I’m a movie geek who (along with several of Team BadRep) can’t possibly choose only one favourite film. It’d take me a month just to narrow it down to a top 20. In the end I wrote about two films – this first one precisely because it’s pretty indefensible from a feminist point of view, and the second – which I’ll get to in tomorrow’s post – because I think it is very feminist in a genre where you don’t expect it.

But I also think this choice, my first, has some hidden feminist aspects:

Movie poster for the 1981 film "Excalibur". (Copyright Warner Bros.)

John Boorman’s Excalibur. We’re firmly into ‘Knights In Armour’ territory here, which means the usual relegation of women to being prizes to be fought over, silent Queens, or love interests whose own opinions aren’t asked for, and absolutely nothing else. There’s a debate about whether showing this dynamic is itself feminist if you use it to highlight how unequal and appalling the situation was for women historically (HBO’s recent series Game of Thrones is reigniting this argument, although the source material books for that one are clearer: they start from a position of female oppression and have several characters rebel against it precisely because of the extreme power difference, and makes the readers acknowledge and dislike the inequality).

At first glance though, Excalibur isn’t even trying for feminism points. Its famous heroes are a male King and a male Wizard, some men who all get to be equal to other men around a table, and a man who starts a war over someone else’s wife. And everything goes to hell when one of the few named women sleeps with the man she actually loves.

Looking at the main female characters in detail, we have Igraine who is a pouting, mostly naked object of lust, and played by (somewhat creepily) director John Boorman’s daughter Katrine. She is famously – and this causes wincing every time – naked while being given loving attentions by a man in full plate-mail (surely that would chafe?!).

We also have Guinevere, played excellently by Cherie Lunghi as someone spirited, but increasingly trapped and fragile. I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to reveal that Guinevere falls in love with Lancelot. The fact that she chooses to act on it in defiance of the strict rules around sexual conduct could be seen as empowering (even if it does result in her being sentenced to death, from which she has to be rescued by him).

And we have… Morgana. Played by Helen Goddamn Mirren.

Which is the point at which the film redeems itself a hell of a lot. It’s not just the power of the performances (several of which are brilliant despite the very-1980 effects and pomp) it’s that as well as being the best cinematic retelling of popular Arthurian Legend even today, the movie is filled with iconic archetypes, and they stand out way beyond the plot.

We’re reaching a bit to find any feminism in the movie up to this point, I agree. The source material was put together (in the best-known version) just around the time women were reduced to princesses in towers in storytelling, so maybe it’s not surprising that they’re mostly given similar treatment here. But there is one ray of hope.

Whether this movie counts as having a strong positive female lead eventually depends entirely on whether you think the archetype of The Witch is a positive one.

Morgana is absolutely the classic dangerous magical female. She’s immensely threatening: ambitious, capable, cunning, sexual, malevolent, but also completely outside the rules. She uses seduction as a weapon, and is utterly transgressive – her hate drives her to sleep with Arthur (her half-brother) and have a child (Mordred). This in turn breaks the whole of nature, and specifically the King’s link with the Land.

The only other magic-user (Merlin) is also chaotic and mysterious, but very careful to stay within the boundaries. Morgana is not. She is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, stronger than the King, and stronger than Merlin (and she proves it in both cases). She sees clearly, which (due to the aforementioned sex-in-armour incident) is what sets her on a path of vengeance in the first place. She is owned by no man, with her own desires and plans for her family to gain power. And she succeeds at a great deal of it.

Now okay, it’s not going to raise the banner of feminism very high when this character is unequivocally the Baddie – meant to be feared and mistrusted from the outset. Witches are outcasts, however independent or fearsome that lets them appear. The men Morgana opposes have made her their enemy by being flawed with greed and lust, by abusing her family and fighting endless wars, but we’re not meant to be sympathetic to her. She’s far too lethal and hungry.

As well as the performances, this movie is one of my favourites because of the amazing visuals, the number of people who turn up in early roles (Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Ciarán Hinds, Patrick Stewart), the fact it has loads of mud and blood in it (unlike many sanitised retellings) and for the sheer bonkers joy of filming a load of knights in armour charging around to the sound of Wagner.

But Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson (Merlin) really do stand out. What could have been an epic about how ‘men defeat other men to decide which man gets to be top man while a man does some magic’ is instead largely taken over by the brilliant interplay between Merlin and Morgana – the electric, snake-hissing, mountain-deep emnity, the sense of power and caution whenever they invoke their power. They’re much more exciting than Arthur or Guinevere.

Of course, there is a story behind that.

