March 6, 2024

Megamind: Critiquing Toxic Masculinity, Perpetuating Misogyny & Hegemonic Values

In which acceptance can be reheated in the microwave of evil.

Hello friends, this week I had thoughts™ about Megamind. Yes, again. What can I say? Mostly, I wanted to talk about some of the notes I took, so this is going to be a little more casual and loosey-goosey than some of my other posts. But more specifically, I want to talk a bit about how this movie, while it does critique toxic masculinity, it didn’t manage to do so without doing a cheeky bit of misogyny at the same time. I also thought a lot about Patriarchy (shocker) and how the same dominant values used to harm and create Megamind and Titan/harm Hal, are later used as the answer to the movie's central conflict.

All thoughts are my own. I’m just a silly goofy girl watching a film for the millionth time.

“… Like A Girl”

While Megamind and Meto Man are arguing in front of a tied-up Roxanne, she says “Girls, girls, you’re both pretty! Can I go home now?”

Because nothing is more demeaning to men than being called a ‘girl’, I suppose.

The other thing that bothers me about this line, aside from the ick of it, is that Roxanne is presented to us as a smart and confident woman who is also more emotionally mature than either of the men bickering in front of her, and yet she is still an active perpetrator of the idea that girls and women are inherently lesser. You would expect two hyper-competent and physically able men to go toe-to-toe in physically violent ways, an assumption that is reinforced by all the weapons and threats, yet here they are swapping increasingly ridiculous comebacks. The implication seems to be that the bickering is childish and stupid, perhaps even “catty”, and is thus seen as a girlish behaviour.

I think Megamind, while being critical of some as yet often under-critiqued aspects of our dominant social culture (patriarchy), unfortunately, does so by also reinforcing sexist stereotypes about women. Wait, you might say. Isn’t Roxanne a strong female character? Doesn’t she solve the mystery of Titan? Yes. She does, and she is fairly strong, competent, and active. One (me, a dreamer) could also read her as a secret genius (Megamind: Women Can Be Super Villains Too). 

A Damsel, Waiting For Someone

 It is nice to see a character who is forced into the role of a damsel in distress, who transcends the distress and finds herself bored. It’s a fun subversion, and I enjoyed it. She may be unafraid of being kidnapped, and it may take a lot to rile her up into panic in dangerous situations, and she may be very active outside of being kidnapped, but she’s also still a damsel in a distressing situation and is unable to rescue or protect herself (But what the hell, a girl can’t do everything).

The recurring narrative for her is being kidnapped by Megamind, then saved by Metro Man. While she’s an active character throughout the film, she is also often rendered helpless and powerless. Even when she smashes a whole guitar over Metro Man’s head, it doesn’t leave a scratch—such are the power dynamics between human woman, superhero, and supervillain. Even though I like the subversion of "damsel who is not in distress", and I think Roxanne is a strong character in her own right outside of that often-relegated role for female characters, Megamind is still a narrative in which the central female character has less power than her male counterparts, and is rendered helpless and reliant on their benevolence multiple times.

Roxanne Ritchie: I believe someone’s gonna stand up to Megamind.

Not her, but someone. What can she do? (Someone, it’s always Someone. Consider this a teaser for more on communitarianism, which I will talk more about later).

“Get the girl.”

This may seem like a small, harmless little line, but it got me thinking about all the small and insidious ways we contribute to the objectification of women and girls. 

Minion says, “I may not know much, but I do know this. The bad guy doesn’t get the girl.”

Later, Hal also says, “Being a hero is for losers. It’s work, work, work, twenty-four-seven. And for what? I only took the gig to get the girl and it turns out Roxanne doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

The difference between these two occurrences is the context; Minion is a character we ultimately see as a “good” guy, on the side we’re rooting for, while Hal is someone we are meant to see as harmful and dangerous. Personally, I don’t like this phrasing coming from either of them. Even with the contextual difference, even though we’re meant to see Hal’s behaviour and use of this language as “bad”, ultimately the phrase still feels unproblematised because it’s also said by characters we’re meant to agree with. Minion is, if we’re generous, talking about getting with the girl—but this is a reinterpretation of his wording, and it’s easy to give the benefit of the doubt when we like the person saying it. Hal is very much written as a man who expects his attention to be reciprocated, that he is entitled to Roxanne’s love because he did X, Y, Z things. He really only bothered with all the heroic stuff because he wanted to win her.

But then, Megamind also says it.

Roxanne Ritchie: Hey, who needs him? We can beat Tighten ourselves. I say we go back to the evil lair, grab some ray guns, hold ’em sideways and just go all ‘gangsta’ on him.

Megamind: We can’t.

Roxanne Ritchie: So that’s it. You’re just giving up?

