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have you consummated your long-standing crush on your former and current fandom?
Okay so.
I love the Mission Impossible movies.
Look, you don't need to be with me on this, they are purest Velveeta, but I do, I love them dearly. With all sorts of varied caveats but frankly? they keep surprising me by not sucking as much as I was expecting on assorted social justice scales, and actually, that means someone involved is making an effort. Hollywood movies don't do better than average on accident.
These movies are really iffy on Bechdel. (Maybe 4 passes? I'll check when I go again tomorrow, it's possible that there's lines exchanged between the female Agent Carter and the female assassin Moreau that aren't regarding dude Hanaway. Lolnope, Carter and Moreau don't really actually talk at all, despite having screen time together, sigh. But if you toss out the subrule where the female characters have to be named, you could make an argument for MI3, where Julia is informed by a female guest that her sister has arrived, and then where she exchanges greetings with her sister before her sister is like "so you're marrying tom cruise?" And then she also tells her sister that "Mom's dying to see you." Clearly Tom Cruise is not the important part of that conversation for them.) However, there's always a female agent on the team, sometimes more than one, like in the first mission in the first Mission Impossible movie, which had Sarah Davies, Hannah Williams, and Claire Phelps. There's always at least one agent of color--Luther, who appears in all 4 films and is on team in 3 of them, is black, and Jane Carter in MI4 and Nyah Nordoff-Hall in MI2 are multiracial black/white; Zhen Lei in MI3 is multiracial Vietnamese/white.
And the primary villain is never a scary brown person or a woman. The first MI film has some problems declaring who, exactly, its villain is--I mean, you could argue for Max, since she's the criminal trying to buy the list of agent names and assignments, but they make it so hard to dislike her, when she's played by Vanessa Redgrave and helps Ethan out and everything. (And then there's the side issue about Claire which... okay, in my AU, Claire doesn't die. Also she killed Jim. Although it looked like a suicide. Murder? There was no murder here. Whatchutalkinbout. Let's just leave it like that, okay. My AU is an AU with less death, although obviously not no death. Also I saved Lindsey Farris.) But seriously. MI3 tried to fake us out with Laurence Fishburne, but no, actually, every time, the main villain is a white dude.
Right now we are at: way, way better than I ever thought they would be.
I mean, let's be real, the main character is is also a white dude, these things are unapologetic Tom Cruise vehicles, but do I watch them for Tom Cruise? I do not. (Okay, I do a little. I watch them for Tom Cruise getting the shit kicked out of him.) Fun fact about the Mission Impossible movie franchise: it basically exists because Tom Cruise fanboyed at Paramount until they let him have it. And you know, basically fund it out of his own pockets. Other fun fact: Tom Cruise loves stunts. Basically he gets cast and crew and funding together based on A LIST OF BEAUTIFUL LOCATIONS AROUND THE GLOBE WITH TALL THINGS FOR HIM TO JUMP OFF OF and then later on, sometimes as they are shooting, they write a script justifying why he needs to do so. You think I am exaggerating. I am not. Brad Bird, director of the last one, joined fairly late in preproduction, and kept bugging producer JJ Abrams for a script. After several times ducking out of it, Abrams admitted they didn't have a script, they had about six scripts, all different. There is a subplot of the film about a dude Ethan breaks out of prison that they didn't write in until they were shooting at the prison. The two set pieces they had set at the time Bird was bugging Abrams about the script were the Burj and the carpark. Oh Tom Cruise.
Back to not-Tom Cruise features of these films.
Have I mentioned how much I love Luther Stickell? Okay, so it's 1996. You're making an action thriller spy movie. Do you cast a big black dude as a) a demolitions expert b) a hand-to-hand fighter c) a hacker? It is totally against (limited, omg, Hollywood is so fucked up) type that Luther is the hacker. And, just, he's always the one to call Ethan on his bullshit. "That look in your eye is a pain in my ass, you know that, right?" So much heart for Luther.
The turning expectations on their head thing is a thing these movies do a lot. In the part that's strictly the universe, the world of Mission Impossible, that can suck, because it means they made the one carry-over character from the TV series, Jim Phelps, a traitor; in fact three of the four films revolve around someone internal to the agency fucking Ethan over (guys, guys it's not a surprise anymore, what are you dooooiiiing). HOWEVER, in terms of turning standard casting/writing/filmmaking tropes upside down, it's actually... sort of... awesome.
Let's talk about MI:3, and the woman in the refrigerator.
