to be honest, i am never going to not love fury road. and i am never going to not love fury road for the exact same reason that i am never going to not love pacific rim: because they are movies that focus uncompromisingly on women and on the stories of women and do not pick at them or highlight their flaws or put them in conflict with other women so that the dudebros in the corner can yell “catfight!” and whistle.
pacific rim doesn’t pass the bechdel test of course, but it is still a movie where i can very readily believe that guillermo del toro asked somebody “do we really need a mildly attractive white boy who isn’t portayed as a sack of shit for the majority of the movie as a protagonist?” and some stuffy hollywood exec informed him that he had to have at least one so he sighed and picked charlie hunnam out of a lineup and informed him that his job was to stand there and look pretty with his shirt off and smile adoringly at rinko kikuchi whenever she was onscreen, which he did fantastically. also idris elba and a narrative centered around a found family featuring a black father and a japanese daughter that culminates in the kind of love so profound that the last words she says to him don’t even need to be translated for a non-japanese-speaking audience.
fury road is a movie that was edited by a woman because george miller literally did not fucking trust a man to do it justice, and even our beloved sad puppy protaganist still has his moment where we all yell at him to just let furiosa and the girls in the truck you miserable bastard you all want the same thing and then they turn an MRA into a feminist willing to die for the cause, and they put naked women on the screen without making me want to curl up inside and die, and killed women to show us how that made other women feel, and brought literal fucking hellfire down on the patriarchy to grind them into rubble. also, ALSO, the only reason this ridiculous fucking plan even worked in the end was because LITERAL CHILDREN and enslaved women lowered the platform and opened the floodgates to water, which is essentially the same as salvation when you live in a post-nuclear desert hellscape run by god-kings who waste thousands of gallons of gasoline just to track down their escaped sex slaves. also actual polynesian actresses in a movie set in australia. also a complete lack of rape scene or discussion of sex, crude or otherwise. also the person who everybody knows is the protag of fury road in the same way everyone knows mako is the protag of pacific rim even though the trailers will do their best to convince the MRAs otherwise is an amputee driven by the same immense boiler of screaming fury that i, as an abuse victim and as a feminist and as someone who has had friends go through way worse shit than i did, feel on a regular basis, and we don’t need to know the full story of what happened; we know that she was kidnapped, we know her mother is dead, we know that it’s probably been twenty years of literal hell for her, and we know that she is not above dying to save four girls who yell at her when she tries to kill someone that has been sent to bring them back to immortan joe.
this is not the wink wink nudge nudge feminism of joss “i quit twitter bc feminists were harassing me” whedon. these are movies that make me feel like they are opening floodgates to stories where megan fox can show up onscreen and be taken seriously instead of objectified, and lucy liu can play any damn character she wants in reboots of stories that used to just be about arrogant white boys, and laverne cox doesn’t have to be asked what her fucking crotch looks like before people can hold a conversation with her.
pacific rim and fury road, as colorful (literally, there is an entire post on this site about modern hollywood and it’s shitty, drained-of-color-to-feel-”gritty” movies) narratives about hope and love, actually make me, a decrepit, sarcastic husk of a human being, 1) cry about two people nodding at each other and touching foreheads, and 2) actually believe that our cinema will one day stop being such a white sausagefest.
movies that can do that are a big deal.
Also why I love Miyazaki films, who I recall said years ago that he noticed that there weren’t stories with girl heroes so he will make some that will be those stories.
Published
konekorambles 