Movie Review! (with some feminist ruminations) Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in "Passengers"

There will be some spoilers in this post, but I'll set off the really big ones with warnings.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see Passengers, the new sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. We'd both been interested in watching it based on the initial trailers, and despite the spate of negative reviews, we decided to give it a shot. I found it an odd and yet oddly effective movie, and wondered why on Earth it had only a 30% score on RottenTomatoes.com. So I went and scoured some of the capsule reviews and had to ask myself some hard questions.

The basic plot of Passengers is evident in the marketing: two passengers on a very long space journey accidentally wake up from suspended animation early, and have only each other (and a robot bartender) for company, with the prospect of decades remaining in the trip. Then more malfunctions turn the story into an action-oriented rollercoaster with the whole ship in terrible danger that our protagonists must navigate alone.

What's not shown in the marketing is the story element that drives most of the critical negativity about the film. (Spoiler ahead, but you'll probably see it coming early on anyway.) The two characters, Jim and Aurora, don't wake up at the same time. Jim wakes up first, and after spending a year in complete isolation from other human beings, he deliberately wakes Aurora up out of desperate loneliness, dooming her to share his fate of aging and dying before they have any chance of reaching the ship's destination. A really large proportion of critics took this as a creepy and gross expression of typical male patriarchal dominance. As one of them put it, "Man gets bored, so man ruins woman's life."

I'll get back to that bit later, in the heavy-spoiler part of the post.

The reason I called Passengers "odd" is that it mixes challenging ethical and emotional issues with science-fictional world-building far more ambitious than the typical s.f. film -- and then tops these elements off with enormously contrived plot devices. The movie was in development hell for almost a decade, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that all of the "ship in danger" action elements grew out of studio meddling intended to make the final product more commercially viable.

As a result of this strange hybridization, Passengers offers tons of stuff to provoke thought and contemplation in its audience, while flaking its way through plot conveniences that require you to shut off your brain. For example, the interstellar spaceship is in part based off a Bussard ramjet -- a well-established piece of theoretical technology that allows the ship to fuel itself by scooping up interstellar hydrogen. But nothing in the movie says it's a Bussard ramjet or that it's scooping up hydrogen. I had to do a search and find an interview with the screenwriter to confirm my after-the-movie realization of, "Hey, wait ... was that a Bussard ramjet?" None of the Bussard ramjet details are needed to understand the film or the situation, so the filmmakers chose to include it without drawing attention to it, a mark of respect for the audience's intelligence. And yet in the third act, when things start going haywire on the ship, audience intelligence clearly ranks low in the film's expectations, because plausibility flies out the window in scene after scene.

In other words, Passengers is a mixture of the extremely smart and the Hollywood-dumb. My brain enjoyed the extremely smart parts enough to put up with the Hollywood dumbness, and of course, Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt have enough charisma to carry off a dozen dumb popcorn flicks. On top of which, the robot bartender played by Michael Sheen holds his own with the human characters in every scene he's in, while also being obviously a non-sentient piece of AI programming.

So if you're willing to let an exceedingly likeable cast guide you through a richly imagined science-fictional setting and then shrug off some very unimaginative Hollywood action-flick tropes, Passengers may do the trick for you, as it did for me.

Unless ...

(Spoiler-laced feminist analysis ahead)

... you watch the movie the way many of the critics seemed to -- as a reflection of our male-dominated, female subjugating society.

Once I started reading the reviews, I had to bring myself up short and ask, "Was my enjoyment of the film made possible by the fact that, as a man, I have the luxury of tuning out sexism and misogyny the way so much of our society does?" Obviously, no feminist wants to fall into that trap, and I experienced some real self-doubt about my reading of the film. I hadn't seen the male-female power disparity as an issue at all, whereas critic after critic marked it as the largest of the film's numerous flaws.

Did I totally drop the ball as a feminist while watching the movie?

Mulling it over, I leaned toward saying no, I had not.

For one thing, there's no question whatsoever that the film expects us to view Jim's crime as exactly that. He does something horrible and unforgivable, ripping his fellow passenger out of her life and stranding her in the same dire circumstances he's been occupying, except that she at least has one person to interact with whereas he has had no one. And the thing is, Jim knows he's doing the wrong thing. He agonizes over it. He argues with himself, and even begs himself not to go through with it. After he activates Aurora's sleeping tube to revive her, he hides what he's done and lets the automated systems manage her awakening, just as they'd done for him. Then he retreats to his room where he's visibly sick over his own actions. He knows it's inexcusable.

