The Complex History of the Chosen One

Emily Blake explains why being picked by destiny is an inferior story choice.

 

I don’t believe in destiny or soul mates or any kind of predetermined fate of any kind. I’m willing to accept that maybe the force is real. Maybe karma. But free will is my jam, so movies about “The Chosen One” are always a bit problematic in my mind. Here’s a person who never earned anything being protected by all the people who are doing the real labor, on the promise that this person will live up to some vague premonition they’ve all decided to risk their lives for. It’s not a great lesson about life, even if it is a nice fantasy to imagine that the Powers That Be have given us someone to save us all with their magical gifts.

 

I love when being The Chosen One is earned. I hate when it’s a birthright. And now, some examples:

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Diversity in Pop Culture is What Will Save Us

It’s time to invest in stories from different perspectives!

 

A few months ago, I sat on a fan filmmaking panel at a small fan convention. I proposed the panel and moderated it. The other panelists were a young man/woman filmmaking team who regularly produced content, and an older white man who had made one fan film in the ‘80s. The other woman and I offered the most practical advice, and ended up doing most of the talking (this was a situation where the moderator is one of the panelists, not an outside interviewer), and providing what I feel is a pretty valuable list of advice to new filmmakers interested in making fan films.

 

Yet when the door opened and the young convention volunteer came in to tell us we had five minutes left, he looked at the old white guy and waited for his approval. I kept nodding at him, then waved at him, then finally had to verbally interrupt a point the other woman was making to say THANK YOU to the volunteer before he realized that I was leading the panel and I got his message. It had never occurred to him that the only old white man on the stage was not in charge of the panel.

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Yes, Women Can Be Friends!

Women can be friends.

It’s true! Women can even be amazing friends who support each other. I’ve worked on all-female crews, and the environment is a lovely, supportive safe place where teamwork is paramount, and nobody has to worry about getting sexually harassed or made to feel insignificant. Conflicts still happen and enemies still exist, but when women work together, they can get a lot done and have a good time.

 

Ocean’s 8 did a great job of embracing this. In fact, the teamwork was almost TOO good. There wasn’t enough drama for my taste, and maybe that’s because it was realistic. In real life, an all-female team of thieves would just get shit done and solve problems and not try to dick measure.

 

 

We’re taught that women are catty bitches who see each other as competition, but that doesn’t match what I see in my world.

 

On film, female friendships are often adversarial. For every 9 to 5, you get 10 Working Girls, where women compete for the same job or the same man or both. At some point action directors realized that when you put a woman in a black leather bodysuit and make her fight another woman in a white leather body suit, that turns other men on. As I’ve written before, in any large group, there can be only one woman, which automatically makes other women competition. We’re constantly barraged in pop culture with this idea that women cannot be friends.

 

But the times, they are a’changin’.

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About that Lone Girl on the Team…

Guys, we need to talk about that lone girl on the team. You know, the only one “allowed?”

Think of your favorite movie featuring a team, something like Ocean’s Eleven, Baby Driver, World’s End, or even a Guardians of the Galaxy.

 

How many women are on the team?

 

Was it one? Did I get that right?

 

 

Actually, in Ocean’s Eleven, the one woman isn’t even one of the titular eleven. In The Expendables, we don’t even get a woman until the third movie – and don’t think I didn’t notice when I saw the first one. My first thought on leaving the theater was “Where was Michelle Rodriguez?” That happens a lot, too – the all-male team – but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. I’m here to talk about that one woman who’s allowed to play with the boys.

 

My feelings about clowns are well documented on social media so I won’t be seeing IT, but I’m familiar with the story. It’s a good story and I enjoyed the original series (Tim Curry’s clown is more funny than scary, which is the only reason I didn’t throw my TV out the window. Fuck that clown in Poltergeist, though. Fuck it to hell.), but it does fall into that “one girl allowed” trap.

 

We went a long time with only one female Avenger, and she still hasn’t gotten her own movie. You don’t have to go far to find examples.

 

Here’s how it works. You’re a group of boys, but you’ll allow ONE girl in, as long as she’s a tomboy. She must be tough and way cooler than all the other girls because she’s willing to do the fun stuff boys do like ride around on bikes or steal priceless artifacts, not just sit around playing with her Barbies all day and being lame. If you’re kids, maybe your lead boy has a crush on her, but she doesn’t have time for that shit because she’s too busy being cool. When she grows up, though, she becomes Zoe Saldana in The Losers – a sexy badass who’ll flirt with you just enough to think you have a chance.

 

It’s a clearly established message, one we see play out in a film like Working Girl, where the women eat each other. There is room in the boy’s club for exactly ONE woman, and that one woman must be tough as nails. If another woman comes along, she is a threat to you. She might take the place you worked so hard to earn. What if she’s tougher or sexier or better at throwing rocks at clowns? You’ll be pushed out and replaced, because there’s never more than one. So you hate that other woman, and you will do what it takes to keep her away from your boys. And this is why you hear that old adage that women hate each other. No we don’t. We’ve just been taught to see each other as a threat because we’re not allowed to work together if we want to be successful.

