I’ll use “movie” for simplicity, but these thoughts apply just as well to a book, play, TV show, etc.
People like what they like, I’m not trying to say somebody is wrong for disliking something; I just scratch my head at some of the reasoning.
A movie having a racist, homophobic, or sexist character does not make the movie racist, homophobic, or sexist. The character can even be depicted as complex, with other redeeming traits, and with no consequences for their bad behavior, without condemning the movie to endorsing that behavior. Not everything has to be a simple morality play where bad actions lead to bad results. That would be very boring.
Movies will sometimes depict sexual assault and rape without any consequences, because this also happens in reality. It is wrong to force an actor to perform a scene she is uncomfortable with, but just because a character is sexually assaulted does not mean the actor is sexually assaulted. Actors are human, and I do recognize the sentiment of, “I agreed to do it, but it affected me in ways I wasn’t prepared for.”
People occasionally do awful things to each other. A movie depicting that is not terrible just because it depicts awful things. There are lots of reasons a movie can be bad, but I think those have more to do with aspects of its creation, not its subject matter.
All of this is probably based on my own like of stories with unsympathetic protagonists.
It’s not just a matter of whether a character behaves badly. It’s the eye through which the movie views that behavior. The question is not whether characters must never do anything wrong. It’s how the movie puts that behavior in context.
For example, both “Revenge of the Nerds” and “Sixteen Candles” end with very dubious sexual interactions. Today we might view them as rape or sexual assault. What makes those scenes unpalatable today is that the movie depicts those acts as benign or even with approval.
Sometimes I don’t like a movie because I don’t like anyone in it; they’re not usually just bad people, but horrible in pretty much every way, and they’re not even funny. Like in the movie Twin Town I didn’t give a damn about anyone in it because they were all unmitigated arseholes. There are complex bad guys, and there are boring bad guys. Also it’s more interesting if there’s a range of characters, good, bad, kind, cruel, etc - if all the characters are boring and evil then I have better things to do with my time.
Also, in Hughes case, he also had an Asian character who was a racist stereotype; that’s not a character behaving badly, that’s just a racist writer putting overt racism in the movie.
One of the smaller reasons I dislike a lot of action movies is because of their attitudes to collateral damage, all those innocent bystanders who get maimed or killed (usually by implication, the movies usually don’t even have the guts to show the actual carnage, only the vehicles or buildings destroyed). It’s generally worse with superhero movies, apparently the only beings who count are the superheroes themselves and possibly their loved ones.
The first time this became a conscious thought for me was during 1983’s Blue Thunder. The climax of this film was a battle within the city between the magic helicopter and (IIRC) one or more fighter planes. Rockets slammed into and/or through tall buildings over and over again, but because the bad guys were defeated in the end, it’s all good. We aren’t supposed to think or care about anything else.
There was a recent superhero movie (was it Batman v. Superman?) that had Superman being berated by a government person for all the collateral damage caused by him defending the world from something. I thought this was a potentially interesting take and at least the issue was out there. Mostly the attitude of such movies is “eh, who cares?”
I agree with all of that. I don’t agree with what I read Ringwald said about Judd Nelson’s character in Breakfast Club. The character was an asshole. He was supposed to be an asshole. He had a redemption arc. To criticize how the character was before the redemption misses the point.
Not that I’m going to defend the movie strenuously. I was in the target demographic when it came out and I didn’t particularly like it. Thought it was hamfisted then and now.
Except in the DCEU this was just a passing observation and then it returned to wholesale destruction in Justice League with no consequences whatsoever for the heroes. At least in the Marvel Cinematic Universe the destruction and loss of life is given more than a single nod and actually forms the major plot conflict of Captain America: Civil War (even though the key turnpoin was the result of one of the heroes trying to stop Crossbones from detonating a weapon on the ground which would have almost certainly killed even more people), and the consequences of having to clean up the resulting destruction is the motivation of the villain in Spider-Man: Homecoming. There is still wholesale destruction (in Civil War, the “heroes” basically destroy an airport due to a pointless internal conflict) and bystanders are basically treated like faceless mooks, so they still gloss over real world impacts of their destructiveness, but there is more than a passing acknowledgment.
Some films have terriblly-behaving characters by design, like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Grifters, or any a number of Coen Brothers films; the difference is, these characters are intended to be flawed and damages and even when you find them sympathetic they’re still not good people, and that is part of the story. The problem with, say, John Hughes films, Nora Ephrom comedies, or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is that the characters are intended to be accepted by the audience as fundamentally good protagonists even though they display sociopathic and narcissistic behaviors like stealing, emotional manipulation, lying for personal gain, et cetera. Such films may seem entertaining in the place and time they were introduced, but upon reflection are actually pretty disturbing.
So, while a film like Miller’s Crossing is supposed to leave you feeling like everybody deserved what happened to them, it is hard to finish *Sixteen Candels * and not feel like Molly Ringwald’s character is suffering from some kind of teen movie Stockholm syndrome.
I can totally accept a movie as being racist because it portrays characters in a racist way. That is different than the characters in the movie being racists.
It would be impossible to tell historical (and unfortunately some contemporary) stories without allowing the characters to be accurately portrayed as racist.
This is what I have a problem with, I guess. I often have a hard time separating the idea of the movie accepting a behavior with the behavior being accepted internal to the story. There are clearly differences.
In the article she mentions Porky’s, which was clearly a movie which had the intent of showing some topless women and making some crude jokes, with no respect for the women in the story. I’d contrast that to something like American Pie, which also showed some topless women and made crude jokes. However, as much as the characters in the movie didn’t always show respect to women, by letting the female characters develop and have their own personality, the movie showed them some respect. Those are just teen sex comedies, so yeah, women are always going to be treated badly, but there are still degrees and nuance.
