The Pop Tart's 3 Things From 2012

When the thought struck me that I ought to do an end-of-the-year list, I dismissed it at first. I don't really see much point in compiling a "Best of" list (or a "Worst of" list, for that matter), since film, television, books, and pretty much every other medium through which we partake of pop culture are not things with true objective scales by which to measure them. What's a good film or book to me won't be to someone else, and that's fine--it's one of the things that makes life more interesting.

So, I present to you, in no particular order, Three Things in 2012 That I Thought Were Pretty Neat.

* Female-led Successes in Television and Film

I mentioned this in part in my post about Action Women. Film studio Lionsgate this year had two films make over $125 million, and, guess what--both of these films starred female leads (the films are, if you're wondering, The Hunger Games, starring Jennifer Lawrence, and Twilight:Breaking Dawn, Part 2, starring Kristen Stewart). Female led comedies like Pitch Perfect have opened doors for women to lead in movies outside of the typical RomComs. Those things would be great on their own, but let's look also at television: Lena Dunham's Girls has been making news, good and bad, all over the place; Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are set to host the Golden Globes later this month; Pixar gave us Brave, its first film with a female protagonist; we finally got to see Legend of Korra, the female-led sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender. These are the sorts of things I can get behind.

*Ensemble Cast Shows

I don't think my love for NBC's Community is any secret, but Community alone isn't why I chose to include this topic.  Let's face it, a larger cast means there's more opportunity for more types of people to appear on television. Shows like Community, Warehouse 13, Alphas, Glee and others show us that casts don't have to include exclusively men or exclusively white people. There are plenty of ensemble-cast shows that are guilty of only showing us more white people, and some of these shows are better at providing the viewer with a diverse cast than others, but the aforementioned shows have seen critical success, if not necessarily commercial success. Which is a step in the right direction, certainly.

*Some Pretty Awesome Talks at TEDx Events

 I've talked about Anita Sarkeesian once or twice before. In case you were unaware, this woman found herself the target of some pretty intense abuse for asking people who were interested--just people who were interested, mind you--to support her attempt to create a series of videos on YouTube to show the types of tropes that female characters fall into in video games. At one of the TEDx events, she discussed her experience.

FOX and Friends anchor Brian Kilmeade said some pretty insulting things about how the female anchors at the conservative news station were hired (it's all in the linked article, but the short of it is he said they just tried to find Victoria's Secret models who were capable of speech). Maybe if he had heard Cameron Russell's TEDx talk about the power of image, he would realize that beautiful women can easily be smart women also.

These were a few of the things that caught my attention in 2012. Use the comments section to share some of yours.

Action Girl

I love a good action series. Sometimes I love a bad action series.

Even the most gentle among us wants to see a good ass-kicking now and then. Part of the draw, I think, is getting to see people like us--people that we can relate to--doing crazy, amazing things and taking charge. It's part of why characters like John McClane and Batman and Hercules are so lasting in pop culture as a whole and American pop culture, specifically.

There's no shortage of male action heroes. They're plentiful and varied--though, admittedly, over time many of them start looking the same (compare video game heroes--the same scarred, angry, bald white guy shows up over and over, but that's a post for another day). The female version of this character type, The Action Girl, while it's being seen more and more in various media, does not saturate the market in the same way.

There are a lot of reasons for this--maybe you remember Warner Brothers making waves in 2007 by saying they would no longer produce films with female leads? -- and this year, editor Frank Parlato, Jr. of the Niagara Falls Reporter made it pretty clear what he thinks of female-led movies when he was approached by a writer who had reviewed Snow White and the Huntsman and, in spite of the eyebrow-raising content of his response to the reviewer, it's depressingly not hard to image that there are plenty who share his views.

