Stardust, the movie

[rushthatspeaks]

I went with B. and seishonagon and thespooniest to Stardust on Saturday, and sat there during the previews muttering over and over to myself 'not that travesty they're making of The Dark Is Rising, please, any trailer but that'. And my wish was granted (phew). The Golden Compass trailer actually looks quite good and is talking polar-bear enabled, which pleases me.

As for Stardust itself, well. The visuals are lovely. It is very well directed, and makes a complicated story easy to follow and a large cast distinguishable and distinctive. The acting ranges between good and awesome, with Claire Danes' love scene to a mouse standing out as a highlight for me. Robert De Niro was an absolute delight. The dialogue was funny, if not quotable.

But.

I'm quite accustomed to accepting that works of art have flaws, and that this does not invalidate them. I know that things can be brilliant in one sphere and horrid in others without it hurting the brilliance. I love many things that are objectively speaking quite bad in ways that should really be quite difficult to ignore.

I do however have a finite capacity to put up with some forms of badness, and Stardust strained that capacity ever farther until finally it snapped violently, leaving me angry, depressed, and thoroughly disappointed.

Because oh my gods, is that movie *bad* about women.


So the women in the movie fall into two major categories: women who center themselves around Tristan, Our Hero, and women who don't. Let's start with the first, and specifically Yvaine.

What is the first thing Tristan does to Yvaine (after crash-landing on her in a sexually suggestive sort of way)? He ties her up.

After that, he calls her a stupid cow.

After that, he makes her walk for miles and miles on a broken ankle, complaining that she isn't moving fast enough and becoming upset with her anytime she tries to rest.

Then he ties her up again and leaves her alone, completely not thinking about whether there is any inherent danger in doing so.

And he does all this because he wants to give her as a present. She even points it out to him, sarcastically telling him that an injured woman is such a romantic gift.

Even after Tristan has started treating her more like a person, he never apologizes for his previous behavior, and he doesn't stop wanting to give her as a present until very, very late (after he's had sex with her, by the way).

So of course Yvaine falls madly in love with him, makes him immortal, and they live happily ever after. And when she's saving the day by using her innate star powers, which she has had all along, she says to him that she couldn't have done it without him, because clearly she can do nothing without Being In Love.

Oh and even though the pirates do not hurt Yvaine, they find it necessary to use sexual threats whenever talking about her, because their reputation as Manly Men would suffer if they didn't. And Yvaine, unlike in the book, does not get to learn swordfighting with Tristan; she learns to play the piano. Because clearly it would be useful in no way for someone who has half the kingdom wanting to chase her down and cut her heart out to learn how to defend herself. After all, she has Tristan to do it for her!

Also in the centered-on-Tristan category we have Tristan's mother, who doesn't take the throne despite being the only surviving royalty of her generation because there has to be a male heir. Yes, this is an analogue nineteenth-century, and yes, that does make sense for the time period-- except that in the novel, she does become queen, because Tristan recognizes that he hasn't been trained or raised to be king and won't be any good at it. The movie has explicitly changed this. All Una gets to do is protect Tristan-- and Yvaine, once she finds out Tristan would like that.

Every woman in the non-centered on Tristan category is some variety of evil, cruel, selfish bitch. Every single one. There's Victoria, who has the horrible taste not to throw aside all her bred-in-the-bone period-appropriate class ideology to marry a shopboy she doesn't like (clearly a quality of evil punishable only by having it rubbed in your face that you will not be the queen of the magical kingdom and also by having your husband make eyes at other men (and I find that bit problematic for other reasons too-- Captain Shakespeare, basically the most awesome character in the movie, is being used to punish Victoria by flirting with her husband, because clearly homosexuals have no taste and are innately threatening to the sanctity of the family, or something)).

There are the witches. The three sisters, despite impressive magical powers, can't think of anything better to do with eternal life or any better reason to have it than to try desperately to make themselves pretty, because clearly visible signs of aging are The End Of The World. They'll do anything to make themselves pretty. The men, meanwhile, get to think about eternal life in terms of kingship and power and whether or not they want that.

The other witch, Ditchwater Sal, doesn't seem to care so much about beauty, which I do appreciate. She does at least seem to have her own motivations. Of course, anytime anyone insults her, it's based entirely on her appearance. And for keeping Tristan's mother a slave (granted, nasty) and doing exactly as she promised she would for Tristan, she gets killed in a really disgusting manner that is then played for laughs.

