Safe Superheroines

While I think that scholar Grant Schreve has the kernel of a good idea in his op-ed at the Washington Post, comparing today’s movie blockbusters (Wonder Woman and The Last Jedi, among the few of Hollywood’s big releases to make money this year) to Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

They gratify audiences by mirroring their own beliefs back to them — depicting white women as heroic paragons of virtue crusading for righteous causes — which, in turn, licenses viewers to avoid having either to acknowledge the far more complicated role white women are playing in our politics or to consider what other forms of racialized womanhood these heroines are occluding. So, while these films may trade on a widespread desire for transformative change, they are also replaying cultural scripts that our recent history already seems on the verge of exhausting and, in the process, foreclosing more visionary — and truly transformative — artistic and political possibilities.

This isn’t the first time in the history of American popular culture that a work of art whose white heroine was tasked with saving not only the men who surround her but also an entire social order met an unprecedented consumer demand and, as a result, had its political afterlife severely compromised.

Indeed, this cultural construct can be traced back at least a century and a half, when the U.S. public worshiped at the altar of another fictional white girl from a work even more divisive than “The Last Jedi” is proving to be.

there are some significant differences, too. First, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the product of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s creativity and imagination alone. Important as a director might be, today’s big budget motion pictures are designed and created by committees. They are assiduously focus-grouped and tested prior to release. And second, although Uncle Tom’s Cabin attracted an enormous international audience, I seriously doubt that was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s intended market. Not so with today’s big budget extravaganzas. To succeed today half or more of a blockbuster’s box office must come from international audiences.

I think that Dr. Schreve has the causality reversed. As young, attractive white women, Diana Prince and Rey are safe. Their charm isn’t that they mirror audiences’ beliefs back to them. They’re insurance. They defuse to some degree potential activists in the U. S. because they’re women without driving away their target markets, both foreign and domestic. Oddly enough, there are lots of people especially men who find young women of extraordinary beauty attractive.

There is a reason that Wonder Woman wasn’t portrayed as a fat, black Lesbian other than fidelity to the Golden Age comic. Such a portrayal would have limited appeal in the United States and practically none at all outside the United States. Precious’s box office was $63.6 million. Wonder Woman’s box office has been $821.9 million. Kareena Kapoor’s performances have probably been seen and enjoyed by more eyeballs than any other actress in the world and she is beautiful, shapely, and quite fair complected.

There is a fact that Bollywood understands that Hollywood needs to relearn. Worldwide people like watching beautiful young men and women singing, dancing, falling in love, and having exciting adventures where everything turns out all right in the end. Those may not be the movies that Hollywood producers and directors want to make but they’re the pictures that audiences worldwide want to see.