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Wonder Woman, Jane Got a Gun, and Ghost in the Shell
From left: “Wonder Woman”, starring Gal Gadot, “Jane Got a Gun”, starring Natalie Portman, and “Ghost in the Shell”, starring Scarlett Johansson

Have you heard? Feminists and superhero fans have been getting anxious about the relative lack of promotion for the upcoming Wonder Woman film, starring Gal Gadot and directed by Patty Jenkins. They are concerned that it is going to suffer the same fate as recent DC Comics films have, and be cast as second-rate superheroes in comparison to Marvel’s string of successes.

I’ve been following the fortunes of the Wonder Woman film for a while now, and I also noticed this lack of publicity.  It registered with me because it fit into a pattern I’ve seen before.

My favorite movie of all time, Jane Got a Gun, was another film whose marketing campaign I watched closely. The Weinstein Co.’s promotional efforts for it were abysmal–I think I saw one trailer for it, and it made the movie look like an action/adventure flick when in fact it was a romantic drama. (Even the title is kind of misleading. They should have called it Jane Ballard.)

Jane Got a Gun had an infamously turmoil-filled production, and apparently the Weinstein Co. based its decision on the film’s history, rather than the finished product. (It’s usually a mistake to focus on process over results.) As such, they didn’t put much effort into promoting it, and didn’t hold advance screenings for critics.  As a result, few people heard of it, and it fared poorly at the box office.

This isn’t the only recent example of a film getting hamstrung by bad marketing.  Ghost in the Shell was a big-budget sci-fi picture with a strong story, and it flopped badly at the U.S. box office.

Unlike the case of Jane, the studio could never be accused of not spending resources promoting Ghost. Paramount even bought a Super Bowl ad for it.  But it was hit with an intense negative buzz, in which people accused it of “whitewashing” because of the decision to cast Scarlett Johansson as the lead character, Major Killian.

This accusation is obviously nonsense to anyone who bothers to watch the film. Major Killian is a cyborg–a human brain housed in a machine.  True, she was originally a Japanese woman, but the entire premise of the film is that her mind and consciousness are transferred to an artificial body.

And yet the accusation of whitewashing persisted, and undoubtedly contributed to negative press surrounding the film. Which is too bad, because while it was not a great film, it was certainly one of the better sci-fi movies I’ve seen in recent years. It was far better than the highly-successful blockbuster The Force Awakens, for example.

This is why what’s happening with Wonder Woman doesn’t surprise me too much.  I have, as they say, seen this movie before. But like Ian Fleming wrote, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.” At this point, I have to think this is part of some pattern.

So what’s the common thread?

While they are all very different films, Jane Got a Gun, Ghost in the Shell and Wonder Woman do have a few shared characteristics.  Most obviously, they all feature female protagonists.  They also are all categorized as action films. (Although Jane probably shouldn’t have been).

Is Hollywood deliberately sabotaging female-led action films? That seems crazy, since the easiest way for studios to prevent such films from succeeding would be to… not make them in the first place.

Let us, like Woodward and Bernstein before us, “follow the money”.

One thing to look at is the studios producing the movies: Warner Bros. is handling Wonder Woman, because they own DC Comics.  As I mentioned earlier, DC has been in competition with Marvel on superhero movies, and they have been losing.

Marvel is owned by Disney, which acquired it in 2009.

It so happens Disney also originally had a deal with Dreamworks to release Ghost in the Shell, but it was terminated in 2016, and the movie was released through Paramount instead.

Jane Got a Gun is the clear outlier here–the Weinstein Co. isn’t on anything like the same scale as Disney, Warner Bros. et al.  Also, Jane was rated “R” whereas the rest of these are “PG-13”.  So, presumably it had a much smaller marketing budget at the outset.

The key point is that all three of these movies are released by companies that aren’t Disney.

This is most significant for Wonder Woman, because of the ongoing DC/Marvel battle, which is really a proxy war between Warner Bros. and Disney.  And Disney has been winning it.

