A Sexist Cinematic Universe

Gamergate seems as good a place to start as any. For those not familiar, Gamergate was a 2014 crisis in the video game community that saw multiple campaigns of targeted harassment against prominent women in the industry. Nominally, the issue at hand was "ethics in game journalism," but this was nothing more than a wispy smokescreen covering over a nasty sentiment: We men don't want women and SJWs* infiltrating our boys' club and critiquing the [ro]bust objectification rampant in the medium. If this is sounding familiar, that's because Gamergate was a sort of a coming out party for the alt-right and neo-nazi movements plaguing our political landscape now. The implications of Gamergate were ignored or dismissed as something dumb happening on the internet. A huge mistake.

*Social Justice Warrior, an apparently disparaging term popularized by this very movement

As the alt-right movement grew in power, if not yet in prominence, the Red[dit] Horde set its sights on the movies. Ghostbusters (2016) has been the most striking example of uproarious backlash to totally innocuous diversity initiatives. This represented a sea change in fan entitlement, crossing a line from tweeting angrily at artists to decisive and violent collective action. Infantile fans resented the womanwashing of their original heroes. In response they waged online crusades against the reputation of the film, trying their best to drag the box office take down (proving, I suppose, that feminism isn't profitable). A particularly insidious group launched an abuse campaign against one of the film's cast members, Leslie Jones, until she was forced off of social media. Why Leslie Jones specifically? Sexism and racism make good bedfellows. Jones hasn't made a high profile movie since, though she lends her voice to this year's The Angry Birds Movie 2.

There have been plenty more bumps and grinds along the way, and here we are in 2019 well worse for the wear. Yet we get bleaker still.


In November 2017 John Lasseter, co-founder and darling director/producer of Pixar was sent on leave and subsequently fired due to allegations of rampant, persistent sexual harassment in the workplace. Not only did it come to light that the Pixar head cultivated a bro-y, boys' club environment at the acclaimed animation studio, but that Lasseter himself was so touchy-feely with his female staff that he was assigned a handler to curb his impulses. A handler, folks.

This should come as little surprise to those who pay attention to the optics of Pixar's output. The heralded films featured a long and unbroken string of male and male-coded protagonists, even when those protagonists were rats or robots or bugs or monsters or cars. Look at Toy Story, for example, one of my favorite movies that I also consider to be one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time. There are a total of three women in the entire ensemble cast: a mother whose face is never seen, a baby, and Bo Peep, whose character traits can be summed up as "placid" and whose arc can be summed up as "standing very still."

Pixar received many pats on the back for breaking this pattern with 2012's Brave--a film that feels mediocre and somewhat schizophrenic because its director, Brenda Chapman, was fired partway through production and replaced with a guy named Mark.

Then came November 2017, the cathartic end of John Lasseter's career on the heels of the #MeToo movement. It lasted about a year.

In early January 2019, Lasseter was announced as the head of Skydance Animation, the recent spinoff off Skydance Studios, distributors of the Mission Impossible films as well as a handful of others that you would vaguely recognize. Hell of a statement to make coming out of the gate.

The fervor around this blew over, predictably. People have Trump's antics to gripe about I guess. Skydance Media Chief Executive David Ellison had Lasseter apologize multiple times to his new employees, and sent a lengthy e-mail asserting that Lasseter is, I shit you not, "contractually obligated to behave professionally." They got away with the bold, inexcusable hire of a legendary industry veteran. With one key exception.

Emma Thompson left the employ of Skydance Studios in the midst of filming their ambitious new animated work, Lucky. This is a precedent that I find tremendously encouraging. A high-profile movie star leveraging her power to disrupt the corruption of art-in-progress... imagine the cartoon dollar signs in the suits' eyes exploding into mushroom clouds. If actions like this can encourage soulless corporate entities to take more begrudging stabs at inclusivity, like Paramount's recent (underwhelming) diversity initiative, then we may begin to see the needle wiggle in the right direction.

Meanwhile, there has been an even bigger shitstorm a-brewing, surrounding an even bigger movie star in an even bigger movie.

Brie Larson Isn't Letting 'Captain Marvel' Press Tour Be Overwhelmingly White and Male, the headlines read.

I GUESS THIS MOVIE ISN'T FOR ME I GUESS IF BRIE LARSON IS GOING TO DISCRIMINATE THEN MARVEL DOESN'T WANT MY MONEY SMDH, the commenters screech.

As the story goes, some time ago Brie Larson noticed the lack of representation of anyone on the publicity circuit who wasn't white and male. Not only is this less welcoming for diverse performers, it creates a perspectival skew in the entertainment news cycle. Rather than taking immediate action on this observation, she bided her time and prepared. She did this by consulting the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which then confirmed her observation with a scientific study: of all the reviews of last year's top 100 movies, 63.9% were written by white men, 18.1% white women, 13.8% underrepresented men, and 4.1% underrepresented women.

