beehammer | Entries tagged with meta

I went to see it last night, and I think probably the thing I most appreciated is that they never took the idea of Carol being "too powerful" seriously. Because this shows up so frequently in comic properties, and it's coming back again with the Dark Phoenix bullshit, and I really, really fucking hate it.

The thing about male heroes is that they get to basically be gods, and nobody looks at that character and thinks "But what if--hear me out, here--what if he couldn't handle being so powerful? What if being so powerful and being able to do anything broke his brain? What if being so powerful is secretly terrible and all he wants, deep down, is to not have that power anymore?" is a super-interesting, subversive, clever storytelling move that anyone wants to see. If you have a male character whose awesome, godlike power comes at a terrible price, or is something that gets dumped on them before they're ready to handle it, or is really a pretty big burden, the story that gets told almost always revolves around finding solutions to those problems that let the character keep wielding those godlike, awesome powers.

Pretty much every time we get a female hero that's basically a god and her title gets any sort of readership, or she gets any sort of fanbase, some dickhole inevitably comes along and proposes this shocking storyline to end all storylines where all that power is just too much for her. And then enough people that this keeps happening sit back and applaud like this is a great artistic contribution instead of a loud fart during a lull in conversation on a conference call.

Thor's just Thor, but when Jane Foster takes up the mantle, using her awesome godlike powers makes her breast cancer (because of fucking course it was) worse. She-Hulk suffers emotional trauma and now she's too afraid to use her own amazing powers. Emma Frost gets too powerful for a hot second, and when that gets taken away it turns out her hubris in thinking she could use all that power has cost her pretty much all the power she started out with.

Jean Grey gets so powerful that she just sort of... goes crazy and dies.

Scarlet Witch gets so powerful that she just sort of... goes crazy and dies.

We keep seeing these things presented as deep, moving storylines when they're the same old tired bullshit. Male characters get to work through their problems without anyone seriously suggesting that there's something inherently and fundamentally wrong with them having them in the first place, that the character's mental disintegration or struggles with their powers are the inevitable result of having too much power or being too awesome. Female characters are perpetually in need of being knocked down a rung or two, because apparently that struggle with the incompatibility between their humanity and their powers is "interesting." It's sexist, and it's fucking lazy.

So Captain Marvel not indulging in it is a huge relief. All the lines about how she needs to learn to control her powers, how when she can control her temper and not use the full range of her powers at the drop of a hat she'll be ready, how she needs a hierarchy and external controls on her powers--it's all self-serving shit being shoveled by the bad guys.

When she finally breaks free of the limits that have been placed on her, accesses her full strength, and attains godlike, awesome powers--that's when she's at her best self. That's when she saves the day. That's her natural state. And at no point in time does the film act like Carol coming into her own and figuring out the full breadth and depth of what she's really capable of is anything other than fucking awesome.

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I know everybody in the DC fandom likes to bag on Gotham like “Why would anyone still live in a town that gets gassed by a clown once a month and has to dodge an entire colony of man-bats and probably has to measure crime rates in terms of how many people made it home from the office without getting mugged or stabbed this week?”

And this is a completely valid question, because like this is a city that thought stuffing their aged police commissioner in a robot and saying “This is the Batman now” was a reasonable response to losing their normal unlicensed vigilante.

But then we live in America and have like

Donald Trump legitimately running for president
clowns hiding in the shrubs is a nationwide thing and the police would like to remind you that it’s probably not legal to shoot them
Flint is probably a month away from having a cholera outbreak
Florida’s being overrun by giant pythons, and someone's actual-facts solution was to put a bound on dead pythons, at which point a state herpetologist had to explain why it was a bad idea to encourage random citizens to go fight massive apex predators in the swamp.
the justice department is trying to figure out how many people the police face-shoot to death every year and it turns out that’s not something anyone keeps records on
every big city has that one hospital where you don’t go if you can help it because you could legit die in the ER waiting room and the janitor will just mop around your corpse
California’s always both on fire and under water, somehow
the news is like “hurricanes as a zika-fighting strategy: what could go wrong?”
Georgia has an entire police department that doesn’t seem to do anything but have cybersex with pedophiles
civil forfeiture is a thing
the number of times people get shot with arrows in this country every year is genuinely astonishing
Texas just blows the fuck up every so often because EPA and OSHA regs are for commies
Worse Virginia’s been on fire for a century in some places because samesies
like six people got shot (with guns) in one day in Minneapolis and their unanimous response to police was “fuck off I’m not a snitch”

and everybody’s still like “lol love it or leave it buddy."

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Given that Bat-Cow is a real legitimate thing that actually happened, I feel like Red Hood needs a goat. Like, a foul-tempered, vaguely sinister, apparently-completely-normal goat that Damien runs across on some mission, and everybody else calls “Not it” before Jason even knows what’s going on, and suddenly he’s got a goat.

And he tries to leave the goat at the manor, but he gets home and finds the goat in his walk-up, somehow. All the doors and windows are still locked, security system hasn’t been tripped, nobody will admit to having put it there.

