How Much Do I Like Scarlett Johansson? This Much!

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern

As I sit here awaiting eviction, or incarceration, or whatever fresh hell lies before me, I guess I might as well try to have a little fun. I guess if you are a man who wants to switch sides in the gender war, you have to fall all the way through the bottom of the male world, like crawling down the devil's back in the ninth level of hell in Dante's Inferno. One day I'll reach daylight. I hope that day is soon...like tomorrow...

So I've never seen any Avengers movie, unless you count the three Tobey Maguire Spider-Mans and the two Hulk movies. So I turn on my television Sunday afternoon, after having revealed the identity of “Jane Galt” as Scarlett Johansson the night before, and what do I see but one of the Avengers movies on the Spanish-language channel Azteca, and there's Scarlett and my fellow ex-convict Robert Downey Jr. I mean, I have to watch, right?

There may be some day when I have to stand in front of a camera and try to walk this back, but what the fuck?!?! I mean, just like my opinion isn't going to stop sales of Taylor Swift albums, my opinion isn't going to stop people going to see Marvel movies. Even if my Scarlett dreams do come true, and Scarlett Johansson marries me, I'm sure Marvel could actually use it to their marketing advantage somehow that her husband hates the movies. And if she doesn't have a sense of humor about herself, and her work, not the girl for me! If she's as serious all the time as she was that night in Vegas, not the girl for me! I'd still love to work for her, though...

I fall in and out of near-fluency in Spanish depending on what I've been doing. Right now, it takes concentration and effort to completely follow the dialogue, so I stop trying. But there's Scarlett! So I watch. I like Scarlett Johansson enough to sit here and watch pretty much the last movie I want to see, just for a few minutes of Scarlett.  Which movie is this? I don't even know. Age of Ultron, I think? The one where the villains are robots. That probably doesn't help...

Anyway, Scarlett, do you have ANY powers whatsoever, or do you just keep getting killed like Kenny from South Park? Are you the only one who isn't a superhero but they just let you wear the suit and tag along because you're cute?!?! It's actually hard to watch Scarlett getting beat up even though I know its not real, and it makes me think about how sci fi and futuristic movies where there is less of a gender distinction desensitizes people to violence against women.

I debate with myself whether that is a good thing or not. I mean, violence is really about power. If I was in a fight with Miesha Tate, I'm at a significant power disadvantage, so if she uses the skills she has to beat the shit out of me, how is that any different than if I beat up a woman, or a man who is weaker than me?

The real issue with violence isn't gender so much as any time a stronger person takes physical advantage of a weaker one, or in fact whether it is physical or psychological or emotional weakness. It just so happens historically men were almost always stronger, both physically and in terms of their ability to influence institutions in their own favor. But as that changes, we must remember that power, not gender, is the fundamental issue when it comes to violence and exploitation.

But lately, it is not the case in every arena and every interaction that the man has more power. Hell, here in San Diego, it would be interesting to have some gender strength tests. I'm not sure that amongst twenty-somethings, women aren't physically stronger than men around here, because all these girls are working out now, and for guys, it seems to have gone out of style a bit. Ten years ago, Pacific Beach was filled with muscle-bound guys pouring out of 24 Hour Fitness nonstop, but since I returned to the world, it seems like being thin and wearing skinny jeans is the style for men, and women are the ones building muscle.

It also makes me think about how a lot of these little actresses are probably pretty damn dangerous. They've been standing around movie sets with martial arts teachers and military consultants for a couple of decades. They had to learn a lot. I think girls have taken over a lot of the personal security jobs for actresses. Much better than hanging out with Mr. T. Hire a girl with a couple of black belts (or one of these girls that just got out of the IDF), and you've got a bodyguard you can hang out at the mall with.

So back to this movie...Has the intellectual level of America and the world fallen so far that this is entertainment? This would actually be enjoyable for me in the way bad movies are enjoyable, if not for the fact that I know all the actors are capable of doing stuff that I like. And oh, there goes Scarlett's Horse Whisperer co-star Robert Redford. Imagine that! You buy a ticket to an Avengers movie hoping to see your favorite actor, you have a good chance of leaving happy. The posters should just say “STARRING: Hollywood”. And there's Sam Jackson...

All you guys, I've seen your other work. You can't like doing this. Seven people standing and sitting around and trading one line of dialogue at a time. And the rest of it must be standing in front of a green screen all day, yes? I enjoyed Chris Evans more covering in whipped cream with a banana sticking out of his ass than doing this! Money's better being Captain America, though. Scarlett, you can't be getting your whole $20 million for this, are you?

This movie is just like The Transformers, each ten minutes looks just like the last and I have no idea who's fighting who for what. I guess you have to read comic books? What's the agenda of the villains? Let me guess: World domination? Kill most people, enslave the rest blah blah blah?

And hey, I don't mean to insult the directors, crew, screenwriters. I'm not criticizing your ability. I know that you are all talented, hard-working professionals. You've made the movies you were asked to make, and they are all wildly successful. I'm sure that had you been asked to make Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia, you would have made something along those lines.

This is painful, but I keep watching just so I can see a few scenes of Scarlett that I've never seen. I liked My Brother The Pig more than this! It was cute. And its not even like she has to work at this, so its not like Ghost in the Shell or even the Island where there are a few little bits of brilliant acting to make it worth watching. It's gotta get dull making that same wide-eyed, half-concerned half-scared face, yes?  

