No, Blade Runner 2049 is not sexist. Really

Tons of reviews all over the internet are speaking wonders of Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017). I'm not going to write yet another review saying you should all go watch it but, just so you know, it's visually the best thing I've seen in years (I went to an IMAX, do the same if you can), the actors are fantastic, the characters they portray are even better and, except for a couple of considerable loopholes in the plot -that I'm not sure Villeneuve didn't leave there on purpose-, the storyline is also really nice.

Do you know what other thing you can find tons of on the internet? Articles claiming that the film is sexist.

So tedious. So tiring.

Buy hey, I'm not giving up; in an attempt to get the world to understand that sometimes in life there can be someone somewhere who does something for a reason other than being a misogynistic jerk, I'm going to explain why, in my humble and obviously right opinion, the mentioned title does not reveal any kind of disdain towards women.

STUFF YOU NEED TO KNOW

For those who don't know anything about me,

a) I'm a woman

b) I loathe modern feminism with passion

I say "modern" because I do deeply respect activists who fight to make forced marriages illegal, those who lead campaigns to raise awareness about how scarily normal it is to rape women in some countries and in general anybody who will happily throw heavy objects at those special people who say that childless women are not fulfilling their duty in life and that "they are incomplete". But those girls who will get angry at men holding doors for them because "why do you think I need a man's help for everything" and in general women who will use their gender to escape any sense of responsibility (see "I didn't get the promotion because I'm a woman and not because I haven't been productive since 1992" or "my movie won't get famous because I'm a female director and not at all because it is so boring every time I watch it I want to kill myself"), those I can't freaking stand.

END OF THE STUFF YOU NEED TO KNOW

For this exercise I'm going to use an article from The Guardian in which Anna Smith (no clue about who she was until now, but whatever, hi Anna) explains what she considers to be the multiple ways in which Villeneuve's latest work is sexist.

The less you know about what happens in the story, the better, so if you haven't seen it yet I recommend you stop reading. In case you still want to keep going, I will write SPOILER tags and change the text to white where appropriate so you can't see the content at first glance. Just select the paragraph in order to be able to read it.

This story takes place in the universe that Ridley Scott created in 1982 for Blade Runner, in which human-like beings called replicants are manufactured in order to be sent to other planets with colonisation purposes. These beings decide one day that they have been created with a ridiculously short lifespan, get angry about it and start killing people. Which makes sense, if you ask me. In 2049 K (Ryan Gosling) is a new model and his job as a Blade Runner is to find and retire the older androids that were not built to obey, which, given how similar replicants and humans are, is basically being a hitman. This said:

Joi

The one element that is easy to read as sexist here is Ana de Armas' character Joi, who is a software designed to behave as a sexy, loving girlfriend. Her duties include waiting for her man at home while cooking dinner, so you may imagine how someone who is determined to find discriminatory hints everywhere will see here a golden opportunity. Indeed, Anna Smith says:

"How are we supposed to admire a hero whose key relationship is with a woman of his own creation who will submit to his every demand and can be switched on and off as he pleases?"

Dearest Anna, as it turns out, here our darling K is the loneliest person in the entire world; he is an outcast and nobody loves him, basically because he is not only a replicant, which is bad enough in the depicted society, but also a Blade Runner, so not even other replicants want him -or this is what I understood. It's kinda hard to get every detail in this movie, to be honest-. Well, this extreme loneliness is only reinforced when you learn that if this guy wants to get a girlfriend he has to buy one. So Joi's lack of free will is not so much a decorative element left there to get boys dreaming of a programmable wife as it is just part of Gosling's character.

Or maybe not. God knows what Villeneuve and his screenwriter were thinking when they created all this stuff. Anyway, I do find K's personality easier to understand thanks to Joi.

Lieutenant Joshi

K's boss, who is by the way quite scary, is brought to life by Robin Wright and is also mentioned in Smith's article:

"Robin Wright is terrific but underused as K’s slick, strong, black-clad boss, Lieutenant Joshi [...] Meanwhile Wright’s Joshi appears attracted to K, but she is not permitted to use him for her sexual pleasure. Where is her holographic lover, her Joi?"