Eventually, of course, Aurora finds out. It takes her a year, and in that time, she and Jim fall in love and create a reasonable facsimile of happiness together, but events conspire against Jim, and she learns the truth.

And her reaction, to me, defies any suggestion that the film is saying it's okay for men to treat women however they like. Aurora instantly hates Jim. She screams at him and flees his presence whenever he tries to explain himself or beg for forgiveness. At one point, she enters his room at night and beats the crap out of him -- not just punching him in the face, but jumping onto the bed with him and repeatedly kicking him before finally grabbing up a heavy object and preparing to bash his brains out with it.

Jennifer Lawrence gives a fantastic performance in these scenes. No person with a heart could watch her in such absolute agony and say, "Well, but really, what Jim did wasn't that bad." Jim himself knows it's that bad. He doesn't fight back or try to stop her when she comes in to whale on him. He doesn't even defend himself when she's about to crack his skull open. Instead, he surrenders and just waits for her to kill him.

Of course, she can't do it (although I wonder if there was an early, dark version of the screenplay that ended right there, with her beating his head open) -- but her inability to murder him the way he has murdered her does not lead to reconciliation. She remains utterly estranged from him, so much so that it's clear she will never get over what he's done.

But Hollywood being Hollywood, they couldn't do the artistic thing and end the movie with Aurora killing Jim or with the two of them growing old and dying on the ship without ever speaking to each other again. Instead, it turns out that the accident that woke Jim up also led to an accelerating cascade of malfunctions, and if the two of them don't find a way to fix things, the ship will blow up and all 5,000 people will die.

So, conveniently, Jim didn't actually murder Aurora by waking her up, but saved her life by doing so, because the events of the third act show that he could never have gotten the ship fixed without her help. Even more conveniently, the process of fixing the ship opens up some emergency facilities Jim didn't know about, including a way for one of them (but only one) to return to suspended animation.

These contrivances are worthy of eye-rolling, but because Lawrence and Pratt have such terrific chemistry, and because we get to see Jim really, really suffer for his crime, I didn't begrudge the movie its fakey happy ending. No amount of suffering could excuse what he'd done, but I could buy Aurora forgiving him, because their romance was genuine, and he not only deliberately sacrifices himself to save the ship, but offers to put her in suspended animation again as soon as he realizes he can, even though her forgiveness means he could keep the option secret from her so that he wouldn't have to be alone.

Still.

After mulling all this over, might I nonetheless be going too easy on the film? Should I instead have been incensed that Aurora forgives Jim? Is this really just a horribly sexist, patriarchal movie that deserves the critical and moral lambasting it's received?

Here's why I think the answer is "no."

I had viewed the film as a story about two people. I had viewed Jim's crime as a crime born out of human loneliness, not male entitlement. And as a story about two people, it worked fine.

Which made me ask myself, what if the gender roles had been reversed? Would the movie still have been blasted as sexist, if it featured a female mechanic with great physical aptitude waking up a male writer and proceeding through the same events? Well, yes, it would have been criticized, because people would have said, "It's just a statement that women are incomplete without men." But I think the criticism would have been much more muted -- somewhere between annoyance and anger, but not at the level of outrage provoked by the Lawrence/Pratt version of the film.

And then I asked myself, what if both the characters had been female?

And I think the answer to that question is that the same people attacking the male-female version of the film would have hailed the female-female version as bold and forward-looking, and would have swallowed the implausible third act to a far greater degree and forgiven the female Jim (let's say "Jem") much more easily.

The exact same screenplay, with the exact same character motivations, the exact same dialogue, and the exact same interpersonal dynamic, would have been touted as a social triumph instead of reviled as a piece of neanderthalic misogyny.

Which means that it's not Jim that people are judging as unforgivable. It's not the story that's an offense against women and against human decency. It's the society in which we live.

