"Wanted" reflects changes in the economy and gender relationships
Wanted
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov
Universal Pictures
110 minutes
Rated R
2008
Reviewed 2008 July
[This review contains mild spoilers.]
"Wanted" seems to make fun of every comic book, superhero or dream/hallucination/illusion-themed movie this reviewer has seen featuring a vulnerable or insecure First World character. Some accustomed to less action- and sex-focused movies of the same kind will call "Wanted" trashy, but many will take the movie seriously.
Stylistically, "The Matrix" was obviously an inspiration for "Wanted" and its "bullet time" sequences. But MIWS would challenge anyone who thinks "The Matrix" is a particularly progressive movie to tell the difference between "The Matrix" and "Wanted" in terms of basic content, leaving aside "The Animatrix," which MIWS has discussed. Both films depict a white office worker on the verge of losing his job and over whom a boss exercises power. The main difference is that "The Matrix" couches the theme in a language of revolution while "Wanted" uses an amerikan folk language of interpersonal relationships and gender.
Specifically, main character Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is a loser whose girlfriend is f-ing with his best friend, and he knows it. The best friend even gets Gibson to buy condoms for him. Gibson's boss is an obese "bitch" who sets off panic attacks that Gibson has to control with medicine. Gibson wonders what his long-gone father would think of him. Cue guns-blasting Angelina Jolie coming out of nowhere to offer Gibson a new life with a hot babe, hot cars, a major self-esteem boost, and lots and lots of money. It turns out that Gibson's panic attacks are actually a manifestation of a time-dilating power that would allow Gibson to focus on objects if he could learn to control the ability. Gibson possesses the potential to be an elite assassin. Gibson's father was part of an ancient fraternity of assassins bringing order to the world.
There is a twist in the movie that may make the viewer wonder whether having a non-normal life is really a good thing, but the movie's message is clearly: Figure out who you are, and take control of your life. The movie's main character speaks directly to the audience through narration.
Looking at "Wanted" and other movies (such as "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (2005), also starring Angelina Jolie) and TV shows, every amerikan wants to be a celebrity, hero, or spy/assassin, it seems like. This is interesting in its own right as a reflection of a bourgeois outlook. But "Wanted" expects people to believe that downtown office workers are broke to the point of almost going hungry or becoming homeless, as Gibson's repeated visits to an ATM make clear. This is the real economic content of "The Matrix" and similar movies depicting office workers, even "Brazil" (1985): pressure for higher and more secure living standards for people who are already exploiters, not a critique of "alienation" or opposition to capitalist exploitation as it actually exists in the world.
The Wesley Gibson character in "Wanted" is deliberately geeky. The fantasy of being powerful, however, is not a geeky or infantile thing specific to comic books and comic book movies like "Spider-Man." Westerners either dream of being more powerful or of losing power, losing control. This is reflected pervasively in Western art, and in films as diverse as "Vanilla Sky" (2001) and arguably "A Beautiful Mind" (2001). Westerners' economic position in the world is not enough for them; they want more stability and power. They also long for greater power as individuals. If there appears to be no connection between "Wanted" and some of the movies MIWS has named, it may be because of elements reflecting the movie's young target audience. As a movie about individuals controlling their own lives, "Wanted" communicates a common message to a certain demographic. There are things more specific to "Wanted," which have to do with the economy and gender. With concerns about the condition of the middle class and service workers in the First World, "Wanted" is timely. "Wanted" promotes fantasies of First World petty-bourgeois impoverishment that Maoists have debunked. "Wanted" also depicts powerful First World females.
"Wanted" brings to mind the Michael Douglas, Demi Moore drama "Disclosure" (2004), which also features a female boss. So, among other things, one can say that "Wanted" deals with the male worker-female boss relationship. Gibson explains his boss' behavior as being rooted in a middle school self-esteem issue with her appearance. It is Gibson's way of resisting his boss, but weirdly politically correct in preserving an image of femininity as pure and innocent. In the Gibson view, only certain female individuals are bitches, and bitchiness must be a result of childhood experiences or something else beyond personal control. Even Fox (Angelina Jolie), a "bitch" certainly to her assassination targets and sometimes to Gibson, had a traumatic childhood experience, involving her father.