Part of the reason I brought up The Force Awakens to contrast with Ghost in the Shell  was because it got way more positive press despite being an inferior film.  But of course, Force Awakens was made by Lucasfilm, which since 2012 is owned by… Disney.

The upshot is that I think Disney is way better at promoting their movies than most of the other studios are.  Even when Disney has something sub-par, they can generate enough positive buzz about it to get people to buy tickets.

It’s important to understand what promotion really entails.  It’s more than just advertisements on television and the internet.  It’s more even than tie-ins, and red carpet events, and sending the cast and crew on talk shows.

It has to do with how PR firms work.  They feed stories to industry journalists to create a buzz around their clients’ products. (Read this marvelous essay by Paul Graham for an in-depth description of this process.)

My impression is that Disney–or perhaps the PR firm they hired–does a vastly better job of promotion compared to the other studios.  They have a much higher success at generating positive buzz for whatever they are releasing next.

Now, to some extent, there is bound to be a “crowding-out” effect. If Disney can internally do better PR, or if they can pay more to get it, it leaves less room for other non-Disney productions to get good PR.

And of course, none of this has anything to do with the actual quality of the movie in question.  (Indeed, I often wonder just how many movie reviews are influenced more by the PR campaign surrounding the film than by the film itself.)

In my review of The Force Awakens, I concluded by saying:

“[W]hy do so many people like The Force Awakens?  I don’t know–maybe it’s the same reason so many people like Donald Trump: both are loud, in-your-face, and have so much money backing them that they won’t go away.”

The comparison actually runs a bit deeper than that.  Trump, whatever else you want to say about him, is great at promotion.  He is like a one-man PR firm in terms of his ability to draw an audience for whatever he is peddling.

Disney, or whoever is handling PR and marketing for their movies, has a similar level of promotional skill.  And the other movie studios are unable to match it.

I think there is also something of an escalation going on, in that the more Disney hypes their releases, the more the other studios are then going to be expected to do to hype theirs. Expectations for marketing campaigns get higher and higher, and when studios fail to meet them, people don’t go to see their movies.

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‘To ev’rybody’s prejudice I know a thing or two/ I can tell a woman’s age in half a minute-and I do!/ But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can/ Yet ev’rybody says I am a disagreeable man/ And I can’t think why!’–W.S. Gilbert. King Gama’s Song in Princess Ida, Act I.

As long as we’re playing the “name the literary genius with shocking prejudices” game, let’s talk about one of my favorites, Sir William S. Gilbert.

Andrew Crowther recently wrote a great piece in The Guardian, examining the oft-leveled charge that Gilbert was quite sexist.  Crowther’s opinion is more or less mine, which is: yes, Gilbert was sexist, but his female characters weren’t just caricatures–there is more nuance to them than critics realize.

One thing to note is that I don’t get the sense Gilbert was any more sexist than the society he lived in was.  (Contrast with the subject of my previous post–H.P.Lovecraft was an extreme racist even by the standards of his time.)

That doesn’t excuse Gilbert, of course, but it makes it more understandable why he thought the way he did.  Moreover, I have never gotten the sense that Gilbert hated women.  He didn’t see them as equal to men, but that’s different than flat-out misogyny.

The best way of addressing the issue of the unpleasant old spinster characters that feature in many of the Savoy operas is to play the men as shallow cads.  This isn’t that hard to do.  Frankly, I don’t think Gilbert liked romantic tenors any more than he liked spinster ladies. Want to make Ruth in Pirates sympathetic?  It’s not too much of a stretch to play Frederic as a shallow imbecile–the entire plot hinges on him being one anyway.

Also, I’ve never thought Princess Ida was just a satire on women’s education–Gilbert pokes fun at it, sure (he was a satirist, after all) but he also mocks men as being dumb, brutish oafs.

None of this is to say  Gilbert is innocent of sexism, but just that the plays must be understood in the context of their time, and sexism unfortunately comes with the territory.