So unhealthy is our patriarchal culture that many progressives and feminists are unable to view a story about a man and a woman as simply being a story about two people. The projection of our world's gender roles onto the story overwhelms the substance of the story itself -- even though there's nothing in the movie to suggest that Aurora and Jim live in a society with the patriarchal flaws of ours.

I really wish they'd made that version of the film with two women. Not because the love scenes would then have been hot lesbian action (well, maybe a little because of that, since I'm not entirely free of male piggishness), but because the story is a good story, and I wish it could have been viewed as a story instead of as a statement on gender inequity.

Even better would have been a version of the story where Aurora doesn't fully forgive Jem, but agrees to let the mechanic wake her up for a week or two a year so that Jem doesn't go crazy from loneliness.

Damn, why am I not the one in charge of Hollywood?

Today's Star Trek Heroine: Doctor Helen Noel

I know I said no more Trek posts for a while ... but I'm kind of wishing I was on another planet right now. So ...

This morning, I watched "Dagger of the Mind" -- a pretty damn good episode with a pretty terrific female guest star.

The episode opens with the Enterprise orbiting a penal colony (no puns about that, I promise), to which they beam down some supplies and from which they beam up a box sized suspiciously like it was intended to hold an escaping prisoner. With our intrepid transporter-room technician immersed in some sort of technical check that requires his full attention to be focused on the back wall, the lid of the box opens and out pops a sweaty, wild-eyed fellow who proceeds to sneak up on the tech, incapacitate him, and take his uniform. Long story short, it turns out this isn't a prisoner, but an assistant of the psychiatrist who runs the penal colony (still no puns, trust me). Once he's captured, communications with the psychiatrist, Dr. Adams, reveal that the assistant was experimenting with a mental therapy device and drove himself crazy.

Kirk and Dr. McCoy get in a bit of a tiff about whether there's something suspicious going on, with Kirk expressing complete faith in the famous Dr. Adams. But Bones pulls some bureaucratic shenanigans that force Kirk's hand, and the captain concedes that he's got to investigate. He asks McCoy to assign someone from the medical staff to help him, someone with psychiatric experience.

And now we return to the transporter room, where Kirk walks in with Spock and does a double-take upon seeing who it is that Bones has assigned him. "Oh, great," I'm thinking, "here's where it surprises Kirk that his requested psychiatrist is a woman. Gasp! A woman doctor? Thank you, 1966."

But the first words out of Dr. Helen Noel's mouth are, "Doctor Helen Noel, Captain. We've met. Don't you remember the science lab Christmas party?" And it quickly becomes obvious through the dialogue that not only is Kirk aware that women can be doctors, but that his double-take was one of dismay because he somehow embarrassed himself at that Christmas party. Score one for Helen Noel, who looks pleased with herself over the captain's discomfiture.

Once on the planet, Dr. Noel does a bit of sensitive-female-psychiatrist shilly-shallying along the lines of, "Surely, you don't think Dr. Adams could be doing anything troublesome, Captain." But Kirk himself had done the same thing in response to McCoy's suspicions, so she can hardly be blamed.

And then, of course, the shit starts to go down.

And when the shit goes down, the ever-capable Captain Kirk heroically ... gets himself semi-brainwashed and imprisoned. Still, before they take him for the full "neural neutraliser" treatment, he orders Helen into the air-conditioning ducts with a mission to find and disable the force field that keeps the Enterprise from beaming anyone down to help. Despite admittedly having no training in force-field electronics -- which Kirk assures her are absolutely deadly if you make one false move -- Dr. Noel gamely hops into the ducts, follows them to the maintenance area, and gets to work.

Naturally, a guard finds her and pulls her away from the machinery, throwing her to the ground where she appears helpless.

Except that the helplessness is an act, meant to lure the guard in close so that she can kick him with both feet into the power junction, frying both it and him. Then she grabs up his fallen phaser and high-tails it back into the vents with the obvious intention of finding and rescuing Kirk.

Objectifying, impractical miniskirt uniform or not, this woman kicks ass. Kirk comes up with the plan and has to endure Dr. Adams' mind-control torture machine, but Dr. Noel takes on all the physical danger and does all the heavy lifting, never once faltering or shrinking from her task. Several times, she debates Kirk as an equal, and in every scene reliant on male-female dynamics, she comes out on top rather than succumbing to Kirk's usual Casanova charm.