Megamind: I’m the bad guy. I don’t save the day. I don’t fly off into the sunset and I don’t get the girl. I’m going home.

Megamind is not quite like Titan, who feels vindictive because he didn’t “get the girl” after bothering with all the hero stuff; Megamind is feeling a lifetime of insecurity from being mistreated and villainised, too. (Although, how different are Hal and Megamind in that respect?) Even so, one of the reasons he gives for giving up and allowing people to be displaced from their homes, be forced to remain indoors for some relative idea of safety from the problems he helped create, is at least partially rooted in “My love for this woman is not/will not be reciprocated.”

I want to do mental work here and not take him literally because we all know that he will be a hero in the end, and I don’t want to believe he actually thinks “I do good thing so I get girl, but if no girl then I won’t do good thing”—as I said, there’s more going on in his mind than that one thing. Roxanne represents and offers the validation and acceptance that Megamind has never had; He has 88 life sentences, and is told he will “never change.”. But it’s still a sticking point for him, and that feels worth unpacking and critically discussing, especially since it's line said multiple times by multiple characters.

How different is this from Titan’s reaction to being rejected? Titan gets angry and physically violent; Megamind turns himself back into jail, withdrawing from society and leaving them even more vulnerable to the dangerous and violent environment he created. So Megamind may not commit active and direct violence, but could one argue he is enabling it?

The trope or attitude of “getting the girl” has long been criticized, especially in narratives centering male heroes, and has been called by some a pattern which rewards men with the love of a woman for whatever heroic thing they do. It shows up in many stories and is the happy ending at the end of many, many, many tales. In the end, the hero always “gets the girl”. 

According to the TVtropes page about this, “If his task involved rescuing a Damsel in Distress, the rescuee is the princess the hero will wed.”1 Megamind does this, even if it is also depicting another man as more overtly and actively claiming he is entitled to said wedding with said damsel. 

One thing Megamind does do nicely, in my opinion, is making Roxanne her own person, with a personality, wants, actions, and values.

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Roxanne’s Cleverness

Megamind is obviously a story centred on a man, or men. Megamind and Metro Man and Hal/Titan are three pillars of the story… But Roxanne is the fourth, and I don’t quite feel like she gets the same respect.

That being said, while watching the film, I couldn’t help but notice just how competent we’re shown Roxanne is, while not really being allowed to see it. For example, we see the male characters planning, theorizing, preparing, and executing their grand master plans. We see Megamind’s cleverness when he lays traps and when he comes up with a plan to manipulate Hal/Titan into heroism so he has someone to fight. We see Metro Man’s cleverness when we learn he did not actually fall for Megamind’s trick in the beginning but rather faked his death. Time is spent on them.

When it comes to Roxanne, however, while we see her bravery in not being bothered by her own kidnapping in the beginning, the pivotal discovery she makes in the film feels logically ungrounded and therefore less clever and understandable than everyone else’s. The implication is that Roxanne is doing good investigative work throughout the city, and that is how she is able to discover Megamind’s plan is “TITAN”.

But, why and how did she hang all of the pieces of paper like that, in just the right way, to make it all line up to “TITAN”? When did Megamind ever lay the pieces in such a way as to allow a clever investigator to put everything together and work out his grand master plan? Much time is spent on the burgeoning romance between Roxanne and who she thinks is Hal (but is really Megamind), yet we don’t see any of this intelligent discovery work, nor are we allowed to understand it. Much time is spent on building up the male character’s plans and executions of said plans, so as viewers we can understand them and follow their logic, yet we aren’t allowed to do the same with Roxanne. I want to be clear that this is not a criticism, merely an observation, and something I want to think about. One of my favourite questions to ask is “why?”.

It makes me think about damsels and how passive they often are. When it comes to this discovery plot point, I feel like I am being rendered a [very] metaphorical damsel, a passive viewer sat in a chair who is only allowed to watch Roxanne in her final moment of discovery, not allowed to engage with the mystery and understand it alongside her. Roxanne is not a passive character—she is very active, was clever enough to deduce the location of Megamind’s hideout, and was bold enough to go in and explore. Why is her cleverness so often something we are not allowed to actively see but rather must passively accept? 

Individualism & Hegemonic Values

Although superhero movies are surreal and are "not realistic", they can tell us a lot about the traits we associate with "heroism" and how those traits and qualities represent, perpetuate, and uphold dominant hegemonic values.

Roxanne Ritchie: (sigh) Someone has to stop Megamind.

Roxanne Ritchie: I believe someone’s gonna stand up to Megamind.

Roxanne Ritchie: The city’s parks restored to their original glory. The streets the safest they’ve been. The banks reopened. Has something happened to Megamind? Has someone tamed this monster?

