Men are spoilt for choice; women are starved. Targeting women is like selling ice to a Bedouin, during a heatwave, in a particularly bad year for the ice harvest. Quality content for women has scarcity value.
This is a guest post by Zoe Samuel.
We live in the age of data, on the personal and demographic scale. Research is changing our understanding of who consumes content, how they do so, and what value they offer advertisers and partners. We know now that there is a group of people who control 70 percent of domestic consumer spending; spend more time on social media; buy 52 percentofmovietickets and 68 percent of theater tickets; and watch more TV than any other group. This demographic is vast: 51 percentof the population.
The group in question is, of course, women. The market opportunity represented by this demographic, as creators and consumers, remains the greatest source of untapped or under-exploited revenue in entertainment.
The amount of competition for the attention of women, when compared to the amount of competition for men, is still currently very low. This demo is horribly under-served, both in the quality and the quantity of content available to it. As far as quality, when it looks at a screen, it is perhaps surprising that it doesn’t have a rage fit and throw things. If it were to buy into how it is portrayed on the screen, it would see itself as few in number; vapid and narcissistic; over-sexualized but rarely possessing any actual desire of its own; an unfunny mirror for other people’s comedy; limited in age range; almost entirely devoid of agency (bearing in mind that feistiness is not a substitute); and just plain stupid. Even given all of this, it is still the bedrock of the market.
Regarding quantity, the mere fact that content is predominantly still aimed at men is proof in and of itself that instinct, not data, is guiding decision-making here, and that that instinct is about 40 years out of date. Men are spoilt for choice; women are starved. Targeting women is like selling ice to a Bedouin, during a heatwave, in a particularly bad year for the ice harvest. Quality content for women has scarcity value.
There is a huge opportunity here. If women buy even when they are not targeted, they buy many times over when they are. This demo rapaciously consumes any content that speaks to it as it is, and as it wishes it could be: three-dimensional, flawed, sexual, old, young, eccentric, powerful, intelligent, funny, varied. Whenever it is treated with this sort of basic respect, it shows up in vast numbers: Bridesmaids, The Heat, The Hunger Games, The Fault In Our Stars, Gone Girl, Divergent, Frozen, Cinderella … these are not aberrations. This is not a niche. This is the invisible hand at work, throwing huge piles of money at people who are paying attention.
This is a demo worth aiming content at, and that requires creators who get their audience’s needs and wants. Selling to a demographic you don’t understand is essentially impossible. And the only way to understand women is – just as with men – either to listen to them, or be them. Clearly men who listen to women can write for women: the songs that made Frozen a hit were written by a married couple, Bobby Lopez and Kristen Andersen-Lopez. Joss Whedon has impeccable credentials when it comes to appealing to women. Shakespeare was doing it centuries ago. It works in reverse, too: Kathryn Bigelow has made a stellar career out of making very dudely movies watched mostly by dudes.
That said, there are certainly correlations showing that women on the team result in women on the screen, and we’ve already established that women on the screen equals bringing in the green. The same way that women in the boardroom correlate with higher profits, women on the creative team are good for the bottom line. In the words of Sheryl Sandberg, “If men want to make their work teams successful, one of the best steps they can take is to bring on more women.” Shows with a more mixed writers’ room enjoy higher audience retention and are more likely to get a second season. Just as people typically hire in their own image, they tend to create in their own image, which means a team with a bigger variety of voices is more likely to competently portray a variety of characters. It’s not because the creators are better, but that they are unlike each other. It’s Darwinian; their strength comes from their variety. (It is probably–and it would be great to see data on this–also because the sort of company that hires and promotes against stereotype when it comes to women is self-evidently adaptable and creative, and is thus more robust in other ways, such as hiring the highest quality men.)
Women, as an audience, represent more value for less effort. Data is everything, and the data doesn’t lie. What’s happening to the media marketplace is not a trend. It’s not even a movement. It’s the economy, stupid, and it’s not going away.
In short, it doesn’t matter how you feel about women qua women. What matters is how you feel about money, qua money, in your wallet, paying your bills, sitting on your driveway in the form of a really expensive car (that, statistically speaking, your wife bought). The last person into any market has the toughest time. The wise course is to get in now before all the best seats are taken, and then fill a bunch of them with women. Alternatively, leave all that money on the table, and wait for someone else to come along and take it.
Zoe Samuel is a British-born writer who writes for stage and screen from her home on a plane between New York and London. She’s also VP of Theater for Concert Live, who provide mobile merchandising and data analytics for live events. Talk data to her at zoesamuel.com and @zoe_samuel.
We need more documentaries and movies about the lives of pilgrims and activists of non-violence. We also need to be reminded of their power and diversity.
Countless movies have been made about the military but very few about peace activists. Yes, there have been exceptions, such as Gandhi (1982) and Selma (2014), but the stories of soldiers- mostly white and male, of course- and their experiences of war have always been considered more worthy and thrilling than those of people struggling for peace. This has been a constant throughout the history of American cinema. From Wings (1927), the first movie to win a Best Picture Oscar, to American Sniper (2014), Hollywood filmmakers have demonstrated an abiding interest in telling and selling war tales. There is the dramatic, aesthetic argument, of course: cinematic story-tellers are naturally drawn to conflict and war is the ultimate expression of human conflict. War is, also, understood as an historical fact and war stories aim to address this unbroken feature of humanity. Obviously, human conflict should be explored by filmmakers but it must be understood that there is no such thing as an apolitical war story.
Although there have been American anti-war movies, most have been either confused in their messages, ideologically fraudulent, or downright militarist. It’s not just the obviously right-wing, propagandist products that promote a militarist culture and ethos. The lives of soldiers at war are generally understood as dramatically appealing and full of meaning, while military men are commonly portrayed as fascinating, charismatic figures. American mainstream cinema has not only provided a mirror to U.S. militarism; it has also reinforced it. Hollywood, it must be said, has never found peacemakers very interesting. Generally speaking, you have to go to independent and documentary films to learn about advocates of non-violence and pacificist philosophy.
Peace Pilgrim
The documentary Peace Pilgrim: An American Sage Who Walked Her Talk (2002) celebrates Mildred Norman (1908-1981), a remarkable woman who walked for peace for nearly 30 years. Calling herself Peace Pilgrim, New Jersey-born Norman travelled the United States from 1953 to 1981. Mahatma Gandhi said, “My Life is my message.” For Mildred Norman, her journey was her message. She was motivated by faith, namely a belief in “universal spirituality” and the “divine law of love.” In an old interview, Norman describes a spiritual awakening she had some years some years before her peace pilgrimage. Walking alone in the woods at night, she experienced, she says, a desire to surrender herself, and a calling “to give my life to something beyond myself.” Her life before had not been particularly unusual–she had been a fashionable young woman and had married. But she and her husband, Stanley Ryder, divorced after 13 years. Ryder says in an interview that she did not visit him when he was in the service and showed little interest in being a homemaker. Mildred Norman’s pacifist principles and independent spirit were already challenging convention. She was destined for another life.
It would be a while before she could realize her purpose, but in 1953, during the Korean War, Peace Pilgrim finally began her extraordinary journey. She took no money with her and carried only a comb, toothbrush, map, and pen. Peace Pilgrim says she experienced generosity and hospitality on her travels but on occasions when she did not get shelter and food from others, she fasted and slept outdoors. She spoke of both inner peace and peace for humankind. Her observations are often powerful. Consider the following statement: “What we basically suffer from in the world is immaturity. If we were a mature people, peace would be assured.” Many–on the left as well as the right–mock pacifists as strange, romantic creatures but whether you are a pacifist or not, there is no denying Peace Pilgrim’s strength of commitment to peace. Although she tragically died in a car crash in 1981, her message was kept alive by Friends of Peace Pilgrim who brought together her writings in Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words.