(mostly cut for augh this is painful and not for plot spoilers for a 6 yr old movie, but the plot and film ending will be thoroughly dissected)
In the very first scene of this film, Ethan Hunt is being tortured for information, and to test him, the villain kills his wife in front of him.
I can't even watch this scene, but it's not totally for the sheer AUGH factor of the refrigerator. His wife is named Julia, and he's yelling "Juls" to her, and as you may know, my handle is Juliette, and at least three of my RL close friends call me Juls to my face on a regular basis. So, that whole thing is just super AUGH.
What you don't find out for 2/3 of the movie, including while the villain tells Ethan in disgusting detail how he will kill her as vengeance for Ethan capturing him, AND during the replay of the opening scene when it comes up in linear sequence instead of out of order as the drag-you-in opener, is that Julia doesn't die. The woman that the villain shoots is someone else in a mask made to look like Julia, because this is Mission Impossible and they make people look like other people with really surprisingly good masks every five seconds. (Actually, sidebar, when I made myself look back at that scene, I wonder if they were trying to cue this with how "Julia" had duct tape over her mouth to prevent her from speaking. Because in MI2, Ethan masks himself as villain sidekick and masks villain sidekick as himself and delivers "himself" to "his" boss and villain doesn't figure out he just shot his sidekick rather than Ethan until he suddenly notices an odd wound, tears the mask off, and finds his sidekick's face with duct tape over his mouth under the Ethan mask. I dunno, maybe the duct tape is a weak link and these films obviously don't expect or require the viewer to have seen any other the films in the series and they all have different directors but, it's interesting?)
So: Julia's not dead. Julia comes back. Ethan finds her. In essence: the refrigerator is reversed.
But it gets better. Because Ethan spends the climax of the film ACTUALLY dead (temporarily, albeit, but it's really him who's had his heart stopped, not someone in an Ethan-mask) while Julia, a non-agent, a civilian who's been kidnapped and tied to a chair for a couple of days and who just got a literally forty-second gun lesson from Ethan, kills a couple of bad guys including the IMF traitor dujour, then resuscitates Ethan, who wakes up ready to shoot people and there's only bodies and he's like, "...you did that? Oh, wow." YES, ETHAN, YES SHE DID, SHE KICKED ASS.
It's really sort of fascinating as a refutation of the woman in the refrigerator trope.
The problem is: they had to set the trope up to break it down. I think it would have been much less awful if they hadn't set it up as the first scene, if they'd let that scene occur only linearly, so, you know, 2/3 of the way through the film, and you find out she's not dead almost immediately after.
Except, Julia's not the only woman in the film they did this to.
Julia's just the only one who got to come back.
There's three main missions in this film: 1) Agent Lindsey Farris has been kidnapped, only you can rescue her, Ethan. Failed: she dies. 2) So that Lindsey will not have died in vain, let us go take down the bad guy who killed her. Failed: escaped bad guy. 3) Bad guy has kidnapped Ethan's wife, must go stop him and rescue her.
So Lindsey Farris is an IMF agent and dangerous shit happens and frankly if she'd just died on an op and they were like "we must use this information" I probably wouldn't have felt like it was a woman in refrigerator problem. But she was set up as a damsel in distress, ie, there was a rescue mission for her, and let us not forget the IMF's standard policy is to disavow all agents who are caught or killed. So there was a rescue mission, which put her in a bad narrative box, if not yet a cold one, and then she died, which was arguably necessary to introduce the plot device that causes Ethan to need to be temporarily dead later, and THEN Ethan has a ridiculous flashback sequence about HOW MUCH SHE MEANT TO HIM, he trained her as an agent and it was all Giles and Buffy and she was the first agent he recommended for active field duty and stuff! it hurted him that she died! That? THAT WAS PURE "WOMAN'S DEATH --> MANPAIN"; that is the main problem, the offensive ugly part of the woman in the refrigerator trope.
I'm like, did they... did they not notice they were doing this? Did they think they needed an intact example of the trope more awful than killing a credible copy of Julia in front of Ethan to contrast Julia's surprise ass-kickery against? Did they suddenly lose the actor that played Lindsey halfway through shooting and have to cut her out of later missions? WHAT HAPPENED IN THEIR BRAINS?
So I have mixed feelings about the woman in the refrigerator problem and MI3. I feel like they had a problem subverting the trope without relying on it in the first place, which is hard, but they made it harder than it needed to be.
