Amongst the innumerable weaknesses and complaints from people regarding Spider-Man 3, one of the common irks with fans was how pathetic Mary Jane was in the film (well… actually… she’s been horrible in all the films). This struck up a conversation with a friend of mine who made this comments:
“You ever notice that most comic book movies screech to a painful halt whenever a female character comes on screen?”
At first I just objected to his generalization of female characters in these movies… but the more I thought about it… the more I began to agree with him. Now, don’t get me wrong… I’m NOT saying ALL, WITHOUT EXCEPTION female charcters in comic movies suck, but you’ve got to admit most of them do. Doesn’t matter if they’re one of the heroes, are the love interest, they generally end up sucking the life out of a movie. So why is that? I offer you my opinion on the matter:
1) Screenwriters just don’t seem to know how to write a strong female character
Like the topic itself, that statement is a bit of a generalization. For some reason, most of the female characters come off as weak and helpless in these flicks. Inevitably this forces the action/pace of the film to take a break to deal with the inadequacies of these characters. The aforementioned Mary Jane is kidnaped and dangled from a high place as a trap for Spider-Man in EVERY SINGLE SPIDER-MAN movie. We don’t expect these characters to fight the bad guys for the hero… but women are not the helpless little sniveling cry babies these movies make them out to be.
2) Love Interests
I’ve recently been comparing movies to meals. You expect and hope for different things from different types of meals. You expect different things from a Steak than you do from a fine bowl of ice cream… but you do have certain expectations for each of them. With your ice cream you enerally want sweet, creamy with just the right texture. You see what I’m saying. With Comic Book movies, we have certain sets of expectations that are different from other genres of films. There are exceptions for certain, but this is true in general. In our Comic Book films, nothing so irritates the rabid fan more than love interests. It’s so set into us that now the mere sight of a female character on screen often sends horrible shivers down our spine “Nope, Wolverine has to stop being bad ass now to take some time to try to woo the girl with his softer side”. And inevitably the love interest is always used for the same thing… to get kidnapped and dangled from a high place as a trap for the hero. YYAAWWNNN.
3) Let’s Talk about our feelings
Referencing back to the point about food and our expectations about this genre of film, one of the consequences of the weak writing of female characters is that whenever they’re on screen, they tend to pull out out of those very things we want in our comic book movies. When Lois Lane comes on screen, you know it’s not to say “Hey Superman, here’s the name of 4 bad guys whose ass I want you to seriously kick”. Nope, you know Lois is there to talk about her feelings… about how she felt when Superman went away… about how she wonders what Superman feels for her, about how it feels to be a single mom… about how it feels to be misunderstood. Basically, the female character generally are there to break us away from all the things we come to see in this genre.
4) Fighting crime is never a good date
Since Batman doesn’t go on patrol with his date that evening, you know that whenever the female character is around… ain’t nothing exciting is going to happen… unless they uses the old tired cliche mentioned in point #2
I’ll stop there for now. So what other points am I missing? Why else to female characters in Comic genre films suck? What are some exceptions to this? (I thought Jennifer Connelly’s character in Hulk was a good solid character)