Young Mildred Norman
Mildred Norman’s pilgrimage can be read as both politically and culturally subversive. To forsake money and possessions, and advocate peace in a militarist, materialistic society is a profoundly non-conformist act. Further, her pilgrimage denotes a rejection of social norms of post-war American femininity. Although she did not have a child and husband, Norman’s pilgrimage still represents a refusal of the domestic space and personal relationships for the life of the road. There persists a belief that women are more conservative in their lifestyle than the average man but Mildred Norman’s story is a reminder of the long, rich tradition of female radicalism and non-conformism.
Peace Pilgrim features period news footage, stills of newspaper clippings and old photos, as well as deeply felt commentary by cultural and religious figures inspired by her example. Maya Angelou, the Dalai Lama and actor Dennis Weaver all underscore that Norman literally embodied her message of peace. But the film aims, above all, to give voice to the woman herself and honor her pacifist teaching. We see Peace Pilgrim walking through the countryside and towns of America, lecturing in schools as well as being interviewed by reporters around the country. Produced by the Friends of Peace Pilgrim, and scripted and edited by Sharon Janis of Night Lotus Productions, Peace Pilgrim is a modestly made but valuable film.
Being interviewed on the road
We need more documentaries and movies about the lives of pilgrims and activists of non-violence. We also need to be reminded of their power and diversity. Incidentally, isn’t it time someone somewhere made a big, bold documentary about Code Pink, the colorful, dynamic, in-your-face American peace activists of today? Watching them disrupt the meetings of war criminals like Henry Kissinger is surely the stuff of great drama.
Olson is one of the only butch-identified filmmakers who also makes films about butch identity. The closest another recent film has come to including “butch” anything was ‘Blue Is The Warmest Color,’ a film from a straight male director in which a straight actress, Léa Seydoux, played a recognizable butch. In that role Seydoux was still firmly within the bounds of what straight male directors and producers deem “fuckable“–conventionally pretty and sexy even with short hair, minimal makeup and “tomboy” outfits.
Writer-director Jenni Olson’s latest film, The Royal Road, which received good reviews when it played Sundance earlier this year and will be the closing night offering at Art of The Real, April 26 at the Lincoln Center in New York, has a structure similar to Olson’s 2005 film The Joy of Life: personal narration accompanying static shots of California vistas. All the scenes in Road, as in Life, are living snapshots, still except for moving water, wafting smoke and cars making their way down the roads, absent of people (except in the narration), even the drivers unseen.
Olson is one of the only butch-identified filmmakers who also makes films about butch identity. The closest another recent film has come to including “butch” anything was Blue Is The Warmest Color, a film from a straight male director in which a straight actress, Léa Seydoux, played a recognizable butch. In that role Seydoux was still firmly within the bounds of what straight male directors and producers deem “fuckable“–conventionally pretty and sexy even with short hair, minimal makeup and “tomboy” outfits.
In Road, Olson talks about gender dysphoria and identifying with men, name-checking Hitchcock and Vertigo as well as filming at a couple of its famous locations. But Olson doesn’t seem to have a much deeper understanding of the women in Road’s narration (Olson also does the voice-over) than Hitchcock did of the “troubled” women characters in his films: men who ignore women’s wants and needs have historically portrayed women as “mysterious” or “unpredictable” the same way traffic can be “unpredictable” when you are busy staring at your phone. Olson calls the women “crazy” when a better description would be “fucked up” and Olson admits to being a bit of a fuck-up too.
The film could use more of Olson’s writing, whether we hear about the “square lips” of one woman Olson becomes obsessed with or this description of Los Angeles. “I’m invigorated by the sense of possibility here. People believe that good things will happen at any moment,” which immediately evokes the confident, charismatic people one finds in LA, so convinced they will attain success, their continued obscurity ends up surprising the rest of us as much as it does them. I would have liked more observations like this one and more detail instead of the generic history lesson we get about El Camino Real (the Royal Road of the title), which seems lifted directly from an unimaginative professor’s PowerPoint presentation.
The problem with movies from queer filmmakers about queer people, like films about feminism from feminists, is that we don’t have nearly enough of them, so we expect the few that we see to be all things to all people. Although I fight this desire in myself I can’t help wishing The Royal Road was more vivid: bolder and dirtier. Olson says, “I want to tell you a story of love and loss in San Francisco that reveals more about me than I ever expected to say,” but in this age of first-person essays that are volcanoes of folly and regret, the revelations in the film seem as innocuous as a very young child’s church confession.
At one point Olson talks about identifying with Casanova, whose memoirs were so scandalous that an uncensored version of them couldn’t be published until 150 years after his death. In contrast Olson’s memories of the two women in Road are weirdly chaste–we don’t have a sense of Olson ever getting lost in desire and possibility, let alone the two women, one in San Francisco, the other in Los Angeles (specifically Los Feliz or “The Happy Place” as Olson sardonically translates it) doing so.
Life’s focus on suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge (and Olson’s advocacy for barriers to prevent people from being able to throw themselves off the side) meant that film felt a lot more urgent and emotional than this one does. The women are closed off to Olson, who in turn feels closed off to us, the way an artist should never be with an audience. I didn’t have to fight sleep during Road the way I did during Goodbye To Language but something nagged at me during its even briefer run-time (65 minutes): I should feel a lot more affinity for a 50-something American queer who chases after “unavailable” women than I do for an 80-something straight, French-Swiss guy who loves his dog–but I don’t.
Late in the film, Olson tells us, “All I want to do is read novels and go to the movies,” touching on the collective predilection for getting away from horrible headlines and messy incongruities to give ourselves over, during our rapidly shrinking leisure hours, to dramas that take place in another time (Mad Men, Downton Abbey) or in another world (Game of Thrones). But Olson never gives us the same chance to do the same in Road. Olson says, “I’m inordinately obsessed with the stories of others, seeking within them the key to sharing my own,” but the stories in the film aren’t ones we are likely to obsess over too, which may be this film’s tragedy.
The new Netflix original series ‘Daredevil,’ about Marvel’s blind defense-attorney-by-day-vigilante-by-night Matt Murdock, surprised me. It’s extremely different from the other Marvel Studios properties. First, it has the “dark, edgy” tone normally associated with Warner Bros. DC movies, particularly the Nolan Batman films. Second, it is really, REALLY violent (like, graphic decapitations violent) in a way that Marvel’s PG-13 movies cannot be. Finally, ‘Daredevil’ is almost a complete disaster when it comes to its female characters. Marvel’s track record with female characters isn’t perfect, but I’ve come to expect much better than what we get here.
This review contains spoilers for Daredevil and some graphic images of violence against women.
The new Netflix original series Daredevil, about Marvel’s blind defense-attorney-by-day-vigilante-by-night Matt Murdock, surprised me. It’s extremely different from the other Marvel Studios properties, the MCU films and the broadcast television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.Dand Agent Carter. First, it has the “dark, edgy” tone normally associated with Warner Bros. DC movies, particularly the Nolan Batman films. Second, it is really, REALLY violent (like, graphic decapitations violent) in a way that Marvel’s PG-13 movies cannot be. Finally, Daredevil is almost a complete disaster when it comes to its female characters. Marvel’s track record with female charactersisn’tperfect, but I’ve come to expectmuch better than what we get here.
Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page in Daredevil
The first woman we meet on Daredevil is Karen Page, the most prevalent if not necessarily the most important female character from the source comics. Karen Page is a notorious example of women being treated horribly in comics, with Frank Miller writing an arc where she’s addicted to drugs and “tragically” became a porn star, and Kevin Smith later fridging her and then having himself drawn into her funeral. She does better in this series, but that’s not saying much.
