There have been some terrible kids’ films released this year. Terrible.
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They look wonderful, of course. CGI continues to improve at an extraordinary rate.
Possibly one of the worst of the bunch is Planes, a Cars spin off from Pixar about a gang of male planes who race each other. Along the way they toss out insults by calling each other ‘ladies’. (This is apparently so funny that it’s included in some trailers.) There are other problems with this movie. I’m not going to pay money to see this one, so that’s where I leave off on my commentary on Planes. Reel Girl has already articulated the main issues, so all I need to do is share.
Suffice to say that this kids’ film, like most, is all about the male experience. Females are the ‘other’.
What I’m most interested in right now is a common counter-argument from people who see nothing at all wrong with a gender imbalance (aka symbolic annihilation of women and girls) in popular media.
The argument goes a little something like this:
“The actual race in Planes is totally dominated by male competitors.” How shocking! You mean in real life the actual race is not dominated by male competitors?… This stuff is silly nonsense.
This feminist whine that animated movies for kids should reflect “progressive feminist” values is the kind of thing that gives feminism a bad name. Why? Because it’s silly overreach as usual.
The idea that animators see machines that race (airplanes, cars, dunebuggies, drag racers, etc.) as a male world isn’t an irrational sexist bias – it’s simply reality. Males – and especially boys – are by nature gung ho about machines to a degree that girls are not is obvious to anyone not wearing feminist blinders. That it’s necessary to point this out these days is a comment on the nuttiness of the feminist whiners who are constantly arguing that these natural differences are not natural but socially imposed. It’s B.S. Boys and girls are different from head to toe and always have been and always will be.
As Margot Magowan points out, in a story about flying planes who have faces and who talk to each other, why on earth should viewers expect some emulation of reality? Filmmakers — especially those with access to vast funds for computer generated imagery, which can nowadays create anything — can choose to tell absolutely any story they want to, yet they choose to tell stories about boys insulting girls.
I may have had a small epiphany recently. Somewhere, I came across this:
Fantasy writers are allowed one big lie.
What this means is that in a work of speculative fiction — especially in high fantasy — the storytellers may create any sort of bizarre world they want to, as long as the details ring true to their readers.
So, if we set a story on a distant planet and have all the characters living inside a bubble, readers are better able to suspend disbelief if the world inside that bubble is similar to the lives of the readers themselves. In this way, writers create a fantasy world which is at once believable and foreign. Because a lot of it looks familiar, the reader is able to relate to the characters. Unless readers relate to the characters, stories fail to stir emotions.
I can’t remember where the ‘one big lie’ advice comes from, but I will link to it later if I find it. But I will say I’ve heard it before. It does the rounds. Storytelling is a dark art, and there are many nuggets of wisdom floating around. I think there is some truth to it.
However:
Are storytellers using this storytelling advice as an excuse to avoid EXAMINATION OF their own sexist attitudes?
First this, from a master of storytelling, who writes of ‘failed’ screenplays:
The “personal story” [one kind of failed screenplay] is understructured, slice-of-life portraiture that mistakes verisimilitude for truth. This writer believes that the more precise his observation of day-to-day facts, the more accurate his reportage of what actually happens, the more truth he tells. But fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small ‘t’. Big “T” Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed. Because this writer sees only what is visible and factual, he is blind to the truth of life.
- Story, by Robert McKee
When the commenter above defends Planes because it’s ‘simple reality’, he speaks of truth with a small ‘t’. Planes is a small film (with a big budget), and speaks the kind of truth that has a very small ‘t’.
On the other hand, a masterful storyteller — nay, a competent storyteller — is indeed able to tell a story which casts females in traditionally male roles, yet it still feels believable.
Some storytellers are even able to write futuristic worlds in which women have equality, and they still manage to tell a truth; not only truth, but Truth. That’s because they are masterful storytellers.
Storytelling is a metaphor for life; not a direct reflection of it.
McKee continues:
[F]acts are neutral. The weakest possible excuse to include something in a story is: “But it actually happened.” Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we *think about* what happens.
- Story, Robert McKee
From the master storyteller himself: Everything happens. Sexism happens. And there is absolutely no excuse at all for the reproduction of outdated, anti-female and outright nasty portrayals of girls in any work of fiction for children.
Consider also the following concepts of storytelling:
‘THE WORLD OF THE WORK’
In talking about what Paul Ricoeur calls “the world of the work”, we assume, of course, that the work offers up a world of its own. Literary works summon such a world through their arrangement and adherence to formal rules; through their use of tradition and genre; through their intent and use of language. We might say that it is through style that literary works become more than the sum of their sentences. Literary works create new worlds by replacing the world itself and it is the metaphorical statement that reveals this operation. “Metaphor’s power of reorganizing our perception of things,’ Ricoeur writes, “develops from transposition of an entire ‘realm’”. Ricoeur calls this realm a “new referential design”, which I specify as the work’s metaphorical design.
- from Goth: Undead Subculture
THE ‘REAL-FICTIONAL DICHOTOMY’
…literary scholars tend to divide characters in terms of what I will call the real-fictional dichotomy. According to this notion, fictional characters, by definition, are “unreal” and human beings “real.” … we “construct an image of a person” by “fabricating [the image] in consciousness.”
- Believable Fictions
carnivalization
I came across this term when reading Maria Nikolajeva, who quotes Bahktin, initially describing the work of Dostoyevsky and Gogol, even though Nikolajeva finds this concept very relevant to children’s literature. (Did you get all that?)
- Children’s book are often criticised for being not true to life.
- In fact, verisimilitude (the appearance of being real) should not be confused with reality.
- ‘Carnivalization’ is a means to achieve a distance from cruel aspects of reality.
- An example of ‘carnivalization’ common in fiction for younger readers is use of allegorical names for people and places, which would never occur in real life, but say something meaningful about the story at hand. (Gogol and Evelyn Waugh do this also.)
- An example of an author for adult readers who has perfected the use of carnivalization is Franz Kafka. The technique is strangely accepted in the work of Kafka, but often questioned by critics when the same thing appears in children’s books.
- The Wikipedia entry on the genre of Carnivalesque
In sum
There is no possible narrative excuse for failing to include more female characters in children’s films.
Storytellers must do away with the idea that in a work of fantasy (e.g. one with talking planes), that no other deviation from reality is possible. Verisimilitude is a robust beast.
‘truth’ is not ‘Truth’, and the slavish duplication of human reality in film indicates a failure to make use of story as metaphor for life.
An audience is able to cope with ‘unreal’ situations in fiction because we understand intuitively the ‘real-fictional dichotomy’. Audiences understand that ‘the world of the work’ is different from ‘the real world’. We get it. We can cope.
The reason these concepts are ‘intuitive’ to an audience is due to a long history of storytelling which makes use of devices such as carnivalization (and metaphor and other figures of speech…)
There is no reason, other than unchallenged sexism, why established storytelling techniques cannot be utilised in big-budget children’s films to reimagine an inequal world.
And though I write here about gender, I am also writing about race.
Interesting Links:
Based on a “true” story: expecting reality in movies
Why newsworthy events do not lead to newsworthy novels, from Nathan Bransford
Only fiction can be about the trivial without being trivial, and more quotes along this line from Explore
The Beautiful Creatures authors give us the rules for creating a believable fantasy from io9
Believable Fictions: On the Nature of Emotional Responses to Fictional Characters
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