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sean10mm posted:If Khan having a space ship 300 years before the events of the movie is confusing, keep in mind that it was basically just a cargo container loaded with human popsicles. It had no warp drive, and no real capability to do much of anything but drift along and keep the cryo tubes running. I don't even get the need to retcon. The obvious point of deviation between Star Trek and reality is the existence of Star Trek as a cultural phenomenon, beginning in 1966.
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May 28, 2013 21:43
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Everything that isn't exposition is a plot hole!
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May 28, 2013 22:01
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What is lazy writing. What is energetic writing.
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May 29, 2013 01:50
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Na'at posted:Except that everyone meeting in that room who got shot up were captains of, ya know star ships. So where the hell did all their ships go? Space. The ships are in space.
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May 29, 2013 02:59
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The point of the Tribble scene(s) is to jokingly compare Kirk to the lowliest piece-of-poo poo creature in the universe.
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May 29, 2013 22:09
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Alchenar posted:A knife is a knife, no matter how much you protest that it's a spoon. They tell you outright that it is a peacekeeping force, similar (but obviously not directly analogous to) the UN. Given some characters' strong objection to militarization, they're probably much more focussed on snalker-scale law enforcement. More progressive characters, like Scotty, are opposed to even that aspect (though note that he does eventually kill a Blackwater merc - that's character development). Into Darkness is very much concerned about what it means to be a peacekeeping force, and whether that's even possible without becoming an oxymoron. As gone over before, the Federation's humanitarianism is criticized pretty strongly here. Of course, the Federation does not actually exist. It, in this film at least, is simply a broad metaphor for the 'Western world' as we understand it today.
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May 31, 2013 05:16
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Great_Gerbil posted:It doesn't even make sense to have a standing force guarding Earth. If you have a force there, you have to have one over Vulcan (and maybe there used to be one), over Betazed, over Andor... Well, you get the picture. I've never run out of resources in my videogames. That's why my house is designed to be fortified with automated M134 emplacements, and hired marksmen will be on rotation to keep out the thugs. That's the point, after all: to win, and to win by beating. When I watch Star Trek, the characters lose - and the whole movie loses. I'm just beating the entire time, and I win.
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Jun 1, 2013 02:53
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What is Star Trek? What is Star Trek 'about'?
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Jun 3, 2013 07:30
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People are getting way too caught up in the big shyamalan plot reveal mystery Lost twist(!!!), when the emphasis Cumberbatch places on his name in that line is an expression of that character's defiance. In one of the few places where the film doesn't over-rely on exposition, Khan is obviously altered to be white (In 'canonical' plot terms, he had to have had future Face/Off plastic surgery. He's also literally been assigned a false, Anglo-Saxon slave name - and you can get meta with the obvious real-life recasting). All of this is fairly clear without additional reams of exposition. Cumberbatch is a white dude playing a latino dude in brownface wearing whiteface. The cumulative effect is, as I've gone over earlier, to complicate notions of race while underlining the importance of class - because the character's class is indisputable. This is less Birth Of A Nation, and way more The Jazz Singer. It's like how King Kong remake opens with an Al Jolson song, and features Andy Serkis under ape makeup in a story of how poverty and destitution can turn anyone into a criminal - including lilly-white Ann Darrow. "But SMG, what if this wasn't intentional?" If it's intentional, then good. If it's unintentional, then I'm appropriating it. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jun 5, 2013 |
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Jun 5, 2013 01:59
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Batham posted:Where the hell were all you guys complaining about white-washing when Idris Elba played Heimdall? Seriously, I give no single poo poo what skin color the actor has, as long as he can perform the roll. The question isn't whether this racially-charged imagery exists, but how you respond to it. By going 'how come there isn't a white history month?', you have chosen... poorly.
