I saw the first preview for 9 before the excellent Coraline earlier this year. (Read my review of Coraline here.) The basic premise of the movie intrigued me from the outset. In a post-apocalyptic world, the only remains of humanity come in the shape of small robotic dolls created by a scientist before his demise. These little burlap-clad characters, known only by the numbers inked onto their backs, are left to navigate a hostile world dominated by intelligent machines.

I have been looking forward to 9 all summer, and I finally got to see it on Saturday. It is a bit outside my usual discussion of literature that goes on here at The Heretic Loremaster, but the movie was intriguing and, to my mind, the definition of speculative fiction, so here we go.

In some arenas, it did not disappoint. Like Coraline, despite the fact that it is an animated feature, 9 is really not a movie for kids. (Although, just as when we saw Coraline, there were a handful of tykes at 9 was well. It makes me wonder if their parents even bothered to look at a preview or just saw “Animation!” and went with it.) Aside from its bleak post-war setting, its sentient machines are often annihilated in–if they possessed flesh and blood–extremely gruesome ways. They are hacked to pieces in large propellers and crushed to “death” by giant cogs. Worst of all is the soul-sucking and unoriginally named Machine, which vacuums the life force from our little burlap-clad protagnonists and leaves them empty-eyed, slack-mouthed shells, their “spirits” abandoned and gazing confusedly around themselves before being dissipated to smithereens.

But despite its darkly detailed landscape and shudder-inducing horror, 9 falls into an unfortunate trap. In order for the viewer to care about the horrors being enacted on the little burlap people, they needed to come to life a lot more. Unfortunately, 9 is dogged somewhat by its storyline, which requires that the characters function as archetypes rather than people and fall flat as a result.

As the movie chugs along, we are made privy to the backstory that leaves the world devoid of life save sentient machines. Returning to the First Room–the room where he awoke–our hero 9 discovers how he and his eight compatriots came into being. The benevolent scientist-creator who engendered them bestowed to each a portion of his personality. Therefore, we get the cautious, the curious, the taxonomists (twice!), the good-hearted, the intuitive, the courageous, the thug, and the idealist: or we get a scientist, or a whole human personality, only fragmented into nine pieces.

While this functions beautifully from a mythological standpoint, it falls short in terms of allowing the viewer to care about the burlappies as people. And, in a movie that is packed full of action scenes, caring about who falls into a bottomless abyss or who gets sucked dry by the Machine is essential. Already, the fact that the characters are animated and the fact that they are non-human distances us from automatically empathizing with them. One of the reasons that 9 can indulge in the degree of character mutilation that it does is because the characters are clearly mechanized and clearly non-human. Remove one of the other and we would have likely ended up with the typical movie treatment of a gruesome death (save in the Saw/Hostel torture-porn enterprise): the camera sweeps away to one of the other characters cringing at his or her shoulder. The same distance that allows these scenes without flirting with a higher rating unfortunately works universally to distance the viewer from all of the characters’ experiences. Characterizing them as personality traits rather than people only hinders the movie further.

It also runs the risks of dualism: shelving the characters as Good or Evil with no allowance for overlap. 1, the conflicted and cautious leader of the burlappies, and 8, his thuggish sidekick, ease across the boundaries a bit and challenge the monochrome worldview, but the other burlappies are without a doubt on the side of good and the machines on the side of evil.

This significantly weakens the story. To contrast, consider Coraline, a story of much greater moral ambiguity. Although Coraline evolves into the classic quest against a villain, it does not shy away from ambivilent depictions of its characters. Coraline’s cruelty to Wybie, her parents’ blatant disinterest in their daughter, and even the Other Mother’s remarkable ability to create things of beauty–even if only as an illusion–suggest something well beyond the dichotomy of good and evil, dark and light, right and wrong but, rather, the human struggle to understand and cope with the shades of gray that we encounter in real life.

Ultimately, this means that the horror of Coraline is that much more potent than the horror of 9. When Coraline inquires of a button-eyed, silenced Other Wybie, “Does it hurt?” she gives voice to the query rattling around in our brains as well, a question that is at once childish and yet outlives childhood. The question and the sentiment behind it appeal to us as humans. When 7 rips a javelin-sized sewing needle from her thigh without a flinch, she marks herself as bigger than us, as more than human. It is hard, then, to empathize with her plights and those of the other burlappies, even as they try to save the world.

And what of that? What of saving the world?

