After all, don鈥檛 Hollywood movies generally include shots of partially clad good-looking people? And this was an action movie, and underwear scenes are almost as much of a trope in action movies as explosions are. Nobody goes to a James Bond film and comes out complaining that there were scantily clad women in it.
So it might seem strange that this particular underwear scene caused such a reaction. It was a short scene, and not especially revealing. And, as 91原创 journalist Matthew Lazin-Ryder has argued convincingly, there were legitimate reasons for its inclusion, because it tells you things about the characters of both people in the scene.
The scene isn鈥檛 offensive, in and of itself. My reaction wasn鈥檛 to take offence; it was to roll my eyes and think, 鈥測ou have got to be kidding me.鈥� Because this isn鈥檛 some random alien getting it on with notorious horndog James T. Kirk. This is one of only two significant female characters in the movie.
There are 10 men with major roles in Star Trek Into Darkness, and two women. One is Uhura, who is awesome in the Star Trek canon, but she spends most of Into Darkness mooning over Spock, or being the setup for tedious 鈥渨omen, can鈥檛 live with them,鈥� humour to fuel the Kirk-Spock bromance.
The other is the woman played by Alice Eve, a science officer. She鈥檚 clever, interesting and 鈥� oh look, there she is in her underwear.
The scene is fine, on its own. But it comes in the middle of a movie that tramples all over half a century of Star Trek鈥檚 own evolution when it comes to gender bias.
The quick and easy way to determine whether a movie, book or TV show is suffering from major gender bias is the Bechdel Test, named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel: Is there more than one female character? Do two women talk to each other at any point? About something other than a man?
Star Trek Into Darkness doesn鈥檛 just fail the Bechdel Test; it spits on it. The lack of women was so extreme that it distracted me from beginning to end, even though I鈥檓 a huge Star Trek nerd and otherwise enjoyed the movie.
Granted, the gender problem is inherent in any reboot of the original series, which aired in the 1960s and failed to foresee a future in which women might crew a starship in equal numbers with men.
But Into Darkness didn鈥檛 even make an effort with new or secondary characters. There鈥檚 a moment where two redshirts look at each other and shrug, and I thought, 鈥淭here. Right there, you could have had two female characters interact about something that isn鈥檛 how dreamy Spock and Kirk are.鈥�
Nope. Both men. The Starfleet depicted in Into Darkness 鈥� indeed, the future depicted in Into Darkness 鈥� is mostly male. It鈥檚 as if a plague wiped out 90 per cent of the female population and nobody mentions it.
Actress Felicia Day wrote: 鈥淪eriously, in the future not one woman over 40 is in charge in this world?鈥�
Watching Kirk and his mostly male gang save the universe is more jarring today than it would have been in 1966, because, well, this is not 1966. We are closer to the 23rd century than Gene Roddenberry was. We don鈥檛 expect the future to be run by white guys, at least not without some explanation for why that might happen.
I can forgive the failures of the Bechdel Test in many of my favourite shows, such as The Wire. But this is Star Trek. Despite its flaws, from its earliest days Star Trek has been pushing back against intolerance and challenging prevailing prejudices. That鈥檚 why it鈥檚 depressing that when Star Trek shows us the future now, it looks so much like the past.
It鈥檚 not really about the underwear.
