FEMALE AGENCY/POWER/AUTHORITY SCORE: -5
THE MALE GAZE SCORE: 0
[no issues]
GENDER/SEXUALITY SCORE: -5
WILDCARD SCORE: 0
Is there anything either positive or negative in the film’s representation of women not already accounted for here? (points will vary)
No.
TOTAL SCORE: +15
IS THE FILM’S DIRECTOR FEMALE? No (does not impact scoring)
IS THE FILM’S SCREENWRITER FEMALE? No (does not impact scoring)
BOTTOM LINE: While the protagonist may be female, she is defined primarily by her relationship to the children in her charge, and by her own past experience with pregnancy and motherhood; the ghostly villain is defined primarily by her own experience with motherhood. So, this isn’t as progressive a representation of women as it might be.
Click here for the ongoing ranking of 2015’s films for female representation.
NOTE: This is not a “review” of The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death! It is simply an examination of how well or how poorly it represents women. (A movie that represents women well can still be a terrible film; a movie that represents women poorly can still be a great film.) Read my review of The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death.
See the full rating criteria. (Criteria that do not apply to this film have been deleted in this rating for maximum readability.)
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Plus the bloke is identified as a big cowardy custard in stark contrast to the female protagonist’s steadfast bravery throughout. Gotta be worth an extra point or two no?
Nah. People are allowed to be complicated…I don’t think this particular complication in the male character would change the representation of the female.
Being braver than a coward doesn’t make a woman more admirable or engaging. It’s like being the world’s tallest midget. But if the coward is cowardly for interesting, complex reasons, that makes the screenwriter more admirable.
Why do you think it’s worth an extra point?
Improving the depiction of women in movies is NOT about making men look bad, or better than men, or anything like that.
Maybe he thinks a movie scorecard works like a football scorecard. Or to put it a different way: If there’s a war between the sexes, he may think there needs to be a winner. I’d rather use a different metaphor, one that doesn’t involve bloodshed. There’s more than enough war in the real world.
Or maybe it was a whimsical throwaway comment that has been taken too seriously?
Oh, almost definitely, but there are so many people who think feminists hate all men that I thought the point was worth making.
To be completely honest, the principal motivating factor to my comment was wanting to use the phrase ‘cowardy custard’.
Fair enough. I like the term “scalawag,” but I don’t think anyone can get away with using it except for Bill Watterson, and maybe Stephen Sondheim.
I’d also like to be able to shout, “Let the wild rumpus start!” but I almost never have the opportunity.
You know, I’ve long wondered if the cowardly version is the pouring custard or the baked custard.
Whichever is a brighter shade of yellow.
Or is the the one that runs?
THE TALE OF CUSTARD THE DRAGON
By Ogden Nash
Copyright Linell Nash Smith and Isabel Nash Eberstadt
Belinda lived in a little white house,
With a little black kitten and a little gray mouse,
And a little yellow dog and a little red wagon,
And a realio, trulio, little pet dragon.
Now the name of the little black kitten was Ink,
And the little gray mouse, she called her Blink,
And the little yellow dog was sharp as Mustard,
But the dragon was a coward, and she called him Custard.
Read the rest: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/Custard.html
The airman is not a coward. From what he told Eve, he is clearly suffering from PTSD, a condition which was not recognized or understood at the time, at least not by the RAF. Nowadays, we know better, and soldiers suffering from PTSD are recognized as injured heroes, honored all the more for having sustained a form of permanent injury in service of their country. Calling a traumatized veteran a coward is like calling a soldier who got his leg blown off a gimp and suggesting that this makes him morally inferior to civilians with two legs. Not cute, in my opinion.
Furthermore . . . SPOILERS
. . . despite his disability, the airman never fails to courageously perform every duty required of him during the course of the screenplay, even when in the throes of a panic attack. The heroine, by contrast, allows her own past traumas and issues to rule her behavior, and spends most of the movie wandering around, brooding, and obsessing over a single child for selfish emotional reasons instead of guarding ALL her young charges, a duty mostly left for the older woman to carry out alone. The screenwriter doesn’t want to make Eve look bad, so he makes sure that nothing bad actually happens to the kids while Eve is off playing Nancy Drew, canoodling with the airman, or moping in graveyards. But I actually still think she looks pretty bad. The airman, not so much.
To clarify, are you saying you regard a woman character in a maternal/caretaking role to be an undesirable, inferior representation?
MaryAnn has already answered that question more than once, at great length, here:
http://www.flickfilosopher.com/2015/01/where-are-the-women-rating-criteria-explained.html
Look under “Gender/Sexuality,” toward the bottom of the page.
What Danielm80 said. There are links that explain every single rating criteria. Every single one.
Spoiler! There’s nothing wrong with motherhood. But there’s nothing progressive in depicting women as solely concerned with the care of children. Women are more than this basic biological function which isn’t even exclusively the domain of women! (Men are capable of caring for children, too, and many men get a great deal of satisfaction from caring for children. Yet we only very rarely see this on film. And I have *never* seen a film that defines man *exclusively* as by his fatherhood or potential for such.)
To clarify: Are you deliberately being a troll?
Also, to create a blockquote, use the open and close carets (aka the “less than” and “greater than” signs), not brackets.
No, not being a troll.
I visit different forums, some use BB code brackets, some use html markup and lost track. But it’s a moot point since I misspelled blockquote in the second tag anyway and there’s no edit function here. But thanks for fixing it.
There *is* an edit function. But you have to be a logged-in Disqus user to use it, probably.
Big Daddy?