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Notes -
True Detective Night Country
There is a culture war internet discourse happening around HBO’s newest show True Detective Night Country. The discourse can generally be summed up as follows: HBO newest show TD Night Country is the 4th season of an anthology mystery/crime miniseries. The first season came out ten years ago and it starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as two detectives searching for a killer in Louisiana. The plot does not particularly matter, but the show is widely viewed as one of the greatest single seasons of TV ever. Speaking for myself, I agree with this assessment. I return to it every few years and I am still impressed at how good the acting, story, and cinematography are.
Fast forward ten years…two mediocre seasons (2 and 3) were released, and HBO announced the release of True Detective Season 4, co-named Night Country. Season 4 stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as two detectives unravelling a murder mystery in Alaska and people were very, very excited for this season. Prior to release, Night Country received overwhelming critical reception from TV critics. It currently has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score (RT can be gamed, but the 93% score shows the general reception).
I was also very excited for this show. Critics were calling it the best season of True Detective since season 1; some were even saying it was better than season 1. With these very lofty expectations, I watched the show as it was released, week by week.
By episode two, I knew this show had problems. By episode four, I knew it just wasn’t very good. By episodes 5 and 6, I was hate watching. Many people have reviewed and discussed the show’s problems much more eloquently than I. This video is quite good and sums up the many many problems the show has:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y2TCOd_YZF4
What I will say is that the show is simply…boring. It is a six-hour miniseries and at least 70% of the show is filled with boring relationship drama (the remaining 30% being focused on the actual…criminal investigation). The characters are uninteresting, low stakes, and unlikeable. The easter eggs paying homage to season 1 are like a frying pan to the face in their obviousness. The story carries no emotional weight, has major plot holes, and the ending is unsatisfying and bewildering. It’s bad. I would not recommend this show to anyone.
Now here is where the culture war comes into play. Online, fans of the True Detective series are panning the series. Go check out the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it is a paltry 61%. The True Detective subreddit is especially critical of the show. People are especially disappointed and confused given how critically hyped it was before its release.
But what has happened is that many critics, podcasters, even Issa Lopez, the director, are blaming the backlash on sexism and misogyny. They say that male fanboys of season 1 are brigading review sites and review bombing the show. They are saying that the viewers dislike the show because it features two women lead detectives and that viewers can’t stand the lack of masculinity that was so integral to season 1. Even the professional critics who have dared to post their negative opinions on Twitter are being called misogynistic.
The problem with this read is that…the show sucks. It’s just not good for all of the reasons I’ve listed above. It’s extremely frustrating to see people called misogynistic and “anti-woke” for criticizing a show with two women leads. I find it particularly unfair because other detective shows with women leads, such as Mare of Eastown or Sharp Objects, were fantastic. It didn’t receive the critical backlash because those shows were actually good. We now exist in a bizarre universe where a magazine like Rolling Stone overwhelmingly praises the show while a magazine like Forbes pans it.
I’m not one who normally gets involved in the culture war, but I found this discourse particularly egregious. I don’t know what the future of this series holds, but I’m hoping someone at HBO sees the light.
Update: Issa Lopez has been hired to write and direct season 5 of True Detective. Whoosh.
You know what was really awful, with terrible plot, weak characters and acting, and tons of boring filler?
Every Jean Claude Van Damme movie.
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
I'm not going to make any claims about this True Detective thing, I didn't watch the show, haven't followed the coverage or reaction, haven't seen the director's interviews. Don't really care about the particulars of this one case much, the dynamic you are describing is definitely a thing that could exist and very well may, for all I know.
But I do want to complicate the narrative beyond 'The people giving this show terrible reviews aren't saying it's bad because it has female leads and don't explicitly believe that's why they dislike it, therefore the director is wrong to say that they are rejecting it because it has female leads.'
No one would say 'I like Jean Claude Van Damme movies because the lead character is a man.' But a lot of similarly brainless beat-em-up action movies have been released with women leads over the years, often with better objective craft and quality overall, and male audiences have generally rejected all of them. It can be true both that male audiences did not reject those movies out of explicit misogyny, and that they would have enjoyed them more if they had starred a cheesy male lead. Those two things don't actually contradict each other.
