by Christopher Barr
Riddick is about a man left for dead
on a sun-scorched, alien-beast infested planet.
Left by a war-lording empire called Necromongers,
Riddick, the title character, must fight for survival to regain his strength in
order to go home to the planet, Furya.
Bounty hunters soon learn of Riddick’s location and come to collect the
wanted mass murdering convict, only to fall victim to an adversary they should
not have underestimated. Aside from
Riddick being a threat to them, a swarm of half scorpion, half psycho dino-beasts
come in the dark rain to kill everyone, including Riddick. The men now join forces to fight off an even
worse enemy, an enemy that doesn’t negotiate or barter for freedom. The movie is also about the objectification
of women while man struggles with his own existence.
Riddick is two movies; the first
half (my favorite half) is like the film Alien
(1979) in the sense of it being more quiet and about a man (in Alien’s case a
woman) using his wits and skills to overcome a vicious adversary. The second half is more like the movie Aliens (1986), where blasting machine
guns and pulsating biceps are the fueling force. Men with massive weapons shooting at anything
that moves, while they compete with each other for alpha male status, which
clearly belongs to the titular Riddick.
The
movie is the third installment of a trilogy; the first being the most
satisfying of the three, Pitch Black,
the middle movie being the weakest, The Chronicles
of Riddick. All three movies explore
a character that, in spite of all odds, survives, not because of chance or luck
but because of choice, by being skillfully better than whatever or whomever is
hunting him. Riddick is a complex guy
because in many ways he’s not relatable, he’s a mass murdering, hateful, nihilist
of a person, a man we presume would snap our neck sooner than look at us. Or is he?
Is he a man that’s just been misunderstood? A man that, if left alone, could live a
fulfilling existence without the use of his innate sense of violence, but is he
not just an animal, when backed into a corner, comes out fighting with blades
and fists?
Nietzsche
spoke of such a man, a man that dares to be more than the sum of all his parts,
a man that strives to be the Superman and leaves the banal, trite existence of
being an ordinary man behind him. Maybe
that’s not quite what motivates Riddick, but never the less, he strives to
survive in the face of enemies that would dispatch hell on earth for most of
us. I think Nietzsche would agree that
his version of the Superman would see the world with a new set of eyes. As in the case of Riddick, he sees into the abyss
with a set of eyes that allows him to see in the dark. He doesn’t see the world the way everyone
else does, he sees it more clear and bright.
Riddick
fought his Jungian Shadow and for the most part, beat it. He is unafraid of the Real, that place beyond
the symbolic world. I think the symbolic
world is the one he sees as being off in some way. But yet at the end of the movie it is the
symbolic order that beats out the atavistic Real, saving Riddick from being overcome
by it. It’s almost as if Riddick, in the
Freudian sense, is fighting to get back to the womb, a place that lacks symbolization,
but in the end he is dragged back in. A
plight, Freud knew himself; a person couldn’t entirely overcome.
Pitch Black was a love letter to Alien and Aliens, respectively. The protagonist
was a woman and remained so to her untimely, yet heroic demise. (I say
‘remained so’ because a lot of heroines in action movies seem to play men with
guns rather than remain as they are, women) She allowed the madman within Riddick to see
in her, a person that cares for him, and a person who wants him to live in
spite of all his misdeeds. Unfortunately
when Riddick finally can see that, she is gone, snatched into the dark of
night by one of the fiendish creatures that brought them together in the first
place.
Sadly
I find these movies portray women from good, to bad, to worse, in that
order. In Riddick, women are mere objects, an alien dog in the movie is held
with a higher regard. What Pitch Black was well aware of, was that
Ripley in the Alien movies was a
strong and resilient woman, not a man in woman’s clothing. In Riddick,
like too many Hollywood movies, women are objects for men to do whatever they
want with. When one of the two bounty hunter
ships land to capture Riddick, a female prisoner is released to make room for
him. During her incarceration, it is eluded
to that she was there to meet whatever sexual needs the husky men on board
desired. Upon being released, she runs
away from the ship only to be shot in the back and discarded. This was a person that likely would have died
on that planet, yet her captors felt it might be a good idea to kill her
themselves, presumably for the fun of it.
Riddick
himself is not exempt from this misogynistic behaviour. There was a woman that was part of the platoon
of men there to capture Riddick. When
captured and bound, Riddick informed all the men that they will meet death very
soon by his hand and before his escape, he’ll be going ‘balls deep’ into the
female bounty hunter, also mentioning that he liked her toe nail shade because they
matched the color of her nipples. Presumably he was
tainting her, but it’s still oddly acceptable to promise to rape a woman in
some of these movies. Like in the case
of The Mother Fucker in Kick Ass 2, failing to rape a captured
woman because of an erectile dysfunction, while others around him laugh about
it. In a flashback sequence in the first
act of Riddick, a number of women are
sprawled all over each other naked in bed.
Riddick sits in a king’s chair, all masculine, sporting a crown, lamenting
about his current station in life as ruler over these Borg-like Necromongers,
while looking over at the women like one would in a buffet line.
Riddick had its moments of beautiful CGI
vistas and exciting action scenes. But I
think, not only did the movie drop the ball, the industry has. With characters like Ripley, now in the
distant past, where are all the new female characters going to come from? Tarantino?
James Cameron? Ridley Scott? Joss Whedon? The personal struggle that Riddick underwent will
always exist in movies and other forms of storytelling, man vs. himself, man
vs. nature and man vs. animal, but what is left for the fairer sex when all the
men in the world are going crazy?
"Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."
- Camille Paglia
No comments:
Post a Comment