Willow (again) 1988

We just rewatched Willow (1988). Yes, I wrote an early Monsters & Mullets about Willow, way back in the old days when Pornokitsch (SFW) was a blog and I was a blogger who wrote about books and movies and whatever else rolled past my eyeballs instead of writing my dissertation. But it turns out I have more to say!

Something I mentioned way back fourteen years ago is that Willow is basically George Lucas’ riff on Lord of the Rings. And, because we also just rewatched the three LotR films, that got me thinking.

First, yes; watching LotR again, and then Willow, makes it really clear that Willow is Lucas’ LotR. Secondly, watching them back to back made it really clear to me that Lucas did things with Willow that Jackson couldn’t or wouldn’t with LotR, such as include multiple female characters with roles beyond “weep,” “hand someone something” and “die?!?” (pace, Eowyn, who does genuinely kick ass). Here’s what I’m getting at: fourteen years ago, I declared Willow “not very good.” Maybe I’ve gone soft, or the world’s gone hard, but I was wrong: Willow is better than I gave it credit for.

I concluded my original essay by making the following point:

The movie ends with heteronormaity restored:  the evil queen is dead, sucked into some infernal abyss, and Mad Martigan with his lady-love (now wearing man-appropriate trousers and a lady-appropriate dress respectively) adopt the magical baby and rule in goodness and light till the end of time, or she turns 15 - whichever.

My original point about Willow’s apparent gender progressiveness being undercut by the film’s finale remains solid.

That said, Willow stands, in terms of gender representation, head and shoulders above many, if not most, fantasy films of its time… and many since. There are many more women in Willow than in LotR (we’ll get to the Hobbit films, don’t worry), and, equally important, they do stuff that matters to the plot. They are well-rounded characters with needs and desires beyond what those of the male characters. Yes, Willow himself is still a nag, and yes, Mad Martigan basically shags Sorsha into goodness. But look, even if heteronormativity is totally re-established by the film’s end, the female characters are still meaningful and important. The boss-level fight between wizards is between two extremely powerful female wizards.

Why, I found myself wondering during that epic battle scene, didn’t Peter Jackson cast more women? And why did Lucas write a film with so many female characters in it, at a time in cinema history when the folks making movies still didn’t really care about adding much more than a token woman?

The great fantasy films of the 80s - if we accept that some exist and are, truly, great films, or at least quite good ones - have many fewer main female charcters than Willow, even those films that are nominally about a female character: The Princess Bride, The Little Mermaid, Ladyhawke and Labyrinth all spring to mind. The Last Unicorn manages two fully conceived female characters, not to mention one or two absoultely unforgettable secondary female characters, making it really unusual for its time. I can’t stand The Dark Crystal, but the main female character does at least… well, she has butterfly wings, I don’t know. I can’t bring myself to rewatch it so I can’t and won’t make any arguments about its greatness or strides toward representation.

[An aside: since first drafting this essay, I rewatched The Dark Crystal. She does do stuff! She calls to the animals! She gets imperilled! She has butterfly wings! I still can’t stand the movie.]

What’s notable about the films mentioned above is that they’re almost all kid/family films, intended for a mixed audience in terms of both age and gender. The female main characters are, at least, actual main characters, with character arcs and inner lives and everything. Your average, well-known and reasonably beloved 80s fantasy film intended for an adult (male) audience, however, generally does not have even this. Conan the Barbarian, I will grant you, has Sandhal Bergman’s Valeria, who gets an actual personality and some ass-kicking in before she dies. By and large, however, those 80s fantasy film ladies tend to be hookers, victims and doormats. Often, a bit of all of the above.

But Willow! So many female characters!

To return to my original question: why didn’t Peter Jackson put more female characters into LotR? He made a fanatically faithful adaptation of the books and did his best with the material he had, and there just aren’t many women in the source material. I’ve always given Jackson the benefit of the doubt on this count, telling myself the real fanatical fans wouldn’t have accepted it, or the Tolkien estate wouldn’t have accepted it, or (likely) both.

But watching Willow last night, and the wizard fight between Raziel and Bavmorda, I found myself suddenly less sympathetic. Fuck the source material, I thought to myself. What a bad-ass role Gandalf would have been for Judi Dench. Helen Mirren as Sauroman. Kelly MacDonald and Thandiwe Newton as Merry and Pippin.

Back in 2001, we had no idea how ugly fandom could get, but Jackson et al. still erred on the side of caution and didn’t change any of the main male characters from the books into female characters. And it didn’t excite much comment at the time (that I recall, but discourse moved differently back then.)

The issue became much more glaring, and much less acceptable, by the time Jackson got roped into doing the Hobbit films. I’ve written at great length about how terrible Hobbit 1 is. And I railed against the fact that it has no women in it at the same time that I railed against everything else in it. The world had moved the hell on between The Return of the King (2004) and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), and it’s moved even further on now.

But also… Gamergate and The Last Jedi discourse happened betwen 2012 and now, and, honestly, the phrase “things have moved on now” isn’t accurate anymore; it’s more like “things have broken into a billion pieces now”, and some things have moved on, and as for the rest: well, there’s a large and profoundly upsetting part of the geek culture world that I can barely wrap my head around. One that doesn’t want you or me or anyone else raising questions anywhere near the things they care about. One deliberately excluding a huge swathe of people - probably you and definitely me - who’ve loved these properties their entire lives. One telling us we don’t belong here and we don’t get to have an opinion, because, for some reason, we’re not right. We’re not the right audience in some invisible but meaningful way, and thus we’re not allowed an opinion.

