Not so long ago, I watched 2012’s Dredd, a stylish, brutal, and many-layered adaptation from the Judge Dredd comics, for about the seventh time. (See also Tim Maughan’s review, “A Comic Book Movie That Explodes Across The Screen.”) Watching it afresh, it struck me anew how well-made it is: its thematic arguments are actually arguments, and ones put forward with a degree of nuance. The figure of Dredd, a man who has given over his conscience to the brutal and unforgiving edifice of Law, has a parallel in the character of Ma-Ma (Lena Headey, in an excellent performance), a crime boss whose conscience, if she ever had one, was long since given over to acquiring and maintaining Power.
They both represent order, of a kind, but their orders are fundamentally opposed. The tragedy of Dredd’s dystopia is that neither of them are capable of making different choices: their entire world mitigates against it. For them, in the words of one of the film’s minor characters, Mega City One is nothing but a meat grinder: “People go in one end. Meat comes out the other. All we do is turn the handle.”
The figure of Anderson, a rookie Judge (played by Olivia Thirlby), lies in the space between, and her character is the pivot on which rests the film’s emotional weight. Neither Dredd nor Ma-Ma can change, or choose. But Anderson? The film hinges on her choice, between Dredd’s absolutism (“Negotiation’s over,” he says at one point, and at another, “Judgment time”) and the radical possibilities of mercy. (“Maybe it’ll be the one difference I do make,” Anderson says, sparing a man Dredd would—most likely—have killed.) It’s her character, and her choices, that open Dredd up to hope. That subverts, in essence, the film’s grim dystopian violence by its argument that even in the meat grinder of Mega City One, it’s still possible to make a difference to individuals.*
*Yes, I have Thoughts about Dredd. For me, it’s a film that rewards rewatching and discussion.
There are four characters with substantial amounts of screentime and dialogue in Dredd. Two of them are women. And neither of these characters is defined by her femaleness in relation to her narrative arc or to the characters around her. Dredd’s women are fully human. The camera inhabits their subjectivity—does so, in fact, in a way that it never even approaches with its eponymous Judge, whose face and therefore emotions we never fully see.
Dredd’s world is a dystopia. Crapsack World. But the way the film constructs its female characters is a radical vista of feminist possibility in comparison to how two recent films whose source material is explicitly utopian construct theirs.
In the rebooted Star Trek, the subjectivity—the interiority—of the female characters with dialogue (shall we say all, counting Uhura’s Orion roommate in Star Trek 2009, three of them?) is given hardly a passing respect. We see them through an objectifying lens: Uhura’s underwear scene in the 2009 film; Dr. Carol Marcus’s in Into Darkness. (Plus Kirk’s ménage á trois, when ID doesn’t even feature two women speaking to each other—or one woman speaking at another—once.)
Despite my great regard for Uhura’s increased role (and for her Klingon moment of awesome in ID) in the new films, it must be said that a large amount of that role is defined by her relationship with Spock. But where Uhura’s emotional beats revolve around Spock, Spock’s, for the most part, revolve around Kirk: everyone’s favourite logical Vulcan only really indulges in emotional displays when Captain James T. Kirk is concerned.
And Dr. Carol Marcus, too, is in the final estimation a character defined by her relation to a man: in her case, her father, Admiral Marcus. Her importance is deprecated; her role as a scientist secondary to the Kirk’s-eye view of her as titillating, to the narrative’s emphasis of her position as daughter.
Rodenberry’s Star Trek had at its base a utopian vision for human co-operation and the potential of the future. Its original incarnation had radical underpinnings. So it strikes me as strange that I should find its newest incarnation more reactionary, in its depiction of power’s justifications, and more limited in its view of women, than Dredd’s explicit dystopia.
I find Dredd the better film. But should I find it morally better, as well as better on technical grounds?
Because make no mistake: I do.
Liz Bourke is a cranky person who reads books. Her blog. Her Twitter.