Panel from Daredevil comic when Karen is killed
In the first episode of Daredevil, Karen is set up for murder in a complicated cover-up that’s tied into all the series’ other complicated criminal ongoings (which are hard to keep track of even when marathoning the episodes). Do-gooding lawyer noobs Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson take on her case, and protect her from all the bad guys who want to kill her, with legal jujitsu as well as the actual kind from Matt in his masked vigilante alter ego that will become Daredevil. They take her on as their assistant, so she can continue to be imperiled.
Karen in peril
In the comics, she’s a love interest of Matt’s, but many of the early episodes give her nothing more to do than be made goo goo eyes at by Foggy. (Nearly every female recurring character on this show is a love interest for someone.) Later, Karen is given “something to do” as she conducts her own investigation of the Kingpin alongside journalist Ben Urich. Naturally, this makes her a damsel in distress once again, but at least she’s given the opportunity to save herself.
Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple in Daredevil
Next up is Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), a nurse who drags a half-dead Matt out of a dumpster and tends to his wounds. Their relationship grows because Matt loses and a lot of fights and falls out of a lot of buildings and regularly needs patching up. But it only takes a couple of episodes before she’s kidnapped, beaten up, and rescued by Matt. Who she’s falling in love with, which makes no sense (I mean, dude is fine, but he’s also seems to be pretty much wrecking her life). Claire peaces out for pretty much the rest of the season, probably because Rosario Dawson was too expensive to have in many episodes. The role is really a waste of her talents.
Claire in peril
The third and final female character in the main cast is Ayelet Zurer’s Vanessa, the romantic interest of the Kingpin, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). I can’t decide if I should call Vanessa “complicated” or just “confusing.” I really do not understand why she falls for Fisk, and grows closer to him the more she learns about his criminal lifestyle. Vanessa feels more like a construct designed to humanize Fisk than a character in her own right. And of course she also functions to give Fisk angst when she inevitably ends up in a hospital bed, because this show sure does love its damsels in distress.
Vanessa in peril
The minor female characters continue the depressing trends: Elena, a friendly elderly client of Nelson & Murdock, is murdered to draw out Daredevil. Evil drug dealer Madam Gao is one of two villainous East Asian characters who just happen to be martial arts experts. And Ben Urich has a dying wife, because not only violence imperils the women our male heroes love, but also the cruel fates of sickness and natural death!
Nice old lady Elena, killed to “get to” Daredevil
And to answer your burning question, no, there’s no Elektra. (Not even a teaser in a post-credits scene, which I was suspecting we’d get at the very least.) I guess they’re saving her for season two.
Ultimately, I still enjoyed Daredevil enough to watch the whole season in two days (it helped that I’m nursing a cold and didn’t feel up to much more than curling up in front of the TV). But I’m terribly let down by its treatment of women, and hope Netflix’s forthcoming Marvel series do much better.
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who actually liked the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie, so you should possibly disregard all of her opinions about everything, ever.
Now playing in North America, ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’ is the Kristen Stewart – Juliette Binoche are-they-or-aren’t-they-lesbians movie that critics have been raving about since Cannes 2014. I wasn’t able to see it at TIFF last year because the tickets sold out fast, but this movie, from writer-director Olivier Assayas, was well worth the wait. It’s thoughtful, well-acted, and everything else you’ve been promised.
Now playing in North America, Clouds of Sils Maria is the Kristen Stewart – Juliette Binoche are-they-or-aren’t-they-lesbians movie that critics have been raving about since Cannes 2014. I wasn’t able to see it at TIFF last year because the tickets sold out fast, but this movie, from writer-director Olivier Assayas, was well worth the wait. It’s thoughtful, well-acted, and everything else you’ve been promised.
I have nothing sarcastic to say – this view is amazing
Clouds of Sils Maria is a movie about ambiguity – in art, relationships, and our understanding of ourselves. The story follows an actress, Maria (played by Juliette Binoche), who’s been asked to star in a revival of the play that made her famous 20 years ago, this time as the elder of the two main characters. She and her assistant, Val (Kristen Stewart), hole up in Sils Maria, running lines and trying to prepare for the performance. Along the way, Maria must confront her fear of aging, and try to understand the way that her perspective on the play, and on her life, has changed with time.
It sounds like a simple set-up, but the movie draws a lot of complexity from the way that the fictional play, MalojaSnake, parallels Maria’s life. Particularly, it zeroes in on how the relationship between the play’s main characters – a business woman seduced by her scheming assistant, or an assistant seduced by her scheming boss – can be used as a prism to view the relationship Maria has with Val.
It’s a story about two people who share a connection they don’t understand – a connection that could be a lot of things, that we don’t have the words to articulate properly. Are they employer and employee? Are they friends? Does one or the other want more than friendship? Do they even like each other? No one is sure, and that’s part of the point.
The relationships in Maloja Snake are similarly ambiguous. Once the characters start talking about the play, it becomes clear that everyone remembers and interprets the story differently. In some versions, the business woman, Helene, is taking advantage of a young assistant who admires her; in other versions, the assistant, Sigrid, is taking advantage of a woman who envies her youth and beauty. In one interpretation of the story, Helene is really Sigrid herself, 20 years older – the same personality at a different stage in life. Maria’s own interpretation of the play changes depending on which of the characters she’s ask to empathise with. When she played Sigrid, 20 years in the past, she saw depth an humanity in the character – a sympathetic struggle that she doesn’t see now. Asked to take on the role of Helene, she struggles with the character’s vulnerability, trying to find a way to inhabit the role without feeling humiliated.
In one scene, Maria admits that the play’s original director, Wilhelm Melchior, must have seen something in her – must have felt something for her – to cast her as Sigrid, though she can’t define what that feeling was. It seems like it must be the same thing Maria feels for Val – like it’s maybe the same thing Helene feels for Sigrid – a spark of connection that can’t be explained.
A neutral expression, or fondness, or contempt – you be the judge
Clouds of Sils Maria takes its time exploring these relationships – between Maria and Val, Helene and Sigrid, Helene and the play, as she ages – from several different angles, and always pulls away from giving us an easy answer. It’s too simplistic to say that Maloja Snake is literally the same as what’s happening between Maria and Val. It’s also too simplistic to say that Maria’s relationship with her young co-star – Jo-Ann Ellis, played by Chloë Grace Moretz – mirrors the play, or that Jo-Ann is scheming to steal the spotlight, or that she isn’t. The characters’ motivations are largely left up to interpretation, and writer/director Olivier Assayas resists the urge to over-explain their feelings, instead pulling back to let us draw our own conclusions.
Val and Maria have a professional relationship that’s complicated by something that seems like a friendship, which, in turn, is complicated by resentment, jealousy, impatience, neediness, dependency, and passive-aggression. In some ways, they represent two people, confused about how they feel – in other ways, they represent two different generations butting heads. Maria is dismissive toward Val’s opinions, and proud of herself for not recognizing young celebrities or liking mainstream movies. Val doesn’t seem to think Maria’s a very good actor, and teases her – with varying levels of hostility – for being out of touch. Like Maria at twenty and Maria at forty, they see the world differently, and they’re both convinced that what they see is right.
