I say this is a man, doing my best to spread the good word: dudes just need to STFU about Wonder Woman. We saw it back in May, when a bunch of chinless MRAs got bent out of shape because a chain of theaters did a handful of girl-power-screenings. We saw it June, when a handful of dopey reviews droolingly sexualized the character and grossly misread the film. The most-discussed of those was David Edelstein’s “superbabe-in-the-woods” missive over at Vulture, a review so tone-deaf, he had to write an explainer for it. (It didn’t help.) So it’s sort of funny that Vulture has brought the latest example of a dumb guy saying a dumb thing about Wonder Woman to the Internet’s attention.
Said dummy is perpetual Avatar sequel announcer James Cameron, who (in an interview aggregated from The Guardian ) has this to say about the success of Patty Jenkins’s super-hit superhero flick: “All of the self-congratulatory back-patting Hollywood’s been doing over Wonder Woman has been so misguided. She’s an objectified icon, and it’s just male Hollywood doing the same old thing!”
But apparently Cameron doesn’t see himself as part of “male Hollywood” – no, he’s one of the few directors who got a female character right. “I’m not saying I didn’t like the movie but, to me, it’s a step backwards. [Terminator protagonist] Sarah Connor was not a beauty icon. She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit.”
Poor James Cameron is just so tired of having to explain these things to the “many women in power in Hollywood” who “get to guide and shape what films get made. I think — no, I can’t account for it. Because how many times do I have to demonstrate the same thing over again? I feel like I’m shouting in a wind tunnel!”
So yes, welcome to 2017, when one of the most commercially successful filmmakers of our time feels free to mansplain female characters to female directors and female executives. Luckily, armchair historians were more than happy to share some of James Cameron’s other watershed moments of feminism. Like when he determined the alien heroine in Avatar has “got to have tits”:
Or his conception of a strong female lead in True Lies:
Or his on-set nickname for Titanic star Kate Winslet:
And, most of all, his treatment of Sarah Connor off-screen:
But the best response, unsurprisingly, comes from the director of the film in question, who tweeted last night:
Or, put another way:
