Wait, What's Wrong With Being a Girl, Again?

(Not officially a part of my series on feminism in animation, although it certainly applies. Just a quick rant.)

So, as most people who might care probably already know, Disney's changed the title of its upcoming movie Rapunzel to the more gender-neutral Tangled. In and of itself, I guess not that big a deal, it's got a certain catch to it, slightly more engaging to a modern audience since it's an adjective, not a noun. Whatever. But then why did they decide to change the content of the movie too? According to the interviews I've read, they're beefing up the role of the heroic prince guy and giving him lots more action scenes. Okay, I'm all for equal character development (which is not what "swashbuckling action" means, btw), but why are they changing so much so suddenly, and especially less than a year before the movie opens?

"We didn't want to be put in a box," according to Ed Catmull, president of Disney and Pixar's animation department (via the LA Times). "Some people might assume it's a fairy tale for girls when it's not. We make movies to be appreciated and loved by everybody."

Translation: "The Princess and the Frog underperformed (ie: only made ~$220 million worldwide) and like we always do, we're blaming something totally arbitrary on the failure instead of our story department and our marketing strategy."

Remember back when they announced they were closing their traditional animation studios in favor of switching to digital animation? Their reasoning there was that everyone else's CG-animated movies were making money and their traditional ones weren't, therefore it must be that traditional animation as a medium is dead and not that the movies themselves had issues. Only now, instead of blaming traditional animation for the "failure" of their blockbuster movie, they're blaming it on the fact that boys won't go see a movie with the word "princess" in the title.

Or, apparently, "Rapunzel". (Which the semantic in me must point out is a kind of leafy green plant people use in salads, not a fancy word for "princess".)

So now, instead of the method of animation at fault, it's the fact that it's about a girl. I keep forgetting that girls aren't regular people who can be easily identified with by people of either gender, like boys can. See, when you make a movie with a girl in the lead part, and it's about "girl" stuff like romance and magic (as 99% of lead-women movies are), it means it's a "chick flick" and the only acceptable guy audience members are the ones dragged there by their girlfriends and who spend every second of its run-time in sheer emotional anguish. Because everyone knows that girl things are silly and emasculating and real men only tolerate it for the sake of sex.

But when a movie comes out with a guy in the lead and it's about "guy" stuff like adventure and action, it's totally cool for girls to like that, too, because when we say "guy", we really mean "everybody". Because guy stuff is the default, "non-gendered" stuff, and "girl" stuff is for sissy, fluffies who like glitter and shoes. And in case you're confused by that, "glitter" and "shoes" and everything else associated with being feminine are less important, interesting, relevant, and acceptable to enjoy because they are silly and beneath all the relevant "boy" stuff like explosions and car chases.

Thank you, Disney, for reminding me that girls are silly and nobody wants to watch movies about them. It's a really good thing you remembered, too, before releasing another movie that will only make a few hundred million dollars because there wasn't enough boy-time and we all know that the only way to relate to a girl character is to be a girl yourself. I mean it's not like they're real people or anything.

(Just for the sake of clarification: I do not assume this of all males, and in fact I think it's pretty demeaning to assume they're all this shallow, but there's a lot of cultural pressure and influence out there that supports the "girls are silly and you shouldn't like anything aimed at them" mentality. I don't know which I find more insulting, the idea that all guys must think this way, or the fact that there are evidently so many who do. And they're not the only ones! There are loads of girls out there who feel the exact same way due to the same social stigma. I was one of them for a very long time. Hence the bitter.)

(Another clarification: I have big issues with the so-called "chick flicks", too, and the predominance of princesses in animated movies. Not because I think femininity in and of itself is demeaning, but because of how "appropriate" femininity is showcased in them, and the almost complete lack of anything else for female consumers. I'm of the opinion that people who genuinely like the glittery princess thing, rock on. But limiting the idea of "girl" to just that is... limiting. Girls can be foofy princesses, and they can be other things, too! We have LOADS of princesses already, maybe we can explore, I don't know, something else for a change?)

"Moonlighting" and the Defense of Domestic Violence

I've been watching a lot of the old Moonlighting show recently for a paper I'm writing for my History of Television class, and I've noticed a distinct change in tone from the writing in the third season. Previous seasons always tackled the idea of "the battle of the sexes" with the two leads, David (Bruce Willis) taking the role of the lowbrow, laid-back, street smart, sexist guy and Maddie (Cybill Shepard) taking the role of the uptight, uptown, aloof, cultured, feminist woman, butting heads over just about everything while clearly just wanting to rip each other's clothes off under it all. Season three was more of the same, but I can't help but notice a very discernible shift in loyalties on the part of the show itself. Instead of trying to present Maddie's side (and her character) as understandable and reasonably angry with her partner's grating and unprofessional behavior, it goes out of its way to construct her as an overly judgemental harpy who needs to be brought down a few pegs, preferably by her suddenly more reasonable and more often correct partner. Her character is harshly criticized and often shamed far more frequently than his is, and a much bigger deal is made about taming her 'shrewish' behavior than about confronting David's personality flaws-- in fact he's more frequently constructed as the sympathetic hero just looking out for her and trying to humanize her than before.

