What I'm tired of seeing
Q. Why did I turn off the movie "V for Vendetta" after 30 minutes?
1. The main female character (and in the first 30 minutes, the only one with any significant lines) is threatened with a brutal rape in the first ten minutes of the movie. She escapes this fate because she is rescued by a masked white man.
This is not a plot that I want to submit myself to watching. Rape is not a casual shorthand for brutality - it is a tactic of war used against women. I don't want to see it casually onscreen as a minor plot point.
2. Unless I missed one when I blinked, every person in the first 30 minutes of the movie was white. (*OK, turns out that there is a convenient 'ethnic cleansing' plot that explains this....but I am not convinced it was necessary.)
3. The violence was unnecessarily graphic.
Q. Why criticize this movie when it's a remake of a comic book? That comic is the original source of any sexism, racism, or violence in the story; the filmmaker was just bringing that story to the screen.
Well, I probably wouldn't buy the comic either, but more to the point, the stories that we tell shape who we are. If all of the powerful anti-Bush movies (as well as, of course, all of the summer blockbusters and the large majority of American movies in general) are also sexist, racist, and violent, then we are telling ourselves - and especially our children - that only white men:
- have the power to beat Bush
- are interesting enough to build a story around
- have the power to stop rape, and only when it serves their purposes
We are telling our children that women:
- are helpless and dependent
- are instantly rendered terrified and helpless by a threat of rape
- do not fight back
We are telling our children that people of color:
- do not exist
Q. Why do I feel the need to criticize a movie that many progressives support as an anti-tyranny, anti-Bush movie? Shouldn't we be supporting art that supports our cause?
I freely admit to having mixed feelings about this. Yes, I do want to support art that supports the causes that are vital to our survival as a species and to general issues of social justice. But I also feel that in order for social justice to proliferate, I need to remind those with more power than I (like V for Vendetta's male white movie director James McTeigue, and white male writers the Wachowski brothers) that just as it's not cool to invade Iraq, it's also not cool to use rape as a quick way to establish a repressive backstory, or to leave out people of color as if they do not exist.
I am tired of watching women be helpless, brutalized, terrified and useless in movies, whether those movies depict the Hulk or the "War on Terror". I am tired of white men getting all of the good lines and all of the good roles. I won't give those directors my money because my power clearly doesn't matter to them.
When I make my hundred million dollars, my movie production company will tell the stories that I feel need telling: of strong women, multicultural societies, people who fight to end racism, etc. The stories we tell shape who we are.