I don’t remember Sixteen Candles much, but yes, the scene in Revenge of the Nerds was always troublesome to me. In the movie the female character didn’t mind sex by deception, so I guess internal to the story it wasn’t rape? It just doesn’t ring true to me that a woman would be so accepting of accidentally (on her part) having sex with somebody she previously was repulsed by. (It takes all kinds, and if your kink is having sex with random dudes in masks, then I’m not talking about you.)
The hypothetical to this would be, the woman in Sixteen Candles is upset, unconscious, etc. and the dude tells his friends, “I just banged this drunk chick,” and they’re all congratulatory. I can see that as being appropriate to a story because, hey look, here is some rape culture. Even if the movie doesn’t give the guy any repercussions, because, hey look, rape culture, the movie might not be glorifying the behavior, even if the characters in the movie do.
But of course, that doesn’t apply to John Hughes movies, there is no historical precedent for Long Duc Dong, he’s a pure figment of the racist imagination of the writer. Indeed, no human is ever the racist stereotype and good art unpacks that truth.
Same.
I don’t need the characters to be good people
I don’t need the characters to do good things.
I don’t need to like them.
I don’t need there to be consequences for bad behavior.
But I do need to know that the creators (director, writer, etc.) recognize bad behavior. There are differences between portraying, understanding, explaining, excusing, justifying, and celebrating. And if the filmmaker chooses to justify or even celebrate actions that I find repugnant, that’s a problem for me.
w.r.t. redemption arcs, specifically - for me, a character who was a serial killer needs to do a lot more redemption than a character who shoplifted some records. When someone gives an arc more appropriate to the latter for a character who was the former, it tells me that the creators really don’t recognize that it was really bad behavior.
I think nearly everyone gets this, though. I very rarely hear adults express a moral objection to a movie simply because it depicts bad behavior or bad people, and those who do are usually kind of nutty. Any reasonably sophisticated adult understands that the filmmakers aren’t necessarily endorsing everything that happens onscreen. When people object to bad behavior in movies, it’s usually because they believe the movie is glorifying or normalizing this behavior. Reasonable people can have differences of opinion as to whether a particular movie crosses this line. People can even object to a movie that you think is fine without wanting everything to be a simple morality play.
I haven’t read the Molly Ringwald article yet, but it doesn’t surprise me if she thinks some of her 1980s movies do glorify bad behavior. Sixteen Candles in particular seems like a movie that doesn’t just depict rape culture and racist humor, but considers the behaviors depicted to be harmless fun for all involved.
Even without the stereotype or the dubious sexual interactions, Hughes’ movies were simply sappy drivel, and unpalatable just because they were insultingly patronizing–not to mention lacking any worthy sense of aesthetics. That’s really why they were bad movies.
I never interpreted Ferris Bueller’s Day off as intending to tell you that Ferris was a fundamentally good guy. It was an over-the-top comedy with a guy doing something he’d get into trouble for in real life, like how someone engaging in 3-stooges style slapstick would be seriously disturbing IRL but is entertaining when it’s not real. I just don’t think Ferris Bueller’s day off was intended to be taken as literally as some critics do.
I found Once Upon a Time in the Midlands really hard to watch because Carlyle’s character was such a total dick. He is very good at playing nasty characters, like in Ravenous or Trainspotting, or the more amusing anti-protagonist in Formula 51, but the guy in Midlands had nothing going for him. I like my bad people to have at least some personality.
But the misunderstanding is going on right in this thread. Ferris was a sociopath and narcissist. Of course he was, but that doesn’t matter. I found the movie funny and entertaining. I didn’t want to be Ferris, I didn’t want to kick my principal in the face, etc. Those things are in the movie because the movie’s creators found them funny, and I agreed enough that I found it funny, too. It’s fantasy and silliness.
It can be a fun thought game to apply real life rules to works of fiction, but viewers should know that a movie can be enjoyable and meaningful without following those rules, and can often make strong statements by breaking those rules.
I always saw Ferris Bueller as a classic trickster figure - a Robin Goodfellow, Ananzi, Br’er Rabbit, or Bugs Bunny. Tricksters may bend or break the rules and tweak the noses of authority, but they never really hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it. They’re good-natured agents of chaos.
The opposite may be true. If there is a power failure and the audience gets up and leaves without seeing the last ten minutes of the picture, it can still be judged as a great or not-great movie. The picture is the sum of its parts, and and the quality of the film is based not just on how the audience reacts to some of the characters, but a good film (a work of art) will reflect good artists all the way through the credits, including the color timer and the foley editor.
As for the last ten minutes, Ive seen a lot more good pictures spoiled in the end, than bad ones redeemed. That’s where you find out if the characters get their just deserts, but the film is already good or bad before it gets there. Far too often, a good picture gets destroyed by an in-house censorship that is afraid to offend an audience and adjusts it to make it pretty. How many times have I watched a picture and near the end, I’m screaming “Roll the credits, right now!” because I know what they are going to do…
OK, are you similarly angered by romantic comedies where the male protagonist is a creepy stalker who “wins over” (another disgusting idea) his true love by doing creepy stalker shit?
My point is, Big Dumb Action Movies are Chick Flicks for Stereotypical Guys, much like how Chick Flicks are Big Dumb Action Movies for Stereotypical Gals: They’re gender-coded escapist fiction, and the hard-and-fast rule of escapism is to buy into the premise. You don’t “see” the collateral damage in Big Dumb Action Movies for the same reason you don’t “see” the traumatized stalking victim in the Chick Flick: It isn’t in frame, it isn’t part of the mindset, so it does not exist. You paid for escapism, so trying to escape the escapism back into reality is rather stupid. You only try to subvert the escapism when you’re making a parodic comedy, like Tropic Thunder or There’s Something About Mary.