The really admirable thing about the movie is that it peels back all of those layers without ever telling us who we should side with, or what the story should mean. The message is that we don’t know – that life isn’t a multiple choice test, where you just pick the right answer. Sometimes it’s unclear – sometimes you don’t understand what somebody else is feeling, and sometimes you don’t understand yourself. Sometimes we’re doing the best we can with things that none of us know for certain.
iPad is the unofficial fourth star of this movie
Just in case existential dilemmas about the ambiguity of life aren’t enough to sell you on the movie, here’s the other stuff you need to know:
Is Kristen Stewart actually good in this? Yes. A lot of the time, when we talk about whether an actor’s good in a movie, we’re partially talking about casting – whether or not this role is the right fit for the actor, whether the actor fits in with the rest of the cast, etc, etc. Kristen Stewart isn’t doing anything all that different here from what she usually does, but it works well in this role. Val is supposed to be a bit of a cipher – she plays things close to the chest and masks most of her emotions when she’s around Maria. In the scenes where the characters are running lines, especially, Stewart’s bored, deadpan delivery also works as a perfect counterpoint to Binoche’s take on Maria – an actress who keeps her emotions very close to the surface and seems to be a bit volatile. Stewart also seems much more confident and relaxed in front of the camera than she has in other roles – this is my favourite thing I’ve seen her in.
How pretentious is it really? Not very. It’s more pretentious than a mainstream movie, but less pretentious than a lot of Serious Movies. For the most part, the film’s exploration of ambiguity actually stops it from being pretentious, because the characters aren’t presented as authorities on what’s happening. They can tell you what they think life is about, but part of the point is that you don’t know if you should believe them. There are a couple of moments that remind you you’re watching a Serious Movie but, mostly, you’ll be so caught up in the characters and in trying to solve the puzzle of their relationships, that you won’t mind a little pretention along the way.
Is there anything in it that’s going to offend me? Probably not. Clouds of Sils Maria doesn’t challenge the ideas we have about gender in any significant way, but it does give us a really thoughtful, interesting story about three women – which, in turn, gives three female actors a chance to shine. If you want to dig for something troubling, I offer you this: the movie takes for granted that aging is bad, and that it’s natural for older women to feel threatened by younger ones. We live in a youth-focused culture where a lot of people are afraid to get old, and where a lot of women – especially women in the entertainment industry – have good reasons to feel like their perceived value drops with age. Clouds doesn’t really do anything with that besides acknowledging that it’s so, and that seems like a missed opportunity but, for me, it didn’t detract much from the overall experience.
Was it worth $14 and having to eat concessions snacks for dinner? Yes. It’s a densely packed movie that doesn’t feel tedious to watch, and the scenery in Switzerland is beautiful. Because of the complexity involved in mirroring Maloja Snake to the movie’s plot, it’s also the kind of story you can think about and discuss after watching.
Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting.
Maggie Nujarluktuk as “Nyla the Smiling One” with “Rainbow”
Nanook of the North is an iconic 1922 drama that recreates traditional Inuit lifeways through the representative struggles of Nanook (“Polar Bear,” played by Allakariallak), his wife Nyla (“the Smiling One,” played by Maggie Nujarluktuk), another woman identified only as “Cunayou,” Nanook’s young son “Allee,” and baby “Rainbow.” However, we are shown older boys, described as “some of Nanook’s children,” eating sea-biscuits and lard at the trading post, adding to the film’s casual, hand-waving vagueness about Nanook’s family relationships. Male helpers pop up for group hunts, as though from nowhere, but Nanook’s family is never placed in a wider community context. Despite describing Nanook as band leader, he is never depicted leading, and is frequently infantilized by director Robert Flaherty. By framing his drama as “documentary,” Flaherty converts Allakariallak and Nujarluktuk from active collaborators into passive subjects.
Flaherty erased the fact that both Maggie Nujarluktuk and, reportedly, the woman playing Cunayou, were his own wives (or “mistresses,” from Flaherty’s cultural perspective). The “morning” scene, in which Nanook, his two women and his son awake naked inside the igloo, therefore closely resembles Flaherty’s own polyamorous living arrangement, exoticized into a symptom of Nanook’s cultural Otherness. The domestic warmth that Flaherty captured in Nanook of the North, through his access to both women, is key to his “documentary’s” charm, but his pretended objectivity converts this intensely personal intimacy into an image of the women’s indiscriminate availability to outsiders. Maggie Nujarluktuk smiles self-consciously and playfully flirts with the camera, because the camera is being operated by her husband, but that husband disowns her smiles and essentializes them as a permanent characteristic of “Nyla the smiling one.”
In her thesis, Neither Indian Princesses Nor Squaw Drudges, Janice Acoose examines the pervasive stereotype of the “loose squaw” in literature about Indigenous women, which constructs the Indigenous woman as a disposable sexual convenience. Flaherty’s own concept of Inuit disposability was demonstrated when he abandoned Nujarluktuk after filming, who then bore him a son, Josephie, that he never saw, acknowledged or materially supported. This adds sinister resonance to Nanook of the North‘s description of Nyla’s baby Rainbow as “her young husky,” jokingly implying that Inuit women view their own children as equivalent to animals. In Acoose’s view, “loose squaw” images “foster cultural attitudes that legitimize rape and other similar kinds of violence against Indigenous women,” whose disappearances often go uninvestigated in Canada, particularly if they are also sex workers.
Josephie Flaherty’s family was caught up in the “High Arctic Relocation,” the forced transfer of a community of Inuit to the High Arctic, as “human flagpoles” to support Canada’s territorial claim to the Northwest Passage. It was masterminded by the Department of Northern Affairs, who wished to remove the Inuit from white civilization to free them from “a toxic culture of dependence.” In other words, like Nanook of the North, the “High Arctic Relocation” was an artificially staged, Euro-American vision of uncorrupted Inuit innocence. It is impossible to draw a neat line between Flaherty’s fictional vision and the Department of Northern Affairs’ imposed reality; each was inspired by a toxic culture, not of dependence but of colonial entitlement and the romanticizing of “noble savages”; the Department’s resident romantics may even have been directly inspired by Nanook of the North. The High Arctic Exiles were denied material support from the Canadian government, though that same government intervened to prevent them from hunting on its designated “wildlife preserve.” The Inuit, identified by numbered tags, were taken from a community with a school and nursing station, and transported on a boat with infectious tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis was also the disease that had previously claimed the life of Flaherty’s star, Allakariallak, a fact that Flaherty covered up by telling audiences that “Nanook” had “starved to death” while hunting deer, yet again erasing Euro-American influence. Several of the High Arctic Exiles’ children were taken from their parents for medical treatment and “misplaced for several years” by bureaucrats, a chilling indifference that echoes Flaherty’s casual attitude to Nanook’s fluctuating number of “young huskies.” For his monument symbolizing victims of the “Relocation,” Inuk sculptor Looty Pijamini chose a life-size Inuk woman and child, carved from a block of granite tinted red like blood.
Looty Pijamini’s monument to the “relocation”
Her international recording career has made “Inuk punk” Tanya Tagaq into one of the most recognizable cultural ambassadors of the Inuit people. Tagaq’s own mother hailed from Nanook of the North‘s Quebec location before falling victim to the High Arctic “relocation,” informing Tagaq’s complex response to the film’s mixture of colonial ideology and preserved history. In 2012, the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Tagaq to provide an original soundtrack to the film, drawing from the Inuit art of throat-singing, katajjaq. Discussing the film, Tagaq spotlights Flaherty’s staged scene of Nanook biting a gramophone record, as though unaware of what it is. “Inuit are running the cameras a lot of the time,” Tagaq laughs. Watching this scene closely is revealing. As the gramophone starts up, neither Nanook nor Nyla appears surprised by it, while Nyla rocks her baby to the music. There is an awkward jump cut, Nyla has been removed from the shot, and Nanook is laughing and biting the record. In such scenes, Allakariallak demonstrates the comic ability which gives the film its charm, but is harnessed to create a demeaning image of Inuit childishness, which Flaherty frames as generally representative of “the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo,” rather than individually representative of the talented comedian, Allakariallak. However, Tanya Tagaq’s soundtrack rejects Flaherty’s impulse to isolate, essentialize and fossilize Inuit culture into artificial purity. As a confident inheritor of her own culture, she engages with the musical traditions of other nations, harnessing non-native technology and instruments to enrich her evolving practice of katajjaq. When the show came to the 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival, I eagerly checked it out, having experienced the masculine tradition of Tuvan khöömei throat-singing in Siberia. Unlike khöömei, katajjaq evolved as a female tradition. Two women, facing each other, would improvise rhythmic motifs, the loser being the first to laugh or run out of breath. These throat-singing games tended to last between one and three minutes. Tagaq’s live performance to Nanook of the North lasts over an hour, an extraordinarily demanding tour-de-force of physical strength and passion.
