Re: SF movies

From: lissa bloomer (ebloomer@MAIL.VT.EDU)
Date: Tue Apr 08 1997 - 14:57:08 PDT


i'm trying to think of fem-sf movies... i saw "TankGirl" and loved it...
but i wonder why so many of the sf women are girls and silly (or, as
someone said, of the "eat shit" kind of aloofness)? (can't we say "eat
shit" and be serious?) we can't forget (well, maybe we can) "Terminator" --
the woman is the one who, as alexander the great's mama says, "rocks the
cradle and rules the world." the woman in the terminator has a couple of
overly coined feminist responses... which, when i first heard them sounded
great... ("you men don't know what it's like to CREATE"...) and she is,
after all, the one who saves the day. plus, she has amazing biceps. i'm not
sure we could call the movie very literary, though. not much to study and
ponder-- "Alien" -- the last one, had a strange feminist twist. but i
became quickly tired of the sigorney weaver character calling the big ol'
baby-producing monster a bitch. (there's a strange part of me, perhaps in
the margins of my feminism, that can't stand any strong woman being called
a bitch -- alein, human-eating, or otherwise.)

i think, though, that we'll be seeing some really powerful movies
soon--reason being that movie producers are just now able to begin to
handle feminist issues- let alone sf issues. "Thelma and Louise" and "Fried
Green Tomatoes" put so many men into intellectual overload... just think
what adding sf into that genre would do. so, instead, we have a ridiculous
plethora of "that-woman-has-more
-than-me-so-i'm-going-to-kill-her-and-her-family-and-take-over-her-life"
genre...which may be science fiction (in it's implausability).

and that's what i can't stand: the putting a woman in the place of a man
idea; assuming that it's going to make a fem story-- gad.
it's kind like the black barbie doll: "maybe if we color the plastic dark
brown, it'll be an african-american doll." i think not.

-lissa

if you're wearing pants, thank my great great great grandmother.

elisabeth bloomer
instructor, english
virginia tech
ebloomer@vt.edu
540.231.2445



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