“You’re telling me that not one of you is responsible for this. That a goat somehow got itself down ten miles of subway, navigated a switchover to the el-train, climbed six flights of stairs, let itself in, and then locked back up afterwards.”

“Goats are very nimble, Jason.”

And he keeps trying to leave it with petting zoos, but it’s the same thing every time, it always winds up back at his place. Maybe he eventually grudgingly accepts it because it is kind of nice to come home to someone, even if it is just a goat, and it is kind of helpful. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s come home to find that somebody’s clearly broken in--maybe just a thief, maybe someone after him specifically, but whoever they were they got headbutted right back out a window for their trouble.

The goat’s never the worse for wear.

Then he winds up in serious trouble, and in swoops the whole rest of the family at the last second, and he’s like “How’d you find me?” because he’s an independent vigilante who is not wearing a bat-tracker, dad. And Bruce just looks pained and says it doesn’t matter, and Dick does his best to be very serious and tells him that Hood-Goat told them Jason was in trouble, and Barbara’s just like “We’re not calling it that.”

(They are totally calling it that. Turns out it’s really hard to come up with good nicknames based off “Red Hood,” and neither Bruce nor Jason will accept Bat-Goat.)

Jason doesn’t believe them. Tim and Steph immediately whip out their phones and show him videographic evidence, which in this case amounts to the goat jumping around the cave and waving his favorite leather jacket--now half-eaten--around like a flag. Which, okay, is one of the weirdest things he’s seen in a month, and doesn’t explain how the fucking goat got from his apartment to the batcave, but he’s like “Okay, sure, but how’d you find me?”.

Steph fast-fowards to the part where the goat headbutts a map case open and stamps its hoof on the warehouse they’re all standing in right now, and Jason’s just looking at the goat, who is of course now loitering in the background like there’s nothing unusual about this at all, and going “You guys didn’t bring it with you, did you?”

And then Jason’s looking at Bruce, because of course they didn’t bring the goat with them, and going “Do you think maybe Zatanna could...?”

And Bruce is like “It’s your goat, Jason. Part of being a responsible adult is arranging for its exorcisms yourself.”

Meanwhile Damien’s assuring the goat that it’s just perfect the way it is and probably doesn’t need the devil cast out of it.

Then the outlaws phase hits, and Roy is just so unbelievably stoked about the goat, and Jason realizes that he's stuck in a live-action reenactment of Goat Simulator. And he is so 1000% done with life. Every time one of the other Robins or Bruce asks him for help, he just texts a picture of the goat in yet another Arsenal-provided get-up and tells them that they did this to him and he's never helping them again.

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I feel like now that Daredevil has established that Madame Gao is still hanging around, doing her thing, we could actually maybe get some non-racist, perfectly ridiculous goon-swarms going.

Like, she’s clearly a charismatic leader, she runs a bustling drug-trade empire with lots of cash and a rolodex full of people up to their eyeballs in debt or wanting a free month’s worth of drugs, and she seems to take at least pretending to be polite about shit pretty seriously. And Matt just will not fucking stop kicking down her doors and beating up her henchmen and being super-rude about everything.

So, you know, just like once a month, she checks her Annoying Vigilante Calendar and sees what he’s up to, calls in one of her more creative lieutenants, and tells him she wants word put on the street about something Daredevil won’t be able to resist investigating. Also, she wants fifty people they can afford to lose to dress up like the cast of Evil Dead and be waiting for him at the bait-address where the fake dog-napping ring or whatever is supposed to be. Matt shows up, kicks down the door, and suddenly there are guys with chainsaws and people pretending to be zombies and somebody threw pig’s blood (?!) on him and then ran away and he does not understand what’s going on but there are dogs to be saved, so he’s going to fight his way through it come hell or high water or ten guys who appear to be walking trees okay this has got to be a dream.

Meanwhile she’s just watching this on a livestream and laughing her ass off, and it’s almost as good as the time she got a bunch of shriners, complete with miniature cars, to take him on for what they thought was a charity bout.

After half a year of this, Matt’s about to have a nervous breakdown because seriously, what the fuck is even going on in this town, and Karen keeps insisting that no, Matt, I swear on a stack of Bibles that there isn’t a gang of villainous Harlem Globetrotter-wannabes with attacks based on trick-basketball moves carving out territory in Hell’s Kitchen, I think someone besides you would have seen them by now if they were, why would that even be a thing? Claire hung up on him after the “evil clowns” call, and Foggy told him to stop falling asleep watching the news after the time with the Sexy Avengers, and Madame Gao’s expanding video library of Daredevil’s Greatest Hits is proving surprisingly popular with all the guys he keeps punching in the face because Daredevil doesn’t do doorbells.

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I finally got around to watching La La Land, and I’m just extremely confused about everything.

Like, I feel like I just spent two hours having a one-sided argument with a film written by an AI that was given a stack of musicals and late-’90s/early-’00s indie romdrams and no other reference material.

Like, I’m mad at the opening and closing musical numbers because they’re evidence that somebody on the project knew what the fuck they were doing, and I’m mad at the musical number that didn’t happen on the pier.

Like, I can’t believe how much screentime they devoted to Seb’s uninspired piano-playing and compared to Mia’s nigh-zero amounts of screentime actually acting.

