Pfffffft

[swatkat]

I go away for one month and my favourite shady tea place shuts down.

Granted, this was going to happen sooner or later -- for years we'd wondered how they even managed to keep the place running, given the number of customers they usually managed (a few) and the property rent in a location such as theirs (astronomical). I suspect some of it involved bribery, since there's no way the manager actually owed that wad of bills I saw him pass on to that policeman one fine afternoon. There might be a moral to this story, but right now I will only lament the loss of its moth-eaten sofas and non-functioning air-conditioning and the lovely glass windows I spent hours sitting by, reading, preparing lecture notes, watching highschoolers throng the shady pub across the street, out of uniform (I've witnessed at least a couple of fights in the past few months alone, while daintily sipping on my tea). And also their tea, which, while somewhat overpriced, was undoubtedly good and the only place in the vicinity where they brewed tea instead of handing you an (also overpriced) cup of hot water with a tea bag in it.

Sigh.

+

I managed to catch Brave last week. 'Managed', because it ran for a week in the theatres amidst appallingly poor publicity and show timings. It's as though they didn't want kids to watch it during their summer vacations.

Even more appalling, however, are the reviews I've been reading ever since: this one that finds it 'impersonal' and 'least consequential', and this spoilery one you shouldn't be reading if you haven't watched the film that finds the protagonist a 'honorary boy' (that's Roger Ebert, by the way). I don't want to say male reviewers did not get a movie that has as its heart a mother-daughter relationship - my friend S went to watch the movie with us and loved it, and none of the little boys in the audience seemed to have a problem with it - except I don't know how else to fathom this sort of a response. My reaction to the movie was an emotional one; applegnat says this far better here when she says:

I found myself shivering with anticipation before I left home to watch Brave. I didn’t realise I was in quite that much need of gender validation from animated Hollywood movies. Shouldn’t have wanted it: did. I haven’t cried at a film in the theatre in years, but there I was in the crucial moment brimming over silently. Shouldn’t have cried: did.

...

Was it worth it? Yes. It was manipulative and the 3D was mediocre (a sad let-down after the Stendhal-inducing beauty of the terrible Prometheus: I thought we had left the Awkward Phase of 3D behind us and was ready to heave a sigh of relief). But as a reinvented fairytale it was heart-achingly good, and I’m going to put it out here for the sake of argument — it is radical in its category.

I shamelessly cry at the movies all the time, so it's nothing out of the ordinary in that respect, but this. 'Heart-achingly good' is the right phrase for it.

It's a classic coming-of-age narrative: a rebellious young protagonist, a restrictive authority figure, a clash of values leading to conflict, and an eventual happy resolution. It also happens to feature a mother and a daughter, a Disney queen and a Disney princess, and I suspect half the problem lies right there - a knee-jerk response to a princess as a protagonist, not to mention an inability to view a mother-daughter narrative as 'universal' in the way father-son narratives, because how else would you explain this being termed 'impersonal' and 'inconsequential' when it made so many female viewers, yours truly included, cry?

Perhaps I'm taking the reviews a little too personally. I certainly detected a note of personal outrage in the passionate discussion zorana and I had last night on Twitter - we're both very far away from our mothers, after all, and the movie certainly tapped into that.

The thing with Brave is that it doesn't slot Merida into a Conventional Movie Tomboy's role, although she's certainly one in many ways; it does not invalidate her tomboyishness and does not dismiss traditional femininity, and that's what makes it such an interesting departure. How many movies, after all, will feature a resolution that takes into account its female protagonist's capacity to wield the sword and sew?