I’m a guy, and maybe that disqualifies or marks what I say on the topic of feminism, and
I find much of the pro-feminist writing on the Tor blog tiresome and repetitive, but
I really really appreciated this article, and agree with everything you said.
Very interesting point, made all the more so by the source material.
There has often been a distinct lack of female characters in Judge Dredd the comic serial, but those who have been have almost always been strong, more than just cookie-cutter women – the original Anderson was a key figure in the whole Judge Death saga.
But Star Trek, in spite of Roddenberry’s vision has had to fight hard to make strong female characters. If I remember correctly at one point Gene wanted the Enterprise’s captain to be female, only to be repeatedly shot down by studio executives who decried the idea as ‘preposterous’, thus reinforcing the very stereotypes Roddenberry wanted to smash. He capitulated for the sake of the series – the execs literally would not have let him go ahead with a woman in charge.
Being one of the only geek/nerd/sci-fi fans who has not seen Star Trek: Into Darkness yet, I shall of course reserve judgement.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I’ve seen both Dredd and Abram’s first Star Trek film. I hated so much how the latter treated its female characters that I won’t watch Into Darkness. The maltreatment goes WAY beyond the underwear bits. If you look at the roles that each woman plays in that first reboot, you’ll see a sex object, elderly mother (who I think dies), pregnant woman (in a wheelchair! Hello!) and so on. And while I didn’t enjoy Dredd as much as you did, I did love its female characters for all the reasons you describe.
Thank you, Liz!
@2
“But Star Trek, in spite of Roddenberry’s vision has had to fight hard to make strong female characters.”
Possibly because Roddenberry was a serial adulterer who IMO had little respect for women. In TOS, yes, he had to fight for the female captain. (who, IIRC was his wife. how much of his fight was for his wife? And how much was for the character?) But by Next Gen he had the power to push and didn’t.
As for Dredd vs Trek, the author has it right. Good work.
add note: the captcha for this post is the same one I got for a post 2 days ago. Interesting.
Majel Barret wasn’t his wife at the time.
And even Shatner admits that the complaints against her, aside from the relationship with Rodenberry, who was married, were very sexist.
I hate what they did to Uhura in the new films, especially the second. In the first she started out all strong and competant and part of the action which gave me hope. It the second she turned into the girlfriend.
I have never seen Dredd, but after having seen the two Abramsverse movies, I made very similar comments, the treatment of women is a regression from STTNG, which might be canon to TOS, but shouldn’t be. It’s not simply the sexualization that is the problem but that it is for the male gaze, and as another poster said upthread, women’s roles are very limited in the Abramsverse.
The good news is that while it would have been possible for the cast to have been “fratified” or “bro-ified” in this modern remix of TOS, I think that in fact they haven’t been, and actually are not bad intereptations (given kirk plotholes, he just happens to become the capt., etc.) of the series. It’s too bad that the women have been regulated to the roles they have.
To augment Liz Bourke’s post’s (and expand on MariaAlexander@3’s) points:
There were 2 other notable female speaking roles (for a total of 5, not counting the one-line female crewmembers) in the 2 Star Trek reboots.
1) Jennifer Morrison’s character (Mama Kirk) was presented as both a relatively helpless wife to one hero character, and the absentee mother to another hero character.
2) Winona Ryder’s character (Mama Spock) was presented as a helpless victim whose death ultimately drives one of the protagonists (Reboot Spock) to act out and engage in a series of actions that ultimately leads to Reboot Kirk meeting Original Spock, retaking the Enterprise, and ultimately saving the day with the help of future Scotty’s transporter equation (bascially, she seems to be a plot device).
Maybe not the best use of female characters in one’s story about a utopian society…
Hrm. While watching the film I remember thinking it was incredibly clichéd that you have a female “rookie” being guided by a Big Strong Man. I think Olivia Thirlby did well, but I don’t agree about the female characters not being defined by “femaleness” – you mentioned yourself the whole “mercy” thing, so you’ve got the “softer” female being prepared to be more merciful?
