I have my own theory. I could be wrong, but I *think* Inception is actually a deeply feminist film – but not in an easy way. I’ve written it up here – http://bit.ly/aVVFqy – but in brief: Cobb and Mal were in limbo together. Mal escaped, but Cobb is still there. The inception (suicide) was not done by Cobb to Mal, but by Mal to Cobb – it was her idea, she was the protagonist, and that idea (in projection-Mal form) is still following Cobb. But he can’t do it. He can’t do it because his being is focussed on believing himself to be the protagonist, and maintaining that belief is where the whole plot comes from. Every not-Mal part of the movie is constructed by Cobb in his own mind, and is a McGuffin. Totems included.

One step further: I’d also argue that this is a movie about movies, and our movies are gendered – the men are *always* the protagonists. Nolan is quietly pulling inception on his audience, almost invisibly planting the idea that the real protagonist can be female.

Unfortunately, following the film’s own example, inception doesn’t work.

Also, I don’t mind sex and nude scenes if the woman is given something to do other than be the object the man projects all his issues onto/something for him to lust over. If she has agency and occasionally gets naked, that’s fine with me.

Oh, and the TV show ALIAS was about a dead boyfriend, stuck in a different appliance/fixture: the bathtub.

Huh? HUH? What does THAT say?

“I’m sort of kidding, but I’m sort of not: men and women are different. Maybe it’s in our DNA to care more about the death of a woman than a man.”

I would argue that these are all examples of how we DON’T care about a woman’s death as much as a man’s. In Momento and Inception, the deaths of these women are catalysts of the stories (which is a certain position of narrative power, I guess), but that reduces them to a plot point, an pure object, only experienced through a man’s subjectivity. Presenting violence against/death of a woman as the genesis of a man’s story is inherently framing a woman’s life as only having meaning in that it influences and affects a man. For The Dark Knight, even though Rachel does have her own subjectivity, because this is a essentially a story about men, that takes a back seat to the symbolic aspects of her death. It seems to me that both men who are affected by her death aren’t mourning her as an individual, but as a love interest-object.

(I do want to say that I don’t think this is a Nolan-specific problem, but a byproduct of the fact that most stories being told are centered on men and their experiences, with women populating the back ground and whose experiences are simply things that actually happen to the men who care about them. See “Taken”, which is entirely about violence against women filtered and only given meaning through a man’s perspective.)

Also, with shows like L&O:SVU, it’s not going out on a limb to say that the overall effect of having all these female crime victims is to actually make their lives, victimhoods and deaths of little or no value at all. Because of the procedural, dead-hooker-of-the-week format, you aren’t meant to care about them, except insofar as they affect Olivia and Elliot and the other regs. I think this is a much more damaging kind of fridge-based sexism, because I believe it actually reinforces the negative real-life narratives of crimes against women: that they are a form of true-crime entertainment for people who think “that could never happen to me or mine”, and that these are things that no one but heroically dedicated law enforcement professionals could care about for any reason except passing titillation.

I don’t think Nolan’s dead ladies are unproblematic, but they sure as hell aren’t the most sexist things out there as far as the trope goes.