Again, I think that the dualist tendencies of 9 dog its ability to speak meaningfully on its theme of our relationship with science and technology. We are given glimpses of backstory throughout the movie, enough to know that the machines that eventually destroy civilization were devised with benevolent intentions by an idealist technologist working for peace. But he was deceived and the machines were hijacked by a nefarious agency (whether corporate, government, or something else entirely is not clear) and corrupted unto destruction. Indeed, their original creator later gives his soul, piecemeal, to the burlappies to ensure some continuance of society and, eventually, rebuilding.

But, again, this dichotomizes it too neatly. Questions concerning the appropriate roles of science and technology in our lives are the bread-and-butter of many speculative genres and certainly an apt subject for consideration. But technology cannot be plunked into Good and Bad, and modern life makes it nearly impossible to interact solely with the Good while excluding the Bad. Consider, for example, the Industrial Revolution. The same technology that improved almost universally the quality of life in Western civilization (and is since making its way to the rest of the world as well) also pollutes our planet, creates opportunities for sweatshop and slave labor, destoys the skilled and fulfilling trades of artisans, and often tethers survival to employment with (and loyalty to) a factory or corporation.  Automobiles afford us opportunities of which our ancestors could not have dreamed, yet they also pollute and cause over one million deaths worldwide each year. Non-human animals suffer terribly and die to make the medicines and the chemicals that grant us safe, healthy lives. Western women are no longer given a life sentence of spinning, weaving, and sewing clothing but, in exchange, women and children in third-world countries make our warm, comfortable, cheap clothes in sweatshops for pennies each hour. Are we better or worse for the technological advances of the last two hundred years that allow these things? It’s an impossible question to answer definitively, and it is even less possible to point our fingers at any individual, entity, or even moral outlook as the reason for technology’s darker side. There is no evildoer to turn the Machine against us and so a dualist examination of the question is going to fall short.

There were a few interesting points in 9 that I’d like to address before concluding my review. Firstly, there is the presence of a female character. At first, her presence irked me because, as one woman out of nine, her inclusion reeked of tokenism. (Someday, I hope, the creative folks who make movies and write books will realize that women are actually a majority of the world’s population and character groups will be structured accordingly.) Then, when I realized that the burlappies represented facets of their creators’ personality, her inclusion becomes a little more complex. Is 9 recognizing gender as more fluid as absolutely male or absolutely female? It certainly seems so. Without 7, I don’t know that I would have thought much about gender at all. Without 7, I would have been content to accept the robots as asexual, inclined towards male because the creator from whom they were derived was male. As it is, though, I’m curious about the motive behind 7’s inclusion. Is she present because the feeling is that a group of heroes must have a woman, so much so that the writers are willing to overlook gender ambiguity that will be an uncomfortable subject for many mainstream viewers? Or are the writers commenting on gender with 7’s inclusion? Or a bit of both?

Then there’s the ending. When I realized what the ritual at the end was to accomplish–”freeing” the spirits drained by the Machine heavenward–I rolled my eyes a little at the need to conform any discussion of death to Christian mythology.

But then it began to rain. And I understood that the ritual was not to “free” the souls to an afterlife but to free them to effect works upon the world.  Rather than moving “beyond the circles of the world” (to borrow from Tolkien) and no longer affecting or being affected by it, death is instead depicted as a means by which a corporeal and spiritual entity bound to the world it inhabits is transformed to enrich and return to life in that world. It’s a very pagan concept.

This leads me to consider whether our idealistic creator-scientist may have done this deliberately. The raving “disbelief” in global warming perpetuated by the most fundamentalist of Christians originates from the conviction that a single lifetime upon a planet–shorter “come the rapture”–does not require stewardship of it. After all, they expect to move onto a better place after death. Perhaps our creator-scientist recognized this and made sure that such destructive delusions would have no place in the mythology of the future world?

Finally, I have to ask myself if I am missing the point with my main critique of the movie, which is its heavy reliance on archetypes and dualism. But, at the same time, this is really a creation story. It is a story of a world destroyed and renewed. (And, as a student of Tolkien, I can’t avoid mentioning that it is renewed by something a lot like subcreation sans the religious angle.) But with its grand quest against evil and the ultimate purpose of its characters to restore life upon an annihilated planet, it certainly has a mythic feel to it. Am I missing the point in comparing it to stories like, say, Coraline, which concern themselves much more intimately with the conflicts of the individual and family? Are the two going to be at odds with each other?