Out of all the wonderful supporting characters we can find in this production, Joshi is, to my mind, the one that appears just as much as she should. The issue here is that there is no rational way to defend that there is any kind of hidden misogyny in this role -she is in charge of at least one man (K), we never get to know who her bosses are and she looks like she is about to shoot you in the face any minute now-, and underuse is the wildcard of complaints, since there is no objective way of measuring whether a member of the cast has been on the screen for an acceptable amount of time. Therefore, unless a supporting actress is virtually a co-protagonist, it's always an option to say that she is being underused. Obviously what we need to do to avoid this problem is to get every main character to be a woman, use women for all the supporting roles as well and maybe get every extra to be female, just to be safe.

About the holographic lover, I may be wrong but I don't see how the audience would be interested in whatever this lady does at home. I mean, I think it makes sense to show way more details of the main star's private life than of anybody else's; Joshi may have a dude-Joi in her living-room, or a husband or a girlfriend or a harem, who cares. I don't see the point in adding scenes showing a minor role's personal life just so ultra-feminists don't feel left out. Not to mention that Joshi's strength only gets more obvious thanks to the lack of any romantic relationship in her life.

Mariette

Mackenzie Davis, whose popularity seems to be on the grow lately, plays a clever prostitute named Mariette, who interacts with K on a couple of ocassions:

"Mackenzie Davis’s Mariette shows initial promise as a strong character who can give as good as she gets, but she is also a sex worker SPOILER who is literally used as a puppet. END OF SPOILER "

Leaving aside how is it that Miss Davis sleeping with men in exchange of money is troubling but Gosling executing people for a living seems to be just fine,

a) I don't see how having their office at a brothel is going to make a character any less valid

b) The universe depicted shows replicants as second-class citizens who have to do whatever they can to survive, so it's not like we have a crazy amount of options here (another replicant makes a living out of growing worms. Just so you understand the level of fanciness here). On the other hand, these people are made with the purpose of covering specific social needs (meaning they are basically slaves), so the creation of sex workers makes quite a lot of sense

c) Mariette is an extraordinarily strong woman who has a great ability to adapt and survive, and I can't think of a  better job than prostitution to imply that someone is capable of keeping moving forward regardless the cost. So, again, this girl's job makes her character more complete

SPOILER

d) "who is literally used as a puppet" is referring to a scene in which she has sex with K. The thing is that having these two sleeping together is literally the only thing that justifies this girl's presence in the film. Her actual mission is to get K to carry a GPS with him so that creepy replicant army can follow him around. In order for this to be possible, Mariette needs to catch him in a vulnerable moment, which happens the morning following the night they spend together. For this moment to happen, she needs to be a prostitute because K is in love with Joi and therefore emotionally unavailable, so the only way to get to him is by providing the only thing Joi cannot give him: physical contact. This woman's job was not open to many possibilities

END OF SPOILER

The problem I see with this is that a role that has a set of perfectly valid characteristics and that helps develop the plot in the end gets reduced to being someone who works in the sex industry. And I find that approach just useless.

Luv

Luv (utterly fantastic Sylvia Hoeks) is a replicant who works for Wallace (Jared Letto, owner of the company that manufactures the new model of replicants); she spends half the movie beating people up and looks like a nutjob who will probably kill you in your sleep. She is just terrifying and one of the best things in the film. About her:

"[...] Sylvia Hoeks’s icy baddie Luv is great fun, but in thrall to her male boss (sinister replicant-creator Wallace, played by Jared Leto)"

So here's the deal: Wallace barely shows up in the nearly three hours this whole thing lasts -that one is underused indeed- and Luv is taking the screen all the time -as she should because she's awesome-, so I am going to make an educated guess and say that, if the boss were a female and Luv was played by a man, Smith's article would say that sure, the boss is a girl and she's really cool, but in the end most of the minutes in front of the camera have been given to that male slave who works for her.

Are we all getting how this works? To these people's eyes there's no way of not being sexist because they will cherry-pick the details that suit them in order to form an opinion.

