from now on maybe I'll just write about previews instead of actually watching the movies

I have written here before about how I didn't get Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, even though I really REALLY tried to like it. I think I have a reasonable imagination. I read books and watch movies and I relate to the characters in them. I don't generally have a sociopath-style lack of empathy, and I rarely have trouble understanding and getting emotionally involved the story of a fictional character, even a character whose life is very different from my own. And yet I can't get my head around Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And I suspect the same thing is going to happen with Spike Jonze's new movie, which people are raving about, and which also seems to portray a relationship between a flesh-and-blood human man, and a woman who is not a person. In the case of Eternal Sunshine, the relationship was between a) a man and b) his internal reconstruction of a woman who actually exists. In Her, the female lead is an AI, an operating system. 

I don't know why but I feel compelled to clarify: I'm not saying that my feminist ideals stop me liking Eternal Sunshine out of some political or moral commitment. I promise I am quite capable of enjoying a movie that is at odds with my personal and political beliefs. I'm saying that when I watch that movie, I just plain don't get it. 

And also, I'm not saying Her can't be a very good movie. It might even explore ideas of gender and romance in ways that are interesting. I'm just scared that it will be one of those forehead-crinkling experiences where I question my basic humanity/cognitive function/sanity, because everyone else gets it and even though I am pretty sure I'm not stupid, I do not get it. I might just not see it, because this experience is so genuinely alienating when it happens. 

Maybe also, we could work on a list of movies where women play a central role, and have relationships with male characters who are not really experiencing the story. I can't think of any, but of course I haven't seen every movie ever made (yet). It's true that a lot of romantic comedies are populated by implausible weird ideal men who probably don't exist in life, and the women are (slightly) more realistic, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm looking for stories about heterosexual romance in which the story is told from the perspective of the woman, and the man has a questionable if any lived experience of the story. My sad little list is very unsatisfying: Bicentennial Man, Edward Scissorhands, Making Mister Right, The Purple Rose of Cairo, the relationship between Data and Tasha Yar. Mostly, that's just a list of movies in which ladies made it with robots. Which might be a useful list, but which is not totally relevant here, especially since most of those stories are pretty focused on the experience of being a whatever-non-human-thing. 

Frozen

It's hard to say what's great about Frozen without giving away parts of the ending, and while the ending is pretty well telegraphed from the first, um, ten minutes?...it's probably the polite thing to avoid giving it away while the film is still in theaters. What is great about Frozen, to put it in the vaguest terms possible, is that it questions/subverts a bunch of fairy tale traditions that Disney has mostly promoted over the years. Also pretty great: Idina Menzel singing, Kristin Bell being funny, the song "In Summer."

What is weird about Frozen is easier to talk about, and that is the Disney traditions it fails to subvert, in particular a few very boring ideas about what is pretty and what people (or girls, or princesses) look like. Princesses are pale pink and very tiny in the waist and very big in the eyes. Yawn. I'm not mad about it, but it is a little boring. I've been defending Disney (mostly in imaginary conversations with people I don't actually know) against the charge that their recent movies about marginalized (non-white, non-European, etc.) characters were a kind of PC box-checking. Native American? Check. African? Check. African American? Check. My theory is that maybe there's a more generous interpretation, in which someone noticed that there are vast stores of characters and narratives to be mined outside the Grimm/Anderson cannon they had explored (but not nearly exhausted) in the first 50 years of the Disney Princess franchise. (It's probably not exactly fair to retrospectively label it a franchise, but I think it was Disney Marketing that did that, not me.) So they made a movie about a little Black girl in Louisiana in the twenties not because of idealism about diversity, and not because little African American girls are an untapped (or, um, undertapped) market for Princess merchandise,* but because they noticed that it would be a fresher, newer kind of character, and because 1920s New Orleans (jazz! voodoo! parades!) is a cool setting for a story.

But it seems we're back to Grimm and Anderson now.

Linda Holmes on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour pointed out that if you look closely at the two princesses in Frozen, you'll quickly see that their eyes are the same width as their waists. Here is a quick illustration:

One more bit of cut-and-pasting further illustrates the weirdness of gender portrayals in this movie:

Doesn't Princess Anna look pretty cute with the eyes of Hans? 

*Obviously this is the real reason for diverse characters. I remember standing at the fabric cutting counter at Joann's the year The Princess and the Frog came out, and talking to the clerks about how ALL their Tiana fabric had sold out before the movie even started playing in theaters.