Tag: Gender Stereotypes

Wedding Week: ‘Sex and the City’: The Movie We Hate to Love

The ladies of Sex and the City on their way to the wedding

This is a guest post by Amanda Morris. 

“Year after year, twenty-something women come to New York City in search of the two Ls: Labels and Love,” goes the opening voiceover for Sex and the City: The Movie. These words set the stage for the decadent, emotional rollercoaster to follow, featuring fabulous clothes, shoes, and the question of what is truly important: the wedding or the marriage?
When I was 37 and getting divorced while finishing my Ph.D., one of my girlfriends sensed the despair I felt (but tried to hide) over feeling alone and worrying that party of one would be my fate, despite intellectual acceptance of my ability to survive and remain a strong solo. Sometimes, emotions trump logic. My friend lent me her Sex and the City collection–the entire series–with the simple words, “Watch this. You’ll feel better.”
As many women likely are when faced with divorce and the possibility of life alone, I was skeptical of any advice laced with platitudes, but this sounded different and I trusted her judgment despite being against the entire series when it first appeared. Who wants to watch a bunch of stereotypical white women flaunt their wealth and privilege and leap from man to man while showcasing physical beauty and flawless fashion taste? My skepticism did not hold up and by the end of the first season, I was hooked. My initial disdain was tempered by truly inspiring and philosophical gems in each episode that I needed to hear in my emotionally questionable state.
By the time the movie was released in 2008, I was a true believer in the friendships, humor, and wisdom embedded in this seemingly frivolous packaging. As most fans were aware, this movie promised Big things for Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, and her main love interest, John Preston (also known as Big), played by Chris Noth–namely, the movie buzz suggested that their relationship’s fate would be revealed in the film.

Sex and the City official 2008 trailer
Revisiting this film five years later (as a happily paired person once again), I find myself chafing against the film even as I enjoy the drama. The choices and mistakes that Carrie make from the time that she and Big decide to marry to the moment he leaves her at the altar about a third of the way through the story are the choices and mistakes that many modern American women make: ignore the man and his wishes, allow friends to convince you that you need a fancier dress, venue, event, and become more enamored with the grandeur and history of a luxurious location over the real fears and concerns your partner has about a large, intimidating, and ostentatious event.
Initially, Carrie and Big mildly discuss their future over dinner prep and decide to get married, while foregoing the traditional diamond engagement ring, which Carrie does not want. At about twelve minutes into the film, Carrie announces to her friends, Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), over lunch that she and Big made this decision and Charlotte excitedly screams, while Miranda looks on, horrified.
This tension grows between excitement over a traditional (and suggested to be more financially and legally secure) choice to marry and the unconventional decisions that Carrie tries to make as the story quickly progresses. Carrie’s implied choice of simple, civil wedding service is subverted by Charlotte’s “gift” of wedding planner Anthony Marentino’s (Mario Cantone) services, which turns the wedding into a grander event. Carrie’s elegant, vintage, and designer-less knee-length cream dress is not “wedding” enough for Charlotte or Anthony. Upon seeing Carrie’s dress choice, Charlotte frowns and says, “It’s pretty, but it’s so simple,” and Anthony mutters, “The invitation is fancier than the dress.”
Despite Carrie’s intentions to keep her classic dress and small wedding, her Vogue editor (Candace Bergen) offers her the opportunity to be featured in a photo shoot as a 40-year-old bride wearing bridal couture for Vogue’s annual age issue. Carrie agrees and when the Vivienne Westwood dress that she fell in love with at the shoot arrives at her apartment door, suddenly, the wedding takes on greater importance than the marriage. As Carrie explains to Big when she announces the guest list has jumped from 75 to 200, “The dress upped the ante.” Big seems noticeably agitated, responding that he just wants her and could have gone to City Hall.
In this respect, the film works as a rather harsh mirror for American women, especially those of us who have made or are thinking about making these same choices by privileging the wedding over the marriage and rationalizing the extraordinary expense to the possible detriment of our relationships. In the film these choices have consequences: Big leaves Carrie at the altar and by the time he realizes what a mistake his choice is, Carrie and her friends have left the church. When the two lovers see each other in the street, Carrie thrashes Big with her luxurious bouquet while tearily yelling, “I am humiliated!”

