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Whiteout

Just as the fiction market in America is dominated by female readers, graphic novels and comic books are read primarily by a male domain, a lonely, eating meals for one and watching “Battlestar Galactica” on the Sci-Fi channel instead of going out on Friday nights domain. While no official studies have been done, one writer in the field estimated that there is an almost 20-to-1 disparity when it comes to comic purchases. There are also very few female creators out there. There are no comic book JK Rowling, Anne Rice, Nora Ephron, or Mary Higgins Clark superstars toiling away in this visual medium. Some people would claim it is because men are more visual than women, and comics are a visual media. Studies have shown that little boys watch a lot more television than girls and are more visual in their thought patterns. On the other hand, girls are more likely to read a book for pleasure. Yet, the more likely reason men gravitate towards comics is that the subject matter of most graphic books in America are male power fantasies. The action sequences are uber-violent and the women are as disproportional as a Cubist painter gone wild.

The media lends itself to brutality. The notion that girls don’t read comics because of a biological difference has been shown false by the popularity of Japanese manga and the huge female readership of graphic novels like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. I also believe that when an industry is owned, written, and drawn by males, figuring out what little girls want to glance at is near impossible. (On a side note, girls, here is a little secret of getting boys to be interested in you. It is not to be beautiful, but to limit your competition. Want to be the belle of the ball? Go to a Star Trek convention, a skeptic’s meeting, or a comic book shop.) If female readership is going to grow, the major companies need to be developing characters and stories that females want to read. It is why I have always held close to my heart Greg Rucka’s Whiteout. While Mr. Rucka is clearly a male, his protagonist in this Antarctican tale is a female, Carrie Stetko, who is a plain Jane. The reader need not worry that she is going to trip in her high-heeled shoes, and become like a turtle on its back because her hands cannot reach the ground due to her enormously large breasts. Carrie is small and mousy and seems overwhelmed against the cold and desolate backdrop. She is a great character because in many ways she is so ordinary.

So, what does Hollywood do? Do they hire a plain Jane actress like a Cate Blanchett, Dallas Bryce Howard, or a Tilda Swinton, someone who is physically similar to how Carrie was drawn in the two graphic novels? Or they could have gone with a physically small actress, a Kiera Knightley, a Natalie Portman, an Audrey Tautou or a Winona Ryder, someone whose slight build makes them appear physically overwhelmed framed against the white tundra. Back when the project was originally bought by Tinseltown, Reese Witherspoon, who was the hottest actress going, America’s newest sweetheart, was attached to the project and even she would have been perfect for the part. Instead they cast maybe the most beautiful actress in Hollywood, the 5’8” British-born Kate Beckinsale who has already starred in two action franchises, Underworld and Van Helsing to play the short, mousy Marshall Stetko. What? Was Angelina Jolie busy? So why did Beckinsale get the gig? The Underworld franchise, at least the first film in it, gives her a box office track record and Hollywood is willing to take as many chances as an Amish farmer in Las Vegas. So, gone is the linchpin of the graphic novels. Welcome to action-adventure-ville. At least I can take comfort that when the first version of the screenplay was turned out, a male counterpart to Carrie was added because Warner Brothers did not want to chance a major motion picture resting on the shoulders of a primary female lead, especially when there is a big, strong man around to help her. (Still the Gabriel Macht (The Spirit) character in the graphic novel was originally a woman but two strong female characters are clearly one too many.)

Hollywood has a long memory. Any time a female detective script bubbles to the surface, Hollywood executives are quick to point out Kathleen Turner’s V.I. Warshawski. Released back in 1991, the film did not turn its lead into a sex object and made a lowly $11,128,309 before being taken out back of the barn and shot in the head. No matter that most of these executives were just learning their ABCs and eating paste when it was released and have never seen the film since. Unless the female leads’ clothes were bought in the children’s section of a local department store so that they look painted on, Hollywood has not been interested in seeing the screenplay of a strong woman placed onto the big screen. Instead of examining why V.I. did not work, studios have tended to believe that people were not interested in the genre unless the words thong and bending over appear somewhere in the script. For the most part, our movies’ attitude towards 52 percent of the population has resembled a poker game between Ernest Hemingway, Bobby Riggs, and Hugh Hefner.

Antarctica is the back end of nowhere. Its existence was not even confirmed until the 1820s, when the British, Americans, and Russians began exploring the Antarctic Peninsula and other areas south of the circle. One-and-a-half times as large as the United States, it is basically one big sheet of ice and cold misery. While over the course of the twentieth century, seven countries have claimed the place as their own, no one has ever taken such assertions seriously because basically you really cannot do anything with the place other than make ice cubes. Residents of twenty-seven nations do research on the continent. With each nation living under Antarctic Treaty, certain US laws, such as murder by or against US personal, are under the jurisdiction of US courts. Considered the bottom rung of assignments, a handful of Federal marshals are stationed there. One of them is the fictional Carrie Stetko. Temperatures drop faster than Bill Clinton’s pants at an intern interview during the winter months. Personnel drop from 4,000 during the summer to a quarter of that in winter. It is just prior to this turnover period that a murder is committed. Carrie must discover who did it and why they did it before everyone flees to the four winds.

Gone are the mousy looks and, of course, Carrie’s alcoholism had to be checked at the door, because god forbid a lead character in a film has flaws that cannot be solved in 90 minutes, but the movie does hit many of the major beats of the source material including the finger severing scene. Still, is it good? In a year with so many great comic book flicks hitting the theater, I was really rooting for this film to be great, the kind of film that might at least help in the transformation of how women are portrayed on the silver screen. What I found was a film that was buried in September for a reason. It is not ungodly awful, but is not on the level of the source material either. Much of the power of the character was lost in the casting of Beckinsale as Carrie. Much like comics, the movie industry has a difficult time pitching their product towards women. Still, I have hopes that someday both mediums will not be primarily concerned with whether the female lead is eye candy.

Verdict: It’s all right