Girls’ desire and lust has started to find space in larger, more costly productions in the so-called dream factory. This collection of films shows a fantasy world that has often been mocked in the media and on the internet. These are fantasies rooted in the early teenage years and they are rarely especially PC. They can include the full spectrum of emotions, and be violent, sexual, tender, submissive, dominant, princess-like, entirely uninhibited and full of supernatural events. They sprang up as a reaction to the imagery offered to girls for many years in the form of books and adaptations of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Gone with the Wind, Disney and of course much more. Classical sagas and even religion have played a big part in the imagery that has formed these fantasies.

In this text, I discuss the Twilight universe, the Wachowskis’ masterpiece Jupiter Ascending and the performative Austenland.

I also want to note that in this text I call this fantasy feminine or girls’ fantasy, but I see the concept of gender as fluid, and the fantasy can of course belong to everybody.

Working with the subconscious image

Among those who work on summarising and celebrating the other fantasy are the Wachowskis.

Lana and Andy Wachowski

Lana and Andy Wachowski try to examine the subconscious idea of gender and reality and see if they can use their art to influence their audience one way or the other.

Together, they have an enormous knowledge of the world’s collective film and image reference library and use it very consciously in their films.

In Jupiter Ascending, an example of how they work with image references is their portrayal of the hero Caine Wise. He is like a cut-out doll of girls’ (or perhaps even women’s) fantasies of the mystery man. The character of Caine, played by Channing Tatum, is an albino-wereworf-fallen angel with elf ears. He is bitten, and the question of whether he is a vampire and might be dangerous is asked: “Caine is… complicated.” Caine is like a mix of Edward Cullen and Jacob Black from Twilight, Legolas from The Lord of the Rings and Pygar from Barbarella. And surely there are many other characters baked in there to maximise the fantasy that is Caine.

Caine is like a mix of Edward Cullen and Jacob Black from Twilight, Legolas from The Lord of the Rings and Pygar from Barbarella.

Choosing a hero like that in a film today is extremely daring and, unlike Twilight, Jupiter Ascending failed to reach its target group and became a financial catastrophe. But it has acquired fans – mainly people who are not cis men. One comment on Tumblr exclaimed, “Is this how straight dudes feel at the movies all the time????” and another, “Like someone carefully noted down your early pubescent fantasies and then threw 100 MILLION DOLLARS at them?”[1]

The financial loss was probably no surprise to the Wachowskis. In an interview, Lana talks about how those films that come out and go against the dominant aesthetic of the time are attacked and ripped to pieces. And I can imagine that the same applies to those that go against the dominant fantasy. Lana cites the examples of E.T. and Blade Runner, which came out in the same year, of which one was praised and became a financial success while the other was poorly received and did not even recover its budget.

“Is this how straight dudes feel at the movies all the time????”

“Ridley Scott paid the price for that aesthetic,” says Lana. An aesthetic that led to The Matrix and many other films, including Twelve Monkeys and Batman Begins[2], but has also inspired the games industry. Mass Effect and Final Fantasy VII[3] are two big titles that contain references to Blade Runner.

And perhaps that is what we are now seeing with Jupiter Ascending: the Wachowskis are having to “pay the price” for the new aesthetic where the female gaze and fantasy are taking root?

Selection from feminine image libraries

In Jupiter Ascending, there are many humorous references declaring a love of what I see as female-encoded imagery and the female image bank. Like the elf world in The Lord of the Rings. Although the worst of the Tolkien hysteria has subsided now, Legolas played a part in many women’s fantasies in the early 2000s, and the elf world became a very popular source of fanfiction.

The top picture shows Rivendell from The Lord of the Rings; below it is Kalique Abrasax’s home in Jupiter Ascending.

The Wachowskis have also been inspired by anime, particularly in the adaptation of the anime TV series Speed Racer, which was shown in the USA while they were growing up. There are also references to anime in Jupiter Ascending, for example in the mecha-robots, which have many similarities with the mecha design of the anime series Gall Force.

The two images on the left are mecha sketches from Jupiter and the two on the right are images from Gall Force.

My personal favourite in Jupiter Ascending is still when our heroine Jupiter Jones takes out a sanitary pad which she uses as a bandage for Caine Wise. That image is – as far as I know – entirely new to the world’s image reference library, and I hope to see it again.

