Damsels snubbing distress since 1997

I've become hyper aware of the ways modern movies try to address the persona non grata cinematic trope of the damsel in distress, who has been basically scrubbed from movies released today. In fact, most movies will try to have a woman save a man, just to be sure to they are on the right side of this issue. The only movie I could imagine having a woman in danger saved by a man would be something funded by conservatives who were trying to thumb their noses at the "liberal snowflakes."

But this isn't really the recent corrective we sometimes think it is. Yesterday I re-watched Disney's Hercules as a movie night with my kids, and I noted that they were already engaging in the meta satirical activity of teasing the trope way back in 1997.

When Hercules first comes across Megara trying to fight off the river guardian -- a blue centaur about six times as big as she is -- she lets out a definite effeminate squeal that sets us up to think she's in need of Hercules and his muscles. And as he closes in to help, receiving her somewhat indifferent welcome, he tries to clarify that she is, indeed, a damsel in distress ... isn't she?

"I'm a damsel, I'm in distress, I got this," Megara says to Hercules, dripping with snark and sarcasm. "Move along, junior."

We later find out that she was actually negotiating with the river guardian on behalf of Hades, so yeah, I think she can take care of herself. (But he did make her "an offer she had to refuse" ... presumably sexual in nature.)

Near the end, Megara does actually save Hercules, pushing him out of the way of a falling column that lands on her instead.

It makes me wonder why we've gotten so worried in the past five years about whether female characters can save themselves, when in fact Disney was trying to be on the right side of this issue more than two decades ago ... and you would never consider them at the forefront of gender progressiveness. I think maybe Megara was one of Disney's first reactions to the criticism of its under-empowered princesses.

Yet the idea of the damsel in distress, and that it is a hallmark of Disney filmmaking, has lingered on to such a powerful extent that the company had to specifically address it and try to exorcise it in last year's Ralph Breaks the Internet, with a scene devoted to a coterie of Disney princesses enumerating the stereotypes related to them. (A fairly tedious scene, I might add.)

It's not that I don't think we still have far to go; we do. It's that Hercules made me realize we've already been on this road for a long time ... and that the perception is still that we're not doing enough.

I'd say that's sad, but it's nothing compared to the perspective of a bunch of African Americans who thought we might have reasonably "solved" racism decades ago. Some things, unfortunately, take time ... more time than most of us have to breathe in this lifetime, probably.