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Saw Monsters University
I love going to the cinema and have counted myself very lucky to have been living in countries where it didn't drive me to bankruptcy to do so. Today I went anyway.
Monsters University only came out after I left Edinburgh, so I missed my chance to see it in English and at my favourite cinema ever, but I still wanted to see it. In a casual moviegoer kind of way, I really wasn't disappointed; I thought it was quite funny, quite sweet, and it had some values I can support. As a linguist I was kind of annoyed; the idiom was sometimes quite awkward and it is always quite wrong to use a plural pronoun for a single person in Swedish! Just don't do it.
As a gender wary person, however, I was astonished by the amount of Fail there could be in just one film.
It started with the traditional Pixar short before the movie proper: this one is called The Blue Umbrella and it's ridiculously heteronormative in its stereotypes. At first I thought it was super cute, because it starts raining and among all the sadfaced grey umbrellas is a blue, happy umbrella that smiles into the rain, an image I instantly identified with because I generally LOVE being out in the rain, it makes me inexplicably bubbly and excited. I did not see the code for "boy umbrella" until the surrounding buildings and street fittings have conspired to put a red "girl umbrella" next to "him", but once "she" turns up it's super obvious. And of course then the boy umbrella and the girl umbrella have to fall in love, and when their owners go in different directions, OF COURSE the boy umbrella has to break free and go on a Heroic Journey to find his lost love. With the quite extraordinary benevolent intervention of the buildings and street fittings. Because of course you can't just have a film about happiness in the rain; of course you have to have romance, and of course it has to be between a male and a female; and of course the magical interventions have to be a help for the male to pursue the female on his dangerous adventure! DUDE NO.
The film itself is hardly any better. I can never keep track of Bechdel criteria while watching a movie but I'm pretty sure no two females are shown talking to one another. The protagonist team is all-male, though it comes with a female mascot of sorts--the fat joke mother! Woo! The Cool Team is all male too! And then there's an all-female team of homogeneous purple-pink spaghetti-thin glowy-eyed monsters. There may possibly be one mixed team, but it's given very little attention and is so heavily coded as emo/goth something that they're so much Other that nothing else could matter anyway. There's so much more but I've run out of steam, so this will have to do: NOT OKAY. Would not let my kids see, if I had any. Which is a shame because it's quite a cute story!
Someday I'd like to go back to the films I watched as a child and look at what characters I identified with and why. I don't think I ever noticed just how male-oriented everything was (I'm a little shocked nowadays!), but I do know I clutched the few awesome female characters I knew very close. I wonder what messages I was really internalising way back then?!
Monsters University only came out after I left Edinburgh, so I missed my chance to see it in English and at my favourite cinema ever, but I still wanted to see it. In a casual moviegoer kind of way, I really wasn't disappointed; I thought it was quite funny, quite sweet, and it had some values I can support. As a linguist I was kind of annoyed; the idiom was sometimes quite awkward and it is always quite wrong to use a plural pronoun for a single person in Swedish! Just don't do it.
As a gender wary person, however, I was astonished by the amount of Fail there could be in just one film.
It started with the traditional Pixar short before the movie proper: this one is called The Blue Umbrella and it's ridiculously heteronormative in its stereotypes. At first I thought it was super cute, because it starts raining and among all the sadfaced grey umbrellas is a blue, happy umbrella that smiles into the rain, an image I instantly identified with because I generally LOVE being out in the rain, it makes me inexplicably bubbly and excited. I did not see the code for "boy umbrella" until the surrounding buildings and street fittings have conspired to put a red "girl umbrella" next to "him", but once "she" turns up it's super obvious. And of course then the boy umbrella and the girl umbrella have to fall in love, and when their owners go in different directions, OF COURSE the boy umbrella has to break free and go on a Heroic Journey to find his lost love. With the quite extraordinary benevolent intervention of the buildings and street fittings. Because of course you can't just have a film about happiness in the rain; of course you have to have romance, and of course it has to be between a male and a female; and of course the magical interventions have to be a help for the male to pursue the female on his dangerous adventure! DUDE NO.
The film itself is hardly any better. I can never keep track of Bechdel criteria while watching a movie but I'm pretty sure no two females are shown talking to one another. The protagonist team is all-male, though it comes with a female mascot of sorts--the fat joke mother! Woo! The Cool Team is all male too! And then there's an all-female team of homogeneous purple-pink spaghetti-thin glowy-eyed monsters. There may possibly be one mixed team, but it's given very little attention and is so heavily coded as emo/goth something that they're so much Other that nothing else could matter anyway. There's so much more but I've run out of steam, so this will have to do: NOT OKAY. Would not let my kids see, if I had any. Which is a shame because it's quite a cute story!
Someday I'd like to go back to the films I watched as a child and look at what characters I identified with and why. I don't think I ever noticed just how male-oriented everything was (I'm a little shocked nowadays!), but I do know I clutched the few awesome female characters I knew very close. I wonder what messages I was really internalising way back then?!