Watching this trio of films in quick succession, I couldn’t
help but notice a trope that is used in all of them – or, at least, in the
second Gremlins film and Muppets Most Wanted – and that is the
use of the token female character, particularly in the form of what Anita
Sarkeesian refers to as the ‘Ms. Male Character’ or the ‘Smurfette Principle’. For
more detail on what these related concepts are, I highly recommend you watch
Sarkeesian’s excellent video (embedded below) exploring this concept in video
games. (It’s long, but worth it. Her other videos in the Tropes vs. Women
project are also highly worth the watch for anyone interested in issues of
gender representation in popular culture.)
You can also read a transcript of her video here,
if you don’t fancy the audio-visual mode, but it really works better with the
visual examples.
In short, the Ms. Male Character is a female version of a
popular character that was previously male or genderless. Culturally, we see
the male as ‘norm’, while to mark something as female we must plaster this norm
with stereotyped additions (bows, skirts, long, sultry eyelashes), because
anything other than maleness is ‘abnormal’ – just think of the male toilet
symbol being a plain stick figure with no obvious gender, while the female
symbol is marked as such by the addition of a skirt, and sometimes a bobbed
haircut and/or a narrow waist.
I’m bringing all this up specifically in relation to the use
of the Ms. Male Character and the token female character in films such as Gremlins 2 and Muppets Most Wanted. I first began to notice this trope after being
introduced to it during my MA course at the University of Hull, on a module
called Gender and Disney (looking at gender issues in Western society at large,
but through the lens of a popular culture icon), and then even more so after
Sarkeesian’s above video, and the other videos in her series. One recent
example that jumped out at me is in Cloudy
with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (Cameron & Pearn, 2013), the
lesser-but-still-pretty-awesome sequel to [if you really need me to say then
why are you reading this?]. In the film, Flint Lockwood and cohorts return to
their island which, at the end of the previous instalment, was left abandoned
and covered with giant food. That food has now mutated into various food-animals
(foodimals) with pun-tastic names such as cucumbird. One of the species of
foodimals is a group of anthropomorphic gherkins.
At first, these gherkins seem to be genderless. After all,
why would they need a gender? THEY ARE GHERKINS.
And, despite being alive and sentient, they also appear to be asexual and
without the need to reproduce, since the FLDSMDFR (no, that isn’t a keyboard
smash, that’s the acronym for the machine that caused the food to mutate – long
story) continues to consistently ‘birth’ new foodimals. Here are some of the gherkins:
There’s nothing about these gherkins which seems to gender
them in any way. They really are just gherkins that have been sliced open and
given pimento eyes. That is it. Okay, one has a fishing rod which tends to be an activity associated with
men, but I will get to that.
Then, later in the film, this gherkin pops up:
Cute, right? But this is also a classic example of the
Smurfette Principle/Ms. Male Character. Note the curved physique (it’s very
weird to use the term ‘physique’ in relation to a gherkin), ‘feminine’ curly hair
style, eyelashes, and fish-hook earring. Now that we have been shown a member
of the species which is so clearly marked as being female, we are forced to
assume that the others are coded as male. Furthermore, this does not stop at
appearances. ‘She’ is cradling what appears to be some sort of onion – I’m
unsure whether she is supposed to be treating the onion as a pet or an infant
(I’m no expert, but I don’t think onions and gherkins bear any relation other
than both being vegetables), but, either way, it puts her in the role of the
carer/mother figure. In this gherkin society it seems that, similarly to
traditional human gender constructs, the female of the species remains at home
in the role of carer and nurturer, while the male goes out fishing, i.e. in the
role of hunter/provider. What’s more, this female is the only one of her kind. The token female.
I am of course using the term ‘token female’ rather loosely,
in relation to a female who is the only one of her species or occupation. In Cloudy 2 (and the other films I’ll
discuss below) there are other female characters, human, animal, and foodimal.
But, as I say, Gherkette (I just made this up) is the only ‘female’ gherkin we
see throughout the film, and is as accessorized as such, while the ‘male’
gherkins are bare.
Let’s move on to the films that inspired me to make this
post: Gremlins 2 and Muppets Most Wanted. Gremlins are similar
to Cloudy 2’s gherkins in the sense
that, in the first film at least, there is nothing to suggest that they are of
any gender. (The official term for the creatures is ‘mogwai’, which I use here
to refer to the creatures in their original, soft and cuddly state, like Gizmo.
