jauntyharrison's recent activity
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Comment on “Socialism” vs. “capitalism” is a false dichotomy in ~misc
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Comment on How The Last Jedi defies expectations in ~movies
jauntyharrison Link ParentYou're slightly misremembering, and I think there's some granularity in the differences between Ridley Scott's film and and James Cameron's film that is useful in this conversation. As the script...Take Aliens for instance, a good movie with strong female characters. The movie was written in a way that any of the role could be interchanged with male or female roles truly showing that men and women are equal while giving the audience a good movie to enjoy.
You're slightly misremembering, and I think there's some granularity in the differences between Ridley Scott's film and and James Cameron's film that is useful in this conversation. As the script for Alien was coming together, Scott made a bit of an eleventh hour decision that Ripley should be a woman. Not much was changed, they didn't go back over it and add a heap of 1970s sexism to the character's details. The lead was a bit underwritten by the fashions of the day, but it holds up because all of the human elements of Alien are presented in a Robert-Altman-esque naturalistic mode. Ripley remains fairly androgynous because the whole film emphasizes subtlety and humanity.
James Cameron has never made a subtle film. The character of Ripley in Aliens doesn't benefit from a series of genderblind drafts, the way she did in the first film. She's explicitly written to embrace or respond to 1980s attitudes of what a woman should be. She's a mother, literal and surrogate. She's patronized by people and institutions in the story. She's objectified by Burke, who literally tries to use her body to smuggle an alien off of LV-426. Where the conclusion of Alien is framed as a sole human struggling to survive, the conclusion of Aliens is explicitly framed as a tough woman struggling to protect a child.
But the Democratic Party thoroughly embraces the laissez-faire deregulation of classical liberalism. They may not be as publicly enthusiastic about it as the Republicans, but they still aspire toward a political landscape where their corporate donors run roughshod over toothless regulation. These two parties may sit at opposite ends of the Overton window, but that doesn't change the fact that the Overton window only stretches from Centre-Right to Far-Right.