The recent all-female reboot of "Ghostbusters" is causing quite a big stink online. Critics who hailed the movie even before it came out as a forward thinking, progressive and empowering film are sticking to their guns now after the movie’s release despite the fact that, well, the movie is not quite a masterpiece after all and suffers from the same issues as all the other needless reboots of the last five years. There I said it.
Call me a misogynist. Tell me I’m reinforcing the patriarchy. No worries. I’m a man, so obviously take whatever I’m about to say with a whole heap of salt, but I think of this issue as a writer first, and a gendered person second. The issue here is that movie studios and writers are putting women in their stories just because they think that the progressive, 21st Century crowd will gobble it up. And that’s just it. Women are suddenly an object of commerce, not fully developed, empowered characters.
So, in light of the "Ghostbusters" remake, I would like to offer to writers and movie studios —
and everyone else here who still might think me a misogynist — a shining example of how to perfectly write female characters and how to have them front in center in a way that both humanizes them and empowers them.So how do you do it?
That’s right, but not just any aliens, James Cameron’s "Aliens," the gun blazing sequel to Ridley Scott’s Gothic masterpiece "Alien," which is empowering in its own way. But today, we’re going to talk about "Aliens."
Here’s a quick synopsis of the plot for those of you who haven’t seen it (and you really should give it a watch it you haven’t): Ellen Ripley, after surviving her first encounter with the xenomorph, an alien with acid for blood and a bad temper, has to face the beast again. But this time it’s not just one. In true James Cameron fashion, the sequel takes the problems of dealing with one of these aliens and adds about a thousand more of them. There’s space marines, an adorable little girl who is the only survivor of a colony wiped out by the xenomorph and the greatest boss battle in action film history. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. For the sake of this article let’s just talk about the female characters.
In no particular order, there is Ellen Ripley (our protagonist), Newt (Ripley’s surrogated daughter), Vasquez (a badass space marine), and finally the queen Alien herself.
Let’s talk about Ripley first.
Interestingly enough, in the original "Alien" Ripley was not written as any specific gender. They hired the actor that simply fit the bill of what the character needed to be. That turned out to be Sigourney Weaver. Now, Ellen Ripley is my favorite female character in the entirety of fiction. The trick with her is that she is both bad ass and relatable at the same time. The scripts allow her to be both victim and hero. This is a trend among ALL the characters in both "Alien" and "Aliens."
Ripley is not a soldier, and there is a scene where one of the space marines has to teach her how to use a plasma gun. I fear that in any all-female reboot of anything, the kind like "Ghostbusters," would NEVER let a man show a woman how to do anything, and I think therein lies a kind of problem. Movies like the "Ghostbusters" reboot don’t let their women be fully developed characters. They’re just caricatures of a gender, which does more to actually objectify women then empower them.
Ripley can’t use a plasma gun because she, as a person, has never used one before. Corporal Hicks, who is an experienced soldier, obviously does know how to use the weapon. It is not a case of a man showing a weak woman what to do, nor is it a case of a female character that can just automatically do everything. Here is an example of one person just teaching another. The movie pretty clearly argues that women can use weapons just as well as any man but that badassery and skill is also learned trait.
Vasquez (pictured above on the left), the female space marine in a company full of men, is probably the most badass character, clearly capable of handling herself and her weapons, but does that mean that she is the hero and defeats all the baddies? No. The movie lets her be a victim too, where she basically sacrifices herself in her badass efforts, buying our main character Ripley more time. Her fate is true to her character in other words. But she is also given the great line in which this article draws its title. Private Hicks asks her "Vasquez, ever been mistaken for a man?"
"No," she says, "Have you?"
And there's Newt, the little girl to whom Ripley quickly attaches herself to, follows the same trend where she is both hero and victim. When traversing the air ducts, Newt leads the group, as she survived on the colony so long by sticking just to the duct system. At the end of the day, though, she is just a little girl and is, true enough, scared most of the time and has to be rescued by Ripley by the end of the film.
"Aliens" is really all about the ladies and the final act of the film, in which both climaxes happen, occurs completely without any male characters. The final boss fight, as well, happens between the movie’s two strongest females: Ellen Ripley and the Queen Alien. We are given two pictures of motherhood. There is Ripley, the mother defending her child, and the Queen Alien, the mother avenging her children. The latter is grotesque though, and feels more than unnatural. And by the end, we are rooting for humanity’s success, not just the success of one gender over the other.
And that’s pretty much it, the abbreviated version anyway. That’s just one example of how to treat female leads. You have to treat them as people (because, duh, they are). To conclude, I will say that the sentiment that goes behind something like the "Ghostbusters" reboot is primarily a good one. People want to see women succeed in a world so dominated by men trying to force women back into the shadows. But as I’ve argued here, movie studios that capitalize on the progressive mindsets of 21st century feminists are not doing right by them and are in fact continuing in the objectification of women. "Aliens" is a shining example of the sentiment of equality done right.
We need more "Aliens" with complex female characters and less one note, "Ghostbuster" rip-offs.
That’s just one man’s opinion, though.
