear this.” Dystopia, in its futuristic escapism and its contemporary relevance, is an ideal genre for the young adult demographic. By pushing the boundaries of disturbing content and reflecting on youthful idealism, dystopian narratives trust the YA consumer to be both literary in their consumption of the book or film, but also socially and morally insightful in their view of the imagined world they hold. By extrapolating a possible future from wider themes of importance in the contemporary age, the need to change current society is heightened.
Literary critic Robyn McCallum prefaces her work on adolescent identity by proposing the relative truism that “concepts of personal identity and selfhood are formed in dialogue with society, with language and with other people.”[2] The implication of this for The Hunger Games, however, is far more significant, as the reaction to and rebellion against Panem shapes not only the self-identity of the characters, but also the audience’s attitudes toward them. Dystopian worlds are often a product of mankind’s inability to learn from history, and The Hunger Games utilises this by mirroring its world building with Ancient and contemporary civilisations while creating the new history of Panem. Penelope Lively’s argument that “to have a sense of history is, above all, to have a sense of one’s own humanity” ties Katniss’ identity to distant history, as much as to her father’s death in the recent past.[3] The use of the name Panem for the dystopian world Collins creates, gives a multi-layered sense of antiquity and contemporary history. The Latin translation of Panem as “bread” is most notably tied to the quintessential Roman phrase “Bread and Circuses,” directly paralleling the Games and historical Gladiatorial contests, with the pre-Games feast even mirroring the cena libera in Roman culture. However, there is also a similarity with the famous Pam Am airline, evoking the past glamour of American globalisation, ironically contrasted with the static divisive state of the future America. Similarly the Capitol ties together ancient Rome and modern Washington with the utopian setting of the high society in Collins’ novel. The film’s costumes and design has a similar relationship with history; District 12 has a distinctive feel of dustbowl America, as if stepping out of the Depression-era photograph of an impoverished farming community.
Although set in our future, Katniss’ outfit undeniably echoes the past.
McCallum argues that “to displace a character out of his/her familiar surroundings can destablise his/her sense of identity,” yet Katniss does her growing within the hostile and unfamiliar landscape of the Arena, as she refuses to mirror the career tributes bloodthirsty methods, even though we as an audience know she is already skilled in hunting and killing.[4] The Arena is a form of anti-society, as The Games encourage a distrust of society via a distrust of individuals and alliances on which communities are based. By placing Katniss in such a space, it ensures a shaping of her social identity as a victor, but also her internal one, as her compassion is not completely destroyed by the mistrust and cunning she demonstrates in order to survive.
For a dystopian society to flourish there needs to be, as a characteristic of its ruling elite, the ability to block out natural empathy, or to remove the lower citizens from full human status deserving of empathy, in order for these hardships to be justified.[5] For the Games in The Hunger Games to achieve their purpose, they have to be watched both in horror by the Districts, and with delight and wonder by the Capitol. The Hunger Games uses the Games as an extreme image of where desensitising an audience potentially extrapolates to. The most immediate reflection of empathy within The Hunger Games is the relationship between Katniss, Rue, and Prim, as Katniss finds herself unable to detach her feelings for her sister with those for her fellow Tribute. This creates a sense of her as an unexpected maternal figure, sensing a gap between the younger girls as small children, and herself as an adult with responsibilities to them. Haymitch, as a representation of the experienced, and therefore jaded, adult character, is able to comprehend consequences of Katniss’ actions, whereas she reflects the stereotypical teenage attitude of living in the present, allowing her to focus on empathy over practicality and preserving her as a moral character as she teams up with the defenceless Rue.
