Boys will be boys and girls will be afterthoughts: The hyper-masculine world of superhero films

It’s raining cash at theatres now showing Batman V Superman (BvS): Dawn of Justice. Money is not the only thing that talks though. If a picture speaks a thousand words, then the film’s posters say more than a million feminist essays ever could.

A female figure joins the male protagonists in some of the promotional material for BvS. There stand Batman and Superman — two imposing, muscular male figures with not an inch of skin on show beyond the minimum required. Batman’s armour almost mimics the most conservative of burqas in the way it covers up even his hands and most of his face. She stands beside them, in a flesh-flashing bathing suit of sorts, acres of bare shoulders, arms and thighs on display while her breasts pour out of a costume that tightly embraces her microscopic waist and impossible curves.

She is, as followers of American superhero comics know, Princess Diana of Themiscyra a.k.a. Diana Prince a.k.a. Wonder Woman, played here by the striking Israeli actress Gal Gadot. If you are unfamiliar with the books and have stayed away from the hype, you may watch the entire film and still be left unsure of who she is, considering her fleeting presence.

The treatment of Wonder Woman in BvS should not surprise those who have tracked male-obsessed Hollywood’s superheroes. The misogyny, marginalisation and exclusion that mark comic book publishing are compounded in the film industry, where stakes are even higher and insecurities more pronounced.

Superhero filmmaking is dominated by men and viewed almost entirely through the male gaze. Result: women are mostly reduced to bystanders, mothers, girlfriends and victims. When the occasional female superhero appears on the big screen, she is usually part of an ensemble, not a lead; and most often a hyper-sexualised creature, with her erotic outfits, moves and personal life being the crucial, if not main, focus of her story.

During Wonder Woman’s brief appearances in Batman V Superman, for instance, almost nothing is revealed about her apart from her sexiness. Bizarre, considering that the big-screen introduction of Wonder Woman (this is her first ever cinematic outing) was the film’s primary pre-release draw for audiences. In a survey by Fandango published on deadline.com, 88 per cent of the respondents said “they were excited to finally see Wonder Woman on the big screen”, only 66 per cent were found to be fans of director Zack Snyder’s work.

BvS acolytes may argue that this film lets on little about Wonder Woman because she gets her own film in 2017. That in itself says much about Hollywood’s gender priorities, considering that Wonder Woman debuted in print in 1941 and has been hugely popular ever since. It has taken 75 years to bring her to the big screen. That number will be 76 by the time her solo film is released.

Contrast that with the waiting period for fans of the best-loved male superheroes. Superman, for one, debuted in comics in 1938. The live-action feature film series starring Christopher Reeve came to theatres in 1978. Time taken for this journey: 40 years. Batman first appeared in print in 1939 and got his first full-length theatrical live-action solo film just 27 years later in 1966.

Some would contend that men have been more popular than women in the superhero comic book universe, which has increased their chances of reaching the big screen. Frankly, that is like saying male underwear are more popular with men than female underwear. After all, these books are by and large about men, for men and by men. Men form the majority of decision makers and artists in the superhero comics industry even today. Ditto Hollywood studios. This translates into better-written, better-fleshed-out male characters with interesting storylines, which do well with readers, thus making them attractive to big producers who are anyway inclined towards films about men.

It is that old chicken-and-egg question again: which came first, the popularity or the quality?

Female superheroes, particularly those selected for cinema, have more or less been afterthoughts and sidekicks. Perhaps nothing explains this better than the incongruity of a fictional army being named “X-Men” although it includes women.

Their identities are most often spin-offs of their male counterparts or derived from relationships with these men. Their stories and personalities cater to their creators’ assumption that the world wants what men want and that men do not want to see tough women on screen.

Catwoman, for example, was spawned as Batman’s adversary and love interest. Elektra is Daredevil’s love interest. When these characters do not fare as well as male leads in books or films — biff boom bang! — those who invested less in their conception in the first place are quick to conclude that nobody wants female superheroes.

That is what happened with the box-office duds Catwoman (2004, starring Halle Berry) and Elektra (2005, Jennifer Garner). Their failure is cited to further shun women superheroes, though no one stopped making male superhero films when Steel (1997, starring Shaquille O’Neal), The Spirit (2008) and Green Lantern (2011) flopped.

This review by Roger Ebert illustrates what ails most female film superheroes: “Catwoman is a movie about Halle Berry’s beauty, sex appeal, figure, eyes, lips and costume design. It gets those right. Everything else is secondary, except for the plot, which is tertiary… The filmmakers have given great thought to photographing Berry, who looks fabulous, and little thought to providing her with a strong character, story, supporting characters or action sequences. In a summer when Spider-Man 2 represents the state of the art, Catwoman is tired and dated.”

Hollywood’s standard justification for avoiding female superheroes is the unsubstantiated supposition that women-centric action dramas do not make the sort of money equivalent male-centric films earn. False.