Not that I didn’t appreciate the climactic audition veering into an impressionistic interlude meant to convey the experience of watching her audition! In a movie where we got to see her perform, or in a movie where every time Seb’s fingers hit the keyboard we cut to his internal state, it would have been a nice touch. But we spend the whole movie watching him play as an objective observer, and we spend maybe a grand total of two minutes watching Mia act as the same, and every last second of it is to show us her professional humiliation.

I’m just basically mad about the whole thing, because I genuinely don’t know what the fuck the movie was trying to make me feel and I’m not sure the movie knew either.

fursasaida replied to your post: I finally got around to watching La La Land, and...

i’m sorry i’ll stop i just. hate it. also please note that chazelle cannot write his way out of a scene with escalating tension. he escalates and escalates and doesn’t know how to dismount so he just has there be a loud noise or a small fire to end it. he does it twice in la la land and it’s BUSH LEAGUE

Hahaha no, please, I spent two hours over dinner last night dissecting every single thing about this movie that either really disappointed me or that I hated and thought objectively sucked.

Like, why did the scene on the pier not turn into another full musical number with all the other couples dancing in the sunset? That was set up to be a barn-burner echoing the opening number, and he just. walks. away.

Why have the Rebel Without A Cause film melt when they almost kiss instead of just transporting them right from a completed kiss into the planetarium fantasia number, which would help establish the film’s idiom of cutting from the actual to the moment’s emotional impression a la Mia’s Big Audition and Mia’s Big What-If Moment? (I cannot come up with a scene where the movie did this with Seb, which is now bugging me, because it means we’re again consistently objectively watching Seb while just getting cut-aways and fantasies for Mia.)

Why did the first ten minutes of the film follow Mia only to pull the rug out from under us and turn into Seb’s story? If they were going to do that, why couldn’t they come up with better piano-playing in a movie that literally hinged on him being the absolute bestest jazz-pianoman in the state?

If your male lead’s dancing is really uninspired and you don’t want to recast, why not do the obvious and litter the background with supporting dancers to help cover it up? So many of the plot-point dance numbers are just them and it leaves him stranded and flopping like the emotionally detached asshole his character is, except it’s also visually unappealing which I have to assume was unintentional in a film that was 99% aesthetics.

I actually did like the smoke detector denouement to the relationship-ending argument that Seb is essentially having with himself because we’re never shown Mia doing 90% of the shit he accuses her of doing but it’s absolutely a fair description of his own insecurities? (Side point: Who’d have thought deciding that you’re the one who can fix a woman’s hatred of jazz would turn into an unallayed, lingering suspicion that she’s just humoring you when she says she loves it now? Who. would. have. thought. it. Hmm.) I thought it was pretty fitting that he’s burning down whatever they had together without even seeming to notice it, then left dealing with the smoking wreckage while she just gets the fuck out of Dodge. But I also feel like the performance didn’t necessarily incorporate the smoke detector going off as a lightbulb moment for him, like him realizing he just said something he couldn’t take back, so it didn’t land like it could have.

I also did appreciate the way Mia’s Big What-If featured him doing everything right--don’t blow her off when she tries to compliment you, don’t accept a gig you’re deeply conflicted about just to stew over it the entire time, hustle for her thing instead of treating it like a cute sideline until it’s too late--in a way we know he wasn’t capable of at the time. I don’t know if that’s what they were trying to communicate, but that seemed like a readily available interpretation, the 20/20 hindsight where you realize you made things a lot harder for yourself than they should have been and ruined something that could have been great because you were too self-absorbed to realize what a dick you were being.

(Like Chazelle’s ex is watching it and going, “Yes, congratulations, if you’d been a completely different person instead of the self-sabotaging dickhead you were, we’d still be together. Also, so long as we’re going back in time with our current knowledge, I’d have bought stock in Google and Amazon before they were big and we’d be billionaires.”)

Like, it’s a film that really could have been good, and it just left all that potential on the table. I don’t understand what the fuck happened there at all.

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So pleased with that one little bit in the season one finale of The Good Place, where Eleanor, who’s been leaning on the weirdly-appreciative compliments toward Tahani all season, has that moment of honesty where she realizes and admits that okay, she actually might be into Tahani. This might not just be her not knowing how to friend good or her going for physical compliments because she’s got the socialization skills of a rabid muskrat, this might be her finally learning how to recognize different shades in the close friendships and interdependencies she’s spent her entire life running from.

Like, I get the frustration with shows where a character is dead to rights bi or pan but “doesn’t like labels” or is just “working through some things” or whatever the chickenshit excuse of the week is, or has suddenly and dramatically switched orientations because the writers are hacks.

But there also needs to be space for honestly-written characters who are figuring things out about themselves or coming to grips with things they’ve wanted but never thought they could/should have as a facet of personal growth and narrative arc. And I think The Good Place got it right this time.

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Does anybody else ever think about how Fantastic Beasts would have been a much shorter movie with a much different ending if the villain hadn’t been such a drama king? I mean, we eventually find out that he wants an obscurial because he wants to use them to trash the city in a big enough way that the wizarding community is outed good and proper, no going back.

