My one disappointment with Star Trek: Into Darkness

(I just realized that it’s been a full year since I last posted, and that was also a feministy movie rant. This tells me that [a] I should blog more and [b] I like feministy movie rants)

(Also I avoided major plot points but there might be a couple mild spoilers in here)

I’m pretty sure I can claim ownership of a geek card. I love Batman so much that I saw The Dark Knight three times in the theater, and The Dark Knight Rises twice. I even love Batman Forever. That’s dedication. I have seen the complete Star Wars series more times than I can count and could hum pretty much any song from the soundtrack verbatim. I grew up on the Amazing Spiderman cartoon. I read about brains and history for fun. So yeah, kinda geeky.

So, true to my geek form, I have now seen Star Trek: Into Darkness twice within the span of a month. And yes, I loved the movie. While my familiarity with the Star Trek franchise is slightly less than my familiarity with Star Wars (I think comparing the two is unfair and silly, but that’s a rant for another day), I still love it. I grew up on Wrath of Khan and the Trouble with Tribbles (which still weirds me out to this day). When the 2009 reboot was released, my entire family and I went to the midnight premiere. So yes, I love Star Trek.

And what’s not to love? There are so many advantages to being a futuristic, sci-fi natured series: rad technological advances, easy access to metaphors about politics and social justice, ability to show many cultures and races (even imaginary or otherworldly ones).

                                                       And also Benedict Cumberbatch.

And when it comes to women, Star Trek tends to commit less of the media representation sins.  A good portion of the crew on the Enterprise are women, in fact I’d say a good half, at least in the newer incarnations.

And let’s not forget Uhura. For the most part, her badass strong lady characteristics have remained intact. She successfully runs her own station on the ship and is a vital part of the crew. In Into Darkness specifically, she faces a group of big, burly Klingons all by herself. She uses her awesome language skills to communicate with them in a crisis situation. It was legit. When there are so few strong female characters to identify with, it’s refreshing to see one like Uhura representing women as capable, strong, and intelligent.

It is because of all of these things that my one disappointment with Into Darkness was so disappointing. In this episode, a new lady character was introduced: Dr. Carol Wallace (played by Alice Eve), a science officer and advanced weapons specialist. “Cool!” I thought. “A lady character who might actually be recognized for her brains and not just her body!”

Nope. Didn’t happen.

For being introduced as a super-intelligent weapons specialist, she isn’t represented as one very well. Dr. Wallace is shown as being useful twice. Twice. In a 132-minute movie.  In which she’s supposed to be a WEAPONS SPECIALIST. She spends the rest of the time being a completely vapid and borderline useless character. This was enough to give me an ounce or two of disappointment, but I went to full-blown facepalm mode when she was featured in a 100% gratuitous underwear scene.

She literally changes clothes in the back of a bunker for no good reason, in front of Captain Kirk, no less. She asks him not to look. He looks, and so does the camera, giving us a full body shot of her in her underthings. She gives him a mildly annoyed shrug, and the scene cuts. URRGGHHH WAS THIS EVEN NECESSARY?

                       This scene literally had more to do with the plot of its respective movie.

It made me so mad. Like, literally mad. Not “oh that was mildly annoying” but legitimately pissed. Here is a series that I love, that is usually pretty cool about diverse representation, and it had one of the most flat-out gratuitous, unnecessary and objectifying scenes I’d ever witnessed. I would ask why, but I know why. We live in a culture in which women are often valued for their bodies, not for their personalities or their intelligence or their kindness or their abilities or any of the countless other things that humans are valued for.

It’s already a pretty well-known fact that women have low representation in the movies anyway (I’ll cite a great example article at the end that talks about this). Male characters dominate the screen, and women are usually thrown in as a love interest who only serves to supplement the male character or just as a pretty face (or body). This is something I am clearly not happy about, and something that should concern you, too.

