The Feminism of Ghosts of Mars

Every once in awhile, I catch myself watching John Carpenter's Ghost of Mars. This is likely Carpenter's dumbest film, and maybe his worst. It's at least in the running. In fact, the film was so bad that it burned Carpenter out and he would not make another feature length film for nine years. That's a tough call for a film staring Ice Cube, Pam Grier, and a young Jason Statham... (of course, Statham did do this too ==> Dancing Jason <==before he got famous). Anyways, what I want to talk about is the feminism of the film. I think it's enlightening.

Feminism is a tricky word because it means a lot of things and few of its adherents follow what they claim it means. On the surface, it means legal and practical equality, i.e. that men and women have the same rights, same opportunities and neither faces discrimination based on gender. But some take it further and want a gender free world. Good luck with that. Others, in particular most feminist dogmatics, see feminism as a sort of female superiority movement where women should be given special right and males are made second class citizens. Carpenter's Ghost of Mars weighs in more along these lines.

The story takes place on Mars in a world run by cartels who have imposed something called "The Matriarchy." It's essentially treated as a government run by women where women hold all the power and roles are sort of reversed. The thing is, this whole reversed roles thing ultimately proves meaningless to the plot except for a couple of small moments. Consider these:

(1) The lead officer, Pam Grier, talks about wishing she had more "dependable" women for her prisoner transfer squad than men.

(2) Grier makes a lesbian pass at the heroine, Natasha Henstridge, and Henstridge suggests this is the price of promotion.

(3) There is a woman in a jail cell who acts like a tough biker and talks about wanting a "piss break."

(4) Heroine Henstridge describes mining towns as places where there are "drugs to take and whore to f*ck."

That's about it. Other than that, the toughest character is either Ice Cube's Desolation Williams or Jason Statham's Sergeant Jericho. The women aren't stronger, faster or more physically able. They aren't brighter or more courageous either. Nor are they better people. They aren't even different people. So there's really no basis for this being a Matriarchy, except that Carpenter wanted this. But what is his point?

I rather struggle with understanding this. Carpenter is a feminist, so was his producer the late Debra Hill. You will see elements of that throughout his work. This film was the first time, however, that he openly made feminism "a thing," and look what he did with it. The government is corrupt. They lie. They abuse. They make secret deals. They discriminate openly. They are violent and stupid. Drug abuse is common. Sex abuse is common, as is prostitution and sexual harassment and being forced to sleep your way to the top. In other words, they are everything feminists claim men are at their worst.

If I didn't know better, I would think Carpenter was making a rather nasty criticism of feminism, but he wasn't. He was just trying to tell a tale of a standard dystopian world where some action film takes place. His use of feminism was just a facade on the plot.

You often see this with liberals. Their views simply don't work in the real world or in stories. So they tell a normal story and they just gloss it over by pretending that liberal ideas are involved. Indeed, time and again, liberals write stories about liberal heroes using conservative ideas to attack liberalism in action and they hide this ideological mashup by making the villain some demonized conservative, e.g. a corporation or religious person, or having the hero spout feminism or environmentalism that doesn't actually reflect the action.

That's what happened here. I suppose from Carpenter's perspective, he is presenting a group of rugged "frontier women" who have finally replaced evil, worthless men. And this is the story of our heroine, Henstridge, as she fights the evil ghosts. But that's not really what he's created. Indeed, while this is a feminist world dominated by women, Ice Cube and Statham are both more dominant than Henstridge. The world is still filled with the kind of corruption that makes this kind of dystopia work as well, even as we are told that women would not do this. These women are just as corrupt, just as over-sexed, just as stupid and just as incompetent. You could actually swap out males for females in this film, strike the word "matriarchy," and you would never have a clue that feminism was introduced into the film.

That's bad.

What I find so interesting is that if he wanted to envision a world run by women rather than men, i.e. a modern feminist dream world, why does this feel like "the ass end of the universe" as Statham puts it? Why is it just a rotten world where women merely replace the men as the rotten actors rather than a world that is changed to reflect supposed difference feminists think women would bring? What does this tell us about feminism? Frankly, I think it tells us that feminists don't really believe the crap they spew.

Thoughts?