As the director says in his autobiography ‘Adventures of a Suburban Boy‘, Williamson knew Mirren from some years before, when they had a huge falling-out during a production of Macbeth. Boorman told the would-be Merlin that Mirren was likely to be playing Morgana, and the actor immediately changed his reply. (I can’t remember the exact words from his book, but the general idea was as follows):

“Oh, then I couldn’t possibly do it.” “Why not?” “Well, if you must know, she wanted to sleep with me and I turned her down.”

This confused John Boorman. Neither of the pair were known for being shy in that regard. (Helen Mirren ended up dating Liam Neeson during filming…)

Boorman asked Mirren if she wanted to play Morgana, and she was very excited. Then he said Nicol would be Merlin.

“Oh, then no way.” “Why not?” “It’s been awkward ever since he wanted to sleep with me and I said no.”

Not knowing if either of them was telling the truth, Boorman decided to cast them anyway, figuring the tension would be good for the chemistry onscreen. And he was right.

I love the overblown fanfare of this movie (and not just in the soundtrack). It has the best ever “hand holding a sword out of a lake” scene, epic battles, amazing Irish locations, and moments where everything is just focused on Merlin or Morgana saying a few words which change the world. Also, Helen Goddamn Mirren being awesome.

The really bad news is… they’re remaking it. In the last two years both Bryan Singer and Guy Ritchie (!) have been linked to King Arthur movies with the words “remake of Excalibur” from Warner Brothers specifically mentioned. Don’t do it, WB! This version may be knee-deep in Eighties Cheese but it will never be beaten, certainly not by today’s Hollywood. Huge amounts of Eighties Cheese never stopped Robin of Sherwood from being amazing (and in fact still the best version of Robin Hood, despite constant remake attempts) and the two have much in common.

Overall, Excalibur is a bit of a guilty viewing pleasure in feminist terms, but that’s not the case at all with my next pick. That one stands up as a triumph of film-making AND feminism…

*** There are spoilers in this!***

Oh man.  Three things, then.  Three things.  Second thing is, I am a dangerously massive fanboy for Warren Ellis.  I don’t really like going into a film already biased either for or against its artistic merits, but I was practically eating my own face with anticipation for this one.

And thirdly, I am also madly in love with Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman.  Helen Mirren is so badass I don’t know if I want to be her best friend or be her.  Morgan Freeman’s voice alone turns me into a glowing pillar of delight.  The mere fact that they are near each other, in the same shot sometimes, in RED (they’re on the poster!  Both of them!  Simultaneously!) is like cinematographical manna from heaven being fed directly into my brain through a glee tube.

So please remember that this film was seen through the eyes of what was basically a person fully transformed into a ziggurat of pure fandom; an obelisk of moist-eyed admiration.  Consequently, any words that have issued from my fingers as I type this have been vetted for inappropriate levels of fanboy, but I can’t promise that I’ll have caught all of them.  I can promise, however, that I have done my best.

But first off – and I’d really like to get this out of the way, because I think we all noticed it, didn’t we – there’s one scene that made me actually shout “NO!” in the cinema and made people look at me in disgust (sorry, Vue Cambridge!).

Okay.  The scene is this: Helen Mirren’s character, Victoria, gets shot in the abdomen in such a way that she genuinely thinks her life is at stake, and she prepares for a final showdown, unarmed and bleeding from the gut, and then! a man saves her.  He literally sweeps her off her combat-booted feet and whisks her off to safety.

This is a cliché that we have ingrained into our social consciousness as thoroughly and as needlessly fictionally as “frogs turn into princes when adequately tongued.”  “Woman cannot save self; man saves woman.”  At least the frog-kissing trope doesn’t then translate across into how people commonly regard frogs.  But this “women are crap and need saving” bollocks translates, doesn’t it?  You get it everywhere, from fairytales to adverts; this pointless, condescending infantilism.  This is a point at which I would like to refer you to Bill Bailey’s magnificent “Beautiful Ladies” song, which tears the piss out of this trope perfectly.

Beautiful ladies, in emergency situations!
Beautiful ladies are lovely, but sometimes they don’t take care
They’re too busy with their makeup, or combing their lovely hair
To take basic safety precautions.

The most aggravating thing about it is that – well, okay, some viewers may find that it made the re-emergence of this cliché less annoying – Helen Mirren kicks fourteen types of arse in this.  She has a free-mounted machine gun.  She blasts her way through waves of drones with John Malkovich meekly in the background handing her more guns.  She explicitly changes out of her heels into a nice pair of combat boots to handle the violence.  She knows surgery and hides guns under flower-arranging.  So, for me, to have her punctured and enlimpened like a party balloon just made me want to cry.