In my last post, I commented on the effect of the media on our kids’ minds. Well, guess what…it affects ours, too. There’s this rad thing called “cultivation theory” that basically means this: what we see in the media affects how we view the real world. A prime example of this, called the “CSI effect,” is that people who watch more crime shows are likely to predict that local crime rates are actually way higher than they really are. These happen with representations of gender, too: the more we see women being represented as nothing more than a body, the more we start to believe that to be true.

The makers of the film did acknowledge that this may have been a bit misogynistic, as evidenced in this tweet and in a few other public statements. (Lindelof was a producer and writer for Into Darkness)



They even decided to release a clip of a shower scene involving Benedict Cumberbatch’s character. This was, I’m guessing, supposed to be a show of good faith (and likely a dose of serious excitement for fangirls everywhere—yes, including me). But, the fact of the matter is, this scene wasn’t included in the actual film (despite the fact that it may have had more of a connection to the plot), but the Alice Eve scene was (despite its complete lack of connection to the plot). Seems just a tad sexist to me.

Sorry, I had to. It was just too appropriate.

Now, am I going to boycott it? No. Like I said, other than this, I really liked it. Media will never be perfect, but it is always a good idea to be conscious and critical consumers. We should always be paying attention, always asking questions, always having conversations. Were those few minutes of the film really frustrating? Yeah. Can we still use it as a way to have awesome socially conscious feminist dialogue? Of course. I wouldn't have it any other way.
(Just so all of you know, on my first try I had this almost completely finished and accidentally erased ALL OF IT. I completely re-wrote it. Dedication, folks. DEDICATION.)


*Article about lack of female characters:

http://flavorwire.com/391410/guess-what-hollywoods-bridesmaids-revolution-never-happened

Chipwrecked and sexism: what are we showing our kids?

Today, I took my nine year-old brother to the movies. There’s a local theater that has a summer movie program—they show movies that are a few months to a year past their theater releases, and you can buy discount tickets. It’s a very popular thing among families with young children in the area.  Despite the fact that the movie choices aren’t always from my top ten, I think it’s great. I have a sizeable passion for film, and I can’t always afford to go—plus it gives me time to spend with my youngest sibling, whom I’m quite close to and miss greatly when I’m away at school.

Now, my brother is a smart kid. He’s observant, capable of noticing details and making connections. A lot of times we underestimate or take for granted the intelligence and capabilities of children. I try very hard not to. After spending a lot of time with him (and many other children—I’ve been a caretaker many times throughout my life), I’ve realized that they take in information quite well. Apparently, the media has figured this out, too.

[Now before you jump down my throat and call me paranoid, think about the last time you, your kid, or a kid you know was watching TV. Have you ever paid attention to what they’re seeing? Commercials are the worst. Advertisers have gender stereotypes down to a science. Look at a commercial for a “boy’s toy,” like Nerf guns, video games, cars, or plastic tool kits. Almost all the time you only have male children in the commercial, blue and red colors, fast-paced rock music and a booming male voice telling you just how awesome you could be if you had this thing. Now they switch to a “girls toy” commercial (Barbies, baby dolls, kitchens, arts & crafts): all girls, pink and purple and sparkles, corny pop music, and some sweet voice talking about being pretty and popular. Don’t believe me? Go turn on Disney or Nickelodeon. Try to last half an hour.]

Now, back to the movies. So today, I’m sitting there with my brother watching “Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked,” when all of the sudden I realize the audience is being bombarded with some of the most blatant and insulting gender stereotypes I’ve encountered lately. Never mind how annoying that franchise is as a whole, I was utterly dumbfounded by the messages it promoted. Here’s a basic rundown: Alvin, Simon, and Theodore are the male chipmunks. Jeanette, Brittany, and Eleanor are the “Chipettes,” basically a female version of the male trio. The chipmunks along with their human companion, Dave, and their sleazy manager, are on a cruise ship to Europe for some kind of music awards ceremony (why they didn’t just take a plane, I’m not sure). On the way, the chipmunks end up stranded on an island somewhere and their human friends have to come find them. And the Oscar goes to…

