It Can’t Always Be Nina: The Battle between Plasticity and Specificity in Widows
2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/adaptation/apz012
ISSN1755-0645
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoI still remember being excited the first time I saw the Widows trailer. I remember seeing director Steve McQueen’s name next to Viola Davis’s in the lineup and believing that them working together on this film, where the widows of dead thieves attempt a heist that their husbands died trying to execute, would be good for the genre. With the more recent gender-blind reboots like Ghostbusters (Paul Feig, 2016) and the Oceans franchise—this time with Oceans Eight (Gary Ross, 2018)—industry logic around equitable gender representation became synonymous with the literal ability to count difference on screen. Thus, while neither script delved into the complexities of what the women characters faced being themselves in the world, the visual evidence of their female presence interceded for the depth and specificity that those characterizations lacked. I call this condition of the moment ‘plastic representation’, whereby audiences and critics place so much emphasis on the visual imagery as the sole marker of meaningful representation that questions about complexity and depth are allowed to be elided from the conversation (Warner 2017). As exemplars of plastic representation, these films that seemed to simply switch female-identified characters in the parts previously assigned to men, suggest that in our social pursuit of racial and gendered progress, we may have ceded more ground than intended by asking for less parity than we deserved.
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