Of course, given that this is Prohibition-Era New York City, a cloud of black malice turned loose on the infrastructure and inhabitants is just as likely written off as some new chemical weapon or bomb by anyone not on-scene for it.

You know what’s not easily written off as either of those things? A suitcase full of fucking monsters.

I mean, it’s not as grand or as poetic or as dignified as using the repressed power of an abused child to metaphorically bring magic out of the shadows, but snagging Newt’s briefcase as evidence and then hoofing it downtown to just flip it over and shake everything out into the middle of Times Square while yelling “Obliviate this, you bastards!” would do the trick just as thoroughly and with a lot more panache.

You’d have the added bonus of watching all the Junior Gestapo aurors flapping around trying to catch magic moths and herd huge glowing rhinoceroses and getting robbed blind by kleptomaniac echidnas while screaming “This isn’t real! This isn’t really happening!” at stray muggles because you can’t take care of both things at the same time.

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Bogue: I need an army.

Posse Depot clerk: Okay. Purpose of the army?

Bogue: For...normal army things. You know, just perfectly ordinary, army purposes.

Posse Depot clerk: Oooookay. Do you maybe just need the Army, then?

Bogue: No. Absolutely not. It would be terrible if the actual Army showed up.

Posse Depot clerk: So you need an army, and definitely not the Army, for perfectly legitimate and normal reasons.

Bogue: Yes. I need an army to accompany me on a three-day ride to the middle of nowhere and do legitimate, completely legal army things there.

Posse Depot clerk: Sounds good, please sign here.

Cut for: Continuity. An earlier re-write clearly shows Bogue delegating this task.

Townsfolk: You can’t do this! These are our homes! This is our land!

Denali: Oh, suddenly there’s a problem with forcibly relocating entire communities with little to no compensation for lost property or livelihood and no concern for the well-being of those displaced? That’s a thing we take exception to, now?

Townsfolk: ...

Bogue: ...

Hired goons: ...

[credits roll after forty minutes of increasingly awkward silence]

Cut for: Time.

Bogue: Hello, good morning, I need another army.

Posse Depot clerk: Wait, another army? What’d you do with the last one?

Bogue: No, sorry, I misspoke. I need an army. My first army. Ha ha, what a slip of the tongue, who even needs two armies.

Posse Depot clerk: No, I think I remember you now. Bartholomew Bogue, wasn’t it?

Bogue: No, no, you’re thinking of my brother. He hired an army here a week ago. He said this place was great, and that he was very happy with the army he got here, and they’re definitely still all riding around somewhere and positively not blown to bits by a weird pack of outlaws. I’m...Shmartholomew Shmogue.

Posse Depot clerk: If you’re brothers, why’s your last name different?

Bogue: Um. The doctor who filed my birth certificate was very drunk. But we’re definitely brothers, and this is definitely my first army.

Posse Depot clerk: I’m charging you a deposit this time.

Cut for: Continuity. This scene was shot before script revisions calling for Bogue to be killed on-screen during the climax were adopted.

Denali: *laughing to himself*

Bogue: What’s so funny?

Denali: You know how you asked me how I got so many men for so cheap, and I said ask me later?

Bogue: Yeah.

Denali: I told them all we were going to Six Flags.

Bogue: Well, that’s just mean.

Denali: *laughs louder* I told them all they could go on El Diablo, even if they had a bunch of corndogs first.

Bogue: Jesus, Denali.

Denali: They’re going to be so mad when they find out the truth. Those townsfolk don’t stand a chance.

Cut for: Characterization; historical inaccuracy. As much as a large band of frontier mercenaries would have doubtless enjoyed them, corndogs were not invented until the 1940s.

A prolonged argument between Chris Pratt and Denzel Washington over a scene in which Chisolm is supposed to do Red Harvest’s warpaint for him.

Denzel swore never to lift a brush again after an incident in college and proposes the scene be rewritten to replace Chisolm with Faraday, but Chris feels his fifteen years of semi-professional watercolor painting is less important to the potential revision than Faraday’s lack of emotional connection with Red Harvest.

Martin Sensmeier is asked for his opinion on the issue, but he pretends not to hear them and continues to eat his lunch as if the argument is not happening. Chris claims that this is because Martin agrees with him, and Denzel says that after this display he regrets defending Chris’s character when he was ranked least trustworthy of all the Marvel Chrises.

Matt Bomer, back on set for a last-minute reshoot, suggests avoiding the scene entirely by hanging several very clean mirrors around the town to make it clear to the audience that Red Harvest can do his own warpaint, no matter how out of hand the make-up artists’ one-upmanship of each other gets.

Denzel apologizes for what he said about Chris, and Chris appears to accept the apology but is still obviously hurt. Martin covers the ensuing tension by opening a bag of sunchips and eating them very slowly.

Cut for: Quality. The argument was surreptitiously filmed by Vincent D’Onofrio on his cell phone while he pretended to be texting Ayelet Zurer about whether she’d bring her new dog on set for him to meet when Daredevil starts filming again, and is consequently poorly lit and badly shot and features no mic dampening once the sunchips are in play. It will, however, be included as an extra on the blu-ray release.