Sexualisation

Besides finding some kind of disdain towards women in nearly every female character, the article also mentions the sexualisation of women in general:

"Visually, sexualised images of women dominate the stunning futuristic cityscapes, from pirouetting ballerinas to giant statues of naked women in heels looming over K as he goes on his journey."

The half naked chicks part is true and useful to create an atmosphere of decadence (as the author herself mentions right after the above paragraph), but the ballerinas bit, what the hell is that about; out of all the dancing disciplines I can think of, the classic one must be the one which is sexualised the least -more like not at all, really-; ballet enhances beauty and elegance, but sexuality? Seriously? Nor are the movements erotic in any way, nor is the clothing designed to arouse anybody. And the dancers that are showed in the movie are the typical ones you have in mind, with the tutu and the pointe shoes and stuff, don't think they made them sexier in any way. Including ballet dancers in the list of "sexualised women" means that absolutely anything that includes a woman dressed in something other than a bin bag is going to be considered sexual -which, ironically, is sexist-. Which gives me yet another reason to believe this article and its associated opinion are as biased as it gets.

There are also some comments about how the film doesn't have enough racial diversity, but imaginary racism must be the one thing that I find more annoying than made up sexism, so maybe let's not get into that today.

Summing up, it's not that I believe that people are overreacting to sexism in the film industry, it's more that I think people are just making that sexism up when coming accross any product that is not led by a strong, independent woman and in which men are absolutely irrelevant. I'm afraid that before we reach actual equality between men and women we are going to have to go through a female supremacy equivalent to that gross disrespect against women that was in nearly every house of the planet just a few years back, only with the genders switched and with females playing the victim and blaming all of their issues in life to the patriarchy's oppression.

I may just hop on the bandwagon one of these days. I don't know what I'm doing taking responsibility for my own mistakes when I could be blaming it all on the men of the world.

I have yet so much to learn.

This post is a rough translation of something I wrote originally in Spanish. You can read it here.

Colossal: the weirdest kind of superheroes

Cinema lovers worldwide have, finally, access to which was my favourite film at 64th San Sebastian International Film Festival, so I come to tell you about Colossal (ID, 2016, Nacho Vigalondo), that was presented in the Official Selection, out of contest.

This movie, which by the way was initially going to be named after the Spanish city "Santander"* (!) introduces Gloria (Anne Hathaway), who leaves New York and heads back to her hometown in an attempt to give some structure to the wreckage that is her life. There she re-encounters her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who will welcome her into his group of friends (Austin Stowel, Tim Blake Nelson) and will help her steer her messy existence towards a lifestyle that would be nice and healthy if it wasn't because Gloria seems to have some kind of connection with a giant monster that is destroying Seoul.

I know, I know, it sounds a bit bizarre. But I promise it's a cool one. Really.

It might be the evolution of its characters what makes this title quite an elegant entertainment instead of a surreal absurdity, I'm not sure; anyway, Gloria and especially Oscar are presented as very likable elements of a chick flick, but that quickly degenerates into extremely dark levels in which everyone seems to be a bit mentally unstable.

Summing up, Colossal is nicely presented, it's developed in a really cool fashion and neatly resolved, and it offers a medley of cinema genres that end up being just a good excuse to make the viewer think about how certain human characteristics such as wickedness or courage can be pushed to insane limits. Moreover, it is original and very entertaining, with rather amusing parts and some very exciting ones, and it was, as mentioned above, among the best products I saw in the past SSIFF. Recommended.

* The press conference you can access with the link at the top is interesting, but don't watch it if you haven't seen the film yet since, as it often happens with press conferences, it contains loads of spoilers (including one in one of my questions and even more in Austin Stowell's answer. My apologies).

How assholes manage to make you believe everything is your fault

I just understood the logic behind something that had been bothering me for years.

What did you say? You want me to explain it to you in a completely unnecessary, yet quite enthralling post? Well, if I must!

The concept -or one of the many, anyway- that has been annoying me for half my life is the following:

How come, when faced with an insensitive asshole, it's actually us who end up feeling stupid and thinking we are being childish?

