Y’all, I’m as hot for science fiction as the next lesbian (I’ll take this moment to advise that this entry is a little more risque than my usual posts). Heck, my superhero novel is an ode to the things about sci-fi that I love, such as giant robot fights and extremely implausible applications of CRISPR. So you can imagine how jazzed I was when Netflix released their new NSFW animated sci-fi (and beyond) anthology, Love, Death & Robots (LDR).
Had I been paying attention before immediately pressing play and sinking into a fortress of blankets for a binge-session, I’d have noticed Tim Miller and David Fincher’s names on the project. They’re known for the first Deadpool movie and Fight Club respectively, two pieces of media that I have a love-hate relationship with. Both films suffer from some degree of Rick and Morty Syndrome: the fanbases completely misunderstand the point, and then rally around the negative concepts (toxic masculinity, antisocial behavior, cruelty on the basis of nihilism, etc.) that the source material is trying to subvert. So, while I can’t totally blame the producers for their tone-deaf audience, I’m still a little leery.
I wanted to love LDR. I love love love animation, and want to see more of it produced for an adult audience. I’m not talking porn, nor am I talking more ugly, edgy comedies like South Park or Family Guy (look, some of those shows have their merits, and you’ll never hear me say a bad word about my beloved Bob’s Burgers, but I’m ready for bigger things). I want pretty, complex, and compelling work intended for more mature audiences.
LDR… isn’t quite there. I did love some of it, but first, I need to address its biggest, glaringest, you’re-not-even-tryingest downfall: Its treatment of women.
Get ready for some spoilers.
Science fiction and gender have a complex relationship, and I could chatter about that for hours. The short version is this: science fiction is an ideal playground for progressive ideas and for escaping harmful societal restrictions, but for every female/non-male character who benefits from that environment, there are 10 more that suffer from it. Ten sexbots, abused space prostitutes, and slave-bikini Leias per every Ellen Ripley.
Like so much of sci-fi, LDR loves to divorce women from their bodies, be that by death, mechanization, commodification, or even creature transformation. These aren’t characters. They’re bodies.
And LDR sure loves looking at those bodies. I’m of the mind that nudity isn’t necessarily sexual, and in fact, there was at least one case of non-sexual nudity in the anthology. In “Fish Night,” a character strips off their clothes to swim in a sky filled with spectral prehistoric sea creatures. It’s a euphoric, impulsive move, and isn’t treated as a sexy display. This character is a man. He’s allowed to be non-sexually nude. (I mean, my dude does get eaten by a megalodon, but what a way to go, amirite?)
Look out, salesman! There’s a giant prehistoric ghost shark coming! Oh no, he has his AirPods in, he can’t hear us! Oh no!
Most women in the anthology don’t get the same luxury (I mean the nudity thing, not the ghost shark thing). If a woman appears on screen, there’s a strong probability that you’re about the see her breasts or genitals (if they’re not out from the get-go) and it’s almost always in a blatantly, specifically sexual way. The worst offender for this is “The Witness.” A woman sees a murder occur in the building across from her, and the killer notices her peeking. The rest of the short is her fleeing the murderer, robe flapping to expose her tits and bits for all the city to see.
She takes a break from running for her life, however, to work her shift in an over-the-top sex club. Because, again, women are rarely and barely characters in this anthology, so of course this woman who’s fleeing the man who just murdered her doppelganger (we don’t have time to unpack that, so leave it in the box for now) needs to stop running, strip down, and have sex with a couch (not unpacking that either) in front of a room full of faceless women in gimp suits. The murderer is there to watch as well, and be rubbed up on, because of course he is.
Now look, I’m no prude, and I believe sex workers deserve respect, protection, and professional legitimacy. My issue with this scene isn’t the wildness of this technicolor BDSM club of the future, but the lazy objectification of our main character (she is supposed to be our main character, right?) and the absolute pointlessness of the scene.
“The Witness” is 12 minutes long. With such limited time, every minute must serve the plot. The minutes in the sex club served not the story, but the hungry gaze of its presumably straight male audience.