In conclusion, I give 9 2.25 E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out of four. Even if I am asking too much of a myth, the flat characterization and simplified depiction of a complex debate made it difficult for me to become invested in the movie. It had some astounding and creative concepts, and it certainly raised some interesting questions for me. But it fell shy of its potential.

Josh Tyler has written a post called We Don’t Need More Female Superheroes. (Thanks to Sinneahtes for first spotting it and to Juno Magic for the heads up!) This post was in response to a post by Thera Pitts that deconstructed the female characters in recent superhero movies, coming to the conclusion that women tend to be “characterized” toward the negative extreme of whatever role they occupy. “Did you ever stop to think that it isn’t just the actresses who sully your favorite movies but the comic book movie industry’s lazy attitude towards women characters in general?” asks Pitts. “The actress is only as good as her material, and the material is seriously lacking.” She notes that women overwhelmingly tend to be characterized as helpless victims in need of rescue, “moody emo-bitch[es],” or as the fateful She Who Ruins All by tempting, betraying, or distracting the hero unto his ultimate doom.

This is an insightful observation, and it echoes a broader trend across centuries of legend and literature. No matter what a female character’s role, she is shoved to the most negative extremes of that role. If she is strong and autonomous, then she becomes a bitch, a ball-breaker, a man-hater. If she is kind and compassionate, then she becomes weak; she is overwhelmingly the victim incapable of helping herself; she is the one who trips on a flat stretch of land and can’t do more than squeal and kick futilely as she is raped/murdered/abducted by her stronger male attacker. And then there’s the Eve effect: Women who, through their failings, bring about the destruction of the male hero, the kingdom, the world. From the rise of pre-Christian patriarchy, these one-dimensional negative archetypes have been women’s lot in literary life (for tempting Adam to the apple, of course). These archetypes are old enough to put the Old Testament on the New Releases shelf, and even as literary styles changed drastically over the centuries, this one thing did not. Women, when not being marginalized or ignored entirely, were maligned in literature, a trend that has extended to film as well.

Of course, when women done went and got uppity and started to complain about their shallow, scathing treatment in literature, men got all pie-eyed and innocent-like because it was only fair! It was only reality! It’s just the way that women were/are! They (the wise male authors) were being true to their subjects! And, anyway, what woman wants to read that ol’ fusty Tennyson when Danielle Steele has a new novel on the bestsellers list?

This is where Tyler’s post comes in. Rather than tackle Pitts’ argument (which is one of characterization and fair treatment in fiction to, oh, more than half of the human race), he attempts to nullify it altogether by … well, I don’t think I can paraphrase it well enough to capture the full wow-factor of Tyler’s words, so I’ll let him dig his own grave:

Men and women simply have different interests. Men are interested in action movies with heroes blowing things up and saving the girl. Men are interested in imagining themselves as ass-kicking heroes. Women are interested in movies about relationships and romance and love. Women are interested in imagining themselves finding the right guy and dancing till dawn. Little boys play with guns, little girls play with dolls. Neither version of play is superior to the other, it’s just different. Nobody is out there trying to force men to get interested in movies about romantic weekends in Paris, so why are we so dead set on forcing women to get interested in movies about beating people up? There’s something unintentionally sexist about it, it’s as if we’re saying women’s interests are somehow inherently inferior, and to be validated they must instead find ways to be more like men.

In the comments on this post, there is much hand-raising from women who did not spend their childhoods wiping the plastic asses of doll-babies but rather careened around the backyard on fantastic quests, using exhausted wrapping-paper rolls for swords and wearing bathrobes for ceremonial robes and converting a quarter-acre swatch of trees into a dark, deep, ominous forest as full of potential for danger and adventure as it was for conquest and reward. Okay … that was my sister and me. But I don’t think I need to go thrusting my hand into the air for playing Hero more than House, and I don’t think I need to poll the women reading here to know that far more of you got together with girlfriends, sisters, and cousins to go battling the hordes of dark minions in your backyard than to play princess tea party in order to prove or validate women’s interest in subjects beyond boy-meets-girl love stories culminating in domestic bliss.

Nor do I need to ask how many women here got far more excited this summer over the release of Prince Caspian or The Dark Knight than Sex in the City or Mamma Mia!.