Gibson tries to avenge his own father. Gibson was destined to be an assassin. Interpersonal relationships offer an easy way of filling the storyline of this movie, which otherwise has to rely on New Agey ideas and suspension of disbelief. However, MIWS would argue that "Wanted," in couching empowerment and disempowerment in interpersonal terms, avoids confronting the implications of a female boss: sex with a power arrangement potentially favoring a female. Gibson's boss has to have the most stereotypically sexually repulsive body imaginable (as if that would preclude hierarchical workplace sexual issues), a difference with Demi Moore's character in "Disclosure." The whole story in "Disclosure" revolves around a female adult's rise through the corporate gender glass ceiling and how much credibility a heterosexual adult male can have as a sexual harassment victim and as a casualty of corporate corruption involving a female executive.
"Disclosure" quite directly raises the question of whether a female adult can be male socially speaking, while "Wanted" re-inserts Angelina Jolie's bitchy character into a heterosexual male sexual fantasy ("re-" because Fox's bitchiness sometimes makes her status as a romantic interest for Gibson uncertain, not because Angelina Jolie is known as a bisexual actress). Through his relationship with Angelina Jolie's character, Gibson is in fact defined as "the man" (in his best friend's words). Fox, by implication, remains a "woman." Next to Fox, it would seem that Gibson's boss, though having power over Gibson, just isn't attractive enough to be a threat in a male way. Also, Gibson's boss may be sexually ambiguous to viewers. Butchness or bitchiness, Fox ends up looking that much more feminine despite her assassin abilities and no-nonsense demeanor. Fox's characteristics are potentially a feminine erotic attraction. A twist in the movie suggests that Fox (apart from carrying out orders coming from the Loom of Fate) isn't really in control of her life and thus doesn't really represent a threat to males.
Thinking about how "Wanted" and "Disclosure" may complement each other or at least be consistent with each other, though, maybe it is that the heterosexual First World adult female and the heterosexual First World adult male would both accept having an opposite-sex boss as long as he or she is attractive and doesn't sexually dominate him or her. It is a solution that would leave the multifaceted relationship between power and sex intact. Contrary to what "Wanted" suggests, attractiveness actually results in privilege for the attractive. There are still power issues when there is physical attraction, something that "Wanted" obscures by portraying the female boss as ugly.
Power is itself attractive, which the absence of a sexual relationship between Gibson and his boss hides. Men's doing things to make up for a lack of physical attractiveness and differences in desire have long been the story of heterosexual relationships. As First World female adults become more male, hidden changes are taking place in attraction and desire. Males (biological) may increasingly fantasize about having sex with powerful females.
Female and male adults in First World imperialist nations get along on a social, if not interpersonal, level. The word "bitch" is commonly used in describing individuals, but First World female adults as a whole along with First World male adults are enemies, enemies of the oppressed globally and are oppressors even in terms of gender. On a global level, First World female adults are like First World male adults in their sexual and lifestyle power and privilege.
MIWS does not see a particular need to have an alternative to "Wanted" of the same type of the movie. "Wanted" dispenses advice to individuals on how to live their lives. Making movies with all the correct scientific ideas about exploitation and gender is also not where the struggle is within the First World. The struggle is in pitting people in a nation of exploiters like Euro-Amerika against each other to benefit the oppressed. However, "Wanted" is interesting as another movie confirming cultural and political trends that correspond to material and structural shifts. Office workers and other unproductive workers form an increasing part of the First World workforce. Themselves exploiters of Third World workers, these office workers ally themselves with bigger First World exploiters. "Wanted" expresses the interests of the exploiter First World petty-bourgeois but in no way challenges the system. "Wanted" offers petty-bourgeois viewers inspiration for individual self-improvement and may seem to divert them from acting as a group for their interests, but "Wanted" fits neatly into the individualism and culture of self-entitlement that work with nationalist and chauvinist forces to help perpetuate imperialism. Awakened to the world outside their cubicles, First Worlders are more likely to attack Third World workers than act in any way that makes it more difficult for imperialism to exploit and repress people.
Gibson questions "fate" and following orders that have no explanations. It would be a stretch to say that "Wanted" opposes assassinations as they exist in the real world. "Wanted" is actually backward-looking, suggesting that the secret society of assassins was an institution that once had a place in the world, perhaps before society became capitalist, making it possible for anonymous individuals to put getting rich above acting morally and get away with it. The Fraternity doesn't need to exist, because killing is now done by government spies and soldiers. Bad guys are still being killed. "Wanted" perpetuates a naive good-versus-evil view of First World repression, the kind that has allowed Spider-Man to be used as a mascot of imperialist aggression. "Wanted" makes killing look cool and sexy in an environment where killing means killing oppressed nation people and death row inmates.