Are James Cameron’s Movies Misandrist, and What Would he Hope to Gain if They Were?

Before I begin, there are two things I’m going to need to tackle. The first thing is that I actually really enjoy most of director James Macaron Cameron’s output (apart from Titanic, but that doesn’t mean it will escape comment!). You may have read my outright praise for Aliens in the past. His plotlines and dialogue are elegant and functional, and the action scenes which drive his movies are hyperkinetic without being incomprehensible. There’s a lot going on, but he can hold a camera still for a few seconds rather than chucking it across the room a la Transformers.

The other thing is what misandry is. I’m sure you’re all familiar with its counterpart, misogyny – the hatred of women – and all the notions that go with it, such as objectification (treating women as objects primarily for the pleasure of the so-called ‘male gaze’). Misandry, it follows, is the hatred of men. What could its possible equivalent to objectification be? Some people would say that hyper-masculine, hyper-muscular male figures are there for women to look at, but a Feminist would be partially correct in dismissing that as a male-manufactured power fantasy. But did you ever wonder why it’s a power fantasy? Because power gets you laid and, statistically speaking and apart from socially important lotharios, bigger and more aggressive men get more girls. Ask yourself, whether you be a man or a woman, how many women have you met who claim to actively prefer puny or fat guys? Are you such a woman yourself? Don’t lie, because I’ll know. And I will find you.

The masculine equivalent of objectification of women – if the argument for it being a problem for women acts as a kind of denial that it could ever happen to men, which is an utter lie – is something I’m going to have to semi-invent a term for. That term is ‘agentification’. An agent is someone or something who actively influences the world around them. How is this bad? It becomes bad when I offer you the following definition – ‘the treatment of men as agents who act primarily for the benefit and gain of women’. As with the objectified female, the thoughts, feelings and personality of the agentified male are considered irrelevant.

Our culture has even had a platitude which reflects this for hundreds, if not thousands of years – ‘man is defined by his actions’. It is an attitude so deeply entrenched in our culture that we take it for granted and it has ceased to be a problem. Think about it – surnames in most cultures are subject to patrilineal transmission, from father to son. Type that into spellcheck. Patrilineal doesn’t exist. But matrilineal does. Why is this? Hmm. I digress. Surnames are patrilineal in most cultures and what do you notice? Potter. Smith. Farrier. Wright. Turner. And so on. All names derived from jobs. A man is what he does – not how he thinks or feels. You don’t get Mr. Sympathetic or Mr. Likesicecream. Of course, if Bruce Wayne had a son, according to occupation-derivation he would be Mr. Batman, which would give the game away just a tad. If a man’s surname doesn’t come from his job (i.e it sounds posh) it is generally an aristocratic derivation referring to some place his family owned i.e De Montford.

Back to the problem. It is the problem that makes young men enlist in militaries and die for countries that don’t care about them. It is the problem that makes men aged 16-24 the absolute statistically-proven prime victims of violent crime, even though culturally we harp on about how at risk women are. It is the problem that means that the human race today is descended from half as many men as women, which means that throughout our evolution males have consistently been killed off twice as fast as females. But this is all okay, of course. This is because it is their choice (although, if they don’t make such choice, they lose their masculine agency and are less likely to be considered for breeding rights. Evolution, baby). The notion that this is okay is firmly supported in many of James Cameron’s films – but in what ways, and why?

I will start with Avatar as the most obvious culprit, and attempt to do it in summary. At its heart, this movie presents a male-driven military industrial complex (the baddies) against a female Gaia-type earth-spirit, Eywa (the goody). The milindust complex is led by the snarky (and physically slight) corporate bigot Parker Selfridge and the scenery chewing Lt. Col. Miles Quaritch. The irony is that although Quaritch is nominally the villain, he is decisive, self-sacrificing and lives up to his word which the ‘hero’ Sully is largely unable to do. Sully’s main motivations for turning against the military that employed him? His new blue body lets him walk, and helped him get a hot blue girlfriend. The hot blue girlfriend part is critical to this discussion.

