I saw this movie for the very first time last night and thought it was a fine low-budget post-the-world-gone-to-shit movie but I’ve got a few questions. Since the movie really doesn’t explain the whys, perhaps people who read the book would have a better handle on it.
Why, in a world where everyone has to fight so hard for food and shelter, were the men wasting so much time and energy looking for women to rape and kill? I can understand if a band of roving men happened upon a poor, defenseless female there would be a-rapin’ and a-stabbing but the men in this movie spend more time puntang hunting than food hunting.
It seems that the whole point of this movie is (the very hunky looking) Don Johnson choosing between his dog and Quilla June Holmes. What I don’t understand is, what was Quilla’s choice? Go back to Topeka? Of course not. Strike off on her own so she could be hunted by roving bands of rapist-killers? The perfectly reasonable choice would have been to stay with Vic and his dog. But it seemed that option never occured to Quilla June Holmes.
Maybe that was the point of the movie. It’s perfectly reasonable that women would be hunted in the future because they’re stupider than dogs.
Oh, I understand Vic’s choice perfectly. Feed his dog or go with the manipulating biatch. What I don’t understand is Quilla. Why was she making him choose between her and the dog? There’s absolutely NO reason for her to do so.
No I think he like girls alot.
He just doesn’t pedestal women at all. Its not like his male characters are always better people.
The Vic/Albert thing is really simple. Albert is a really lame name. Vic is a cool name. If you were a 12 year old boy (I think Vic is supposed to be 12ish in the book obviously older in the movie) which name would you rather go by?
Quilla also saw Blood as a threat to her hold on Vic that’s why she wanted to leave him behind.
And no the point of the book/movie is not that “It’s perfectly reasonable that women would be hunted in the future because they’re stupider than dogs.”
The main point is that without any social order, the natural biological mechanisms of males (procreation and essentially predeliction for violence) takes over
Also that a forced social order that oppresses people’s natural tendencies also leads to entropy (The Topeka underdwellers are sterile).
We are seeing the last generation of humanity in the story.
In the book they even mention that babies being born now (which implies that not all women are hunted and raped and killed just unattached unprotected women) are so deformed and mutated that they are killed immediately.
The movie doesn’t pedestal women. It depicts them as expendable-- hunted, raped and killed seemingly for sport. There was only two women in the movie that weren’t screaming while being raped and killed or lining up to marry Vic’s sperm in the movie. One was Jason Robard’s second fiddle scripture reader and the other was a stupid, manipulative bitch.
The movie does make it look like the only thing women are good for is fucking and killing. The only thing added from the book that I can see so far is that they are also good for eating.
So we’ve got flawed yet capable male characters and their fodder. In EVERY point in the movie women were shown in this manner. From the bad porn to the stupid Quilla.
The book I know nothing about-- except that, apparently, the boy and his dog ate her. Please 'splain how this shows a lot of love of woman-- except how tasty they are.
Fair enough. I was thinking more of Harlan’s view of women in this particular movie. Certainly in other works his women are not just fodder. Starship Troopers jumps directly to mind.
With A Boy and his Dog, I think you’re putting more of what you read in the book into the movie, myself. Can’t wait to read that site with the comparisons between the book and the movie. Of course now I have to go get the book.
I always seem to be missing the Good Stuff at colleges by a year. The year before I got to the University of Rochester in upstate New York Harlan Ellison came up these to defend the movie A Boy and His Dog against a feminist protest against the showing of the film on campus (Rochester, maybe because of the legacy of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the whole Seneca Falls thing, has a very active feminist community). I wish I’d been there. Ellison apparently defended his novella (which won a Hugo or Nebula, I forget which) and the film based on it from charges of misogyny and male chauvinism.
No, Harlan definitely hates women. I read a story he wrote that was supposedly true about how some woman invited him back to her parents house for some fooling around, and he left her taped or tied (I can’t remember the details) naked in the living room for her parents to find when they got home, for no other offense than being female and being perceived as stupid. I’ve seen it on the internet before but I can’t find it now, maybe someone will link it.
I was a little shocked by his mean-spiritedness, and the tone of it was a kind of self-satisfaction that never questioned that she deserved the treatment.
Harlan Ellison is a mean-spirited and vile little man who isn’t half as smart as he thinks.
Circle gets the square. Ellison doesn’t hate women. He hates people in general, regardless of gender.
Re the story
The solos don’t care about social order. They just care about getting what they want. One gang does run a power plant, but only because all the other gangs in the area pay them for it (in food and immunity from attack IIRC). The tincan towns do care about social order (they’ve got guns and robots to enforce the law). But, they have other problems (sterility, denial of reality, etc).