But I think this is worth pointing out: good guy characters, all women, most of them of color, in the Mission Impossible films who got kidnapped or shot or otherwise endangered, who I really, really expected to be dead by the end of the film, who got out alive:
--Nyah Nordoff-Hall
--Julia Meade/Hunt (twice, even)
--Zhen Lei
--Jane Carter
I winced, I swore, I said I know how movies work, this will not end well, I braced myself for them to kick it, and they all survived.
Baby steps. And still.
I love the Mission Impossible movies.
Look, you don't need to be with me on this, they are purest Velveeta, but I do, I love them dearly. With all sorts of varied caveats but frankly? they keep surprising me by not sucking as much as I was expecting on assorted social justice scales, and actually, that means someone involved is making an effort. Hollywood movies don't do better than average on accident.
These movies are really iffy on Bechdel. (
And the primary villain is never a scary brown person or a woman. The first MI film has some problems declaring who, exactly, its villain is--I mean, you could argue for Max, since she's the criminal trying to buy the list of agent names and assignments, but they make it so hard to dislike her, when she's played by Vanessa Redgrave and helps Ethan out and everything. (And then there's the side issue about Claire which... okay, in my AU, Claire doesn't die. Also she killed Jim. Although it looked like a suicide. Murder? There was no murder here. Whatchutalkinbout. Let's just leave it like that, okay. My AU is an AU with less death, although obviously not no death. Also I saved Lindsey Farris.) But seriously. MI3 tried to fake us out with Laurence Fishburne, but no, actually, every time, the main villain is a white dude.
Right now we are at: way, way better than I ever thought they would be.
I mean, let's be real, the main character is is also a white dude, these things are unapologetic Tom Cruise vehicles, but do I watch them for Tom Cruise? I do not. (Okay, I do a little. I watch them for Tom Cruise getting the shit kicked out of him.) Fun fact about the Mission Impossible movie franchise: it basically exists because Tom Cruise fanboyed at Paramount until they let him have it. And you know, basically fund it out of his own pockets. Other fun fact: Tom Cruise loves stunts. Basically he gets cast and crew and funding together based on A LIST OF BEAUTIFUL LOCATIONS AROUND THE GLOBE WITH TALL THINGS FOR HIM TO JUMP OFF OF and then later on, sometimes as they are shooting, they write a script justifying why he needs to do so. You think I am exaggerating. I am not. Brad Bird, director of the last one, joined fairly late in preproduction, and kept bugging producer JJ Abrams for a script. After several times ducking out of it, Abrams admitted they didn't have a script, they had about six scripts, all different. There is a subplot of the film about a dude Ethan breaks out of prison that they didn't write in until they were shooting at the prison. The two set pieces they had set at the time Bird was bugging Abrams about the script were the Burj and the carpark. Oh Tom Cruise.
Back to not-Tom Cruise features of these films.
Have I mentioned how much I love Luther Stickell? Okay, so it's 1996. You're making an action thriller spy movie. Do you cast a big black dude as a) a demolitions expert b) a hand-to-hand fighter c) a hacker? It is totally against (limited, omg, Hollywood is so fucked up) type that Luther is the hacker. And, just, he's always the one to call Ethan on his bullshit. "That look in your eye is a pain in my ass, you know that, right?" So much heart for Luther.
The turning expectations on their head thing is a thing these movies do a lot. In the part that's strictly the universe, the world of Mission Impossible, that can suck, because it means they made the one carry-over character from the TV series, Jim Phelps, a traitor; in fact three of the four films revolve around someone internal to the agency fucking Ethan over (guys, guys it's not a surprise anymore, what are you dooooiiiing). HOWEVER, in terms of turning standard casting/writing/filmmaking tropes upside down, it's actually... sort of... awesome.
Let's talk about MI:3, and the woman in the refrigerator.
(mostly cut for augh this is painful and not for plot spoilers for a 6 yr old movie, but the plot and film ending will be thoroughly dissected)
In the very first scene of this film, Ethan Hunt is being tortured for information, and to test him, the villain kills his wife in front of him.
I can't even watch this scene, but it's not totally for the sheer AUGH factor of the refrigerator. His wife is named Julia, and he's yelling "Juls" to her, and as you may know, my handle is Juliette, and at least three of my RL close friends call me Juls to my face on a regular basis. So, that whole thing is just super AUGH.
