Pixar's Up: Uproariously Funny/Infuriatingly Gendered

What can I say about Pixar's most recent offering, Up? Well, after the pure and innovative wonder of WALL•E, Up seemed almost destined to come in second. And yet, I don't think it is in Pixar's power to make a bad movie. Up, the story of Carl Fredrickson, is so moving, so powerful, so slapstick funny, so entirely different than what has preceded it, that it both fits in the pantheon of Pixar films in terms of greatness and reaches those heights independently. Just like all of the great Pixar films that came before.

I can say that Russell is the most believable kid I've ever seen in a movie. From his reason for wanting the last necessary Wilderness Explorer badge, to his complaints about how his knee hurt and how he had to go to the bathroom, Russell was a prepubescent kid. The excitability, the lack of precociousness, the poking Carl in the face when he thought Carl might be dead - all were spot on.

I can say that the twenty minute montage of Carl and Ellie's life together was perhaps the best and most moving piece of animation I have ever seen. It in and of itself could have been a Pixar short, though a rather somber one.

I can say that Carl's reactions throughout the film, from bonking that guy on the head to his obsession with his mailbox to talking to his house as if Ellie were still in it to kissing Ellie's picture, were achingly, heartbreakingly realistic.

I can say that Dug the Dog was an awesome addition to the movie.

I can say that I would watch this movie perhaps more than any other Disney or Pixar film - if it weren't for Dory's "I wish I could speak whale" moment in Finding Nemo.

And yet. And yet there is the "girl problem". I've posted about this before, after WALL•E came out. But Up continues to highlight the problems I've had with Pixar films - and in ways, it goes farther toward making it worse, to making it less female-friendly.

Like, Ellie gets a couple of lines in the beginning of the film when she's a kid, and then is silenced by the (again, thoroughly beautiful and moving) 20 minute montage, a montage that ends with her death. Young Ellie, for all of her 5 minutes on screen, is the only actual speaking role a main female character, partially because there is only one other main female character. And that's a bird. Named Kevin. I've probably posted before about my dislike of boys' names for girls in movies and television shows. Which I was fine with for quite a while. My antipathy for that particular practice didn't develop until I heard Bryan Fuller talk about how giving girls boys' names made them easier for him to write, that it was hard for him to write a 'girl' character. Then I had a bit of a lightbulb moment.

The lightbulb moment is this: "characters" are easy to write. "Girl characters" are not. A film about someone bringing his house to Paradise Falls and having a young stowaway who only wants his Wilderness badge is a film the Pixar people can write. A film where a girl does the same thing is not.

In many of the other blog posts about gender issues in Pixar films floating around the feminist ether, some commenter inevitably makes the point that Pixar isn't the only film studio almost exclusively living in Boysville. And that's true, but that (a) doesn't really absolve Pixar, and (b) only demonstrates exactly how prevalent this problem really is - which just reinforces the point that this is a bad and deserves to be addressed. However, the reason I'm picking on Pixar is because the films they make are so imaginative, so talented, so brilliant, so emotionally resonant, that it is all the more disappointing when they either can't or won't write a film with a main character who is a woman - and who isn't a princess. Pixar movies about boys can be chef-rats and toys and superheroes and fish and cars and old men. Pixar movies about girls - the one Pixar movie in the works about a girl - is about a princess. The juxtaposition the complex imaginings of the Pixar oeuvre with the seeming inability to imagine where women and girls fit as individual characters within that oeuvre is profoundly depressing. It is depressing because I believe if ever there was a studio that has the ability to create a universal story with a female protagonist, Pixar is that studio. It is depressing because these are children's films that continually privilege boys, making them the centers of each individual universe, and thus reinforce the idea of Male as default and Female as the other. It reinforces the idea of Woman being the Second Sex.

The Mad Typist has a run down of Pixar films and grades them accordingly in terms of how the women are portrayed, and FilthyGrandeur has another run down of the Pixar dilemma. And again, the problem isn't the films individually. It is incredibly easy to defend the decision to make a film about Flick, or Buzz and Woody, or Bob Parr, or Marlin and Nemo, or Carl and Russell, or Lightening McQueen, or Remy, or Sulley and Mike, or WALL•E. Each individual movie is great. Each individual movie can be rationalized. It is when all of the movies are taken as a group that the issue emerges. Out of the 10 movies that have been released, not one of them features a female protagonist. If we add the 3 movies in some form of production, the average goes to 1 out of 13 movies features a female protagonist. Meanwhile, one is about a newt named "Newt", which just goes further to reinforce that "male as default" thing.

