There’s a scene in the brand-new Supergirl where the titular heroine, having suffered a crushing defeat, launches herself into the stratosphere to experience what screenwriters refer to as “a dark night of the soul.” In space, nobody can hear you scream, and so that’s what she does—howling soundlessly into the vacuum before turning away and returning to Earth. The camera, however, lingers to make sure you see what she’s left behind: a single tear, floating in the emptiness, glittering in the distant sun.
It’s hard to overstate how devastating this moment was—in that it was the moment I had to admit to myself that I was wasting two hours of a perfectly lovely summer day watching a pretty terrible movie.
The new comic-book tentpole from the freshly rebooted DC Universe, and a spin-off sequel to last summer’s crowd-pleasing Superman, Supergirl was supposed to kick off this summer’s blockbuster movie slate with a bang. So, when the film opened last weekend to lukewarm reviews and abysmal ticket sales, underperforming its already-pessimistic projected box-office numbers by nearly 25 percent, the critical apparatus thought long and hard about just how such a thing could have. . . ha ha ha, yeah, I’m just kidding: They basically immediately blamed misogyny.
Those lousy box-office numbers? The product of “resurgent misogyny among the core fan base, which is largely male,” declared The New York Times. Those terrible reviews? “There’s a simple answer: misogyny,” griped Entertainment Weekly. Variety, whose own critic loathed the film, published a second, scathing editorial blaming the studio for not putting more “care and consideration” into Supergirl, to give the film a fighting chance against the “hordes of online misogynists” who lose their minds over the mere idea of a superhero without a penis: “Who can forget the manly meltdown over women-only screenings of Wonder Woman?”
