Categorical Rejection: Feminism and Fury Road

Transcription

1 Categorical Rejection: Feminism and Fury Road Anita Sarkesian is my favourite public intellectual. She is doing the thing that all of us critics of popular culture ought to be doing: she s articulating sophisticated arguments about the media we consume and making them publicly accessible. And she does it despite the horrifying and unceasing barrage of threats she receives. I hungrily consume every one of her videos. I support her cause both implicitly and explicitly. She is who I want to be when I grow up (and yes, she s younger than me). I happen to disagree with her about Mad Max: Fury Road, but it s a fascinating disagreement, and one I d like to share. Here s what she said, recently, about the film:

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3 There is a lot to unpack, here, but I want to start with what I think is the unspoken substrata of what she s asserting, here. Her argument is at least aligned with (and probably derived from, if I m reckoning her sources right) Laura Mulvey s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is the paper that created, or at least popularized, the term male gaze to refer to the way that Hollywood movies are filmed as if through the eyes of men who are leering at women: reducing them to sexualized body parts, for example, or always filming them from a high angle to make them look small or even child-like, or always posing women in the frame to look sexually available and/or off-balance.

4 A short look at how Meagan Fox is filmed in Bay s Transformers gives you a clear idea of the phenomenon. Any time the camera moves up a woman s body so that the viewer can admire it or cuts off parts of the body with the frame in order to focus on a torso, a bust, a rear end, legs, etc., that s the male gaze. Seth McFarlane singing We Saw Your Boobs at the Academy Awards was a celebration of the male gaze. (And if you claim it was satirical, you re going to have to locate the part where it makes fun of the men who looked.) I could go on and on about the male gaze in comics, but that s a whole other thing. There is a lot more to Mulvey s paper than just the male gaze including a whole structure of Lacanian psychoanalytics that, to be frank, I ve never found plausible (when Jacques can explain to me how he knows what babies are thinking, then perhaps I ll give it a second look). But the concept that we can take from it and put in our pockets is that sexism in film isn t just about the plot and the characters. It s about the form, the way that they depict women, specifically their bodies. So Sarkesian s argument is that Fury Road can t possibly be feminist because it s formally still using the male gaze, and even more to the point, that same gaze depicts violence in exactly a similar way: making it look desirable, cool, sexy, awesome. And to be honest, I don t think they re wrong. It may be a movie that condemns violence against women and sexual slavery in particular, but it s not anti-violence. It revels in the violence: the explosions, the gun play, the rusty metal war cars. It merely pits the (pretty clearly) patriarchal violence of Immoten Joe and the Warboys against the (ostensibly) feminist violence of Furiosa and her crew: the Wives, Nux, and Max. What that means, though, is that when Sarkesian says it isn t feminist, what she s really saying is it doesn t conform to the kind of feminism that I ascribe to, but there are lots and lots of kinds of feminism. If you want to really make that argument, in its fullest most convincing form, you ought to articulate what kind of feminism it is you re ejecting the film out of, and why that kind is so good that the statement it s not feminist is justified. But let me be clear, Anita Sarkesian is by no means obligated to justify her statements to me. She s published much more widely than I ever have about exactly what kind of feminism she favours, and with every video and every speech, she is articulating why she ascribes to it. She doesn t happen to have done it for this short Twitter essay because that s the nature of Twitter, and because she doesn t fucking have to, and I m not the arbiter of logic anyway.

5 I do differ with the one argument, though, so that s what I m talking about here. And I differ with it on two levels. First, this is a pattern I ve seen amongst the educated left. Essentially, the argument is that X doesn t go far enough, so it doesn t even qualify as Y. X is any text or statement, and Y is whatever progressive ideology is at work: feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, whatever. Often, this argument is followed by an assertion that X even worse than outright sexism/racism/colonialism because it hides the real problem, or pacifies people with a false solution, or what have you.i m not going to say that this argument is always wrong. It s not. Some attempts at feminism are shamefully counterproductive.i do want to illuminate the faulty thinking, though: X isn t the form of Y that I ascribe to becomes X isn t Y becomes X is shit. I d add, too, that this line of thinking can easily dismiss actual progressive stuff and discourage the people who made it. That said, sometimes people with all the best intentions in the world do need a reality check, and if they re damn lucky, folks who Get It will give them that check in a constructive manner (and I personally have benefited from that kind of luck many times). Good intentions do not turn sexist statements into feminist statements. The other problem I have with Sarkesian s argument, though, is the tendency within the formalist school of thought to dismiss content as immaterial, or at the very least as way less important than the form. It doesn t matter that we are not things is a great line. It doesn t matter that the entire plot happens because of Furiosa s agency. It doesn t matter that she s in charge of Citadel at the end of the film. It doesn t matter that feminine compassion rescues Nux from being a child soldier. It doesn t matter that the kind of domination Joe s exerts is explicitly patriarchal. It certainly doesn t matter that Furiosa is consistently more capable throughout the film: This is the part that actually bugs me, the notion that form is so deterministic that content doesn t matter. I don t know that Sarkesian believes that. She s not exactly saying that here. But I have heard people in academia say it, specifically psychoanalytic theorists and the people from communication, and it s bullshit. It s just as much bullshit as when people in English refer to everything in the universe as a text.

6 Form and content aren t separate things, and more to the point, if we don t pay attention to both of them, we re literally looking at only half the available evidence. And again, to be clear, Sarkesian frequently talks about content in her videos, so this is not an attack on her as a critic. I m merely taking issue with this one argument she s made. Any time I hear a critic say it s not really feminist or it s not really Marxist or whatever, I know that that s not what they re saying. They re actually making a whole different argument than that, and it s sometimes a faulty one. Personally, I think feminism is too important to settle for faulty arguments, but I m also aware that nitpicking feminist speakers is a tool of internet trolls, so I m doing my best to couch my words. I will say that I one response to Sarkesian s tweet, one that I only read because she retweeted it, states her argument (more or less) in terms of the relationship between form and content instead of implicitly dismissing content: This statement makes perfect sense to me (and not just because a dude said it). If form and content contradict each other, if one is feminist and the other is standard Hollywood violence (or Aussploitation violence, in Max s case), then yeah, you ve got a problem, but it s not that they cancel each out. It s that both are present.