Recently, Andrew O'Hehir had this to say concerning The Avengers and its
(ostensibly) all-male demographic:
I don't think I'm breaking any news if I tell you
that "The Avengers," Joss Whedon's ensemble action-adventure that
unites an entire posse of Marvel Comics superhoes, will be far and away this
weekend's No. ! film at the box office. [. . .] Or that a large majority of
those ticket buyers will be teenage boys and young men. Like most summer
"tentpole" productions -- those designed to support franchises, and
ensure the financial future of major studioes -- "The Avengers" is
aimed squarely at guys under 35, long the demographic, psychological and
economic bulwark of the movie industry.
All this is standard operating procedure in
21st-century Hollywood, where the industry is dominated by post-boomer males
reared on the comic books, TV shows and blockbuster movies of the ’60s, ’70s
and ’80s, and the audience is understood in almost Pavlovian terms as a
slavering horde of permanent adolescents. Audience familiarity and
“pre-awareness” are greatly prized, so nearly all these guy-oriented movies
derive from superhero comics or video games or other decades-old pop
franchises. (It is, of course, possible to go too far into the pop-culture
past. Let’s observe a moment of silence, once again, for“John Carter.”)
We can certainly argue about which of these movies create an interesting twist
on existing formula and which are cynical crap, but I don’t think we can argue
that it makes much difference to the bottom line. “The Avengers” will make a
kazillion dollars, and so did “Transformers:
Dark of the Moon.” The differences between the two are mostly a
matter of fine-grained detail; they’ve both got cartoonish male bonding, a lot
of stuff blowing up, and hot-chick eye candy.
If you’re female and you’re interested in any or
all of the above pictures, by the way, I apologize for making it sound as if
you don’t exist. But in marketing terms, you don’t.
[. . .]
All of this reflects deeply ingrained social and
cultural ideas about gender, which are present in people of both sexes. Maybe
men’s preference for violent action yarns and women’s preference for sappy love
stories — and our tendency to understand one as more “serious” than the other —
are hard-wired in some biological way, although that falls a long way short of
scientific truth. But despite the torrent of male-centric franchise flicks
we’ll see this summer, and next summer, and for all the summers into the
foreseeable future, the tide in the Hollywood gender wars has begun to shift,
slightly but perceptibly.
I personally wonder if
what we will see this year, next year, and further beyond are periodic
interruptions by liberals of their basic enjoying of life to float out mouthy
j'accuses at still-male-centric society, allowing some smaller bite, to come
off themselves. And I wonder if it was time for one such interruption to
come from Andrew, and this is what actually explains why it is only
in the comment section of this article that we learn why Joss Whedon's
Avengers apparently wasn't permeated by Whedon's ostensibly natural
female orientation, rather than for the film being in the end, mostly all
Marvel.
What I am drawing upon
here is not right-wing concerns, but rather that of some leftish occupiers --
Chris Hedges, specifically, as well as some of truthdig. In "Death
of the Liberal Class," Hedges challenged readers to imagine liberals as
mostly being uninterested in what happens to most Americans, in actually
finding them disgusting, and as having since the late '70s spent their
time essentially walling themselves from them. He contends they've
actually become courtiers, a class distinct from "fellow Americans,"
and use "boutique" issues of race and gender to justify their
privileges and relevancy while keeping the rest of America feeling suspect,
probably owed their inferior place. And so thereby life goes along
comfortably, even if significant changes to American life -- the kind of stuff
Hedges contends liberals once defined themselves by -- are intentionally
forestalled, and democratic America comes to be increasingly pyramidic -- in
accord with liberal preference. If you're on my end, you might
just indicate how much you agree with Andrew, but unless this becomes your one
and only comment ever on a comment section, a brief passing by conveying no
sense that you live on the web but rather are for the most part out and about
on other things, though your heart will be deemed in the right place, the whole
otherwise anthropology of you will keep you a jumble more than a bit comically
less kept-together than he.
We are told that this essentially
is Marvel's picture, not Joss Whedon's. Personally, I wonder how someone
supposedly so infused with female respect could ever not effuse his affectional
ethos all over a film of his make. If this film does indeed feel
all-male, I'd encourage people to look back on his earlier works for signs of
significant female discomfort that would lead him -- when such could be excused
-- to ultimately seek to sublimate himself into projects where women end up
shoved to the side while male concerns predominate. A lot of men who
champion women are trying to be good boys, showing their mothers their
allegiance to them through their annhilating misbehaving boy-men -- their own
bad boy selves. These types always find some way to guilt-free revenge
themselves for this ongoing maternal domination, though. For Whedon, it
might have been this opportunity to do damage through the excuse of following
Marvel heritage. Perhaps if this psychology holds true with Andrew, look
for signs of it in the kinds of art movies he can preference which others
blanche at -- ones that contain significant examples of female humiliation and
torture, for example; for with art films, you could always convince yourself it
was the other things that tintilated, or that the manner of the portrayal
conveyed unmistakable criticism, or some such.
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