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whetstonefires · 4 years

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both the negative AND positive reactions i'm seeing to BOP give me a very mid 90s to mid 2000s sense of "Girl Power" and idk why peoples standards are so low because i do not consider that kind of "girl power" to be particularly 'profound', if that's the right word. i haven't seen the movie yet so i can't say whether it's good or bad as a movie in terms of quality, completely unrelated to how it adapts certain characters, but if it's not then somethings just :/

Eh, it does better than a lot of its forebears, mostly in little ways? 90s girl power isn’t the worst thing, anyway. In some ways I really liked how awful Harley was allowed to be, even as that’s not how I see the character and I hate gross-out humor.

But yeah, the overall effect is not advancing any feminist frontiers and is in fact a mild disappointment on that front; it probably would have done better to have no attempt at messaging at all, and just been a romp that happened to be all ladies.

It’s not trying to be deep and it doesn’t need to be, but some of the ways it engaged with the concept of ‘girl power,’ if you will, bugged the heck out of me.

Particularly Harley’s big fuck-you to the Joker early on, that sets off her part of the plot, being inspired by coming to terms with a break-up he initiated that she had been in denial about; that nasty taste is lingering in my mouth really badly. I guess they were trying not to overlap and/or conflict with whatever happened in Suicide Squad? Which I did not watch. So I don’t know.

The stylistic pattern generally of sabotaging the characters and making them objects of derision immediately after they had a Big Moment, as I’ve mentioned, also struck me as a really bad decision.

(Especially in moments like when Harley was initially captured, when she was very assertive and provocative and ‘meh whatever’ about the threat of torture right up until it was actually going to start, at which point she flipped instantly to appeasement, making the previous actions the opposite of powerful, and also…that, in this context, is not funny. The context of Harley as longterm victim of the Joker which they avoided really shittily, I mean, and the context of supposedly making an anti-misogyny movie. There was a lot of iffy subtext of this nature. Eh.)

I personally had a lot of trouble with the way it swayed in and out of Serious Mode, tho; I couldn’t keep up. People who can switch like that probably had a better experience.

Overall it worked for me a lot better than Supergirl or Jupiter Ascending, the last two things billed as feminist that I was notably disappointed by; it didn’t feel the need to fall over apologizing for its lead’s girl-ness like the former, and it didn’t ultimately deny its female leads the ability to make good calls or to cope with the consequences of their own decisions in any practical fashion ever.

(I’m still mad okay about how Jupiter Ascending had a whole arc setting up Jupiter being able to use the rules of the evil space society to her advantage, only to have her consciously choose not to do that because her family was held hostage, and order everyone who could help her not to do so because She Has The Right To Make Her Own Choices, then once she’d put herself in a position of powerlessness have the belated breakthrough that actually she wouldn’t let the world burn to save her loved ones, she’d let her loved ones burn to save the world–except if she died here, as she now had no way of preventing, she couldn’t save anyone, whoops.

She does not ultimately do anything whatsoever that actually resolves this situation she’s put herself in by finally asserting her right to make decisions; her people (mostly the boyfriend) just ignore her wishes and save her, which was a really aggravating resolution thematically even if watching her beat up Eddy Redmayne’s character was mildly cathartic.)

Anyway I try not to waste any more of my energy than I can help on Rep Media not being good enough. It’s an ongoing struggle.

#ask #a nonny mouse #harley quinn bop #hoc est meum #feminism #when will my inbox function again #infantilization #hqbop had five female leads to spread stuff across #it helped a lot #of course it would have helped more without Disaster Harley as the lead #and if it hadn't been so obsessed with making most of them spend most of the movie helpless in some sense #but ultimately rejecting that helplessness in the finale was the point #and it achieved that very well #for what it was worth

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