There are plenty of examples of this at work, like the Christmas episode which takes the Dickens approach to Maddie's humbug attitude: her staff is angry because she's keeping the office open until Christmas to work on a case they'd already accepted (I'd be angry, too), but she's been stressing about making ends meet since they have so few cases, even covering her employees' paychecks herself when there wasn't enough money in the company account, and on top of it all, her sick aunt, whom she'd been meaning to visit in the hospital but hadn't gotten to yet, died that morning. As sympathetically as the episode starts, it quickly goes on to show her how terrible she's been in wishing that she hadn't kept the business open by showing her how people's lives would have turned out without it-- Agnes the kindhearted receptionist wound up the cold, steely president of a greeting card company (supposed to be a reflection of Maddie herself), David wound up engaged to a supermodel and even bought Maddie's house because of "a very good year" which is never elaborated on, and Maddie herself wound up broke and alone, crashing her car into a wall. All this is to get her to repent her humbug ways and drop the case so everyone can have Christmas off. There is a token bit where the three people who had been particularly mean to her apologized when they found out about her aunt dying, but it's really Maddie who's shown to have the most to apologize for.

However, I feel the most blatant example of the shift in writing comes from the episode "The Man Who Cried Wife", only the second one of the season. Here, a man is shown coming home to his philandering wife, whom he strikes so hard, he kills her. He's so remorseful over this that he doesn't call the police or relatives, but instead drags her body to the woods, buries her, and doesn't say a word to anyone. Until he starts getting phone calls from her, that is. So he goes to hire some private detectives to figure out what's going on, but Maddie doesn't want a thing to do with a man who hit his wife, no matter how remorseful he may have felt about it afterwards. David disagrees and thus follows one of the most one-sided, flagrantly biased debates on the entire show.



Because we all know it's all right to hit someone as long as you feel really bad about it afterward and the person "had it coming". Come on. So after this, of course Maddie's so shamed by her irrational dislike of a man who killed his wife in a fit of passion and then buried her in the woods, that she apologizes and joins David on the case. David, as he so frequently is in these episodes, is coldly condescending and clearly supposed to represent the more "realistic" attitude about passion and spontaneity that excuses and forgives both the husband here and Maddie for their physical displays of anger. There's no point of contention that it was wrong for either of them because they were angry and provoked into behaving in such a way. (For my money, Maddie hit David way too much in the whole show, but I guess in the 80s it was still funny and acceptable for women to slap men because men were manly and could take it. Or something.) Once again, Maddie is shamed and brought down off her high horse while David gets to play the condescending educator who can sanctimoniously forgive her after the realizes the error of her ways.

I don't hate the whole show, really. But some of these episodes sit in a really icky place with me.

Dresses Are for Girls, Swords Are for Boys...

...And ne'er the twain shall meet. Or so a bunch of people on the internet would have us believe.

I wasn't sure about posting this right out of the starting gate, but honestly, this one hit me close to home. I'm hoping to go into animation in the next few years, and regardless of my success in that endeavor, it's still my favorite storytelling medium. I never outgrew my love of watching drawings run around on a screen and have adventures, even though I went through a phase when I was around 12 where I tried to convince myself that I had. There is just something in me that craves it, that delights in seeing it in its many forms. So when I saw some of the responses posted to Linda Holmes's (I thought) very polite and respectful desire to see Pixar deliver a movie with a female leading character (that isn't a princess, since there's already loads of those), I was, to put it mildly, shocked and dismayed.

In retrospect, I suppose it was naive of me to think that because I'm fully aware of the fact that girls like adventure stories just as much as boys, are just as capable of being interesting and enjoyable, and like seeing people they are inspired by and can identify with up on the big screen, that most people had come to the same assumption I did. Thank you, internet, for pulling me back down to planet Earth and reminding me that there are still a lot of people out there who have trouble with the foreign concept that women are, in fact, people.

Over at Cartoon Brew, a blog all about animation that I used to really enjoy perusing but have recently lost my taste for, there was a particularly high volume of outrage at the idea Ms. Holmes posited. In their brief article, entitled "Dear Pixar, How About a Chick Flick...?", responses ranged from supportive, to neutral, to downright hostile. One poster responded to someone's comment about not understanding what was wrong with wanting to see a story about a girl and the things that happened to her instead of a boy and the things that happened to him with, "The lady in front of her in line got the pair of shoes SHE wanted at Payless. The girl in the cubicle next to hers keeps laughing on the phone all day and getting on her nerves. She starves herself all weekend and yet gains 2 pounds! All exciting and true topics to be sure (courtesy of my wife) but I can’t say as I’d like to see them animated with 3-D characters." Another poster had this to say: "Everybody has an agenda. I’m sorry if this delightful movie didn’t service yours. Perhaps we should petition President Obama to oversee the animation industry, and appoint a Gender Equity Czar to implement “representational justice” on the silver screen. I nominate Barney Frank for the position." But far and away the most common sentiment I saw expressed there (and on other sites as well), was essentially this: "The real reason behind Pixar having never released a film focusing on a female character is because all of their films thus far have been directed by males." That sentiment is further encapsulated by this from another poster: "As is said above, you can’t pay most men and boys to go to movie about a girl. While I respect the drive for equality and am willing to stand up and be counted when it comes to supporters of both equal opportunity and equal wages, I am among those who could not be payed to go see a movie about a female unless it had an incredibly compelling story and was superbly done." There were even a small number of more hostile people who saw the letter as a declaration of female superiority and an effort to exclude the male population from movie viewing.