Equally interesting is the way it doesn't take the SMASH Patriarchy Through Display of Grrl Power route, although it certainly could have - it had all the ingredients for it (an arranged marriage, a princess who likes to fight, a disapproving mother). Instead, it chooses to give the authority figure a narrative arc of her own, in which she comes into an understanding of her daughter's point of view, even as her daughter learns her own more conventional lesson about responsibility and patience, and that Mother Has A Point Even If She Has The Most Infuriating Way Of Making It. There is a priceless little scene in the movie where Elinor throws her daughter's bow into the fire in anger. As soon as her daughter leaves the room in a flood of tears she rushes to the fireplace, aghast at what she's done and trying to undo the damage. It's a counterpoint to Merida's own moment of hasty action with the tapestry (saying any more will spoil the main plot), and a foreshadowing of what is to come: a recognition of a future where the bow and the needle both exist to empower the female protagonist. Too many narratives think handing over a weapon to its female protagonist is enough to make them strong characters (and here I'm reminded of a long-ago discussion with a fannish friend about Merlin, wherein she talked about how Merlin gave its female characters swords but robbed them of their agency), so it's refreshing to see one that thinks about it. There is real female power in the fantasy Scotland that Merida inhabits, and you can see just what Elinor is preparing her daughter for: not just a life of a good and proper princess, but one where she will wield actual power and where her thoughtless actions will have consequences. Consider this, and consider Aladdin, where it's amply clear that after the Sultan dies, it's his son-in-law who will wield actual power in the realm, which is why Jaffar wants to marry Jasmine in the first place. ('Honorary boy' my arse. Because evidently if a princess' story does not end in her finding a handsome manly man but taking one step towards becoming a powerful future leader on her own, it means she's a boy.)

I don't mean to suggest that viewers shouldn't have complaints with the movie (I think The Dark Knight is an exceedingly dull movie, I'm sure most people will disagree with me), or that every female viewer is bound to enjoy the movie the way I did, but I can't but be appalled by reviews of this sort because of the significance they have in terms of what sort of movies might be made by studios in the future. And so I come back to what zorana said so well yesterday: "They have NO clue…like none at all…and I don't think that it's even a what lil girls enjoy thing but a essential lack of understanding about what mother-daughter relationships are...beyond surface noise about boyfriends and mini skirts…no man got how hard it hit." Make that ‘most men’, and that’s still just… very sad.

In conclusion:



[from phoenixpen; press ESC to stop the gif]


It's off the theatres now, but I will buy my mother the DVD the moment it's out because I know she will enjoy it. And I hope someone more articulate than I will write a comparative analysis of mothers/daughters/power in this movie, and the two Snow White movies that came out this year.

Comments

[topaz_eyes]

First, a caveat in that I haven't seen the movie. That said, re Ebert's review:

But Merida is far from being a typical fairy-tale princess. Uhm, wasn't that the point of the movie?

"Brave" seems at a loss to deal with her as a girl and makes her a sort of honorary boy. Ebert's doing his damnedest to try to re-frame the movie into something he's more likely to recognize, isn't he. I'd say Ebert got the part of the message about mothers and daughters, but missed the rest.

[swatkat]

Ebert's doing his damnedest to try to re-frame the movie into something he's more likely to recognize, isn't he. I'd say Ebert got the part of the message about mothers and daughters, but missed the rest

Yes, exactly. It's as though he's looking at it with certain expectations about princess protagonists and how the media portrays them, and in the process failing to really look at the text that's right in front of him. I also got the feeling that he, like most of the other male reviewers, got that it's about mothers and daughters, but missed its emotional resonance.

[amalthia]

I loved your review. :)

[swatkat]

I'm glad!

[applegnat]

What really gets me about the reactions to this film is the criticism -- some of it even from self-identified feminists -- who say that Pixar fell down by creating for its first female hero a ~domestic conflict~ instead of a more exciting adventure. Not exciting enough. Too restrictive. Too unambitious. Too -- girly.

I can't. I cannot.

[dhobikikutti]

You know, I'm sympathetic to your and swatkat's readings of the film. But I do have to say that some of the criticism should be seen in the light of Pixar's previous trend of movies where prepubescent characters like the one in Up, and even robots, were gendered so that the adventures that in no way revolved around romance and sexuality were - always happening to males.

