I, and I feel like most people, are perfectly willing to give any creative work a fair shot, and indeed, female leads in traditionally male roles offer a new opportunity to tell a new story, which is great in this time of endless remakes, reboots, and sequels nobody asked for.
…but just like it’s not fair for viewers to dislike a work just because of a female lead, it’s just as unfair for the creators (and critics) to expect viewers to like a work just because of a female lead.
Too often these days, it seems like the discourse surrounding such movies is simply a straightforward test of: “Did you like this movie? If not, you’re a misogynist.”
Unfortunately this misses the possibility (intentionally, at times) of viewers who didn’t like a work for any number of fair and valid reasons, from fairly objective weaknesses to simple subjective preferences. Even people who wouldn’t have liked the same movie even if it were cast with traditional male actors filling the roles as expected.
This does a disservice to women (or whatever unrepresented demographic takes center stage in the work) by shackling the merits of gender and/or racial equality to an artistic work for which criticism will necessarily be highly subjective…and from that point it just makes a fundamentally strong and simple truth (“We should value everyone, regardless of gender or race”) and corrupt it to the point that the message that’s really coming across in these conversations is sadly more the unspoken suggestion that these groups need this movie to prove their worth.
Which is nonsense.
Women are perfectly capable of kicking ass without having a movie tell us so. A shit movie about women can still be a shit movie without changing the truth of women being incredible. And we should all be able and willing to make a distinction between negative sentiment for a movie featuring women, negative sentiment for the performance done by female actors, and negative sentiment toward women in general.
Well said.
I, and I feel like most people, are perfectly willing to give any creative work a fair shot, and indeed, female leads in traditionally male roles offer a new opportunity to tell a new story, which is great in this time of endless remakes, reboots, and sequels nobody asked for.
…but just like it’s not fair for viewers to dislike a work just because of a female lead, it’s just as unfair for the creators (and critics) to expect viewers to like a work just because of a female lead.
Too often these days, it seems like the discourse surrounding such movies is simply a straightforward test of: “Did you like this movie? If not, you’re a misogynist.”
Unfortunately this misses the possibility (intentionally, at times) of viewers who didn’t like a work for any number of fair and valid reasons, from fairly objective weaknesses to simple subjective preferences. Even people who wouldn’t have liked the same movie even if it were cast with traditional male actors filling the roles as expected.
This does a disservice to women (or whatever unrepresented demographic takes center stage in the work) by shackling the merits of gender and/or racial equality to an artistic work for which criticism will necessarily be highly subjective…and from that point it just makes a fundamentally strong and simple truth (“We should value everyone, regardless of gender or race”) and corrupt it to the point that the message that’s really coming across in these conversations is sadly more the unspoken suggestion that these groups need this movie to prove their worth.
Which is nonsense.
Women are perfectly capable of kicking ass without having a movie tell us so. A shit movie about women can still be a shit movie without changing the truth of women being incredible. And we should all be able and willing to make a distinction between negative sentiment for a movie featuring women, negative sentiment for the performance done by female actors, and negative sentiment toward women in general.