So there is in fact a nuanced claim the director could be making here, that audiences 'aren't ready' for a female lead in this type of story, or that the story was written in a way that would appeal more to women audiences but the existing audience was mostly male and liked it less, or that having female leads and director led to some necessary changes from the first season that aren't bad but that are noticeably different and therefore upsetting to big fans who were promised a return to form, or etc. etc. etc.
I just want to carve out the fact that there is room for nuanced claims in this discussion, and we don't always have to reduce discussions about things like this down to the barest-bone caricatures of the two 'sides' in the culture war.
The very obvious explanation is that neither men nor most women actually enjoy watching a woman act like a man. An action movie featuring a thin woman punching, shooting, or otherwise overpowering men is not only wildly unrealistic, but also just aesthetically revolting on a primal level. Women are not actually strong, hypercompetent, ruthless badasses. The number of women who have ever lived who could truthfully be described in this way could probably all fit inside an average-sized parking lot. The number of women who have been successful police detectives is probably a bit larger - maybe it’d take two parking lots to fit all of them - but the fact remains that this is also a heavily male profession, generally utilizing classically masculine virtues.
Now, it’s unclear if you’re identifying this phenomenon as “explicit misogyny”. The director could be fully correct that audiences reacted poorly to this show on account of its female leads, but also totally wrong that this is “sexist” or “misogynistic”. Men and women are different. The overwhelming majority of both men and women are aware of this. They strongly prefer media which accurately depicts men as men and women as women, and in which men and women embody the virtues typical of their respective sexes. I wouldn’t want to watch a film about a male nurse or caregiver; the only three films I can think of off the top of my head which feature males employed in those professions are Meet The Parents (including its sequels), Mr. Mom, and The Pacifier - all of which are comedies which treat this situation as inherently and hilarious incongruous and weird.
Whether we’re talking about action movies or romcoms - the two most broadly popular film genres of our age - the overwhelming default is men acting like men and women acting like women. To the extent that True Detective challenges this dynamic by treating two women as hypercompetent, dogged, logically-minded badasses, it’s doomed to fail. I haven’t seen any episodes of any season of the show, so I can’t comment on whether or not that’s the case, but if it is then perhaps instead of blaming misogyny the director and the writers should blame themselves for making media that people didn’t ask for and didn’t want to watch.
Anime and other interactive media has quite a bit of this going on already; perhaps you just need to watch more of it. Popular examples include Gunsmith Cats (both the MCs do this), Gunslinger Girl, Ghost in the Shell, Upotte, Re:Zero, Made in Abyss (more 'girl acts like a boy', but she definitely gets beat to shit), Ranma 1/2 (and all the gender-bending anime that would follow in its footsteps; bonus points for female author), Genshin Impact, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy, the Persona series, Fate/Stay Night (and the Nasuverse in general), You're Under Arrest!, Hunter x Hunter, Trigun, Nier: Automata, Bayonetta, Half-Life 2, and every other shooter video game or RPG that allows you to pick a female player character (the usual answer is "actually, I'd prefer to stare at a girl's ass in third person", but come on). Western examples include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alien, The Matrix, Kill Bill, Terminator/2, and the X-Files. For rarer 2010s examples, all the movies in the Kingsmen series have female antagonists; Edge of Tomorrow had an action girl right out of the '80s but that's an adaptation of an earlier manga so maybe it doesn't count. Also the most popular Vtuber in the world is a woman who acts like a man. This isn't an exhaustive list.
Of course, I'd actually say that in a good number of these cases the women aren't actually acting like men, but then that generates the "what's 'acting like a woman' mean?" question (in the same way as "what's 'acting white'?"). Gynosupremacists (and black supremacists) are by definition going to answer that question as selfishly as possible- and in so doing miss the truth that nobody has a monopoly on acting constructively (in fiction or in real life), most constructive (and destructive) actions don't have a gender, and all successful writers understand this. Now, it might be the case that the more flashy constructive/destructive actions do tend to go to characters on the right end of the population distribution- which is why they tend to be white and male- but the choice to just not do that is always there (the problem comes from progressives wanting it for free, hence the desire to colonize previous works rather than creating something out of whole cloth- this is the root of corruption).