Uhmmm that couldn't get any more vague. Let me develop it a bit:

Have you ever had a friend, or a boyfriend or girlfriend, that you found amazingly self-centered and that would hurt your feelings on a regular basis, but somehow ended up convinced that it was indeed yourself the one screwing things up all the time?

I get rid of that kind of company quite fast, but a recent situation has led me to going through the above once again.

And thanks to that, I think I have finally figured out how it works.

I'm going to explain further, but before starting, I just need you to realise that if this situation I just described happens to you all the time, with everyone, about everything, then you may be at least a small part of the problem. Oversensitive spirits who get extremely offended by every freaking thing they are told, or not told, or somehow implied or any other variation, seem to be pretty much everywhere these days. So bear in mind that what I am about to explain describes a relationship from the point of view of a person who is not often hurt by their friends. There can be unnerving conversations every now and then and some of my mates may make me feel left out, or the other way round, once in a blue moon. But in general I'm quite happy with the company I keep.

This said,

HOW JERKS MANAGE TO MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE YOU ARE THE ONE BEING A SULKY BRAT

As hinted above, I am going to use a personal experience to explain things. You are going to meet my friend (ish) John, and I'm going to begin by telling you that John is a really nice guy. He is cheerful and interesting, and I am quite sure he is not a bad person at all.

The problem is, just as lively and kind John is, he is also the greatest, most ridiculous narcissist I have met in a very, very long time. This would usually just lead to quite a lot of shallowness and a recurring sensation of annoyance, which is already bad enough but tolerable after all; the problem is that narcissism usually comes, and this case is no exception, with certain actions that include acting like a self-centered prick who is more than willing to smash the fragile little soul of anyone who is not a valid tool in fulfilling whatever plan they are following to satisfy themselves.

Again, the good things I said earlier about John are entirely true. I am actually quite convinced that this guy is not aware of the harm he inflicts on others or, more likely, he is aware but has been lying to himself about it for so long that his brain doesn't register the actual level of pain inflicted anymore. John is not an asshole, John behaves like an asshole. This is key to understand why I've put up with his crap for longer than anybody could humanly expect me to do so. I have a hard time getting angry at people who don't really understand that they are doing things wildly wrong.

Anyway, there are lots of situations I could choose to make you understand the many ways in which this guy wrecks my nerves, but I will stick to the simplest one: the online interaction.

In this contemporary world, subtle and a bit creepily dominated by Mark Zuckerberg's companies, a lot of the communication I have with my friends happens through text messages. I use whatsapp or telegram, mostly, and I do so relatively often because most of my closest friends live in my home country or are scattered around Europe (if you didn't know, I'm Spanish but live in London).

Back to John, he had this lovely habit of getting a text, several hours later reading it -which I am made aware against my will every single time, thanks to that fantastic, extraordinarily intrusive blue tick-, and several hours later replying. Sometimes he wouldn't even reply in the same day he got the original text.

Now, if this happens every now and then, I couldn't care less. I texted my friend Iris three days ago and I am realising this second that she hasn't replied yet. Usually she doesn't ignore me if I try to contact her, or it's actually her sending whatever to see how I'm doing, so if she forgets to reply one day I may not even notice. But John never ever ever replies in a decent time frame.

I would also like to clarify, for the sake of context, that people not reading my messages is something that barely bothers me. The target of my attention may be watching the whole of the Star Wars saga with no intention of getting in touch with the outside world for all I know. But someone knowing I am trying to reach them, yet deciding to ignore me, that's another matter entirely.

You may be thinking, "just don't text him. If if bothers you so much that he takes seven hours to reply to you every time, just don't send him anything". And we will get there. But at the moment of this happening, I was just trying to develop a normal friendship with a normal person, without worrying too much about the little things I didn't like about him. And I found myself being incapable of such development because of this attitude I'm talking about. Now, this may sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but it's really not. Let's see:

Imagine you want to be friends with Laura. You meet her, you hit it off and you start hanging out. Imagine you meet up with her for coffee and have a fascinating conversation about, I don't know, the possibilities of extraterrestrial life in this new solar system they just found. You finish whatever overpriced drink Starbucks is selling this season and part ways. Two days later, you come across a super interesting article that adds some information to that aliens chat you had. The normal thing to do? You send the link to Laura. Because you know she would want to know. If Laura likes talking to you -which you know she does, not only because she has actively told you so, but also because otherwise I doubt she would have spent three hours wondering about the possibilities of finding water somewhere in TRAPPIST-1 with you- she will read it and give you her impression, or tell you she will read it later, or whatever. Something. Anything.

