https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=soh-3jiHq4s
One of the important aspects of interpreting symbolism in culture is the capacity to discern patterns not only within stories but also across them. The capacity to notice these patterns will help us see when certain directions, certain deep movements and changes are taking form in culture. It will give us the capacity to let’s say read the signs of the times. Sometimes an understanding of symbolism can be used for purposes of propaganda and to push certain social agendas. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Now in the movies I’ve interpreted until today, many of them have a certain trope which I have mentioned now and again in passing. This trope is the replacing of the masculine hero by a feminine one. We see this pattern not only in the fact of certain replacements but it often appears as a pattern within the stories themselves. So it’s not just that there are more lead feminine characters in stories, which could have been an opportunity for good storytelling, but it is the very act of supplanting and replacing which is often shown as a story trope. And this trope becomes boldly apparent especially when we see this pattern appear across several movies. The pattern can take a variety of forms. It can appear as a strange play on the masculine virtue of wanting to save others. Though now the male character sacrifices himself in order to make way for a feminine character which replaces him. We see this for example in the movie Logan. Wolverine sacrifices himself to make way for his female clone. There is also Kay in Blade Runner 2049 giving up his place as the son to make room for the daughter. But there are many other such scenes in several movies. Sometimes the masculine character will be humiliated and made to look useless. But there are several occasions where the masculine character will willingly get out of the way to make place for a feminine replacement. In the final scene of the movie Mad Max Fury Road, after tossing the dead body of the tyrannical father, Max presents the female lead to the people who clamor for her. And Max then gets off this escalating elevator in order to let all the feminine characters ascend to replace the toppled authority. In these movements one sees the raw power play that is happening in the cultural narrative. It is not about parody, about equality and all those virtues. Rather the current social move appears as revolutionary. It’s about inverting the traditional hierarchy, putting it upside down. At first glance there are those who might cheer to see such a replacement. It’s about time that women make room for themselves. But things are not always what they seem. By simply filling masculine social tropes with female characters who embody those very tropes, it might not so much be an elevation of the feminine that we are seeing, but rather a blind attachment to masculine qualities as the ones that truly matter. As if being on top, as if being physically strong, a warrior and a leader, is somehow more virtuous than beauty, than the caring and intimate connections of our private realm. There have been very powerful female characters who embody the feminine in profound ways. For example, Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings has been a perfect type. She disarms men by her depth of vision, by her insight, by her beauty, her grace. And even in her terrible moment she shows us the terror of the feminine. That she could be as terrible as the dawn, as treacherous as the sea. All will love her and despair. Such a character is far more engaging and encompassing than simply making the female character a feisty badass who, it turns out, is a better fighter than all her male counterparts. Characters like Galadriel, but also the wonderful and rich female heroines we find in Miyazaki films, take into account the whole range of human emotions and activity, which is primordial in understanding what it means to be fully human, male and female. Once we see, though, the pattern of replacement, we can then begin to understand the storytelling choices made in recent movies as soaking in an ideological zeitgeist, we could say. So for example, it would not have been difficult to have Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi return to the Resistance in order to lead one last grand show of heroism before passing on. But having him appear only as a mirage, cut that hope short and crystallized the ascension of Rey, who had already been shown to not need a man, and is constantly shown upstaging the already established masculine character. Now I could have analyzed many movies in order to give a detailed symbolic understanding of what is happening, but I thought that one scene from the recent movie Wonder Woman encapsulates the structure most succinctly. So the scene is happening in a village. The movie has already set up that this village is a kind of microcosm of what is happening more broadly in the war. So after clearing the village of all the enemy soldiers, there is still this sniper shooting people from the church tower which looms above the center of the village. The fact that the sniper is at the top of the church is very important in terms of symbolism. Just as we can understand the sniper in the very vertical tower shooting his rifle down at the people below as a form of tyrannical masculine power, we don’t have to be Freudian to notice that the incapacity of Charlie, their own sniper, to take a shot himself is an image of the flip side of tyrannical power. That is, it is a form of male impotence. So the solution which appears suggested by Steve Trevor is for the men to get under the steel shield and prop up Wonder Woman. Now the mechanics of the situation did not need the men to do that. We had already seen Wonder Woman leap up at least that high and escalate stone buildings. But it was important that the men lift her up, just as it was important to have that escalating platform in Mad Max to show the ascent in order to establish the new hierarchy. In the village scene, we can now easily understand the importance of the church tower as Wonder Woman, the goddess but also the god killer, leaps up and destroys his masculine symbol of power, of tradition, of Christianity, only to then appear in the rubble above the villagers, replacing the tower itself in order to receive the praise of the villagers. And this scene of the church tower is also the first of this repeating pattern in the movie, where we see Wonder Woman lifted up into the air in order to kill her enemies, culminating in taking the form of the cross and striking this masculine god of war and of tyranny from above with lightning bolts. And finally, when we see the enemy is defeated as the new day rises, Wonder Woman is then shown at the center of the new world she represents, a world that believes in love, as the German soldiers suddenly forget their violent ways and start to show camaraderie, even with their former enemies. Now there are two things to understand. One is that we have to be careful, we have to be careful not to reduce our vision to polemics, as many have done. We cannot reduce the movies to this trope. We must not be blinded by politics. We always need to stay clear headed enough to see the symbolic patterns appear, where they appear. That is why I only occasionally mention all of this when analyzing many of these movies before, such as Logan or Gravity. Having said that, the second thing to understand is that we also need to see the pattern. And I can surmise that many of you have watched my past movie interpretations without noticing how this pattern reappeared in many of the movies that I chose. You see, if such a scene as this one in Wonder Woman had appeared on its own, you know, and as some freak event, it might have been exactly that. It might have been an exception. But the recurring pattern is not only significant, but it is often quite deliberate. And it is being cheered by certain factions of the political sphere. For example, in an article critiquing the latest Marvel Universe movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp, in which this very pattern of supplanting and replacing his playing itself out, for example, notice the composition of the posters. This journalist praises not only the fact of the strength and smarts of the leading female, which would be understandable and maybe even laudable, but she also rejoices in how the male character is shown as hapless, with his successes due only to accident. The author of the article complains that the MCU is not going far enough, but is moving in the right direction. And she looks forward to seeing how the MCU will deal with the introduction of Captain Marvel, who has already been a focal point of propaganda in recent Marvel comics. And so too, those of us who look for symbolic patterns, we should all pay attention as this trope, this sign of the times, shows every sign of being on an accelerating ascent.