We’ve come a long way from the days when female reviewers grumbled that men won all the star parts in movies whilst female characters were one-dimensional props to hero males.
Many of the producers and playwrights churning out today’s entertainment display total indifference to making male characters believable.
One of my favourite movie performances is Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation.” He plays a fading movie star stuck filming in a Japanese hotel who befriends a young woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, portraying an equally lost soul.
He’s in a troubled marriage, and she clearly has the hots for him, yet he resists temptation, valuing their growing friendship. It’s a complex, touching story celebrating male restraint and kindness.
That was in 2003 before the rot really set in. Over the next couple of decades, men were pushed ruthlessly from their pedestals.
By 2020, Sophia Coppola, the producer of “Lost in Translation,” again called upon the talented Bill Murray, this time for her comedy “On The Rocks,” where he portrays a philandering father whose daughter fears her husband is having an affair.
In this supposedly jolly romp, dad drags his daughter around town spying on the husband, indulging her paranoia with crass comments about “that’s the way men are.” No moral complexity here—just degrading stereotypes about men who can’t control themselves. Yawn.
He’s acerbic about the latest “Star Wars” sequel. He points out that Han Solo “started out as a selfish smuggler who only cared about Number 1 but over the first three movies transformed into a smart, resourceful, brave fighter, and protector for Princess Leia, ready to risk everything for the sake of his friends. Pretty cool, right?”
The YouTuber then describes the sequel set 30 years later, where Solo is “a cynical, self-absorbed smuggler". A deadbeat dad who’s abandoned his wife and son, and an incompetent criminal who’s made enemies across the galaxy.”
Solo is supposed to be in his 60s, yet he is “somehow less experienced, competent, and mature than when we first met him. All his experiences, his character development, and achievements have been rendered completely moot.”
A fitting epitaph, perhaps, to the fate of generations of once-competent men in this feminist world?
