In Defense of Hit-Girl

Since Kick-Ass was released in theaters, there's been a lot of swirling hubbub about Hit-Girl- her place in cinema, her place in feminism, her place in the film. It's an interesting debate, since the space she's occupying is unique in Western cinema.

There is a wonderful article about the phenomenon of ass-kicking pre-pubescents over at a wonderful blog, The Mystery of Girl's Media, and I'm going to touch slightly on some of that here, but you should give it a read.

One of the comments about Hit-Girl's ease of disposing of other humans is that it seems indicative that she will become a serial killer. I don't think Hit-Girl is going to turn into a serial killer. Especially now that she's going to be acclimated to life as a normal kid and has a supposedly strong father figure, who was her father figure before, who she trusts and loves and who apparently believes in the value and the power of the law (or else he wouldn't have stayed a cop). In the first place, serial killers aren't trained to be serial killers. They are innately serial killers. They're not carefully taught to torture animals and derive sexual gratification from torture and dismemberment. It's readily apparent in most case studies that there is something about a serial killer that is exceptional and usually off from a very early age. At no point are we shown that Hit-Girl has a built-in disdain for human life or a hatred for older men. She has a massive daddy complex, sure, but guess what: So do lots of girls.

She does, however, enjoy violence. But enjoying a bit o'the ol' ultra violence does not a serial killer make, not by default.

What's interesting about Hit-Girl is that she has ZERO sexuality. NONE. Even the winks and nods to male fantasy tropes amount to zero in effectiveness because she doesn't have it, it's not there. The blown kiss, the school girl uniform. She's not cashing in on the lust of the men around her, she's using her own guilelessness to make them uncomfortable or lure them into underestimating her.  The doorman doesn't let her in to screw her, he lets her in so she can use his phone to find her mommy and daddy. They don't want to do her, they want to pat her on the head and give her a cookie, or shoo her away. She doesn't count, until she's stabbing them.

Back to a prior talking point, she enjoys violence, something girls, especially little ones, aren't supposed to do. People are up in arms over a little girl using that language and liking weapons and being violent, but to be honest, I think that's better than the picture she herself painted (over sundaes with her dad at the bowling alley) of an alternate 11-yr old's reality. One where she wants to own and idolizes Bratz dolls, and is taught through Miley Cyrus videos that the best thing to be is sexy and available to boys. A girl is just as likely to become a hooker from playing with Bratz dolls as she is a serial killer from playing violent video games- in fact, the social imperative to bombard girls with images that tell her she is supposed to be hyper sexualized make the former a much more likely prospect than the latter.

Album cover
and Nickelodeon
Broadcast
Performance.













I've been babysitting a girl from age 7 to age 9 and I have tremendous difficulty dealing with that aspect of her world. That said, while, yes, killing people is bad, in the grand scheme of morality, I sorta think it's cooler to be killing violent drug users in your teen years than getting pressured into having sex or doing sexual acts with boys. ...have I mentioned lately that I'm completely well balanced and normal? I am. I swear.

Interesting fact 3: She hasn't been sexually abused. In WESTERN cinema, I would challenge you to find a young girl fighter character, particularly one who ever dons a school girl uniform to kill people, who wasn't either sexually abused or the object of sexual desire for her mentor. Yes, Hit-Girl has been abused, by having her childhood replaced by grueling, painful, dangerous training at the hands of an obsessed father. However, he has real affection for her. They drink hot chocolate with marshmallows. And he isn't sexually interested in her. Leon in the Professional is kind to Mathilda, but wants her, though he is a moral enough person not to act on the desire. Big Daddy does not think of Mindy in those terms, which is a revolutionary aspect to that character outside of, well, Japan, and even Japanese school girl killers are largely fetishized (see: Kite).