The Other is a vital component of social (rather than ecological) dystopian fiction, as the propensity of the ruling elite to create such a nightmarish reality often relies on the subjugation of those who are deemed different. Going through the physical gendering process of puberty emphasises gender divides for YA characters and viewers. Gender in Panem is never raised as an Othering principle, indeed both male and female tributes are treated with the same objectification and callousness, and both genders display compassion and ruthlessness equally. However, the problems of patriarchy are so present in our own society that we project these values onto the characters. TheAtlantic magazine, for example, described Katniss as “the most important female character in recent pop culture history”and the success of the film franchise has bolstered support of an increase in films with female protagonists as both morally and financially justified.[6] In The Hunger Games, Katniss’ unbridled contempt for her Mother’s mental state, shapes her into becoming a traditional father figure, assuming the patriarchal rather than matriarchal role in the house. Similarly, although ostensibly the tribute Johanna Mason subverts the traditional gender stereotypes when fakes a meek sensibility in her own Games before revealing her bloodthirsty nature in order to win, there is a sense within the books that the same ploy would have worked had Joanna been Joseph.
Those of a high social rank in the Capitol become characterised by an extreme aestheticism, mirroring the turn of the Century upper-class preoccupation with art and beauty explored by Oscar Wilde and other Decadent artists. Cinna’s team work relentlessly on Katniss, as the ideals of beauty are vital to gaining support in the Capitol; looks help you win. In Finnick’s storyline, this preoccupation is given an added sinister twist, as he confesses Snow allowed Capitol citizen’s to rape him, inviting a comparison with the sexual exploitation of both men and women from the working-class backgrounds in Panem, with the sex industry in our own world.
Having Katniss act as the face of a building revolution, young adult viewers can see reflected in the films images of fictional young adults with the ability to change the world. They use a combination of fear and hope to allow young adult viewers to feel empowered, both in their internal self-identity and their engagement with the contemporary issues reflected in the films. Hope is traditionally the driving force in children’s fiction–to prevent despair from becoming the ultimate end of the experience, thereby preventing the impetus for creating a better alternative, and the same can be seen in Young Adult fiction. The actor Donald Sutherland, who portrays President Snow in the film adaptations of The Hunger Games has noticed the story’s “potential to catalyse, motivate, mobilise a generation of young people who were, in my opinion, by and large dormant in the political process,” through this combination of alarm and optimism.
Dystopian films relate the horror of the fictional worlds to the future of their own; in The Hunger Games the starvation in the Districts is a clear reflection of the poverty and famine experienced world-wide, even within contemporary America, where 57 percent of American children live in a home which is designated “poor” or “low income” and 20 percent live in poverty. Moreover, the extravagance of the Capitol’s food and clothes holds a mirror to the wasteful culture in the Western World, where up to half of all food produced is never eaten. Furthermore, the life or death conditions for children chosen as Tributes can be associated with the problems surrounding the use of child soldiers in countries such as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The empathetic fear of young adults towards these issues was illustrated clearly in the viral awareness campaign “Kony 2012,” where the plight of child soldiers captured the attention of hundreds of thousands of young people world-wide. Although critic Downey wrote in 2005 that “one of the great difficulties in teaching about horrific periods of history […] is addressing how to help students comprehend the incomprehensible,” she simplifies the abilities of young people by supposing that what is viewed as “incomprehensible” is relegated to the past, and that as adults, teachers are able to better understand these events.[7]
Hardships endured can both build and destroy characters, and although destruction can be viewed as a more realistic reaction to living in a dystopian society, forming positive identities around interacting with a society and set of values one finds unfair or lacking is a YA viewer’s reality. As the brilliant YA author Patrick Ness puts it, “Teenagers don’t see dystopias as dystopias; they see them as barely fictional representations of their day-to-day lives,” through their own powerlessness and fear. A fear which is inevitable in our world, and a reality to YA viewers–Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, famously composed its terrifying society from real cultures and historic movements. Dystopian narratives gives a YA audience a way of processing this reality at a distance, while potentially using it for personal inspiration, to foster an empathy which allows them to create their own morality separate from and informed by imperfect societies.
[1]Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster Inc, 1995)
[2] Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1999) p.3
[4] Robyn McCallum, Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1999) p.190
[7] Downey, A.L., “The Transformative Power of Drama: Bringing Literature and Social Justice to Life” English Journal, 95/1, (2005) p.33
Rowan Ellis is a British geek using her YouTube videos to critique films, TV, and books from a queer and feminist lens.
