I was talking with a friend today about Hallmark movies because we all seem to have at least one grandma who loves them around this time of year, and we’re hashing out the tropes they all share because they’re so formulaic that you could probably boil it down to a mad libs prompt, and something dawned on me because of one particular similarity, not in every film, but a lot of them - the Heroine quitting her high-stress executive job to move to a quaint little town and settle down with Mr. Right. It struck me as deeply misogynistic that the movies imply she can’t have both and that her career goals aren’t worth it compared to getting some dick.
The other side of that coin is, in almost every single one of these movies, the guy is a Prince who needs to marry, or secretly loaded, or otherwise financially stable unless the plot revolves around his family whatever on the brink of closure that the Heroine steps in to help save the day, and he’s shown to be a good-if-distant dad to his kids, if he has any, but needs help raising them because work keeps him busy, or his nanny’s retiring. It’s never implied that he should be the one giving up his lifestyle to be a better partner for her; The only thing Mr. Right is ever doing wrong in these movies, if anything, is just not already being with her, and I get that these films are basically wish fulfillment fics, but she is always the one who has to make a change for him, to basically be a stay at home mom, or step closer to it than she was at the beginning of the film. Does anybody else see that? Am I wrong in thinking that’s absolutely fucking greasy?
Oh there’s so many more
They strap Mike Wazowski to the machine and try to suck his face off or the screams out of him so that he tells Randall where the kid is in Monsters Inc
They literally torture a car to death in Cars 2. They want to know where the information is and he reveals that Mater has it. And at the end of the torture session his charred remains can be seen in a reflection.
In Finding Nemo, near the end when they’re looking for Marlin again, they come across the two crabs that have seen him leave and the crabs say I’m not going to tell you where he went and there’s nothing you could do to make me. Dory then holds him above the water and he starts screaming at the site of the seagulls that are eyeballing him " I’ll talk I’ll talk!!!"
Its literally every movie, someone gets tortured.
Think about how often you see someone get tortured in everyday life. PRACTICALLY NEVER. In the movies it’s like quicksand, it’s just one of those things that people seem to run into all the goddamn time for inexplicable reasons.
The problem is, it gives people an excuse to actually torture people. In fact, people are cooperative and offer information when they are cooperated with when they’re promised protection, when they’re treated with respect, when good things are done for them. When people are tortured they become more oppositional and more uncooperative. So in reality, torture doesn’t work at all. People still torture people, because they think it works. It either produces bad information or no information. But they still do it because well they saw it in that movie where it worked, literally every children’s movie they’ve ever seen. They saw in that one.
The sad thing is that torture didn’t used to be a staple of kids films. I watched a lot of animated films in the last few months (research component of an animation module at university), and the torture scenes only really start appearing in the last 30 years or so - and seems to be more of a thing in the 3D animated films than in the traditionally animated ones during the brief time period where the two mediums overlapped.
There’s violence in pretty much all of the older ones, for sure, but that feels different to torturing someone for information, I think, because there tends to be two contexts for the violence: a hero is using it as a last resort to deal with an enemy (eg Jungle Book, where Mowgli initially goes “well I’ll just talk to Shere Khan so he understands I’m not a threat”, and only engages in violence against the tiger when Shere Khan is literally trying to murder everybody) or it’s used to demonstrate how cruel and petty a villain is (eg Lion King, where the hyenas shove Zazu into a geyser - they’re not torturing him for information, they’re doing it because they find it funny). In both cases, there’s no ambiguity about whether the violence is justified or not - it is justified when the hero is doing it in self-defence or defence of others, and it’s not when the villains are doing it for the giggles.
Even in, say, Pinocchio, where Stromboli uses the threat of violence against Pinocchio, it’s in a situation where it’s undeniably evil. He had been using cooperation and persuasion up until that point, very successfully, but when Pinocchio basically goes “okay, I’ve had a nice day, but I’m going home to my father now, I’ll be back tomorrow”, Stromboli cannot find anything that would persuade Pinocchio not to go home. So violence and the threat of violence are the only options remaining, but there’s no question that using threats to prevent a child from going home to their family is in any way justified. And a key part of this is that when Stromboli does this, Pinocchio has absolutely no interest in helping him anymore.
I think the most troubling element of torture in animation films of the last 30 years is how often it’s used by the heroes. There is, perhaps, some leeway when the villains do it, because if a villain does an evil thing, then it creates no grey area about whether torture is acceptable. (And it’s probably an easier way of having a good character reveal information that they shouldn’t, than have them do it voluntarily, which would have audiences going “WTF Mike Wazowski just betrayed his best friend! What a shit guy!”) But torture does seem to be increasingly used by the protagonists, when what they should be doing is trying cooperative methods - why does Dory opt for threatening the crabs after taking “there’s nothing you can do to make me give you the information” at face value, instead of at least trying cooperation first?
Holy crap, I’ve never thought about that.
Jesus that’s a lot. I forgot about so many of these.