Should the plays be re-written to be less offensive?  There is precedent for that, as the “N word” was removed from both The Mikado and Princess Ida. But it was an easy re-write, as it occurred only in passing in a couple of songs.  The sexism is a harder task, since it involves whole characters.  I agree with Crowther: reinterpretation is the best solution here.

Like all great writers, Gilbert wrote about human nature, and I believe that his wit was so sharp, and his insight so keen, that he sometimes unconsciously saw through the prejudices of his day to essential truths.  Take this song from Princess Ida:

Is it mocking prototypes of the so-called “man-hating feminist”, or is it mocking  anti-feminist men–“pick-up artists”, who try to cloak their misogyny but nonetheless think of women only as sexual objects?  It’s a little of both, I think.  It works perfectly well as either.

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Interesting article in The Guardian about a renewed interest in witchcraft, or “Wicca”, and the associated mystical stuff among young women.  The general point of the article is that witchcraft is feminist because witchery is about female-headed authority structures. Naturally, traditionalists are upset by this trend, though whether they don’t like the witchcraft because it’s feminist, or that they don’t like the feminism because it’s witchcraft is hard to say.

I bet somewhere conservatives are saying “See? We told you the “Harry Potter” books would lead the youth into more serious pagan witch-cults!” Although it’s not like Harry Potter invented presenting magic as a good thing.  Why not blame Samantha Stephens? Or Glinda the Good Witch? Actually, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure when people were not interested in witchcraft in some form or other.

I wonder when traditionalists and conservative religious people will realize that the only reason people get into tarot cards and potion-brewing is because they know it will annoy the conservatives.  Once they quit acting upset by it, it won’t seem cool anymore.

I’m not kidding about this–most of the people I know who are into this stuff are doing it because they are rebelling against their religious families.  Personally, as a non-religious (though not really anti-religious) person, I find it pretty tiresome. It’s just trading one set of rituals and relics for another, as far as I’m concerned.  Wicca is religion for hipsters: they’re only doing it because it’s not mainstream.

People are always getting renewed interest in the mystical and the occult.  Back in the 1920s, there was a wave of fascination with the occult. I think it waned a bit in the 1930s what with the Depression and all, but there was still Aleister Crowley being Aleister Crowley. Find me some point in history when there wasn’t interest in the occult among some group or other.

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As the preeminent video game critic of my time <insert laugh track here>, I feel compelled to weigh in on the recent series of events referred to as “GamerGate”.

As I have stated before, I absolutely despise this habit of appending “-gate” to everything that is considered a scandal.  Following this logic, you’d think the Watergate scandal was about water.  Attention, people born after the 1970s: the Watergate was an office complex. The scandal was called that because it centered around a break-in at said office complex.

Now, then:

The origins of GamerGate are shrouded in the mists of the internet, but the facts are these, as related by that always perfectly factual and unbiased source of information, Wikipedia:

The controversy came to wider attention due to the sustained harassment that indie game developer Zoe Quinn was subjected to after an ex-boyfriend posted numerous allegations on his blog in August 2014, including that she had a “romantic relationship” with a Kotaku journalist, which prompted concerns that the relationship led to positive media coverage for her game. Although these concerns proved unfounded, allegations about journalistic ethics continued to clash with allegations of harassment and misogyny.

Kotaku is a video game focused blog from the Gawker network. Being outraged at them for giving biased coverage to a given game is a bit like being outraged at The Chicago Tribune for giving biased coverage to the Chicago Bears. Or maybe being outraged at Weekly World News for giving biased coverage to Bat Boy.

Zoe Quinn’s game Depression Quest supposedly, according to the GamerGate crowd, got more favorable press than it merited, either because she was romantically involved with a critic (not true) or else because the gaming press generally was biased in favor of a game made by a woman.

