Marvel mania or bust
Our movie choices shouldn’t make or break inclusivity The rallying cry to buy tickets so more movies about female superheroes are made is music to the bottom line.
Hesitating to go see Captain Marvel? Then you must be a bad feminist. Even before Captain Marvel, with its female superhero in the title role, opened this week, a lot of people already knew what they thought about it and were happy to share.
One side calls the movie’s star Brie Larson “man-hating” and “sexist”, and the other attacks those who may not want to see the movie and dismisses mixed reviews of female critics. There’s a push by Captain Marvel fans to support it as a way to lift women and combat trolls. On IMDB, the film’s user rating shows votes of 10s and 1s, and very few in between.
A small but rowdy bunch of mostly male comic-book fans spawned this latest case of toxic fan culture. Using Gamergate-style harassment techniques they honed with co-ordinated attacks on fans and stars of diversifying franchises like Ghostbusters and
Star Wars, they turned their attention to Captain Marvel, voting it down or leaving negative comments on platforms like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB.
Captain Marvel defenders have made the movie a cause celebre. The party line is that by supporting it, you are inherently supporting women and diversity in the entertainment industry; if you don’t buy your ticket, you’re hurting the cause. The charged situation has left little room for dissenting or lukewarm opinions. You’re expected to like this movie or you’re a bad feminist — or, worse, a misogynist. You must feel empowered by this movie or you didn’t get it.
As a critic and feminist, I don’t like being told I will have to love this movie by default because it’s led by a strong female character. And I am not alone. The pop culture writer Kat Rosenfield said in a tweet, “I wish some of the Captain Marvel hyper-uppers would slow their roll just a liiiiittle bit on the idea that little girls have been twiddling their thumbs since the dawn of time, waiting for the arrival of a Lady Superhero who they can Finally Relate To.”
Last year, Larson made headlines when she called for more diversity in criticism after a USC Annenberg study showed the profession to skew mostly white and male. It was a welcome call to action for some, but for others, it was a logical fallacy.
More female critics in the field would not necessarily translate to better reviews for women-centric films. Women, like men, don’t always share the same opinions. Gender is not the only lens through which we watch movies.
If a movie’s bad or doesn’t work, it’s a critic’s job to say so. Within hours of the first reviews of Captain Marvel, commentators had drawn attention to the ongoing gender imbalance, but less helpful was the scrutinising of female critics who had something less than positive to say about the film, and harassment by the movie’s fans soon followed.
I’m sure Marvel Entertainment and its parent company, Disney, are watching the social media and audience reactions just as closely as box-office numbers. The rallying cry to buy tickets so more movies about female superheroes are made is music to the bottom line. The studios have found a minigoldmine in maintaining the scarcity that leaves viewers with less diverse options.
The burden has been on nonwhite and non-male audiences to prove they can sell out screenings for movies like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians.
One tactic Hollywood has used to justify the exclusion of women and other underrepresented groups is to label their projects a risk. There are old studio adages that men won’t see movies about women, or that films starring people of colour don’t do well abroad. These myths have been disproved time and again — women-centric comedies like Mean Girls and Bridesmaids
showed there were audiences for these movies, and black actors like Will Smith and Eddie Murphy reigned at the box office through the ‘90s and ‘80s.
Black Panther took on that tired excuse with its over $1.3 billion global box office, but it’s too early to tell yet if that success will translate into more opportunities for other directors of colour to lead movies with a diverse cast and sizable budget. The reality is that all films are risks. Even a director like Steven Spielberg or a star like Tom Cruise isn’t a surefire bet that a movie will be a success. Not every movie by a director from an underrepresented background or featuring a strong woman needs to be an Oscar-winner or the biggest box-office hit in history for the movement toward parity to be a success.
Untold stories should get the chance to be seen sooner rather than never; and moviegoers should be able to go to the theatre without feeling the need to “represent” in a rigged system.