He would also be rewarded by such irresistible movies as “Hidden Figures,” about three African-American women whose brainpower
fueled the American space program, or two such universal stories as the lost boys and found men in “Lion” and “Moonlight.”
These movies meet the “chick flick” entry-level test of being more about people than special effects, more about relationships than chases.
Indeed, as long as men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world —
and women are not taken seriously when writing about ourselves, much less about men and public affairs — the list of Great Authors will be more about power than talent, more about opinion than experience.
From classics starring John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, both masterful actors who portrayed heroism without ever leaving the studio back lot, to Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private
Ryan,” in which the character would rather risk death than be rescued, Hollywood may have spent more money on making movies about World War II than was spent on fighting it.
Thus, there are “novelists” and “female novelists,” “African-American doctors”
but not “European- American doctors,” “gay soldiers” but not “heterosexual soldiers,” “transgender activists” but not “cisgender activists.”
As has been true forever, the person with the power takes the noun — and the norm — while the less powerful requires an adjective.
Then, a woman-directed war movie like “The Hurt Locker” could show him
that close-up combat was not as simple as it was made to seem on the back lot, and the latest in the “Star Wars” franchise could make him cheer a female heroine.
These may not be as much fun to watch — Vietnam was the first major war we lost,
and we haven’t been so great about stopping terrorism either — yet such movies do allow us to see mass mayhem in, say, Africa or South Asia or the Middle East, and so to justify whatever this country might try to do there.