That there’s even any consideration of this movie as anything “deeper” than a generic action shoot-out set in a generic post-apocalyptic world (“generic” in part due to a tradition partly founded by Dredd (the comic series) itself, yup), is entirely due to Lena Headey’s performance where she managed to make Ma-Ma something else entirely. She’s fantastic.
(in all her roles I’ve seen she just seems so… unhappy?)
(I liked Dredd overall, but the story felt a little slipshod. It felt very much like a movie that was being designed around the “visuals” as opposed to a story. Oh of *course* the “reinforcement cops” were crooked. Of *course* the medic with the change of heart gets killed. Of *course* the stereotypical-geek-tech-nerd is a soft guy who was forced into it against hiw will. Etc. etc. And the thing that really killed the movie for me in the end was how Dredd got around the “dead man’s switch” by exploiting range/distance – these things would be designed to blow up if the signal was *lost*, i.e. once it exceeds range it’d go poof. We have that in our bombs TODAY, much less the grim darkness of the far future)
side note – I thought the soundtrack was AWESOME, and the composer IIRC also did the music for the BBC documentary series “A History of Scotland”, which is a completely different genre of music but ALSO awesome, which I suspect indicates the presence of genuine talent :-)
Dredd is the superior film, both in direction and acting. STID made way more money, of course. Got to love lowest common denominator film making.
The only problem I have, is the crime stats are so off. In our current time, more crimes are comitted per capita.
Doesn’t actually feel like we should be suspending civilization with those numbers.
An interesting piece. I’ve been meaning to get around to watching Dredd.
Was “mitigates” really the word you meant here?
ngogam @12:
You’d prefer that I used “militates against”? You’re probably more correct, but Faulkner used mitigate in that sense, and it has entered colloquial speech where I am practically to the exclusion of the other.
build6 @9:
See, now, my reading of the film doesn’t take Dredd as a role model or mentor. No one sane wants to be Dredd: he’s a killing machine only held back by the Law. And when Anderson says, “I picked up the fail when I lost my primary weapon,” it seems to me the film is presenting her as much relieved as angry in that moment. Dredd and Ma-Ma alike are presented as people you don’t want to grow up to be. Anderson, unlike either of them, retains some capacity for empathy. I submit that the text presents this as more connected to her psychic powers than to her femaleness: if she were the only woman in the film, it might be a different – and much more problematic – matter, but instead we have the Chief Judge, one of the corrupt Judges, the woman in the apartment (who just wants her family safe, everyone else can go to hell) and, of course, Ma-Ma.
You could put a fresh-faced young lad into a similar role and you wouldn’t even have to change any of the dialogue. (I’m pretty sure there’s more than one cop film or war movie that has.)
StrongDreams @1:
We’re mostly tiresome and repetitive, are we? Well, so is sexism! But I’m glad you enjoyed the column this time around, at least.
Makes you wonder whose utopia it is, doesn’t it?
TansyRR @15:
Not mine, that’s for sure.
On the Star Trek bits, I have to agree -I haven’t seen STID yet, but Star Trek generally seemed to objectify women unabashedly –just look at the costumes worn by female characters in TOS! TNG reduced this problem significantly –Captain Piccard, unlike Kirk, was not a womanizing maniac– but it still had its issues.
Regarding Dredd, I fear I fail to see the depth so many others see in it. To my eyes, it was just a bleak, simple story of grotesque brutality. Anderson, while an admirable character in her own right, seemed to fall in the “damsel in distress” role rather neatly, and I think the character of Ma-Ma –as awful as she was– was a more tragic figure than she was portrayed.
Uhura’s “Klingon moment of awesome” is completely undercut by the movie essentially saying “ugh, enough with talking lets get some lasers up in here.”
It beats Star Trek 6 when she had to resort to actual printed dictionaries however.
@8: Because, apparently losing your homeworld and a goodly chunk of your people isn’t quite enough to make someone ’emotionally comprimised’.