The best example of "wants it for free" I think I've ever seen is the opening to Terminator 6; where it's literally "fuck you, we're killing off the whole reason for the plot in the first place; this series is now about (if memory serves correctly) some random interracial lesbian couple".
Beauty cannot come from corruption. The reason all the competent female characters come from the '80s and '90s is because feminism and gynosupremacism weren't quite yet the same thing for the average writer (or investor); that's no longer true, so all they can possibly write are Mary Sues. Places that don't have a culture of open gender warfare are less likely to suffer from this, though Japanese media also tends to have weird out-of-character things like "lost a fight, time to go back to the kitchen" (Sloot's DBZ example) so you have to contend with that instead.
Anime isn't interactive media, unless you're referring to anime-style video games.
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Hold on, which one? This needs some qualifications, because I can immediately think of several who are #1 for certain metrics/categories, and I wouldn't call Ironmouse or Gura very man-like in mannerisms.
EDIT: And yes, the difference between strong female protags then and now is that, before, there was genuine challenge for the likes of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. They didn't suffer from the boring inevitable invincibility we accuse shonen protags of having, they had to face genuine life-or-death struggle.
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But in the show that kicked this discussion off (True Detective) this isn't true. Navarro is a schizophrenic with anger issues whose mistakes allow her sister to commit suicide and then provokes fights in order to have herself punished and beaten for her failure and is unable to have mature emotional relationships. Danvers is a bitter, emotionally repressed, failure of a wife and mother, tormented by the death of her husband and son, who treats everyone terribly and drinks and has meaningless sex a lot.
They make obvious mistakes, mess up a lot (missing huge clues that are right in front of them) and are pretty clearly flawed in a lot of ways. They are both unlikable characters. And this appears to have been intentional as Jodie Foster describes her character as a horrible Alaskan Karen. Most of the criticism above is not that they were Mary Sues but that they were portraying mostly masculine character traits. Most of the traits we see for them would be entirely normal to see on a hard boiled male noir detective.
The arc they both go through interestingly is to be more open to feminine traits (being more emotionally present and open (and physically present for her kid in Danver's case), and to let go of the rigid hierarchal structure of the law, to see the predominantly female scut work in the town as worthy of respect. It's certainly a feminist message in that respect, but you could have swapped in two male detectives as the leads who would learn the same message without having to change anything pretty much.
For a spoiler we meet a weak female character early on who is missing fingers, they find a palm print on the murder victims clothes which matches those missing fingers, yet dismiss the suspect due to her status. It turns out she was indeed part of the group that murdered the victims. The group of female cleaners has access to the various pieces of information they needed to solve the crime they were avenging because they were able to wander around the police station, lab facility and everywhere else in town as no-one gave them a second thought including our two female lead cops.
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I think there's a fair bit of context that's needed to make a decent female action character. It's easier to suspend disbelief when it's already been suspended for fantasy settings.
A female superpowered character is just as realistic as a male Hulk. In animated media, the downside of unrealistic representation (drawings) is balanced by the ease of implementing fantasy settings. An anime will never look as realistic as a live-action show, so writers may as well make full use of fantasy settings.
On the other hand, live-action shows can very easily make us believe in the reality of their settings. Real actors make us believe that we have real people on the screen, and their work (can) add a depth of visceral emotion that cannot be replicated by animated drawings.
Here the issue is also with the actors and actresses. While it is very easy to animate a badass superheroine/magical girl/ruthless adventurer etc, getting Brie Larson to look menacing/intimidating is not an easy feat. Even if the character is supposed to be fantastically superpowered, the behavior of the actress (and supporting cast) does not meet expectations. Weak punches that don't connect getting turned into devastating conflagrations by CGI does not satisfy the way a painstakingly choreographed movie like John Wick would.