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I just want to see one of those dopey supervillain team-up things where instead of everybody being like “All right, time to fight us some heroes!”, every last one of them has an existential crisis because somebody lumped them in with the rest of these fucks.

Dr. Doom’s all “Doom will usher in a new age, a golden utopia, free from the burden of want or indecision or petty dissent! Doom knows what’s best for mankind and will bring it about! These peasants are mere jailbreakers and thieves! How has it come to be that Doom is numbered among their ranks!”

And like Sandman’s sitting there going “Dude, I just... I steal shit. Sometimes I team up with guys who also don’t like Spider-Man. Worst thing I ever did was slap an old dude, and I felt really bad about it for weeks. That guy’s been sanctioned by the UN three times and counting for running death camps.”

“The skulls of Doom’s enemies pave the road to a better tomorrow!”

Three guys’ve got their hands up like “We literally just fight the Avengers for kicks. Pretty sure that ain’t even illegal.”

General Ross is sitting there glaring at everyone and going “I’m still a general. I work for the US government. I’m being paid, right now, out of taxpayer funds. You’re all going to super-jail as soon as I get my phone back.”

Everybody’s side-eyeing Kraven like, it’s 2016, bro, stop killing endangered animals for fun, and he’s looking at them like he doesn’t even know what to say to someone if it’s not about hunting.

Wolverine and Deadpool are somewhere in the back, bickering with one of the roster-guys about how it shouldn’t count if the hundreds of dudes you’ve knife-murdered were knife-murdered for good reasons.

It’s just the most demoralizing thing since Osborn got elected president. Super-crime plummets 50% in the next three months as everyone takes some time to reflect on their lives and try to get their shit together.

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We’ve all seen The Mummy (1999), right? Brendan Fraser’s stupid face. Rachel Weisz’s equally stupid face. Arnold Vosloo and his unforgivable habit of wearing way fewer clothes than necessary. Oded Fehr and his actually unforgivable habit of wearing way more clothes than necessary. In fact, if you haven’t seen it, you should probably do yourself a huge favor and just never, ever watch it. Ever.

Ahem.

Anyway, the whole plot is basically that Imhotep and the pharaoh’s main squeeze get their rock and-or roll on, and then there’s a murder-suicide, and all this leads directly to Imhotep getting cursed. Or, more accurately, cuuuuuuuuuuuuuursed, cue dramatic music.

The curse is one of those fun curses where you’re listening to the characters talk about it and you’re thinking something along the lines of “Why do you even have that curse?”

“Yes, I’m immortal and have godlike power, but only at the price of shirts and robes refusing to cover my pharaoh-betraying flesh!”

(I totally wasn’t kidding about the unforgivable habit of wearing way fewer clothes than necessary.)

So you have this guy that you hate so bad that you feel like death is too good for him, and you want him to suffer for an eternity. The side-effect of the thing you have to make him suffer for an eternity is that if he ever, I don’t know, gets out of cursed-people jail, he’s essentially a malevolent god. Who is specifically pissed off at you, or your descendants, because he’s spent the last mumblemumble years suffering under a terrible curse that you deliberately slapped him with.

Do you a) think about it for a few minutes and decide that just being tortured to normal death is actually good enough for him after all or b) say “Screw it, I’m sure he’ll never in all eternity bust out of this trap” and go for broke?

Because if you always pick “go for broke,” then congratulations, you’re probably one of the idiots who kick off one of these easily-avoidable horror films. I mean, if you sat down and explained how this happened to the people currently running from walls of sand or an entire city that’s been zombified or a pack of angry vampire mummies, they’d be happy to explain the likely consequences of giving someone you hate the power to do all that.

“This guy is practically omnipotent because…you didn’t like him. Did it ever occur to you to make sure he…couldn’t do all this? No? Okay. Fine. No, no, we get it. Drinking was involved. Bad decisions were made. We’ll just get back to saving the world from the machinations of a dude you hated so much that you gave him superpowers.”

I mean, think of the future trouble that could be saved if people back in the day sat down and periodically did a curse-review while they were editing their magic tomes. “What’s the best thing that happens if this gets used?” Somebody you hate has something really, really unpleasant happen to them. “What’s the worst thing that happens if this gets used?” An eternal night filled with blood-sucking monsters that delight in the anguished wails of the living falls, and sunrise never comes. That one doesn’t make it into the next edition. Problem solved.

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It’s been like a week and I’m still chuckling to myself over Gone Girl. (The book. Haven’t seen the movie.) It’s just so, so good.

I read an essay once–I forget where, it was in an anthology about horror movies–that posited that horror of the intimate, single-protagonist sort really only worked on an emotional level if there was some initial sin or bad act on the protagonist’s part that provoked the (horrific, disproportionate) response of the antagonist. They have to have done something, to have some reprisal coming, in order for the story to work. Otherwise it’s basically just a martyrdom playing out on screen for two hours, or over the course of two hundred pages.