Carrie is humiliated

The question once again becomes what will happen to Carrie and Big? For the audience, another question lingers: Were those choices worth this result? As Carrie admits to Miranda during their Valentine’s dinner the following year, “I let the wedding get bigger than Big.”
When Carrie and Big do finally come back together at the end of the film, have an unassuming civil service, and a low-key restaurant gathering with their closest friends, this seems the perfect end.
Big proposes to Carrie at the end of the film
However, even after all of the movie’s (and series’) promises to break with convention and turn tradition on its ear, to learn from mistakes, to know better…three of the four main female characters end up in traditional marriages–husband, wife, and for two of them, children. The film promises an alteration of expectations related to weddings and marriage and ends up in the same rut that American society stubbornly refuses to leave, and because we love the fantasy, the opulence, and the promise of love against all odds, Sex and the City is a movie that we love, but hate that we do.
Amanda Morris, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of multiethnic rhetorics at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and when she’s not writing or wrangling students, she loves shark fishing, gardening, and cooking with her man.

Wedding Week: ‘Bride Wars’: When Weddings Drive a Bitch Crazy

This is a guest post by Alisande Fitzsimons.

In Gary Winick’s 2009 film Bride Wars, two best friends pit themselves against each other in order to both have their dream wedding day. If this thoroughly unfeminist – not to mention unlikely – premise doesn’t put you off then pull on your spanx, pin up your hair, and settle in to enjoy some fun so light and frothy it may as well be a specially designed valium-laced cupcake.

It pains me to state that a rare successful Hollywood film featuring a rare two female leads (Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway) orientates itself around the wedding industry, an industry that feeds on female insecurity, causing otherwise sane and sensible women to spend a fortune on a single day in a quest for a level of perfection that probably only exists on cinema screens.

Best friends turned worst enemies

It also pains me to admit that the film is a firm favourite of mine because the lunacy that is fused to its girliness means it fits very well into that hallowed space known as “comfort movie.” Feel free to judge. I know you have one too.

Written by the female comedy duo Casey Wilson and June Diane Raphael, Bride Wars can be read as a much lighter companion piece to Kristen Wiig’s infinitely dirtier Bridesmaids, were Wiig’s depiction of how women behave when their closest friendship is self-immolating not far more realistic (yes, I do include the part where she hallucinates on the plane) and – let’s be real – funnier.

Bride Wars depicts both its brides – friends since childhood – as beautiful, successful in their careers and in stable relationships. It also depicts their descent into venomous harpies when it emerges that their wedding planner (a dignified and ice-cool Candace Bushnell) has booked both of their weddings to take place at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel on the same day.

The Plaza, we understand, has been both of the women’s dream venue since childhood visits with their mothers, who were also BFFs. This may be a side issue but, realistically, how many women’s best childhood friend remains their closest friend into adulthood, particularly when they became friends because of their mothers’ friendship?

Also, how realistic is it that both of these women would remain fixated on the goddamn Plaza from the age of six through twenty-six? Yes, the Palm Court is divine but I maintain that at some point at least one of them – probably Hathaway whose character Emma is a teacher – would have looked round and said, “You know? I don’t think it really is worth the money.”

Liv in Vera Wang

Bride Wars, then, is a film about madness. Emma and Liv (Hudson) are arguably experiencing a folie a deux bought on by that well-known contagious disease, wedding fever. Since before the Great Depression there have been studies showing that even in times of dire need, people in the West will still spend the equivalent of a down payment on a home on their weddings. Tell me that’s not crazy.

Bride Wars is a film that aims to capture its audience, which I think we can take for granted is made up entirely of women, by highlighting the worst side of what Hollywood likes to depict as the nature of women. Rather than solving their planner’s error in a dignified, or even organized way, the brides turn on each other, exploiting each other’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses in ways that only a former ally ever can.

And though it’s amusing to watch the pair go at each other in increasingly underhanded ways – a dye job gone brutally wrong, a fake tan turned neon, deliveries of cakes and sweets causing one bride to gain so much weight that she can no longer fit into her bridal gown, a Bachelorette crashed and dance-off performed – there is also the fact that these acts have consequences so far-reaching that it’s hard to imagine the pair hugging out at the end of the film (which, of course, they do).

Liv’s dress, for example, was by Vera Wang, meaning it probably cost in the region of $25,000. That’s a lot of money to make a former friend waste. The bad dye job turned her locks blue, causing a disastrous day at work that very nearly costs her the job that’s paying for that fancy frock and, one suspects, her wedding as her fiancé is shown to earn less money than her.

