Pop Culture

Grimaldi: Dystopian movies provide narrow roles for actors

Young adult novels are wonderful. The public especially has certainly embraced this genre — the success of “The Hunger Games,” “Harry Potter,” and “Twilight” prove this perfectly. The amount of film adaptations that have occurred in the past few years show Hollywood sees the potential to make serious cash off of books for young adults.

In recent years, young adult genre is totally dominated by dystopian sagas, full of grim, boring worlds and supposedly badass, but mostly white, solemn heroines. Last weekend, the film adaptation of “Divergent” hit theaters and proved that the genre and its leading ladies are becoming derivative of each other, creating a bleak future for Hollywood blockbusters.

Maybe I should be glad that young women are being portrayed as strong, agile archers and warriors. Sure, Katniss Everdeen is cool, but I keep seeing movies and books with similar futuristic worlds and women who seem like they could be cut and paste from one story into the next.  The upcoming “The Giver” and “The Maze Runner” have more similar themes and aesthetics in the film versions to “The Hunger Games” than their own original texts. It’s all an indication that something is wrong. The problem lies within Hollywood and existing gender schema in pop culture and beyond.

The heroines in these titles are characterized as tomboyish and not ones to care about how they look, but the filmmakers and casting directors certainly care a lot about looks. Most of them tend to be white, between sizes two and six, and for all intents and purposes, drop dead gorgeous. In “Divergent” the main character, Tris, is supposed to be exceedingly plain, and yet directors casted Shaliene Woodley, who is eye-popping and anything but ordinary.

Accuracy and dedication to the source text aside, this really emphasizes the cookie-cutter effect that is so observable in these movies. Audiences are made to feel like there is only one type of heroine. Hollywood should diversify representations of women and veer away from the played-out post-apocalyptic genre. It’s a lose-lose situation.



This is probably an indication that Hollywood needs to rethink its blockbusters and who’s in them. These new movies are so unoriginal that they cannot stand on their own. In an August issue of Entertainment Weekly, the cover story featuring the cast of “Divergent” had the headline “Is This the Next Hunger Games?” plastered across it. Hollywood should be striving for new representations to tell stories that are the first of their kind, not the next of another’s.

I fully support Tris and Katniss’s bad-assery, but I think they deserve some more interesting counterparts to complement the desiccated world of young adult fiction. Different examples are few and far between, such as the film adaptation of “The Fault in Our Stars,” which also stars Shailene Woodley as one of the most unique heroines of our time. Another book due to be adapted as a series is “Dorothy Must Die” which combines everything we love about Oz with “Kill Bill”-like action sequences.

There is plenty out there for Hollywood and book publishers to draw from, and now is the time for them to do it. Audiences won’t want to see the same story again and again, and we certainly won’t want our heroines to become abstracted from great women into bland characters designed for movie studios to make money rather than for us to actually enjoy.

Cassie-lee Grimaldi is a senior television, radio and film major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected] and reached on Twitter @cassiegrimaldi.

 





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