Michael Solana's Blog: Layla's Station

Lucy is a film about a woman who gains access to “100% of her brain.” She becomes a superhero, kills a bunch of bad guys, and then becomes a god kind of, which is how we do in Hollywood, now, all day / every day, and I’m not even standing here opposed. I mean, who would be standing here opposed? Look at this trailer.

Actually, okay, some people are standing here opposed.

Yes, the “100% of her brain” premise is very stupid and annoying and should go away. It’s lazy, pseudoscientific nonsense. But let’s set that aside for a moment, because this isn’t a superhero movie. Lucy stars a woman and is therefore, according to the internet, a female superhero movie. Phew! Now it’s worthy of a think piece.

Over at WIRED, Devon Maloney was vague in her specific criticism, but holds clearly that the “weaponized woman” trope is problematic to begin with (why?), and especially so with this movie, because “Lucy isn’t really about a female action star or one character’s liberation from the chokehold of Hollywood tropes—it’s about an idea.” And the idea Maloney takes to task, here, is not feminism. The director barely even talks about feminism! This is a movie about a woman fighting bad guys and she is not talking about how she is a woman! Lucy isn’t even defined by her femininity in this movie, you guys. She’s defined by her humanity. Wtf is this nonsense?!

Wait a minute.

Isn’t that a good thing? When was the last time a male superhero talked about his own gender in a searching, thoughtful way on film? Great superhero stories do tend to explore an aspect of our culture with some thoughtfulness, whether it’s Batman’s odyssey of the ‘Hero’ and his relationship to the city, Iron Man’s individuality and his complicated relationship with the American war industrial complex, or civil rights as center stage throughout the X-Men franchise. But why is every female superhero expected to comment on ‘women in society’?

Maloney defines her “weaponized woman” as a character whose abilities are “a) dangerous, b) either present from birth or given to her without consent, and c) exploited by adversaries for their own purposes.” This is a bad thing. We cannot have women running around being “weaponized,” okay? This is automatically anti-feminist! Women aren’t weapons, you guys, they’re women! They’re not male fantasies! They’re people, not ideas! And look at all of this coded sexism up in here, somehow, someway, or… actually I have no idea, because nobody seems able to make a compelling argument for why the weaponization of women in film is bad. Our knee-jerk reaction is simply that it is. A guy directed this film. Guys aren’t really being all that helpful re: women. This guy probably isn’t really being all that helpful re: women.

Any questions?

But of course the real problem, here, is we are once again discussing the treatment of women in a vacuum, free of thoughts concerning the treatment of men. How are we supposed to measure the treatment of women as equal or unequal if we have nothing to measure their treatment against?

From within an imbalanced gender framework, any data point can represent both the great height or abject failure of gender equality. So check it out: I could have told you at six-years-old, from beneath my mountain of comics, that every superhero is a weapon, and a whole shit ton of them became weapons because of some effed-up bad guys trying to use them for effed-up bad guy stuff!

Consider Akira. Consider Wolverine. Consider the Matrix’s Neo. Maloney’s description just about touches every great superhero, male and female, in existence.

This begs an interesting question. If we take away the weaponization of women in genre, what’s left? Well, in a superhero movie, where a feminist consumed by the question of her own femininity could probably not do much against, for example, the Sentinels, or the Terminator, or Galactus, for god’s sake, the answer is pretty clear: she’d have to play sidekick, or love interest, to a man.

And that sounds pretty sexist.

So please, internet, let a lady kick some ass.

Mrs. Basinski could not at all say she found her second floor tenants peculiar. The Clarks were the most dreadfully ordinary people she had ever rented to, and this was a sting and fact of her life from which she had never fully recovered. She poured coffee into three of her good china cups, placed them on a silver tray, and served the two suited gentlemen in her living room.

“Mr. Florence,” she said. “Mr. Jetworth.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Jetworth.

“Wonderful,” said Mr. Florence.

Mr. Florence took one, two, three scoops of sugar, stirred, and licked his spoon. Mrs. Basinski winced.

“Do you mind telling us a little more about their son?” asked Mr. Jetworth.

“Johnny? I can’t think of anything out of the ordinary. He lives on the internet, same as ever. It’s a waste if you ask me, a young man spending so much time inside, but I doubt it’s all that strange in general. Not anymore.”

She shook her head and sipped her coffee.

