Yesterday evening my wife and I watched Moana, streaming on Netflix. After watching it my wife asked me what I thought of it. I said I thought it was an astonishing technical achievement and very affecting but I had reservations about the portrayals of men. Without exception every male was portrayed as timorous, pompous, a buffoon, an idiot, or all four while every female was portrayed as courageous or at worst misunderstood.
I have no problem with the occasional male villain but I do with the systematic demeaning of men. If that’s Disney’s marketing plan, I think they should rethink it. For one thing timorous, pompous, buffoonish, or idiotic men will do women no good.
I didn’t have a problem with the male characters, particularly since I thought Maui was the funner character. The ending seemed like it was stolen from a Miyazaki movie and it’s always interesting to watch Disney respond to diversity critics in ways that gets criticized for cultural appropriation.
Ok, ok, you’re halfway to a thought. Can you think of any movies that are similar, except gender swapped? What if, hypothetically speaking, 70-80% of movies treated men as objects to be won, cajoled, or moved around the plot in the service of the women’s character arcs?
Also, you are missing an important male character: the tattoo.
I thought the movie was a lot of fun, and didn’t really care too much about the gender issues. Not all stories have to be about men.
The whole thing is based around an actual (and much grimmer) Polynesian legend. It’s been a long time since I’ve read it.
I agree with that. However, the analogy is if all of the female characters were portrayed as brainless bimbos. There’s a middle ground. I don’t believe that in order to build women up you’ve got to tear men down.
I haven’t seen Moana yet.
However, on New Years Eve we watched “The Man with Golden Gun” – the Roger Moore James Bond movie. Wow was it painful. The Moore era was never really good but it was also a “male” movie in all the bad ways.
I agree there’s a middle ground. I think female characters can be full of thoughts and damaged as much as male characters can.
One of the criticisms I have of the new Star Wars movies is that Rey is without fault. As a consequence, her character isn’t that interesting, particularly compared to Kylo Ren. His inner turmoil is one of the few interesting things about the new trilogy.
I should clarify my last point about diversity/ appropriation didn’t have anything to do with Dave’s comment. It was about articles like this that explain to parents how to use your daughter’s desire to dress-up as Moana for Halloween as an opportunity to gently shame her about her race and redirect her towards the appropriate princess for her race and ethnicity:
http://www.redbookmag.com/life/mom-kids/news/a52626/moana-halloween-costume-racist/
@andy, your critique of Rey is one that might be applied to the heroine in Moana. These are both “heroes journey” type of films. I wonder if heroes in this type of move will tend to be less interesting because we don’t expect them to fail, and if they fail in some way, its usually a mistake that makes them better to handle the challenges ahead. Along the journey, the hero will meet interesting people.
(I would argue Rey makes serious mistakes in the last movie, similar to ones Luke made, but I don’t want to get too far into it since not everyone has seen it yet.)
Eric Auerbach writes somewhere that it was the Old Testament which created a type of interiority unknown to the Greeks. I think that one of the reasons comic books/Star Wars have become ‘serious’ is that they work like Greek myths. Orestes, for example, has no interiority. He faces an impossible situation–avenge his father by murdering his mother, but it’s not psychological or faith-based, whereas what God tells Abraham to do is. It’s pretty much similar to the darkest comic books: heroes or anti-heroes brood but they are not Job or Stavrogin.
I read the James Bond novels pretty much as they were published. I stopped watching the Bond movies a couple of decades ago. I found them too painful to watch.
MM:
Filial piety is “faith-based”. It is not natural although love for one’s offspring is. It’s a glandular response.
His point was that the depiction of Orestes in myth was not about faith or psychology–it’s about the cursed logic of his role. Whereas Abraham is presented almost as if he could be anybody, which is why so much of the Bible seems applicable to our lives, even though God is not going around telling us to sacrifice our first born.
Overall, I think that comic books, and Star Wars-style adventures are very inadequate for touching on modern reality. I love Tristan, and can tolerate some other Wagner, but much of Star Wars is basically the Ring minus any of the chromatic innovation and sexual desire and perversion (Luke and Leia only kiss once, for example).
But if you subtract out Wagner’s music and its repetitions and leitmotivs you have a very sterile and ludicrous story. And we all know who loved Wagner, or pretended to love him…I think they actually really liked Carl Orff, who Wagner would have considered worse than Puccini.
God might. IMO that’s one of the main points of the story.
Also, that’s why so many Americans describe themselves as “spiritual” but not religious. The difference is that amorphous spirituality makes no demands of you but religion does.
I think it’s because organized religion, especially in the fundamentalist world, seems detached from life. The idea that one can be led out of sin and into light speaks to people because most of us can imagine falling completely apart.
But living with someone you love and are faithful to, and engaging in premarital sex might just be breaking a rule. Being gay might just be breaking a rule. And they may not be like, psychologically, sleeping with someone you despise every night and then waking the next morning in self-disgust.
Outside of blaming the sexual revolution and invoking damnation, what answer do religious rules have to this? It’s like calling a meaningful spiritual existence the same as empty hedonism.
I suggest that you read Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain. That would provide a start to answering your questions. Then Orthodoxy.
I was asking rhetorically. I’ve read Lewis before. I can’t imagine there being that many people who would disagree on a basic level that there’s a universal code to good and bad, and that, regardless of how one really lives, love for others and telling the truth bring joy and happiness.
But I don’t believe that most of the same people alive now think that chastity exactly fits with love and truth. It’s like arguing that one is being selfish and against love and joy for only having two children rather than twelve. It’s a nutty way for religion to try to claim its lost power, one that’s peculiarly inhumane. Sex simply does not fit with the rest of what is universally obvious about good and evil. If you lose a child at four, you might deny God or you might be consoled by God’s hand, however terrible, in the world. But one can’t expect a gay person to be consoled by chastity and a lack of natural intimacy in the same way.