In truth, well-marketed, well-made action flicks revolving around female characters that live up to their promise have done brilliantly at the box office. For instance, the Angelina Jolie-starrers Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Salt (2010) both made more than double their big budgets. Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2, both starring Uma Thurman, collected almost six times their combined budget. (Source: boxofficemojo.com)

Incidentally, Wonder Woman comics have been immensely successful (though of course film spin-offs would have improved her book sales, as they have for male superheroes). Some feminists have also seen in her a possible starting point — not necessarily an ideal — for an equitable comic book world.

Baby steps, not perfection. In a 2008 listing of “The 50 Greatest Comic Book Characters”, Empire magazine described Wonder Woman thus: “Created by the man who brought us the lie detector, his careerist wife, and their live-in lover, this feminist icon is the most important woman in comics. Naturally, that means she’s often been given short shrift, frequently demoted to menial status (she was a founder member of the Justice Society, but only as secretary)… If they ever give her a steady (and maybe female) creative team, she could be a true icon for the 21st century.”

Captain America — who debuted in comics in the same year as Wonder Woman and was ranked below her by Empire — got his first solo full-length theatrical film in 2011, six years before the scheduled release of the Wonder Woman film in 2017.

The sidelining of female superheroes by Hollywood is exemplified this decade by Black Widow, the character played by Scarlett Johansson in the Avengers series. In her screen appearances, Black Widow has been romantically linked in various ways to a range of men, including Iron Man, Captain America, Hawkeye and The Hulk. It is as if the creators feel her cinematic destiny is unfulfilled without a hint of a romance.

This is not to say that men’s affections and physical intimacy are not easily given, but that portrayals and attitudes are different. As it is off screen in the real world, so it is on screen in the superhero world: promiscuity is a good word for men, not for women. When Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man has multiple sexual/romantic partners, he is projected as a cool dude. When a woman shows even a slight inclination towards more than one man, she is deemed a “slut”.

Don’t take our word for it, ask male superheroes instead. Last year while promoting Avengers: Age of Ultron, actors Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans who play Hawkeye and Captain America respectively gave this interview to Digital Spy:

Interviewer: Fans were pretty invested in the idea of Natasha with either or both of you guys, and now she’s with Bruce. What do you make of that? (Note: the reference was to Natasha Romanoff a.k.a. Black Widow’s blossoming bond with Bruce Banner a.k.a. The Hulk in Age of Ultron.)
Renner: She’s a slut.
Evans: (bursts out laughing) I was going to say something along that line. She’s a complete whore.
Renner: Trick, maaaaaan.
Evans: She’s a slut.
Interviewer: Whatever movie it is, she’ll just be the sidekick, she’ll be flirting away…
Evans: That’s right, she’s just flirting with everybody.
Renner: She has a prosthetic leg anyway.
Evans: Leading everybody on.

Following online outrage against their slurs, Evans apologised unequivocally. Renner, however, issued an insincere platitude, emboldened no doubt by admirers who could not understand the fuss. He then repeated the insult on a prominent TV show and said he was “unapologetic”.

The film also faced criticism for sidelining Black Widow in its merchandising, although the promotions positioned her — the only woman of six Avengers — as being of equal importance to her male colleagues.

Perhaps it is foolish to expect anything better from a film that featured a rape joke. In a light-hearted scene in Age of Ultron, the Avengers compete to lift Thor’s hammer. The prize is Thor’s kingdom. Iron Man quips that if he wins, he will be “re-instituting prima nocta”, an ancient custom discussed in detail in Braveheart (1995), in which noblemen got to have sex with every new peasant bride before she slept with her husband.

Defenders of Age of Ultron pointed out that Iron Man is known for his condescension towards women. How, they asked, is a film to portray a character’s sexism without showing sexism? The answer lies in the countering voices provided by the script. Or rather, their absence. Not one of the decent folk present in that scene expressed disapproval of that casual comment about sexual violence.

Sadly, the film’s director is the respected, self-professed male feminist and proponent of strong women characters, Joss Whedon, creator of the TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

This article is not a finger-pointing “look, we’re better than they are” exercise. On the contrary, it is a reminder that when it comes to gender prejudice, the largest democracies on the globe — India and the US — have much in common.

Still, in a world where the pickings are slim, Wonder Woman’s entry in Batman V Superman brings hope. After her solo film next year, in 2019 will come Captain Marvel featuring a female superhero who reportedly possesses superhuman strength, the gift of flight, a seventh sense (yes, that’s a thing) and energy absorption and redirection skills (that’s a thing too).

It would be naïve though to see these films as a goodbye to sexism in this sphere. To gauge the misogyny still going around, read this remark from a 2014 column about Captain Marvel on mashable.com: “The only question left is who will play her. Battlestar Galactica star Katee Sackhoff has been a fan favorite for a long time, but she’ll be 38 by the time Captain Marvel comes out — and if the studio wants its No. 1 heroine to be around for six movies or more, here’s betting they’re looking much younger. Yeah, we know ... shocking.”

No one seems to care though that Robert Downey Jr was 42 when the first Iron Man was released, or that after six films as the superhero, he will be seen again in this summer’s Captain America: Civil War at the age of 51.

Expecting an end to sexist ageism in comics, films and film columns? Yeah, we know … shocking.