What you don't find out for 2/3 of the movie, including while the villain tells Ethan in disgusting detail how he will kill her as vengeance for Ethan capturing him, AND during the replay of the opening scene when it comes up in linear sequence instead of out of order as the drag-you-in opener, is that Julia doesn't die. The woman that the villain shoots is someone else in a mask made to look like Julia, because this is Mission Impossible and they make people look like other people with really surprisingly good masks every five seconds. (Actually, sidebar, when I made myself look back at that scene, I wonder if they were trying to cue this with how "Julia" had duct tape over her mouth to prevent her from speaking. Because in MI2, Ethan masks himself as villain sidekick and masks villain sidekick as himself and delivers "himself" to "his" boss and villain doesn't figure out he just shot his sidekick rather than Ethan until he suddenly notices an odd wound, tears the mask off, and finds his sidekick's face with duct tape over his mouth under the Ethan mask. I dunno, maybe the duct tape is a weak link and these films obviously don't expect or require the viewer to have seen any other the films in the series and they all have different directors but, it's interesting?)
So: Julia's not dead. Julia comes back. Ethan finds her. In essence: the refrigerator is reversed.
But it gets better. Because Ethan spends the climax of the film ACTUALLY dead (temporarily, albeit, but it's really him who's had his heart stopped, not someone in an Ethan-mask) while Julia, a non-agent, a civilian who's been kidnapped and tied to a chair for a couple of days and who just got a literally forty-second gun lesson from Ethan, kills a couple of bad guys including the IMF traitor dujour, then resuscitates Ethan, who wakes up ready to shoot people and there's only bodies and he's like, "...you did that? Oh, wow." YES, ETHAN, YES SHE DID, SHE KICKED ASS.
It's really sort of fascinating as a refutation of the woman in the refrigerator trope.
The problem is: they had to set the trope up to break it down. I think it would have been much less awful if they hadn't set it up as the first scene, if they'd let that scene occur only linearly, so, you know, 2/3 of the way through the film, and you find out she's not dead almost immediately after.
Except, Julia's not the only woman in the film they did this to.
Julia's just the only one who got to come back.
There's three main missions in this film: 1) Agent Lindsey Farris has been kidnapped, only you can rescue her, Ethan. Failed: she dies. 2) So that Lindsey will not have died in vain, let us go take down the bad guy who killed her. Failed: escaped bad guy. 3) Bad guy has kidnapped Ethan's wife, must go stop him and rescue her.
So Lindsey Farris is an IMF agent and dangerous shit happens and frankly if she'd just died on an op and they were like "we must use this information" I probably wouldn't have felt like it was a woman in refrigerator problem. But she was set up as a damsel in distress, ie, there was a rescue mission for her, and let us not forget the IMF's standard policy is to disavow all agents who are caught or killed. So there was a rescue mission, which put her in a bad narrative box, if not yet a cold one, and then she died, which was arguably necessary to introduce the plot device that causes Ethan to need to be temporarily dead later, and THEN Ethan has a ridiculous flashback sequence about HOW MUCH SHE MEANT TO HIM, he trained her as an agent and it was all Giles and Buffy and she was the first agent he recommended for active field duty and stuff! it hurted him that she died! That? THAT WAS PURE "WOMAN'S DEATH --> MANPAIN"; that is the main problem, the offensive ugly part of the woman in the refrigerator trope.
I'm like, did they... did they not notice they were doing this? Did they think they needed an intact example of the trope more awful than killing a credible copy of Julia in front of Ethan to contrast Julia's surprise ass-kickery against? Did they suddenly lose the actor that played Lindsey halfway through shooting and have to cut her out of later missions? WHAT HAPPENED IN THEIR BRAINS?
So I have mixed feelings about the woman in the refrigerator problem and MI3. I feel like they had a problem subverting the trope without relying on it in the first place, which is hard, but they made it harder than it needed to be.
But I think this is worth pointing out: good guy characters, all women, most of them of color, in the Mission Impossible films who got kidnapped or shot or otherwise endangered, who I really, really expected to be dead by the end of the film, who got out alive:
--Nyah Nordoff-Hall
--Julia Meade/Hunt (twice, even)
--Zhen Lei
--Jane Carter
I winced, I swore, I said I know how movies work, this will not end well, I braced myself for them to kick it, and they all survived.
Baby steps. And still.
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The only thing I don't have a problem with is the setting up of the trope because it is always such a pleasant surprise when the females characters survive. I know I should feel uncomfortable but it is just such a nice change when they do survive.
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NGL, I swooned a little it was so damn cute.
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And now I want to rewatch the films.
*is cursing*
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