Going into a weekend, nothing puts a spring in my step and a song in my heart more than a little of the ole’ blue-on-blue violence. On Thursday, Oscar-winning director James Cameron, who is about as leftwing as Hollywood leftists come, blasted another leftwing sacred cow — no less, than the box office smash Wonder Woman, which is being incorrectly hailed all over the country by dumb-and-dumber feminists as some sort of feminist breakthrough (it’s not).
For his part, Cameron dug the movie but had some issues with that whole feminista thing:
All of the self-congratulatory back-patting Hollywood’s been doing over Wonder Woman has been so misguided. She’s an objectified icon, and it’s just male Hollywood doing the same old thing! I’m not saying I didn’t like the movie but, to me, it’s a step backwards. Sarah Connor was not a beauty icon. She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit. And to me, [the benefit of characters like Sarah] is so obvious. I mean, half the audience is female!
Did Cameron just use the word “objectified” as though that’s a bad thing. I mean, has he seen Gal Gadot, has he laid eyes on this real-life goddess? And if she is willing to be objectified and I am willing to objectify her, is that not a consenting relationship between two consenting adults, and I thought leftists were all about staying out of the bedroom — not that I watch a bootleg copy of Wonder Woman alone in my bedroom every time my wife is out running errands because that would be sick.
Obviously Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins did not care for the fact that The James Cameron slammed her film as a “step back,” and so, as is the case in this 21st century of ours, she fired back via the Twitter-nets — and accused Sir James of the Dances With Smurfs of — gasp! — not being a woman:
James Cameron’s inability to understand what Wonder Woman is, or stands for, to women all over the world is unsurprising as, though he is a great filmmaker, he is not a woman. Strong women are great. His praise of my film Monster, and our portrayal of a strong yet damaged woman was so appreciated. But if women have to always be hard, tough and troubled to be strong, and we aren’t free to be multidimensional or celebrate an icon of women everywhere because she is attractive and loving, then we haven’t come very far have we. I believe women can and should be EVERYTHING just like male lead characters should be. There is no right and wrong kind of powerful woman. And the massive female audience who made the film a hit it is, can surely choose to judge their own icons of progress.
What was the middle thing?
Did anyone get any of that? I dozed off right around “multidimensional.”
Snark aside, they are both wrong. The claim that Cameron doesn’t understand women is of course accurate. No man alive understands women. But Jenkins uses that truth as both sword and shield, as a means to dismiss Cameron’s opinion of the film and the character. That’s just stupid.
For his part, Cameron is being a priggish, moralizing ass. If we are going to allow sodomy between two consenting adults, why are we not allowed objectification?
Cameron’s frustration — and that is what this is really all about — makes sense, though. He is, after all, the director who turned Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley into a full-blown action hero in Aliens, the guy who did the same with Sarah Conner in Terminator 2 and Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies. Cameron has to feel a little burnt watching Wonder Woman receive all this feminista cred for something he did 30 years ago.
Nevertheless, even Cameron wasn’t first. Fifteen years before Aliens and 45 years before Wonder Woman there was Pam Grier. And leftwing Hollywood’s continued failure to accurately recognize a black woman for breaking this barrier nearly 50 years ago, is just more proof of where the real racism in America resides.
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