It’s not a bad theory, I don’t think, and it’s helped explain the dissatisfaction of a few movies where the protagonist’s fuck-up is really…not that big a deal? Like Club Dread*, where the murderer is like “You said you didn’t have any pot, but you totally did! And you! You didn’t say ‘bless you’ after I sneezed!”, only it’s not horror-comedy, and you’re expected to take it seriously. Without a real transgression, a film hitting beats the seem to imply some level of guilt or comeuppance just comes off as weird and sadistic.

If you’ve seen it, Drag Me to Hell** is a good example of when it works. You tell an old-old, poverty-stricken lady she’s getting foreclosed on because you work for a soulless bank when all human decency tells you to let the poor old bat die in her own home in peace, well. You haven’t earned getting damned to hell, obviously, but you’ve done something concrete and reasonably infuriating to provoke the witch who curses you. It’s a struggle that makes sense. You, Protagonist McGee, are righteously indignant because Jesus Christ, this is an over-the-top response, and fighting like mad because you don’t deserve this, and Antagonist McBastard is over there going “You foreclosed on a dying ninety-year-old! Fuck you, you’re going to hell!”.

So, what did Nick do to deserve his fate in Gone Girl? I mean, Amy’s pretty other than else in the book. She’s pretty much Moriarty, if Moriarty were motivated by spite and not profit. But she’s also an absolutely perfect disaster to befall a man who wants, and spends much of his life pursuing, a shallow fantasy of women as toys, women who exist only to dispense comfort and pleasure, women who have no uncomfortable needs or personalities or demands to inconvenience him.

Of the three main female characters–Amy, Andie, and Go–Go is the only one who’s a real person. Nick’s twin sister is the woman he can’t leave, even if their relationship hits the skids or sours, and so she gets to be a human. Andie exists in the same twilight zone where he wishes Amy lived, where she’s sexually and emotionally available and needs nothing in return that he can’t easily give her and is automatically subordinate in the relationship thanks to the huge gap in age and status (over a decade apart; she’s a college student and he’s her professor). So what happens when Nick breaks the marriage contract and cheats on Amy with Andie?

What happens is that it turns out that Nick, who wants nothing more than to be married to a pleasant little doll who will never give him any trouble, has married the woman that every casual misogynist tells ghost stories about. As punishment for his pursuit of the puerile daydream that requires real people to act as props, he gets the vindictive monster inspired by centuries of lingering guilt over the unacknowledged unfairness of the demand that women act like toys.

I mean, let’s be clear: Amy is not a real person. In the function of this story, Amy is the monster. And Amy-the-monster is epic. Amy’s wrath knows few bounds. Amy will murder you because you make her act grateful one too many times. Amy will have a baby just to trap you. Amy will have sex with you just to say it was rape. Amy will make you fall in love with her all over again just to throw it in your face. Amy will work and work and work at something and never let on and then act as if everything she accomplished was effortless, because Amy is unknowable and omnipotent and consequently bordering on magical. Are we even sure Amy had to work at it? Of course not, because fuck if Nick was paying attention. Amy can snap her fingers and turn seven years of your life into a lie. Amy will tell the whole world about your flaws, and she can do it because you let her see the real you. Amy is every gangrenous fear of intimacy ever spawned come to life and given reason to be angry at a man, and when Nick cheats, he pulls the trigger.

And in the end, the monster wins. Nick rolls over and accepts it, and tries to spin Amy as a stabilizing, maturing force, a fire-and-brimstone god who will make him toe the line and be a good man–the good man he couldn’t manage to be under his own power–even as Go tells him that this is fucked up and terrible. Of course, what Go fails to understand is that Nick has come to the realization that he doesn’t want a real woman, a real human being of flesh and blood and frailties and needs. A real woman would be boring. The idea of being in a real relationship with a real woman still holds no appeal. Amy-the-monster has taken away Nick’s expectation of the blow-up doll, but in its place he’s latched onto the expectation of the vampire. If he can’t have the comfort of an infinitely-soothing caregiver, he needs the horror of an infinitely-terrible tyrant.

*Actually a reasonably good movie?

**Also a reasonably good movie, and one of the few I’ve seen (not usually a big horror fan, so this might not be unusual) where a female protagonist gets to play kind of cocky and brash in response to supernatural aggression without getting shoved into the vapid-slut role. Christine basically gets to be Ash.

One of my favorite tropes of all time--and I know this is a weird one to the point of possibly not being a recognized trope, but bear with me--is probably the Incompetent Mentor.

You know the one. Some kid's the Chosen One, selected by Destiny to slay the Great Evil, and then it turns out that the person put in charge of making sure they lived to hit puberty never bothered explaining the job to them.

Obi-Wan Kenobi's probably the most famous example of this. Dude's got almost twenty years to spend teaching Luke to at least not be such a jackass, and what does the kid get? Half an hour with a training droid, a pack of lies about his father, and a second-hand laser-sword.

"I'm going to be honest with you, Luke: I completely fucking forgot about you roughly two weeks after I dumped you on your aunt and uncle's doorstep."

I don't even know why I love it so much. I just do. Just whenever you've got some teenager running around as poorly equipped for their grand destiny as humanly possible and a caretaker who knew this was coming and did fuck-all to prepare them for it, I can't stop snickering to myself. It's just like, you had one job. And who even put them in charge of raising the chosen one in the first place?