I know what LDR is trying to do in shorts like “The Witness.” It’s trying to be shocking and avant-garde, but science fiction’s already been pushing the envelope on sex and violence for years. We’ve seen so many female bodies used and broken on screen that we’re no longer shocked or thrilled by yet another installment of “ogle and then brutalize this nameless female character.”
It’s cheap, it’s weak, and it’s a disservice to the progressive nature of the genre.
Over and over in the anthology, women’s suffering is used as a cheap plot device. Multiple stories are driven by rape and body-destroying acts of violence against women. And it’s not like LDR is bringing some kind of fresh, healing perspective to the table when they use a woman’s assault as an easy characterization tool. It’s not about the women, after all. Only their bodies.
I’ve struggled the most with two examples of this rape-as-a-weak-plot-device issue in LDR. First, there’s “Sonnie’s Edge,” in which our main character’s assault is brought up tactlessly by one of her companions as a piece of poorly-written exposition. It’s flat and cheap and made my eyes roll so far backwards that I could see my brain cells fizzling out in real time.
“And does it get worse from there?” you may ask, to which I reply, “Boy howdy, you know it does!”
Because next comes the queer-baiting, which everyone knows is a hot-button topic for me. I could talk about the ending of this short for almost as long as I could talk about gender in science fiction. The extremely short version: the audience is taunted with two women getting a bit hot with each other (and it’s surprisingly not handled as badly as it could have been), and then one kills the other. Brutally. By stabbing her through the head and then stomping her skull to mush.
I expect so little, and yet am still disappointed. Source
It’s a terrible scene, made especially terrible by all the violence this murdered woman has already endured, and by her queerness. The plot explains that she wasn’t killed because of her sexuality, but the subtext is there, whether the writers intended it or not.
There’s so much more to “Sonnie’s Edge” that makes me want to rip my hair out, but I have neither the time nor the hair for it, so let’s talk about something a bit more complex.
“Good Hunting” is subtler in its treatment of rape and violence, if just barely. It’s the story of a spirit hunter’s son and the huli jing (a Chinese fox spirit) that he spared as a child. It follows his relationship with this mystical feminine spirit throughout the years as their small village is absorbed and transformed by British colonization.
The huli jing does get to be more of a character than other women in the series, but she’s also a very on-the-nose metaphor for her country. As trains and machines and towering cities cut through the landscape, she’s increasingly trapped in the form of a human woman, rather than her true fox spirit shape. So, as the British rape the land, so do British men rape the huli jing. One particularly powerful and gluttonous man enslaves her and, unable to get hard for anything that’s not a machine, replaces her body with machinery.
It’s body horror, and like everything in LDR, it’s visceral and uncensored. A beautiful spirit of the land is now a colonist’s sexbot.
Our protagonist, the spirit-hunter’s son, uses the mechanical expertise he’s been forced to develop in order to work on British trains to help the huli jing regain some of her original body. With his help, she shifts into a mechanical fox creature again, and is able to hunt through the streets of their colonized city, defending other Chinese women from white men.
Which… I mean, yes, good. Very good. Heck ‘em up, huli jing. But I can’t help but feel conflicted about yet another story powered by extreme on-screen sexual violence against women.
Science fiction is capable of so much more than this. So much about LDR was delightful. I was tickled by a story in which a group of robots tour a post-apocalyptic city, and the concept of a bunch of farmers piloting mech-suits to drive back alien invaders is terrific. I appreciated the beautiful CGI and traditional animation work of many of the pieces… but I was shaken from my moments of appreciation by the gratuitous, exploitative, and disturbing scenes of sex and violence.
On screen and off, sci-fi has come a long way in its treatment of gender, and I’m grateful for that. I’m not bashing the entire LDR anthology, despite my concerns and frustrations. I want more of this kind of content, after all, but I also want to hold creators to a higher standard. I’m not asking for instant perfection, but I do need to see a little effort. The age of using sexual violence as a badge of edginess is dead. You’re not being fresh and gritty anymore. You’re cheapening and normalizing the mistreatment of women, and on top of that, you’re being a lazy writer.
Step it up. Do better. Your audience is expanding and advancing, and it’s time you caught up.