Maria essentially makes Freder the chosen one—she inspires him to go underground and gives him his purpose when he awakens to the dystopian system in which he lives. Without her, the story does not proceed and the system continues unopposed.
This guest post by Julia Patt appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.
Contemporary audiences best know Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for its unlikely restoration after museum workers discovered several missing scenes from the film in Brazil in 2008, 80 years after the film’s 1927 release. An archetypal depiction of the class struggle, Metropolis continues to influence dystopian landscapes, from George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead to The Hunger Games.
In the opening scenes of the film, we learn that the Metropolis is in fact two cities: the wealthy city above and the workers’ city below. Our protagonist is Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), son of the Metropolis’ Master, Joh. Freder differs little from the other men of his class—indulging in meaningless contests in the city’s stadiums, enjoying the comfort of elaborately dressed and painted women in the Eternal Gardens, and completely oblivious to the trials of the working class. It’s only when Freder encounters Maria (Brigitte Helm) that he deviates from the course set for him.
Freder in the Eternal Gardens.
In this first scene, Maria brings a large group of children up to the Eternal Gardens so that they may see the people who live there. “These are your brothers,” she says again and again, perhaps addressing both groups. While the other visitors seem alarmed by the newcomers and move away, Freder stands transfixed, watching Maria.
Maria.
He then learns of the deplorable conditions in the city, but only because he follows Maria underground. There he sees terrible accidents, men lagging with fatigue at their posts—all the horrors of the industrial world with its vast inequalities. Afterward, he tries to explain the conditions to his father, who is unconcerned, so much so that he casually dismisses one of his own employees to go join the ranks at the machines.
Although he prevents the man’s suicide and saves another from exhaustion, Freder can find no overarching solution or purpose apart from pursuing Maria and at several moments bids these other characters to wait for him. He’ll find answers, he seems sure, when he finds the woman who has so shaken him. He’s not wrong, either. When he later finds Maria—more than 30 minutes after her first appearance—she is delivering a modified sermon about the Tower of Babel, ending with the maxim: the mediator between the head and the hands is the heart.
Maria essentially makes Freder the chosen one—she inspires him to go underground and gives him his purpose when he awakens to the dystopian system in which he lives. Without her, the story does not proceed and the system continues unopposed.
Joh, Freder’s father, immediately recognizes the danger she presents and turns to the inventor, Rotwang, to help him discredit her. They decide to give Rotwang’s greatest creation, the Machine-Man, Maria’s face. It’s worth noting, however, that the Machine-Man had a female form well before this plan—Rotwang created it to replace the woman he loved. Joh and Rotwang are naturally delighted with the Machine-Man version of Maria, calling it the most perfect and obedient tool. Each believes that the Machine answers only to him, although it is ultimately unclear whether the Machine has motivations of its own. (“Let’s watch the city go to the devil!” it exclaims toward the film’s conclusion with noticeable glee.)
The perfect woman, apparently.
It does, however, fulfill its joint purpose, which is to bring chaos to both the city above and the city below. In the Metropolis’ nightclubs, the Machine dances, driving the upper-class men to violence and delirium. Below, it incites the workers to revolution and encourages them to destroy the machines that keep both cities alive and functioning.
Men lose their minds for this move.
Thanks to the Machine’s efforts, the Metropolis comes close to complete destruction, with the workers’ children trapped in a flooding city below and the wealthy stalled by massive power outages above. Rioting breaks out as the two classes encounter each other on the surface. However, Maria saves the workers’ children—with Freder’s assistance—and later, the mob unwittingly destroys the Machine-Man. After seeing his son nearly die, Joh has a somewhat convenient change of heart and, with Freder’s help, joins hands with the worker’s foreman.
