it's protective coloring

pre-dating this entry again, because i was too tired after getting home from 'coraline' to write last night.

i had finished reading the book a mere hour and a half before seeing the movie, and i think that caused some problems, because i was so upset by the end of the movie that i couldn't even speak.

and that's annoying to me, not the not speaking bit, but the being upset that the movie was different from the book bit, because i have always been of the opinion that a book and it's subsequent movie interpretation are two different pieces of work, not to be compared to one another. i think that adam was right, that i just had the book so fresh in my mind that i couldn't help but be upset by all of the very drastic changes.

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sort of spoiler alert! i hate having things spoiled for me (and it's happened twice with the harry potter series) so i am alerting you now. and doing jump cuts on blogger is obnoxiously complicated involving style sheets and the like, so this is what you get instead.
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but mostly what got my blood boiling was the inclusion of a male sidekick. in the book, coraline does just fine on her own. obviously she gets some help from the ghosties and the cat, but her ingenuity is all her own. her cleverness is all her own. and her heroism is all her own. but just as the movie is winding down, just as coraline finds herself in the most gravest of all dangers, her male sidekick comes out of nowhere, out of the blue, to save her at the last minute.

are. you. kidding. me.

i looked around the theatre at all the little kids in the movie (which, if i were 6 would probably have scared the crap out of me, they did a fabulous job of upping the terrifying factor of the other mother), and i thought, well, here is another movie that shows men will save you in the end.

through gritted teeth i explained this to adam, who "didn't get it". and i wouldn't expect him to. when you're the dominating party, you see things through that filter. i've got plenty of filters, white filter, college educated filter, vegetarian filter, etc. everything seems normal that way, when the things you see reinforce your filter. but look at it through the eyes of a little girl. a little girl who sees coraline as a hero, as smart, funny, clever, brave, strong, adventurous, and she is indeed all these things, and then at the very end, she is saved by a boy, a boy who she doesn't even like that much.

why couldn't they have given her a female sidekick? why did they have to give her a sidekick at all?

the last big scene in the book was so fun, and while sort of predictable, it highlighted coraline's transformation from uncertainty to downright unflappability. (not to mention that this scene in the movie wasn't properly set up at all and thus wasn't as spooky or dramatic.) by letting her friend save her at the end, it just becomes another one of those movies.

i'm so disappointed in animated children's movies as of late. i love pixar as much as the next person, but it really irritates me that they have yet to create a movie based around a girl. sure, jessie was a big star, but the movie was still about buzz and woody. just look at them: ratatouille, cars, bug's life, finding nemo, monster's inc, wall-e, etc etc etc. sure, they each have a female character, or a shell of one, but there is never any female title character. the girls are always sidekicks. (even though eve was pretty bad-ass.) the girls in kid's movies (and, to be honest, a lot of adult movies) are always almost an ancillary thought, thrown in to get some women to feel like they have a reason to see the movie.

so, you might say, why am i upset that the girls are usually sidekicks, but in coraline's case, her sidekick is a boy and she is the lead? because he had to save her at the end. because they couldn't let this powerful girl save herself, which she does in the book in a wonderful way. they couldn't let the girl win.

and relating this back to the walk: for centuries, as i understand it, women's medical problems were sort of swept under the rug. they weren't discussed in public, they weren't something that anybody should know about. they gave silly names to real problems, to make women feel silly for feeling that way, to make women feel stupid for feeling that way, to make women feel like it's all in their heads and that there was no real reason for feeling that way.

and now, it's 2009, and i'm talking about walking with thousands of people in one city, participating in a walk that will be taking place for weeks before and after in other cities, walking under the banner of "breast cancer". a "woman's disease". (not in actuality, but i think most people think of women first when they hear "breast cancer.)

thousands upon thousands of women, men, children, old, young, everything, will walk for miles to raise awareness, money, and support to fund prevention, research and, hopefully someday, a cure. they will don pink, they will have names for their teams involving words like "boobs", "titties", "breasts", etc. for three days, for many weeks, breasts will be at the forefront of many, many people's minds. we will celebrate the women and men we have lost, the women and men who survived and the women and men who are still fighting. we will share stories about these women and men, about our encounters with them. we will listen and we will learn, and maybe some of us will think back to 50 years ago, 100 years ago, when a woman who had a disease would've been locked up away in the attic of a house without any support, without thousands of walkers, without sincere medical attention, with nothing to do but to stare at the wallpaper.

and maybe, for once, the women can save themselves.

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Day Eleven- 2/6/09- pings: 1