and the search begins...

For those of you who haven't read the comments to my earlier post about Batman Begins, Jacob, my professor and friend who taught me last fall (ie corrupted my mind with brilliant performance theory and liberalism) responded and was able to tell me what that article was! Hooray! It was Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema," which, as Jacob pointed out, our entire class hated. Now that I had that "aha!" moment the other day, i'm going to have to see if I still hate it as much.

So, I've got a lot more to think about, thanks to Jacob and Frances who posted as well as many others of you who I have chatted with about this.

I want to address a few questions put into my head about the whole subject of masculine vs. feminine in the movies and feminism in general.

I hate the Charlie's Angels movies so that is an example of girl kicking ass i don't enjoy. It fits neither in my catagory of heroines enacting masculinity OR the ideal portrayal I talked about which would be strong women being heros without playing into the hands of masculine stereotypes. I think I need to narrow what kind of movies I'm looking into. Charlie's Angels is an action movie, which would seem to coincide with the genre of Batman Begins. However, it is such a silly movie which does not even try to be taken seriously. Although all of them are strong women in their way, they play into the sexual stereotypes of the men both in the movie and in the audience. But then, as I'm thinking out loud, what makes that any different from Alias, which I have lauded in a past post?

Well, in Alias, Sydney often uses her sexuality to manipulate targets in her multiple disguises and I cannot deny that the viewing audience also thinks she is very sexy. However, I'm going to argue that the focus of Alias is much more intellectual than Charlie's Angels. It takes itself seriously as opposed to the Angels who seem to constantly laugh at themselves and beg for people to laugh with them. There is nothing wrong about laughing at the movies, but because Charlie's Angels is really a satire of a tv era, in many ways, it falls into a comedic action catagory which has its own problems. I think it falls out of the realm I'm really interested in right now which consists in a large part of comic book adaptations and spy stories, action movies which may have humor but are not made for the purpose of comedy. They are hero stories of a different kind.

Jacob also pointed out other types of movies with strong women like Erin Brockovich which I probably misspelled. I saw it awhile ago so I can't comment on it yet but that is a good point. I'm going to rent it again as well as some other movies in slightly different genres to make sure I cover everything. The audience is so different for that kind of movie though that if I do something with my research I might narrow my view down to action movies. Although I would like to explore this in theater too since I am, afterall, a theater major, not a RTVF major.

Well, I'm about out of steam right now. I'm sure I'll have more tomorrow after another night of sleeping on the hard questions in life.

Goodnight y'all!