I mean, if you're entrusted by the High Council of Stuff with the future savior of the world, it seems reasonable to think that somebody would have checked your references and made sure you're not a slack-ass loser, right? Did the All-Knowing Wisdom-Havers of Ancient Power just pick some asshole at random and tell them to raise the hope of all mankind? Did they look at the resume that includes "Fucked Up Royally Last Time This Happened, 1189AD-current" and hand the baby over with a shrug and a "Surely you won't make the same mistake twice."?

We're not talking about the stories where an infant of dubious identity is smuggled out of a burning castle by a half-senile washerwoman and raised by her unwitting grandchildren as a foundling. That can't really be helped most of the time, because it's a huge fucking surprise to everyone when the kid can shoot lightning bolts from their eyes and fly on alternate Tuesdays. I mean the stories where the kid starts shooting lightning bolts from their eyes, and good old Uncle Jim goes "Okay, time to take your proper place in the world as Wizard Jesus. Did I mention that magic is real? Because magic is real. So, let's hit the road."

And sometimes you can chalk it up to the fact that they were in hiding, but most of the time the kid's been left wildly incompetent even by those standards. Like, okay, you couldn't teach them magic with the massive, perpetual, kingdom-wide witch-hunt on for any unapproved sorcerers. But you probably could have gotten away with teaching them how to whack somebody in the face with a cudgel really well and how the government works. Maybe explain the basics of the economic system and that stormtroopers aren't your friends. Maybe "Dragons are fantastical creatures, but if they were real, you'd probably kill them by shooting them in the heart with an iron arrow."

But it's just like, nope! The most incompetent mentor available taught them to grow turnips really well and never let them leave the farm or watch the news, so you better hope they're a quick study or can find a way to weaponize turnips.

Because I went back and rewatched Spider-Man, because whyyyyyyyyyyy did Amazing Spider-Man have to make so little sense, you're getting a breakdown of why I don't like how it handled Mary Jane.

So, the problem I have with Sam Raimi's Mary Jane is basically 90% "pretty is not a character trait" and 10% "does this character ever get to do anything but suffer?". And I'm willing to let some of the last one go, because Raimi's Spider-Man can be described as "everyone suffers, all the time" without much inaccuracy.

After all, MJ's rotating slate of disrespectful, asshole dudes is not that much different from Peter's rotating slate of tragic father figures, with the caveat that MJ's dudes try to kill her dreams while Peter's fathers are more into the literal death thing.

But the "pretty is not a character trait" part of it? Pretty is not a fucking character trait. That should be like Writing 101. If your answer to "Why should the audience care about this character?" is "She's a knock-out," you need to sit in a corner until you understand where your parents went wrong in raising you.

Harry wants to introduce her to his dad and starts picking at her about the fact that she's not dressed how he wanted? "It'll be fine. You think I'm pretty, don't you?" Not "You love me" or "I'm awesome" or "How big an asshole could he possibly be?", but "He'll think I'm suitably attractive to be your girlfriend." When Aunt May talks about the first time Peter and Mary Jane met, it's "You asked if she was an angel." When Norman ruins Thanksgiving, he snarls at Harry about her looks and what she could possibly want with a guy like him outside of his bank account. When she's attacked in the street, her assailants pick her because she's pretty.

Is she funny? Kind? Weirdly angered by grammatical errors on signs? Did she go joyriding in Flash's fancy car after they broke up because he can go to hell, but she's really going to miss those wheels? The movie does not expect us to give a damn. Peter's set up as the natural choice of boyfriend not because she's attracted to him or has a great rapport with him or because they have a long-standing friendship that's deepened into love, but because he's the only dude in her life who doesn't treat her like a toy.

And then the script seems to go out of its way to dump on her for not being good at anything else.

Peter runs into her in town? Let's have her asshole boss chase her down the sidewalk to yell at her for being a shitty cashier in public. Peter asks her how her audition went? Let's talk about how she not only didn't get the part, but that a) the part she didn't get was low-rent and b) they told her she sucked and needed to go pump gas for a living. The only real outside interest she's given is acting--nothing else is on the horizon as far as the script is concerned--and she doesn't even get to take joy in that or be recognized as having talent.

It's not enough to set her up as a damsel in distress once Osborn starts rocketing around town and blowing shit up. The script takes the time to set her up as a figure of suffering, which is doubly sleazy when the whole point of most of that suffering, in terms of plot, is to give Peter something to comfort her over. Mary Jane has bad things happen to her; Peter rescues/comforts her. Eventually, we understand, Mary Jane will fall in love with him because he's patient and kind and no one else will ever treat her as well. It's gross, and cliched, and aggravating.

And none of this would have been difficult to avoid! At all!

You can absolutely accomplish the same plot goals without humiliating the character into the bargain. After all, Peter gets to be fired over his spider-manning and wind up working for a guy who tries to get him arrested/stoned by an angry mob without it being treated as a morale-killer. He can cop to having less than $8 to spend on dinner in New York City and still have a stupid smile on his face, but MJ's stuck spending 90% of her time on-screen looking like she's about to burst into tears.