And then she SMASHED STUFF

That said, I was so delighted by her character that I was genuinely pleased that she’d been saved, rather than sacrificed.  So the getting-saved-by-a-man was more pleasing to me than if she hadn’t, and been left to die, but she’s an epic-level character!  She shouldn’t be shot down by a faceless NPC¹ in the first place!

So there’s that.

On the whole, though, RED absolutely delighted me.  The dialogue is hilarious, the action sequences beautifully shot and choreographed, and the whole thing is a visual feast.  The characters are chunky and believable – yes, including The Girl, the love interest, the object of obsession – and while they’re all deeply flawed in some critical respect, they’re likeable.

Let’s take Bruce Willis’s character, Frank.  He’s the hero.  He’s badass in pretty much every respect, but his treatment of The Love Interest, Sarah (Mary Louise Parker), at the beginning is absolutely repulsive.  We are right by her side when she makes a bid for escape – it doesn’t matter if what he says is best for her and that we’ve seen his house shot to pieces, the fact of the matter is that he has BROKEN INTO HER HOUSE AND KIDNAPPED HER.  As she says, “You can’t just go around duct-taping people”.  And we can absolutely sympathise with her.  She’s just an ordinary person.  And you can’t just go around duct-taping people.

I actually loved her to bits.  She felt like someone I knew, and the scene where she brazens her way out of a Situation In A Lift is a spectacular testament to how ordinary people can rise to a challenge.  She’s great.  Also, that’s a very gratifying example of her saving Frank.

Interestingly, this film was given an opportunity to pass the Bechdel Test.  Sarah and Victoria are left alone in the snow, while Victoria takes aim at some kneecaps with a sniper rifle.  They discuss Frank.  And then Victoria threatens to kill Sarah and hide the body.  So it had this whole assenting-to-trope/subversion thing going on.  The opportunity was there! But sadly missed!  But I think it also does just go to show that a film doesn’t have to pass the Bechdel Test to also have brilliant female characters in (and visa versa: Sex And The City 2 springs to mind…).

Because it does, you know.  It’s not just Sarah and Victoria (HELENNNN) that are brilliant in this; a tiny bit-part background character with no name gets held at gunpoint by John Malkovich’s marvellously paranoid Marvin.  He declaims her as following them, and having a gun in her handbag.  This is awful; she is terrified and shaking, and Marvin is the bad guy.  And then, it is revealed that yes, she was following them, and yes, she does have a gun.  It is a rocket launcher.  And if that’s not brilliant, I don’t know what is.  The gun-wielding grunt role isn’t just restricted to the men in this film.  And that’s good.  I’m up for that.  Let us have equal opportunities in both our heroes AND our villains.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• The dialogue is hewn from purest diamond genius
• The characters make sense and are, despite their flaws, readily engageable-with
• There is a real estate agent with a rocket launcher
• It looks edibly good
• HELEN MIRREN.

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• Helen Mirren gets shot and has to be rescued by a man and that is boring
• Helen Mirren doesn’t play all the roles

1. Non-player Character for the non-nerds. I’m sorry, everyone.

• SF author John Scalzi has written a beautiful post about Things I Don’t Have To Think About Today.
  
• This may be a few months old, but here’s a still-very-readable article by Tiffany Daniels on Women in Music in 2010 with lots of snazzy recommendations.  Its parent zine, God Is In The TV, are hoping it’ll scoop a Record Of The Day Best Music Feature award, and if you dig it you can vote for it.  And if you like that, there’s more music blogging from Tiffany over at Drunken Werewolf.
• We like comics. We like activism and inclusivity. We like the Riot Nrrd webcomic! (We especially like the Joss Whedon puppy.)
• Muslims Wearing Things – a tongue-in-cheek reply to those tricky discussions about ‘traditional Muslim clothing’.
• It’s not out until December, but Julie Taymor’s directed The Tempest – with Helen Mirren as Prospero. Russell Brand is playing himself again, but this time scripted by Shakespeare. Surely an improvement.
• Peter Tennant writing for Black Static magazine breaks down the statistics regarding women’s writing in recent horror anthologies. Horror author Maura McHugh discusses the findings at her blog.
• No More Mutants – a new column by Andrew Wheeler over on BleedingCool on representation in Marvel Comics. The initial link is #4, or you could start with  the first one here.

This linkspost is the first of what’s going to be a regular feature.

Clearly you guys have damn good taste in your reading material if you’re reading BadRep, so if there’s anything you think we should be reading, or any projects in need of a signal boost, mention ’em in the comments and we’ll try and fit them into next week’s linkspam.