can we stop giving all the credit to JJ Abrams for the cool female representation in TFA, & start giving more to the fact that six out of the eight people involved in developing the film where female, the president of Lucasfilm is Kathleen Kennedy, a woman, & she works with a 50% female executive team?
JJ Abrams is fine sometimes, but like, it’s important to also look at who he worked with & the choices he makes when nobody argues different.
Like, example…
This is the guy who made two Star Trek films (You know. The franchise that’s meant to be built on equality & progressiveness? that one?) where the only time the Bechdel test was even slightly passed, across two movies? Both women were in their underwear, they were still talking about a man, & one of the women died offscreen a couple scenes later.
(Oh, and that woman was an alien whose hair colour is on record as having been changed to red from the canonically established hair colour of black for her species, because the makeup design guy thought it looked hotter that way, & it was pitched to production on those grounds. Yikes.)
In fact, the only female characters with any lines of dialogue not shown in her underwear are both mothers, one of which was fridged, the other of which only scene was a birth scene.
A scene which the male writers are again on record, as having put in the film because the male writers decided that, since they had a underwear scene ‘to appeal to the male fanbase’, they need a birth scene. Because all women love babies & how else would men convince their wives to come see the movie?
Actually.
So yeah. Captain Phasma? The amount of agency & humanity that Rey had? How commanding Leia was, or how cool Maz? The total lack of sexualized costumes for women, the amount of female extra & supporting characters we got the screen?
Probably not on JJ.
Kathleen Kennedy is on record at pointing to the amount of women who worked on the movie as being integral to the way that women are represented in the film.
“Having a balance of men and women in the room changes the story… The dialogue, the point of view.”
Stop crediting JJ for Kathleen Kennedy’s (and everyone else’s) work.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1JZL0MO