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| First female Doctor Who and Tardis - but can she drive it? |
I only watched two television programmes on Christmas day and both in different ways brought into focus the role of women: Doctor Who and The Queen’s Christmas Message. I had also been intermittently following The Crown series and I almost wondered if the real queen would live up to the performance of Claire Foy who portrayed her as a young wife gradually approaching middle age while holding down an uniquely demanding career.
In fact, the Queen’s annual broadcast to the nation and (importantly for her) the Commonwealth is usually a tepid affair with very little that is original or challenging in it. That is probably no bad thing: you do not want to divide your people, especially at Christmas and, for everyone who praised her boldness for speaking out on some issue, there would be at least as many who criticised her. Her Maj has perfected the art of seeming to care about her people without worrying overmuch about the issues which affect them. The danger for monarchy is not that they do not get involved, but that they forget the importance of neutrality for a head of state, something that the Queen’s uncle Edward VIII (later Duke of Windsor) did when he hobnobbed with the Nazis and which Prince Charles occasionally show signs of doing, albeit on a far smaller and safer scale.
After the Queen and Christmas dinner we watched that other Christmas insitution Doctor Who. I loved it as a kid and was genuinely frightened by what now seem laughably crude special effects. Later I grew bored with it before coming back when the series was regenerated by Steven Moffat and actors such as David Tennant and Matt Smith (who has done excellent service as Prince Philip in The Crown). I was starting to get bored with it again but knew that the new programme would end with the first female Doctor being introduced and thought I would like to be present as history was being made – along with several million others. The first thing Jody Whittaker did as she appeared was to press the wrong buttons in the Tardis and get thrown out of the door into space, instantly fatal for any human but not for a Time Lord, who presumably will survive and reappear when the next series starts, just as Carrie Fisher playing Princess Leia did in the latest Star Wars film. Cue lots of jokes about women drivers. In fact, government statistics invariably show that women are much safer drivers than men. Lewis Hamilton need not worry, however. I wrote 'safer' - not more skilful. You are far less likely to have an accident with a woman at the wheel, also less likely to arrive before a car driven by a male driver.
The Last Jedi has the same concern with diversity as Doctor Who with a largely female crew and a diverse cast including a couple of rogue heroes portrayed by a black male and a Chinese female while the ‘bad guys’ are all white and male. The reassuringly presence of Harrison Ford, who portrayed Han Solo an unreconstructed chauvinist, albeit one who sides with the ‘good guys’. (They actually use those terrible phrases in the movie.)
Action films, in which ‘good’ characters can waste as many ‘bad’ ones as it takes to get the job done, have until recently been the last preserve of aging male movie stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger who still kill lorry loads of their enemies, conveniently lining up to be offed and unable to shoot straight or move fast enough even when confronted by action heroes who are now lumbering into their eighth decades. Recently, however, there has been an increase in films in which the killing is done by women.
I do not care for ultra-violent films like these and have little desire to see Angela Jolie or Charlize Theron join this line of licensed psychopaths who emerge with barely a scratch after killing off multiple anonymous villains who, whatever their motivations, are human beings with a living to earn and a family to support. Curiously enough it was in an Austin Powers spoof film that this issue was confronted. In one scene family members of victims mourn the loss pf a loved one as Powers makes increasingly desperate puns about the methods used to bring about their demise.
Is it a victory for female emancipation to see women taking charge of spaceships and sending shedloads of fellow human beings to their doom? Or is it just females trying to act more masculine? Shouldn’t women try to change the agenda rather than just adopt the worst habits of men? As James Bond has shown there is a lot of money to be made from characters who can drive fast and kill without remorse. Unsurprisingly women and minorities want to get into this act, once the preserve of urbane white heterosexual men.
Good luck to them. The latest Star Wars has done well enough at the box office to survive any churlish objections that it was too anxious to appeal to the politically sensitive in its audience. There are still plenty of shoot outs and explosions in it, although the female characters might have done more good if they had managed to use their non-macho skills to effect some sort of compromise between the forces of dark and light, just as the Queen does. She is good at bringing people from different backgrounds together to enjoy what they have in common rather than what divides them. Female power might even produce a shades of grey solution – even if that suggests a semi-pornographic novel in which the man in the story is triumphant thanks to the power of his penis. Sometimes women cannot win.
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Edwin Lerner - my other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