All this comes at the hands of one woman and her doppelganger—equal forces for peace and chaos. But Maria isn’t a character with much agency or screen time. Freder’s pursuit of her dominates our attention throughout the film. And ultimately she is not the mediator, rather only the inspiration for him, the original Trinity to Neo’s Chosen One in The Matrix.
Maria is an unusual character in other respects. It’s unclear what her position or profession is, although it seems likely she might be a teacher or a minder for the children, and she doesn’t quite seem to belong to the working class. Neither does she seem to spend time with other women. Only men come to the meetings she calls; in fact, we see no women workers at all until the film’s final act.
There seems to be a suggestion, then, that only men can overthrow the oppressive society—we see three men clasp hands at the end of the film to show that peace is possible. Aside from the women in the mob of workers, women in Metropolis remain isolated, surrounded by crowds of men. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no moment of: “These are your sisters.” However, without Maria, revolution seems unlikely. She threatens the status quo by calling her meetings; she inspires Freder to leave the city above and witness the city below. Her image—properly manipulated—is enough to create division within both societies, but she also contributes to the unity.
We need you! Just not as a leader.
The Machine-Man, of course, has even less control over its destiny. Its appearance is stolen, an appropriation of Maria’s body for the benefit of the patriarchal upper class. If it loves chaos and seems devious, we should remember that it was designed to behave as it does. It is an ideal tool because it appeals as women as meant to appeal without any desires or notions of its own. But it’s worth noting that the other women of the upper city are also tools of the patriarchy, used for a particular end other than their own determination, however willing their participation in the system might appear.
Ultimately, Metropolis gives us two images of how women function in repressive societies—as revolutionary visionaries and unholy temptresses. However, it falls short on both sides: they can neither overcome nor create the dystopian world as they choose.
The Machine-Man mirrors Maria.
We find a similar duality of character in François Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. The film deals similarly with a male hero of the dominant society awakening to the realities of the world around him: Guy Montag (Oscar Werner). Montag belongs to the enforcement class—he burn books—and lives a comfortable if unhappy life with his wife, Linda (Julie Christie).
Linda is the picture of complacence. She consumes the media her society dictates, wants what her culture tells her to want, and questions little.
Linda.
We wouldn’t know anything of her unhappiness, save for the fact that in her second appearance in the film, she has apparently overdosed on pills. It’s never settled satisfactorily whether she did this intentionally or by accident. The emergency crew treats it as a routine occurrence, so it seems likely that Linda represents the typical woman of her station—lonely, uneducated, and lacking control over her life in any meaningful way.
Montag is visibly shaken by the episode, but only to a point—he is in the midst of a transformation inspired by Clarisse, a woman he meets on the train. In a deft move by Truffaut, Christie also plays Clarisse, distinguished from Linda only by her short hair.
Although he is not as immediately taken with her as Freder is with Maria in Metropolis, Montag clearly finds himself drawn to Clarisse. (She is often regarded as one of the original manic pixie dream girls.)
He seems happy to see her again and goes so far as to visit the school where she works with her after she’s fired. He particularly seems moved by her emotional response when the children don’t remember her—she cries the tears Linda can’t.
But most importantly, Clarisse puts Montag on the path to his awakening by asking him, “do you ever read any of the books before you burn them?”
Don’t mind me…just here to inspire you to a revolution.
Clarisse, like Maria, is an active participant in a movement to change the way her society works. She warns a man at the beginning of the film that the firefighters are on the way to his house. She doesn’t teach the way she is directed to and she challenges all of Montag’s preconceptions about the world in which he lives. However, as with Metropolis and Maria, Fahrenheit 451 is not Clarisse’s story. And strikingly, the dual casting of her and Linda suggests that the two play complementary roles in Montag’s life. One represents the inadequate if safe life he’s lead and the other the intellectual freedom and curiosity he learns to want. But under slightly different circumstances, Clarisse might have been Linda or vice versa. Their individual desires, while relevant, do not drive the narrative the way Guy’s do. Rather, like Maria and the Machine-Man, they represent the two possibilities in particular dystopian systems—their roles largely determined by the needs of men in those societies, be they revolutionary or otherwise.