Then there's the perception that action films that star women can't succeed; people tend to back this up by citing films like Catwoman and Suckerpunch (which, if we're being honest here, are indeed lousy films, and both, incidentally, are great examples of Male Gaze in effect), and that's sort of like judging every Sean Connery film by League of Extraordinary Gentlemen--which is to say that it's unfair and only provides a narrow view of the subject,only looking at one not-so-great example, and it doesn't take into account things like the marketing the movies get, the writing, the star-power behind the film, and other factors in what makes a movie sell.

But sometimes, action movies that star women as the hero and not the victim in need of rescuing do get made. And they do sell.


Consider two of the twenty highest-grossing female-led action films: 1979's Alien starring Sigourney Weaver as Ripley and 2010's Salt starring Angelina Jolie as the title character. Ripley and Evelyn Salt are two very different and interesting characters that share an unusual trait: neither character was written for a woman.

When Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett wrote the early drafts of the script for Alien, the characters that comprised the crew were to be "unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women. Ripley's gender wasn't decided until Sigourney Weaver was cast in the role.

Gender is not a factor in Ripley's actions at all--even in scenes in which she's clad only in underwear and a t-shirt, Ripley's not played for sexuality. Issues of femininity never come up. The actions demanded by the situation are the beginning and end of Ripley's motivation.

And then there's Evelyn Salt.

As the story goes, Tom Cruise was approached to play the title role in Salt--Edwin W. Salt. Cruise, not wanting to play a role so similar to the one he played in the Mission: Impossible films, declined the part, and Edwin became Evelyn, a vehicle for Angeline Jolie, who had already seen some success with the Tomb Raider franchise. Rather than trying to rewrite the script with a female in mind, the minds behind the film changed the character's name and left almost everything else untouched. In fact, the only major change was removing the children that Edwin was written to have (which does give the message that a woman can be an action woman or a mom, but not both, and that's kind of crappy any way you look at it).

But a female action hero doesn't have to be portrayed with masculinity or without gender at all to be successful.

The top-earning female-led action film came out earlier this year, and set sales records for movies with a spring release.

The Hunger Games, the first movie in a trilogy based on the books by Suzanne Collins, was wildly successful. The second film in the series, Catching Fire, is already in production and looking towards a November 2013 release. Judging from the buzz about the movie online and the success of the book series, the second film will be just as popular. And this is with a female character that was written to be female. Katniss's gender, while never a focal point in the story, is not ignored. She dresses up (though, granted, it's not because she wants to), she thinks about boys--at least, when she's not focused on surviving, which isn't often, but her understanding of her more romantic emotions does play a part in her character development--she's a girl. She just happens to be a girl who can fight.

There are plenty of examples from other media--Buffy, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, the Abhorsen trilogy, Charmed, Warehouse 13, Lost Girl, and tons of female-led anime.

One of the most shining examples of strong, action women on television has been Avatar: The Last Airbender and it's follow-up/sister series, The Legend of Korra. Both of these series are among the most popular animated shows of all time, with fans of all ages and all genders. And these two shows have some of the greatest female characters on television.

 Okay, Pema may not actually fight much, but she's definitely a tough lady.

(And these are just the good guys.)

So, what's the secret, then? How can we get more characters like these?

It's in the writing, really, when all is said and done. In his essay "Why I Write 'Strong Female Characters,'" novelist and comic book writer Greg Rucka, says this about writing strong women:

Writers don't write Men or Women or Dogs or Salmon. Writers write characters, and at our best, if we do it well and with care and with thought, we invest in those characters a spark of life, a realism and nuance that makes them believable and relatable. We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy, characters our audience will care for, and as a result, will care about what happens to them, and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey. No character - no well-created character, at least - is defined by only one trait, by one aspect.

 That's why characters like Ripley, Katniss, Salt, Katara, Buffy, and so many others are so popular--it's the same reason why so many male characters are popular.

They're characters. They have flaws, passions, motives, and interests that make viewers and readers care about them.

So, how do you write a great female action character? It's like Greg Rucka says.

"The Quick Answer goes like this:
Q: How do you write such strong/well-realized/positively portrayed women?
A: I don't. I write characters. Some of those characters are women."

