Non-performative inclusion and “The Mandalorian”
This post contains minor spoilers. Proceed with caution.
In the season two finale of “The Mandalorian” there is a scene near the beginning of the episode in which a strike team (minus Mando himself) storms onto an Imperial ship, blasts stormtroopers, etc. It’s an extended action sequence. Two of the characters are helmeted.
I was well into the scene before it hit me that all four of the characters on this strike team were women.
The fact that there was this all-female action team wasn’t new. I’ve seen that before. What was new about it was that this was the first time I’d seen a team of women that didn’t feel performative.
Remember that scene in “Avengers: Endgame”, the “she’s not alone” scene where All The Lady Characters Assembled, and you could tell the filmmakers were getting some kind of weird boner of “looooook at how many Strong Female Characters we have, let’s put them all together and have them be Strong Female Characters at the same time” and it felt super gross? That was performative.
I’ve heard and used that term before but I’m not sure I really grokked what it meant until I saw what its absence looked like, in “The Mandalorian.”
It didn’t feel performative because each of those characters had been part of the narrative in their own time over the previous two seasons, with their own agencies and backstories. They were characters in the story as it needed to be told, they weren’t Strong Female Characters introduced for the purpose of being that (in a sexy way, of course). There was never a sense of ticking off the “kickass lady character” boxes. When Cara Dune is introduced, or Fennec Shand, or Bo-Katan, there was never that subtext of “Okay here is our Lady Character, isn’t she such a great Lady Character, look look we’re Doing the Thing you want us to do with having Womens in our Boy Stuff.”
No. It was, here’s a Rebel soldier. Here’s an assassin. Here’s a Mandalorian exile. Here’s a Jedi. Here’s a magistrate. They have functions to perform and stories to tell in this narrative. Those functions and stories happen while these characters are women, not because they are women.
And it’s so, so subtle, the difference. It’s hard to put your finger on how it’s usually done wrong until you see it done right. It’s not just the writing although that’s a big part of it. It’s in how they were filmed, framed, shot, costumed, and lit. It’s in how they were directed, how the camera treated them - i.e. no differently than the male characters. None of these women were sexified, either. Not that they weren’t being portrayed by attractive women, but that wasn’t remotely played up or displayed in how they were styled, costumed, and made up.
Unfortunately now that we’ve all seen how non-performative inclusion of women into a narrative can be done right, everything else is going to seem that much more insufferable.
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