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Jun 6, 2013 06:11
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This is so thoroughly abstracted from the film's actual and specific treatment of race that it's
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Jun 6, 2013 18:54
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The Warszawa posted:Only not really, because trying to abstract away the film's real world treatment of race (by participating in and arguably furthering the marginalization of people of color) in favor of exclusively considering its "textual" treatment of race is silly. That would be silly, which is why I've taken broader contexts into account - like how the film opens with an Indiana Jones homage featuring a bunch of white-skinned aboriginal people. An alien dude in whiteface is practically the first thing you see! Is it paint, or is it his skin? And does it matter? Note how the plants are red, and you can see the indirect homage to Let This Be Your Last Battlefield. Color is arbitrary - but there is an obvious power dynamic in how this group and the Enterprise crew interact. You are attacking systemic racism when the filmmakers are obviously not trying and failing to be 'race-neutral.' This imagery is overt and confrontational. In same the same way that Ridley Scott insists Deckard is a replicant while Harrison Ford insists he's not, Into Darkness goes meta with creator and creation. Abrams publicly asserted that John Harrison is an all-new character whose race doesn't matter, but the character then defiantly announces, almost directly to the audience: "that's not my name. My name is Khan." Remember that this is a self-conscious reboot that is not only critical of Star Trek before 2009, but of the 2009 film as well. The superficial multiculturalism of previous entires is directly under fire, showing the liberal Star Trek crew eager to nuke a civilian population in the Space Mideast. "Huh, that's weird. This area is supposed to uninhibited. It must be a random patrol." As a sign of the film's respect for its audience, it's never spelt out that the Space CIA gave them bad intel out of incompetence or malice. It's never outright admitted that Kirk, gullibly, almost killed untold thousands of innocents. The audience is fooled too. Several fans earlier in the thread noted that the area was populated in the TV show, so the canon must have been changed. Folks totally missed that they were being lied to, because decades of technobabble have primed them to accept this exposition uncritically. The film also trusts you to understand that, while Pike is the better father figure for Kirk, he is not himself a great guy. Pike's admonishment that Kirk is 'playing God' contains the implicit message that the higher-ranked officers are not playing God - that they are God. This is directly tied to Pike's open and troubling disdain for 'primitives who have barely even invented the wheel.' And Pike's the good guy, representing the Federation at its best! Star Trek 2009 was a very Old-Testament film, in which the space-Jew vulcans suffer hardship and then dispense godly wrath. Into Darkness moves beyond that, into the New Testament. If Into Darkness doesn't have the same passionate authorial voice, it may be because Abrams is a Jewish director making a christological film. The creation conflicts with the creator, and both Pike and Marcus are killed. It's a pretty good movie. What your criticism misses is the point of Khan being a part of the Federation in this one. He's not just part of it but beneath it, deep inside it. So of course he's a placid white face with some uncanny and 'inhuman' otherness repressed within.
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Jun 7, 2013 02:15
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Nessus posted:I don't think you could describe the 'liberal Star Trek crew' as being eager to nuke Klingons. That's all accurate, but I'm talking about their willingness to rely on this questionable/shoddy/false intel in the first place. I'm also referring to how, despite eventually going for a diplomatic solution, the characters never realize that it wasn't 'just a random patrol'. They do their best to resolve the conflict, but (due to their trust in Starfleet) they're never fully aware of what is at stake. What makes this story interesting is that the characters all have the best intentions at heart, and still fall into these traps because of flaws in their ideology. Kirk aspires to be like Pike, but Pike himself is an inadequate role model.
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Jun 7, 2013 02:57
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"...it has become clear that ethnic studies paradigms have become entrapped within — and sometimes indistinguishable from — the discourse and mandate of liberal multiculturalism, which often relies on a politics of identity representation that is diluted and domesticated by nation-building and capitalist imperatives. In addition, in our post-affirmative action and so-called “post-racial” society, an ethnic studies narrowly confined [to] identitarianism fails to speak to the emergence of a multicultural white supremacy and settler colonialism. People of color become ethnographically entrapped within academic discourse. As Rey Chow contends, ethnic studies scholars are often entrapped within the role of becoming self-confessing subjects who display their ethnicity in the service of multicultural representation. Our assigned intellectual task is what Denise da Silva describes as a “neoliberal multicultural” representation that “includes never-before-heard languages that speak of never-before-heard things that actualize a never-before-known consciousness.” Thus, it is often the case that gender and ethnic studies scholars who do not challenge logics of current disciplinary formations or their assigned role to display their “difference” actually prosper in the academy. Their success is then used as an alibi to attack scholars who do refuse their position of ethnographic entrapment. Furthermore, ethnic and gender studies is never positioned as a field of thought that can fundamentally question or reshape larger academic discourses. By shifting the focus and expanding the scope of inquiry of ethnic studies from multiculturalism representation to the analytics of power and domination, ethnic/gender studies would become situated as an expansive field that addresses how the logics of domination structure the world for everyone, not just those who are racialized or gendered in particular ways." -Andrea Smith, "Multicultural White Supremacy and Heteropatriachy: Fostering Insurgent Scholarship In the Academy", my bolding.
