Over the weekend, director Joe Wright spoke to a crowd at WonderCon in San Francisco, and among other things, he heroically criticized Sucker Punch for its shameless objectification of women. And Joe Wright should know a little something about terrible movies set entirely in the protagonist’s imagination, he directed Atonement.
“For me, one of the main issues in terms of women’s place in society and feminism is the sexual objectification of women,” said Wright, speaking at Wondercon in L.A. on Saturday. “That’s something that feminists in the ’70s tried to fight against but has been totally lost in the 21st century consumer-celebrity world. So for me, when I look at the poster for Sucker Punch it seems actually incredibly sexist, because it is sexually objectifying women regardless of if they can shoot you or not.”
Yes, it takes a real hero to finally take a stand against Zack Snyder’s sleazy whorephanage fantasy that everyone hated and hardly anyone saw. But tell us, Joe, is bullying bad? What of breast cancer? Is this terrible scourge stealing away our mothers and sisters? And please, be sure to phrase your answer in the form of semi-meaningless, PC buzzwords.
“I have a kind of immediate, knee-jerk reaction to such iconography,” Wright continued. “I remember when the Spice Girls came out in the mid-’90s and it was all about girl power, but one of them was dressed as a baby doll, do you know what I mean? That isn’t girl power, that isn’t feminism. That’s marketing bullsh*t. And I find it very, very alarming.”
You’re right, this terrible objectification is keeping our western women down, as evidenced by young women out-earning their male counterparts in 147 of America’s 150 biggest cities. We should cover their flesh and start treating them better, like they do in Afghanistan. That would be so much more “feminist.” It’s nice to finally see someone who’s against all this marketing bullsh*t. Wait, why are you at WonderCon, again? It’s not to promote a movie, is it?
Wright’s Hanna, in which a totally not-scantily clad young girl kicks a bunch of ass, opens on Friday.
Oh right, that.
In Hanna, 16-year-old Ronan plays the titular teenager, a girl raised in the wild as an assassin by her ex-CIA operative father; when the time comes, Hanna leaves home on a mission for revenge that opens her eyes to the world beyond her isolated upbringing.
“In my opinion, the reason that Hanna is so empowering is because she is a young girl who is not in sexy clothing and is not sexy, really, in any way,” Ronan explained. “She’s a bit of a misfit, especially when she steps out into the world, and is quite confused and fascinated at the same time by everything that she sees. And suddenly she turns into an animal, because these people that she’s fighting — every single one of them threatens the person that she loves, which is her father. The only world she knows. And although it is violent in some places, it’s all motivated by love. That’s quite wonderful, I think.” [Movieline]
So, just to recap, an unsexy misfit who turns into a violent animal to protect a dude = feminist. Girls wearing sexy clothes = not feminist. I’m just saying, maybe we shouldn’t be listening to gender-relations advice from a guy who made a movie about a “titular teenager.” Also, and I can’t stress this enough, Atonement sucked.