The Armchair Feminist Returns: Dark Knight Rises

So, I just saw Dark Knight Rises, and I thought I'd share a few quick thoughts about the presentation of women in the latest installment of Chris Nolan's bat-trilogy.

The below will contain SPOILERS for Dark Knight Rises. Seriously. SPOILERS! Do not read if you do not want to be SPOILED.

The Good:

There are two whole, important, prominent female characters in this movie! Count them! Two! That's one more than one. That's fully twice the number dictated by strict adherence to the Smurfette Principle!

These women have plans. These women have motivations. They have their own agendas, and they do stuff. And the stuff that they do? It moves the plot forward! This is, seriously, a triumph of superhero cinema.

It is perhaps a little sad that this is a triumph of superhero cinema, but still . . .

The Bad Not-So-Good:

Both of these lovely ladies are romantic interests for the male lead. They are even, more or less, girlfriends for the respective sides of Bruce Wayne's/Batman's split personality. Talia, in her guise as the ethically responsible Ms. Tate, is the 'good' woman who can attend social events with Bruce, and help him use his parents' legacy to save the world. Selina is the dangerous, 'bad' woman who can hold her own with the goddamn Batman in his illicit vigilanteism, and look hot straddling his big, long, wide, powerful . . . completely unFreudian bat-cycle. Yeah, that's it. Bat. Cycle.

Having a girlfriend for each personality sounds like a pretty cool way to do a Batman character study, actually. Until you think about how these are the only prominent female characters in the movie, and their presence is largely useful for what it tells us about the goddamn Batman. Until you think about how Bruce/Batman is so complex that he needs two whole girlfriends to explore two different sides of his psyche, but these girlfriends only get half a man each. What does that say about their complexity? Their characterization?

It helps a little that both women are misdirects, that the 'bad' one becomes the useful ally while the 'good' one is revealed as criminal mastermind. The movie nonetheless still feels firmly entrenched in Noir-esque femme fatale/woman-as-redeemer female stereotypes, even if they do get to play swapsies at the end.

The Ugly:

Catwoman's pose in the promotional poster. I know, I know; it's not part of the movie proper. But it vexes me. Even while watching the movie, I kept remembering the silly thing, and it did impact my reaction to Anne Hathaway's character (though her performance itself was actually quite solid, and one of the more pleasant aspects of the movie). For an awesome rant about the poses that women are posed into in the media, see Emily Asher-Perrin's quite excellent "Hey, Everyone--Stop Taking This Picture".

My verdict (because this is a subjective space for the sharing of my own subjective opinions):

Flaws aside, this movie is eminently watchable as well as trying its damnedest to give us some kickass female characters. And you know what? It doesn't do too bad a job. Though it's not exactly the highest bar in the world, this is probably the Batmovie with the best girls women in it.

Satisfactory, Archie. Cookies all 'round.

Spotlight #8: Jiu Jiu

Well, I've already covered Kamisama Kiss, and chances are good that, in the not-so-distant future, I'll be blogging on Her Majesty's Dog and Inu X Boku Secret Service / Youko x Boku SS (now that the English-licensed anime's out and most of it is even up on Hulu), so I think I'll be declaring "Girls and Their Dog-Boys" an official subcategory of femdom manga+anime. Come to think of it, Tramps Like Us / Kimi wa Petto would also fit more-or-less into this category, and even Inuyasha would get an honorable mention--though I don't think it really fits the 'femdom' criteria (magic necklace aside).

So, anyway. On to discussion of the femdom dog-boy manga to end all femdom dog-boy manga: the recently-licensed Jiu Jiu, volume one.

English Title: Jiu Jiu
Japanese Title: Jiu Jiu
Author: Touya Tobina
English Publisher: Viz Media
Manga?: Yes
Novels?: No
Anime?: No
Volumes out in English: 1

Technically, Night and Snow aren't dog-boys, but wolf-boys. Not to be confused with werewolves, which are a different monster in this universe. Nope, the two male leads are just domesticated demon/human hybrid wolves who can transform into boys. Naked boys, because this isn't a White Wolf role-playing game and they can't take "whole cloth." There is a predictable amount of the boys turning into naked humans and cuddling the heroine inappropriately, but it all plays out as quite innocent, mostly because the motivation on the wolves' part seems to be dog-like loyalty combined with an equally dog-like desire for attention rather than anything hormonal.

Takamichi, our heroine, is a demon slayer, and Night and Snow are her "Jiu Jiu," or demon-hybrid servants, who assist her in hunting the more dangerous, wild varieties of demon. When they're on the job, that is. In their day-to-day life, the wolf-boys are her pets while they're at home and her classmates while they're at school, making the trio's relationship a bit odd, to say the least. (They have a cage to sleep in--as dogs--but consistently end up sneaking into Takamichi's bed--as naked boys--in the night. Oh, running nudity gags.)

The story is . . . surprisingly affecting. (Warning: There be SPOILERS ahead.) At the beginning of the manga, we get a flashback scene in which Takamichi is having a hard time getting over the death of her twin brother. Her father, the demon-slaying clan head, gives her two demon wolf puppies to raise. (Time then jumps ahead three years to the manga's current continuity.) The emotional core of the manga is Takamichi learning to care for her pets, even while the trauma of her brother's death makes her want to push away those people she most loves. This setup offers some real internal conflict for the character, and it's also quite the refreshing change-of-pace to see the girl, for once, be the tortured/emo/angsty hero worried about sullying the ones closest to her.

The art is cute, if not especially intricate, with the requisite amount of bubbly shoujo backgrounds counterpointed by blood-splattered action scenes. The character designs are quite stylish, and the heroine has a particularly distinctive, little-girl-meets-angular-tomboy look to her, which ramps up the coolness factor quite a bit--and makes me want to figure out how to work a cap and sword into my own wardrobe.