But if Laura replies to your article thing six hours and a half later, with a text that is not only late but also pretty empty and more a politeness requirement than an actual answer -taking forever to text back often comes with shallow content. That is also the case with John, if you were wondering-, then it doesn't really matter what she says, because the conversation is broken. You will be fine with this once, twice, three times. But if you see that every time you try to contact Laura she does every possible activity in her life before getting back to you, and when she does it doesn't really look like she is interested in whatever you are saying, at some point you are just going to realise that once you step out of that café, the conversation is over for good.

Here I'd like to make my first point. Don't be fazed by the fact that I have zero idea about psychology, just believe blindly in the things I find out by analysing the people who annoy me:

If you want somebody to count on you, you need to choose one of these two options:

1. Either you show up on a very regular basis (you get in touch every weekend, you have lunch together every Tuesday, stuff like that), or

2. You are willing to be contacted by means that don't involve being physically in the same room with the other person.

It's one or the other. Ideally both, but you don't need one option too bad if you have the other one.

Of course, this is up to you; you can do whatever the hell you want. I'm just telling you that if you don't comply with at least one of the two options above, your friends will stop calling on you in the long run, and creating new relationships is going to be extremely hard. Your loved ones need to know that if they have had the worst day ever they can tell you and you will listen to them. And that is not a feeling you give by showing up at random times and by taking five hours to reply to every text you get.

Needless to say, face to face interaction beats any other means of communication, but, whether you like it or not, technology is part of our lives now, so you might as well learn to take advantage of that.

Back to the story, you should know I am not that good at hating people in silence, so after the couple of weeks it took me to understand this was not a random attitude but a stable habit, I explained all this stuff to John, trying to get him to understand why I found it offensive when someone only pays attention to their friends if they are sharing the oxygen in the room.

Wanna know what John said?

That he doesn't want to live his life checking his phone every five minutes.

I don't know how the six hours, or seven, or the half day I was talking about turned into five minutes, but it doesn't matter! Because now I understand!

It's not that John doesn't give a flying fuck about my life once I'm out of his sight -literally-, it's that I expect everyone to exist staring at their phones every minute of the day!

Blaming your bullshit on others: The musical.

And here goes my second point:

An egotistic jerk will twist facts as much as needed to get rid of all responsibility and blame the situation on others, including you. This, I must say, is more to fool themselves than to fool you. John actually believes all this crap he is telling me, or at least he tries really hard to believe it. It's way easier to think I expect too much from everyone than to realise he should actually take people's feelings into consideration. Because thinking of people's happiness all the time is freaking exhausting, I must add.

I had a friend in college who was a clear example of this attitude. I remember she could organise a party in your face and invite everyone in the table but you, and then claim you didn't need to do absolutely everything together when you explained that she made you feel a little excluded. So a situation in which you felt bad because you had been deliberately ignored turned out to be actually your fault because you were just too needy.

But blame shifting is a well-known technique. The aim of this post is not to tell you about stuff you already know, but to share why -I believe- that technique actually works.

After thinking a lot about it, I've come to a conclusion that I can't decide whether is the most ridiculous idea ever or whether it's the one an only legit answer to all my questions:

When a person you are close to shows symptoms of not really caring much about you, your feelings get hurt. When your feelings are hurt it's kind of embarrassing to let others know, so most people try to hide it, therefore never letting whatever idiot we're talking about know about the flaw in their acting. If, in spite of it being slightly humiliating, you build up the courage to tell the offending moron, then you will probably find yourself feeling like an immature and clingy teenager at some point while having that conversation. The more you have to explain, the more immature and clingy you will feel. And this is what I'm talking about: I think the reason why you feel like a whiny teenager when defending whatever basic rule of human interaction is that the last time you had to explain these very things to anybody you were actually a teenager.