Ultimately, what are we to make of these manic pixie dream girls with their unusual ideas? Is there a moment when they might do more than inspire others and take real revolutionary action on their own? And is it possible to tell the story of a woman coming to the same realizations that Freder and Guy do?
Or, does it all come back to the creation of the Machine-Man—the ultimate symbol of society’s desires with no identity of its own?
Julia Patt is a writer from Maryland. She also edits 7×20, a journal of twitter literature, and is a regular contributor to VProud.tv and tatestreet.org. Follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/chidorme
What helps ‘Evangelion’ continue to grow its popularity is not the focus on religious or sci-fi elements, but its commitment to showcasing the fragility of humanity through its flawed and destructive characters tasked with saving the world and themselves. And how does the franchise show this? By literally placing the future of what’s left of the world in the hand of dysfunctional and emotionally fragile children.
This guest post by CG appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.
Dystopian landscapes have begun to grow in popularity with audiences, particularly in film and literature. Franchises like The Hunger Games and The Walking Dead have given audiences this love affair with settings that include abandoned cities, constant threats of death, and the occasional love triangle in an attempt at normalcy. But what these popularized franchises have done is cloud our definition of what dystopian media can do. In fact, there has been dystopian media done before that called for us to embrace and examine how humanity is represented in these otherwise bleak landscapes.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, Neon Genesis Evangelion refers to a franchise created by Hideaki Anno and Gainax Studios, going on to include a 25-episode anime, six films (including three reboots), and a 13-volume manga series. The franchise itself is incredibly popular, launching back in the 1990s and maintaining a steady fanbase ever since. What helps Evangelion continue to grow its popularity is not the focus on religious or sci-fi elements, but its commitment to showcasing the fragility of humanity through its flawed and destructive characters tasked with saving the world and themselves. And how does the franchise show this? By literally placing the future of what’s left of the world in the hand of dysfunctional and emotionally fragile children.
The story of Evangelion focuses on three 14-year-old pilots that control giant robots called Evangelion Units, as they battle monsters called Angels that threaten to destroy (what’s left of) the world. These Angels have already destroyed half of the world – the oceans have turned red, half of the world’s population has been killed. Some of the characters live with the consequences of the Second Impact – one character, Misato Katsuragi, tries to live with her guilt of directly surviving the Second Impact while her father does not.
The pilots of the Eva Units serve as the main characters of the franchise, and remain the gatekeepers to the internal conflict of the internal conflict of the franchise. The main character is Shinji Ikari – abandoned by his father who later asks him to pilot one of the Eva Units, Shinji revels in the feelings of guilt and unraveling that comes with feeling horribly inadequate to everyone around him. One of the episodes of the original anime is called “Hedgehog’s Dilemma,” focusing on a psychological condition that makes for Shinji’s insecurity to hinder him from getting close to others, for fear of further rejection. For Shinji, he reclaims some of that validation in the form of piloting the Eva. Like the other pilots, the Eva Units give him identity beyond his own limitations. Although, as we soon learn, it is not enough to allow them to completely escape.
The second pilot is Asuka Langley-Sohryu, a hotheaded and brash girl who clings to her title as an Eva pilot as a badge of honor. To Asuka, she revels in being needed and having purpose. But her overconfidence shadows a deeper hurt of fierce inadequacy. When her title as an Eva pilot is no longer enough to shield her from facing her fear of being useless, it quickly manifests into putting Asuka in further danger. In this unforgiving future, where the survival of humanity rests on the sounders of three teenagers, Asuka’s mental unraveling to be more dangerous that we would expect.
The final pilot is Rei Ayanami, a girl who is seen as emotionless and stoic. She follows orders without thought or individuality, and she has a strange connection to the Eva Units themselves, as well as to Shinji’s deceased mother, Yui. Rei is interesting in that she must learn to reclaim her individuality and importance as a person. She struggles to find meaning with being expendable.