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Jun 7, 2013 17:40
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A Steampunk Gent posted:Most people are going to simply conclude it was a profit-led piece of Hollywood casting to maximise ticket sales at the expense of minority representation, and from their level of analysis that is a good place to leave it. If this JJ Abrams Star trek film is too academic for general audiences, then the battle is already lost.
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Jun 7, 2013 20:21
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The Warszawa posted:The point s/he was making is that it's more like you're trying to talk about the complex interplay of historical circumstances and the academic theory of social stigma and the etymology and how it applies to hate speech and other people are really more concerned with how hate speech is used against them and their communities. Both are valid enterprises that reflect different priorities. Yes, and the latter issue is symptomatic of the former. This is something that the film addresses directly in its not-very-subtle criticism of liberal ideology (which I've gone over in my analysis of it).
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Jun 8, 2013 03:39
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The Warszawa posted:No, not really. They're both ways of looking at the same phenomenon - one is concerned with explaining it and the other is concerned with stopping it. They can feed into each other, but accomplishing the former doesn't accomplish the latter. I don't agree with what I'm reading you to be saying, which is that we (either we society or we, specifically me and other people of color) should be more concerned with theoretical explanations (or, worse, to embrace manifestations of the problem as "criticism" of the problem) than in actually eliminating the problem. Quite the opposite. Let's say Benicio Del Toro is cast, as was originally planned. The only immediate effect is that world-famous celebrity Benicio Del Toro is now a couple million dollars richer. Now, you're not inaccurate to say that this would generate visibility, 'put a foot in the door' and subtly increase the likelihood of Latino actors being cast in other films, etc. etc. You might recall that I've been down with that from the beginning, though I find this alternate casting fascinating for its metatextual implications. Multiculturalism is not in-itself bad. But as has been pointed out, this multiculturalism does not in any way restructure or change the functioning of, say, Gulf+Western's Paramount Pictures A Viacom Company. They can even now point to the multiculturalism as proof that 'the system works', which is a logic that culminates in black president Obama ordering drone strikes on Pakistan. (Maybe the solution is to hire a Pakistani actor to appear in the next Star Wars?) I actually find it rather surprising that an avowed anti-racist, quoting MLK, would dismiss economic and class warfare as 'theorhetical' compared to the 'actual' issue of (effectively) seeing more nonwhite baristas in Starbucks. And it cant be reiterated enough that the head of Starfleet in this series is Tyler motherfucking Perry, and that this very Tyler Perry is now at least tacitly approving the Space Drone strikes against Space Pakistan. Like hell he doesn't know about it, and like hell this whole specific criticism that forms the core of the film was accidental. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Jun 8, 2013 |
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Jun 8, 2013 18:49
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The Warszawa posted:I guess my concern with your emphasis is not on the economic justice aspect but on your fascination with metatextual implications to te extent that they excuse exclusion. I think we're in fundamental agreement that both halves are necessary, but I don't believe that just one half means we should stop agitating for the other. Well, that brings things back to the earlier point that racism is just a mask for class conflict. So what I'm talking about is simply a more focussed and effective approach. Also more effective: rather than lay judgment upon JJ Abrams, Paramount, the casting director or whoever, my approach leaves the film 'as it is' and attacks the ideological baggage an audience may bring to it. This denies the usual "Michael Bay/George Lucas/Damon Lindelof/X raped my childhood" bellyaching that creates a convenient 'out' from genuine introspection and obfuscates systemic issues by targeting convenient individual scapegoats. It also changes the conversation from "the film is racist and you're probably racist for liking the film" to "here's how the film can be better understood, and appropriated towards the cause of antiracism if you so choose." Into Darkness is, however effectively, a film that criticizes the racist ideology underlying both this star trek and Star Trek itself. And, however questionable it may be to make an anti-corporate film for Viacom, the film incorporates its own production in a truth-to-materials way (addressing the debate over the course of the series, the nuances of the casting process, and even the inherent contradiction of this 'post-capitalist' utopian vision being presented by a massive conglomerate). I think your approach is a baby-bathwater thing, when there are multiple babies in play. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Jun 9, 2013 |
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Jun 9, 2013 04:44
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Arglebargle III posted:Should I bother to go see the film in theaters? Movie tickets are kind of expensive. For reference, I probably would have payed to see Trek 2009 once, but only just. Now I hear this is a kind of breathless, brainless, half-baked remake of Wrath of Khan that tries to jam in Klingons and races from setpiece to setpiece and then Kirk dies and comes back to life... I used to be a huge Trek fan but based on that description I'm not even sold on the price of one ticket. Should I go check it out or just make a note to rewatch Star Trek II sometime this year? Watch After Earth.