 

 

And before you’re like “Get over it, lady. They’re just movies,” realize that this mimics our daily lives. I’ll never forget when Ken Marino was on The Nerdist podcast and Chris Hardwick asked him why he never had more than one woman in the cast of The State. I’m paraphrasing (not by much), but this is what Ken said: “We had Kerri Kenny. Why would we need another woman?” They had what – ten men in that cast? But why would you need more than one woman? It wasn’t a joke – this was Ken’s actual reasoning. (And white people as far as the eye can see, while we’re at it)

 

Movies about women doing “grrrrl power” stuff is totally fine. A chick flick like Waiting to Exhale or First Wives Club? Go for it, ladies. Just don’t touch our man’s world with your delicate manicured fingers.

 

Need proof? Look at what happened with the female Ghostbusters. More than one woman holding a gun? And none of them are even wearing spandex and sliding sexily under a laser beam? (Although, OMG now I really want to see Leslie Jones wear spandex and slide sexily under a laser beam) And they’re FRIENDS? And THE MAN IS THE DUMB SEXY ONE? THE WORLD IS ENDING!!!!! EVERYONE PANIC!!!!

 

Men hate women liking the same things they like so much that they actually said a Ghosbusters movie about women would ruin their childhoods. Like, those actual words were used, and not just by one or two guys either. I gotta tell you dudes, I survived all the Ghosbusters being dudes. I survived all the kids in Stand By Me being dudes. I survived all the Expendables being dudes. I survived all the thousands of heist movies (Go watch The Hot Rock, you plebes) being about dudes (and usually one woman). My childhood was ruined by shitty parenting, not by watching movies about boys. I sure do wish I’d had some female Ghostbusters to look up to, though.

 

Boys get to have movies where they share a bond of friendship by going on adventures together. Girls get to have movies where they share a bond by drinking wine and talking about boys. We like having adventures too! We like busting ghosts! We like leaving the house and traipsing through the woods! And not just one of us – a LOT of us! Sometimes together! If the idea of that threatens your sense of self, the problem is you.

 

 

That’s why I’d like to conclude by giving a big shoutout to The Fast and Furious series. As that series has expanded, it’s gotten not only more diverse in color, but more diverse with women as well. Sure, you’ve got Letty, who is the stereotypical tomboy who’s normally allowed to exist in movies about teams, but you also get Gisele, who’s all grace and poise and has her own agency.  You get Ramsey, who’s smart and quippy. You get Hobbs with a female partner he relies on – more than once, even – and the relationship feels real. Say what you will about those films and their silliness, they allow their characters to expand away from what we’re used to seeing over and over, which is probably one of the reasons they’re so successful.

 

I’m tired of going to the theater to see the same sexy tomboy surrounded by white dudes (and one funny black guy) in every single movie. So bring on your lady Ghostbusters. Bring on your Amazons. And also bring on some new story about women that isn’t a reboot or adaptation or a story about a fucking road trip where we chat about how much boys suck or compete for a man. Bring on some goddamn girly adventures, because as Cindy Lauper once said in Goonies, which was allowed to have TWO girls, “What’s good enough for you is good enough for me.”

 

 

QUICK NOTE: Originally mentioned at the top of the post that Kung-Fu Panda only had one female character on the team, but it turns out we forgot about Viper, played by Lucy Liu.

 

Wonder Woman: Why She Matters

Go see this movie. Don’t make me have to hurt you.

As you must know by now, Wonder Woman is almost here. The big marketing push hasn’t begun yet, making some nervous that the studio isn’t going to support the film as much because it has a female lead. Others are dismissing the concerns, asserting that the marketing barrage will begin as soon as Guardians 2 hits theaters and stops sucking the air out of the room.

 

“Why does this even matter?” You may ask. “If the movie is good, it will make money. If it’s bad, it won’t! So stop worrying and go to the movies.”

 

If that is what you’re saying, you’re probably a dude.

 

I plan to see this movie about a dozen times, whether it’s good or not. Don’t get me wrong – I hope with all of my being that it’s amazing and blows every other superhero film right out of the water, but it’s getting my dollars even if it turns out to be worse than that one really terrible Batman movie (you pick which one).

 

I’ll explain. It starts at the beginning:

 

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Katniss & the Strength of Vulnerability

When your government forces you to murder teenagers on a live TV show, you really need somebody to hug.

 

Let’s talk about girls.

 

I’m a girl. You may or may not be a girl. But one thing we both know is that girls don’t always get the best roles in film. I watch a lot of action films, and sometimes I’ll watch a movie that is otherwise spectacular, but has zero women in it. Sometimes action films will have a cool prostitute character who keeps our hero grounded emotionally while also having super sweaty sex with him.

 

There was a time when conventional wisdom was that you couldn’t get an action film made with a lady in the lead unless that lady was Angelina.

 

That was then.

 

Now I have all kinds of girl crushes. Watching women kick ass is probably my favorite thing in the whole world besides impressing strangers at a karaoke bar.

 

Every so often I’ll be popping by here to talk about films from the lady perspective. I won’t just stick to action films, but I will start there.

 

One of my biggest girl crushes is Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. If you haven’t seen the movies, go watch them right now and come back, otherwise you’re gonna be super spoiled by what comes next.

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