Oh, hell ... tee-hee! Penal colony!

Dammit.

Mudd's Women: One Last Star Trek Review (at least for now!)

I swear I'm not turning this into a Star Trek blog. Just one more Trek entry and I'll get back to other topics, promise.

When last we left our intrepid twenty-first century feminist, Ian Saul Whitcomb, he'd gone through five episodes of the original Star Trek and been dismayed by its paternalism toward women. Dauntingly, he knew the next episode he faced would be "Mudd's Women," a tale of mail-order brides gussied-up by a beauty-inducing drug and taken to a mining colony as goods of commerce. Would the show's woefully dated attitudes make this the most uncomfortable episode yet?

Surprisingly, and to my great relief, no. In fact, the episode stood in stark contrast to its predecessors as the first genuine example of Star Trek as morality play, commenting on the social order of its time and suggesting that things ought to change.

(At this point, I'll give an obligatory spoiler warning, in case you haven't ever in the last fifty years watched this episode ...)

Where previous installments of the series showed the male officers of the Enterprise occasionally comparing notes on the attractiveness of female crew members, the Venus Drug of "Mudd's Women" turns them into gawking idiots, rendered incompetent by their baser instincts. Captain Kirk largely resists -- by taking his awareness of the women's hypnotic effect and making a determined effort to treat them like people and maintain his professionalism. When one of the women, Eve McHuron, complains about the eyes of all the crewmen following her, Kirk apologizes, saying, "They're not usually like that."

So despite the archaic plot device of mail-order marriage (and numerous "ooh-la-la" musical cues as the women slink and sway around), the episode carries a clear anti-ogling message throughout.

More importantly, in the climactic scenes, Eve McHuron chooses certain death over continuing to play the role society has foisted on her. She survives, demonstrating in the process a genuine character and intelligence that sets Kirk up to deliver the episode's crowning message: that there's only one kind of person -- "You either believe in yourself, or you don't."

Finally, six episodes in, I've found the Star Trek that forcefully helped make me the person I am today.

Ahead, warp factor one.

Tonight on Star Trek ...

Yikes!

So, I remembered thinking "The Enemy Within" was kind of dumb from the last time I watched it, probably a good 10 years ago or more. It's the one where they glued some fake horns on a Pomeranian to make an alien critter for a transporter accident that splits creatures into good and evil twins. (The transporter also later renders some thermal heating units useless by splitting them in two, which maybe explains why the units are both "thermal" and "heating," although the consequence that neither a good nor an evil thermal heating unit would be functional is beyond my comprehension.)

What I didn't remember was the super-creepy attempted rape of Yeoman Janice Rand by Evil Kirk. Though scene made me pretty darn uncomfortable right from its opening moments, I told myself it could be excused as an entirely logical consequence of the episode's concept, and handled correctly would constitute legitimate drama. And the scene itself did play out in a more or less appropriate fashion -- clearly portraying Evil Kirk's behavior as horrific and very traumatic for Yeoman Rand, though she escapes before Evil Kirk takes things very far.

But then ...

At the end of the episode ...

Mister Spock kids Yeoman Rand about it.

I shit you not.

Now, this too could be viewed as logical within the context of the show, given Spock's detached curiosity about human emotions and his calculated analysis that Kirk's hostile, aggressive side is intrinsically necessary for his success as a commander. But the logic goes out the window after that point, because instead of being hurt or appalled, Yeoman Rand responds to the joke as if it's just another of Spock's ironic "oh, you humans" jibes.

And yet, while my jaw absolutely dropped that anyone would consider that joke okay, I came away from the episode with a sense of the positive.

All too often, I look around at the world and think, Good lord. We're getting nowhere. In fact, if anything, things are getting worse and worse. But the fact of the matter is, fifty years ago, a television show could portray the near rape of a female character as an acceptable springboard for humor -- and still be the most forward-looking thing on TV.

We are getting somewhere. Maybe not as fast as we should maybe not at warp speed, but we're making progress.

Cross your fingers for me, though. The next episode in the sequence is "Mudd's Women," and I see great potential for it to go wildly awry in comparison to my childhood memories of it ...

