Here’s a question that no one needed to ask, but it seems, some people are asking anyway: Will boys want to go see A Wrinkle In Time? Will boys think a movie that stars a young black girl is a story for them? Will boys feel represented by a science fantasy movie that doesn’t put someone who looks exactly like them at the center of the story?
These feel like silly questions to ask. More to the point, they are the wrong questions to ask. The only question worth asking is: Why wouldn’t boys be interested in a film just because the hero is a little girl?
In the days just before Ava DuVernay’s new film, which is based on the classic Madeleine L’Engle book of the same name, people seemed to find themselves wondering if boys would want to see the movie given that its poster prominently featured the female leads. One person postulated on Twitter: "This is a GREAT poster - but don't they want little boys to see this too...?" To which The New Yorker's Helen Rosner rebutted with, "I see at least 3 dudes on here, though to be fair, they were hard to make out through the fog of your internalized misogyny."
The implication — that boys need to see images of men and boys otherwise they won’t know a movie is for them — is inherently dangerous. It reinforces a notion that things have to be “for boys” in order to be marketable and relatable to boys. Yet that kind of thinking forgets about all the boys who rushed out to see Frozen, a Disney film about a princess. It ignores how many boys know all the words to “Do You Want To Build A Snowman,” a hit song from an unapologetic princess movie. One that boys love. Most importantly, boys' attention is caught by Elsa because of her ability to hold her own in a fight. That was five years ago. Clearly, our culture’s sexism didn’t limit those boys’ desire to see what could be written off as a “girl’s movie.”
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I know what the world-expanding power of a well-told story can mean for those boys. I know how it can change a life. Once upon a time, I was a little boy, and Barbra Streisand made me a better man, even if I didn’t understand why at the time.
One weekend my mom rented Yentl for a grad school assignment. Rather than go read comic books, or fix one of the bikes I’d taken apart to understand how it worked, I decided to watch Streisand’s movie about a young Jewish woman who masquerades as a Jewish man so she can attend rabbinical school. I’m not Jewish, I’m not a woman, I’m not religious. Yet the movie was riveting for me. I asked my mom a ton of questions about why Barbra Streisand was pretending to be a boy, and why she had to, and why she couldn’t just go to school as a girl. I completely identified with Barbra’s struggle. In fact, watching Yentl was the start of a lot of my understanding of sexism, feminism, and how gender is a socially-constructed performance.
Nowadays, when I look at the posters for A Wrinkle In Time, I wonder what it would have meant to me as a kid if, instead of Barbra studying to be a rabbi, I watched a little black girl like Storm Reid — who looks a lot like my little sister — save the world. Barbra taught me to ask questions about gender. Her film first taught me to see how sexism limits the potential of women and girls. Seeing Storm up there on the screen might’ve taught me to see intersections, to see how race and gender compound to make it even more difficult for a girl who looks like my sister not just move in the world, but to save it, too. To be a boy watching Storm’s fictional triumph, to see her believe in herself when even she wants to doubt her strength based on the toxic messages society gives her, that would have certainly changed how I saw my sister (who coincidentally is named Meg).
As her big brother, I thought of both of us as black kids, siblings against the world. Partners in crime. But I missed how much harder she had it than I did, how much more difficult her challenges were being both black and a girl. Raised in the same house, somehow I didn’t get it. I saw her story the same as I saw mine. I had to go to college to learn that was wrong. It makes me wonder about all the ways I could’ve been a better big brother if I’d learned that sooner.
This dynamic is something that writer Mikki Kendall pointed out on Twitter, as well, writing, “If we keep teaching boys they have to be centered they will never learn to listen to anyone else's stories.” This idea is so damn important. And it’s not something enough men or boys get. Not yet. Boys and men who aren’t interested in stories about girls and women miss out on half the world.
Imagine the stories we have lost because women were only given 34% of speaking roles in movies released in 2017. Seeing a woman, regardless of age, anchor a movie is rare. And the issue extends behind the camera, too; female directors still aren’t given the same chances as their male counterparts. Women are denied the ability to not just tell their own stories, but to tell largely tell any stories. Yet it is crucial that they do, and that people who are not women listen to them. Could you imagine A Wrinkle in Time if a man had directed it instead of Ava DuVernay? I can’t. I hope we never need to find out.
When we watch a movie, a magic spell is cast. We imagine ourselves as the hero, we imagine their struggle as our own. This process of identification enriches our lives. It can also deepen our sense of empathy. This is why it matters so much that Ava picked Storm, a little black girl, to play the hero. Towards the climax, when Meg is forced to confront a manifestation of her self-doubts, it’s a moment we can all empathize with, since we all know those unique self-defeating terrors that only your imagination can conjure. When Meg overcomes hers, as the audience identifies with her, you feel the rush of her victory.
This sense of identification is also why it matters that boys go see the movie. It’s important that boys identify with women and girls in their life. That they take an interest in women, girls, and their stories.
Women and girls’ stories are important. So are boys’ stories. But why do we have to think in those binary terms all the time? We don’t need to gender our interests, instead, we need to teach boys to find women and girls’ stories as valid, vital, and informative. A movie like A Wrinkle in Time gives boys a compelling, entertaining chance to practice this world-changing social skill. With fiction, we each can live a thousand lives. Stories about little girls can help boys grow up to be better men.
Related: A Wrinkle in Time Is Being Praised for Showcasing a Multiracial Family
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