I use ‘gremlins’ to refer to the malicious lizard-like creatures that the
mogwai turn into if they are fed after midnight.) They have no genitalia, nor
do they have any use for it since they are parthenogenetically birthed when
another member of the species comes into contact with plain water. However, the characters in both Gremlins and Gremlins 2 seem to automatically assume that the mogwai/gremlins
are male, with no evidence. Even the scientists in Gremlins 2 are guilty of this, and they should know better. Take
this scene (and try not to get distracted by how adorable Gizmo is):
All three
scientists begin by referring to Gizmo as ‘it’, but then all of a sudden refer
to Gizmo as ‘he’, after Christopher Lee utters ‘He likes this music?’ (it is
difficult to tell, but this is confirmed by the DVD’s subtitles), followed by
calling Gizmo ‘my boy’. Unlike the twin scientists, Lee is meeting Gizmo for
the first time, and has not examined Gizmo in any way in order to determine
gender. He is making a blind assumption.
Let us do what these scientists failed to, and examine the
bodies of the gremlins in further detail. Here is a ‘normal’ gremlin, as
established in the first film:
(It’s basically impossible to find a full-body shot of a
gremlin from the film itself; as they are puppets, we almost always see them
from the waist up, but to my knowledge the above is an accurate
representation.)
As with the gherkins and the toilet stick-figure symbols,
there is nothing about the body of the gremlin which is inherently ‘male’, but
as we are culturally conditioned to assume that the male is norm, it becomes
automatically accepted that body types like the above are either male or
asexual – rarely female.
As seen in the video above, there is a sub-plot in Gremlins 2 that involves a scientific
lab with all sorts of B-movie experiments going on. Inevitably, the cheeky
gremlins get their claws on several vials of chemical potions. One turns a
gremlin into a spider, another a bat, another a ‘genius’ gremlin with the
intelligence of a human adult. And one of them, of course, turns a gremlin
female.
Behold, Femlin (again, I am making this up):
I do actually like the female gremlin. She’s kind of
fabulous, and seems to really rock that leopard-print bikini and long, green
hair. But, it’s not necessarily her appearance
that I really have a problem with in as much as it’s the need to coat her with
accessories in order to mark her as female, and the ‘other’ to the ‘normal’
male gremlins. (I also find it problematic that she clearly has a fully
developed female physique, when it is my opinion that, in the first films at
least, the gremlins are coded as naughty children. However, since Gremlins 2 seems to not just throw away
the rule book, but shred it to pieces and burn them to cinders – the Brain
gremlin is birthed with glasses already
on – perhaps we cannot dwell too much on this.)
What is also extremely problematic about Femlin is her
motivations as a character, and her place in the story. Femlin is created quite
a long way into the film, and while her role is relatively minor, it is
difficult to ignore. As the only overtly ‘female’ gremlin, she is celebrated as
such by her asexual/male counterparts: a musical number of ‘New York, New York’
the other gremlins forming a giant mosaic of her face, from which she emerges in
a glam red dress, accompanied by cat calls and wolf whistles.
One can certainly read a number of positives into the
depiction and celebration of Femlin: on the one hand, it is quite nice that she revered due to her status
as the lone female. She is also clearly more socialised than the other gremlins,
and this is her salvation. The other gremlins are all bent on exiting the
building in which they are trapped, waiting until sunset when it will be safe
for them to venture outside and wreak havoc and destruction on the Big Apple,
while also seeing all the sights it has to offer. This is the gremlins’
downfall, as while they wait in the building lobby for the sun to go down,
Billy and his cohorts take advantage of them all being in one place and
electrocute them. All but one, that is. As we find out at the very end of the
film, Femlin survives. Rather than being bent on destruction and mayhem, Femlin
is more focused on romance. We find out that she has trapped a human male in a
bathroom, and the film closes with her preparing to marry him. Her salvation
therefore lies in her being a great deal more socialised than the other
gremlins, and rather than desiring to rampage New York City she merely desires
to wed and, presumably, live happily ever after.
While on the one hand this happy ending for Femlin seems
great, it is extremely problematic and frustrating that she is given this happy
ending and character motivations that are based on lazy gender stereotyping.