Where No Man Had Gone Before

Watching the original Star Trek show as a 21st-century feminist provides a very weird experience.

I got the whole series on Blu-Ray a while back, watched a couple of episodes, then got busy doing other things. Eventually, nagged by guilt at abandoning this iconic part of my childhood, I got the discs back out and started up again.

Three episodes in, I find my head regularly shaking in disbelief.

Everybody who knows anything about Star Trek understands its position as a groundbreaking work of diversity. Even amidst the social upheaval of the 1960s, it blew people's minds to see women working alongside men as equals in an environment where individuals of all races mixed freely without comment. This just didn't happen prior to Trek. Lieutenant Uhura famously inspired people like Mae Jemison and Whoopi Goldberg to pursue their dreams as though there were no longer any boundaries. Personally, I'm 100% sure that my feelings about diversity benefited as much or more from watching Star Trek every day after school as from having parents who'd taken part in the civil rights marches.

But when you watch it ... what an amazingly paternalistic and objectifying show!

Now, to give credit where credit is due, Gene Roddenberry and his collaborators did their best in two different pilots to dress the female crew members in the same shirt-and-slacks uniform worn by the men. The miniskirts came in after that as a concession to the fashion sensibilities of the times.

Nonetheless, despite frequent talk about equality, women are a distinct minority aboard the Enterprise and occupy exclusively "soft" or subservient positions -- nurse, communications officer, psychiatrist, personal assistant to the captain. Command and technical positions remain exclusively the province of men. (Roddenberry tried to make the second-in-command female in the original pilot, but even then, the character was criticized by others as being cold and aloof -- something that never would have happened to a human male first officer.)

With despairing frequency, these "equal" Star Fleet officers wilt in the face of danger and must be consoled or comforted by the men. When they leave the room, it becomes fair game for their male crewmates (and commanding officers!) to raise eyebrows and discuss their looks. If Charlie X (brought up by aliens with no understanding of human society) behaves inappropriately toward Yeoman Janice Rand, she can go so far as to tell him he shouldn't do that -- but she has to demur on explaining why he shouldn't, referring Charlie to Captain Kirk rather than schooling the miscreant herself.

Little grade-school Ian may very well have been steered toward feminism at least in part by Charlie X getting lectured on the impropriety of a man slapping a lady's bottom. But grown-up Ian can only blink and mutter at the implication that it's not a woman's role to instruct a male on basic human decency.

Don't get me wrong ... I still love the show, for all its kitsch and melodrama. Its heart is certainly in the right place, and it attempted to make statements in territories where the later shows often played things far too safe. And without its brave explorations, we very likely wouldn't be as far along as we are today.

But yeowtch! You can certainly see, watching it, why sci-fi nerds of a certain age often think of themselves as non-sexist while railing against the ascendancy of female characters like Rey in the new Star Wars.

Their childhood heroes, their template for admirable diversity, just never went there.

Let Jargons be Jargons

Update, 10/29/16: There's some dumb-ass stuff in this post, but I'm leaving it up anyway, because I think it's worth thinking about. In particular, I remain convinced that we need to watch ourselves for patterns of language that make us sound like an exclusive clique, and we need to be patient with people who haven't yet absorbed the complex intellectual constructs behind these terms. If we find someone who bristles or goes blank at one of these words or phrases, we should shift gears and work in common language to bring them on board with the concepts, rather than doubling down and insisting on the righteousness of our progressive lexicon.

One of things I find frustrating about being a feminist is that feminism and gender-conscious activism are not always a particularly welcoming club. It's pretty doggone easy to come across articles or blog posts or Twitter feeds full of statements lamenting straight white cisgender male indulgence in heteronormative language and behavior that ends up contributing to rape culture.

Now, I know what's meant by each of those terms, and I know that the issues they address are real issues with profound negative consequences for women and for the collective psyche of our society. But to someone looking at feminism from the outside, the movement's language sounds at best like that of an insular academic subculture and at worst like an actively hostile clique.

"Cisgender" is the least offputting of the batch, but let's face it, it's awful. There's nothing intuitive about it -- it's weird looking and alien, and really has nothing to recommend it to the people it's supposed to describe. Intellectually, I think it's kind of cool, "cis" meaning the numerically prevalent form of something with "trans" being its inverse. But I had to look it up in the dictionary the first time I encountered it, and most people don't want to look things up in the dictionary.