The biggest problem with the character is that the film is constructed in a way that has the audience too busy cheering her on for anyone to mourn how tragic she is. There just isn't time, and even if there were, it's all a bit candy colored and kinetic for it. A half a scene with her ex-legal guardian telling Big Daddy something we already know- this isn't a childhood, and Mindy deserves one- doesn't quite do the trick. We're watching a little girl who's been turned into murderer hack'nslash her way across the kind of ordinance Spike Spiegel would have had difficulty with. But I was reveling in the action of it, not heartsick over what she was going through. So it's an interesting push and pull.

Ultimately, Hit-Girl has created a template for future girl fighters- ones that aren't being grabbed, groped, oggled. Ones that don't kill men after they've attempted rape, but just because it's their job, or their opponent is a bad guy.  It may be charged with all kinds of controversy, but the fact that Hit-Girl's character, power, and appeal doesn't revolve around her or anyone else's sexuality is in fact the biggest step a female action hero (or anti-hero, or participant, in the least) has taken in some time.

Stop back in three days, when we talk about why The Losers was fun but Aisha was a wasted opportunity. See full post

Dear Infinity Ward: I Figured Out Where You Went Wrong

Modern Warfare 2, the sequel to the incomparably popular Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, dropped this week. If you know that this happened, I assume you own the game and have played it through at least once. It's a hell of a game. If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen my mini review.

I have just finished Modern Warfare 2. I cannot even cope with how fucking amazing this game is.

Infinity Ward has not only revolutionized gameplay, but has more effectively humanized war than any film I've seen in recent memory.

Fast paced episodic storytelling, an epic and intricate plot, emotional punches you weren't expecting, and examination of the morality of...

...war as well as the psychology of war mongers make this game a step forward even beyond that of COD4.

I love this game. The storyline, gameplay, characters, sound, graphics, voice acting- top to bottom, the game is astounding. It is riveting and exciting. Love it. Infinity Ward deserves their accolades. And then you get to the online play, the thing that made COD4 one of the best selling, most replayed, and least discounted games of ever. They have also improved upon this, now with seemingly endless unlockable titles; emblems; customizable perks; your own accolades at the end of every round; and the ingenious host-forwarding, so when your game goes wonky, it pauses and resumes it for you on a most stable host. Brilliant.

But they eliminated party chat from all small team games.


At first, I was merely disappointed, and only slightly. So, if I wanted to play with friends in regular team deathmatch or domination, we'd have to endure the endless, reedy cries of "I'm gonna rape you, you fag" from the occasional hyper-active twelve year old, or withstand the awful crackly droning from the guy who's playing hip hop way too loudly in the background. I could manage these. You can mute individual microphones, so, fine. No party chat. I don't even use my mic unless I'm playing with pals, anyway.

And then I actually started to play. PATRIOT15, fellow NYU alum and faithful COD buddy, accompanied me into a realm I had not visited for eight months or more- that of the Game Chat. And at first, it was fine. The occasional, "Dude, you know you sound like a girl" which is easily enough replied to with "Actually, I am one," followed by the "Oh, cool", and then that's the end of it. Some then feel to need to make extremely juvenile, mostly-giggled out sexist comments and ask offensive questions, but it peters out fairly quickly.

Until this douche bag rolled on up into our lobby. About two seconds into the game, when I commented to Drew that I loved the 'Companion Crate' id tag, since it's a play on another one of my very favorite games, Portal. It goes unremarked upon. A little later into the game, douchebag (who sounds about 15), makes a comment about shooting a 'n--ger', to which the black guy in the room does not take kindly. Douchey replies he can say whatever the hell he wants. I say "Maybe so, but that's really unnecessary."

Well, forget the blacks, because now he has a vagina to lash out at. He's probably had more contact with black people in whatever whitebread farming community he lives in than he has female genitalia. I know this, because he immediately questions me:

"Are you a dyke? Do you like to lick things?" And persisted with (watered down for our sensitive reading audience): "I bet you're all loose down there. Except you don't take dick so you're probably not," and "Women shouldn't be allowed to vote. [Five second pause] Women shouldn't be allowed to vote. Women shouldn't be allowed to buy Xbox games. Women shouldn't allowed to vote. I'm just saying the truth."