Grrr. Just... grrr. And it annoys me more than it might otherwise because some of this is things that are movie-specific, because the book wasn't spectacular about its women but it wasn't like this. It would have been so easy to do so much better, and it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

Do I still think people should see this movie? Sure. A lot of it is great. Just know how it's going to be on this score, and that it crosses my personal line as to what I cannot watch without nausea and fury. Your mileage may vary.

I just wish they'd taken the giant glowing opportunities to do better than they did.

Comments

[seishonagon.livejournal.com]

I would just like to say that I totally agree with you on all counts, except that I enjoyed the movie anyway. And I would add encouragement for people to read the book - because the book, while it has a bit of this in order to be period-correct, has far less of this problem than the movie.

I will say that I think that Captain Shakespeare is making eyes at Victoria's husband not to punish Victoria, but because Victoria's husband looks suspiciously like Orlando Bloom, and I thought it was more a commentary on recent actor fetishes than anything else.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

*laughs* I like your interpretation of the Captain's little flirting moment. Personally I assumed it was just the most convenient way to hint at Humphrey's own latent homosexuality-- which is, admittedly, being used to punish Victoria for her lousy taste in men, picking the rich pretty boy over the poor dedicated one.

I also second the "agree but loved it anyways" bit. After all, this is hardly uncommon in such movies (I mean, I love "Princess Bride" and all, but is Buttercup ever a spineless sap!).

Then I got to thinking-- the men in this movie weren't much better portrayed, were they? They were pretty much all, with the exception of Cap. Shakespeare, either villainous (often without sufficient motive) or downright daft. I mean, Tristan is this big lunk who goes off on an idiotic quest on behalf of a woman who treats him like crap, and he doesn't recognize true love when it hits him over the head. Septimus was a greedy bastard... in fact, I think the only two decent characters in the entire story were Una and Shakespeare. One of each gender, just to be fair. But hey-- that's fantasy for you.

I really do have to read the book now.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

As with everything in The Princess Bride, that was halfway intentional. If you read the book, the book is much clearer about the fact that the fictional book, "The Princess Bride", is very much an exaggerated set of fairy-tale stereotypes that we like because they reflect certain glimmering portions of our own experience but certainly nothing of our reality. Goldman knows that Buttercup is kind of passive and silly, and that Westley, by comparison, dashing and handsome as he is, is also kind of creepy and abusive. He acknowledges that and doesn't let that affect his love for the characters (just as he forgives, say, Inigo for being an alcoholic, a criminal and a murderer).

There *is* something sexist in the way William Goldman's (fictional) "real-life wife", who's Harvard-educated and a psychologist and a feminist and stick-thin and pragmatic and disapproving of everything he does, is so strongly contrasted with the "fantasy" Buttercup that our narrator and "editor" Goldman seems so enamored with.

But then, he himself falls short of the fictional Westley in as many or more ways -- played up for just as much or more pathetic humor -- as his wife falls short of Buttercup, and the way fantasy fascinates us *because it isn't and can't be real* is pretty important to the way the book's story is told.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I only recently got around to actually reading the book (that's very rare for me-- seeing the movie first!), but I agree with your points. Goldman did paint himself as a bit of an asshole in some ways, but I think he partly did that to contrast with the fairy-tale-ness of the story.

Have you ever read Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment"? (I may be misspelling the name). Anyways, it's a Freudian analysis of classical fairy tales, and I found it absolutely fascinating and quite entertaining. I can't say I agreed with the interpretations of the tales (I'm not much for Freudians in general), but it sure taught me a lot about psychoanalysts!

[sylvanfae]

I really missed the part from the book that saw Tristan apologizing and learning he can't treat people like that and be selfish and inconsiderate, as part of his "becoming a man" as the movie called it.

How does he become a man in the film? He learns to sword-fight, gets nice clothes and hair, and makes a few important decisions on the fly. Oh Tristan you manly Decider! And then he treats Victoria like crap in the end. *sigh*

[q10.livejournal.com]

when you say he ‘gets nice clothes and hair’, you mean he gets longer hair, and borrows clothes from a transvestite.

i certainly think that's a better way to ‘become a man’ than most of the popular historical alternatives.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Another problem I haven't seen pointed out elsewhere is that the movie uses lesbian and/or trans imagery in a creepy way, for throwaway humour, by having the transformed-into-female-form Bernard leer at Yvaine when she's in Lamia's trap.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Hunh. I for one can wait till it comes to the video store. I can quite understand the above objections, without even seeing the movie, because Neil Gaiman's attitude to women wigs me out. (I've discussed this with various people and none of them have agreed--but see if any of this sounds like what's gotten on your nerves.)