There is very little communitarianism in Megamind. That is, an ideology that recognises and upholds collective responsibility, based on the belief that our social identities and personalities are moulded by community relationship2. Interestingly enough, the very story of Megamind seems to be grounded in this albeit in a way that feels unacknowledged: Megamind lands in a prison and is socialised there, and one can see how his personality, skills, and identity were moulded by his time in prison. Even Hal's personality is moulded by toxic patriarchal ideas of manhood, masculinity, and entitlement to women's time/space/attention. One’s community and one's relationship to said community helps shape these characters in explicit ways, and yet.

Megamind very much buys into the idea of a “one true hero”, an individual who will make all the difference, with no consideration for systemic change led by and within a community. Roxanne and Megamind find Metro Man and ask him to stand up to Titan. Roxanne chooses to stand up to Titan on her own when nobody else will. Then it’s Megamind’s turn to be the hero. Though there is some teamwork in the climax of the movie, much of the narrative upholds the idea that “someone” will come along and help, “someone” will make a difference, “someone” must protect Metro City.

There is this “someone” and then there is everyone else. There is an active “someone” and then the passive others who wait for him.

There is no acknowledgment or real consideration of the value offered by interdependence and community cooperation—what if everyone (or a lot of people) in Metroctity stood up to Megamind? What if the characters or the story acknowledged the ways in which Megamind was set up for failure by being raised in a carceral system that relies on punitive justice? What if Roxanne had called in her networking connections and they used their platforms to inspire people to engage in collective clean-up measures? (I do like that Megamind cleaned up his own messes, but the idea stands).

When I think of the dirty (trash-filled) environment in Megamind, I think of the COVID19 pandemic and how our individualist culture has contributed to the same lack of community care. The Metro City community picking up rubbish and clearing paths would get the job done in no time, make pathways accessible for those with wheelchairs and other mobility aids, and make the city nicer to live in (we even see this impact when Megamind cleans up). In the real world, a community masking up and advocating for clean air would help achieve safe and equal access to public spaces for disabled and chronically ill people, would help us re-integrate into society instead of being forced to stay home so we don’t get sick. I think of how many people see disabled folk as "lazy" for staying home, despite being forced to for our safety; And I think of Megamind and how people view him as "irredeemable" when he commits crime, despite being relegated to the role of criminal before he was ever really given a chance to be anything else.

The values of individualistic heroism resist obligations to the community and all the social responsibility it entails, while also positioning itself as the ultimate act of caring for the community, as aspirational, and the answer to evil. But the evil Megamind faces isn’t an individual issue, it’s systemic, just like ableism and the pandemic. He is racially coded—look at how black children are criminalized by society, meanwhile Metro Man is a white child who receives power and accolades as a given—and treated with prejudice, is sentenced to 88 life sentences and told he will never change, that he is irredeemable; He is a criminal, always, incapable of good, a victim of punitive justice enacted not only by the law enforcement and carceral system but by the community at large. Even his creation of Titan is a community issue; Hal is a product/victim of toxic masculinity, which is a result of the systemic oppression that is, you guessed it, patriarchy—which is enforced by people of all genders.

It follows a traditional individualist narrative template wherein the schema of empowerment is such that the protagonist is progressively more powerful and recognised by the community, “empowered” as a result of empowering said community by rescuing them. This, opposed to empowerment through working with and within the community for real effective change. So, in very broad strokes, if patriarchy operates through dominance, power, and individualism, and patriarchy played a huge part in creating Titan, why is the answer to the issue of Titan yet more individualism, dominance, and power? 

It feels like ‘Individualistic system’ + ‘Individualistic Heroism’ is somehow meant to come together and = Community in the end.

It may seem necessary. The story unfolds in such a way that necessitates such an answer, such a dynamic. But it is, as always, a story written through a series of writer’s choices, and I’m curious to know why this was the chosen narrative shape—and why this narrative shape is so common.
After succeeding in the big climactic battle, the crowd of humans in the street rushes at him in thanks, and he pulls out a dehydration gun and aims it at them, shouting at them to get back. Roxanne puts herself between them and tells the people that he's just not used to getting “positive feedback”—a trauma response if ever I saw one, from being constantly bullied, misjudged, and looked down on. The happy ending relies on the hope that after his climactic battle, the system of values and beliefs held by the populace of Metro City actually changes for the better—that Megamind doesn't only get applause and thanks for saving the city, but also is finally accepted and isn't villainised any longer.

While Hal ends up arrested and locked up in Megamind's former cell, where we know he will not be rehabilitated. Thus the movie begins and ends in the same place, with a man in prison, with no hope he can ever change.

There ya have it

Those are the rest of my thoughts on Megamind. For now. Never say never, and all that.

What do you think? 

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