Stupidly, I fired back a few good insults of my own. I say this was stupid because he did not understand any of them. My subtle returns and rebuttals, which are usually highly effective in undermining and shutting up the sophomoric idiots on Xbox Live who can at least appreciate a girl who can talk as much trash as they can, and can sometimes even respect that I am a hell of a lot smarter than them, were wasted on this particular piece of juvenile, misogynistic, rapist-in-training trash. I reported him in the middle of the game for sexual harassment and abusive language- please understand that this went on for a good seven or ten minutes, and I have written only the most bland and vanilla of it here, and that it was non stop, barely a pause for breath, once he realized there was a girl in the room- as did PATRIOT15. I told Patriot, not having realized he was busy doing the same thing I was, that I just "Reported my first complaint! That's so exciting!"

Surly and somber, douchey began proclaiming, "I can make complaints too, dyke. That you're tampering with the game. Cheating dyke." etc, and so on. I encouraged him to do so, seeing as there was absolutely no evidence I had tampered with or cheated during the round, and in fact had been killed twice as many times as I myself had scored since I'd stood still in the middle of an active game like a fish in a barrel while I'd posted my report.

I then muted him, and his guffawing lackey who would snicker and repeat "dyke" like a drunk and mentally challenged parrot, and continued on in the game. But this instance opened my eyes to what is, officially for me, now, a problem.

So now, an open letter.

Dear Infinity Ward:

Please release a patch or fix that will allow users to utilize party chat in all modes of online gameplay, if only for the sake of your female fans. We shelled out the money for the game, we stayed up all night and missed half a day of work playing it, we write and read reviews and buy MW2 caps for our avatars on the XBox Live marketplace.

Out of respect for us, since, sadly, the majority of the people who play your game online have none, give us back party chat so we can enjoy the wonderful evolution of the online play without being told how unwelcome, ugly, stupid, and useless for anything other than degrading sexual acts we are. Please give us back party chat so we can have tactical conversation with the friends we're playing with, without having to hear how we have no right to be there, no right to play; so we don't have to hear, out of the mouths of sexist, bitter virgins who have clocked months worth of their lives in game time that we are socially defunct and sexually wrong, somehow, for playing.

I would really appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Amanda

P.S. To all the gentlemen bloggers who use words like 'cunt' and 'whore' when taking shots at women in business or the media, there is a reason we don't respond well to that and chastise you for it. It's because, frequently, we know you're not limpdick misogynistic trash. But when you resort to those words for female targets, it makes you sound like you are.

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What A Ho

As per usual my "movie review" is going to have some sort of cultural freak out in the middle of it, so buckle up, friends. This won't be long, but let’s jump into some Body talk.

The box office numbers are supporting the haters’ stance that Jennifer’s Body sucks. Now, everyone with the slightest shred of self awareness knows that if they think this without having seen it, they’re judging this movie based on two things: Juno, which is a different movie, and Megan Fox, who has been damned by some of the most exploitative non-porn roles to come down the cinematic pike in recent years, and who has not yet backed up that persona with what the public feels is a requisite amount of talent or humility to make it palatable. If you hate patter, banter or stylized reality, yeah, you probably hate Diablo Cody. If you hate whorish things, the way The Office’s Angela does, you hate Megan Fox. So you, hater, are probably filled with loathing all the way to your creamy center at the mere concept of Jennifer’s Body. And I don’t blame you.

The thing is, Jennifer’s Body is neither Diablo Cody nor Megan Fox. It includes distillations of them that delightfully warp the realities of both, but the movie isn’t about them. It’s about the painfully familiar and horribly toxic Best Friend relationship, something every single woman or girl I have ever met knows intimately, the horror of which is give physical form on screen. This movie, similarly to The Descent, I thought, is a horror movie for girls.



