This post is largely triggered by the film Valerian, which
at the time of writing is still in cinemas and I had seen earlier in the week.
It is not limited to Valerian though, or a full critique or review of the film[1],
it is merely using it as a recent example of a common problem in SciFi.
Clothing. What your characters are wearing. You may think
it’s trivial but really it’s not, especially in film and television where the
visual image you create should be telling us as much about the story and
setting as dialogue and and action sequences. Throughout history our clothing
has told a story about how our culture functions, what is important to us, how
we work, the economy, the tastes and ethos and of course the morals. To take a
non-scifi example think about a period drama set in the early 1920s. Whilst
most of the characters are still fairly conservatively dressed a female
character that shows up wearing a knee length skirt will stand out. The skirt
tells us as much about her character as do her actions and the reactions of
supporting cast. Think also how in this period drama, we can instantly tell the
difference between a servant, a working class character and an upper class
character merely by how they are dressed: the cut and shape of the clothes, the
fashions they pick, the fabrics and colours are all visual cues that tell us
about the characters and the setting.
So how does that relate to scifi in general and to Valerian
in particular? Well there were two areas that it stood out to me and we can
tackle them individually. Firstly, gendered uniforms and armour and secondly,
how you dress your aliens.
In the future our uniforms are old fashioned
In Valerian, there was a clear difference between the
uniforms of male coded and female coded military/police/security personnel: trousers
and smart jackets for the men and skirts and tailored jackets for the women. Short
skirts at that. Very short. Now one of the nice things about the uniforms was
how they varied them for rank, but due to the quite frankly ridiculous lack of
female background characters there was no opportunity to compare like with
like.
 |
| Screencap from Valerian City and of a Thousand Planets. The representation of female personnel is so rubbish this is the only still I could find that showed the uniforms |
There are two arguments I anticipate here: that this is a
film adapted from a comic and draws its design from the original art; that real
female soldiers wear skirts so it’s not an issue. I’ll tackle them separately.
The first argument that it is staying faithful to the comic
art can and should be dismissed easily. While the film does take a lot of
influence and direction from the comic there are many, many things it has
changed and redesigned. This is by no means a faithful and painstaking
reproduction of the comic in film. The uniforms are almost entirely created
from scratch for the film, as the comic’s chaotic style and strong colour
washes mean that they rarely appear clearly or consistently in order to be
reproduced. With that amount of creative freedom the only reason to create a
starkly gendered uniform is the whims and desires of the creative directors.
The second argument, that real world female soldiers wear
skirts is also, I would hope you can agree, just as easy to dismiss. Real world
dress uniforms in many armed forces including the UK, the USA and France (the
comic was originally French) are indeed often gendered with female personnel
being required to wear skirts with their tunics. These skirts or generally knee
length or there about. There are also specifically the dress uniforms, those
worn on parade and for formal occasions. They are not their everyday uniform
even when they are operational on[2] base or in “office jobs”. Even if there was
some reason that a scifi film should be copying contemporary real world
uniforms, this gender division would be incorrect. But it is a scifi film, a
world that yes is a theory of future human civilisation, but it is not actually
trying to represent the here and now of western earth life.
The design of
uniforms for men and women has changed considerably throughout the 20th
and in to the 21st century, largely removing gender differences and
better reflecting the status and roles of women in the military. In Valarian
then, the creators have decided that the natural development and progress is
that female presenting human cadets and officers should wear mini-skirts. They
have an entire fictional universe to play with, they can choose literally
anything and they chose miniskirts. The most stereotypically gendered uniform
item available. Perhaps it was a deliberate choice to hark back to the comic’s
1960s origins, but if that was the case then they missed the mark entirely by
deciding to go with something that is such a tired trope instead of reflecting
the exciting visionary appeal of the early comics.
Valerian is definitely not the sole perpetrator of the
“traditionally gendered uniforms in scifi” trope, but they are the most
recent. There is just no fathomable reason why a future society would choose an
archaic dress form for their uniforms that isn’t a decision based in real world
sexism and lack of vision.
Now on to the second recurring problem:
Your aliens are dressed according to Western Earth morals
This is an issue that rises again and again in multiple
scifi films and television shows. The carefully crafted humanoid alien race is
encountered for the first time. They are new and strange their ways different
to ours, their understanding of the world and how we live novel and ripe for
study. Their men wear trousers and shirts and their women wear dresses. Or for
variation, their men wear loin cloths and go bare chested while the women wear
complicated bikini like garments that hide their surprisingly human like
breasts and nipples.