Also bringing up Gaila (Uhura’s Orion roommate) again, who has sex with Kirk, ends up on one of the non-Enterprise ships sent to Vulcan and (presumably) winds up dead. (And according to the novelization and deleted scenes, Kirk seduced her to get access to the computers so he could reprogram the Kobayashi Maru.)
Interviewer: So, why do you write these strong female characters?
Joss Whedon: Because you’re still asking me that question.
Most of the complaints about Trek Into Darkness are pretty much complaints you could make against Trek in general. It’s nearly always been a sexist show, from the form-fitting skirts to Troi’s ridiculous low-cut outfits, to the generally low number of females in the various casts. If you look at the original series writing guide, they consistently refer to the female crew as “lovely”. Kirk slept with hot alien women all the time. The infamous Orion slave girl appears in the very first episode. “Enterprise” featured, on a regular basis, its cast oiling each other up in nude “decontamination” scenes. There is exactly zero new about the stuff in Into Darkness.
Maybe people just don’t like Star Trek, and are just now realizing it?
I thought it might have been interesting to pull a Starbuck with the
reboot, and have Chekov be female this time around. Maybe Sulu, too
(though there I suspect we’d just end up with a “hot asian girl who
knows kung fu” problem). Then I think of how people would have reacted and I laughed and laughed and wanted it even more.
My primary issue was that both women are still sexualised and fall into the virgin/whore dichotomy quite nicely.
Ma-Ma is quite literally a whore. Meanwhile, Anderson is ‘raped’, even if only in the mindscape and even though she resists/turns the tables on her attacker. These are both problematic, anti-feminist tropes.
That said, the film is miles ahead of STID, and miles ahead of most other films these days. Who remembers Suckerpunch? Just awful.
@23 Please tone down the rhetoric, and be respectful of all points of view when engaging in discussion with other commenters. If you’re not sure what our guidelines are, you can refer to our moderation policy here. Thanks!
@22, I will defend Sucker Punch til my dying breath. Was it as good as it could have been? Hell no. But there is so much going under the surface there, and I have to give it credit for TRYING to tell a feminist action movie.
@14, a lot of it goes after low-hanging fruit. Star Trek sexist? Read it a hundred times before. Dredd surprisingly not sexist? Sure, I’ll take that idea out for spin.
@Adam Lowe I don’t think I could agree with you more.
I don’t know how much of the symbolism you, Daniel and I were picking apart in that twitter conversation is really intent, but the layers of text and subtext in Dredd are fascinating.
Even imperfect, to have a movie with real female characters who make real choices with real agency was refreshing. And they were distinctly different, too. I think Ma Ma AND Anderson transcend those stereotypes Adam talks about. Anderson quite handily rescued herself, which relieved me greatly.
Hi Liz,
That was a great read. thanks for writing… SHAME though you only managed to see it 7 times at the cinema.. i was lucky to go 8 TIMES ……
WHAT A MOVIE havent done this since the ORIGINAL STAR WARS ..
Does anyone no if there will be a sequel to this piece of ART ????
@build6
“(in all her roles I’ve seen she just seems so… unhappy?)”
In looking over her CV, that is rather true, but please watch Imagine Me & You. She radiates joy in that movie.
Dredd’s representation of women was some of the most rounded I’ve seen in a genre film for a very long time. They didn’t exist simply as shallow eye candy and had far greater character arcs than women are generally afforded in these typically testosterone dominated affairs.
Let’s hope someone sees sense and we get a sequel!
Sadly the same couldn’t be said of Star Trek: Into Darkness, which arguably set back female character in Sci-Fi back several decades, with it’s choice of whiny Uhura or Bakini clad sex object Carol Marcus. Please try harder next tine.
great article by the way!
Interesting analysis, and I totally agree. Dredd was so spot on in terms of gender that I didn’t even notice until I read this – the characters were just characters, and there were no points at which I had to consider their place as men and women.
Awesome, you wrote a column on Dredd :o) And it only took a me a whole week to notice it!