So how is the above so critical? Sully is portrayed as stupid, bland and selfish – he betrays pretty much everyone. Despite constant verbal abuse and disdain from his soon-to-be-girlfriend Netyri, (“She calls me ‘skown’ which means moron”) he still falls in love with her. He starts off on the wrong side, and betrays his new blue buddies. What redeems him? Two things – that he acts upon the instructions of a female (Netyri) for the benefit of a female earth-spirit, and that (as a masculine agent) he tames ‘Last Shadow’ which is essentially a huge and deadly pterosaur. The fact that he is accepted back as a saviour under these circumstances amuses me – suddenly, all the Na’vi trust him. It is very much like me leaving in shame driving a Fiat Fiesta and becoming a hero just because I drive back in a Mercedes Benz. His feelings do not matter, the fact that he is stupid does not matter, the fact that his motivations are skewed does not matter. He is the hero because he did something cool to impress a girl.

Don't laugh mate - you die in 45 minutes' time.

Let’s examine the other male figures now. Sully’s main competitor is an arrogant blue dude called Tsu-tey who basically dares to expect a woman who had already pledged herself to him to be faithful! What a goddamn crime! How does the movie absolve him of this terrible crime? Twofold – by having him become subordinate to the ‘hero’ (who is in turn subordinate to Netyri’s genitals), and die heroically assaulting the bomb shuttle. The good old disposable male strikes again – Cameron leaves no trope behind.

Killed by your own tree, FFS!

The two tribal leaders can be compared, too. The patriarchal leader – who wants to kill Sully – is ignobly disposed of via a spare of wood when hometree is blown to bits, while the matriarchal figure, who saves Sully (stereotypically nurturing - how ironic) is spared. Ho hum.

How do men and women in the milindust complex compare? Little better. All the background female figures who remain loyal to the army have close-cropped hair like their male colleagues, while the heroic female pilot (Trudy) who turns against her employers has lovely long hair. As a strong, assertive man, Quaritch is put in a position where the audience is not meant to sympathise with him despite the fact that he’s the only consistent and trustworthy character with any power in the whole damn film. His female adversary and equivalent, the scientist Grace Augustine, whose name is just a face-palm worthy pathetic fallacy, is a total bitch to everyone. But the film tells us to like and respect her – so a behaviour changes from wicked to respectable depending on whether a man or a woman does it. In a meritocratic, equal society, we should judge people’s behaviour, not their sex. Cameron’s hypocrisy here clearly sees him judging sex. Shouldn’t a (pseudo) Feminist avoid employing the supposed tactics of the patriarchal enemy?

Anyway, Doctor Elegant Majestic wilfully pounds down on her subordinates Norm Spelman and Dr Stereotype Patel. These are the two token consistently loyal and pleasant men in the film, but they are both portrayed as nervy, nerdy, back-seat taking somewhat asexual blobs. Norm is even a drooler, apparently as Grace tells his Avatar, “Norm, you’re getting your saliva in the samples” in response to his lisping dialogue. So, Jim, you’re saying that we should be confirming the stereotype that nice guys are chumps, but bad guys can be redeemed if they subject themselves to the will of a woman while retaining their ability to act and take risks. That’s just fucking great man – game over man, game over.

"Not if I kill you first, Jim!"

Now, on to a summary of how this works in his other movies. In both Terminator films, male (or masculine-bodied protagonists such as the T-800 in Terminator 2) exist to protect the female and her offspring and then die. Kyle Reese gives her offspring, protects her, then dies. The T-800 gives the thumbs up as he commits suicide or ‘self-terminates’. As the T-800 is referred to as the ultimate father figure at several points throughout the movie, the implications are sinister. Mother-of-the future Sarah Connor says, “watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him. It would never shout at him or get drunk and hit him. Or say it was too busy to spend time with him. And it would die to protect him. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice”. Ideally, men are just self-sacrificing machines that exist only to help females and their young. What they make of it is meaningless. What they feel is moot. But we are not permitted to see them as victims of agentification.

He's just DYING to help out!

The creator of Skynet, Miles Dyson, is on the other hand a male who neglects his family in favour of his work and needs to be shown the error of his ways by a woman. He dies redeeming himself in staying behind at Cyberdyne to detonate the bomb intended to wipe out Skynet’s future. Can you see a pattern developing here? 