The psychological stability of the pilots, as well as the adults that are supposed to be directing and guiding them, become paramount to the development and plot of Evangelion. It’s not simply the bleak landscape that draws out the despair in the characters; it is the drive of destruction that lingers on the tongue of everyone around. Shinji, Asuka, and Rei are left to salvage humanity out of the hopelessness that surrounds them.. and it makes for oddly addicting media.
from left: Eva Unit 02, 01, 00
Though the franchise explores other themes of faith, relationships, and tragedy – at its core, Neon Genesis Evangelion gives us a tale of searching for meaning and embracing the strength of flawed humanity, even when the situation is bleak.
CG is a writer, blogger, and fangirl from New Jersey. Most of her online writing can be found on her site (blackgirlinmedia.com).
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.
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.
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.
Scary, right?
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.
President Woodard, we salute you.
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.
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.
While my conversations with my friends’ 12-year-old daughters about the trilogy always began with “Team Peeta!” or “Team Gale!” our conversations in the classroom focused on the scholarship of female collectives and violent resistance; we didn’t need Gale and Peeta as fodder for conversation. But on the last day of class, I introduced Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality to complicate the larger conversation in which readers—and viewers—find themselves forced to choose a camp, just as Katniss is forced to do.
This guest post by Colleen Clemens appears as part of our theme week on Reality TV.
I taught Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games as the culminating text for my Women and Violence in Literature course this semester. Almost all of us had read the book already, but to look at Katniss through the lens of the female protagonists that had come before her in the semester—The Bride, Firdaus, Aileen Wuornos, Legs, Lisbeth Salander, Malli, Phoolan, Sihem—meant we could consider the work Katniss is doing in popular culture. So while we had read the book before, we hadn’t read it the way that we read it together.
Much conversation focused on subverting gender norms, yet we talked little about the focus of the love interests until our final discussion. While my conversations with my friends’ 12-year-old daughters about the trilogy always began with “Team Peeta!” or “Team Gale!” our conversations in the classroom focused on the scholarship of female collectives and violent resistance; we didn’t need Gale and Peeta as fodder for conversation. But on the last day of class, I introduced Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality to complicate the larger conversation in which readers—and viewers—find themselves forced to choose a camp, just as Katniss is forced to do.
Of course, the filmic versions of the novels rely on the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale as a way to include the most viewers, including the 16 or so people who saw the films without having read the trilogy. In a perhaps unintended meta-moment, Caeser smiles to the adoring crowd and calls a surviving Peeta and Katniss “the star-crossed lovers from District 12” from a set that looks uncannily like one from American Idol or The Voice.
Within the context of the Hunger Games and the arena, The Capitol, just like Hollywood, gives the audience what it wants: a forced—or let’s borrow Rich’s term “compulsory”—heterosexual relationship that Katniss barely tolerates in the novels. However, Katniss co-opts the Capitol’s compulsion, her only opportunity to ensure the survival of both herself and Peeta, and uses it to resist the Capitol and disrupt their narrative of what the Hunger Games should accomplish—passivity—and instead incites the fire of revolution.
After Katniss becomes District 12’s first volunteer in an attempt to spare her sister Prim, whose odds were clearly not in her favor, the former is whisked to the Capitol where she must become what the audience wants: the picture of femininity as a clean, waxed, young lady, a female object that must win the affection of the wealthy sponsors who hold her life in their hands. In the clinical setting of the Remake Center, her team—after a required second round of cleaning–transforms her body from that of a ragged, hard coal-mining daughter to that of a smooth, soft Capitol woman where femininity means manipulation of one’s body, often to the point of disfigurement (as happens to Tigris in Mockingjay). Haymitch reminds Katniss that she needs to be “nicer” to win the attention of the viewers.
Once the tributes are in the arena—the Capitol’s entrancement with the Hunger Games relying on bloodlust, the Districts’ on fear—Katniss and Peeta separate. After many, many deaths of children in a PG-13 film, the Gamemaker announces a change of rule after his menacing conversation with President Snow: two winners can emerge from the same District. As Gale watches the Games, his jealous sidelong glance casting toward the television, the rest of the Capitol can now root for love in the reality death match.
