Griffin Op-Ed

Feminist Films or Capitalist Commodities? Hegemony and Blockbuster Movies

Matt Griffin

 

Can blockbuster films be “feminist”? Consider 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi. For many people, Jedi’s infamous legacy shows that it was a progressive cultural text. The film focused on women and people of color much more than previous Star Wars films; especially within major action franchises, very few films tend to center women – and when they do, they are almost always white, able-bodied, and not explicitly queer (as was the case in Jedi).  It is no surprise then that the film drew the ire of toxic viewers, who made “defeminized” edits that cut out storylines about women to recenter the film on male characters. Based on such statistics and outrage, many feel that films like The Last Jedi represent victories against patriarchy and racism.

 

Source: Lauzen, 2018-2022

 

            From another angle, however, calling such a film “feminist” or in some way socially progressive is a trite and naive claim. Star Wars is a mega franchise owned by Disney, a company that serves as a clear example of late capitalist consolidation and culture industries production. The truly important matter is not Disney’s products but its business dealings -- and given that in the past two decades it has purchased brands and companies like Star Wars, Marvel, and 21^st Century Fox, we should be raising the alarm about the monopolization of the entertainment industry. Praising Disney for making a marginally more diverse film is simply falling for their cynical marketing gimmick and becoming the “cultural dope” that critics like Stuart Hall discussed.

            These two perspectives, which can be applied to any cultural product far beyond The Last Jedi, represent the struggle over larger questions: Is popular culture a viable tool for shifting our cultural power structures? Do culture industries products inherently reinforce the status quo due to their capitalist nature? This broader conversation is really a debate about “hegemony,” or the negotiated hierarchies of particular social classes. Put another way, those at the top of the social ladder – White people, cishet males, non-disabled people, wealthy elites – are dominant in large part because of cultural messaging that makes it seem like “common sense” to center their lives. Such centering can happen across axes of both identity politics and economic inequality.

            Feminist and anti-racist movements hope to make culture more equitable, but the role of popular culture in that effort is contested. By definition, a blockbuster film like The Last Jedi, for example, appeals to a broad population. Therefore it must stick to recognizable social codes and structures; if it is too counter-hegemonic in its content or its production practices, it will lose its status as “popular.” This point seems to present two (broad, overly simplified) options: create avant-garde art outside the traditional methods of production, which will likely reach small groups but points to a more positive social direction; or negotiate with and take what you can get from widely seen but often compromised blockbuster texts.

            Within this dichotomy, it is important not to lose site of the value that can come from popular art. While we should refrain from seeing a female Jedi as the ultimate end-goal of feminism and we are right to be concerned about how many media companies Disney continues to absorb, seeing popular media as inherently unhelpful to feminist causes – or worse, assuming people who do get some pleasure from such texts must be naïve cultural dopes – risks wasting potentially helpful tools.

            One example of how to harness such negotiated readings: In her 1995 book Black Women As Cultural Readers, Jacqueline Bobo discusses the 1991 film Daughters of the Dust, Bobo writes that, despite the film’s shortcomings, it nonetheless was popular with many Black women and therefore provided a space “for [B]lack female activists to build upon the momentum of [B]lack women’s favorable reactions to the film” (196). Bobo’s research on the reception of Daughters of the Dust, and many other studies like it, show that people have the capacity to critique popular media without disengaging from it completely. In other words, we must criticize hegemony and create work that is productively counter-hegemonic – but, for better and worse, we must also engage with those texts that we are given.

 

Works Cited

Bobo, Jacqueline. 1995. Black Women As Cultural Readers. Film and Culture. Columbia University Press.

 

Lauzen, Martha M. 2018. “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the 100 Top Films of 2017.” Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/2017_Its_a_Mans_Celluloid_World_Report_2.pdf.

 

Lauzen, Martha M. 2020. “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the 100 Top Films of 2019.” Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019_Its_a_Mans_Celluloid_World_Report_REV.pdf.

 

Lauzen, Martha M. 2022. “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World, Even in a Pandemic Year: Portrayals of Female Characters in the Top U.S. Films of 2021.” Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2021-Its-a-Mans-Celluloid-World-Report.pdf.