But I must admit, I like seeing Robert Downey Jr. too. I always thought that it was one of the great injustices in our country that has a long record of injustice that he was sent to prison for having a substance addiction.  Injustice is no less if the person suffering it is rich and famous.  So now that I've been to prison too, it's good to see him back on top.  Gives me hope because I need far less than to be Iron Man.

But finally I give up because like ten minutes have gone by with no Scarlett.  But now I actually want to see an action movie that I find entertaining and at least has something that passes for substance. So I put in The Chronicles of Riddick. Shout out to Vin Diesel. A girl told me I looked like you once, and I thought, “I wish I looked as good as that dude.” People will go crazy if I say The Chronicles of Riddick is better than The Matrix. I won't say its better. I'll say I find it more entertaining, though.

But they had a clock up on Azteca that Civil War was coming on in about an hour, so I went back to check that out and see if it was better. It is. At least there is some meaningful dialogue and a plot that is followable if not exactly coherent. Still, these one-line at a time conversations between half a dozen people. Nobody talks like that. No wonder you guys can never reach a conclusion on anything!  Do you actually have in your contracts who gets how many lines of dialogue?

Why would you even try fighting this red thing when all you've got is bows and arrows?!?!

Watching all this acting talent doing this, it's like if you tuned in to see the NBA Finals, and instead it was Kawhi Leonard and Steph Curry playing checkers. Not even chess. That would be a little interesting. I'd bet on Kawhi Leonard. Quiet people are usually better chess players. Although Steph's fairly quiet too...

Hey, breaking news!  Scarlett has powers! She shot some blue web thing off her wrist, but it didn't really seem to do that much. Did Tony make that thing for you so you wouldn't be totally defenseless? Did you guys make these movies for all your kids to be able to watch you while you're away? Is that it? I mean, you all have enough money, most of you anyway. I know, its hard to turn it down when, what does it take, about four or five months to make one of these movies, and its an easy billion dollars in profit at minimum, damn near three billion for the latest one. I get it. Cash rules.

But I think there is another explanation. Sure, Hollywood will take the cash, but just like we saw with Tobey Maguire and the Spider-Man movies, they don't actually need any of you. I talk to these people who are scheduling their lives around the next Avengers release. They aren't movie fans. They don't care who the stars are. More than anything, I hear criticism that they don't like this person or that person in the role because they don't fit the comic. The audiences might like it better if it was all CGI like Final Fantasy, then they could have their exact comic book character. Marvel Studios or whoever is running this show could replace Robert Downey Jr. with Robert who works at the 7-11 down the street, and replace Scarlett Johansson with a CGI talking spider, and it would still do two billion.

So why would all these talented actors participate in this project, when most of you who have been around for a long time, I know you've turned down money for artistic principle?  So what is the artistic principle making all the most talented actors of a generation want to stand around wearing latex suits? I've been puzzling over this for a long time, and making fun of Scarlett Johansson about it, though I didn't expect that it would ever circulate back to her since her universe seemed so far away from mine.

Scarlett's universe is far away from mine. I thought that, while my sister was working in the Fox tower in Century City, a place I would imagine Scarlett and a lot of you have been, and while a screenplay of mine was being circulated to Hollywood actors. And my sister is enough of a bitch that if she saw Scarlett walking through the hallway at Fox, she might say “I love your work, but my brother says you haven't done anything good since The Horse Whisperer”. I'm sure a lot of you know of my sister. Many of you have met her because her daughter went to school with your kids at Brentwood. Maybe you guys like her, though I doubt it because I would imagine that all of you have a better ability to see through phony people than I do. But she and I don't get along, to say the least. If I never see her again, that'll be too soon.

But anyway Scarlett, I hope you aren't mad about anything I said, if people repeated it back to you. Mostly I was sort of joking. I just didn't expect that anyone would find my opinions about your movies or your cuteness worth repeating, and I didn't calculate for the fact that a lot of people that I'd allowed to be a part of my life were just rotten.

But anyway, this brings me back to the mystery of the superhero movie. Mysterious because I know Hollywood people are smart and Hollywood actors are students of the human condition interested in reflecting what is important about our experiences, as actors have always been going back to ancient Greece. But superhero movies are simplistic children's stories, most of them embedded with a 1950s ultra-right-wing worldview born in the McCarthy era. So why these movies, from a group of people who are intelligent, mature, and (mostly) liberal?

I think the reason Hollywood became Superhero, Inc is that superhero movies give people the idea that extraordinary individuals can be a part of the fight to dictate the future of this world. And if extraordinary individuals can do it, you can do it too.

This is important because we've become a society of people who don't believe they have any power to make a difference, and everybody is waiting on God, or the government, or aliens, or the earth rotating into a new part of the galaxy to bring about change. But these movies say to people, we can be the agents of change. You can be an agent of change. So while these films have become one of the most talked about phenomena in our society, this is the lesson that people are absorbing: “I matter.”

I didn't get that, and I didn't see that these movies were important, because I never lacked belief in my ability to make a difference, at least not until I went to prison. It was just making the RIGHT kind of difference that I found to be a challenge. But power was always right there for me to take it, if I wanted to take it the wrong way. But most people feel powerless in our world today. And what these movies do that is so important, is that they get all those people who are feeling powerless to start looking for their power. And one by one, they'll find it.

But man, this is just too much work to see a few seconds here and there of Scarlett Johansson. I'm sorry Scarlett, I'm putting the Chronicles of Riddick back on! But I understand what you're doing now. And yes, I did see the one scene where it seems like you can't keep a straight face talking to somebody that I know has talked to somebody that I know. That puts you right square in my universe. I feel like Jennifer Love Hewitt in I Know What You Did Last Summer: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?!?”

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern