Jurassic World: Bryce Dallas Howard Is Meant To Be a Badass Action Heroine, But Is It 70’s Era Sexist?

They can’t all be Mad Max: Fury Road. George Miller’s recent update of his moribund franchise is not really about a post-apocalyptic tough guy named Max. Instead, it’s a feminist revolt led by Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who uses a run-of-the-mill refuel mission for her tanker as cover for smuggling a harem of female sex slaves to freedom. It’s the feminist picture of the years, says The New York Post. Wait, it’s not, but it gets serious point for trying, says the NewStatesman. It even upset men’s rights activists. Either way, to some it is now the go-to example for the right way to do things in this new age in which the internet will no longer stand for Hollywood trotting out the same old cliched female characters.

But Fury Road is out of the spotlight now, replaced by Jurassic World, another relaunch of a moribund franchise. Director/Co-Writer Colin Trevorrow similarly aspired to make a big budget tentpole release in which the main character turns out to be a woman. Despite his post-Guardians of the Galaxy marketing pull, Chris Pratt’s Owen, a rugged ex-military-turned-velociraptor-whisperer, is not the star, lacking any real character arc. The two kids who play Bryce Dallas Howards’ initially neglected and eventually endangered nephews visting the park are certainly not the stars. That honor truly belongs to the dinosaurs, chief among them the genetic hybrid Indominus Rex. However, as far as the humans go this is Bryce Dallas Howard’s movie. Her character, Claire, goes from the park’s uptight, passionless operations manager to fierce bad-ass saving the day and running in heels because, hey, women can do both of those things. When she needs a gate opened near the film’s climax, an act which will place her in extreme danger, she actually admonishes the reluctant male technician (Jake Johnson) by forcefully insisting that he act like a man for the first time in his life.

Yet that’s not good enough. Jurassic World is not enjoying a Fury Road-esque onslaught of articles whose central arguments essentially amount to, “You go, girl!” Instead, Colin Trevorrow is out there defending the choices he made with Howard’s character. It’s a familiar position for him by this point. The negative reactions kicked in at the start of April, a full two months before Jurassic World’s opening. Universal released what is actually the film’s first scene between Claire and Owen. She’s there to request his presence at the top secret Indominus Rex exhibit, but it’s an awkward encounter with a punchline implying Clarie just needs to get laid, which unfortunately falls into the category of real shit male film crew members have said to female directors (as chronicled on the “Shit People Say to Women Directors” blog):

In response to this scene, The Mary Sue, a feminist-leaning pop culture site, Tweeted a joke about Chris Pratt’s hotness:

Joss Whedon, mere weeks away from an internet firestorm of his own in response to Black Widow’s sterilization backstory in Age of Ultron, Tweeted back, “…and I’m too busy wishing this clip wasn’t 70’s era sexist. She’s a stiff, he’s a life-force – really? Still?” He later expressed regret for having said anything at all, but the internet seemed to agree with him. As the AV Club’s Katie Rife put it at the time, “The trope of the uptight career woman whose dedication to her work results in things like immaculately tailored pantsuits, chilly-looking loft apartments, and emotional walls that only the right man can tear down is a popular one. Most times, this serves as a substitute for actual character development as our heroine, smitten with our hero’s skill in fighting aliens or Nazis or whatever, learns to loosen up a little bit—and maybe even to love. This reassures audiences that even so-called ‘liberated women’ really, deep down, just want to be swept off their feet by a man, preferably a khaki-clad, wisecracking one. It’s boring, and arguably pretty sexist.”

Oddly, Colin Trevorrow sort of agreed. If it had been up to him, that’s not the scene they would have released. His approach to the script with his writing partner Derek Connelly was to start the characters off as easily identifiable archetypes before watching them grow into something else (or, in Owen’s case, mostly stay the same) when faced with the type of carnage that usually awaits anyone in a Jurassic Park movie. Claire and Owen are initially meant to sound like Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in 1984’s Romancing the Stone, which was itself an homage to the screwball comedies of old Hollywood. So, sure, maybe that scene made it seem like Clarie is an ice queen who’s cold heart will only be thawed the hot love of the man otherwise known as Starlord. However, Trevorrow begged for patience, promising that we’d be delighted with where they took Claire in the rest of the story.

Oh, what sweet optimism, Colin Trevorrow. Now that the film has arrived, Vulture’s Jade Yuan spoke for many, “Was it really necessary for Jurassic World to resurrect gender stereotypes along with the dinosaurs? […] Clarie is defined by her job, but we never learn about the smarts or hard work that got her to arguably the highest administrative position in the park or see her do anything but be brusque and make cold, terrible decisions, like not evacuating the island when it’s under imminent danger because she’s worried about the economics.”

Elsewhere, the fact that Bryce Dallas Howard never takes off her high-heeled shoes throughout the film has become such a big deal that CBS’ new late night host James Corden hilariously had Chris Pratt try on a pair of pumps and run across his talk show stage to see how hard it really is.

