Soft vs. Wasp

Looking first at Soft, we’ll discuss a theme and how it’s explored. To start us off, we’ll talk about the theme of masculinity. The age-old role of being “Man of the house”. It’s pretty obvious to be this; you have to be a man. And men are supposed to be brave, strong and triumphant. However when we open on a teenage boy getting brutally beaten up by a group of thugs, it’s made nearly immediately obvious that the boy is not triumphant. Later, a relationships is established by what seems to be our lead character and the boy, as father and son. This would lead us to presume the father is the “man of the house”. After an encounter with the same group of thugs, this is immediately disproven as the father is shown as a coward when he reacts in no way a man is supposed to in our society when he’s assaulted. The thugs then follow him home and after a small conversation with his son about sticking up for himself, the father and son notice them running amuck outside. They have a conversation which makes it painfully apparent that the father is scared and has no intention of going outside and confronting them. This leads the son to go outside in frustration. The father rushes to hurry him back in and is now faced with the thugs. He’s punched in the stomach and falls to his knees. The son finally comes outside with a cricket bat and hits the lead thug over the head with it and proceeds to stomp on him. He chases the other thugs away. He goes to give his father the cricket bat and purposefully drops it in front of him. Throwing it down like a gauntlet, which in medieval times was a challenge to a duel. The son has established that he is man of the house now and he’s daring his father to dispute it.

As for Wasp, the theme of masculinity is very subtle but definitely there as there is no man of the house at all. It’s the story of a single mother trying to care for her 4 children. So in this case, she’s the man of the house. This leads to her being confrontational to another mother at the very beginning, defending her children with violence, as we’d expect a man to do. This theme continues as the mother is also the one who’s the breadwinner, giving her children food, although barely any of it. Finally at the end when she goes to a bar with a date and the children are left alone, she’s the one who must rush to the rescue of her children from danger when they scream. So in conclusion both short films have aspects of masculinity, sharing some of those aspects, such as the unlikely father figure. However they differ in why they must take on that role. In Soft, the son must become the man to fend off danger and in Wasp, the mother must become the man to feed her children