Women are victims and villains, usually at the same time. The new Sandman's mother (in "The Kindly Ones") loses her husband and baby to the dream-world, and she is made out to be an evil harpy who deserves to lose everything. The one we are supposed to feel sorry for is Dream, who preens around looking tragic and being a deus ex machina and then he dies. And there's Shadow's wife from American Gods, who is a betrayer and adulteress; the guy who killed her is still treated as a sympathetic old semi-comical buffer, and Shadow misses him. And and and...

Wow, this was a rant whose time had come, I guess.

[maeve-rigan.livejournal.com]

Here from oyceter. Thought it was just me getting a wiggins from Gaiman's treatment of women. Possible exception: Door in Neverwhere

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Door was cool. And no, it ain't just you.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

...Wait, you felt sorry for Morpheus in The Kindly Ones but not for Lyta Hall?

More to the point, you felt like you were *supposed* to feel sorry for Morpheus and not for Lyta Hall?

I had the exact opposite reaction. I was kind of angry at Lyta Hall by the end of the book while feeling heartsick at seeing Morpheus die -- but the whole time, I was pretty damn sure convinced that the message of the book was supposed to be that Morpheus is getting precisely what he signed up for, and that Lyta is the sad, human pawn in all this who deserved better. And that despite all this I perversely felt more sorry for Morpheus.

...Although maybe Gaiman was really tricky and intended for me to feel that way and that's how it was set up all along. I dunno.

FWIW, I kinda doubt anyone who remembers Morpheus' conversation with Nada really thinks that Morpheus is supposed to be the good guy in that relationship, or the vast majority of his dealings with women. We meet a lot of people who are worse than he is, but he's *not* a good guy. He locked Nada in Hell for ten thousand years just for jilting him. I mean, c'mon.

And Morpheus' male-ness and the fact that he tends to be imperious and callous with everyone but especially the women in his life is, I think, supposed to be a big part of his character. Yeah, people still love him because of his rock-star glamor, but I always thought part of that was to imply that, like most rock stars, he's an asshole.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

I'll note that this doesn't necessarily invalidate your point -- it may be that Gaiman was trying to set up a sympathetic female character in Lyta Hall and yet, for a lot of people, failed to make her sympathetic, which is a problem.

[foleyartist1.livejournal.com]

Ahem.

I SAW THE DARK IS RISING TRAILER AND I DIDN'T EVEN RECOGNIZE IT AS HAVING ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE BOOKS FOR ALMOST THE ENTIRETY OF ITS LENGTH AND I BECAME EXTREMELY DEPRESSED.

This is not the most deep answer I could give to what was a thoughtful and interesting post on a completely different movie, but I really needed to say it. Thank you for understanding.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i just went to see the film. i swooned over DeNiro and walked out with a lot of feminist indignation. i vaguely remembered you having a bitter review behind a cut tag and thought it might be the same.

yeah.

yeah it prettymuch is.

specific comments:

‘... and he doesn't stop wanting to give her as a present until very, very late (after he's had sex with her, by the way).’

this wasn't how i read the chronology. here's how i remember it - around when they both check into the Inn, he tells her he loves her and the thing about what you want being right in front of you. presumably at this point he's given up on giving her away as a gift. moments later, there is sex. he then wakes up and sneaks out with a lock of her hair as part of his plan to generally taunt Victoria, and tells the innkeeper that he's discovered who he truly loves (Yvaine) and needs to go see Victoria (to tell her that he's not interested in an unnecessarily obnoxious manner). i thought it was pretty clear that he departed for the sole purpose of telling Victoria off, in which case there's no particular evidence that he was still hoping to barter Yvaine away at the point when they slept together.

mind you, this still gives us a picture of his behavior that indicates his meanspiritedness is outdone only by his stupidity, but it's still a subtly different picture.

‘Yes, this is an analogue nineteenth-century, and yes, that does make sense for the time period-- except that in the novel, she does become queen, because Tristan recognizes that he hasn't been trained or raised to be king and won't be any good at it.’

what? what? they had that ending in the original and they got rid of it in favor of this crap? why? this was the most boring predictable ending imaginable - if the had another one right in front of them and chose not to use it that's just -- ohmygods.