There's no reason--absolutely none--that Mary Jane couldn't have landed her part. She can be disappointed that shitty roles and spotty gigs don't pay the bills and she still has to waitress to make ends meet. There can be friction between her and Harry because he's dating a girl with two embarrassing ad-spots on her resume who's temping to pay her rent, or because he doesn't see her successes as something to be excited about. Her boss can be a jerk who won't let her trade shifts with a co-worker so that she can do a call-back. But she'd be doing the thing she loved, and actually getting her shot. The sacrifices or setbacks would make some amount of emotional sense and be tied to something important to her.

And it would have been the easiest thing in the world to establish them not just as having known each other for a long time, but having been reasonably close friends. Instead of Peter being the (borderline stalker) guy she winds up with by sheer dint of him not being completely awful, you can tweak a few lines and establish that they've been consistently involved in each other's lives. A long history of solidarity and companionship that turns into an awkward flirtation once they're adults requires very little extra effort from the script and would make more narrative sense than "I've loved this girl I barely know for over a decade, and now she's been beaten down enough by life to settle!".

I think one of the biggest problems I have when it comes to writing about female characters is the difference between the character herself and the handling of the character by the (usually male) writer/director/etc.*

You criticize a particular writer or director's handling of the character, and it very easily gets read as a critique of the character herself. (Which may or may not be warranted, but it's a little besides the point in that particular moment.) I mean, I've actually seen a few essays now that complain about the fact that a director's paid a fair amount of attention to making a female character a meaty character instead of a literal prop (yay, right?), but then hasn't bothered to actually do anything character-y with her. Like, "Yeah! You've got a complicated backstory and a morally ambiguous motivation and relationships that don't involve the hero! Why don't you go stand in a corner until the action is over and you can kiss somebody?"

It's an improvement, but it kind of misses the point of asking for female characters that work as characters instead of just some sort of weird ambulatory reward system for the male protagonists.

I think one of the most recent examples is Gamora, who's a fantastic character. I mean, the script literally gives her a hero's journey. She is unambiguously the moral center of the film. She's the most selfless and noble character in the entire movie. Like, the Novas? At least are defending their home planet. She's just out to save billions of strangers at great personal cost because fuck letting the genocidal maniacs win. She's getting her crew together and going to save the goddamned galaxy, in the face of her entire (death-cult) adopted family. Everyone she actually knows and cares for personally is lined up against her. Or at least, that's what's going on with the script.

The director somehow seems to find it way more interesting to focus on whether or not a space-age dude-bro gets to kiss her.** We're stuck watching "I May Not Have Explained The Consequences of Failure to This Primate Well Enough, As He Keeps Being Distracted by the Possibility of Mating with Me: The Gamora Story."

And none of that is actually an indictment of the character! The treatment of the character is another story. Which, honestly? I get it. This can be a weird conversation to have. Most of us are used to dealing with a sort of closed system, where the person writing the character and the person who created the character are the same person.

But once you're talking about corporate-owned characters, the bets are kind of off. If JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien or Anne Rice fucks up their characters, there's not a lot of daylight between authorial intent and what's on the page. But with television and movies and comics, you're dealing not just with authors and artists and producers and directors, and all of them having something to say about how a character is presented. The studios and networks are throwing their weight around, too.

You get a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist running DC, Lois Lane's going to act very differently than she did before he took over. You get a writer who's into women's lib doing storylines for Fantastic Four, Susan Storm's going to be a lot less interested in cleaning up after the boys and giggling ineffectually when Reed forgets they have kids because Science!.

One executive can be the force behind a show having this Amanda Waller:

instead of this one:

(Apologies for not being able to find a screenshot of her personally ordering that President Luthor be arrested for treason immediately after he tries to make out with her/recruit her to his evil plan for post-apocalypse world domination. Because that happened.)

The original creators for both characters can start spinning in their graves for all DC or Marvel care; they're the ones running the show currently. Hell, look at Gene Rodenberry's treatment of Kirk and Uhura compared to Abrams's.

And it is difficult not to hear "This character sucks" when someone says "This director's portrayal of this character sucks." We're primed to hear that. Female characters get bagged on all the time, for pretty much every reason under the sun. Too feminine/not feminine enough? The same character can be both! Did the exact same thing an immediately-forgiven male character did? What an irredeemable bitch! Sexy-lady mouthpiece for the dude-writers' anti-femme misogyny? Ugh, Strong Female Characters are awful. Everyone's a Mary Sue!

But it's not especially difficult to write a script that avoids lazy misogyny or being super-shitty to your female characters, so I'm probably going to keep complaining about directors and writers who pull some bullshit at female characters' expense for no real reason.

*Which isn't to say that this is a problem unique to female characters. I mean, god knows how many pixels I've spent over the years talking about this effect with pretty much any long-standing character. I think my personal favorite that this shows up with most frequently is Batman, for fuck's sake.

**Yes, Peter Quill. I've also written an embarrassing amount about Peter Quill. But that doesn't alter the fact that the movie shortchanges Gamora's character to focus on his arguably less interesting character for no apparent reason.