The radical notion that women like good movies
The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.
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.
I had been curious to see what the filmmakers would do with this adaptation of the Lisa Genova novel. The writer-directors are a married gay male couple (Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer) who not only made the underrated ‘Quinceañera’ (the rare film about Chicanos that doesn’t have a white savior or even a white main character), but also live with the relatively recent ALS diagnosis of Glatzer (whose disease has progressed enough that he can’t speak or eat without assistance). While ALS is not the same as the Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease the title character has in ‘Alice,’ I thought Glatzer’s experience might give the film more insight than the usual able-bodied writer and director’s view of disability. What I didn’t expect from this film was how mild and polite it is about the challenges and loss Alice (Moore) faces.
In an interview with the ‘New York Times,’ Gillian Flynn says, “The likability thing, especially in Hollywood, is a constant conversation, and they’re really underrating their audience when they have that conversation. What I read and what I go to the movies for is not to find a best friend, not to find inspirations…It’s to be involved with characters that are maybe incredibly different from me, that may be incredibly bad but that feel authentic.”
Check out all of the posts for our Academy Awards 2015 Theme Week here.
So, you just saw a terrible movie and you want to tell the world about it – not so fast. How we frame our discussions about sucky movies depends on who’s listening, and whether we’ve got common ground.
‘Ex Machina’ and ‘Her,’ by contrast, are uncomfortably searching explorations of the hetero-male fear of, and emotional need for, women, that feel like self-scrutiny. By replacing women with female images that are literally constructions of male fantasy, the films offer no distractions from probing the heroes’ own psychology. These guys are not chauvinazis. They are the real deal.
“You’ve got a lot to learn, Myrtle Mae, and I hope you never learn it.” These words, from 1950’s ‘Harvey,’ apply equally to sex and sanity. Harvey’s young women, Myrtle Mae and Nurse Kelly, are open and assertive about their sexual desires and frustrations. It is the older woman, Veta, who is inhibited. She flinches when a bosom jiggles and squirms when discussing sex. Society’s usual concept of sexual inhibition, as a natural innocence corrupted by experience, is flipped in Harvey: female sexuality is the natural innocence that experience disciplines into inhibition. Myrtle Mae and Nurse Kelly have a lot to learn, and we hope they never learn it.
Check out the 2015 Oscar Nominees with links to our reviews and articles providing feminist commentary!
So, where does that leave us? There are the dismal numbers, all laid out, Hollywood’s claims that it can’t take risks, that women are a financial liability (though they buy the majority of movie tickets), or that the few female execs that climb to the top can’t or won’t pull other women up with them. But on the micro-level, this is about individual decisions each woman makes when she allows a story she wrote to be usurped as it transfers to the screen, or takes a part, no matter how fantastic, that is written and directed by a man.
So, you just saw a terrible movie and you want to tell the world about it – not so fast. How we frame our discussions about sucky movies depends on who’s listening, and whether we’ve got common ground.
To get an idea of the Soska sisters, picture ‘The Shining’s Grady twins, only all grown up and in control of their destinies. Just in time for Halloween, Jen and Sylvia Soska spoke with us about their favorite horror movies, the hardships of working as female directors in masculine genre, their work on ‘See No Evil 2’ and what’s next for their careers.