Worse than that, the film’s ending has fallen into the Black Widow-Age of Ultron curse of misinterpretation. [Stop Reading If You Don’t Want the Film’s Ending Spoiled] At a makeshift disaster relief center for Jurassic World’s survivors, Claire hands off her nephews to her sister and tearfully watches them embrace before immediately seeking out Owen to walk off into the sunset together, holding hands. He makes a very-Sandra Bullock-from-the-end-of-Speed joke about their future involving lots of sex, but some failed to find any humor in that, reading the entire sequence as reducing Clarie to her reproductive choices and implying that her only path to happiness will be popping out plenty of babies. Those arguing for this interpretation point to an earlier scene in the film when Claire talks to her sweet, maternal sister (played by Judy Greer) on the phone, observing that she doesn’t think she’ll ever have kids to which her sister quickly retorts, “Don’t talk like that. It’ll happen for you. One day.” Claire’s sister also cries out of concern for her kids during the conversation, telling Claire that she’d understand if she were a mother. [You Can Start Reading Again]

To Jade Yuan, this is a pathetic far cry from the first Jurassic Park where “[Laura Dern] played world-renowned paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler, the intellectual equal to her partner, Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), and a tough, resourceful heroine in the mold of Alien‘s Ellen Ripley or Terminator‘s Sarah Connor. She was able to identify extinct poisonous plants on sight, went toe-to-toe with Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm on chaos theory (with that great line: ‘Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the Earth’), and got elbow-deep in a mountain of dung to diagnose an ailing triceratops. When it came time for her to fight off a velociraptor while taking the initiative to restart a power grid, we had faith she would prevail.”

Jurassic Park has inspired academic study in books like Jurassic Park and Philosophy: The Truth is Terrifying, but, as Steven Spielberg has maintained over the years, it’s really not a complicated movie.  It’s the story of Dr. Grant (Neill) who initially has no fondness for children but ends up an amazing father figure, two kids sleeping next to him on the helicopter as his spouse watches with extreme admiration, implying they might soon try to have kids of their own (until Jurassic Park III took that away from us). So, why is it really so bad if Jurassic World tries the same thing with a female character?  In truth, Claire is more like a combination of John Hammond, Dr. Grant and the numbers-crunching lawyer from the first film, with less of a pronounced arc about coming to embrace the notion of having kids and more of a general awakening to “dinosaurs are living animals, not lines on a spreadsheet” and “there is life outside of work.”  Similar to Hammond in the first Jurassic Park, she takes just a little too long to realize her loved ones are in danger, but by the end she realizes how much more important they are than anything else.

I didn’t personally interpret the ending as implying she was suddenly baby-crazy, and neither did  Colin Trevorrow, as he told io9:

[Claire] goes through a pretty massive arc, from being the head woman in charge and very corporatized, and very much governed by the needs of that corporation, to somebody who has kind of stripped herself of all the trappings, and become very at one with her inner animal — and the natural world. And [she’s] recognized that she saw these animals as assets, and as numbers, and that they are in fact living, breathing creatures. And I found it to be a movie about her finding her humanity. And that’s always how I saw it.

And honestly, I guess it’s a testament to my own ignorance of how things can be perceived — I never really saw it any other way. I definitely didn’t see it as a character who was learning to want to have children. That didn’t even occur to me. Because I don’t see her as going off and having children at the end of the movie — that doesn’t seem like that’s what she’s going to do. But I’ve heard that argument.

And look, it’s hard for me to debate any of those things, because it’s all about perception. It’s all about something lands with somebody. And I feel like everybody is right. However it lands with you, and however you perceive what we’re doing, you’re right. Because that’s how you saw it. So all I can say is, I hope that whatever people see in it, they know I very sincerely was looking to make a real badass action heroine who doesn’t surrender her femininity in the process of being a badass action heroine.

And that’s the thing about Jurassic World – I really appreciate that Colin Trevorrow tried. Claire is supposed to be a badass action heroine [spoiler alert]. Her first kiss with Owen happens after she has saved him from becoming dino-dinner. She’s a huge part of why they survive their final encounter with the Indominus Rex.  Trevorrow’s efforts could have been better thought out, though. For example, for as much work as they put into building up Claire once she is finally reunited with her nephews they immediately reject her and embrace Owen as being the true, obvious badass, insisting they want to go wherever he goes because he makes them feel safe even though they’ve barely seen him do anything at that point.

The fact that Trevorrow never anticipate the level of snark over Claire’s high-heeled adventures or the misinterpretation of the ending could be seen as inadvertently supporting the need for more female voices behind the scenes of movies such as this. For example, when Chris Pratt put on those heels on James Corden’s show he lamented, “Who would ever wear these things?” to which Bryce Dallas Howard, seated to his left knowingly deadpanned, “Only around half the population.” She can speak about that in ways Pratt can’t. Yet you can’t blame the Jurassic World shoes thing on Trevorrow’s lack of insight into the female experience because according to him Howard insisted that she wear them, “She felt like surrendering the heels felt like surrendering the femininity of the character, even though women are — I don’t want to say forced to wear heels — but you’re expected to wear heels in certain environments […] But I support my actors! I want her to feel comfortable. And I want her to create a [character] that is truthful and true to her and how she feels in that character’s shoes, for lack of a better [word].”

For better or worse, this is Colin Trevorrow’s movie.  They never did any test screenings or focus groups.  The first people who saw a finished cut were family, friends and co-workers.  There were no re-shoots.  He wanted to make a kick-ass Jurassic Park movie, and Steven Spielberg trusted him to do that.   Maybe it doesn’t ultimately boast Max Max: Fury Road’s feminist credentials, but I appreciate the effort.  Claire is supposed to be badass action heroine when this so easily could have been all about Owen.  Although, truthfully, I was mostly there for the dinosaurs, and that final sequence with dinosaurs piling on dinosaurs put a grin on my face which threatened to never leave.

How did you feel about the way Claire was used in Jurassic World?  Did you notice her shoes right away?  Or do you think that people paying attention to a girl’s shoes in a movie about dinosaurs is inherently misguided?  Did you think she was kind of a sexist character, a version of badass heroine only a man would write?  Or did you think she was kind of awesome by the end?  Or did you just want more of Chris Pratt?

Sources: io9, Vulture