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other”[4]

Austenland, released in 2013, produced by Twilight author Stephanie Meyer and written by Shannon Hale, who also wrote the book on which the film is based, and by Jerusha Hess, who directed the film. A film with women in so many important positions is more than unusual. The fact that they also never felt the need to market the film to men is also unusual. In an article in The Guardian[5], the writer says that the previews and premiere were only directed at women. “It’s not like we’re going to have guards at the door throwing men out,” said SPC’s vice-president Tom Bernard. “But I think everyone will get the message based on the invitations.”

The affirmation of fantasy

In Austenland too, there are many images historically anchored in feminine fantasy, and I get the feeling that director Jerusha Hess and author Shannon Hale went through the entire Jane Austen book, film and TV collection to find the best way to create their Disneyland – I mean Austenland. They really have let that world expand like a kind of grotesque cream cake, with male servants who are all well-endowed, and it is mostly set in a castle in the English countryside with corsets, bonnets, horses, hunting and performative role play.

Our main character and heroine Jane Hayes, played by Keri Russell, is a thirty-something woman who is deeply obsessed with Austen’s work and, perhaps above all, her character Mr Darcy. Her home look like the classic girl’s room “gone wild”, with flowers, lace and collectibles all relating to Mr Darcy, including a full-size cardboard poster of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in the 1995 TV adaptation.

Jane Hayes is depicted as one of Austen’s own favourite characters, the quick-witted, somewhat modest woman with a sharp tongue who gets the man of her dreams. But she also contains references to other classic fictional characters like Bertha Mason, Charlotte Brontë’s character from the book Jane Eyre. This is achieved through Hayes in Austenland living in “the creepy tower”, the place where Bertha Mason was locked up by her husband. That place in turn gave rise to the title of the 1979 book “The Madwoman in the Attic” by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, where they read Victorian literature from a feminist viewpoint and criticise the dualistic separation of the woman into angel and monster that characterised that period.

Austenland also refers to more recent Austin-inspired worlds, such as Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by having Jane Hayes describe herself in one scene as a ninja, which all respectable young ladies are in Grahame-Smith’s book.

The affirmation of fantasy is a strong theme in the film and there is a strong understanding that the fantasy that is created has its own history and is made up of the dreams and imagery of generations – our shared women’s reference library.

Stephanie Meyer

Something that both Jupiter Ascending and Austenland have in common is that the heroines can be feminine without losing integrity or dimensions – quite the reverse, in fact. It reminds me of a quote from Andy Wachowski: “Women are getting sick of the roles where they are literally playing men. They tell us about these roles. ‘This character is so one-dimensional. Oh, this is just like a man would be.’ To some extent, women are starved for roles and so they take them and they perform them well. I guess I’d rather see a woman performing that role as opposed to a man because that’s all we get. But it’s becoming more obvious that’s what it is, and that it’s not enough.”[6]

Team woman

But something is happening in Hollywood. An otherwise massively macho industry has begun to admit – or perhaps be infiltrated by – feminine heroines and fantasies. For now it would be naive to say that it is a trend that is here to stay, given that the partriarchal machine continues to operate as usual in parallel with this “wave”. But there are films and TV series coming out where the image of the hero is becoming broader, and the properties that a gender can have and the possible worlds that those properties give the character are increasing as well.

Besides, women are supporting one another. One example is when Stephanie Meyer helped to initiate “The Storytellers – New Creative Voices of the Twilight Saga”, where she teamed up with other producers to find new female directors who would have the chance to make short films set in the Twilight universe. Their mentors included director Catherine Hardwick, actors Kate Winslet and Kristen Stewart, and Chathy Schulman, chair of Women in Film.

What is happening in popular culture, and what needs to continue happening, is summed up nicely by the character of Jane Hayes in Austenland: “I’m going to take charge of my story.”

And what is Jupiter Ascending’s answer to that?

Caine Wise: You ready?
Jupiter Jones: Watch this.

Sources:
[1] http://www.dailydot.com/geek/jupiter-ascending-female-audience/
[2] https://theshadowzone.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/thirty-years-later-blade-runner-1982/
[3] http://www.1up.com/features/tracing-replicants?pager.offset=1
[4] From Emma by Jane Austen
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/10/austen-film-comedy-shuns-male-audience
[6] http://www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/part-one-of-a-major-interview-with-the-wachowskis-jupiter-ascending-secrets#RBZlty9KRdEFmGfe.99