Might the latter be true? Sure.  Remember, the first rule of journalism is that “Dog Bites Man” is not a story, but “Man Bites Dog’ is, because it’s unusual.  “Man Makes Game” is not interesting, because most games are made by men.   So of course the press would pay extra attention to her game; regardless of any extracurricular romantic activity on anyone’s part.

Now, I don’t know how much coverage the game really got compared to a lot of the triple-A titles.  I do know that I would never have heard of it if not for this GamerGate business. So they have not exactly done a marvelous job, if their goal was to correct what they saw as an imbalance in the game’s favor in terms of press coverage.

But things quickly went beyond Zoe Quinn and her game. First, internet troublemakers started publishing her personal information online.  People responded by saying the attacks on Quinn were “misogynistic” and constituted harassment. More troublemakers responded to this by posting those people’s personal information as well.

Among the people whose info was posted was actress and writer Felicia Day, after she wrote a post about “GamerGate”. This is noteworthy because Day’s biggest claim to fame is writing the web comedy The Guild, the final season of which culminates with a huge protest made by a bunch of gamers, who have something of a reasonable point, but undermine it with their insults, sexual innuendos, and boorish behavior.  Life imitates Art, it seems, and all that stuff has given the “GamerGaters” a bad name; and while their concern may be journalistic ethics, they have been completely overshadowed by the trolls on this one.

Putting aside all the sordid instances of harassment against female gamers/game developers/journalists that have been perpetrated by those allegedly affiliated with the “GamerGate” crowd–which invariably devolve into arguments over who is truly part of the “GamerGate’ crowd–I want to focus on what a singularly unlikely and useless thing it is to want “ethics” and “fairness” from gaming journalism.

First of all, we will never have unbiased gaming journalism as long as companies like Electronic Arts exist and have a seemingly endless supply of money to throw at promoting whatever re-hash of a game they are selling. (I actually don’t despise EA as much as many do; but I think they are a negative influence on gaming.)

I don’t know what an un-biased entertainment journalism industry would look like, to be honest.  I mean, what’s the idea?  the good games get coverage and the bad ones don’t?  Well, I mean, this may shock people, but there are disagreements as to whether particular games are good or bad.  I love KoTOR II; other people hate it.  I thought Half-Life 2 was a mediocre FPS; most people think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Do people think we have an unbiased movie journalism industry? The truth is, which movies get reviewed and given awards is based on which studios decided to pay which journalists to review them, to submit them for which Academy Awards, etc., etc., etc.

Does this mean the gaming industry is doomed?  No; not really.  I don’t think that journalism matters that much when it comes to gaming.  I don’t make my gaming decisions based on what some review on Kotaku said; I make it largely based on what genre it is and whether or not Chris Avellone wrote it.

Integrity, honesty and ethics are easy things to ask for from journalists who are covering subjects like politics, weather, crime and so on.  We don’t get them, but it’s reasonable to ask for them.  It’s much harder to ask for them from people covering art and literature.  But the good news is, we don’t need integrity in gaming journalism; because we can just go right to Steam and download whatever strikes our fancy.  I don’t care that Destructoid gave Alpha Protocol a 2 out of 10; I still know it’s a very good game. And I’ve said so.  On this blog.  That anyone can read.

Do you want to see an example of what happens when gaming journalism gets hit with a truly innovative game?  Here it is:

If you’ve played the game, it’s hard not to cringe at some of the questions the reporter asks there.  It’s not her fault, because nobody knew what to expect from SO:TL, but the questions are in anticipation of a typical “choose your ending”-type military game, when Spec Ops is… let’s say… different. If you think Depression Quest is ‘not for typical gamers’, well, Spec Ops is actively against them.  You want to know more than that, play the game.  But my point is just that all kinds of games can flourish now; gaming journalism isn’t holding them back.

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Generally speaking, I don’t like to comment on peoples’ appearances much on this blog.  You wouldn’t go up to random people and start criticizing their looks, so it seems similarly rude to do so in a public forum.  It’s true that I occasionally do talk about it, as in this post, but I justify that by saying (1) it was about appearances as they related to politics, and (2)  it was about politicians, who are sociopaths whose feelings can’t be hurt.