We'll Be Back

No new post content today, folks.

Apart from the grad school prep and potentially getting to write a guest post for DC Women Kicking Ass (I'm all manner of excited about that), there just hasn't been enough time.

And, also, there are a couple of comic book movies that are out today, and I have no choice but to indulge.

These'll make for a good day, I think.

I'll be back on Saturday with part four of the TV Moms series; I'll be taking a look at Sophia and Dorothy from The Golden Girls and mothers with adult children.

Cabin in the Woods, or, How to Deconstruct Tropes While Still Adhering to Cliched Gender Roles

(Forgive me, I am late to the party on this one—I didn’t get to it until the movie made it to the dollar theater, so, yeah, this post is closer to the DVD release date than the theatrical release date.  This is what it’s like to be employed, but still pretty broke.)

(Also, you know, spoilers.)

It takes a lot to get me to go see a horror movie.  I’m not particularly a fan of the genre in general, mostly because the films tend to be poorly written and incredibly trite. But Joss Whedon could write a movie about a throw pillow, and I’d probably go see it and think it was fantastic, so, for The Cabin in the Woods, I made an exception.

The horror genre is one rife with tropes, and if there’s anyone you who’s willing to turn tropes on their ear, it’s Joss Whedon. And that’s what he does with this film. Almost every horror trope still appears, but each one is twisted or, in the least, explained as part of a larger plan to appease a group of divine beings that will destroy the world if they don’t get the required sacrifice before the deadline. Everything from the choice not to Stay Out Of The Woods to Jules’s Death By Sex is explained with drugs that alter brain chemistry or pheromones pumped into the air or some other outside force concocted by a bunch of people in an office with Ominous Multiple Screens.

It’s certainly refreshing to see what are frequently clichéd and easy screenwriting techniques given actual purpose that’s defined by the main conflict of the plot, and one has to respect the details included in both the writing and directing of the movie. But there’s one thing that confuses me.

In all of this effort to turn tropes inside out, it seems like one important cliché was overlooked.

Traditionally in storytelling, there are two female archetypes that are used over and over again: the virgin and the vamp. The virgin embodies purity and "traditional feminine values"; the vamp is a woman of questionable morality—meaning she is a sexual being, and unabashedly, even aggressively, so.

The Cabin in the Woods, likewise, bases its main characters in traditional archetypes.  The five guests in the cabin—three men and two women--are placed explicitly in the roles of Athlete, Scholar, Fool, Whore, and Virgin.

I’m sure it surprises no one that the two females filled the Whore and Virgin roles. In fact, it didn’t really surprise me. Though I don’t agree with it, I do understand that there are certain archetypes that the average viewer will always expect to be female and, while I think that’s a narrow view and, more importantly, sends messages to movie-goers that really don't need to be encouraged, movies are, at their core, produced so that they can make money, and most of that money comes from average viewers.

The thing that really puzzles me is that women were cast in only these two archetypes. Like I said, I'm normally a big fan of Whedon, and Whedon has a pretty good track record with female characters—Buffy and Zoe come to my mind, and there are certainly many others—which, I suppose is why I was disappointed that the film (which, on an only slightly related note, failed the Bechdel Test, unless you count The Director as a name, and even then, it's a very brief interaction) didn’t branch out. Why couldn’t the Athlete be a female? Or the Scholar?

            For a film that was supposed to be subverting, deconstructing, or at least poking fun at tropes, sticking to conventional gender archetypes feels almost like a broken promise.

            I shouldn’t complain. Even stuck in traditional roles, the women in the cabin, or at least Dana (poor Jules didn't last too long), were active participants in the story, and the women working with Sitterson and Hadley, though they were only shown briefly, appeared competent and professional. As far as representations of women in film—particularly in horror films—go, this one did pretty well.

            But it could have done better. It’d have been nice to see some ladies in major roles that weren’t defined by the amount of sex they’d had.

            And I don’t think that’s asking too much.