Hollywood (Still) Doesn’t Get It

Hollywood has granted quality roles to women more frequently in the new century. Many well-written characters are for a TV series such as Little Big Lies, but we have learned to not complain.

In this decade of movie remakes and gender adjustments, the reboot of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was inevitable, I suppose. Director Roar Uthang moves from developing video games to movies with this outing, so the action sequences are in place.

The race to recover her pack stolen by a wharf street gang allowed a very buff Alicia Vikander (Light Between the Oceans) as Lara to depend on her wits and using some Captain Jack Sparrow jumps with wharf equipment. I especially enjoyed the later sequence for the rotting Japanese bomber that tumbles down the waterfall in a series of responses to Lara’s weight.

Upon analysis, though, my hackles are raised for underlying gender assumption typical of Hollywood archetypes.

Lara’s father (played by Dominic West) has a Stark-like business empire but leaves Lara isolated on the family estate with no business training or martial arts training from a misguided need to protect her. Completely isolated, Lara is forced into a pattern of self-taught skills and chip-on-her-shoulder self-reliance.

Hello, Hollywood!  A son in this situation would be trained for an executive position as the heir apparent. His skills training would include Asian masters and ex-military types on daddy’s payroll.

**spoiler alert**

So Daddy has gone missing, but Lara in her pride doesn’t sign into access to his billions but hones her skills as an East London bike courier. The visual transition from born-to-the-manor supposed shrinking violet to spunky street kid is painful to watch. Lara even pawns her only jewelry, a gift from Daddy, to finance the travel to Asia and her first real adventure.

My complaint is always the same. Where are Lara’s sisters and cousins and aunts and sorority sisters and rich girlfriends who have entered the university or business or the stock market? Where is the aging mentor who happens to be the Asian ambassador’s wife? A good ol’ boy support system exists for the male comic book heroes, but not for Lara Croft.

It’s true that Batman had an aging mansion and inherited wealth. It’s true that Indiana Jones went on at least one adventure following the clues left by his dad. Except both (originally cartoon) characters had a battery of colleagues from the police, university, adventurer sidekicks, foreign traders, foreign laborers -- all old pals who came running with a single phone call.

Lara Croft doesn’t even have a girlfriend travel agent who will spot her the cost of a ticket to the vicinity of the exotic island. The girlfriends are kickboxers whose roles in the story are to find some excuse for a woman’s lack of upper body strength.

The only other woman in the whole movie is an executive secretary type who holds the keys to the vault, played by Kristen Scott Thomas. Her moves are mostly held in reserve because she’s set up as a possible internal nemesis in a sequel, maybe similar to the Jeff Bridges character in one of the Tony Stark movies.

**spoiler alert**

Finally admitting that Daddy is gone, Lara is about to sign the estate transfer papers (in ignorance of how she’s manipulated by the executives) but is distracted by a Chinese puzzle that leads her to a dusky vault. Here is Daddy’s personal legacy to Lara, boxes of unfinished projects that were either unworkable or unprofitable. Throw her a bone.

Typical. And Hollywood doesn’t feel the gender insult, not in the slightest.

It’s true that Spiderman finds his daddy’s research hidden away in a sunken streetcar, but it’s all the research of a lifetime that was prematurely sacrificed and intended for Peter Parker’s advancement in the sciences along with colleagues. Parker’s secret status as Spiderman happens AFTER his parents are gone.

Part of the confusion for who is Lara Croft is a conflicting presentation of who is Daddy, an empire-building (but over-protective) business executive, or an adventurer who is stuck for seven years with this one problem of saving the world from a pandemic. That’s what happens with writing a script on committee.

I have several gripes about the storyline once Lara is in Asia, especially the useless and drunken Asian sidekick who is pressed into a work gang as soon as they arrive on the island. No diversity insult there.

Once they open the tomb, Lara is pushed forward by Daddy and the team of bad guy diggers to lead with solving the tunnel traps, maybe as a sacrifice to them. She is allowed the mental exercise of addressing ancient puzzles from archeological evidence. When the walls begin to collapse, though, Lara can save only herself. She doesn’t save Daddy. She doesn’t save any member of the digging team. She doesn’t save the Asian workers who turn out to be good with guns once they get their hands on some.

At the end the adventure, Lara has not gained a battery of loyal followers, men or women. Her success is achieved in complete isolation.

Women action adventure heroes often operate in isolation. Who can forget Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien who must fight the monster with only the ship’s equipment as her ally? Women characters in real situations often are forced to side-step gender isolation like Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs.

Where are their sisters or aunts or cousins or sorority sisters or trained colleagues in a good ol’ girl network?

Here’s an insight for Hollywood.  Women mostly look to each other for how to solve today’s problem. Movies that allow the display of this minion are often revenge-on-husbands storylines like Rosanne Barr’s She Devil or Goldie Hawn’s First Wives Club. At least these adventures got it right for who women call first to get it done.

But I’m in danger of sounding like a problematic woman here with my ideas for improving the Lara Croft story. Next outing will be my complaints for women acting how men think women act in Oceans 8.

The Life of Ideas

With the Summer 2018 need for a second Supreme Court justice nominated by Pres. Trump, I’m surprised at the shouting of old rhetoric from the far left. No prisons, no ICE, no school tuition. Like any of those could happen.

One leftist news segment guest (I knew she was leftist from the angry tone of a defeated person) claimed that university students will rise up and achieve what congress cannot with impeaching Trump. 

I remembered my days as a returning adult to art school in Chicago. We were required to take certain gen-ed courses, so I signed up for ten-weeks of post WWII Marxist thought, the latter-day thinkers who came out of the European Marxist dialogue.

I often went horns-to-horns with this teacher who was wholly committed to the idea that Marxism was a better path than decadent capitalism. I asked in class, “Isn’t Marxism disproved by history? What do you expect these art students to take away from these readings?”

The students sat in the back and doodled witch cartoons on their notepads, sometimes a pair of them.

So this teacher played a video of Michel Foucault. You remember him; the guy who thought up the prison round with a center tower that Cuba actually tried.

In the video a young sycophant interviewer lobs softball questions to Foucault in the hotel suite with a bed in it. Foucault in a thin turtleneck and slacks, and wearing slippers I think, languished on the bed and rubbed his bald head before he tolerantly answered.

I remember thinking then that when I get rich and famous, I will never allow anybody to film me in a room with a bed in it.

And that’s what I learned from Michel Foucault.

These days when a student of mine starts with the polished derivative rhetoric about school-to-prison pipeline, I ask if he has read Foucault. His mouth puckers and his eyes go blank.

I’m not too worried that free-and-fair market principles, used as a bludgeon by Pres. Trump to humble trading partners, will risk much exposure of structural flaws from the inquiring minds of college freshmen.