Sunday, April 23, 2006
More horsehockey
Hm. Thinking about the Rose Da Silva/Harry Mason thing... I was fairly pleased with her but if they did Harry, yeah, that would've been better and even unorthodox. We've seen women get scared in movies. Spider-Man 2 could be called Screaming Women 2: More Screaming Women. When they changed Harry's gender they did it for nothing but weird, sexist reasons that don't really make that much sense. From ComingSoon.net's interview with Gans:
Actually, when we decided to adapt the first game, we decided to have the hero of the first game, a guy named Harry Mason, but when we put him on the paper and tried to be very close to the original character of the game, we noticed that he was almost never acting like a man, but much more like a woman. When we decided to make him a woman, we realized that all the game was filled with women. It was almost like a complete feminine world, so then we realized that it was very interesting that "Silent Hill" was dealing with such issues as motherhood, sisterhood, immaculate conception, and we realized that was a good angle to make the film. It started as a convenient thing, making the character female, but then it became the structure of the project, and we realized that "Silent Hill" was a feminine dimension.
"He was almost never acting like a man?" WTF? So Harry lacks a penis, let's just go the whole nine. :\ Gans is playing off archetypal gender expectations which couldn't please anybody. So a single father can't be concerned for his only remaining family? He's in a frightening situation so let's make him a woman? I dunno but to me, seeing a biiiig stroooong man break down is much scarier, even if that is ALSO playing off gender type since guys are expected to be gun-toting bruisers and not pansy wusses which we rarely ever see unless it's Final Destination or some teenage shit. Then again, I hear The Hills Have Eyes takes the male protagonist idea and does its own crazy gender stuff.
Plus, if the Silent Hill-verse truly is feminine, having a man penetrate its darkness would make more sense and be much more interesting. Hear me out.
Look at Alien. The Nostromo is run by a computer called Mother. The crew is a closeknit family seemingly raped by a phallic invader (yet capable of impregnation), repelled by a feminine force. THAT'S gender play. If Gans really wanted to play with gender he'd take that basic theme with its weirdo contradictions, spin it around and keep Harry, except he wouldn't be a sinister rapist so much as a poor schlub lost in the confusing "otherness" of the terrifying female realm. When the male in Alien invades the female it's to hurt, when Harry visits female Silent Hill it's to save.
Hm. But then that becomes problematic doesn't it? So, a woman NEEDS a man to save her. Ho-hum, whatever, we saw that. But this wouldn't be a romantic relationship - it's his daughter. It's about family. Cybil, Harry and Cheryl would reinforce traditional American family values at the end... I guess. =\ Not that I'm offering right-wing crap like "family values" as an alternative to Gans' and Avary's "kill the red states" idea but that's how the game was and it felt better.
But after ruminating all that I can see why they chose Rose even if introducing the feminine into the feminine doesn't seem to add up to anything unless you count a deal with the devil, despair and a family torn apart. The gender politics get complicated don't they?
# posted by magusart @ 3:37 PM 