Pixar, because of the power the studio commands, because of the audience their films attract (like, young ones), because of the fact that women make up more than 1/13 of the world population, need to engage in some serious corrective measures. Because as much as I love Pixar, it cuts to consistently see my gender underrepresented or outright erased from the films I pay to see. It hurts to have my gender consistently portrayed as "love interest" or "sidekick" - or both in one character. And to be perfectly frank, it's kind of pissing me off that after the wondrous ingenuity of rats who want to cook and toys who are alive (in a noncreepy way) and old men dealing with grief and life's disappointments, girls once again get the princess crap. As if "Princess" is an underrepresented genre of film for girls. As if "Princess" isn't a problematic description for little girls, if for no other reason than most little girls won't ever be one - because "princess" is something one is and not something one can work at becoming. As Monique Fields said regarding Disney's The Princess and the Frog,

Some little girls are telling anyone who will listen that they want to be princesses when they grow up. If nothing else, I expect a more ambitious and attainable goal from children who haven’t yet learned to read or write.

I have faith in Pixar. I have the expectation that I'll be going to see Pixar films in the theater much more frequently than I will see any other type of movie. I anticipate that, like Linda Holmes, I will adore The Bear and the Bow. But as much as I want Pixar to recognize that there are girls in the world and we're worth their attention, I'd also really love it if they recognized that shorthand for "girl" isn't "princess". You'd think they would have gotten that memo, after making Ellie and EVE and Violet and Dory. But apparently, they haven't yet.

Oh, Toot

Barack Obama's grandmother has died. I wish she could have held out two more days, to see Obama become president.

Paul Newman

Paul Newman, resident of Westport Connecticut for more years than I've been alive and star of such films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke, died yesterday after a battle with lung cancer at age 83.

Paul Newman was an actor my mother adored, not only because of his looks and talent but also because of his philanthropical ways. We bought Newman's Own products in part because they were delicious and in part because the proceeds -after taxes- went to charities. We bought his daughter's off-shoot of Newman's Own because it was organic. She bought Shameless Exploitation: In Pursuit of the Common Good, a well written, funny, moving, and sad book about Newman and his charities and how he and AE Hotchner came up with the idea for the first product -the salad dressing. And it talks about the development of his Hole In The Wall Gang Camp, a summer camp for seriously ill children. It is hard for me to greatly admire actors as people rather than just admiring their craft in many circumstances. But I admired Paul Newman as a person; I admired his dedication to his charities, and I admired the way he developed those charities and worked at those charities instead of just signing over a good deal of money to one already founded. I think it speaks to what he was passionate about, and what force of good he thought he could be on the world. And his charities and products will continue to live on, which is the best outcome Paul Newman or anyone else could ever hope for.

In honor of Paul Newman, I may break out some of his movies; The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, maybe even Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And I'll wish he and Robert Redford had made one more movie together. And maybe, once I'm financially solvent, I'll write a good sized check to the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp.

Just Call Me the Harbinger of Doom

My mom does, in fact, call me the Harbinger of Doom. When I was younger, I would listen to the radio as I read or decorated my walls or -more infrequently- cleaned my room. And through those years, I was often the first one in my family to learn of a tragedy and would then pass along that news to the rest of the family. Princess Diana, JFK Jr.'s disappearance, the Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy, these were all incidents my parents heard first from me. It got to the point where my mother threatened to confiscate my radio. The nickname has returned with a vengeance this weekend, as I had the unfortunate fate of telling her that Bernie Mac had died at 50 from pneumonia, and also that Isaac Hayes died at the age 65. 

Both Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes made an indelible mark on popular culture as a whole and on their own mediums individually, and I'm sure their loss will be felt keenly. What this really makes me want to do, though, is jump in my car and drive to Memphis to visit Stax Museum, a museum built in the recording studio where Isaac Hayes first recorded and which is one of the best museums I have ever been privileged to visit. Plus, it has Isaac Hayes' car and a recording of him warning visiters not to get too close. I want to go there, and see the influence he has had already and see the mark he has made on history for myself. And maybe buy a cd on the way out.