This brings me to the only human female character in this
discussion: Nadya from Muppets Most
Wanted, played brilliantly by Tina Fey sporting a Russian accent. Nadya is
a prison guard at the Gulag in which Kermit has been mistakenly incarcerated
(in the place of his evil doppelganger, Constantine). Nadya seems to be the
prison guard in charge, ‘welcoming’ Kermit in the number ‘Big House’, being put
in charge of orchestrating the annual show put on by the prisoners, and is also
clearly very good at her job as she foils every one of Kermit’s attempts to
escape (due to her having seen every single prison movie, thanks to her Netflix
subscription).
However, like Femlin, it is Nadya’s motivations which are
problematic. She quickly becomes aware that Kermit is not Constantine, and yet
she does nothing to help him appeal and be released. Why this is is not made
entirely clear to begin with (although, I am basing this off of my slightly
hazy memory of the film – please correct me if I am wrong), though towards the
end of the film we discover that it is because she is completely, utterly
infatuated with Kermit. Therefore, her motivation in keeping Kermit at the
Gulag is not due to simply a Shawshankian injustice of the justice system, but
because she wants to marry him. Sigh.
Why is this such a big deal? Well, firstly, this would not
have happened had the prison guard been a male character, not least because it
is highly unlikely that a family-oriented film from a major Hollywood studio
would include a homosexual relationship (but bestiality is fine, apparently). Had
the character of Nadya been a male, undoubtedly the screenwriters would have
had to concoct a different reason for Kermit to be kept in the Gulag. Although,
perhaps that is because of the ‘easy’ female-wants-to-wed character trope that they
made the character female. It also continues a narrative that Kermit is irresistible,
given that Miss Piggy’s main motivations in both The Muppets and Most Wanted
are to finally marry Kermit (and it is this desire that, for a great deal of Most Wanted, prevents her from realising
that Kermit has been replaced by Constantine, as Constantine is willing to give
her what she wants). I love Miss Piggy – she, like Femlin, is fabulous. She’s
tough and doesn’t take any bullshit. However, when you look at the key female
characters across recent Muppets films (I am avoiding talking about the earlier
films, as I ashamedly haven’t seen anything prior to 1991’s Christmas Carol), including Amy Adams’
Mary and Gremlins 2’s Femlin, and notice that they all have one thing
in common – a desire to wed – this is very troubling.
This is not to say that female characters cannot have the desire
to wed at all. However, it becomes frustrating and worrying when this lazy and
gender-rooted character motivation is repeated over and over. It is further
exacerbated due to the fact that Femlin and Nadya are the only women of their
species or, in Nada’s case, occupation (as, at least in the 24 years between Gremlins 2 and Most Wanted, the female characters have jobs). It might still be
annoying, but not half as bad if there were other female prison guards in
addition to Nadya who have no interest whatsoever in forming a romantic
relationship with Kermit. Or, if in Gremlins
2, there were other female gremlins who are just as bent on destruction and
mayhem as the ‘male’ ones. But no. In these films the female is an oddity, a
novelty, and while she is often kick-ass and the best character in a film, she
also often embodies lazy gender stereotypes. Add to this that Gremlins 2, Muppets Most Wanted and even Cloudy
With a Chance of Meatballs 2 are all aimed primarily at the child/family
audience, and that these films are seeming to enforce to children that the
females of the species are a) a novelty, and greatly outnumbered by their male
counterparts, b) abnormal, and both derived from and in opposition to the male 'norm', and c) whether or not they have a job, are in charge, or generally fabulous and bad-ass, they are ultimately looking
for heterosexual romance and a happily ever after.
While the roles of Gherkette, Femlin, and Nadya are
relatively minor in their respective films and in the grand scheme of things,
they make up just a small number of countless other examples from film,
television, video games, and other media that we are exposed to every day. Their
place in these popular culture texts is insidious – and it needs to stop.
I'd hate to end on a completely negative note, so I want to end with some positive examples of non-human characters that are not merely asexual or male with female parts added on. Sarkessian mentions some good examples from video games in the video above. Although I have criticised the depiction of Gherkette in Cloudy 2, I should point out that the film also includes other 'mother' foodimals that are not visually modified to gender them as female. For example, the tacodile is seen with baby tacodiles, and does have any features which gender her as being either male or female. WALL-E and EVE, the pair of robot protagonists in WALL-E (Stanton, 2008) are clearly intended to be thought of as male and female judging by their names alone. However, in terms of their 'bodies' they are not given any sorts of accessories that give them an explicit gender, other than EVE's body being sleek in a way that we may say is feminine; however, we can also put this down to her being a more advanced robot than WALL-E. If there are any more examples, I would love to hear about them.
