Women Underground

Watched 10 Cloverfield Lane last night---a pretty good flick. Without spoiling much, the concept is a young woman wakes up from a car crash in an underground cellar being held captive (?) by an older man. She freaks out, but he maintains the world is under attack either by another country or aliens, and everyone outside is suffering a fatal skin disease. So, is she safe or is she prey? I will talk about this movie--with spoilers--in another post.

What occurred to me as the credits rolled is that this is the 5th piece of media about women being held in a bunker underground I've seen in the past one year: 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Room, Ex Machina, Stranger Things. Oh, and. There's a new movie coming out this fall called Morgan that is also about a girl with special powers trapped in an underground bunker. It's not truly a repetitive "problem" as all five of the works I have seen are actually really good. But, huh.

Being a drinker of the critical theory Kool-Aid, I can't believe this is coincidence. These stories are all slight variations on the current zeitgeist of American feminism. We have been down here with people who say they are helping us when they actually are harvesting us: for our intelligence, for our innocence, for our unique abilities. Most sexist men do not know they are sexist. They become funnels between women and power believing they are protecting women or helping them. Women made huge strides in the earth 20th Century, and then again in the 70s, and now...we reach a new age. Without being an expert in the field, I champion Twitter for bringing women together instead of lashing them apart with catty magazine headlines and lonely kitchens. Not even concrete can contain us and everyone knows it.