In The Abyss, proto-Augustine superbitch Lindsey Brigman appears and makes a fool of her ex-husband, Virgil. He makes his transition from immature layabout to hero only once he accepts that his ex-wife is right about the aliens being benevolent. The villain of the piece is unsurprisingly a male soldier -but he’s played by Michael Biehn, so I’m automatically on his side. Corporal Hicks and Kyle Reese are good-guys!

 In Aliens, Ellen is a mother-figure who essentially adopts the little girl Newt / Rebecca. Carter Burke, the primary villain, is the proto-Selfridgian corporate stooge. The nice guys, Corporal Hicks and android Bishop are both horrifically injured in the service of a woman. They accept this humbly, despite the fact they got hurt as the result of said woman taking a massive risk (trying to save someone from alien impregnation) which she had previously disapproved of herself (“You can’t help them! You can’t! Right now, they’re being cocooned just like the others”). Yet the risky hypocrisy displayed by Sully is shown to be just fine when Ripley does it. No-one needs to redeem her – her actions redeem themselves in the narrative. Granted, it is the only grave error in her otherwise sterling leadership.

So Jack and Rose get married and - nah just messin wit ya.  HE'S FUCKING DEAD!

In Titanic, Jack dies to save Rose. Oh yeah, ‘Women and children first’. I forgot. 

 

All of his men are put-up, shut-up, define-yourselves-by-your-actions types who become defined as heroes in their services to women. Self-serving men are villains, self-serving women are frequently sympathetic protagonists. His films are frequently hypocritical and misandrist on this level. True Lies is the only one I can’t figure out.

Do as I say!  Not as I do!

 But why does James Cameron keep doing this in his films? I don’t think he really believes any of this stuff. It’s all sinister marketing. Knowing that just making a kick-ass action movie won’t be enough to bring in the big dollars considering that some – though not all – of the female audience will be hesitant about seeing it, Cameron essentially enshrines women in order to put bums in seats. Does he believe in this ‘natural order’ in real-life? He is on his fifth marriage. Former wife Linda Hamilton, who ironically played the heroine Sarah Connor in both Terminator movies, is on-record as describing being married to him as “terrible on every level, he was terribly insecure that I was going to ruin it for him somehow,”(The Week Uk, March 3^rd 2010) and that  - in another blazing irony -implied he was much like Miles Dyson in that he was single-mindedly focused on his work to the detriment of his family relations. It is also suspected that he cheated on Hamilton with current wife Suzy Amis. None of this is secret, libellous or revelatory – just have a look on Google. You can make your own judgments as to whether he has anywhere near the respect for women he pretends to have in his films.

What does this all mean? Look at it all from this angle, and his movies are pick-up artists. These movies are the sleazy guy in a nightclub who sidles up to a woman and says ‘all these other guys are horrible. You should sleep with me. I’m nice. I understand. I’ll look after your interests. Come with me if you want to live’. Well, to paraphrase the awesome and now sadly perished female-fronted alt-rockers Lush: You say that women are superior to men? Well, I know the score – and I’ve heard it all before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David M. Jackson is a lecturer in English Language and Literature as well as Sociology, so he’s seen your retorts to this article coming from a mile away and frankly they’re bloody feeble. Don’t even start – you don’t want to see him get out of this chair.

When not teaching or beaming smugly from this hallowed webpage, he works on making his ‘about the author’ blurbs shorter.

By the way, he wrote a novel about a cybernetically augmented police officer struggling to maintain her humanity while seeking revenge for her father’s death against the backdrop of civil war in happy ol’ Britain. It’s called ‘Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity’ - which you may find a bit ironic. It’s out on Sunday 1^st  July 2012 via Amazon, priced at £3. Keep your wallet handy – there’s more to come.

Why I Love That Film: Aliens

Ladies and gentlemen!  May I present to you I Love That Film's very first guest post from a fellow writer and teacher, David Jackson.  Here's why David Jackson loves Aliens:

In all honesty I feel that this review is moot; why I love Aliens and therefore why everyone else should love it is self-evident and can be summed up in the following three words:

It’s fucking great.

