1. That was an outstanding post, and I do not want number 2. to overshadow number 1. here. That was an outstanding post.
...
2. Holy shit, we're illegal in China?
Okay, back to one.
I don't think I've ever heard someone articulate that thought before. "She is not treated believably by the other men. For a woman on screen to be a real, believable woman to me she must face the same social struggles I would face if I were trying to do what she did." Could you vamp on that subject a bit more? As someone who's never really had to deal with antiprivilege, I struggle to imagine the complexities of it, but this idea really interests me.
I have to take it to a huge extreme and twist it around just to get my head around it, but when I do, it actually does make sense to me: If movies existed in the time of slavery, slave-folk probably wouldn't relate - even aspirationally - to a movie wherein a black guy was just suddenly treated as equal to a white guy. There's not any semblance of real life in that for them, so it's at best neutrally-uninteresting, and at worst trying to solve a problem by sweeping it under the rug or saying it never existed.
Would you contend that women-in-movies-going-forward should be mirror images of women-in-contemporary-culture-going forward, and that to "skip ahead" in the overall evolution of gender equality is bad? Is a female character existing in a painstakingly grounded context the only way to fairly depict her?