[swatkat]

But the interesting thing about Brave (unless I'm misunderstanding your comment) is that it doesn't revolve around romance or sexuality at all, to the point where a critic like Roger Ebert concludes that our heroine's failure to end up with a suitable boy makes her a 'honorary boy' and Tumblr speculates on whether or not Merida is asexual. The love story of the movie is between the girl and her mother, which is no different than say, Finding Nemo.

[dhobikikutti]

I haven't seen the film yet. Just read a bunch of positive and negative spoilerific reviews. My understanding is the conflict comes from the mother wanting her daughter to get married, and the daughter deciding not to?
To me, marriage is never a gender neutral topic for a story. I would have been much more pleased, obviously, if one of Pixar's previous efforts where the boy could have been replaced by a girl had indeed done that genderswap, but I'm also wondering if some of the frustration with this movie comes from the fact that this story could not have been told as easily with a boy character. Especially because while Disney did sell teenage characters whose romance was the main storyline to actual children, Pixar does have a tradition of actual children as heroes.

[swatkat]

My understanding is the conflict comes from the mother wanting her daughter to get married, and the daughter deciding not to?

This is true, but the mother doesn't want the daughter to marry out of the pure motherly need to get her daughter married off that many of us are no doubt familiar with - the mother wants her to marry because as the future monarch of the realm, she has to pick a suitable match from the other clans in order to keep the clans happy and the realm together. She's not doing it because it's the proper thing for a daughter to do and because she just ~knows it will make her happy. There is enough actual thought behind it that would make a copy/paste genderflip unfeasible - and that's precisely why the movie works, IMO, because Merida and Elinor feel like a real mother and daughter duo as opposed to 'honorary men' - but it wouldn't also be very different from any coming of age story of a prince whose father wants him to enter into a political alliance but who would rather find ~love and ~be free. In fact, the 'finding love' part is sidelined enough in the story to make it very clear that the central conflict is about responsibility vs individual freedom, youth and maturity, and if that's not a story that has been told countless times with male protagonists, I don't know what has.

I don't disagree that the marriage plotline is more in line with Disney storylines of yore than what Pixar has dealt with in the past, but the treatment is not the same, and the protagonist enough of a departure from a lot of earlier treatments of the same. I would argue that a lot of the frustration comes from the inability to separate certain narrow expectations of a female protagonist's - a princess protagonist's! - role from the actual text (see also: responses to Black Widow's characterization in The Avengers).

Now, we could certainly talk about why we can't have more stories with girl protagonists who aren't princesses, but it also seemed from some of the criticism that critics are very eager to dismiss the entire subgenre as 'girly' and outdated, which is unfortunate.

(Am I being coherent? Please forgive me if I'm not, I think I need to get more chai.)

[applegnat]

I think they did fall down in a crucial scene by having Merida make a speech about people being free to choose who they love, which was a bit of a cop-out: nothing in the rest of the movie is AT ALL about Merida caring about a chance to love freely. She doesn't actually give a damn. This does go largely against the grain of the film and I did talk about it in my review.

Having said that, I don't think the "previously on Pixar" argument holds all that much water when it comes to the emotional context of Brave. As Swatkat says the film's explicit, overarching love story is between mother and daughter.

What I can work with is the critique of Pixar choosing to go the princess route with its first female hero, since male protagonists from the studio have all had varied and interesting identities that aren't monarchy-bound: in fact, critics have made that point already and I agree with them, even though I suppose part of Pixar's purpose with this film was to destroy part of the princess subgenre from within.

[swatkat]

I'm wondering now if a lot of the discomfort comes from the primacy given to Elinor in the narrative. Because a father saving his son or vice versa is of course universal and the right thing to do, but everyone knows mothers in coming of age stories are either Always In The Background Doing Motherly Things or Just Plain Wrong, right?

Your point about evil stepmothers in fairy tales is spot on and I really do wish you someone would write that comparative analysis about mothers/daughters/power in Brave and the Snow White movies that came out recently.