Ten years a widow, Mrs. Basinski craved excitement, and her opinion of those who did not ranged from mild skepticism to overt contempt. It was years since she discovered Mr. Clark was a musician and promptly rented to his family, that long hair of his whispering of a lazy, bohemian lifestyle. She imagined get-togethers with his friends — jobless, eccentric people in and out of her house with wild clothing, loud music, drinking and smoking and who knows what else? She was giddy at the thought of all the drama she was meant to have, forever chastising her tenants for their many infractions on her peace and quiet, coldly threatening them with eviction, recounting their atrocities one by terrible one to her perfectly scandalized friends and loving every awful second of it. What she received instead was regular help with her trash and cheerful morning salutations.

“But of course he’s always home,” said Mrs. Basinski. “He’s learned from his parents. His mother babysits, and his father gives guitar lessons. They don’t even leave for work.”

“This upsets you?”

“I thought they were in a band.”

The bitter taste of it was too much. She closed her eyes and sunk into the warmth of her cup on the palms of her hands. The gentlemen stirred.

“You haven’t noticed any family interests in mathematics, have you? Engineering, design, programming?”

“You said the boy spends quite a bit of time on the internet?” asked Mr. Florence. “Doing what, exactly?”

“Something filthy and perverted, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Basinksi. “But exactly? I don’t know, what was it he called it the other afternoon, giggling like a lunatic? Monster maybe? No, that isn’t it. Troll — trolling? He was trolling something, or someone, whatever that means. He likes to troll. Is that a drug thing? Oh, my… is it some kind of new sex thing?”

The gentlemen smiled absently and waited.

“Well I doubt it has anything to do with math,” she finally said. “He’s failing out of school.”

“His parents told you that?” asked Mr. Jetworth.

“No, he just has that look. Filthy little pervert dropout. Why? Is he in some sort of trouble?” Mrs. Basinski licked her lips. “I knew it. His parents are upstairs,” she said. “I can get them for you.”

“Yes, you told us,” said Mr. Jetworth. “And thank you. But that won’t be necessary. An associate of ours is already speaking with them.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Basinski. “She came in with you.”

It was more than a lapse in memory. She thought back those ten or fifteen minutes and recalled, though just barely, and as if from a dream, the presence of a woman with the men — another… what were they, anyway? Officers? Agents? Who was she speaking to, and why? She served them coffee? In her good china? The details of the strangers all escaped her as she grasped for them. More than having forgotten, it felt as if she had never retained the information of her visitors to begin with. Even then — what had she been saying?

“We were hoping you could help us with something else,” said Mr. Florence. “We’re looking for a device that we have reason to believe one of your tenants is in possession of. It’s likely small, perhaps the size of a television remote, and very modern looking. Almost futuristic.”

“Made to seem that way, of course,” snapped Mr. Jetworth.

His partner’s carelessness was a recurring thorn in their relationship, though Mr. Florence himself would hardly call the behavior careless. He purposefully pushed out of boredom, and this was a game he often played, delighting in the misery of his old friend. He yawned, and shrugged, and determined not to take it too much farther.

“Have you seen anything that fits this description?” he asked.

Mrs. Basinski wished she had.

But, “No,” she said, “I haven’t.”

The thin, funny whistle of Mr. Jetworth’s cell phone interrupted them. He stood and answered. Mr. Florence smiled, patted his knees, and stood to join his partner. There was nothing more that they could learn from the landlady.

“Thank you for your time, ma’am, and thank you for the coffee. We’ll head upstairs for a look, now, if you don’t mind.”

“Incredible,” said Mr. Jetworth.

He tucked his phone back into his pocket and fixed his eyes on Mrs. Basinski with a creeping smile at the corners of his mouth.

“What did they say?” asked Mr. Florence.

“Benjamin ran a spot scan. This one’s interfacing with the Cradle.”

“You’re kidding. The device?”

“Not hers. She’s just a tourist. But it looks like there were two in the same house. What are the odds?”

“In this chapter? About one in six million.”

Mrs. Basinski squinted, shifted her weight, and tried very hard to follow the conversation’s turn.

“Tourist?” she asked. “What’s this?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Mr. Jetworth. “It’s just, you’re real. We didn’t expect that.”

“It almost never happens,” said Mr. Florence.

Mr. Jetworth laughed. Truly, the odds were slim. He shook his head, as if to say, I’ll be damned. Then he withdrew his pistol and shot her in the head.

CITIZEN SIM: CRADLE OF THE STARS