Though every last letter of that pronouncement is wholly true, the horrible realisation has dawned upon me that there are people on this Earth who have not seen Aliens. Those who have an excuse – the absence of running water, let alone DVD players – notwithstanding, this situation is unforgivable. It is a situation almost as unforgivable as the fact that there are people alive on the verge of adulthood who are younger than that other great James Cameron movie – Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

 

Before I get into highlighting the fact that only three of my students have seen any of the Back to the Future trilogy and one of them claimed they ‘were rubbish’ (and has since been committed to psychiatric care), I should resume reviewing Aliens. The topic of the death of culture itself can wait.

For the uninitiated, Aliens  is the 1986 follow-up to Ridley Scott’s uninventive but flawlessly executed Alien, and concerns the PTSD-afflicted Ellen Ripley’s ill-fated attempts to investigate (with the assistance of gum-chewing soldiers) the disappearance of an entire colony of humans on the planet where the titular phallus-bonced xenomorphs were originally found.

There are so many reasons to love this film from an aesthetic and technical point of view. Aside from the despicable haircuts, it’s hard to place it as a 1986 movie – a testament to the excellence of a production put together on (even then) a mediocre budget of eighteen million dollars. The academy award winning practical and special effects still equal those of any CGI-driven blockbuster of today, and even the slightly phony rear-projection face-offs with the Queen in her nest towards the end of the movie are more convincing than watching Ryan Reynold’s head floating against a background of pixellated green mush. The central character of Ripley is portrayed within a believable Feminist framework that is rare today. It is an action movie. It is a horror movie. It is a cyberpunk commentary on the dangers of unlimited corporate power. It’s even a serviceable Vietnam War allegory. To cover it all would require an entire book.

I remember seeing snippets of Aliens at a young age and finally saw the director’s cut in full aged fourteen when the boxset was released on VHS in 1997 before Alien Resurrection came out and ran head-first into a brick wall. What impressed me most was the design of the Colonial Marines’ military hardware – it was both futuristic and grounded within a recognisable practical reality. The designs are so cemented in the collective geek imagination that it they have been knowingly and smirkingly assimilated into other media. The UNSC troops and vehicles in the legendary Halo videogame franchise are the clearest example. Even Sergeant Apone makes an appearance in them under the guise of Sergeant Johnson.

One thing that is brilliant about the use of military hardware from a narrative point of view is that it underlines the menace of the xenomorph threat itself. The Colonial Marines are over-equipped to the point of complacence. Their weaponry is in fact overpowered to the point of liability – it indirectly results in the destruction of the colony they set out to save. One message of the movie is clear – flesh is stronger than steel. As an allegory for the trials of the US during the Vietnam War, it serves to illustrate how the superior numbers, guerrilla stealth and almost fearless nature of the North Vietnamese were more important than all the high-explosives at the Americans’ disposal.

Characterisation is a strength of this film – oddly because it doesn’t try too hard. The heavily-armed ready-meals who populate this film are painted with broad but memorable strokes. Sometimes, the best icons are the simplest. What really matters is the character of Ripley herself and how she is used to deftly handle second-wave Feminist issues in the script by Cameron (and some extent Alien screenwriters Giler and Hill).

Summary of powerful female characters in a modern film: take the recent Salt or maybe Tomb Raider (Jolie coincidence? I think not) or even the horrendously overrated marathon pop-video wank-fests known as Kill-Bill parts 1 & 2. Their approach is ‘because I am sexy, I am powerful’. Supermodel physiques that in reality can barely pull back the bed-sheets in the morning pull off feats of superhuman strength and speed far outclassing the obviously physically-fit male counterparts of these movies. I see this and I’m immediately bored. Why is it that their power has to be linked to their attractiveness in the most conventional terms? Why do we need to define female characters by their sexuality at all?

Aliens eschews all this and gives us in Ripley a character with powerful biological drive in terms of mothering instincts,  and assets that are universally praise-worthy in anyone. She is pragmatic, determined and cool-headed. She isn’t given any super-strength or inexplicable martial arts skills and the justification of her place in a masculine hierarchy certainly isn’t centred on her appearance. Surrounded by gung-go troops, an incompetent combat-virginal Lieutenant and a slimy corporate executive, she uses her experience and ingenuity to help the group survive. Some people might criticise Ripley, in her leather jacket and blue overalls, as being a character that’s essentially neutered. They might also argue that the loss of her own child and subsequent near-suicidal attachment to the orphan Rebecca (also known as Newt) are simply concessions made to give her a traditional female grounding. 