Geek fandom has always found ways to attack people on the basis that certain folk don’t “belong” but the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been before, and the discourse much, much uglier.

All of which is a very long way of saying that rewatching Willow last night left me, to my surprise, reevaluating some stuff: a) the film itself, which is geuinely better than I was willing to give it credit for, nearly a decade and a half ago. b) Lord of the Rings, which I suddenly and uncomfortably found myself unwilling to extend the credit I had been giving it for 22 years, and c) the fucking Hobbit movies, which look somehow worse in comparison now than they did before I rewatched Willow. I didn’t think that was possible.

Let me make the obvious but extremely troubling point that, in LotR, the only actors of colour are playing orcs; there are no actors of colour in Willow or the Jackson Hobbit films either. So, while I think it’s really worthwhile to consider Willow as, for its time, a beacon of progressive writing/filmmaking, it is in another and equally serious way, as flawed and problematic as those films which came before it and for, alas, still continue to come, decades after.

Also worth noting: the new LotR series and the new Willow series both course-corrected in terms of casting, and naturally the internet was super chill about it. (Not linked: endless “arcticles” well-actually-ing the Rings of Power backlash as not being racist or sexist but simply due to the fact that the new series “isn’t true to the source material,” and therefore “sucks”; like, guys, we all know what you actually mean when you say that.)

From what I’ve picked up from Tumblr, the new Willow series (RIP) was also more progressive in terms of casting on all counts, and also hornier than the original film. And gayer! Tumblr is still very sad about its passing. I will never know, becuase I didn’t get around to watching it while it was available to stream, and then Netflix wiped it from its servers after cancelling it and salted the earth so it wouldn’t have to pay its actors residuals.

What fun times we do live in.

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• At this point, my attitude is that everyone should just Bridgerton the shit out of every adaptation in their casting. Is Bridgerton great? No! Is it an absolutely charming fantasy full of gorgeous, horny characters having some really high drama, low-stakes fun? Yes. Is it representative and inclusive and joyously so? Yes, yes, yes!

• On that note, I recently had a few days off and used it to reread the Bridgerton novels, which I’d only read once, ten years ago. The first two are not great, many of the male leads say absolutely horrible things to their partners and never get called out on it, and poor Eloise - 100% my favourite character in the books and the show - gets absolutely ground into dust in her book and then forgotten about (hashtag justiceforeloise), which is unforgivable. But they’re still pretty fun, and really made me appreciate the work that the Shondaland writers have done complicating and expanding Julia Quinn’s world.

• If you want to dip your toes in the Regency-adjacent historical romance waters, I suggest either the Desperate Duchesses series by Eloisa James, and/or some of the OG (non-Austen) Regencies by Georgette Heyer. My favourite is The Talisman Ring, but lots of folks love The Grand Sophy, and the non-Regency-set These Old Shades offers a particular confection of delights: cross-dressing, bubbly heroines, grumpy heroes and quite a lot of totally ridiculous action.

• The New Yorker served me an article from its archives earlier a while back, and I lost the better part of an hour reading this famous but nevertheless utterly riveting account of the Apollo 13 disaster. Sadly, the follow-up article, recounting the mission’s re-entry, splash-down and rescue, seems only to exist as a scan, and my eyesight isn’t quite good enough to permit me to read it online.

• Update: since writing that I have been prescribed bifocals, but I can’t be bothered to go back and try it again; sorry. Also I hate my bifocals and plan to stick to my cheap drugstore readers until forced to give them up.

• What else have I read? I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai, which I did enjoy, even though it is not as deep as it thinks it is. Hate Mail, by Donna Marchetti, which was adorable. Night Shift, by Annie Crown, which was very sweet. Twisted Love, by Ana Huang, which I really had to force myself through; I won’t be reading the rest of the series. Don’t @ me. Jen Comfort’s three novels, all highly recommended (What Is Love, The Astronaut & the Star, and Midnight Duet). Love In the Time of Serial Killers, by Alicia Thompson, which I really enjoyed, but I must warn you that the main character’s anxieties really wore off on me as I read. Lights Out by Navessa Allen, which was like a funnier Butcher & Blackbird (yeah, don’t @ me about that, either).

• I read non-fiction too, I swear: Black Ops & Beaver Bombing is a hilarious, poignant book about finding (and conserving) the rarest mammals in the UK (Fiona Matthews & Tim Kendall). Mrs Gaskell and Me by Nell Stephens is sort of demi-autofiction about a woman trying to write her PhD while getting involved in the personal life of her long-dead subject; definitley one for fans of Elif Batuman. As someone who spent most of her own PhD-writing experience being obsessed with the personal life of her long-dead subject, I, uh, related. Finally, Hamza Yassin’s lovely, conversational Be a Birder is a fun introduction to the world of birdwatching. He and I agree that dippers are awesome birds.

• And finally, My Life as a Villainess: Essays by Laura Lippman, which I loved. I don’t generally tend to go for autobiographical essays but Lippman did the thing the best kind of essays can do: she made me feel seen.

• Also I ❤️ bulletpoints.

• Thanks for reading!