Sarah Churchwell has an article on Comment is Free titled “The Bourne Misogyny.” Her thesis is that the Bourne movies use women characters in a stereotypical fashion, by making them accessories. Sugary excerpt:
There are female action heroes these days. In TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and now Heroes, and movies such as Catwoman, Elektra and the Matrix films, women kick some ass. But these are all science-fiction fantasies: they take place in imaginary worlds, and several of them were notable flops. The rule seems to be that the more "realistic" an action film, the more hapless the women. The men can outwit entire government agencies, fight off 43 assailants at once, emerge from spectacular car crashes unscathed, and survive 10-storey drops into the East river (merely what Bourne does in Ultimatum). The women mainly stand around looking anxious. Joan Allen, who plays a CIA boss in all three films, has a slightly less thankless task; her character makes some intelligent decisions, but she isn't exactly stirring.
I disagree. I watched the last Bourne film, the Bourne Ultimatum last Friday. I thought that it was very good because it didn’t try to do too much and because it focuses on one person Jason Bourne played by Matt Damon. However, let’s assume that Churchwell is right for a second and that the women characters of the film are merely there to fill the screen. What would it mean? In other words, can a film be about misogyny to use Churchwell’s terms and still be not only entertaining, but worth seeing and instructive? My answer to that question is an emphatic yes because I think that films are not meant to please people and to portray reality as we wish it would instead of how the filmmaker perceives it to be or want it to be. Screaming that the Bourne Ultimatum is misogynistic because it doesn’t fulfill one’s vision of the world or of gender is not capricious, but it is also so useless. Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour is in my opinion one of the best movies ever made and yet, some have argued that it is misogynistic and Séverine, the woman character played by Cathérine Deneuve is not a real woman, but just an embodiment of a male fantasy. The point is that complaining that a movie portrays something bad or is bias toward something is in most cases nothing more than an assertion of one’s tastes and preferences unless more is provided to show that one’s taste should matter more than the one of its creator. Thus, after reading Churchwell’s article, I am left wondering where is the beef.
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