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Jun 9, 2013 20:03
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gohmak posted:Why? have you done a reading on that? I'd read the hell out of that. nelson posted:Can we have a Star Trek with exploration of new worlds, life and civilizations?
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Jun 11, 2013 05:16
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It's really interesting that this is being focussed on to the exclusion of all other aspects of the film!!! Like a dartboard grid with two axes (white/no, good/bad), and everyone gets a toss.
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Jun 12, 2013 01:08
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Khan is an explicitly satanic character who, in his original incarnation, was a sort of ridiculously exoticized oriental caricature designed to be opposite of Star Trek's 'western in space'. He's directly analogous to Iron Man's 'Mandarin'. Now, folks who've seen Iron Man 3 know the twist that the Mandarin isn't real - a British actor hired by a corporation to frighten people. Into Darkness demands to be read as an inversion of this, because it takes the braver stance that Bin Laden is real, and not a conspiracy or hoax by a handful of bad people. But, at the same time, Bin Laden's evil is not due to some 'clash of civilizations' with some inscrutable eastern threat, but a product of the very same logic of domination that motivates those who would hunt him down - only more purely and unabashedly totalitarian. This is the link to Kurtzman and Orci's Transformers films. Khan is the open, unapologetic Megatron to starfleet's two-faced, shameful Optimus Prime. References to Blade Runner, as you'd expect from the writer of Prometheus, make this pretty explicit. Khan in this film recalls the message of Rick Deckard - and The Thing's MacReady. The line between them and the monstrous clones is impossibly blurred. Khan isn't revealed to be white - the white character is revealed to be Khan. Big difference. Remember that this is a science fiction film about a posthuman character who has been modified from birth and may as well continue to be - evidently has been. The point, to reiterate, is to complicate and destabilize notions of whiteness (and masculinity, heterosexuality, etc.), putting renewed emphasis on class. Khan, the name, persists after the character's body has been entirely altered.
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Jun 13, 2013 05:49
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How is racism (and sexism, etc.) not about class?
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Jun 13, 2013 05:57
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The Warszawa posted:Because those oppressions operate independently of class - and across classes. They may have economic consequences, and racism of course interacts with and impedes class solidarity, but reducing it to "it's just a mask for class" either overbroadens class (which I don't think you're doing) or grossly misunderstands how racism (and sexism etc.) actually operate. My approach does not presume equivalence, and I think you have it flipped in saying that racism has economic consequences. Racism began as a justification for slavery and has been used as an essentialist explanation/justification for social hierarchies since. Racism does affect people in pretty much any income bracket, but when I talk about class I am not referring simply to income.
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Jun 13, 2013 08:53
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The Warszawa posted:It's been a while since I studied Marxist theory (and when I did, I clearly focused on orthodox Marxism, so I don't expect I'm perfectly representing either you or Danger here), but I don't think its particularly equipped to deal with racial struggle alongside class struggle - and in fact often rejects (as you seem to) that racial justice is actually a thing in its own right, as opposed to either something that, insofar as it's worth solving, will be solved by class justice or, less generously, a distraction from "real issues." Obviously class is not simply income (nor did I ever say it was), but racism is not purely economic, unless you're arguing that how someone relates to the means of production, etc., is trumped by racial subjugation for class purposes, which is interesting and more in line with what I think, but certainly isn't orthodox. The point is that by shunting race, gender, etc. to the side and - in your words - putting the emphasis on class, you're delineating them as separate and prioritizing one over the other, which leaves people of color twisting in the wind when what is needed is direct confrontation of racism itself, not just white confrontation of liberal ideology in a white context (which is what we have here). This is the kicker: even if racism is just one manifestation of class, it is a manifestation that must be tackled directly and independently of "traditional" class struggle, and asking people of color to line up behind the latter while dismissing the former (by discarding color - both metatextually, as you've articulated as a "more effective and efficient way" of dealing with class, and literally, by excluding them from the process of the critique) is unconscionable. I think there's some confusion here, because Danger's and my position is not exclusionary but inclusionary. Although we're critical of Tim Wise and multiculturalism and whatnot, we are not putting antiracism to the side to focus on something else - and it's certainly not 'discarding color.' Rather, we're going right to the root cause of racism, and promoting solidarity along class lines as a specifically antiracist tactic. The film we're talking about doesn't even 'discard color', since it links the treatment of Khan to how Starfleet treats other races and how Kirk treats women. The film opens with colonialist imagery that the film then returns to in a critical way. The science fiction is that film begins with the magical premise of a 'postracial' utopia where multiculturalism had been fully embraced - and then addresses the racism and other inequalities that persist because of flaws in that ideology.