The Capitol viewers—and the Hollywood viewers—are then treated to the scene they have been waiting for. All of us feel relieved there is a chance for the heterosexual love to live; the edict seems to good to be true! We get the love scene that confirms their relationship, and Katniss’s performance makes it easy for all of us to forget that this relationship is forced, that Katniss and Peeta have both come to realize that their best chance of surviving is by feigning heterosexual desire. They press together in the cave. Haymitch sends medicine with a note reminding Katniss what she must do: “You call that a kiss?”
In talking about Kathleen Barry’s work, Rich reminds readers in her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” that “[t]he ideology of heterosexual romance, beamed at her from childhood out of fairy tales, television, films, advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry, is a tool ready to the procurer’s hand and one which he does not hesitate to use.” The viewer requires a fairy tale—Katniss and Peeta’s lives depend on this fairy tale. In an infection-induced fog, Peeta dreamily recounts watching Katniss go home, “Every day. Every day.” We are led to believe she has been the object of his love without her awareness. We can hear the viewers in the Capitol swooning—and lining up to help. And we see Gale leering at the screen as his love goes to another man.
This feigned relationship is in fact their only option for survival, one that they will play up later in this film as they dress like Prince Charming and Cinderella…
and (spoiler alert) in Catching Fire with their acceptance of the sad fact that the Capitol’s desire for their heterosexual relationship to carry on means that they must marry in order to survive…
and (super spoiler alert) by Katniss’s resignation in the epilogue of Mockingjay in which she succumbs to Peeta’s desire to have children with him.
In the final scene of the Games, Katniss is mocked by another girl for trying to save her “lover boy.” We see the Capitol watching the love story. The command center grows quiet while the men and a few women controlling the couple’s environment watch during a rare moment of stillness; even they are captivated by the story they have created. Katniss and Peeta are the finale. The audience must know: Will their (heterosexual) love survive?
Panem holds its breath. The desire for compulsory heterosexuality is the pair’s shield—though it puts them at risk, it is the only way for the two of them to survive. They are in a bind of expectations others put on them in order to endure in this system of oppression called Panem and its games. And instead of choosing herself–“We both go down and you win”—she sends Cato to the dogs, saving her life and Peeta’s (and in a moment of gender essentialism, fires a mercy shot to spare Cato an even more horrible death).
They hug. Everyone relaxes. A crescendo of anxiety is released for a moment when we think they will both live: Heterosexual normativity can persist.
And then the previous provision is revoked. Peeta and Katniss stand at the cornucopia, the ultimate symbol of hearth and home reflecting the audience’s desires for heterosexual normativity, and recognize that their attempt at playing into the Capitol’s desires for a heterosexual relationship to flourish even in the face of terrible odds did not work. One of them must kill the other.
Katniss takes control of the situation. We see the districts watch them hold the poisoned berries to each other. The thought of losing both lovers becomes unbearable, and the games are called to an end. They are the “winners,” a moniker few of the surviving tributes accept. Katniss and Peeta hug again.
Rich argues that “[h]eterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women, yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.” The Capitol has done just this: imposed the narrative of heterosexuality onto the lovers, and then used it to attempt to kill them. However, when Katniss takes the Capitol’s desire and pushes it to its limit—to the star crossed lover, the Romeo and Juliet, the Pyramus and Thisbe, the dangerous hyper-heterosexual narrative of “if my partner is dead, I can no longer bear to live” story—and thereby breaks the games. By encouraging co-suicide, she makes the story so much more than the viewers can bear (whilst they have no problem bearing the awfulness of watching children die) that she takes the Capitol’s desire and exploits it to save their own lives—though it relegates her to a life of living a lie to maintain the ruse that saves her life.
In their final interview, the fairy tale couple, “the star crossed lovers from District 12,” sits onstage as the audience swoons. Caesar feeds them the story they are to parrot: “You were so in love with this boy that the thought of not being with him was unthinkable.”