What is important here is that is we are dealing with the female not the feminine. Her biological leanings are inescapable and provide drive without defining her means of success. Other characters in the films mentioned above are defined in terms of the feminine – the artificial, socially contrived characteristics associated with females but which (though we get confused in our culture) have nothing to do with the essence of being female or even human. In short, the abilities that Ripley displays can be believed. There is a clear relation between her outward presentation and behaviour and what she achieves. She’s not even the ever-pouting super-bitch that is commonly portrayed as being the kind of woman who excels in a ‘male’ environment. Ripley is tough, but sensitive in quite a straightforward, undecorated manner. In other words, a great leader.

Unsurprisingly, another area in which Aliens excels is in its action ... or should we be surprised? If you added together all the action sequences from the 137-minute director’s cut, you probably only get about 35 minutes of action. In these scenes, the xenomorphs themselves are seldom in the same frame as the Colonial Marines and there are long moments of fighting where the aliens aren’t shown at all. Far from being simple cost-cutting exercises, these are strategies that make the action work. Marines blast away at middle-distance off-camera threats because they are in a confused situation and attacked by almost invisible enemies from all sides. Constant cuts to their out-of-depth Lieutenant watching their decimation from camera feeds enhance the sense of helplessness. Snap-cuts to creatures being mown down by sentry guns in a dark corridor give the impression of the beasts being innumerable even though we are only shown a few being involved at any time.

The sense of action, in short, relies on atmosphere for its thrill and menace. This is not a ‘literal’ action film that shows you everything in candid, realistic detail. The lighting in particular plays a crucial role. In one set-piece, the aliens make their way around the Marines’ barricade and into the Operations Centre by crawling under the floor and over the ceiling grates – but not before cutting the power. Cutting the power of course results in the engagement of emergency lighting which saturates the scene with murky blood-red tones that underline the primal horror of the moment, create a tantalising half-light which makes the creatures more threatening and serves as pathetic fallacy for the turning point wherein there is no hope for survival. During Ripley’s rescue of Newt and her final duel with the Queen, strobing hazard-lights create a tense visual heart-beat.

Aliens is fantastic not only as a stand-alone film but as a sequel. It isn’t the simple ‘more expensive version of the original’ approach taken by many films (though it did cost more). It operates on an entirely different dynamic and unravels some of the more mysterious elements of the original in a logical way. The nature of the xenomorph is expanded upon with the exposition of a hive hierarchy, and their survival strategies adapt when the conditions of their human enemies change. Expectations set up by the original – such as that all androids are untrustworthy tools of the evil Weyland Yutani Corporation – are toyed with and then smashed.

In summation, Aliens is a movie that has aged well. It has clever direction, sympathetic and believable spins on classic stereotypes, and stunning production design. It is a movie-geek’s dream as well as a satisfying mainstream action-horror. The more you know about this film, the more you appreciate it, mainly because so much was achieved with such limited resources. Despite having relatively little action, what there is happens to be well-paced and hits harder because of the dramatic tension that develops between.

... and plus, Bill Paxton makes this face:

What more could you want?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 DAVID M. JACKSON is the semi-fictitious construct of a crazed Language and Literature lecturer born in Essex and working in Berkshire.

He has loved Science-Fiction all his life and regards it as the ultimate means of developing complex hypotheses regarding how technological development catalyses social change.

He is pretentious and precocious enough to have been writing Science-Fiction since the age of fourteen, though most of those ideas are in quarantine. When cleansed of their impurities, he will rebuild them faster, stronger and better than before.

His corporeal avatar currently occupies a position in real-space approximately 1.6 meters in height, 0.6 meters in width, 0.35 meters at its deepest point and 98 kilograms in weight according to the metric increments employed by homo-sapiens in the industrialised territories of Earth (Solar System).

If you want to read more from David M. Jackson, look for his new novel Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity on Amazon – due out as an eBook from 1^st July 2012.

Set in the near future, Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity sees cybernetically augmented police officer Jennifer Carter fighting to avenge her father’s death, evade arrest by her former colleagues and hold on to the last remnants of her humanity as Britain explodes into civil war.

Our real enemies are closer to home than you think …