Crossing the line

I seem to have watched a lot of films this week, but in amongst the amazingness of Inception, the plain weirdness of Fantastic Mr Fox, and the joy of watching future Professor X Mr James McAvoy in The Last Station there is one moment that has stuck out amongst all others.

It came roughly halfway through Predators, and for many people it may have been a throwaway moment to be briefly laughed at before continuing with the film. It comes during a 'quiet moment' where the characters are sitting around talking about what they will if they survive and manage to get home. One of the characters, already established as a convicted murderer, says (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'man, when I get home I'm gonna rape me so many bitches'. Cue laughter from most of the audience for this deeply inappropriate comment, but it just left me cold, and I couldn't help wondering at what point did casual misogyny become socially acceptable in mainstream cinema.

Perhaps other people may not read into it the same way I did, but after a week seeing some of the horrendous comments posted by men in response to the actions of Raoul Moat it made me deeply uncomfortable. Coming from a main character, someone who we as an audience are supposed to empathise with, made it worse than if it was something uttered by an antagonist: as viewers we are supposed to write the comment off as being 'a funny character quirk'.

Coming from a huge fan of idiotic eighties action films, it may seem a bit rich to get politically correct over a few seconds of a mostly successful film, but I don't appreciate film makers assuming I have such a base view of women just because I enjoy watching aliens reducing people to piles of their component organs.

Still, Topher Grace's follow up line was funny, eh?