Indigenous Siberian artist Konstantin Pankov blends nature with rhythmic vibrations
Katajjaq blends mood, rhythm and the imitation of natural sounds, from wind to howling dogs to crying birds, weaving them into a spiritual whole. By blending the sounds of the natural world with the mind’s vibrations, katajjaq reflects the worldview of animism, the traditional Inuit conception that all objects and beings are endowed with spirit. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Christian missionaries banned throat-singing as a demonic and sexual act. Certainly, Tagaq’s version of katajjaq is strikingly sexual. Her hyperventilations build in intensity and peak with shrieking cries, inducing ecstatic trance. Where “Nyla the smiling one” was crafted as a submissive image of availability, the throat-singer powerfully (perhaps threateningly) voices her own desire. Nina Segalowitz, a survivor of coerced adoption and forced assimilation, found katajjaq an empowering tool for reconnecting to her heritage. Her story recalls the Australian Aboriginal experience of forced assimilation portrayed in Rabbit Proof Fence: “my father thought he was signing hospital admission forms. The next day, he came to take me back, but I was gone. They told him that he had signed release papers and couldn’t get me back.” Evie Mark, raised Inuk but with a white father, also describes the craving for something that will make your identity stronger as a major motivator for katajjaq revival, indicating its importance to national self-esteem. Placed against the imagery of Nanook of the North, katajjaq collapses the distance between spectator and subject, dismantling the subject’s perceived quaintness and giving voice to Inuit experience and perception, from the shrieking killing of a walrus to the grunting effort of igloo construction.
Tagaq in concert with Nanook of the North (sample)
Tanya Tagaq’s reclaiming of Nanook of the North, with music that fuses tradition and modernity, may be compared with the work of A Tribe Called Red, a collective of First Nations DJs who have collaborated with Tagaq, that remix traditional chanting and drumming with electronica, dubstep and spoken word, rejecting the impulse to isolate, essentialize and fossilize. A Tribe Called Red‘s visuals (start two minutes in) remix stereotypes of “Red Indians” from pop culture, with witty juxtapositions that subvert their original associations and assert A Tribe Called Red‘s authorship. Genocidal policies of forced assimilation, from prohibitions by Christian missionaries to coerced adoptions and residential schools (whose painful legacy is depicted in Cree director Georgina Lightning’sOlder Than America, among other Indigenous filmmakers), interrupt the line of cultural transmission in oral cultures, so that the imperial culture’s anthropological records can become the only source of preserved heritage. In reframing a colonial record of Inuit life into an expression of Inuit experience, Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North can be compared to the art of Jane Ash Poitras(Cree),which reframes anthropological photographs by symbolically visualizing the subject’s own perspective. One of her Inuit artworks, “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit,” offers multiple symbolic frames for her young Inuk subject. First, he is surrounded with the syllabic writing of his own language, inuktitut, whose flowing edges are contained by a rigid frame bearing the imposed Euro-American label “Copper Eskimo.” The outer frame is looped with blood, suggesting interior flesh, while the Arctic exterior, with ghostly inukshuk, is placed inside this flesh, the body experiencing the environment rather than the environment defining the body. On the lower left, an elder represents connection to cultural tradition through role models, an experience stolen from the victims (and survivors) of Canada’s policy of coerced adoption, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s.
Jane Ash Poitras’ “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit”
Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting. In reality, Inuit women were hunters, including polar bear hunters, and played strong roles as educators and storytellers, while today’s Inuit women are also lawyers, government ministers, and activists. Nanook of the North established the Inuk man as the sole icon of Inuit life. It was followed by 1934’s Wedding of Palo, a portrait of Greenland Inuit by Danish filmmakers, in which the Inuk woman is a love object fought over by two rivals. Though brilliantly filmed, and preserving authentic Inuit traditions, the film reinforces perceptions of Indigenous women as natural spoils of war, submissively accepting their role as the victor’s rightful property. The Inuit-made Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) does portray the frustration of its heroine, Atuat, at being promised to villain Oki rather than her beloved Atanarjuat. Nevertheless, the story centers Atanarjuat’s experiences, and it is he must find a way to marry the heroine. The short film Kajutaijuq, co-written and produced by Nyla Innuksuk, also centers a male hunter but, hopefully, the rise of promising female filmmakers like Innuksuk will lead to more representations of Inuit women’s perspectives in future. In the meantime, Tanya Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North is a powerful start.
In the haze of her Shondaland television production empire, many people forget—or aren’t aware at all—that Rhimes’ success began in 2002 when she wrote the screenplay for a little movie called ‘Crossroads,’ which also happened to be Britney Spears’ silver screen debut.
In the haze of her Shondaland television production empire, many people forget—or aren’t aware at all—that Rhimes’ success began in 2002 when she wrote the screenplay for a little movie called Crossroads, which also happened to be Britney Spears’ silver screen debut. Spawning the coming of age anthems “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” and “Overprotected,” Crossroads may have been a critical flop but it drew $61 million internationally and will forever remain a cult classic for many millennials, myself included.
Another of Rhimes’ success stories that allowed her to go on to produce some of the hottest dramas on TV was Grey’s Anatomy. Originally sweeping the Golden Globe and Emmy nominations (with a few wins here and there) in its early years, the general consensus about Grey’s today is consternation that it’s still airing after 11 seasons. What originally began as a dramatic look at the lives of a diverse cast of surgical interns arguably devolved into a shark jump of epic proportions with Izzie’s cancer-induced hallucinations and a musical episode. As a lifelong Grey’s fan, I’ll defend it to the death and contend that it has corrected course in the past few years while not being afraid to take risks.
At first glance, two of Rhimes’ early successes might not look so similar, but I’m here to argue that Crossroads acted as a dry run for Grey’s Anatomy. Let me count the ways…
First, both center on a somewhat boring white woman whose less conventional friends turn out to be much more interesting. Crossroads (along with Center Stage) introduced us to Zoe Saldana, the well-to-do popular girl to Spears’ awkward valedictorian and Taryn Manning’s pregnant teen from the wrong side of the tracks, subverting stereotypes of race in the small Georgian town where the movie is set, which has become Rhimes’ calling card.
In Grey’s, Meredith finds immediate kinship with Cristina Yang, and later brings Latina Callie Torres and mixed race half-sister Maggie Pierce into a fold that’s more fucked up than their Crossroads counterparts. Like Orange is the New Black (in which Manning also stars), Meredith and Lucy act as Trojan horses to introduce audiences to the lives of other, more diverse women.