Katniss plays into the audience’s desire, though we know she is not in love with Peeta: “I felt like the happiest person in the the world. I couldn’t imagine life without him.”
And finally, “We saved each other.” The audience practically faints with joy.
But forcing herself into the ruse of heterosexuality puts her at more risk, not less. Katniss is trapped: she cannot “win.” Playing into the deception draws the attention of the Capitol’s leaders, while not playing into the narrative means she may have been dead in the arena.
The last shot of the film focuses on Snow watching the “lovers” hold hands overhead. Menacing music plays as he walks off. The image of their heterosexual coupling is not enough for him. Katniss will be at risk for the rest of the trilogy because of her subversion. Rich ends her essay with a call to the reader to consider the damage that occurs to women within the framework of compulsory heterosexuality:
“Within the institution exist, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives. As we address the institution itself, moreover, we begin to perceive a history of female resistance which has never fully understood itself because it has been so fragmented, miscalled, erased. It will require a courageous grasp of the politics and economics, as well as the cultural propaganda, of heterosexuality to carry us beyond individual cases or diversified group situations into the complex kind of overview needed to undo the power men everywhere wield over women, power which has become a model for every other form of exploitation and illegitimate control.”
Katniss spends the rest of the trilogy grappling with the material consequences of her decision to co-opt heterosexuality to save her life in the arena. Her experience echoes in Rich’s words: “absence of choice,” “cultural propaganda,” “the power men everywhere wield over women.” Catching Fire and Mockingjay find their roots in her struggle to come to terms with her need to feign a heterosexual relationship with Peeta. We will have to wait to see how the filmmakers decide to construct the rest of their “love story.” Because Katniss and Peeta never really have a choice.
Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.
However, the truth and realness of reality TV is, and always has been, a myth. A basic concept of psychology is that the act of observing a thing changes that thing. How could a camera crew with all their equipment following people around not affect what those people do and say? How could knowing that millions will be watching and listening not affect their actions?
Our theme week for December 2014 will be Reality TV.
Though films like The Running Man explored the concept of reality television before the genre actually took off, most US audiences identify the 1992 MTV show The Real World as the defining reality show that popularized the genre. Audiences were hungry for representations of real people, unscripted, unproduced, and raw. The idea of watching these real people go about their real lives, experiencing real emotions in real situations was, and continues to be, fascinating to audiences.
However, the truth and realness of reality TV is, and always has been, a myth. A basic concept of psychology is that the act of observing a thing changes that thing. How could a camera crew with all their equipment following people around not affect what those people do and say? How could knowing that millions will be watching and listening not affect their actions? Not only that, but most reality shows often create a non-real (often absurd) premise, such as making strangers live together or having them compete for love or money in increasingly elaborate ways. As time goes by, audiences expect less and less of the realism supposedly inherent in reality TV, much the same as professional wrestling fans accept the performance component of their sport. All the while, many reality series continue for over a decade, a constant, reliable source of income for show producers.
There are many films that question or parody the notion of reality TV. Both The Running Man and The Hunger Games series critique the bloodthirsty, drama-hungry gladiatorial reality TV physical challenge sub-genre that we see in shows like Survivor or Naked and Afraid. The show Burning Love satirizes the absurdity of shows like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, which require group competition for a single mate. The Truman Show calls into question reality itself, exploring the idea that unbeknownst to the subject, their life could be a scripted, carefully executed reality show.
Some questions to consider for your submission: Is there value to reality TV? What kind of gender roles are advocated? What kind of notions on race, sexuality, and class are advanced? Who is represented as the subject? Who lacks adequate representation as a subject? What does the progression of the genre look like, i.e. will we be televising executions in the future or will everyone have a camera to film and share their own reality? Why has reality TV sustained such a long history of success and audience engagement? Is it possible for reality TV to be more realistic?
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, Dec. 19 by midnight.
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?
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.