But for the most part, I try not to go around playing “hot or not” just for fun–people pay enough attention to surface appearances as it is, and this blog is supposed to be about examining the less-obvious things in the world, and the subtle points that people too easily miss.

This post is going to be about looks, though–and it’s even going to involve one particular lady’s looks.  (I am especially hesitant to blog about women’s appearances, since I think they tend to be judged on those too much as it is.)  I’m only doing it because I think it’s a good jumping-off point for sociological and cultural discussions, and because the lady in question already discussed the topic on her own blog, which I think (at least, I hope) means she does not mind a polite public discussion of it.  But before I get to the point, I’ll need to give some background.

Felicia Day is an internet celebrity, popular especially among gamers because she is not only pretty, but also a gamer.  This, of course, makes her very popular with many male gamers.  She’s been in several online video series, including starring in the show The Guild, which she also wrote.

I mainly like watching her show Co-optitude, where she and her brother play multi-player games.  It’s a very funny show. (be warned: lots of profanity, only some of which is censored.) Here is a recent interview with her for those unfamiliar with her:

Anyway, though, the point is she had a lot of male gamer fans, until one day, she cut her hair short. Well, ok–she still has a lot of male gamer fans, including yours truly,  but according to this post on her blog, she started losing some, who complained that her new short haircut made them lose interest in her.

She linked to this article by Laurie Penny about why short hair on women is a political statement.  That article is itself a  response to another article called “Girls With Short Hair are Damaged” by someone called “Tuthmosis”.

At this point, I should like to pause briefly for an editorial comment: there may be many articles on the internet about celebrity haircuts.  But what site besides Ruined Chapel gives you assigned reading in the course of such an article?

Now, there are lot of interesting points in all these posts. For starters, I don’t buy Penny’s idea that a woman cutting her hair short is a political statement.  I know conservative Republican housewives who cut their hair short because they find it more practical and convenient.

But what I really want to focus on is this: in the “Girls With Short Hair” article, “Tuthmosis” asserts that long hair is “almost universally attractive to men.”  And Penny, in her feminist response to that article, implicitly agrees with this assertion.  She views short hair, therefore, as women rejecting the notion they need to please men, whereas “Tuthmosis” views it as a negative thing.

What I want to examine is whether the assertion is even true.  It is qualified with the word “almost”, which may be enough to save it, but I want to see the data backing it up.  I say this because I am one of those men who find short hair more attractive. I don’t mean this in some high-minded “it’s attractive when a woman asserts her independence” sort of way (although I do think that as well.) I mean that at a very fundamental level, I find women with short hair to be, for lack of a better word, “prettier”  than those with long hair.

My personal opinion does not prove the assertion false.  I am the “almost”.  (I might even say, “I am the 1%”) Even so, the fact that such an exception as myself exists admits the possibility of this taste for long hair changing, and short hair being preferred.

But while I may be in the minority, I’m by no means convinced I’m in as small a minority as that.  And anyway, if the 1% elites are allowed to control every other aspect of society, why not hairstyles as well?

I’m kidding.  But really, is long hair that overwhelmingly preferred?

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Do I have to turn in my liberal card if I’m not excited about this?  Yes, I think it was a stupid policy to exclude women, but frankly I don’t see why the whole thing got made into such a big deal.  It’s a place for rich people to hang out with other rich people and do, I don’t know, rich people stuff.  And play golf.

I seriously doubt that this will open new career paths for Condoleeza Rice or Darla Moore.  Rice was the Secretary of State; I’m guessing that carries more weight for networking purposes than being a member of some fancy golf club.  I bet when she was picked to be Secretary of State, her first thought wasn’t “Great!  Now maybe I can finally get into that golf club!”

Look at this list of famous people in this club.  I bet none of them got where they are by becoming members of that club.  I’m thinking their success was the cause, rather than the effect, of their membership.