Male actors themselves go through a whole transformation to embody an 'action hero'. Sadly, most of the cape movies actors are on steroids. Keanu Reeves who does not look like a great badass in real life apparently spent a long time practicing with real guns to be 'John Wick'.
What would be needed for satisfying live-action female badass movies would be a crop of actresses who would dedicate themselves to the genre like exists on the male side, and actually work on the craft, instead of feminist fantasies that neither women or men are interested in watching.
So for good live-action female action character:
for realistic settings:
I think the biggest issue with having women on the set of an action movie is that it breaks the magic, in a way. Mostly because female actresses in general seem to be bad at demonstrating violence, and nobody making these movies seems to have any issue with that.
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I'd argue that the enjoyment of watching Gunslinger Girl wasn't all that much related to how cool the girls looked doing manly things like chasing down and shooting terrorists in city streets. I always thought the action scenes had more of a somber and tragic tone than thrilling (though they often were thrilling). Then again, perhaps being funneled into a thankless, depressing, and dangerous line of work by a society that abandoned you before turning you into a monster might be the most manly thing there is, so I guess this counts.
I couldn't watch Gunslinger Girl. The whole setup with older men mentoring young girls to do weird things, even if in this context it was assassination, seemed too close to grooming for me.
As someone who watched a few episodes of the anime and didn't stick with it, I imagine it pretty much was just grooming without any sexual component to it--was probably the point, even.
It did start as a comiket doujinshi, so the grooming angle was explicit in every sense of the word. Complete with management having the "what did we learn, Palmer" discussion after a lovesick cyborg murder-suicides her handler: "sprinkle some terrorist blood around the scene, destroy the ballistics report, and for god's sake don't do whatever we did again"
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Which one is that again?
Gura, the shark girl. Male-coded interests, male-coded avatar, male-coded lack of disgust/manners/candor, male-coded memes (some of them are harder to catch, but c'mon, titling your video referencing "pee is stored in the balls"?)
It's not necessarily a 1:1 example because, well, tomboy... but there's something qualitatively different between her and the other girl streamers in that the whole "men and women are different" thing is minimized [even if it is an act, or specifically engineered to do that, you can't tell]. It's the "girl you used to be friends with a long time ago at the age before men and women naturally drift into their own spheres of influence" thing- and while all of the streamers do this to some extent, she just happens to do it better.
Yeah, I dunno, I feel like Mori is the more man/tomboy/ladette-ish of HoloMyth, Gura just comes off as "wacky girl" to me.
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Boy-coded, maybe.
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Indeed. If anything, the opposite.
Men, on average, are much physically stronger than women. Aside from physical characteristics, the concept of "badassery" usually entails some combination of stoicism, risk-taking, hyperagency, self-accepted disposability/expendability—traits that are very much more present in men than in women.
Thus, it's far easier to suspend disbelief for a male "badass" than a female "badass", just as it is easier to suspend disbelief for men dunking in pick-up basketball games than women dunking.
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Counterpoint: God created man (and woman), but Sam colt made them equal. There’s nothing inherently revolting about a woman with a gun. In fact, I’d say there are lot of ways to make female violence appealing to men, especially if skin-tight costumes are involved.
The catch is that making the violence great is still only going to pull in men. Might even push women away, whether or not the lead provides Representation. It’s not hard to believe that female audiences are generally looking for something else in their films.
Now, a more nuanced claim might say that empowering women is incompatible with the post-Bourne zeitgeist of gritty, jump cut fisticuffs. Maybe the 80s fetish for martial arts provided suspension of disbelief. Maybe men lost all plausible deniability for wanting Trinity to step on them.
I’ve gotten the impression that the generic modern fight scene is just a lot cheaper and easier to produce. You don’t need Jackie Chan on retainer. Movies which do invest heavily in stunts and choreography, ones like Fury Road, still come out looking pretty good.