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Jun 14, 2013 01:24
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I incorporate these things into my reading of the film as commentary/satire, because of course Starfleet is 'actually' dominated by white dudes. Even good-guy Pike is highly questionable. My points of comparison have been films like Starship Troopers and the Michael Bay Transformers for a reason. Example: Sulu's brief role as captain involves unintentionally (and ineffectually) threatening to commit an act of war by illegally bombing Space Pakistan. He's been duped, and his rote 'badass' moment is thoroughly undercut as a result. This is deliberate; the film makes a point of how people constantly change roles and 'anyone can be captain,' but the captain - Sulu - is always a patsy for Marcus. In a film that's basically about the current state of Hollywood, through criticism of one of its holy cow 'progressive' series, this is all extremely accurate. The film lays its cards on the table, with this obviously troubling imagery that demands analysis. I don't even think it's a particularly great film, but this accuracy is important, as it's what sets this apart from your Iron Mans and whatever.
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Jun 14, 2013 04:57
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Alchenar posted:Because his very inclusion in the film is part of a long list of callbacks to old trek that continually miss the notes of why the things they are calling back to are meaningful and fits into the pattern. This is the same odd complaint that Watchmen the film is simultaneously identical to and totally different from the untouched original, which misunderstands that the film is about adapting a story from one medium to another. This Star Trek film is about remaking. The error is in reversing form and content, so that you believe everything is the same but Khan is wrong. In actuality, Khan (the concept) is largely unaltered but the perspective towards him has changed completely. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Jun 18, 2013 |
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Jun 18, 2013 21:34
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Timby posted:Yeah, Into Darkness absolutely tries to leverage achievements that it hasn't earned yet. The reason that Spock's death is so emotional in The Wrath of Khan is because these guys went on a five-year mission together, potentially another five-year-mission after the first movie, and the audience has been watching these characters for almost two decades. That friendship fire has been built, stoked and nurtured in the audience's mind by that point. The filmmakers didn't forget that their main characters aren't 50 years old. You're writing a fanfiction and attributing it to JJ Abrams' soul. The dysfunctional friendship in Star Wars is likewise 'deliberate'.
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Jun 19, 2013 01:21
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People are focussing on the sheer fact of there being a woman in underwear, when there's nothing erotic to the scene whatsoever. She's just kind of standing there, stern and mildly annoyed. Her underpants are less revealing than a bikini and she's not embarrassed or offended. It's like 'what were you expecting?' She's very frank about it. It's not sexualized.
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Jun 25, 2013 05:14
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Supercar Gautier posted:"This scene wasn't hot enough to be stupid." The scene has in obvious purpose, in that Kirk is pushed to stop objectifying women. People have a weird thing where they consider all nudity inherently sexual, when that's not what's going on in the scene. It's along the same lines as Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen.
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Jun 25, 2013 05:20
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Space Hamlet posted:Using female characters to develop male characters without really bothering to develop the female character is gross. It's grosser when she doesn't even behave believably in order to make it happen. It's grossest when her contrived behavior is such that it gratuitously lets us scope out her bod. (Of course it was gratuitous. She gets naked for no discernible reason.) She behaves believably. Marcus is totally aware of Kirk's reputation, and finds him pathetic and not worthy of her time. She gets naked anyways because she wants to. It's her body and she's not covering up out of modesty or shame. She's not covering up at all (this is crucial). Kirk turns around and she doesn't care, but she still rejects his advances because she simply doesn't like him. Covering this up with a plot explanation for why women change clothes sometimes would render the scene gratuitous by obfuscating the actual content (Marcus' attack on Kirk's sexism), to make it about dilithium crystals or something (see the ridiculously skeevy decontamination scenes in Enterprise). The irony is that Eve does a fantastic job acting out the callous "yes, I have breasts. gently caress off." That is the characterization, but folks are overlooking that personality because they can see her bra. That's your fault - not the movie's, the character's, or Eve's fault.
