Rubia, my grandaunt, only used her right hand to wash her face. She would run the water and vigorously splash her face with her right hand while her perfectly good left hand lay limp as if it were on strike. When I asked her about this curious habit she replied, “I grew up without running water.” After decades of having running water Rubia should have upgraded her face washing routine to a double-handed wash, but she couldn’t shake off the habits of her youth.
As I watched the new Disney live action version of Mulan, I thought of Rubia washing her face. We are all products of our time and sometimes these influences lead us to non-sensical actions. Mulan is not a horrible movie but neither is it a good one. This isn’t due to the exclusion of Mushu, as other reviewers have bemoaned. I don’t need to have a talking dragon, not even a really funny one like Eddie Murphy, to make a film enjoyable. A poetic movie, with an engaging plot and strong female characters like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would be wonderful to watch. But alas, Mulan tried too hard for a current “Me Too” vibe and failed. Instead it was silly, flat and worst of all actually disempowering for girls.
Mulan begins with almost Star Wars The Phantom Menace feel. We see a young Mulan doing a Rocky Balboa training stunt as she chases a runaway chicken. But unlike Stallone, this kid isn’t even breaking a sweat. In fact, she does a spectacular slip, pole stop, surfing combo from the roof into the courtyard only to be greeted by less than enthusiastic looks. The townsfolk, who are all chumps, ignore her gifts, but from this early scene, we know that this one is strong with the force. The screenwriters literally say this, replacing the word “force” with “qi”. (Apparently, they weren’t confident that the amazing chicken chasing scene would be enough to have us realize this.) A point is made of saying that Mulan is just born with more qi than most people, as if she really were little kid Anakin imbued with the force. Now, you don’t have to be of east-Asian decent to find this a bit insulting. “Qi” is a real thing. It has been written about, studied and cultivated for centuries. Martial arts, including Qigong and Taichi, work on the development of qi, which is a person’s life force energy. Everyone is born with the same amount of qi. But being a Disney movie, Mulan’s qi is a “gift”, a special power she has to hide (just like Elsa in Frozen). The reason being that in this “Me Too” parable/ancient China story girls aren’t supposed to have qi. (Which is odd since it is literally in every living thing.)
The film quick shots to the future, when years later when two important events happen. The first is that the baddies arrive. There is Jason Scott Lee, who is sporting some Klingon-like markings on his forehead. (Did he arrive with Keiko O’Brian a.k.a. Mulan’s mom?) Jason plays the bad guy, so he has to wear lots of black eyeliner, black clothes and ride only black horses. With him is the “witch” played by Gong Lee who will never be out done in the realm of eye make-up, and who possesses spectacular fighting prowess as well as the ability to turn into random people and birds. As the baddies make plans to attack the empire, a now grownup Mulan is being auditioned as a potential bride by a woman who does her best to look like a drag queen. Of course, the testy drag lady is none too impressed by the awesome qi powers of Mulan. No matter, because soon other life plans become manifest when the feds come looking to conscript her crippled father into the anti-baddie army. For some reason, it is just assumed that crippled dad would be put forth front and center on the battle lines. The notion that he could be recruited to perform non-combat roles like cooking, cleaning or beating the giant drums that are featured in every battle scene is never considered. Hence, Mulan either due to love for her dad or that surging qi she’s been hiding, takes her dad’s sword and armor, and joins the army as his son. As gender transformations go, she doesn’t make much of an effort at disguising herself. Nevertheless, throngs of qi-less generals and soldiers are incapable of recognizing that the completely feminine looking Mulan is a woman. Even as she sits in the barracks wrapping her breasts in public the power of her qi (and their lack of it) prevents them from taking any notice.
Weirdly even though little Mulan was a chicken chasing, roof surfing goddess, solider Mulan is a bit inept at first. She, like the dudes with her, is unable to carry huge buckets of water up a steep hill. This ineptitude is explained later on by her hiding her qi and her girlieness along with it. Her “I am the Chosen One” moment occurs when she finally utilizes her girl qi to haul those water buckets to the summit. Perhaps the message for girls everywhere is that if you ever fail in some overly strenuous activity do not whine about physical limitations. This was not a failure of physiology, you failed because you didn’t call upon you girl qi. Like Ultron said, “the Earth will crack with the weight of your failure” – but hey- feel no pressure. This is where I think Mulan fails to be empowering for girls and young women. If you make it seem like only one special chosen girl can succeed or that every girl can succeed in even ridiculously difficult physical tasks if they just try hard enough – they you are setting up many girls for failure and self-reproach. In the animated version of Mulan, she uses her brain not brawn (nor special qi powers) to reach the top of the pole. It was a feat that none of the other soldiers could achieve because they relied solely on muscle. Yes, cartoon Mulan could fight but she was a regular woman who used training, determination and intellect to achieve her goals. Ironically, the cartoon Mulan seems more like a real woman, one I would like to hang out with, then this live action one
As this live action movie progresses, Mulan’s worthiness is further highlighted by the occasional presence of a phoenix who looks very much like a kite. (CGI crew what were you thinking?) Speaking of birds, Mulan meets the witch lady. Witch lady is also an ornithophile, who seems to change into lots of black birds when bad (this movie really has a subliminal racial problem) and a hawk when she’s not-so-bad. Witch lady gives her Me Too speech to Mulan mentioning that her girl qi was likewise vilified and offers a Thelma and Louise alliance. Mulan refuses but the audience gets to ponder the whole you can’t be strong if you’re not you message of bird lady.
Brutal hordes of baddies dressed all in black and like Arabs come attacking. (Don’t the Uighur suffer enough without the Muslim stereotypes?) Mulan decides the only way to fight them is to take off her armor and let her hair loose from the “man bun” so it could fall in her face and obscure her vision. (I’m no military expert but I think I would have done the exact opposite before a battle.) She kicks slow-mo flying CGI butt that fails to impress her commander. (Does this mean the offer to marry his daughter is off the table?) She leaves but the kite that looks like a phoenix (or is it a phoenix that looks like a kite?) comes to silently remind her that the movie still needs a climatic fight scene so she returns to the army. She warns the general who now decides to let her lead the forces while he takes a break off screen.
Big battles ensue as many people walk on walls (leading me to wonder how they manage to keep them so clean). The baddies capture the Emperor, even though he is surprisingly bad ass at fighting and in true TV Batman style they plan an overcomplicated execution so that he will have plenty of time to Adam West himself to safety. When he’s not cackling over his evil plan, Jason Scott Lee, aka Klingon head, mocks Mulan as “the girl who comes to save the dynasty” until she gives him a good Me Too girl-qi kick in the gonads. They fight, he shoots an arrow (which we all assume she could just catch) but witch-bird-lady decides to become a hawk (not a black hawk, a brown one) and she takes an arrow for the team. Seething at the murder of her bird-lady frenemy, Mulan bloodlessly dispatches Klingon head to join the other bloodless dead baddies.
Mulan saved the empire. Impressed, the Emperor offers to make Mulan a guard, without contemplating that the entire recruitment standards of the military forces may then also need to be revamped. (A kind of transgendered “don’t ask don’t tell”.) Luckily for his legal ministers who were worried about all those extra hours rewriting the law, Mulan declines due to the family obligations. Mulan returns home a hero which seems to give drag lady a mild heart attack but it makes everyone else happy. No one minds that she lost her dad’s armor, which she decided to drop in order to go styling into battle with a red flowing robe. As a reward for her girl qi efforts, Mulan gets a new souped-up sword to replace the one that got melted along with Klingon head in his Gollum like death. (“My precious!”)