There’s also the awkward, bumbling love-interest-that-wasn’t. In one of Crossroads’ opening scenes, we see a lingerie-clad Lucy about to have sex for the first time with Justin Long’s Henry, who’s pined after Lucy for the three years they’ve been lab partners. Over in Shondaland, it was Meredith who drunkenly succumbed to George’s subtle advances, but it was not to be–she started crying during sex and damaged their friendship, working relationship, and housemate dynamic for a long time. (The one aspect in which Grey’s differs to Crossroads is that Anson Mount’s Ben is certainly no McDreamy.)
Crossroads is a road trip flick whereas Grey’s primarily takes place inside a hospital, but make no mistake: there have been plenty of outings away from the four walls of Seattle Grace/Mercy West/Grey-Sloane Memorial Hospital. These include the men’s camping trip in which Alex and George get into a “slap-fight” (“open-handed combat” to protect their surgeon hands); the residents’ sojourn to San Francisco to take their boards where April and Jackson finally get it on; Cristina’s fellowship at the Mayo Clinic sees her isolated in icy Minnesota; and the car accident involving Callie and Arizona which spawns the abovementioned musical episode, “Song Beneath the Song.”
Speaking of music, Crossroads is a film that utilizes it quite heavily and with Britney Spears as your leading lady, you’d be (“Drive Me) Crazy” not to. In addition to the songs I mentioned above, there’s also the requisite karaoke scene in which Spears, Manning and Saldana sing “I Love Rock & Roll,” also released as a single for Spears. Like The O.C. before it, Grey’s is one of those TV shows that has become better known perhaps for its music than its melodrama. In 2006, the show won a Grammy for best compilation album featuring two of the songs the show is perhaps best known for: “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol and “How to Save a Life” by The Fray. Both have the requisite Madonna singalong while Grey’s has made famous the “five second dance party” and drunken boogie sessions Meredith and Cristina frequently engage in.
Finally, both protagonists have strained family lives. Lucy in Crossroads grew up with her father (Dan Aykroyd) after her mother left them to start a new family; this is part of the reason Lucy tags along on the road trip in the first place. The titular Meredith Grey rivals Lucy in the dysfunctional family department: in addition to her father walking out and her mother’s cold and distant demeanour, Meredith discovers later in life that she has not one but three half-sisters spawned from her parents’ subsequent dalliances (spoiler alert: these sisters three don’t all share the same DNA).
Crossroads’ Mimi (Manning) begins the movie pregnant but miscarries at the culmination of the road trip, while Grey’s Izzie gave the product of her teen pregnancy up for adoption. Where Crossroads doesn’t deal with abortion, Grey’s certainly does, with Cristina undergoing an abortion and a miscarriage for her two pregnancies. For a teen movie, Crossroads isn’t afraid to deal with rape, either, which is how Mimi came to be pregnant in the first place.
At first glance the two Rhimes productions couldn’t be more different, and while Grey’s is far more sophisticated, Crossroads is evidence that Rhimes began her progressive storytelling long before Meredith, Olivia, Annalise and co. hit our TV screens. Who would have thought that Britney Spears would be involved?
Scarlett Harris is a Melbourne, Australia-based freelance writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she writes about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter.
‘The wHOLE’ explores humanity, exposes the prison industrial complex which controls and subverts the humanity of all those it houses, and in the course of the series it invites viewers to grow in empathy for a person, who, for some, would be otherwise unlikely to evoke it.
This is a guest post by Jennifer Fischer.
As a female filmmaker, I’ve asked myself many times why my latest dramatic project, The wHOLE, focuses on a man in an almost exclusively male milieu. In the pilot episode, no women appear on screen until the very end of the episode, and then only for a few minutes.
Given the show’s subjects–torture, racism, mass incarceration–to begin the series with a woman in solitary confinement would have been equally powerful, and equally realistic.
A part of me longed to begin the series there. Perhaps a woman was sent to an isolation unit because reported she had been raped by a correctional officer (as is quite common), or perhaps a transgender woman was sent to isolation “for her own protection,” only to find that isolation offers no protection, but only psychological, emotional, mental, even physical trauma.
We could have started the series in these places and more, but we didn’t. We started with Marcus, an African-American male.
We start the show with an individual unlikely to receive sympathy from most viewers: we offer no immediate explanation for why he has been sent to solitary confinement, nor do we hint at why he is imprisoned in the first place.
This individual is defiant, he has rage. This is an individual that many might think deserves his punishment.
Though the story centers on a man, telling his story becomes a feminist act. A friend recently shared her definition of feminism with me: “The crux of feminism is about equality. Feminism cannot ever be separated from the multiple layers of our identity—race, class, culture, etc. Feminism is about exploring our underlying humanity and the forces which try to control or subvert us.” Drawing on this understanding she went on to say, after watching our pilot episode, “Your story is a feminist story.”
Yes, I realize, it is. The wHOLE explores humanity, exposes the prison industrial complex which controls and subverts the humanity of all those it houses, and in the course of the series it invites viewers to grow in empathy for a person, who, for some, would be otherwise unlikely to evoke it.
As I developed this project, I did a lot of research—speaking, meeting, and working alongside individuals who have themselves lived the experiences we’re highlighting. Cast and crew on the project have spent a combined seven years in solitary confinement.
And lately, I’ve been reading and listening to Angela Davis, a feminist and prison abolitionist icon, who spoke the now familiar phrase, “The personal is political.” She references Beth Richie, who discusses the ways that current incarceration practices reinforce “the intimate violence of the family, of the relationship… [t]he individual violence of battery and sexual assault.” The current system fails to offer restorative justice or solutions that benefit our society. It offers no solutions worthy of a feminist paradigm.
Solitary confinement is perhaps the most violent, most dehumanizing aspect of the prison industrial complex. When a person is placed in a small box for 23 hours a day with no human contact, it strips identity from them. It calls their existence into question. It is domination and subjugation at the most intense level. It is everything that feminists struggle against.
Bringing this hidden reality (facing approximately 80,000 men, women, and children in the U.S.) to light in a very authentic and real way is an act of feminism, an act of defiance, and an act of hope. Feminism is uplifting not only to women. Insisting on the humanity of all is a feminist act.
Angela Davis says, “Prisons are constituted as Normal. It takes a lot of work to persuade people to think beyond the bars, and to be able to imagine a world without prisons and to struggle for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment.”
She’s right. We’ve come to see prisons as a way of life. Some viewers of the series may think the system is working because they are not affected by the problem. And if it doesn’t affect them, they need not act. But the truth is this series is about the whole of our society—our acceptance of a violent, oppressive system that only echoes the worst of our history (colonialism, slavery, patriarchy).
Davis does insist that a feminist approach to understanding prisons must focus on imprisoned women as well, not exclusively on men. As it traces its narrative arc, The wHOLE will do that as well—it’s one of the main reasons The wHOLE is a series, rather than a film. We will tell many more stories from behind bars as the series unfolds and through transmedia storytelling during the initial season.
We’ll tell stories of women who are imprisoned, of children who are imprisoned, of exonerees, of the families left behind, of the correctional officers, nurses, psychologists, and others asked to enforce this isolation. And each of these stories will be told through a feminist lens because ultimately, The wHOLE, is about the humanity of us all. Its insistence on humanity, on equality, and on the dignity of all lives is what makes it a feminist story.
This is why I am proud to be a woman telling a man’s story. And it seems only fair, given how often men have taken it upon themselves to tell women’s stories. I’m proud, too, to be collaborating with men who share my vision, who understand this project as an act of resistance and defiance. I’m proud of our feminist lens.