Now I know there is a frustratingly mundane reason for this
– we have some ridiculously strict regulations about exactly how much flesh,
especially female flesh certain cinema ratings allow. If you want your film to
have a 12 Certificate in the UK (suitable for persons aged 12 and over),
essential if you want that big summer hit while all the kids are off school,
then you need to abide by the regulations and keep female nipples and anything
deemed titillating to a minimum and that means bikini tops at the very least.
It’s frustrating but it is something that film makers have to keep in mind.
It’s barely an excuse though and definitely not for those that are content with
a higher certificate or for adult audiences on TV.
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| Still from Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets. Alien landscape, very human modesty |
And why is it such a flimsy excuse? Because there are so
many ways you can deal with that issue without resorting to familiar Western
Human Civilisation standards and methods of dress. We can’t deny that fashion
in most of the human world, especially those “western” societies is shaped by
morals (often religiously derived), norms and prejudice. We have, over
centuries decided that women’s breasts should always be covered (though not so
that we can’t tell that there are breasts at all), that women do not wear
trousers and if they do they must look suitably feminine and that men
definitely don’t wear skirts except perhaps for certain “traditional dress”
occasions. Of course there is far more to it than that, but they are the very
basic rules that we can observe and see in the world around us. Crucially they
have come out of our human early culture. It is of course possible that other
cultures will develop in that way, but there is no reason for it. If you are
truly wanting to create a new, mysterious, intriguing alien culture that is so
different to ours, why would you then decide to dress them in a way that
adheres to our cultural norms and morals.
In the issue of men having bare chests and women covering
their breasts, let’s consider some solutions. Firstly, does your humanoid alien
actually have to have breasts which are so human and sexually dimorphic as to
risk the wrath of censors. Make them a different shape. Make them all flat
chested. Reposition them. Do away with a gender and sex binary in your alien
characters and randomise features. Don’t sexualise them with the same features
as human breasts.
If for some reason you must have female human shaped breasts
on your aliens then do they have to be dressed in the same way as human
females? Fine, you have to bend to the will of the certification authority and
cover any pesky female flesh but there are other garments available than just
bikini tops. Have all your aliens regardless of gender wear the top. Have them
wear tunics. Have them loose and draped. Have them incidental, garments that
just happen to cover the breast and are as likely found on a male character as
on a female or any other gender. Wrap all your aliens in bands of cloth from
chest to hips.
Again, in the whole galaxy of human imagination and options
available to us in scifi, even if we adhere to the concept of scifi as
metaphors for human social issues we should be able to conceptualise our aliens
as, well, alien. In an era of advanced CGI, animation and costuming to see
Valerian create beautiful and enigmatic aliens[3]
with wondrous skin and empathic reactivity and then dress them in fanciful
reproductions of bikinis and loin clothes was just sad. It’s an inability to
break the bonds with human morals and ideals even when at liberty to be as free
and creative as you please. I know that there are a whole host of constraints
on a costume designer: what the producer want, what the director wants, what
will sell, what the animator likes to draw. My argument isn’t specifically
directed at the costume designer but at productions teams as a whole that have
an opportunity to create aliens and instead create humans with blue skin.
Aliens don’t need to care if 21st century humans
find female breasts too risqué to be seen they don’t even need to know what a
human breast looks like. They can be humanoid and have very different genitals
and very different attitudes to if they are left covered or not. They can
create their wardrobes, fashions and conventions based on their culture, on
their society and their world. There is no need to imagine something free, new
and exciting and then to bind it in human standards.
When it comes to Valerian, as noted, there were other
issues with the film, and indeed other issues with the costume and wardrobe
choices. We could talk more about why erotic fashions 500 years in the future
are still centred on pseudo-Victorian corsets and 20thCentury show
girls or speculate that some people in The City of a Thousand Planets simply
have an antique clothing kink and quietly and politely decline from judging.
But that won’t stop me raising more than an eyebrow at the dismal and tired
state of scifi costuming.
[1] A
full critique of the film is deserving though, as it is a film with so much
potential and so many problems.
[2] You notice I don't even mention the body armour here. I don't want this post getting too long and that's a topic better covered by BikiniArmourBattleDamage on tumblr.
[3]
There were additional problems with the aliens, beautiful as they were,
regarding racial coding and the trope of “the noble savage” that I do not feel
suitably qualified to talk about
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