Minions

Ashia R:

It’s #FamilyMovieNight, let’s live-recap the Minions movie (2015) with these surly children.

I’m watching this movie tonight sandwiched between Q and the rest of the family, with Q aggressively sniffling and moaning through a head cold.

Which means I’ll be aggressively sniffling and moaning through a head code for our next movie.

We open with the evolution of Minions evolving from single-celled organisms into whatever age the T-Rex reigned. All the minions are wearing goggles and loincloths created out of leaves.

And you know given the few stories I’ve seen with minions in them – I’m wondering if minions are truly genderless. Single sex maybe (and still maybe reproduce through mitosis?) and given the lack of boobs probably lay eggs or something?

Oh gosh now I’m spinning out in a google hole – how DO minions reproduce?

Or are they immortal and simply adapt?

Also curious: The goggles. These were so important they developed them before clothing. What happens to a minion if they don’t wear goggles?!

Okay my theory on there being a finite number of immortal minions holds up because Kevin, Stuart, and Bob seem to have been around for the entire history of the species.

Oh! Bob has heterochromia.

:: googles furiously in hopes there are other minions with facial or body differences or disabilities:::

It’s 1968, our three heroes have left their snowy civilization in search of a leader, and I’ve lost count of the banana jokes. Even though they’ve been isolated in the arctic for generations, they instantly know how to read.

::: finally gives up and accepts that everyone in this movie is abled and visually typical:::

(I mean, except for the wasp-wasted women that leaves no room for vital organs.)

I’m not sure anyone should spend this much time thinking too hard about minions. Now I’m stuck on their lack of features. With no ears, no noses – how do they hear and smell and stuff? 

Oh! Our fellas have found a lead! They’re heading to Villain-con, hosted in Orlando Florida. Which feels…. Like an adequate place with the necessary infrastructure but somewhere in the middle of small-town America would have been more fun.

I guess there’s regulations in Florida.

I wasn’t paying attention while the Minions walked around an urban area, but so far as I can tell, everyone is white. TV hosts, folks driving around, famous villains, etc.

And sure it’s 1968 and things are pretty segregated but it’s not like there just weren’t BIPOC in the cities. We were on the streets and working the restaurants and stuff.

As for the minions themselves, despite living in all kinds of climates through millions of years of evolution/adaptation, they’ve remained the same plasticy-yellow color. I’m assuming they’re defending themselves from the sun using a different mechanism than the rest of us melanated animals.

Luckily the suspicious Nelson family helps our hitchhikers on their way Orlando.

I have to admit I would LOVE to attend Villaincon. 

I mean – the folks who do believe in the whole good/evil thing are DEFINTELY going to classify me as evil.

According to the announcers at Villain-con, Scarlet Overkill is the world’s FIRST female supervillain.

In 1968.

I mean like…Ching Shih was active starting in the 1800’s and that’s JUST one example of a truly spectacular super villain who resisted ‘law and order’ and taught the powers that be WHAT FOR.

Scarlet Overkill is a white woman in a strapless dress, opera gloves, and stilettos, with the signature sleek black hairdo.

I feel like they could have been a LITTLE more creative with this character.

I mean it’s not like we haven’t had supervillain-esses(?) like Maleficent and the Queen of Hearts and the White Whitch who definitely predated the 60s. If not Ching Shih then at least some of these ladies must have lived in the same universe as the minions!

I mean I just find it a *little* hard to believe there were no villainesses before 68’?

Conveniently, the minions only spend a few days in the US before immediately flying to England with Scarlet, so they miss the whole… complicated civil rights era so the script writers don’t have to unpack which side villains would be to be on in THAT conflict.

Cause like Scarlet is pretty charming as far as bosses go, but she’s giving off ‘politics have nothing to do with me’ white lady vibes.

And the minions supporting villains is charming and quaint until you think about the fact that some of the villains they support are prooooobably problematic as far as… like human rights and stuff.

Our heroic trio is headed to Queen’s Elizabeth’s castle to steal her crown for Scarlet. Which is helpful for context because we’ve been talking all week about the conflicting emotions about the Queen’s death last week.

‘Cause of like… the bloodthirsty invasions and colonizations and residential schools and other assorted cruelties orchestrated, overseen, and condoned under Queen E’s reign.

