The
full-length trailer for the fifth Mission:
Impossible movie, now sporting the not-at-all-laughable subtitle of Rogue Nation (at least it’s not Dawn of Justice
or Ragnarok?),
popped up online Monday, and the world got yet another opportunity to gawk at
Tom Cruise’s commitment to jaw-dropping and likely ill-advised stunts with a
mixture of bemusement, exasperation and awe. While I have little doubt that the
film’s action scenes will be thrilling, an ideal spectacle for blockbuster
season, I would be infinitely more interested in it if 1) Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol helmer Brad Bird returned to
the directing chair and 2) more importantly, if Paula Patton were not
conspicuously absent from this sequel, while Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg
and Ving Rhames will all reprise their roles.
Even if it is for harmless
scheduling reasons, this means we have yet another major movie boasting a
single major female character (newcomer Rebecca Ferguson) in an ensemble
otherwise consisting of all guys. Yes, we’re talking about an action franchise
whose primary draw has always been its over-the-top gadgets and stunt work, so
it’s obviously not surprising that Rogue
Nation, at least based off the trailer, will be extremely dude-centric. However,
this tokenism and the trailer’s heavy use of the male gaze suggest that the
movie and, by extension, the franchise as a whole, isn’t especially interested
in women – either in terms of portraying them as more than eye candy or in
attracting us as an audience.
I couldn’t get a non-blurry screengrab, but in case you’re
wondering, Rebecca Ferguson is about to snap this guy’s neck with her legs, and
I’m so here for that.
The Mission: Impossible franchise’s difficulties with female characters
can arguably be blamed on one particular source: James Bond. Not only is the
iconic action hero notoriously
misogynistic
as a character, but the franchise basically created its own trope in the Bond
Girl. Notice that it’s ‘girl’, not ‘woman’, and she doesn’t have a name,
emphasizing that these characters exist in relation to Bond rather than as
individuals with their own narratives and agency and are designed to be
replaceable, disposable. Often playing the same role that femme fatales did in
classic noirs (that is, as a simultaneous love interest and adversary for the
hero), the Bond Girl can be intelligent, savvy, sweet or manipulative, but
above all, she must be beautiful, always in a conventional, fashion model kind
of way that will seduce both Bond and the men watching these movies. She never
carries over from one film to the next, usually vanishing without even the
slightest mention or explanation. In other words, the Bond Girl exists not as a
meaningful character that audiences need to emotionally invest in, but as sexy
decoration, serving essentially the same purpose as Bond’s shaken, not stirred
martinis and signature Aston Martin.
Unfortunately, while the Bond Girl may not be the only female character
to appear on-screen, she is usually the most prominent one. 2012’s Skyfall, which featured Judi Dench’s M
in a pivotal role, was an exception, and even there, she was killed off by the
end of the film and promptly supplanted by the decidedly male Ralph Fiennes. If
Naomie Harris wasn’t returning as Eve Moneypenny, we would be in the exact same
situation with the upcoming Spectre
that we’re in with Rogue Nation; while
a number of women have been added to the cast of the new film, with Léa Seydoux
presumably serving as the de facto Bond Girl, forgive me for being skeptical
that any of them will get much to do beyond flirting with Daniel Craig and, if
we’re lucky, one action scene to show how “badass” they are. Because,
obviously, if a lady gets to shoot a gun or kick some nameless henchman’s butt,
it doesn’t matter if she still has no more actual characterization than a prop,
right?
In the end, though, what’s most
frustrating is that the tokenization of women isn’t confined to a single
franchise or genre. As evidenced by everything from Star Trek, Pacific Rim
and Edge of Tomorrow to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the
Marvel and DC cinematic universes, and even non-blockbusters like Margin Call and The Imitation Game, ‘The
Smurfette Principle’ is the norm, not the exception. It’s why the initial
casting announcement for Star Wars VII,
which mentioned Daisy Ridley as the sole new female cast member, was greeted
with not so much an uproar as fairly
vocal yet resigned exasperation that was placated when Lupita Nyong’o and
Gwendoline Christie were later added. Of course, four women, including Carrie
Fisher reprising her role as Leia, to at least nine men just in the main
ensemble still isn’t exactly an ideal balance, but if having half as many women
as men can be accepted as a reasonable expectation, then most movies don’t even
live up to that bare minimum.
