1. It has two named female characters
2. who have a conversation with each other
3. about something other than a man.
It's harder than you think. Much to my surprise, Ironman 3, a scifi/comic/action/dickflick actually passes the test. But the movie adaptation of the classic fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk? Not so much. It only has two female characters total, and one of them has only a few lines and dies in the very beginning.
In Jack the Giant Slayer (I guess it needed a more badass title?), Jack is an orphaned, peasant farm boy living with his uncle. He is sent to the market to sell their horse. While there, he is distracted by the sites and sounds and is drawn in to a theatre performance where he encounters Isabelle, the princess. He saves her from ruffians before she is whisked away by her protection detail. Isabelle, it seems, has just been out for a bit of adventure and has quite typically got herself into the position of needing to be rescued.
Princess Isabelle, pictured in gold armour, doesn't actually feature prominently in much of the film's marketing. It took a while to find this image.
Jack and Isabelle were both raised with the epic tale of King Erik, who defeated the evil race of giants who live in the sky.
As we all know and expect, Jack loses his cart and then sells his horse for a small bag of beans. He returns empty-handed to his uncle, who would have much rather had some seed to plant or at least some food. Uncle goes off to try to solve the problem. Meanwhile, Princess Isabelle slips away from her protection detail again and goes off adventuring. Alas, the weather turns sour - a dark, blustery storm, and she ends up on Jack's doorstep. One thing leads to another, the beans get wet, and a giant magical beanstalk bursts from the ground and takes Jack's house with it. The princess is trapped inside, sailing up toward Giantland, and Jack is unable to open the door to rescue her.
Yes, of course, the adventuring princess has once again gotten herself into trouble and needs to be rescued. This isn't my biggest feminist complaint with the film. No, the king and all his men arrive in search of the princess and see the giant beanstalk. A small search party is sent up, including Jack, and we soon seeour first giant. They are huge, hairy, incredibly ugly, and they like to eat humans. Several members of the team are soon eaten and others are carried off. We see more and more giants - hordes of them. There is not a single female giant. Not one. They must be immortal because they have no way of reproducing their race.
Jack rescues the princess and is hailed a hero. There is a brief moment where the princess gets her own armour - armour she has apparently had all along - and rides back to the castle more or less as an equal with her father. Also worth noting - this princess will inherit the kingdom one day, regardless of who/if she marries, and become queen. She is not actually destined for a lifetime of being secondary to a man. This is not a key plot point, but worth noting because...
The giants figure out how to make their way down to the kingdom and attack the castle. Jack and Isabelle work together, but ultimately she needs saving a few more times and it is Jack who saves the day and becomes the hero. He earns the crown of the mythic King Eric and, in effect, eclipses any power that Isabel might have had as Queen in the future.
I enjoyed the movie, don't get me wrong. The action was great and the makeup and/or cgi on the giants was really well done. I was initially struck by the complete absense of female giants, because how awesome would gigantic hairy, slobbery, big-nosed female giants be? But I still looked at it as a movie my kids would enjoy. There's violence, yes, but it's not all that realistic so I don't think it would give them any ideas. I wanted to hear George get excited and scream "Mummy, look! A giant!" similar to how he screams "Mummy! Helldoctor!" every time he sees a helicopter on tv. But then I thought about the Bechdel Test and the more I thought about Jack the Giant Slayer, the more I second-guessed myself. Did I want my daughter seeing a film and internalizing anything about her role as a female in life? Did I want my sons internalizing the hidden message that women are so secondary that they are largely invisible? Or that their job as men is to rescue women and supercede them, rather than support them in their own chosen roles? Probably not.
Meanwhile, there is a new movie that I have not seen yet called Epic, featuring a heroine named Mary Catherine. I think there's an environmental twist, as well as a fantasy race of mini people or fairies or something. From previews I've seen, the fantasy race of people include both males and females, so it's already one step ahead of Jack the Giant Slayer.
No comments:
Post a Comment