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.

2 x 0 interest = 0 interest

Without me caring or almost even noticing, there have been two major motion pictures about the Greek hero Hercules released this year -- one of them today. (Actually, yesterday in Australia, and tomorrow in the U.S.)

My suspicion that I cared very little about any new movies featuring Hercules was confirmed last night when I saw Dwayne Johnson promoting Hercules on Jimmy Fallon. (Strangely, a compacted half-hour version of Fallon's show plays on one of the stations here at 7:30 p.m.)

I like Johnson a lot, but the clip they chose to show reminded me just how little movies like this interest me these days.

And what do I mean by "movies like this"? Well, movies where a heroic figure rallies an army into battle with words about destiny and courage, and then two armies run at each other.

The fact that the clip ended with Hercules putting his shoulder underneath a horse, then shotputting it and its rider, only made me marginally more interested.

I'm not going to rant about the armies running at each other movies today, though -- I'm just going to use the release of Hercules (and The Legend of Hercules earlier this year) to recognize how isolated I feel from movie advertising here in Australia, and also how much the event movie itself has changed.

Let's take the first one first.

I feel like I should know a lot more about both of these movies, and in the past, I certainly would have. I'd have seen billboards and TV ads, and likely a trailer or two in the theater as well.

Here in Australia, though, billboards are considerably fewer overall (haven't seen a single one for Hercules), and TV advertising seems to be far less prominent -- though to be fair, most of the TV we watch here is through an on demand format known as Fetch. As for trailers ... well, maybe I just haven't seen the right movies to get these trailers. (I bet I would have seen a Hercules trailer if I had seen the likely similar 300: Rise of an Empire.)

What interests me, though, is how little you have to do in the U.S. to be aware of movies. The awareness just seeps through your skin, even if you aren't naturally attuned toward cinema.

It was my constant awareness of what was coming out next that made it easy for me to write a new release post every Friday in the U.S. Since coming to Australia? I've done maybe two of them. The fact that the days don't coincide very well has something to do with it. The fact that I'm writing for a largely American audience, and the release dates aren't usually the same between here and there, is a factor as well. But it's still rather astonishing how much I've lost the awareness of which movies are getting released, when, just by moving halfway across the world.

Then there is the second part of what I want to talk about today, the steady depreciation of movies like Hercules from seeming like must-see summer tentpoles to "I'll catch them on video, if then." Hercules is one of those characters we all know about, where if they haven't just made a movie about him, they should be soon. There was a time when such storied characters would always pique my interest. Now, I make almost no note about not only one, but two movies about them.

I suppose it's that Hercules isn't distinctive anymore. Whereas he may have once seemed like a unique character, whose feats of strength had to be seen to be believed, now every second movie hero is blessed with some otherworldly talent for moving mountains. What chance does Hercules have in an era when superhero movies are the most reliable bet at the box office? Hercules may have been "the original superhero," but now he predictably seems antiquated. Throwing over a horse, in this day and age, is a quaint showing of strength indeed.

And if Hercules weren't being marginalized by today's superheroes, he would also be getting rendered less distinct by the series of other sword and sandal heroes who have flooded our multiplexes today. Not only are there the 300 movies, but there's Immortals, the Clash of the Titans movies, Gladiator, Beowulf, Troy, Conan the Barbarian, Kingdom of Heaven, Braveheart, the Lord of the Rings movies and even Game of Thrones providing some kind of direct competition ... and often doing it better. Speaking of Beowulf, I'd almost prefer for Hercules to go that route, using motion capture to burst outside the limits of what we would expect to be able to see with human actors. That sea monster scene in Beowulf alone is probably ten times more interesting than anything we'll see here.

Interestingly, the onset of two more Hercules movies does make me more interested in revisiting Disney's Hercules, which I quite liked. Maybe that's where I'll go on this, and leave Dwayne Johnson and Kellan Lutz -- or their schlock directors, Renny Harlin and Brett Ratner -- to fight it out for the remaining shreds of our collective interest.