On Jennifer Lawrence and Action Heroes

internet discourse really sucks

Jennifer Lawrence, the actress who played Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games film franchise (based on the novel series), became the internet’s main character with statements in an interview that were factually wrong, including that Katniss was the first female protagonist of an action movie.

“I remember when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,’ nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work – because we were told girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead,” she said.

The internet went insane pointing out Sigourney Weaver from Alien and other examples of female action heroes that happened well before 2012.

Mockery of Lawrence for ignorance of her own field’s history, as well as the perceived narcissism in seeing herself as a groundbreaking figure in a way that she actually wasn’t, became the easy, fun dunk of the day online.

She Wasn’t Totally Wrong

Lawrence’s statement that girls would identify with a male hero but boys wouldn’t identify with a female one is based on a longstanding notion in publishing that men and boys will not read fiction by female authors.

Do you know why J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books said “J.K. Rowling” instead of “JoAnn Rowling”?

Because, at the time, the idea that boys would not read a book written by a woman was considered common knowledge in the world of book publishing.

Lest you think this is just some Woke nonsense, Lionel Shriver, who is just about as based as novelists get, has also talked about this. She changed her name to Lionel as a teenager and commented in an interview that it worked out to her advantage when she became a writer, because it opened up her readership more widely, including to men who would probably not have picked up a novel with an obviously female name on the cover.

(I cannot find the interview where she said this, probably because I’ve seen so many of her interviews over the years, so you’re going to have to trust me. If I find it later, I will edit this to link to it. If any of you happen to know which interview it was, please send me a link!)

The Internet Is Killing Our Brains

Instead of having a nuanced, interesting conversation about whether this particular dynamic has changed over time—which is a conversation that we really should be having—it’s all just dunking on her.

If this dynamic has really changed, then it would be a marvelous bit of progress. Something to celebrate! A marker of positive societal change that we could be proud of, demonstrating long-term success of a cultural trend away from sexism. It would be a market of demonstrable progress towards the idea that people of both sexes can produce great art.

I want us to have that conversation, because it stands a chance of changing some of the victim narratives, if we do.

But we can’t talk about any of this.

The internet had to have its main character of the day.

The impulse to mock had to be acted upon.

The simple question, “What gave her that idea?” cannot be asked.

Everything must be reduced to its simplest and most memetic, mockable terms.

This is what the internet, particularly Twitter, does to us: robs us of the ability to ask questions, to look deeper, to actually think or reflect.

Instead, we must dunk.

Recognizing this in myself is part of why I left Twitter, which was both an act of cognitive self-defense and my own small attempt to “be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Someone will either email me or comment that the reaction to Lawrence’s comments—the rush to dunk—is proof that the sexism I want to believe has diminished, actually hasn’t.

I disagree with this. I think the internet’s need for a new main character to mock every day is separate from male audiences self-segregating by the sex of the artist.

I may be wrong. I hope one day we can have that conversation.

Locked the comments because I don’t have the energy to write a revision yet, but I have been proven entirely wrong. No matter patiently and repeatedly I explained that her statement was made in the context of the framing she was given going into a books-to-movies project, the take seems to be “LOL dumb girl said ‘movie’ not ‘book’ so the internet jerking off to hating her for days is super fair and fun and helpful!” My former belief, that society had gotten past the kind of knee-jerk sexism that made the trope she was referring to seem reasonable, was probably wrong. If commenters to an explicitly anti-Woke substack are this committed to ignoring context and rigidly holding to the precise wording, context-free, of a short, edited clip, even when the larger context has been explained repeatedly, to the point of giving myself a headache….yeah, I’m definitely guilty of confirmation bias here. I want the Woke to be wrong so badly that I was seeing a Woke take as wrong where it probably wasn’t. Ah, well. Live and learn.

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