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Cape FearSuperheroes and male anxiety in My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

By Dana StevensPosted Friday, July 21, 2006, at 4:54 PM ET

Listen to Dana Stevens, Mike Pesca, and Julia Turner's Spoiler Special about My Super Ex-Girlfriend by clicking the arrow on the player below:

Uma ThurmanYou know it's a grim summer-movie season when mediocre rom-coms starring a Wilson brother open two weeks in a row. But where last week's You, Me and Dupree was merely sodden and unfunny, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Fox), the new Ivan Reitman comedy starring Luke Wilson and Uma Thurman, is actively enraging. Leaving the joyless world of this tale of male sexual panic, you breathe a sigh of relief: Thank God we don't really live there. Or do we?

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In case you missed the tell-all trailer, the film's hero, Matt (Luke Wilson), is a successful architect—architecture being the career of choice for hunky male movie protagonists. Matt's romantic comedy to-do list is nearly complete: He's got the dreamy Manhattan apartment, the wisecracking best friend (Rainn Wilson), and the crush-worthy but unavailable gal Friday at the office (Anna Faris). All that's missing is the girl, who soon shows up in the form of Jenny (Uma Thurman), a gawky gallery owner given to wearing spectacles and high-necked Victorian dresses. Until, that is, the city finds itself in need of saving, at which point Jenny secretly transforms into G-Girl, a superhero in a corset and garter belt.

Jenny's real alter ego, though, isn't a blond superheroine but a basket case. Beneath both the glasses and the corset lurks a needy, neurotic girlfriend given to jealous rages and weeping jags. Matt dumps her in short order, and the rest of the movie is a misogynist's catalog of escalating offenses: Jenny rips a hole in Matt's ceiling, puts his car into orbit around the earth, and hurls a shark through the window of her romantic rival. We're meant to find Jenny comically awful and chortle along in eye-rolling sympathy with Matt, but in fact, the script leaves us with no one to care about at all. If Jenny comes off as a petty-minded hag, Matt is a simpering cad, and the supporting characters (who include Eddie Izzard as G-Girl's arch-nemesis, the insecure supervillain Professor Bedlam) are too sloppily drawn to provide any real moral counterpoint. Even G-Girl herself is a muddle of a character: Does she perform superdeeds out of a true desire to do good, or simply to manipulate men? An early scene in which she poutily butters a roll as a missile threatens the city takes all the fun out of the subsequent action sequences: Why should we care about the world's safety if she doesn't?

A less willfully misogynist movie might have made Thurman's double identity the starting place for an exploration of female power, super- or otherwise. What would you do if your girlfriend not only made more money than you, but knew how to stop an incoming missile with her bare hands? Instead, the movie, like Wilson's character, spends two hours cowering under a table, waiting for the scary lady to go away.

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Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

In almost all superhero stories, certainly all mainstream ones, the heroes are driven by sacrifice of self. The world is more important. You don't use your powers for petty, self-serving interests. Yes, they have personal problems of their own and they may even use their powers to help them work through those problems, but they are always used in a "greater good" situation. Witness in Spiderman 2 where Peter Parker, having done some heroic derring do, is now late for his job delivering pizza. He's got to deliver a stack of pies across town in 10 minutes or he's fired. His scooter-bike isn't cutting it, so he slips into costume and webslings his way there. Personal gain? Of course, but it isn't like he's getting revenge on somebody. Nobody has been hurt by this act.

But what if the superpowers were bestowed upon somebody completely incapable of making that separation of self and society? What if there were a super who would use those powers for revenge? No, not on any supervillain who was set on destroying the city or was killing innocents. What if the super was just a pathetic, needy, whiner who, because of those superpowers, takes stalking to a whole other level? Who's so self-centered that the fate of the world simply doesn't register because wallowing in self-pity over a bad breakup is much more important? […]

If the super had been a man and the movie had him floating outside her window, staring at her through the walls with his X-ray vision, we'd call him a creep (unless, of course, he's Superman and he suddenly realizes that what he's doing is wrong and goes away). If he did to her what Uma does to Luke, we'd call him an abuser. There wouldn't be any way to make it funny. But by making the super a woman, we can sidestep the gender politics of domestic violence and get to the humorous center:

What if Wonder Woman were a ninny who threw a hissy fit just because Steve Trevor forgot to send Diana Prince flowers on Secretary's Day? This movie isn't about Lois Lane and how she handles being Superman's girlfriend. They're too well-adjusted and thus there is no humor there. This is about a super with mood swings that make Mommie Dearest look like Mother of the Year.

Just because a woman is the antagonist doesn't mean it's a misogynist movie.

--Rrhain

(To reply, click here.)

(7/23)

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