It would be one thing if it were the only golf course in the world, or if the ladies they admitted were, for example, too poor to go to another location to golf.  As it is, why, surely there are adequate substitute golf clubs that Rice and Moore could go to if they wanted.  Maybe loyal reader and golfer P.M. Prescott can explain why this particular place would be so special.

I don’t actually see how discrimination really hurts anyone in this particular case, except for the discriminators.  Since the entire point of the club appears to be propagating a prestigious reputation that it has manufactured for itself, the bad P.R. for being “the place that doesn’t admit women” could get to be very damaging, as indeed it ultimately did.  I’m not defending their policy, but I don’t see that it was hurting anyone except the people who made it.

Bottom line: I think the people running Augusta National were being stupid by not admitting women.  However, I think people need to quit acting like the change in policy is some kind of giant feminist victory. It’s nothing of the kind.

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I was watching The Dick Van Dyke Show on TV last night.  The episode I saw was called “The Bad Old Days“.  In a nutshell, it went like this: one of Rob’s colleagues tells him about an article on “the decline of the American male”, and how men are becoming more subservient to their wives.  This worries Rob, who starts to fear that Laura too often tells him what to do.  The episode culminates in a hilarious dream sequence, in which Rob imagines himself as an overbearing, bullying 19th-century-style husband, who makes his wife do all the housework and forces his son to work in a factory.  Of course, Rob wakes up and realizes that this wasn’t such a great way to live, after all.

It’s kind of funny to me, because you often hear this complaint of “feminized” men being subordinated to their wives these days, especially in conservative and “alt-right” circles.  Often, the 1950s and early ’60s are considered the archetype of a more restrictive and socially conservative era, and to some extent the setup of The Dick Van Dyke Show is emblematic of that.  I remember my blogger-friend Thingy contrasting Mary Tyler Moore’s accommodating housewife character on Dick Van Dyke with her independent, single, career-woman character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the ’70s.

But then, here we have an episode of Dick Van Dyke from 1962 that addresses this same “men are too subservient to their wives” idea.  So, it seems like that idea must have been in the air even back then.  Which, in turn, suggests the possibility that perhaps there is an ever-recurring nostalgia among authoritarian men of every era, that they had it better in, as Rob says, “the bad old days”.

Well, that’s enough sociological musing!  The point is, it was a very funny show.  It does amaze me that the best thing on TV some nights is a show from 50 years ago, but there you have it.

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Check out this BuzzFeed article about a Scholastic Books series called Survive Anything!  The article claims that the books are “misogynistic” because there is an edition for boys and an edition for girls.  The boys’ edition teaches things like “How to Survive a Tornado”, “How to Survive a Broken Leg” and, perhaps least usefully, “How to Survive a T-Rex”. (Oughtn’t they at least teach how to survive time-travel first?)  The girls’ edition, on the other hand, teaches stuff like “How to survive a BFF Fight”, “How to Show You’re Sorry” and “Top Tips for Speechmaking”.

This, the writer at BuzzFeed says, is not right.  Why do girls get tips on emotional, domestic-type stuff when boys get tips on how to survive in the wild?

Well, I agree it’s not right, of course. But I don’t think it’s misogynistic.  It’s really just sexist. But if you must use a stronger term, it’s misandrist.  Surviving a tornado is a useful skill, although frankly, unless you already have tornado shelter built, it’s purely a matter of luck.  Most of the Indiana Jones-like scenarios the boys’ version seems to cover are situations that (a) probably will never happen and (b) would be decided mostly by chance if they did happen.

The girls edition teaches all sorts of things that might actually occur.  I’m a man, and I’ve never needed to know how to survive my parachute failing, but I have had to give speeches and say “I’m sorry” for things.  But these books merely assume that men would never be concerned with such things.  Well, enough of that prejudiced thinking, say I!  I resent the notion that we fellas are only good for feats of brute strength and endurance, and that the civilized arts of diplomacy are closed to us!