There has been endless bitching about the continued fetishizing of Megan Fox, and in regards to films like Transformers and even How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, I’ve done my totally reasonable, fair share. You have to understand: As a pretty average female, it offends every fiber of my being that Megan Fox exists to set the imaginary bar that much higher and make girls like me, girls like most of us, feel like absolute shit. We’ve got a right to hate, with the fiery passion of a thousand red hot burning suns, this archetype who is literally worth nothing but sex. There are certain quotes I could happily pull from their context that have Megan Fox declaring this to be the case, herself. She’s commodified to within an inch of her life, and as far as Hollywood and the tabloid press are concerned, that price tag is set by her looks and her looks alone.

Exactly like a high school it girl.

So the casting is perfect, to start. Amanda Seyfried is a wonderfully talented comedian. She is adorable but, when not made up and dressed well, when she looks like a normal person and is stood next to Megan Fox who… does not… she fits her role perfectly. People have complained that Seyfried is who they went for as the ‘plain Jane’. But she’s not supposed to be a ‘plain Jane’, she's supposed to be a high school girl. Everyone gets relegated to roles they aren’t in high school. Needy is smart, quirky, and sexual. She has an adorable boyfriend. So people getting pissed at that casting are just projecting. Sorry.

The horror in the film is well done. I almost said excellent, but I‘m trying to be true to the film, which was very good, but not great. However, it‘s my knee jerk reaction to all the vicious hating and, I think, deeply prejudiced reviews of this movie to be more ardent in my support of it. It‘s a movie with faults, it could have been better, but that doesn‘t mean it‘s not good, and it doesn‘t mean it‘s not valuable and important to the genre. It’s violent, it’s bloody, it’s multitudes less graphic and sexualized than what comes out in most slasher movies, and it is largely a slave to the emotional state of the characters involved. Several reviews I’ve read have condemned it for being falsely-feminist, and they’re wrong. I can see why, with the long shot of Jennifer swimming naked through a clear, placid lake, they would snap back and accuse the film of being anti-feminist while purporting to be otherwise. I say again: They’re wrong. There is less sex in Jennifer’s Body than the majority of horror films released in any given year, and what there is is a) mostly verbalized, in which case there’s less sex in Jennifer’s Body than in 90% of all movies released in a given year (at least recently), and b) when it’s shown it’s addressed with humor and taste. Jennifer doesn’t actually have sex in the film. Not once. Needy does, for four minutes, with her boyfriend. Sex plays a role, just not the one typical to the genre.

False feminism is saying a movie has strong women because they’re playing military personnel, and then having those military personnel raped by mutants in California mountains. Hills Have Eyes, I’m looking at you. Again. I really hate you.

io9 made a wonderful point about the lesbian kiss sequence, which is that when threatened, Jennifer relies on the one tool in her possession, her “overpowering sexuality”, which Needy- who is partly in love with Jennifer and partly hates Jennifer and has always, always needed Jennifer, and who has previously had an intimate relationship with Jennifer in their tween fumblings before they entered the world of Having-Physical-Relationships-With-Boys- gives in to for half a minute before freaking out and SPOILER promptly kicking Jennifer out of her room END SPOILER. Again, there is the surface titillation, the almost pre-requisite non-lesbian Girls Kissing moment, but it’s not there for your arousal, it’s there for Needy’s journey and Jennifer’s floundering power-play. More so than any chick flick I have seen, this movie is for girls. Male participation is optional.

