Geena Davis is a fucking moron.
According to the AP, this bish felt compelled to open her scold hole and hold forth on the subject of “gender parity on screen.” By parity here, she is not talking about the difference in SAG pay rates for male and female actors (because no such difference exists). She’s talking about there being an equal number of lead roles in movies – all movies (including movies with all-male casts like Das Boot, the Great Escape, The Hunt for Red October, Lord of the Flies, Lawrence of Arabia, The Shawshank Redemption, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 12 Angry Men) for men and women. Like, seriously. Sure, these are all inarguably classic films, she seems to be saying, but they would be made significantly “better” (?) if they were reshot with at least half, if not all, female characters. Seriously. This is what that bullshit a couple years ago with that stupid female remake of Ghostbusters that bombed was about?
There are two main reasons a writer writes male character into their screenplay, novel, et cetera. Both reasons are simple and have nothing to do with any kind of oppression. The first is historical accuracy, and the second is psychological believability.
Rewriting history in this way is insipid, immoral, unethical, and vile in its ignorance. Which the idiots behind it don’t give a damn about, but they should: rewriting history in the manor undercuts and dismisses virtually all of the accomplishments of the “firsts” achieved by the very minorities and women you claim to be trying to help. For example, three of the films mentioned above take place on submarines before 1984. When there were, ya know, no women on U.S., German, or Russian submarines. It would be another 30 years before that happened:
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On 29 April 2010, the Department of the Navy announced authorization of a policy change allowing women to begin serving on board navy submarines. In 2015, the Navy selected the first 38 enlisted female sailors to serve aboard a submarine,
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Aug 11, 2015, Janine Asseln was made the first female submarine officer in the German Navy.
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The Russian Navy has been in the process of integrating women onto surface ships since 2018. There are presently no female submariners in the Russian Navy.
And I’ll bet a testicle that Miss Davis has never heard these names before. Because they are not part of her narrative. They actually went out and kicked in whatever doors needed kicking in and became what they’d been told they couldn’t, what nobody before them had been able to accomplish.
But according to the rewritten history of Ms. Davis, movies and scripts need to be rewritten as if there were always women on subs. If she makes movies where women are seen voting in the United States before suffrage, then was there ever even an issue? It seems to me that to rewrite the struggles of various people such that those struggles never actually happened is far more dangerous than making movies that were not cast by affirmative action.
And I don’t know what Geena Davis’ opinions and statements about other subjects are (simply because I don’t care enough to look), but if she is in line with the rest of Hollywood, then gender in fluid, non-binary, and just a construct with no real basis in biology. And if that’s the case, it seems to me that it would be far easier for an actress to simply announce at every audition that she identifies as a man, which would then make “him” eligible for all the male roles that Ms. Davis finds so problematic, than it would be to rewrite and reshoot most classic movies to conform to Ms Davis’ rather odd version of enforced diversity.
But the thing that really pisses me off about what this old bat is saying is her alarmingly dim and simple proposition for a solution. Yeah, get a load of this shit: “Just go through (the script) and cross out a bunch of male first names and put female first names. That’s all you have to do.” And all you have to do G.D. is go fuck yourself, you simple, simple creature. You know nothing. I’m not even going to qualify that shit. But you obviously do know nothing about writing, about character and characterization, about storytelling, and about human psychology. This statement is the stupidest and most ignorant thing said about art by anyone since the emperor told Mozart his piece had too many notes. You can’t just shuffle the genders, identities, or even names of characters that have been painstakingly crafted and expect any reader or viewer not to instantly cry foul. They will dismiss the writing (and thus the writer) as moronic. And rightly so.
Davis was joined onstage at this stupid event by some other actor I’ve never heard of (Mayim Bialik? Once again, I simply don’t care enough to look it up) went on to say, “Of course, why wouldn’t we need to see people who are like us to be able to imagine what we could become?” in response to being asked about “the need for diversity on screen to break stereotypes and encourage young people to pursue careers they might otherwise have felt were off limits to them.” I swear to God, most days, I’m walking around in a sort of shell-shocked state of disbelief that I exist on the same planet at the same time as these idiots. It’s really embarrassing.
Okay, look…promoting diversity might be your prime directive in life, but don’t let yourself get so delusional that you think that that makes it important to anyone else. Because it doesn’t, regardless of how many of your friends like your bullshit on Facebook.
The Solution: As a college composition instructor, it’s always amusing to watch incoming freshman (who have been so inculcated with fear by their politically correct high school teachers that they are more worried about potentially offending people who will never read their essay than they are about telling Greater Truths grapple with pronouns when referring to anonymous or hypothetical people in non-gender-specific roles, i.e., doctor. “So I’m talking about doctors opening private practices, and I say, ‘When a doctor is first starting private practice, ____ is faced with myriad choices.’ What do I use there?” . Inevitably, their first choice is “they,” which I inform them is simply grammatically wrong and will be graded against. Their second choice is often to alternate between “he” and “she,” using each one alternatively. I demonstrate how pointlessly confusing this would make their prose. It’s usually then that they will propose this grammatical abortion: s/he. At that point, they can typically see my eyes darken and lips turn up into a threatening snarl. It’s then I offer them the perfect solution: use whatever applies to you. Every year I’ve taught, there have been far more women enrolled in college, both where I teach and nationally, so I’ve churned out rather a lot of female students whom have graduated and I’m confident will forever be using the female pronouns in their writing, something which Dumbass Davis surely must be pleased with. But therein lies the simple (and only real) solution to your manufactured issue: rather than taking successful screenplays written by men that, for whatever reason, contain more male characters than female characters, and arbitrarily (and completely pathetically) changing the names to female names and attempting to recast and reshoot yet another remake and calling that feminism, why not do what you can to buy more screenplays written by females about females. You’ve got some juice in Hollywood…why not use your voice to instead of promoting your dumbass ideas about rewriting someone else’s work (stupidly), lobby to have more original ideas and screenplays bought and developed, rather than rehashing and repackaging the same old ideas over and over again? At this point in your career, you must have your own production company…why not announce that your company from now own will only be producing movies with strong female leads? You’ll find yourself without financing or studio backing immediately (not out of some women-oppression thing, but because any studio that declares they will only produce one kind of movie is a studio guaranteeing to never see a profit), but at least you won’t look like such an idiot as you do now.
Hell, you’re a big girl…why don’t you sit down and start cranking out the sort of screenplays you want to see made? The only thing that could stop you is lack of talent, which is almost certainly the case. But just because you can’t create something great on your own does in no way entitle you to steal and destroy the work of others who can.
N.P.: “World Destruction” – Time Zone