(I know compared to some of her other family members she seems like a lesser evil but HOLY SHIT still!)

TWIST! Bob pulls the famous sword from the stone and becomes King Bob. Meanwhile, the minions our trio have left behind are traveling around the world forming bridges between Australia and India with their bodies like ants. 

Okay sure!

Oh okay this is… interesting. One of the minions is in a hot tub canoodling with two yellow fire hydrants. 

So… minions are definitely not asexual.

Aside from the unrealistic whiteness, this movie is just so far removed from reality and a hard swerve from cultural norms there’s not much to pick apart.

It’s not problematic. But it’s not…NOT problematic?

UNEXPECTED! The evil villainess they supported turns out to be EVIL to THEM!

And luckily the royal castle of England (I’m sure it has a name but I’m too lazy to look it up) comes fully equipped with a spacious and immaculately maintained medieval torture dungeon.

Herb, Scarlet’s boyfriend, is in charge of torturing our heroic trio. But he can’t because minions are untorturable.

Oh! I learned something this week!

 Herb gets paged as ‘the future king of England’ but Herb CAN’T be the king of England ever. Because if he became king, he’d out-rank Queen Scarlet (because patriarchy) so Scarlett will never allow him to be a king. (For the same reasons that Queen E’s husband* never became king)

*(Also not looking up his name because I’m too lazy to look it up.)**

**(BUT I am NOT too lazy to look up how minions, avoid skin cancer, and reproduce and/or die and obviously I’ve been researching all three this whole time).

Q claims a piece of equipment (a giant underground drilling vehicle) is front eh Incredibles, so from here we’re assuming we’re in Incredibles universe.

IN WHICH CASE, the first Incredibles movie early scenes took place in 1962. They definitely had lady heroes, so surely there must have been women villains in 1962 in the golden age of supers.

Although honestly despite the physics, the fact that Australia is located 10 yards away from India, and the ton of creatively wiggly unrealism in this movie, by far, the most unrealistic scene is happening right now.

So earlier, Scarlet, the first (and supposedly only) known female villain in the (at least) English-speaking world is RAUCOUSLY cheered by all the(man dude) villains at Villain-con. And now that our minion heroes are threatening her crown, she’s called on all the dudebro villains to capture the minions at her command.

I mean…

Like when has a woman in power, much less a singular ‘first’ woman ever, EVER been unquestioningly cheered on by her dude peers?

TOTALLY unrealistic.

IRL these dudes would be cutting her down, insulting her looks, calling her slutty, arguing that she’s hysterical and too emotional to lead, and just doing absolutely everything to invalidate her and remove her from power.

Okay so Kevin just exploded in a fiery rocket crash. And the minions are mourning his death and humming a death dirge.

So the minions do know they’re capable of death.

So many questions answered, and yet so many more questions created in the answering!

And in the end credits, another revelation: while earlier in the movie we learned that minions have butt cheeks and no nippes, we now know they have no external genitals or belly buttons.

Adding more evidence that they either lay eggs like fish or reproduce through mitosis.

Or maybe it’s a caterpillar situation. Minions are the larval stage or something else. Or the butterfly stage of…tic tacs?

And now me and the kids are all googling ‘minion larva.’ And the kids are just infodumping all the theories they hold about minions with absolutely no evidence but the full confidence of people who have absolutely no idea how things work.

And all of this is to say that – while yeah we can pretend minions are genderless and there are no feminine minions in the movie because the character development team is decades ahead…

I think we can safely assume  that the same folks who wrote a movie:

• Rooted in the most contentious moments of the civil rights er
• Fanboyed over Queen E and all things British Invasion and colonizers
• Filled the entire speaking human cast with thin white people
• Voiced every minion with the same white man
• Gave every minion a basic white man name
• Showed Kevin in a hot tub making out with two fire hydrants named ‘Tiffany (and another feminine name I didn’t catch)
• Thought 1968 would be a realistic dawn of a woman villain with power
• Unironically reflected a compete fantasy land where a woman who finally scrambles and beats her way to power would be enthusiastically cheered on and supported by her masculine peers…

… proooobably did not make the minions all masculine-presenting as some sort of statement on gender equity.

Honestly we can be *pretty damn sure* that all the minions are men because the character developers just… kind of forgot women and other genders existed.

But it was fun to dream for a few minutes.