Showing posts with label Oz the Great and Powerful. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oz the Great and Powerful. Show all posts

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Monsters under the Bedroom

I watched Jurassic Park III last night.  My son had never seen it, and though it's the worst of the three, we happen to have the entire trilogy on blu-ray, so what the heck.  It's short, fast, and relatively convincing dinosaur-wise, so it wasn't a bad way to spend a Friday evening.

It's also, however, evidence of Hollywood's fascination with reasserting male power and prerogative, particularly in the family circle.  I commented on this in an earlier post on Oz, the Great and Powerful; I comment on the same phenomenon at length in my analysis of the first Jurassic Park in my book Framing Monsters.  It's one of the recurrent themes in Hollywood fantasy film (and, for all I know, in other genres; I don't watch much else).  As such, it's worth discussing.

On the surface, Jurassic Park III is about two things only: dinosaur attacks and cool special effects.  (That's really one thing, I know.)  But look a little closer, and you'll see it's also about a broken family that has fallen apart because, as the movie sees it, husband and wife have been playing the wrong roles.  She's the aggressor, the sexual predator; he's the wimp, the milquetoast.  They've been divorced for a year when the film's action starts, and we have every reason to believe she's the primary motivator of the marriage's breakup: her son is para-sailing with her new boyfriend when the two catastrophically crash on the island of the dinosaurs, an event that sets the whole rest of the plot in motion.  She's reckless, thoughtless, careless: according to her own report, she totaled three family vehicles during the time she was married.  In other words, she's a homewrecker--or, in the fantasy terms of the film, she's a monster.  Thus, though it makes no story sense that the female velociraptors would identify her as the one who's stolen their eggs--we the viewers see that she had nothing to do with the theft--it makes perfect thematic sense: this woman who has failed as a mother and nurturer, who has pursued sexual activity outside the sanctioned bounds of the family, must be humbled by the film's true monsters and, relinquishing the eggs that don't belong to her, return to her proper role within the family unit.

But monstrous women, the film also insists, only exist where weak men allow them to.  Thus the husband must be represented as his wife's polar opposite: prissily careful, incapable, anything but the strong, heroic male figure of Hollywood legend.  He owns a bathroom fixture store, which connects him to the home in a subordinate, "female" role: in Hollywood, it's women who make the toilets sparkle.  He gets his clock cleaned by paleontologist Alan Grant--no impressive male specimen himself, though in the first Jurassic Park he does claim the father's scepter by helping two abandoned children find their way across dinosaur-infested territory.  (Interestingly, in the end Dr. Grant chooses the study of raptors over the charms of his female companion, so that by the time we see him in JP III, he's a childless bachelor, "the last of his breed.")  It's only when the husband begins acting in a more appropriately macho way--lighting fires, operating heavy machinery, saving his wife and child from dinosaurs--that he recovers his lost family: in a completely nonsensical scene, the woman who divorced him a year previously screams hysterically, "You can't leave me!" when she believes he's died defending her from a dino attack.  Perhaps the most interesting moment in the film occurs when the father smiles in grim satisfaction at his son's rejection of his mother's coddling: in the film's terms, the son too has become a MAN, someone who keeps a firm hand over women rather than submitting to them.

I've wondered for many years why Hollywood seems so obsessed with telling such stories, but perhaps the answer is simple.  Along with the corporate boardroom and the political arena, Hollywood remains one of our culture's bastions of traditional male authority: it's a place where almost all the important decisions are made by men, while women meekly obey.  Yet that kind of power never comes without anxiety that someone--Barbra Streisand, the feminists, NOW--might strip it away.  So the film industry neurotically imagines the opposition in the form of female monsters, only to restore male power in the end.

It makes for some interesting analytical moments.  But it also makes for a lot of films that really bite.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

We're Not in Kansas Anymore

I saw Disney's prequel to The Wizard of Oz today.  My initial reaction was that it had some interesting effects--particularly the well-rendered china doll--and characterizations--particularly the winged monkey who aids the neophyte wizard--but that it didn't pack anywhere near the imaginative punch of the 1939 classic.  Like so much of today's big-budget fantasy fare, Oz, the Great and Powerful seemed more interested in spectacle than story: instead of deepening or extending the Oz mythology in interesting ways, what we got was a lot of green-screen action sequences (many of them looking like bad 1980s video games, and some of them clearly included only for their 3-D possibilities), an overly familiar tale of a scoundrel becoming a fatherly saint (think Real Steel and X-Men: First Class, just to name the two that popped first into my head), and a painfully familiar tale of evil women (wearing black and showing lots of cleavage) duking it out with their angelic counterparts for the love of a man.

In one respect, though, I found the film interesting: its self-referential nature.  When a film culminates with a showman projecting images of himself onto a screen to dominate the masses, one can't help thinking that the film is making only a barely disguised appeal to its own technological and cultural operations.  (The film does, in fact, refer to Edison's early experiments in moving pictures, so the self-referential nature of the effects cannot be chance.)  The 1939 film, as I've shown in my book Framing Monsters, was itself very much interested in the nature of film and film technology, so there's a nice continuity between the two movies there.

The difference, however, is that Oz '39 was quite skeptical about the power of film as a cultural force; set against the backdrop of 1930s Hollywood's attempts to monopolize the technology, bust unions, and force independent producers and exhibitors out of business, the original film was anything but enthusiastic about film's immense cultural power.  (It's the wizard's cinematic exploits, after all, that are revealed as humbugs.)  But Oz '13 represents the deceptive qualities of film as an agency of salvation: the wizard cows and defeats the two witches through the power of the cinema, and the citizens of Emerald City are liberated, not shanghaied, by this power.  I sensed no irony in the wizard's triumphant use of cinematic illusion to ascend the throne; judging by this film, it seems that little compunction remains in today's Hollywood about the industry's cultural dominance.

And really, why should any such compunction remain?  Film is so pervasive as to be all-but-invisible.  It's everywhere, and as such it's nowhere.

Which is about as good a definition of ideology as you're likely to find.