What would be wrong with something like "plain-gender"? The word "plain" is known to everyone, and is neither favorable nor unfavorable because it has a variety of connotations -- some positive, some negative, and some neutral. It implies that which is commonplace, and seems far less likely to confuse or turn people off than "cis."

So let's look at "heteronormative." Anybody with basic reading comprehension skills should be able to glean from context that "heteronormative" means something bad. No one ever goes around talking about the benefits of heteronormative thinking. So if you're heterosexual, and you think of yourself as "normal," the word "heteronormative" seems to be calling two strikes against you. It's obviously something bad, so maybe it means being hetero is bad or being the norm is bad, or both. That automatically puts nonfeminists on the defensive and raises their barriers to the word.

But what if we replaced it with "heterotyping" or "heterotypical?" The echoes of "stereotyping" and "stereotypical" would make the terms more familiar and more sympathetic, because everybody already knows that stereotyping is bad, whereas most people don't think that the "norm" is bad. Furthermore, stereotyping is a special kind of bad -- we all get that it's usually very negative ... but we also know that everybody does it, and it's sometimes relatively harmless and can even be a source of humor. A nonfeminist might bristle at being called "heteronormative" while thinking, "Well, maybe I am 'heterotypical,' whatever that means," or "Could I be guilty of 'heterotyping?' I mean, I know I let myself stereotype people sometimes ..." So some combination of those two terms might be more accessible to nonfeminists from beyond academia than "heteronormative," which if we're honest sure sounds like an egghead pointing fingers and being snooty.

Finally, the most problematic is "rape culture." I think it's self-evident that any decent person who perceives her- or himself to be living in a "rape culture" must feel profoundly alienated from that culture, because any decent person finds rape abhorrent and unacceptable. So as soon as we use the term "rape culture" around those unfamiliar with its overall conceptual framework, we imply that we're a bunch of malcontents unable to tolerate and fit into society as a whole.

I have to ask, who wants to join that team? Who do we think is going to rally to a cause that advertises itself as alienated by and disjoined from the mainstream? Maybe we do live in a "rape culture," and maybe it does deserve our contempt and alienation -- but do we think boasting about that is going to bring people around to our way of thinking if they're deeply invested in what they perceive to be a generally decent society?

A major drawback of the phrase "rape culture" is that everyone knows about "gun culture" and "drug culture," which are both associated with people who actively engage in and want to promote the objects of their focus. "Gun culture" people think guns are great. "Drug culture" people like doing drugs. These are established terms, and the fact is that "rape culture" is not parallel to them in the least. There's no significant group out there openly advocating rape or its legalization.

In truth, "rape culture" is an awkward umbrella term for a slew of insidious and often subconscious attitudes and phenomena. It encompasses rape-enabling behaviors like the failure to properly investigate and prosecute rape, rape-denying behaviors like victim-blaming and slut-shaming, and general ignorance of rape due to media complacency. But in virtually none of those cases are the people involved in favor of rape. Aside from criminals cooking up date-rape drugs and the subset of fraternity types who distribute them and encourage or excuse their use, most of the elements of "rape culture" are not deliberate cultivations of rape.

So what we actually have is not a "rape culture," but a rape ecology. A set of conditions under which rape can flourish despite the fact that almost everybody believes that rape is bad. Rape is the weed or the weevil in our field of crops, and because we're not properly focused on fighting it, some of the things we do to fertilize and irrigate the field end up encouraging the weeds and weevils. "Rape culture" doesn't accurately describe that situation, and if we were to talk about "rape ecology" instead, nobody would think we were accusing the larger society of deliberately fostering rape.

Obviously, there's a huge amount of linguistic inertia that feminism would have to overcome in order to switch its current terminology to a vocabulary more friendly and welcoming to nonfeminist ears. But if we're worried about that inertia being difficult to overcome, we might as well just give up entirely, because the attitudes and societal structures we're up against are far, far more entrenched than the lingo we've developed to talk about them.

If we want everybody to be a feminist, I think we need to start using words everybody can buy into.

Otherwise, we might as well just talk amongst ourselves in Esperanto.