Talk Movies to Me

And then there’s Sansa. Sansa Stark who named her deadly, killer direwolf Lady. And she trained her to be gentle, and quiet, and sweet and loving. And then what happens? The Baratheons have her killed. So now Sansa is so alone, having lost her family, her home and her Lady. But she is the exact opposite of what her father said would happen to wolves who end up alone. Ned Stark said that the only way they could survive was to stick together, and that was never an option. Robb had their mother. Rickon and Bran had Winterfell and then each other. Jon is on the wall, with his brothers, and then across it with Ygritte, then back to the wall. Arya had Gendry, and is still linked to Nymeria. But Sansa has absolutely no one who is her family. So she takes the strength and poise of a lady, and turns it into something as deadly and defensive as a direwolf’s fangs and claws. She knows that she is alone, and that no one is coming for her, so she adapts. She plays the game, she keeps her mouth shut, she stays alive.

Because the best way to hide a wolf, to keep people feeling safe, is to make them think it’s just a well trained dog.

I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.

There are not any.

By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that’s at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (on 891 screens) so I hope you like it. Because it’s pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.

Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.

Somebody asked me this morning what “the women” are going to do about this. I don’t know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?

They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.