many mothers
I already reblogged a thing about Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron and the contrast between how they deal with motherhood, infertility and what it means to be a woman.
It’s surreal to think that these two movies came out just two weeks apart from one another in the US. In a way I feel a little bit sorry for AoU, because it would have looked like a perfectly okay summer blockbuster if Fury Road hadn’t come barreling down right on its tail and smashed all our pathetic lowball expectations to flaming shards in the sand.
When AoU came out, I had a lot of discussions with people about Natasha’s plotline. Because my gut reaction was certainly a massive eyeroll that the one female Avenger’s deep, dark secret is that she can’t have babies. But also, it’s not like a story about a woman who underwent forced sterilization is something we shouldn’t care about. (And in the US, this is a particular form of restriction of reproductive rights that’s disproportionately affected poor women of color.) And if she internalized the line that was fed to her, that she couldn’t be both a killer and a mother, that certainly doesn’t make it her fault.
But it still frustrated me, and my frustrations were really, really well articulated by this article. You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s excellent. But this is the relevant quote:
There’s nothing wrong with stories about women who are housewives or stories about women who struggle because they were forcibly prevented from having kids as a condition of whatever mission they chose to undertake. The problem is that with so few women in superhero movies, each of these portrayals stands not only for the choices Whedon made, but for all the choices he and many others didn’t and don’t make. The portrayals of Natasha and Laura rankle at some level, for me, not because they are stories about a woman traumatized by not having children and a woman waiting for her husband to come home, but because it’s another story about those two women rather than any of the other bazillion women who could exist in this universe and don’t. If you had five butt-kicking women in this movie, it would seem perfectly logical that one of them might have a story related to getting pregnant or not. Why wouldn’t she?
These, for me, are scarcity problems. They are problems because there are so few opportunities to show women in action blockbusters that I tend to crave something very much capable of moving discussions of what those portrayals can be like forward.
…Scarcity will always drive us back to these same conversations about how every woman carries the obligation to represent What This Director Thinks Women Are For, and absolutely no answer to that question will ever be a good answer.
I think this is an interesting discussion in the context of Fury Road, because, intentionally or not, the movie takes on the scarcity problem in a couple of different ways.
On the most basic level, it gives us lots of women. In a context where studies have found that even background crowds in movies are on average only 17% women, Fury Road is FULL of women. Young women. Old women. Women who are disabled. Women who are physically strong and as skilled with weapons and vehicles as any of the men in their world. Women who are not physically strong but fight anyway. 80-year-old women who ride motorbikes and talk about all the kill shots they’ve made.
Look at the shot at the top of this post. Twelve women on screen at once! That’s more women in a single frame that some movies have speaking parts for.
Max may have his name on the title card, but he spends the movie surrounded by women. Team War Rig starts out as one man and six women; later it’s two men and five women; then it gets supplemented by a bunch more women in the third act. It’s almost an exact flip of the 20% rule of thumb, where one woman for every four men seems normal.
But Fury Road deals with the scarcity problem in another way, too, one that I think is particularly important given the film’s content. It gives us six women all reacting to the same circumstances of slavery and sexual violence, and allows them to have different, individualized, and sometimes contradictory reactions, all of which are presented as valid.
So we have Toast, who counts bullets and loads weapons, who hacks off her hair to spite Joe, who grabs his gun at a key moment and gets pistol-whipped for it, who spits on his corpse when he’s dead. Angharad, who self-injures, who uses her status as Joe’s favorite against him, who can be fearless, or reckless, with her own body, but also clings to nonviolence even when that tactic has limitations in a violent world, who stops Furiosa from killing Nux, but then pushes him out of a moving vehicle seconds later. Capable, who holds onto kindness, understanding and compassion, despite all the violence around her, who trusts Nux when Furiosa is pointing a gun at him and growling, “Get out,” and proves to be correct in her instincts. Dag, who retreats into her own head, but is often the first to sense danger, who hurls insults at her abuser, and also at Max while he’s pointing a gun at them. Cheedo, who gets scared and tries to run back to the person who hurt her, but then later uses her perceived fragility as a weapon. And Furiosa, who holds on to her rage even as she fights her way up the ranks to become Joe’s trusted lieutenant, and finally uses it to end him.
And none of these reactions are treated as better or worse or right or wrong or the correct way to be a survivor of violence. It’s okay to be angry; it’s okay to be kind; it’s okay to be scared. Because there are so many women in the movie, each one of them gets to be a unique character instead of an avatar of What This Director Thinks Women Are For.
Extend that to all of filmmaking, and to all the many kinds of identities that are underrepresented on screen today. That’s how you deal with the scarcity problem.