Case in point, the necklace moment. A trinket that holds no power other than what it represents to the girls, the act of its removal shocks Jennifer out of her attack, and undoes her. A BFF necklace. They probably got them at Claire’s. When they were ten. But in the world of the film, it is a mystical amulet, as powerful as the knife used in Jennifer’s murder or the words spoken over her before the act. Most of the men I’ve heard talk about the film mention that moment in particular as being cringe-worthy and corny, and most of all bizarre. I have not yet spoken to a girl for whom that scene did not resonate, didn’t hit something deep in them. Even if you never had one of those necklaces, you know what it means, the way you know what BFF can mean. A best friend is frequently not a ‘best friend’. They’re someone you’re tied to, through whatever events, and remain tied to, for whatever reason. When you’re friends with someone long enough, someone you don’t really necessarily like, but who you’ve nonetheless spent that much time with, your relationship becomes about domination and submission; finding, testing and expanding your boundaries; exerting your will and desires over someone else. This all sounds very dark, but it can be as basic as using someone to make you look better at a club (as Needy describes at the beginning of the movie), or using someone as nothing but a sounding board for you to talk about your life, your needs, your self about, completely disregarding and not caring about the other person’s life or what they have to say. Someone to keep around to assert yourself over. Find me a girl who hasn’t been on either end of this, and I’ll show you a robot or an alien.

Jennifer’s Body is a pretty good movie. It’s sure as hell a fun movie. I’m shocked that the possibility of spectacle, given Fox’s almost bipolar media presence, wasn’t enough to draw the MTV crowd and the US Weekly readers. For all the accusations of hyper-hip-speak and grotesque sexuality (which it IS, on PURPOSE, for a REASON- LITERALLY grotesque), the most shameful aspect of Jennifer’s Body so far is the unwillingness of the audience to meet it half way.

If you want to read another really interesting positive, female perspective, head over to ScarletScribe's review.
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I Am Woman, Hear Me OH GOD THEY SEE WITH THEIR EARS RUN! RUUUUUN!!!!

So, I just watched- and pretty much tweeted- The Descent, a horror film released in 2005 that I didn't see because I didn't think it looked interesting. Well, BOY-HOWDY, was I WRONG.


I have a crush on Natalie Jackson Mendoza.

A zillion reviews exist, and apparently, after reading the wiki, the version I just saw (on SciFi) was so badly cut up that I missed a few very important thematic character moments, and that pisses me the eff off, but whatever- so I'll keep this brief. The basic gist is PURE SHEER AWESOME and I will tell you why.


All female cast. It's just as gory as any other recent horror release. It's as plausible. It's intelligently written, the characters are as varied, there are no token characters. It's scary as hell.

But you're not bogged down by the ridiculous, oppressive, nauseating sexual aspect that pretty much every gore flick feels the need to perpetuate. Take a look at the single most successful horror films of recent years: The Saw movies. Almost wholly devoid of sex. I have never been a fan of slasher movies, but I can, do, and always have appreciated good horror. Good horror is extremely rare, these days. The only thing that tends to be horrifying about them is the way they use women, not as characters, but as fetishized objects not just for male characters (who tend to be equally as disposable) but also for whatever mutant creature or murderous fiend is the antagonist of the picture. And to be honest, I'm fucking sick of it.



I will not watch your crappy, hack, uninspired and unoriginal (probably remade) horror-porn. It's bad enough being subjected to your terrible cellophane plot and tired devices. I absolutely will not subject myself to watching your use of rape as a gross-out factor without addressing what it is and what its repercussions are.

I'm looking at you, Hills Have Eyes.

With The Descent, we have a psychological profile of a trauma victim that is explored against a backdrop of sheer, crushing terror and real danger, both from the Creakers and the dark of the Earth. The relationships between women can frequently be complicated- guys that I know don't really understand terms like 'best enemies', or understand how people who are ostensibly friends are actually traversing a continual minefield of mutual resentments and possible outright dislikes, and yet persist in being friends.

It's complicated.

The Descent explores the complexity of female relationships (with the added fun of life or death situations and guilt, gobs of it), the fractured nature of a grief-ravaged mind, and oogie creatures that live in the dark, all compressed together in a riveting, stifling, freaking scary 99 minutes.

That movie was awesome.



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