Now, this really made me stop and think. Why is it that the mere mention of the idea makes so many people uncomfortable, makes them automatically assume that it's part of a PC ploy, or that it's even female superiority rhetoric? I read the same letter they all did and I didn't see any angry accusations of sexism, no war cries, no knashing of teeth, no criticisms of the company's movies, nothing. I saw a respectful letter written to a movie studio that the author obviously respected a great deal, expressing a wish that she (and frankly, many other women) have had, not because of something wrong with their movies, but because of everything they do right. Women are not given leading roles in films very often in Hollywood, and it's not because male writers are fundamentally unable to write women well, nor is it because male viewers are fundamentally unable to connect to a female protagonist, but because somehow the idea that those two things are true have become "common sense". The problem with common sense is that it isn't necessarily built on real truths, but on the popular opinion that something is true. 'But women are so alien and unfathomable' male writers cry, 'how can we do them justice when we don't understand them?' The fact of the matter is, men and women have far more in common than not, but we culturally focus on the differences and blow them out of proportion which leads to this mindset that 'men are from Mars, women are from Venus', when really, we're all from Earth. There are differences, yes, psychological and phsyiological, and the genders do identify more strongly with their own than with the other, but that does not mean it is impossible to do so. If that were the case, then female movie-goers and literature-readers over the vast passage of time would not have enjoyed the vast majority of produced works because they wouldn't be able to identify with the male lead. And yet we have and we continue to do so, as box office returns will tell you. A movie like The Dark Knight doesn't become the biggest movie of the year and one of the highest-grossing of all-time on the sale of tickets to men alone, and that goes the same for any other hit movie.

So what this tells me, is that men who protest so vehemently against the idea of seeing a leading female protagonist in a film are either a.) not impressed with most of the representations of leading women in films, or b.) don't like the idea of surrendering their gender-perspective for an hour and a half. (There's probably more to it, too, but I have no idea what it might be, so give me a heads-up if anyone might know because this stuff fascinates me.) Maybe a lot of the outrage was stemming from the idea that Ms. Holmes had accused Pixar of being sexist, or was demanding that they change how they make movies to fit some personal agenda, but I'm somewhat at a loss to explain how many people came to that conclusion based on her letter. Personally, I can't speak for her, since I don't know what she was thinking when she wrote it, nor will I ever, because I am not her. But I can speak for what I saw when I read it, and what I saw was not anger, but hope. We ladies adapt to a male viewpoint for the duration of most media forms because very often they're made by men for men. And there's nothing wrong with men making movies for themselves, at all. But there is a serious deficiency in the other viewpoint, too, and after a while, we start going, 'well where's my story?'

I think Pixar was chosen for this focal point, not because of any deficiency or a problem with their films, but because they have shown such consistency in storytelling, and in particular their depiction of women, that it creates an excitement amongst viewing women at the possibility of a female lead. 'But most of Disney's leads are female', people say. Actually, most of Disney's leads are male, if you look at the actual story (in Sleeping Beauty, the title character has less screentime than the prince character, and barely any speaking lines at all), and by and large they tend to fit one archetype: the princess. Now, I'm not arguing that there's something wrong with enjoying princesses, I've certainly enjoyed my share of mine, but one has to wonder where all the other types of roles are. Girls can be more than just one thing, just like boys, and yet nearly all of the leading women in U.S. animation are one thing. Yes, there are exceptions like Mulan and Lilo, but they're the ones that prove the rule.

Why, when directors like Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon can achieve such great success with leading women in Japan, a country that is arguably more restrictive toward women, are U.S. directors and studio heads so reluctant to branch outside of that box? Do they not think that little girls will like a female character who isn't a princess? If that's the case, they need to meet more little girls. Just because princesses are popular, doesn't mean that's all they want. Girls will identify with a female on-screen no matter what her 'role' is because she's female, just like boys will identify with a male character because he's male. And I'd bet good money that boys would be able to identify with the story of a girl on an adventure just as much as girls identify with boys on an adventure, so long as the adventure is compelling. But the most important thing it could do for kids of both genders is to say 'girls can be anything, too.' And maybe when kids finally see that message in action instead of being given conflicting messages, society at large will finally start to acknowledge that being a girl isn't anything to be ashamed of, isn't demeaning, isn't alien or unfathomable, and isn't second-best. That's my hope, anyway.