It's a good look for her.

Takamichi, I want your hat.

Some of the panels, especially those which focus on shape and color more than detail, are actually quite beautifully composed, and really enhance the mood in a few key dramatic moments.

The weird: the male leads are three years old. Not that there's anything technically romantic about their relationship with the heroine in the first volume. And no real reason, aside from shoujo convention, to assume that their three-way relationship will blossom into romance. But they are three years old. And dogs. Which would make them, as dogs, approximately twenty-one years old. While Takamichi is sixteen. Which inverses the problem without really solving it. And some of the scenes look like this:

She sleeps with her puppies even though she's a cat person.

And this:

Why are they blushing so hard? Because Night's mistress just got up the courage to call him a "good dog." Aw, that's adorable. And a little messed up. I love manga.

Ultimately, I quite like this title. It has action, demonic puppies and a nontraditional female lead, along with hefty doses of squee-worthy cuteness and angst in equal measure. I also count it as a plus that the canine characters act a lot like you'd imagine dogs would if they could walk, talk, and demand extra Frisbee time. I'm looking forward to seeing how Takamichi's (hopefully platonic) relationship with her pups unfolds in future volumes.

Spotlight #7: The Flowers of Evil

This post could just as easily be entitled "What just happened to me while I was standing in the manga aisle at Books-A-Million?" Or perhaps "What the frell just happened to me while I was standing in the manga aisle at Books-A-Million?" Because fictional curse words convey a sense of out-of-one's-element confusion that real ones just can't.

Without further to-do:

English Title: The Flowers of Evil
Japanese Title: Aku no Hana
Author: Shuzo Oshimi
English Publisher: Vertical
Manga?: Yes
Novels?: No
Anime?: No
Volumes out in English: 1

So, this middle-school kid, Takao, is kind of a loner and really likes reading Baudelaire. He has a prized copy of the poetry collection The Flowers of Evil that he carries around with him. It has an awesomely creepy eyeflower on it. His schoolmates get on his case for being so unutterably bizarre as to read stuff (which, as I recall, is exactly what middle school kids do when they see someone having the audacity to read in public) so he's already got a reputation for weirdness at the beginning of the book. He's head-over-heels for the cute, smart honor student Saeki, so much so that when he happens to find a bag with her gym clothes in it, he steals the gym clothes. Naturally. (Baudelaire made him do it.)

And that's how the manga starts. SPOILERS ahead--because there is so little plot here that I have to talk about a lot of it to talk about any of it:

Unfortunately for Takao, Weird Girl Nakamura saw him steal Cute Girl Saeki's clothes, and from that point on, Takao pretty much becomes Nakamura's bitch. (In this volume, anyway. Not sure what will happen later.) What does Nakamura want from Takao? Well, more perversion. She's very excited to have found her very own real-life pervert to mess with, and she wants him to reveal all his perverted thoughts about Saeki to her. Actually, what she says is that she wants to "strip" Takao bare of all the "skin" his perverted self is hiding behind, so . . . that's interesting. (Especially as that moment nicely represents what I assume will be the emotional core of the series.)

I have no idea what to make of this. I saw the premise as laid out in blurb-form on the back of the book, thought "hey this fits in the femdom category as I describe it; maybe I should check it out" and then read a little of the volume to see if I liked it enough to buy it and bring it home with me. I ended up finishing the volume before I could decide whether I liked, hated or was completely indifferent to it. I just don't know. I read it yesterday and today I still don't know.

Was it interesting? Yes, more or less, though it sounds more interesting than it is. This manga has a pretty slow, thoughtful pace, and very little actually happens in Volume 1.

Did it make me think about sexual awakening, and what it means that (in both America and Japan) kids generally experience the emergence of their own sexual selves before a repressed society is willing to give them the tools with which to understand their newfound urges and realizations? Of course.

Did it make me think about perversion and what it means? A little. Not as much as you might think. In one of the author pages, Shuzo Oshimi states that he hopes that this manga will get people to think about perversion. Which got me contemplating perversion more than I otherwise would have. Of course, this is only volume one, and there's lots of room for further development of this topic.

It's marketed as for kids 13+, which is nice, since it means that some kids still in puberty will be encouraged to read a manga actually about puberty. But hey, it's (as my own experience attests!) not bound in plastic wrap, so probably whomever wants to can gain access to it.

Is it good? No clue. Is it bad? Again: no clue.

It's well-dawn, anyway, though the art has that unnervingly solid look to it that a lot of horror, seinen and shounen manga use, and that style isn't particularly to my taste. Fits the tone of the book, though.

Are the characters sympathetic? Honestly, I found Nakamura more sympathetic than the whiny protagonist or the innocent, virginal, untouchable object of his 'shameful' desires. Perhaps because she was trying to be honest about her own socially unacceptable desires. Then again, if I found out at the end of the series that she was a projection of Takao's psyche, I would not be exactly surprised, in spite of the fact that she interacts with other characters. So, this indicates to me that she is not (yet, anyway) fully developed as a character in her own right.

Does it support the whole virgin/whore dichotomy thing? Oh boy oh boy yes.

Does it interrogate the same? A little. Mostly in that Takao's pedestal-worship of the virginal Saeki is so obviously something he does arbitrarily, for himself, without learning anything about the girl one way or the other. There's room for later volumes to shatter his dichotomous mode of thinking about women, and I think the series as a whole may get a lot more interesting if it goes in this direction.

Concluding remarks: At this point, the manga has the potential to become 1) brilliantly insightful, 2) disgustingly offensive or 3) unutterably boring. It also has the (approximately equal) potential to become all three at once.

In other words: What the frell was that?