To my mind it’s an almost perfect film (it has problems, just nothing that bothers me too much), mostly because it’s ostensibly so stripped down – and yet the more you watch it, the more layers become apparent. And I’ve probably watched it 20+ times at this point, and it’s *still* fascinating, so apologies in advance for rambling..!
The things that I keep noticing, even now, are the unexpected parts – MaMa is introduced as a whore, of course, but have you ever seen a less sexualised portrayal of a sex-worker? Even showing her in the bath in her first scene, the gaze isn’t on her, it’s on what she’s seeing on SloMo – and her male bodyguards don’t even remotely glance in her direction. They wouldn’t dare. She’s dressed in scruffy leggings and a loose top the entire film (as much as the female Judge uniform is equally as non-revealing); her make-up looks like she took tips from TDK’s Joker, and the scarring, obviously.
This is someone who does not remotely trade on sex any longer – Exposition Paramedic may introduce her as a whore, but she runs the place on sheer force of personality and the threat of extreme violence. And she only really wants to get her hands dirty with particularly extreme cases: the eye gouging and mass murder. The rest of the time she lets Caleb handle it (as her little intro montage actually has him appear behind her to pull the trigger).
Looking at the original screenplay (it’s available on Kindle, makes for an interesting read), MaMa was originally meant to be a much older character – casting Lena Headey obviously changed the dynamic of that, but some of the same characteristics come through in a different way.
I’m always intrigued as well as to whether we’re supposed to take the whole ‘no raping, no torturing’ order against Anderson at face value as well – obviously it’s presented as such, but the dynamic of the film is so weighted to be Anderson vs Kay and Dredd vs MaMa that it almost ensures that Anderson and MaMa never really go up against each other. Even when she’s captured, MaMa pays her zero attention otherwise – won’t look at her, won’t even remotely do anything to make sure Kay actually kills her, apart from the orginal order (she spends more time remarking how hopeless Kay is at getting anything done, and still lets him get on with it). Literally the only thing she does do directly to Anderson is order that she gets a quick, clean death – and frankly that’s the most mercy she shows anyone for the entire film. Considering that they’re the two main female characters in the entire film, it feels a little odd – whether Anderson doesn’t matter to her because she’s only a rookie – or a girl – or because she’s so set on defeating Dredd at this point. I always wonder whether she’s doing it on purpose or it’s just there for plot construction.
They run something similar with Dredd and Kay, but do include them actually butting heads (literally, ha) – except then of course Anderson has to step in, because it’s her battle. Dredd pays almost as little attention to Kay throughout the film than MaMa does to Anderson, so you have these clean lines of conflict all the way through. I am so in awe of what Alex Garland did with this script, can you tell…
What’s really funny is, I kind of loved The Raid when I first saw it (obviously months before Dredd came out, although apparently the Dredd script was written years before originally?) but when I tried to go back and watch it earlier this year, after multiple viewings of Dredd, it simply doesn’t work for me any more. They do share a lot of the same DNA, but The Raid feels so much more black and white – the main character is actually a nice guy! motivated by family and stuff! – whereas Dredd has some actual female characters, and is just wallowing in shades of grey (and much prettier ultraviolence, just saying).
Much as I love it, I’m actually quite content there’s no film sequel – is that bad? There’s no way you could possibly recreate the bizarre alchemy that produced this film (including how much Alex Garland did or didn’t shut the director out of the editing suite) and without MaMa the quotient of female characters would plummet, methinks. Although of course, there is an actual comic sequel that’s just started in the 2000AD Megazine, if you’re so inclined…
@jencat:
When Ma-Ma is ruling out torturing and raping Anderson, I’ve wondered how aware the film-makers are of the dynamic that exists in terms of powerful women surrounded by violent men. Is there a reading there where Ma-Ma sees the Judges as potential equals/threats, and is aware of a hazard in letting her crew both have the same conclusion and act out sexual violence against someone who could be Ma-Ma’s equal? I don’t know if that’s a valid reading. But it’s a possible one, alongside the structural paralleling of Dredd/Ma-Ma Anderson/Kay.