Now, I am no fan of folks reducing truth claims to the sorts of objectively observable data you can glean from science and statistics, but I consider this gesture an absolute masterstroke on Brie Larson's part. Knowing that, as a woman, her simple observation would be rejected by a great many neckdwellers, she made a point of doing her homework and framing it in a language that they can goddamn understand.

Armed with science and conviction, she made sure these underrepresented groups would be present on her Captain Marvel press tour. The fervor commenced, with word quickly spreading from asshole to asshole that Brie Larson is sexist and racist towards white men. (It is impossible to be either sexist or racist towards white men, in case you weren't sure.)

On the surface it's incredible that Disney, who have an insidious habit of caving to right-wing trolls, allowed this to happen. Upon further analysis, though, it makes sense. They get to be the heroes of this narrative, and in any case they benefit from the extra publicity.

One crucial battleground for these petty babies has been the critic aggregate website, Rotten Tomatoes. The site asks all critics to assign either a "fresh" or a "rotten" designation to their reviews, then collects that data into a percentage of freshness. A modicum of thought would reveal that while this number is useful as a bellwether of taste, it has little to do with the quality of a movie. Art is subjective, and anyway that's not even what the system is designed to accomplish. A divisive masterwork might scoot in at 55%, while a lukewarm but acceptable crowd pleaser might hit 90%. Alas, the folks we're talking about have the critical engagement skills of a kindergartner, so a great many users have taken the Tomatometer of a movie to be the final word on its objective merit.

This misunderstanding first blew up way back in 2010 with Toy Story 3 (here we are, full circle back to Lasseter). The film's perfect 100% Tomatometer score was ruined by two or so reviews, knocking it down to a paltry 99%. Nostalgic manchildren descended upon these reviews en masse to protest the besmirching of a movie that they hadn't seen. The spectre of this backlash reared its head again a couple years later with The Dark Knight Rises. A parade of incensed fanboys caused them to shut down the comments for that film entirely.

Since then, Rotten Tomatoes has been a lightning rod for enraged fanbases seeking to impress their agenda on a wider audience. It's a practice that has come to be known as review bombing, as exemplified by the famously disparate audience and critic scores for The Last Jedi, a mess of bigotry that has still not blown over and that I wrote about extensively here. Black Panther also got a hefty dose of angry white baby rage, for obvious reasons.

Captain Marvel has been the latest film to suffer these fools, many of whom have a suspiciously synchronous agenda as this Cracked article points out. It'll be the last film to weather this very particular brand of nonsense though, as Rotten Tomatoes has announced that it is suppressing the audience "Want to See" score (which hit a ridiculous 53% for Captain Marvel before the change), and removing the ability to post reviews before a film's theatrical release. Although they've been working on this adjustment for a year, the timing is fortuitous, and it is certainly a response to similar such review bomb circuses.

As much as I relish the image of a disgruntled dudechild logging on to Rotten Tomatoes and cracking his knuckles only to discover that he cannot malign a film that has not yet been released, these folks will always find another platform for their abuse. Where did all this misplaced hatred come from? Where is it all going?

Much like Pixar, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been cultivating a despicable boys' club of its own. We are eleven (!) years into the largest franchise in the world, and we are only now getting our first woman-led AND our first woman-directed film. We could easily get into the other issues of representation, like producer and guiding hand Kevin Feige's perpetual promises of queer representation that always seem to recede into the horizon. Even worse, multiple recent gestures of queer inclusion pushed by franchise writers and directors have been repressed in the final edit of their respective films.

My point is that the entitled prejudice of fandom doesn't come from nowhere. These sentiments burble everywhere, but they take root where they're invited. Of course fans would believe they deserved more of the same if that's what they had grown comfortable with over the past decade. Their sexism does not exist in a vacuum; they are disturbed people responding to a greater ethos. When you spend so much time as the member of a privileged and powerful class, equality feels like oppression.

A great many of our cultural critiques these days amount to bigotry whack-a-mole. He said this, cancel him. She did that, cancel her. They funded this, cancel them. But our enemy isn't individuals. These cretins are the hydra; cut off a head and three more will grow in its place, emboldened by the "injustice" of the beheading. Our enemy is corporate, collective, subconscious. Our problems are social, ideological, deep tissue, ubiquitous. They are forces that bend and shape us, contort what is possible, make us believe.

Thompson and Larson's protests are promising. They strike closer to the source, reorienting our power structure in small ways, opening avenues for more voices to be heard. These voices will be the ones to figure out how we move forward as a species, as exemplified in this article by Philadelphia's Nia Benjamin on the transference of power in artistic communities.

All that is to say, welcome to women's history month. As we endeavor to do every year here at Post-Credit Coda, we'll be reviewing four movies directed by (gasp!) women. I realized a few years back that I barely knew a handful of women actively working in film directing. It's amazing how many suppressed careers you discover as soon as you start looking into it. Meanwhile, male hacks are handed bigger and bigger opportunities in celluloid gift wrapping.

As a white man, I look forward to mercilessly critiquing these women and their SJW politics.