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They certainly weren't hyper-logical and hyper competent. Dogged, probably, yes. I think there is also the fact, that of the female police officers I know, they do seem to act more masculine, presumably because they are in an overwhelmingly masculine space. If you are going to portray female cops I think you should show them as more masculine acting than the average woman, because they probably would be in real life. Female cops are likely to be more aggressive, because those who are not, are not likely to want to be cops at all.
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Great action movies with female leads are films like Alien where the lead is not beating the xenomorph senseless through pure baddassery like later Rambo films, she's mostly running, but also the only character who takes the threat seriously, and during the big fight she's using heavy equipment she's shown as having relevant skills to use.
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Neither are most men, even most action movie protagonists. Most of them are heroes, and being a hero means having a flaw you are blind to, having a cathartic moment and fixing yourself. Steven Seagal and JCVD are famous for portraying hypercompetent protagonists and their movies aren't really taken seriously by anyone.
Among the newer action movie protagonists I can only name John Wick as the strong, hypercompetent, ruthless badass. And his character arc in the first movie (and the sequels are trash) is not heroic at all. He's neither stronger nor wiser in the end.
I simply cannot agree with this. Revenge is heroic, very heroic.
What he gets at the end is not strength nor wisdom, it's satisfaction. He accomplished what he set his mind to do, he finished the task he undertook, a task he set for himself not because he wanted to, but because he had to, because he was forced.
Revenge is one of the most heroic motivations, and Wick is a hero. It's also one of the few motivations that can be equally shared by men and women, as some of the most famous revenge movies star women as the ones taking revenge (Kill Bill, Carrie, Gone Girl).
Does he? His victory over Viggo is hollow. Both men who have slighted him are dead, but this won't bring his friend or his only living memento of his wife back. Wick's revenge is just a repressed death wish driven by grief. In the end, he's not satisfied at all, he's empty, bereft of emotions or the will to go on, saved only by the belated realization that there's more to his existence than grief and revenge, that despite the fact that he's lost three companions he might still save another life and form a new bond.
The mafia boss himself, Viggo, has a better character arc. He thinks of himself as the papa bear, his paternal obligations force him to protect his wayward son even from Keanu Reeves. But when push comes to shove, when he's staring at the barrel of a gun, he crumbles and trades his son's life for his own. Emasculated by his weakness, he seeks his own death in a way that mirrors John's, except he's driven by shame.
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I'm surprised this never occurred to me, but it definitely seems like the last decade or so of Strong Female Action Heroes in films has been as if major Hollywood studios handed Seagal billions of dollars to make his god-fantasy wish-fulfillment vehicles just with more expensive CGI. And then blamed the audience for being bigoted against fat people (or whatever other category you could stick Seagal into) when they complained about boring, unlikable, unrelatable protagonists with no growth.
JCVD is also a funny choice of example in the previous post, since AFAICT, JCVD isn't held in all that high regard today outside of the campy nostalgia. What do people remember him for today, maybe Street Fighter, famous mainly for the franchise and for being a filmmaking disaster, and Bloodsport, the one that was a breakout film for him. There are far better examples of similar action stars from his era who were far more successful, such as (obviously) Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. And the films these guys were known for - e.g. The Terminator, Rambo, Rocky, Predator, Total Recall - were generally praised for having good scripts. Not fancy or deep or thought-provoking - though maybe on occasion - but having fun plots with charismatic, likeable characters that were easy to root for in stakes that made sense and seemed important and often even went through some journey of growth themselves.
To add on re Jcvd, the most prominent film of his I recall is JVCD, that meta film where he plays a loser version of himself directing his thousand yard stare at his own miserable life as essentially an international joke because of his old action films.
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I think Van Damme is also remembered for his leg splits, incidentally. His ability in that regard is almost a meme unto itself.
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Given that the new series of True Detective stars Jodie Foster, it's probably worth pointing out that, thirty years ago, she won her second Oscar playing an FBI agent-in-training, in a film which was both acclaimed by critics and awards bodies (still the most recent film to win the Big Five at the Oscars) and a huge commercial smash ($270m against a $19m budget). For added diversity points, at various points in the film Foster's character is assisted by a fellow agent-in-training, a black woman.