I am well aware that this sounds absurd, but give it a thought. When I was a kid I would get told off every now and then by a friend because I didn't reply to a letter -yes, I'm old- fast enough. I would tell friends at some point that if they were asking for postcards every time I went on holidays, I would be expecting the same from them when they traveled. Maybe you were yelled at a couple of times because it would always be your friends calling you, while you would rarely pick up the phone to contact them.

It doesn't matter if we are talking about postcards, landline calls, whatsapp messages or homing pigeon letters; the concept is always the same: I am trying to reach out to you; I am interested in your life, and you are not showing any kind of interest back. That is somehow disrespectful and it makes me feel like you don't care about me. If you want ours to be a healthy relationship, stop doing it.

Back in the day, we all had this conversation. We all understood the really basic concept that is to want a friendship to be a two way street. And we moved on.

The problem is, these people never did. Maybe no one ever told them this was a harmful conduct, or, more likely, they convinced themselves that this was an acceptable way to treat people, blaming every related issue they would have on whoever was complaining about them.

And actually, all this psychological stuff I essentially made up -but that you are believing anyway because it makes total sense and you know it- is just an excuse to give you my final conclusion:

If a person clearly came to your mind while reading this, if you painfully understand every detail of this post, then I am so very sorry to tell you this but you have to let that person go.

Like, for real. Right now.

No, seriously.

If you have explained how you feel to your friend/partner/whatever and they keep behaving like this, you need to move on. They are not going to change. It's not going to get better.

And don't think I don't understand how hard this is, because I do. I really do. John is fun and brilliant and I miss him very much. I could have a three-hour discussion with him about how machines will one day dominate the world, or about the anthropological background of monogamy, or I could just spend half an evening watching telly and eating ice cream with him, and it was lovely. But he was messing with my self confidence. He was trying to convince me that the many acts that proved over and over that he was not really my friend (I only mentioned communication here, but there was also hiding information unnecessarily, never being there whenever I needed any kind of help, ignoring me for weeks but then getting upset when it was me not wanting to meet up with him and a long etcetera) were totally normal responses and that they didn't at all mean that he didn't care about me. As a consequence, I was starting to doubt myself. I was starting to think maybe he was right and it was me expecting too much from everyone, being needy. Which is not only untrue but also kind of messed up. This guy was meddling with my self esteem, and the second you allow someone to manipulate your self esteem in any way, that's the time to seriously reconsider things.

The funny part here is that it's not really me at loss. And I don't mean it only because John is missing out on hanging out with me -I am super fabulous, OK? I promise-. He may have ruined his relationship with me but that's not a big deal; not everybody needs to like me, and, as much as he claimed the opposite, John didn't like me that much. The actual problem is that our man here will one day meet a guy who could have become his best friend, or a girl who could have been the love of his life, and he will screw things up so spectacularly that there will be no way for him to fix them. I can only begin to imagine how many amazing people would have been glad to be John's friends but after a while just gave up on trying to make him see that he is not the centre of the universe.

So here we have this guy, who has the potential to be a true asset for whoever crosses his path, who will change your perspective in so many subjects and open your mind if you just listen to him. And you just won't want him to do so, because you will find him so bloody annoying and self-absorbed that you will willingly give up on all the coolness of the relationship only not to have to orbit around his massive ego.

I must say, though, that after telling him he did try to improve some of the things I've mentioned. He doesn't take half a day to reply to a text anymore, for example. But whatever I get is just a tiny amount of superficial information that doesn't help build a relationship in the slightest. And I talk about what I saw a while ago, because, as you can imagine, I don't text him anymore. Actually, I don't really see him anymore.

With John, once you are out of sight you basically stop existing, and whenever he's around it feels like you two being together at that particular moment is more of a cosmic coincidence that him actually wanting to spend time you.

Fortunately, I can do better than that. And so can you.