Sorry. Back on track. I understand that animated talking chipmunks are not going to have a lot of character depth. But I honestly felt as though the writers made every possible effort to be as sexist as humanly (or chipmunkly?) possible with them. The male trio are in their traditional roles (the cool one, the geeky one, the fat one…I’ll get to the guys a bit later). But the females have some obvious distinctions as well. Brittany and Eleanor are fragile, dainty, “girly girls” who would rather die than mess up their hair. They are ditzy and unapologetically unintelligent. The other female, Jeanette, is “the smart one.” She is not as physically attractive as the other two, and she doesn’t have near as many lines in the script. She is made to look obviously geeky as if to signal to the audience that yes, she is the smart one, because she’s not pretty. This is one of the oldest stereotypes in the book. Not only are there visual cues, which are bad enough, but the characters make a point to talk about it several times. The worst offense was this line by Brittany: “She’s the smart one. I’m the pretty one. You don’t see me walking around trying to be all smart.”

I kid you not, that is exactly what was said.

It was at this point that I was tempted to leave, but decided that I should watch the rest and catch any other blatant sexism so I could pass it along to the general public. They never state it explicitly, but the overall message to girls was this: “It is pretty much impossible to be both attractive and smart. You have to choose between the two.” Later on, because of plot developments that aren’t worth mentioning, Alvin and Brittany end up having to take on the roles of being the “responsible ones”. They decide that they should build shelter. Alvin, of course, assumes that he should do it because he’s the male. He turns around from building his own structure to see that Brittany has, in fact, built her own. Now, if they had left it at that, I might have thought they’d redeemed themselves a little. But no. Brittany’s structure is a Disney-esque cottage covered in pink flowers. She makes some high-pitched statement about how they should have a good-looking place to be. Because, obviously, all women care about is flowers and being attractive. To top it all off, Alvin turns to her and says “so I guess you can be smart!”

He made it an announcement as if it’s some rare, unseen, notable thing for an attractive young woman to be intelligent and self-sufficient. I just about lost it at that point.

They go on to show that Jeanette, the “smart one”, starts to develop a relationship with Simon, the geeky male. At one point, under the apparent influence of cabin fever, he turns into Simone, a French Casanova version of himself. He tells Jeanette how pretty she is and gives her jewelry, and she finally seems to have found happiness. New message: “girls, even if you manage to be smart on your own, you’re gonna need a man to protect you and give you shiny things to find true happiness.”

And it’s not just damaging to the girls. Boys absorb these messages, too. But they’re also told through the transformation of Simon to Simone that the only way to “get the girl” (a sexist idea in and of itself, as if a woman is an object to be attained) is to be a danger-loving, non-geek, materialistic and macho kind of man. Intelligence doesn’t matter. Being shy is bad. If you want to be noticed, be something that you’re not.

Once I had officially processed all of this, I knew I had to write about it. I had to point it out. If you’re thinking “it’s only a kids’ movie, what’s the big deal?”, think again. When we are children, our minds are made to learn and absorb more than at any other point in our lives. Children are impressionable. They will take what they see and copy it. Sexism in children’s movies is nothing new (go to you tube and check out some of the videos that have been made on gender roles and classic Disney films).

What are we showing our kids? What are they learning? How will it affect how they act as adults?

Gender stereotypes are alive and well because of influences like these. People keep them alive by perpetuating them in daily life. This cycle will not end until we decide to do something about it. Like I said before, I love movies. I love watching movies with my little brother and sharing that time with him. I still love watching the classic Disney movies even though I can see the flaws in them now. But I am not about to sit back and allow him to see these things without taking the time to remind him what’s wrong about them.

Today, I took my brother to the movies.

I also had to explain to him that girls can be smart regardless of what they look like.

I am perfectly willing to be the one to remind people of that. But I am also sickened by the fact that I still have to.