honestly the only woman in all of the zapruder projects that's written with any class whatsoever is chrissy, and she's not even well-written, it's just refreshing that she's allowed to be sweet even though she hangs out with assholes and that she and owen are never explicitly shown to be dating. and then you find out that josh boles wanted her to have some kind of "wrong side of the tracks" story and matt johnson wanted the dating to be more explicit. and then you watch evan morgan's kid detective and you realize that Oh, actually, the only reason that she was written with any class whatsoever is because evan morgan was involved. no wonder he left after the dirties, man

i remember watching the dirties for the first time and getting insanely annoyed when chrissy asked what arbitrary meant. i was like do the guys who wrote this movie think women generally are this stupid

yeah dude that is so fair. I think when I first watched it I was so de-sensitized to white guy movies treating women as stupid that I was more just shocked that they made it so chrissy could also speak double talk, because what do you mean she and owen are able to bond over their shared understanding of something. except actually that wasn't meant to be a scene and krista madison just actually also knows double talk. so actually yes they do think women are this stupid

it's just honestly incredible how matt is so quick to be so self-hating and self-deprecating in every single way for exaggerated reasons in every aspect except, you know, being extremely discriminatory in his humor 10-15 years ago, but most pointedly because 10-15 years ago he was Actively much more outspoken about discrimination than he is now. like how were you both more openly racist and misogynistic and more of an activist? like, genuinely every other interview with matt from between 2013-2017 has him making a point about how white and male-dominated the canadian media is and how he saw this as a problem. he once said it was reasonable everyone was sick of him (in 2016 already!) because he was annoying and also privileged as fuck, but that he wanted to use the platform he'd been given to be serious about the fact that if he wasn't, he'd be a nobody. it was around 2016 that he started that fund that would prioritize productions made by women, people of color and queer minorities. i'm pretty sure he's not in charge of it anymore! it was something he'd go out of his way to mention every time and it makes Perfect sense considering his message has always been "if you have something you want to do artistically you should just do it and fuck every obstacle" and it was Good that he always acknowledged that that is an honestly very privileged stance to be able to take. so where the fuck is that awareness now that you're getting more famous and you don't have an audience of 100 people anymore? you are 40 years old and still making racist jokes because that's the pristine state of your teenage humor and whatever. it's really pathetic.

it’s absolutely insane how every single woman in a matt johnson movie only exists for the purpose of being a love interest. genuinely the only example I can think of that breaks this trend is chrissy’s female friend. and even the most important think she does is date one of the dirties so that matt can get mad at owen for that!

and I Know someone is going to come into the notes here and argue that it’s because his movies are about homosocial insularity. which sure whatever. but minor male characters exist, so why can’t minor female characters exist in the same way? why did michael have to be a boy? why couldn’t ned have been a woman? why can’t any of the camera people be women? the entire joke there is that matt and jay don’t acknowledge the camera guys as people anyways so i don’t see how it would change things! why are all the people working in the kitchen men when the irl provincetown restaurant did have female chefs? if they’re going to point out the misogyny in research in motion why doesn’t the one female employee get to be heard? it’s a far deeper issue than just making your movies about male friendships and I wish that the homosocial themes weren’t seen as a gotcha