I’ve ranted
before about how the idea that the Mako Mori Test would “improve” the
Bechdel Test is severely misguided, so I won’t go into that again, but as long
as Smurfette Principle remains common, movies that pass the Bechdel Test will
still be depressingly far and few in between. In a way, the Smurfette Principle
and Strong Female Character trope also are closely related, because when you only
have one female character to work with, she must carry the burden of not only
representing all women, but also giving all audience members what they want. In
action blockbusters, the kind that dominate the modern cinematic environment,
this essentially translates to the heroine, if she exists at all, being
designed as both a symbol of female empowerment, as limited and superficial as
that idea of empowerment might usually be, and an object of male pleasure. You
can find male characters with a wide range of identities – hero, villain, leader,
sex symbol, nerd, sidekick, comic relief – because there are usually tons of
them in any given film, but these solo women have to fulfill all those roles
simultaneously, resulting in characters that feel less like well-defined
individuals than amalgams of vague, generically admirable traits whose overriding
signifier is ultimately that they are female.
Some might argue that there are
signs that things might be getting better, pointing to the success of such
franchises as The Hunger Games, where
there may only be one major, active female character but at least she’s the
lead, or to the impending all-ladies installment of Ghostbusters and Paul Feig’s entire post-Bridesmaids career. However, while I’m nearly always a little glad
to see a female-driven movie do well and Feig seems to have the best of
intentions with projects like The Heat
and the upcoming Spy, vehicles for
female stars can still be tokenistic if they’re forever surrounded by men (how
hard can it be to just give Katniss a female friend?). Having an all-female
Ghostbusters or similar movies doesn’t solve the underlying problem that women
are still marked as Other while men get to be the default.
If this Ghostbusters thing and other highly
publicized
moves
to diversify major franchises feel like gimmicks or merely part of some
marketing trend, that’s because they
are. To stick with the Ghostbusters
example, perhaps the all-female cast would seem less like a calculated
publicity stunt if they’d announced the movie by simply revealing that Kristen
Wiig and co. had been cast instead of doing an entire build-up to it, because
as it is, the presence of women isn’t incidental to a larger, planned story or
concept, it is the concept. Imagine a
film being promoted solely for having an all-male cast; the thought is absurd
not just because we have plenty of movies without a woman in sight, but because
the gender of your characters isn’t actually the basis for a story or even a
decent elevator pitch. Studio and network executives aren’t suddenly interested
in diversity for moral or political reasons or even because they know it’ll
result in better, more interesting art. More likely, they’re investing in ideas
like the all-female Ghostbusters or a
Wonder Woman movie (finally!) because they’ve seen a bunch of surveys showing
that women
and minorities
make up a good
portion of the movie-going audience and that films that have a woman and/or
person of color have
been doing better at the
box office lately than ones that don’t, so for now at least, diversity
seems to be where the money’s at. That’s not to say these projects aren’t
welcome and a relatively refreshing change of pace, but they’re not reflective
of significant structural or institutional changes within the industry. The new
Ghostbusters in particular serves as
a reminder that greater visibility for marginalized groups doesn’t always – or even
often – coincide with increased
power or more equality, and history suggests that this diversity-related trend,
like all past ones, will be temporary with little lasting, widespread impact.
All of this is to say that I don’t
wish Rogue Nation had retained Paula
Patton or at least added more new female characters to the cast because I think
having more women would automatically make the Mission: Impossible franchise more progressive or because this
should be an important battleground for feminism. I do think, however, that we
should be calling out art when it doesn’t have diversity instead of praising it
when it does, and dammit, I just want to be able to enjoy watching Tom Cruise
hang off the side of a plane without feeling irritated and guilty for indulging
in some pleasure that I know is explicitly not meant for me. Yes, these movies,
just like most blockbusters, are male power fantasies to their core, but maybe
I’m naïve or giving men too much credit, I don’t think that kind of wish
fulfillment needs to be completely
sexist and exclusionary. I would like to actually be allowed to escape into my
escapist entertainment. That honestly doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
Photo Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXwaKB7YOjw
(screenshots)
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