Megan Wright

Feministing.com has so many stories about violence against women today that all of them have been combined into one blog post. They are all horrific, but one in particular had a comment on a linked-blog I found particularly true. It is the case of Megan Wright, a girl who was allegedly raped by three men in a dorm room and later committed suicide in the aftermath. The detective in charge of the investigation did not look very far into the accusation, and decided that because the boys held up a sign to the surveillance cameras stating "I WANT TO HAVE SEX" and signed by Megan that she had given consent. Now, maybe Megan wrote the sign, and maybe she didn't. Maybe she signed it, and maybe she didn't. However, I can't help but feel that if even one of the three boys felt in the middle of all the sex that there was the possibility there may be a rape accusation in the morning, then maybe it wasn't so consensual. That the sign could have been written under some form of coercion. Another possibility is that the boys were engaging in an act of "slut shaming" -ie, making this girl feel badly for giving it up at all (though that still reeks of coercion to me); either way, this isn't exactly behavior that screams innocence to me.

And that brings me to this insightful comment:

"It is such a myth that women wake up and decided [sic] rape is a better alternative to shame. Considering how much more her name has been sloughed through the mud, and how awful her treatment was, that seems evidence that this young woman made a very hard decision to come forward with rape charges."

That is an apt observation. Yes, there are cases to the contrary. Yes, there will always be women who falsely accuse men of rape. Yes there was that Duke rape case. Yes, that will be brought up by rape apologists, rapists, mainstream America, and Men's Rights Activists when rapes are reported for the foreseeable future. But even if women's rights groups have a depressed figure in their 2% of false rape accusations (and I think they probably do), the FBI's 1996 study puts the figure only at 8%. I'm more for using that figure than ones given by women's rights groups or MRAs because the FBI has less of an agenda than either side. And yet, almost every single woman who comes forward saying she has been raped gets hit with the insinuation that she is falsely accusing the man involved. It has replaced the panty defense in the rape apology arsenal.

I happen to agree with the quote; no sane woman would report a rape to reduce the shame of having sex -mostly because as soon as most women do they are accused of making it up. In most cases, consensual sex is not a publicly known event. There are cases in which it is; pictures, video tapes, a roommate happens to be present. But often, the only people who know if sex went down that night are the people who engaged in sex. If a rape is reported and investigated and brought to trial, the circumstances of the rape become known to more than just the two people involved. Parents, friends, jurors, and the people in the courtroom now all know -and on top of that, the normal defense is that the sex was consensual, that the girl wanted it, and that she is a liar and a scarlet woman for bringing false charges before the court.

Secondly, there is less shame around sexual involvement now. There is still shame, don't get me wrong, and often it is gender-based. Jessica Valenti's book She's a Slut, He's a Stud says so in the very title. But there is a degree of sexual freedom now available to women that has never before in modern history been present. And because of that, there is less of a "she's dirty, she's worthless, she's the cow who gave away the milk for free". Women's worth is still tied, in part, to her sexuality; but it is getting better.

Which leads me to this point: those who slut shame, those we insinuate the women are accusing men of rape because they are embarrassed or feel dirty after they have had sex are part of the problem because they further inculcate that idea into the minds of society; the idea that women shouldn't have sex, that women shouldn't like sex, and that women should be ashamed to have it and thus when they do immediately have to cry rape. The media, these MRAs, and so on are part of the problem because they reinforce gender and societal stereotypes. 

And those stereotypes hurt women like Megan Wright, and they hurt other women who have been raped and who are strong enough to bring that charge forward. I hate those women who do falsely accuse men of rape, because they make it that much harder for women who have been victimized to be taken seriously. But we have to all do our part to take these accusations seriously, to really examine them without jumping to conclusions about how she slept with the whole swim team or how he obviously did it because he's a thug/has an earring/privileged rich white boy/etc. Because this is too important an accusation to be playing around with. Lives, the ones of the people accused and the lives of the accuser, depend that we investigate these claims thoroughly, seriously, and without prejudice. Megan Wright deserved that; the Duke Lacrosse players deserved that; and countless other victims deserve it too.

Another One

Goodbye, Blanche. I hope the school xylophone is ringing out for you.

George Carlin

Just in case you missed it....