So, the other day I watched 9. The one with the anthropomorphized socks puppets, you know, not the musical or the other movie called Nine that I forget now. Maybe there isn't one, maybe I'm just thinking of 91/2 Weeks or Nine Songs or something. Anyway, I was watching 9 and I started thinking about portrayals of sexuality in the media. You know, like you do.
The thing about 9 is that all the characters look like this:
Though they have human personalities, they have bodies made of burlap and old zippers and, I don't know, buttons. Shoelaces? Just whatever shit the inventor who made them happened to have lying around. At the risk of spoiling a movie that came out like two years ago, I'll reveal that the homunculi are basically ensouled with different aspects of the inventor's personality - there's an artistic one, and one that's good with gadgets, and one that's a total asshole. Et cetera.
9, the titular hero, represents the inventor's "humanity." Whatever. The point is, later in the movie you meet 7, who is voiced by Jennifer Connelly and represents the "warrior" that evidently lived inside the inventor. Which is - just great. Really.
Here's the weird thing, though. The only thing feminine about 7 is her recognizably female voice. Her little burlap body looks identical to everyone else's, because they were in fact all cut from the same cloth. Perhaps literally. I slay me.
So naturally, because she's The Female Character (TM), 9 has to have a few little flirtatious moments with her. The sort of oops-we-accidentally-brushed-hands thing that's in kid's movies, sure, but it's overtly romantic. And this is okay. We're all right with this. Because she has a girl voice.
I don't know why I keep coming back to this thought. The notion that all we need is the most basic of cues, and bigots keep their mouths shut. If 7 had a male voice and 9 flirted with the same exact creature - same personality, same looks, same everything - all hell would have broken loose. Despite the fact that the behaviors of these little sexless dolls implies nothing about actual human sexuality - they can't, and probably wouldn't want to, have any kind of sexual contact with each other - we've got to give 7 a girl voice.
It would have felt more natural to bypass the hints of romance altogether. The idea of different parts of an inventor's personality falling in love with each other is a little twisted for a kid's movie. I don't know what came first - did the need for a romantic scene beget the girl-voiced character, or did the girl-voiced character beget the need for a romantic scene? (I deliberately avoid the word "feminine" in describing 7 because the character is not traditionally feminine in any other way. Besides, it's a dumb concept.) I don't know and it bothers me that I don't know.
Does gender influence our perceptions more than it should? If we see two male characters interacting in a certain way, we make different assumptions than we do about a male character and a female character interacting in a certain way. Maybe it's because most people are straight-identified, so most people in movies are straight-identified. Maybe it's really that simple and I've got my brain tied into knots over absolutely nothing.
But just once, I guess I'd like to see a movie where two dudes are always sniping at each other (like say Arthur and Eames in Inception to pick a COMPLETELY RANDOM EXAMPLE) and then they start making out hardcore. Except anything of that description is either on British TV, or relegated to the "Gay & Lesbian" genre. Because, you know. Straight folks don't want to see that shit.
Or maybe we do.
Maybe we need to see it.
I'm not sure really. But art is the place where things begin to change, where they can change. We can talk until we're blue in the fact about whether it's necessary to portray gay relationships in the media, whether kids really need to see it portrayed as normal, whether it's maybe too much for them to handle. Meanwhile, this happens.
Maybe we need to see it.
In conclusion,
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