Tuesday, 30 Jan 2007
I remember noticing problems with Free Enterprise the last time I saw it, but reading Ami Angelwings rant on fanboy attitudes towards gamer girls made me realize a reason to appreciate it. (found via Johanna) Ami writes:
I keep hearing that we dun exist. That there are no gamer girls. But what these guys mean are that there no gamer girls that fit THEIR fantasy. >:|
What they want isn’t a girl who shares their interests, or knows as much about comics as them, or who plays video games. What they MEAN is that they want a girl who is
a) attractive
b) like a “normal” silly girl
c) is INTERESTED in everything they like, but has less knowledge than them
A gamer girl isn’t a girl who games, it’s one who will watch in awe as their boyfriend games and tell him how awesome he is and complain about how much trouble it is to get to lv10 with her blaster. XD
What they want is a girl who says “omg Batman is awesome, but I like Robin too” and then when they respond “Oh, Robin died, this is the third Robin actually” and we’re supposed to go “REALLY? I didn’t know that! OMG you know so much!”
They want a girl who’s not gonna make them do things they dun want b/c they love everything they love, but wun hog the computer to play their video games. They’ll just sit there in ever loving adoration.
That made me realize that, even though the female characters in Free Enterprise don’t do much more but react to the guys’ personal issues, the film’s geek girl is portrayed as knowledgable about sci-fi as Rafer Weigel’s romantic lead.
In case you haven’t heard of Free Enterprise, the romantic comedy focuses on two sci-fi geeks, Robert and Mark, who meet William Shatner just as they’re heading into their thirties. Their childhood hero fails to live up to their expectations, however, as he turns out not to be someone they should have spent years admiring. The film focuses largely on Robert, who is good looking and charming, but has seen several relationships end when his girlfriend doesn’t understand why he would rather spend money on a Star Trek collectable than pay his electricity bill. He thinks the problem is that he can’t find a woman who shares his love of sci-fi, but that idea gets to confront reality when he meets Claire when buying comics.
Ami’s post gets me thinking to Free Enterprise’s romance scenes, where Claire comes off as knowlegable as her geek boyfriend and the two are shown bonding over their shared fandoms. I recall finding her character being rather poorly-defined, but she was more respected than the gamer girl ideal that inspired Ami’s rant.
January 30th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Free Enterprise largely struck me as “what would a Kevin Smith movie be like if Kevin had no basic understanding of human relationships” — much the same pop culture coyness and feeling of being handmade and a personal vision, but without that meat. The female character struck me as mere wish fulfillment, not just what she was like, but what she wanted. It’s not that there aren’t real geek girls, nor even real beautiful geek girls, but if there are any that all they want is geekdom, well, there would be no shortage of guys for Claire to choose from, and she could and would have found someone with more to offer than what she found in the film.
January 31st, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Yeah, I agree that Claire was entirely a wish fulfillment character. Still, that discussion made me think that at least the wish fulfillment as her as an equal (and equal who had few points of disagreement) in terms of geekiness. That’s small, but a step ahead of the perspective Ami wrote about.