Producer Jennifer Fischer co-founded Think Ten Media Group with Ramon Hamilton. Prior to producing The wHOLE, Jennifer produced the company’s multi-award winning feature film, SMUGGLED, and served as the Producer of Marketing and Distribution for the film, successfully self-distributing the film, which screened at universities, colleges, and community organizations throughout the United States and abroad. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, where she fell in love with filmmaking and directed and produced her first short film, “Songs of Palestine.” She followed that with a narrative award-winning short film, “Rachel’s Fortune,” which she wrote, edited, scored. She served as a technical consultant on “In Conflict With Kismet,” a short film from Writer/Director Dani Dixon, which debuted on BET and was featured at the Reel Women International Film Festival.
Jennifer can be found on Twitter @IndieJenFischer, and she curates a Film Articles and Resources Pinboard that Indiewire selected as one of the Top 10 Pinboards for Independent Filmmakers to Follow. She also recently started a Women In Film Pinboard as well. Tweet your best Women In Film stuff at her so that she can pin it!
How you define risk – be that financial, ethical, physical or moral – is vital. It shapes who we are and, even more so, what we see in the media and onscreen. We all know that male studio heads define “risk” as films helmed by women (despite the overwhelming stats that women-led films do better financially). It is clear to me that now, more than ever, we need risk-takers in charge. We need risk-takers to make women better represented in film, on both sides of the camera.
This is a guest post by Stacey Davis.
I am a risk taker.
When I say risk, I’m talking about the impulsive, why-the-hell-not, damn-the-consequences kind.
Case in point, several years ago I convinced my husband that we should open an ice cream shop in our neighborhood. Why did I think this was a good idea for two full-time working adults with a toddler at home? Well, I couldn’t get the image out of my head of kids on bikes coming in with piggy bank change clinched in their palms, falling over themselves to buy penny candy.
“It’ll be great” was my best argument for why we should jump off this cliff. And it was great. We had a stream of neighborhood kids pour in with eager faces and wander out with sticky ones. But, despite our enthusiasm, it failed.
After 11 months, we closed the doors. But I’d do it again. I’ve never looked upon that experience as a mistake. Instead, I think, “Damn, if I knew then what I know now, I could have killed it.”
How you define risk – be that financial, ethical, physical or moral – is vital. It shapes who we are and, even more so, what we see in the media and onscreen. We all know that male studio heads define “risk” as films helmed by women (despite the overwhelming stats that women-led films do better financially). It is clear to me that now, more than ever, we need risk-takers in charge. We need risk-takers to make women better represented in film, on both sides of the camera.
So, my question is this: How can we all learn to take more risks?
How can we encourage each other to take them? For starters, we must never let past failures influence future success. A few years after the ice cream shop shuttered, I decided it was time for me to move on from the law firm where I had practiced for the last 12 years. My passion was entertainment law and the only way to pursue that path in Birmingham, Ala. was to set up my own shop.
I never once second-guessed the idea of starting another small business. Consequences be damned, remember? So two months later, I opened my own entertainment law practice, the Law Firm of Stacey A. Davis. It hasn’t been easy, but a year later the doors are still open.
I didn’t let one failure chain me down or stop me from taking another risk. I couldn’t. The fear of sitting behind a desk working another 10 years at a job that was just a job and not a passion was far more insidious than the fear of failure.
As Drew Barrymore said, “If you don’t take risks, you’ll have a wasted soul.” And my soul craved the risk.
Still, I can hear the chorus shout: “It’s easy for you. You’ve got a safety net” or “Your family is so supportive.” Whether or not that’s the case, I encourage everyone to take the plunge themselves. Regardless of your circumstance, it does not feel safe.
During my legal career, I’ve represented a lot of first-time filmmakers who failed to achieve the level of success they wanted with their first film. Hell, some of them didn’t even finish their films. They took a risk and it didn’t pay off. But being afraid of failure only makes future success impossible. It is those filmmakers who shouted the mantra of consequences be damned and jumped off the cliff again (and again) that have etched out a career in this business.
One of my writing instructors once told me every no gets you closer to a yes. I’ve heard a lot of nos. And I looked at each one of them as a way to get one step closer to a yes (granted, that perspective is not always immediate and usually involves a margarita or two).
Call it eternal optimism. Call it the growth mindset. (If you haven’t read Carol Dweck’s Mindset, read it now.) But I believe that the risk mindset is the No. 1 quality a woman filmmaker needs in order to succeed in this industry. You’ve got to fight for it. You’ve got to take it.
So now I’ve moved on to my next adventure. Making my first film, The Sibling Code. I’ve been writing for many years and knew I needed to take the next step. It’s a big risk. Maybe my Seed & Spark crowdfunding campaign will fail. Maybe the film will be a flop. Maybe in a year I’ll say, “Damn, if I knew then what I know now, I could have killed it.” But I don’t live for maybes. I don’t get out of bed for maybes. My name is Stacey Davis and I take risks. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Stacey Davis is an entertainment attorney and the writer/producer of The Sibling Code, a comedic short about the love-hate relationship of siblings. Stacey lives in Birmingham with her husband, Nick, and 8- year-old-son, Charlie. Stacey can be reached at sdavis@staceydavislaw.com, www.staceydavislaw.com or @staceydavislaw.
Considering more than one in five women are raped in their lifetime in the USA, I feel it is a hard-hitting reality and it is about time this film is made. I should also point out, that the script focuses on the recovery of a rape survivor and is much less of a tragic tale, than a realistic and a hopeful one.
Filmmaker, Jessica M. Thompson, at the premiere of her short film, Across the Pond, at Tropfest NY 2013
This is a guest post by Jessica M. Thompson.
When I started writing my latest feature film, The Light of The Moon, I had a few comments from friends lamenting that I was not writing a Romantic-Comedy. Now, I should point out, I have not written or directed many Rom-Coms in my life – I am definitely more driven by the genres of Drama, Thriller, and even Sci-Fi – so these friends were not making a statement about my previous Rom-Coms being an utter hit and that I should not digress from my proven track record. These friends were making assumptions about the types of films that women write and direct, and also suggesting that these are the types of films that resonate with female audiences. Because, you know, Rom-Coms are the only types of films that women want to see, right?
Carlo Velayo and Jessica M. Thompson from Stedfast Productions at Tropfest NY 2013
Now I am very picky about my friendships: I only mingle with highly intelligent, interesting, creative and progressive women and men of the world, so I was pretty shocked to hear some of them make such blatantly pigeonholed comments. I had the overwhelming sense that the overarching stereotypes that Hollywood projects on to female writers, directors, actors, characters, and audiences were even starting to encroach on the Brooklynites of New York.
Director Catherine Hardwicke on the set of Red Riding Hood, 2011. (Photo courtesy of IMDb)
There has been a long pervading idea in Hollywood that it is only men, between the ages of 18-35, who go to the movies. This has been disproved time-and-time again, with one article in Variety pointing out that women made up 51 percentof all film audiences in 2011. Yet, only 30 percentof speaking roles in movies in 2014 were female characters (and this includes animated films that suggested we should just “let it go!”). And to make the situation direr, those speaking roles were largely supporting characters who were passive in nature and contributed very little to the overall plot within the film.
Director Catherine Hardwicke at the premiere of Red Riding Hood, 2011. (Photo courtesy of IMDb)
Writer/director Catherine Hardwicke struggled to secure funding for her indie hit Thirteen in 2003. “Of course there are double standards. No one can say it’s a level playing field,” she said. Stories with strong female leads are often disregarded for funding by the largely male-dominated production and distribution companies of Hollywood. Although Thirteen went on to win the Sundance Award for Best Director, be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and earn over $4.5 million at the box office, Hardwicke still found it hard to get her future films, with ladies in the leading roles, off the ground.
