Heavy Metal: Too sexist even for stoners.

So yesterday, for whatever reason, I found myself in the mood to watch a cheesy cultish fantasy movie I’d never seen.  Something fun, where the appeal lies more in the visual splendor than the writing or acting.  After browsing the Netflix Instant options, I settled on Heavy Metal.  It’s a film I remember being keenly aware of as a child in the 80′s.  It was one of those rare animated films that I wasn’t allowed to see, which made it unbelievably enticing.  Not only that, but I’d seen enough posters and VHS boxes to know that it involved space ships, epic battles, alien creatures, and pretty ladies in skimpy scifi outfits.  In other words, it was just like my favorite movie at the time, Return of the Jedi, plus it was a cartoon, and it was forbidden.  Needless to say, at the age of eight, I was convinced that Heavy Metal had to be the greatest movie of all time.

And yet, even though it became easy for me to see R-rated films somewhere around the age of 13, I never saw Heavy Metal until yesterday.  Part of that might be the snags that apparently kept it from video release for several years, but separate from that, I feel like sometime in the decade or so after the film’s release, people completely stopped talking about it.  Even later on, when it was on video, and I was taking an interest in psychedelic culture and underground animation, recommendations for Heavy Metal were few and far between.  Now that I’ve finally watched it, I have some ideas as to why.

First of all, the animation itself hasn’t aged well (and I can’t imagine it looked that good to begin with).  Some of the design (much of it inspired by the comics, of course) is gorgeous, but even in those segments the motion is stiff and awkward.  It’s obvious which characters are meant to be hideous and which are meant to be beautiful (and more on them momentarily), but even the “beautiful” characters are frequently pretty ugly.  You can tell the filmmakers spent a lot of time looking at the work of Moebius and others, but they clearly lack either the ability or the inclination to produce anything close to that interesting.

The bigger problem, though, is the extraordinarily overt misogyny on display in this film.  I mean, obviously a 30-year-old psychedelic adventure film is bound to be male-centric, and I wasn’t expecting it to be otherwise.  Still, the volume and shamelessness of the sexism left me shocked.  Heavy Metal is a fantasy about men who get to do awesome, ass-kicking, groovy things, and some of those things they get to do happen to be women.  From the moment any adult female character appears on screen, you can start counting the seconds until she gets totally naked, and you probably won’t make it to ten (so yeah, South Park pretty much has this film’s number). One segment does offer a female protagonist, but she has no lines, alternates between little and no clothing, and is tortured and killed by the end.  No exception could better prove the rule.

This degree of misogyny in a film like this seems glaring in this post Whedon/R.D. Moore/Rowling world, because there’s so much more acknowledgment that just as many women are into scifi/fantasy as men, but I guess that still wasn’t regarded as the case at all in 1981.

I was reminded of some of Amanda Marcotte’s writing, particularly on the subjects of Playboy Magazine and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.  Basically, both essays make the point that there was a time when women could be openly excluded from any sort of culture of cool.  Hugh Hefner presents himself as a symbol of sophistication, and Kerouac and Cassidy are presented as avatars of rebellion against the mainstream, but all three men proceed from an unquestioned assumption that women exist solely to look hot, fuck them, and make them feel good.  This same assumption is at the core of Heavy Metal, which makes it a much harder film to enjoy these days.  Realizing this, I’m actually glad that people stopped discussing and recommending it, because I probably would have looked at those people a little differently afterward.