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Jun 25, 2013 13:25
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Supercar Gautier posted:And yet we've got DFu4Ever talking about how the scene enables the audience to appreciate beauty, and how titillation is like adding spice to food- so I'm going to guess the scene didn't cause him to feel "deeply anxious". If you've just found out that people on the internet can ruin something by sexualizing it inappropriately, then I have some very bad news for you! The problem is with these folks and not with the woman's body. Their interpretation of the scene is wrong.
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Jun 26, 2013 01:43
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Ferrinus posted:I think you're exactly right about this. The scene makes an ostensible effort to be above pointless cheesecake and male gaze and so on, but oops! Not quite there! A Whedon character would never appear in a bra. Instead, she would wear a 'functional' short-sleeved jacket over a tight tank top and tight leather pants. She would also pretend to be down with Kirk's advances before revealing herself to be a kung fu werewolf/kung fu robot/kung fu alien, because [boilerplate menstruation symbolism]. She would then hurt him physically, though not so much that he is actually injured. The Marcus character cuts through the bullshit. Here is a woman's breast. How do you react? Some react poorly, but that was obviously anticipated.
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Jun 26, 2013 09:21
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Ferrinus posted:Also, gently caress's sake. Toothpaste also exists - even in space !! - but we don't follow the characters as they see to their morning and nightly hygiene. ...but we would see that if hygiene were a theme in the film. The movie Hannah, recently, had a prominent tooth-brushing sequence. With Into Darkness, the focus is on the racist and sexist attitudes that persist in spite of the series' superficial utopianism, because the history of all hitherto existing Star Trek is the history of class struggles. It makes perfect sense to tackle this subject head-on by showing a breast and asking what the audience represents.
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Jun 26, 2013 18:57
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Manet's Olympia doesn't even wear a bra. How scandalous!
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Jun 26, 2013 20:02
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There's a spaceship's wall in the background of the Alice Eve meganude porn shot, straight lines emphasizing that she is not an object and cannot be understood that way.
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Jun 26, 2013 20:08
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Ferrinus posted:Oh, come on. Kirk already bedded two scantily-clad women earlier in the film, and nobody cared. This second, contrasting scene is presented very differently and makes many people very uncomfortable because the woman is nearly breaking the fourth wall and saying "I know you're looking, and I reject you." This is very similar to the Manet painting which also depicts a woman's breast and is controversial because the woman is breaking the fourth wall and saying "I know you're looking and I reject you."
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Jun 26, 2013 20:56
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I gotta say though that I love the overall argument that the woman must cover up because patriarchical institutions already control her body and male audiences can't control themselves. Your body is always-already sexualized and commodified, so the game is over. Sorry, ladies.
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Jun 26, 2013 21:10
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Ferrinus posted:Yes, that's definitely what's going on here - I'm not criticizing a scene in a movie, I'm criticizing women. How dare they, those women! Pretty much, yes. Your posts have focussed exclusively on there being a breast onscreen. You've not written anything about the actress' pose, the dynamic of the gaze, how this scene fits into the context of the film, the editing or cinematography (outside the fact that her breast is visible onscreen, and not cropped out or obscured behind a pottery). Admittedly, you did drop an offhand reference to 'the male gaze', but without elaboration, when the character straight-up says 'stop gazing at me' in a calm, rational demand for respect from a man. Everything about her pose conveys 'I'm a person." And this needs to be read in context with Khan the 'inhuman' other who likewise demands respect. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jun 26, 2013 |
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Jun 26, 2013 21:47
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Ferrinus posted:All right, here's my idea - we'll point the camera at a scantily-dressed woman, but the woman's going to be, like, totally annoyed about it. This is my overall point. You seem to have conflated male gaze (which describes a specific type of power relationship) with literally any time a man looks at a woman - and therefore, effectively, any time a woman appears onscreen at all. So, in this case, a male director and a female actor work in tandem to obviously subvert the male gaze by calling attention to it and making her character a subject with agency - but this doesn't count because the director actually had power over her all along and she forgot that audiences are too dumb to stop masturbating long enough to hear her voice. Her character is and can only be just an irrelevant annoyed face attached to a breast. So again, the game is over. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jun 26, 2013 |
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Jun 26, 2013 22:21
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