This is another thing Dredd did that’s interesting. Because very few other films ever show sex workers having a context outside or after sex work. Much less power that doesn’t lean to some extent on sex.
In a way late response to @22…. I don’t think either Anderson or Ma-Ma were sexualized in the least bit of sense. Their dynamics related to power, not their gender. Also, Anderson’s “rape” in the shared mindscape with Kay is… not so. Or at least not how I saw it. Anderson is ALWAYS in power inside the vision. She lets Kay think he has power over her as a lure, and when she turns the tables is not that she recovers… is that she springs the trap and shows the thug something so horrible that he literally pees his pants and is stripped mentally bare by her psychic onslaught.
She is always in power.
Well, it has become very clear how little regard JJ Abrams has for Roddenberry’s vision of a better future for humanity. Also, how little Paramount values the continuity of the Star Trek canon and its huge fandom’s knowledge of such.
The first reboot has great casting, and the story was compelling, but in every other way there is nothing of Roddenberry in it (nor of the 1960s, which WAS a decade marked by rising consciousness of the potential of a future society that has ditched racism, sexism and war, in addition to money and poverty and hunger).
I was excited that there was a reboot. But now I am so disappointed with Abrams and his writers, I might not even see ID at all.
@@@@@hawkwing-lb
Ah, it hadn’t occurred to me in that context, but it does make sense. She’s all about covering her back to some extent. I’m always fascinated how she basically seems to run her empire/gang on the basis of a personality cult – she’s certainly not *physically* stronger than the men she’s controlling, but is it that she’s prepared to go further, to more extreme violence (which she doesn’t always perpetrate personally)?
And, as by this point she doesn’t seem to leave the ‘penthouse’ level very much, she’s fairly reliant on Caleb to cover everything else (and has been since the beginning, if the intro montage is anything to go by). I find Caleb more interesting the more I watch this, too – he barely registers the first time on first viewing apart from being a random henchman – but he does actually seem to be the only person who’s not scared of her so much as motivated by taking care of her and making sure she doesn’t have to deal with the day to day petty stuff of running a gang? Is it somewhat paternal in that respect? He’s not vying for power against her; doesn’t seem to show any of the more stereotypical grudging respect Kay shows towards her so much as actually care. *That* feels unusual to me.
And pretty much the only time you see her actual register anything more than irritation is when Dredd decides to chuck him over the balcony. When Ma-Ma seems to retreat into disaffected junkie mode, Caleb’s always standing by with facts and figures and a useful arsenal of submachine guns. There’s a power dynamic there that’s almost more interesting because there’s no focus on it, and it’s as effective a partnership as Dredd and Anderson have.
In terms of the film-makers’ intent, I do wonder how much of any of this is deliberate, and how much is inevitably present purely because, when you put so many female characters with agency and power in this kind of film, this stuff is always going to rise to the surface? There are obviously deliberate choices there – Anderson has to make her own decisions, and she has to rescue herself, and then go rescue Dredd. Which alone is awesome, and unusual in any film, but then it’s accompanied by *all this other stuff*.
And in the background when Dredd is talking to the Chief Judge at the end, you can see Anderson storming past the paramedics and apparently refusing treatment for her bullet wound. And you see that Dredd sees it too, when he hesitates right before he tells the Chief Judge she’s passed. That has to be deliberate, right?
jencat @38:
Interesting perspective. I could talk about Dredd all day, because it respected me as a viewer. I really like that about a film.
There’s a reason the ST reboot movies have been so non-Trek-like: the people making them are action-movie fans, but they are NOT Star Trek fans. (They say so, flat-out, in one of the special features on the first reboot DVD.) They haven’t watched any of the series, they don’t understand the utopian underpinnings or the social commentary — they’re just making Stuff Explode, because they know that sells. The reboots are basically action movies with Star Trek trappings, rather than Star Trek movies.