This makes the "you only hate season 4 because you can't stand to see strong female detectives" defense even harder to take seriously. No one* had a problem with a thriller revolving around a strong white female detective (and her black female partner) 30 years ago. You'll have a hard time persuading me that the average prestige TV audience member in 2024 is more misogynistic (and racist) than the average Anglophone cinemagoer in 1991. Not saying it's impossible, just saying it's a point that needs to be argued for and can't be taken for granted.
*Except feminists and trans activists.
I watched Silence of the Lambs a while ago, and I remember that Lector expounded that Buffalo Bill wasn't necessarily trans, he just hated his own identity--which, sure, these days, that might be more of a distinction without a difference, but it doesn't seem like the movie is as anti-trans as one might think.
Also, the source novel really labours the point that Buffalo Bill isn't actually trans, to the point that it almost disrupts the immersion. There's a point where one of the characters contacts a gender reassignment clinic looking for information on people who applied for the surgery but were rejected, and the doctor is like "you have to understand: we do not want the general public to think trans people are dangerous. This is already an incredibly marginalised community, making their lives worse in any way is completely unconscionable."
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I once argued that, on the film's release, TSotL wasn't transphobic, because during production "trans" was an identity category subject to medical gatekeeping: only people formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a qualified mental health professional are "really" trans; Buffalo Bill has not been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and has had his request to medically transition refused on that basis); ergo Buffalo Bill isn't a trans woman. (One could plausibly argue that it was homophobic at the time of release, as Buffalo Bill is stated to be homosexual. My understanding is that Demme took this criticism seriously and made Philadelphia in a conscious effort to atone for it.)
But under the modern self-ID rubric, Buffalo Bill says she's a trans woman, therefore she is, therefore the film retroactively becomes transphobic by depicting a stunning and brave trans woman whose trans identity motivates her to become a vicious serial killer who starves and mutilates her victims.
In other words, TSotL wasn't transphobic until trans activists made it so.
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Jodie Foster's character also has a line where she specifically calls out that this behavior is unusual for transvestites, who are normally passive and far from dangerous. I believe the controversy existed at the time, and they slightly altered the script to ward it off.
It's based on the book, where the statement "transsexuals are passive types usually" is made (top half of the page around 164 or 5).
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There are a bunch of action movies with female leads that are widely considered good or at the very least have mass appeal. See: Aliens, Fury Road, Kill Bill, Terminator, Hunger Games, Underworld (not actually very good but a box office hit), etc. That expands further when you include movies that don't have female leads actually beating guys up but still taking aggressive, active roles. See: Zero Dark Thirty, Silence of the Lambs, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoos, Sicario, half of all horror movies ever made, etc.
Humans have had warrior goddesses for thousands of years. Surely the ancient Canaanites did not find Anat aesthetically revolting.
I guess the Underworld series falls into the "fighting f*cktoy" genre, so it doesn't really count. At least not in the eyes of mainstream feminists.
I mean, sure, but that's not a very nice way to talk about Michael Sheen
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And for any characters where it's too hard to apply that label, behold the Female Character Flowchart for some other options. (It's from a post on a 2010 nerd-feminist blog that was linked on Jezebel and made the rounds, it stuck with me because normally you only see such critiques used one at a time.)
And they have to resort to scare quotes ("Strong" female character) to disparage one expected action character path.
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Another possible reading is that it took divinity for a woman to transcend their stereotypes.
See also the ancient Greeks, who typically divided the sexes into separate spheres so strongly that would make a medieval trad blush -- while also worshipping and holding in high esteem goddesses like Artemis, Athena, and Hera, who are often depicted as more competent than the male gods. Certainly less likely to be diverted from their goals by a sexy woman.
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That long list of examples feels like it's undermining Darwin's little rant somewhat...
I don’t think he’s supporting guesswho or the directors so much as arguing with the Hoff.
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