Of course, this does not make stereotypically “women’s movies” or “women’s interests” inferior. In that sense, I agree with Tyler. But … I think his self-righteous defense of the fairer sex is a straw man bigger than the one in which Nicholas Cage was torched by a bunch of misbehavin’ womenfolk back in 2006. Hollywood doesn’t have a problem making the sorts of movies that Tyler believes serves the “female interest.” In any given week, there is a romantic comedy or somesuch in theatres that is aimed at women. Nor do women have problems going to these movies, if that’s their thing. Witness Bride Wars‘ quick ascendency to the #2 spot in U.S. box-office sales this weekend. Witness the fact that men being “dragged” to “chick flicks” by their excited wives and girlfriends is perennial fodder on primetime sitcoms. Tyler makes it out like Sex in the City was a come-from-behind indy flick and Hollywood reject, or as though there are lines of people pegging tomatoes at women as they walk into Nights in Rodanthe. Not hardly. In our family, the lists of new movie releases are, weekly, the source of first excitement, then scrutiny, then inevitable disappointment because neither my husband nor I are interested in this sort of movie, and they often seem to crowd out the independent and limited-release films that rarely make it as far as our rural corner of the world. Trust me, there is never a dearth of chick flicks, which means that there is no dearth of women lining up to see them. If it doesn’t sell, Hollywood doesn’t keep making it. (Which–as in the constant peltering of Friedberg & Seltzer spoof flicks–can often act as a sorry commentary on the state of our species.)

Nice try, Tyler. Pardon me if I’m writing this blog post instead of getting signs painted to march on the Mall this weekend in recognition of women’s unalienable right to see chick flicks or in defense of the women “forced” to see “movies about beating people up,” an issue that surely deserves its place right alongside my outrage at sex slavery. This feminist finds it far more frightening that, in the year 2009, anyone seriously makes the argument that one’s interests even tend to divide neatly along the same lines as the possession or lack of a Y-chromosome.

This kind of thinking–not arguing for more female superheroes in movies–is what is sexist and offensive.

It has nothing to do with validating women’s interests by how closely they fall to the interests of men. It has everything to do with perpetuating stereotypes that have, for centuries, been used to dismiss and subjugate women as inferiors to men. In the comments to Tyler’s post, a few people expressed outrage at his generalization about how girls play with dolls. He retorted by asking, where was the outrage for the little boys pigeonholed into violent gun play? And I’ll be the first to speak out against stereotypes, whether against males or females. But the stereotyping of women is more dangerous. It is more offensive. Why? Because the stereotyping of men and the interests of men is not used to excuse the subjection of men to women’s benefit.

(In fact, I must speak out against offensiveness in this post that goes beyond that which affects me as a woman:

Of course some women actually are interested in superheroes, just as there are guys out there who are really into touchy-feely musicals. Most of them are British, but even here in America you’ll occasionally run into a guy with a twisted love of Mamma Mia!.

As an American, I despise when my culture and language is thought automatically inferior because of stereotypes like the ones that Tyler is embracing here. For the love of all things heretical, stop with the chest-thumping, my-balls-swing-harder-than-yours nasty rhetoric implying that British/European men are less “manly” than we red-blooded, steak-eatin’, pickup-truck-drivin’ ‘Mericans because we like seeing things blow up more. It is “twisted” to enjoy a musical more than an action movie if you are a man. Veiled homophobia much?)

Inherent in Tyler’s argument is the assumption that women are predetermined to be softer, gentler, and more nurturing. They are incapable of strength, assertiveness, or competitiveness. This has been used to keep women illiterate, ignorant, without the vote, without rights, under the thumbs of their fathers, under the thumbs of their husbands, stuck in the home, barefoot and pregnant, married against their wills, out of schools, out of jobs … need I go on? Do you see, Mr. Tyler, why your opinions on female superheroes are so offensive? Why recognize the spectacular range of human interests–i.e., not confined to or deemed acceptable for one gender or another–when we can pigeonhole people tidily into interests based on what is most acceptable to the dominant patriarchal culture?

Ironically, Tyler’s argument ties back into the root cause of the phenomenon that Pitts’ observed in her post. Women have been maligned and misunderstood in literature–which now extends to that which is written for the screen–for a very, very long time now using arguments just like those that Tyler uses to dismiss a woman’s demand for better-written female characters. Women deserve no better than to be sluts, bitches, poisoners, traitors, witches, victims, and agents of downfall and destruction because we all know–as Tyler points out to us–that this is simply the way that women are. It is against our own best interests when we dare to argue otherwise. Thank you, Mr. Tyler, for the enlightenment.