Actor/writer/producer Brit Marling in I Origins, 2014. (Photo courtesy of IMDb)
Interesting to note, Hardwicke did go on to direct the first Twilight movie in 2008, which grossed over $392 million worldwide, only to have male directors take over her role for the last four films in the series. As Hardwicke points out: “Despite achievement at the highest levels, women still find themselves pounding on doors that are slow to open.”
Actor/writer/producer Brit Marling, in The East, 2013. (Photo courtesy of IMDBb)
The film I am making this year, The Light of The Moon, is about the first six weeks after a sexual assault and the impacts on the main character, Bonnie, and her relationships. When I have spoken to some savvy film festival audiences about the story, I’ve heard comments, like: “Wow, sounds like a real picker-upper” or “isn’t that a bit too depressing to watch?” Considering more than one in five women are raped in their lifetime in the USA, I feel it is a hard-hitting reality and it is about time this film is made. I should also point out, that the script focuses on the recovery of a rape survivor and is much less of a tragic tale, than a realistic and a hopeful one.
Jessica M. Thompson co-founded Stedfast Productions in 2010. This year, Stedfast will be making their first feature film, The Light of The Moon, which is now crowd funding through Seed&Spark.
But these comments did make me start to wonder if male directors, like Derek Cianfrance, encountered the same problems when pitching an utterly sad, romantic-tragedy, like Blue Valentine? Or if our darlings, Matt & Ben, got some slack for making a film about a genius who was violently abused as a child and now has emotional problems in Good Will Hunting? Or any of Lars Von Trier’s movies for that matter!
Do we have a problem with women who are not just passive side-characters? Do we have an issue with women making films where the female characters do not only act as sexy half-time entertainment or as the love interest of the male protagonist? Do we have a problem with seeing complex female characters, who make mistakes, who hurt, and change, and grow, and fight, and struggle to achieve what they want?
No. Actually, I don’t think we do. Because the movies that have been made in the past with dynamic female leads, like Thirteen, Boys Don’t Cry, Hunger Games, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Kill Bill, Amélie, Juno, Erin Brokovich, (etc., etc.), have all proven otherwise. They have all performed ridiculously well, both in the critics’ circles and at the box office. But I do think, despite all of these success stories showing that film audiences want to see more interesting female characters on screen, it is the male-dominated Hollywood executives who still have a problem with funding movies about women and by women.
Fortunately, there is hope. As Brit Marling said at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: “I think it is something like less than 10 percent of directors and screenwriters are women? So, of course then, cinema and TV is usually from the male perspective…so I think the more women that go into writing and directing – I think that will be the beginning of the shift…women taking the reigns and saying: ‘I’m not finding the characters that I need, I’m just going to sit down and write them.’”
With females now making up the majority of the human population and theatregoers alike, surely, it is about time we give the masses what they want. It is about time that art reflects life in this matter. So ladies, pick up your pens and your cameras and keep on fighting the good fight!
Jessica M. Thompson is an Australian filmmaker who moved to Brooklyn, New York over four years ago and founded Stedfast Productions – a collective of visual storytellers. Jess has directed several short films, music video clips and commercials and recently edited Cheryl Furjanic’s award-winning documentary, Back on Board: Greg Louganis.
Jess looks forward to making her feature directorial debut with The Light of the Moon, which is currently crowd funding through Seed&Spark.
‘Working Girl’ is a product of its time, when feminism meant a white lady achieving all the power and success normally reserved for white men. And what’s worse, the antifeminist backlash of the 1980s is paradoxically woven throughout. See, Tess isn’t like the other women who’ve made it in business, she’s a “real woman.”
Is there a German word for the discomfort of an adult re-watching something they loved as a child and harshly realizing its flaws?
I felt that watching Working Girl last night. This movie was MY JAM in my youth, paving the way for a lifetime of having “Let the River Run” stuck in my head every time I’m called upon to wear “work clothes” (for someone who writes for the Internet and does comedy, this is not often). My husband, who had never seen it, kept saying “I can see why Baby Robin loved this.” I mean, it’s a feminist twist on Pygmalion where the girl not only remolds HERSELF but chooses high-powered businesslady as her new form. A high-powered businesslady who wears pretty dresses. And gets to screw Harrison Ford. Growing up, Working Girl was my fairytale of choice.
But now, as a grown-up with years of feminist training, I see that Working Girl is essentially White Feminism: The Movie. Chantelle Monique’s previous Bitch Flicks piece on Working Girl hits the nail on the head: “Even though Working Girl seems like a harmless romantic drama, its female representation is firmly rooted in classism and sexism.”
Our hero, Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith, in one of those hypercharismatic undeniably star-making performances), pulls herself up from her working class Staten Island roots to make it in the “man’s world” of business (ambiguous movie-world business, where words like “mergers and acquisitions” and “arbitrage” are thrown around in front of stock tickers and computer monitors but the actual work being done is never clearly illustrated). Working Girl is a product of its time, when feminism meant a white lady achieving all the power and success normally reserved for white men.
And what’s worse, the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s is paradoxically woven throughout. See, Tess isn’t like the other women who’ve made it in business, she’s a “real woman.” When love interest Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) first spots her at a corporate mixer where she’s decked out in a sparkly black cocktail dress, he tells her, “You’re the only woman I’ve seen at one of these things who dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.” Uninhibited by valium and tequila, Tess responds, “I have a head for business and a bod for sin.” It isn’t Tess’s particular brand of lipstick feminism that bothers me so much as it is the putting down of other women who’ve eschewed standards of feminine beauty and sex appeal. It’s another aspect of Working Girl claiming progressivism while reinforcing the status quo.
Tess’s makeover into Business Barbie also involves a lot of unfortunate class issues. She chops off her gloriously teased 80s mullet (“If you want to be taken seriously, you need serious hair”), drops her gaudy costume jewelry, and stops wearing sneakers during her commute. Tess’s transformation comes about while she’s Single White Femaling her high class Wellesley grad boss Katherine (Sigourney Weaver), whose job she’s fraudulently taken on while Katherine recuperates from a skiing accident. Tess also borrows the absent Katherine’s clothes, deluxe apartment, and we eventually find out, boyfriend. She even practices imitating Katherine’s upper class accent while listening to her dictation. Madeover Tess is contrasted against her best friend, Cyn (Joan Cusack), and the rest of the secretarial pool, who keep their teased hair and peacock eyeshadow. Once again, we’re meant to admire Tess for not being like the other girls, advancing the sexist trope of the Exceptional Woman.
Tess is also portrayed as superior to her boss, Katherine, who becomes the villain of the piece by passing off one of Tess’s ideas as her own. This deception makes Katherine a cutthroat bitch who will do anything to get ahead. Meanwhile, the ethics of Tess passing off Katherine’s entire LIFE as her own are barely questioned. And Tess’s questionable moves to get ahead (notably, crashing a wedding to get face time with a business prospect) are just spunk and moxie.
So what makes Katherine the bad guy? Is it her privilege? Then why is Tess celebrated for shedding her working class trappings? Is it Katherine’s ego? How does a purportedly feminist movie justify punishing a woman for being proud of what she’s accomplished? Or is it simply that pitting women against each other is more palatable to Hollywood? Katherine first presents herself as a mentor, and wouldn’t that have been a better feminist message? (This compares unfavorably to another one of my favorite lady-frauds-her-way-to-the-top-of-the-corporate-ladder movies, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, where Joanna Cassidy’s Rose supports Christina Applegate’s secretly teenage assistant from start to finish.)
This piece has pained me to write. I can’t quite let go of my love for Working Girl, even though the problems with its purported feminism are now abundantly clear to me. I guess it will just have to be another one of my problematic faves.
Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who would totally wear sneakers on her commute to an office job if she had one (potential employers take note!).