But worse than all of this is the fact that, while the women go at each other like thirteen-year-olds with enough money to act out their most schadenfreude-filled fantasies, the men in it are doing nothing. Not strictly nothing. Both the grooms have jobs and seem like OK dudes, but neither of them is running around the city in a vengeful huff because his soon-to-be-wife’s former-bestie is trying to best their wedding day and destroy his woman’s life.

The madness at work

No, in Bride Wars that brand of madness is entirely female. This says nothing good or particularly realistic about the state of mind of the modern adult female. I mean, yes, we get hurt and pissed off when our friends do something that seems designed to cause pain to us, but how many of us who are not mentally ill follow them around, actively trying to ruin one of the most significant and expensive days of their lives?

For one thing, who would have time, especially if they were trying to plan the happiest day of their own lives at the same time?

So, once again, even though I doubt the writers were trying to make a serious point about how the pressure and expectations of the wedding industry can direly affect women’s mental states, I think the film is about mental illness. You decide.

Alisande Fitzsimons is a writer and stylist from Dublin. She can be found tweeting about weddings and clothes @AlisandeF.

Wedding Week: ‘Coming to America’ and Coming to Terms with New Marriage Traditions

Coming to America movie poster.



Written by Leigh Kolb

When I was a kid, Coming to America was one of my favorite movies. I’m not quite sure exactly what it was–maybe I just thought Eddie Murphy was really cute–but I’d like to think that I was drawn to its message of valuing female intelligence and independence over subservience. 
Coming to America was released in 1988, and helped round out Eddie Murphy’s rise to stardom in the 1980s, from Saturday Night Live to Beverly Hills Cop. While Murphy played side-kicks in many of his early films, Coming to America was unique because it featured Murphy as a romantic lead, and a cast dominated by African Americans. 
The premise of the film–a wealthy African prince travels to America to live modestly and find true love, not an arranged marriage–isn’t particularly groundbreaking, but the film worked because it was (and is, sadly) rare to find a black man as a romantic lead, especially in a blockbuster-friendly romantic comedy.
The film begins by taking the audience over the sweeping landscape of the fictional African country of Zamunda, while a South African choir sings. As the camera focuses in on a palace, it’s important to note the stark contrast of this depiction of an African country against the frequent portrayals of Africa in American media, which showcase Africa as a continent in need of our saving (after all, they don’t even have snow at Christmas time). 
The royal family of Zamunda: Prince Akeem Joffer, King Jaffe Joffer and Queen Aeoleon.  
Prince Akeem (Murphy) wakes up on the morning of his birthday, and he’s attended to by male and female servants (from royal bathers–beautiful women who clean the “royal penis”–to royal wipers in the bathroom). Akeem doesn’t seem comfortable with any of this, and even requests to use the bathroom alone. At breakfast, his father, King Jaffe Joffer (James Earl Jones), assumes his son must be excited to meet the wife they’ve arranged for him to marry. 
Akeem acts unsure, and finally speaks out against being doted upon and the idea that a woman would be chosen for him for his rank, not because she loves him. The tradition of arranged marriage doesn’t sit well with him, and his youthful rebellion takes the form of wanting to fall in love with a woman on his own terms and to be able to be more independent.
Semmi (Arsenio Hall), Akeem’s friend and attendant, serves as a foil to Akeem’s noble goodness. He is baffled that Akeem wants a woman with an opinion instead of having a woman who would follow his every command. Semmi assures Akeem that his wife need only have a “pretty face.”
Akeem asks him, “So you’d share your bed with a beautiful fool?” Semmi says that that’s the tradition for men in power. Akeem says that it’s also tradition for times to change. 
While the film isn’t a bastion of female empowerment, feminist nuggets like that pop up throughout the film, which is always refreshing within the confines of the well-worn tropes in romantic comedies. 
Akeem asks Imani, his chosen wife-to-be, to speak privately, breaking tradition.
When Akeem is presented with the beautiful woman who is to be his wife, Imani (Vanessa Bell), he asks to talk to her privately. She proudly tells him, “Ever since I was born, I’ve been trained to serve you.” He pushes to find out more about her, her favorite music, food, anything. But all she says is that she likes what he likes and will obey him. He says, “Anything I say, you’ll do?” after she refuses to not obey him, which is what he wants. He tells her to bark like a dog, and she complies, making a fool of herself as he is convinced this is not the woman he will marry. 
The fact that she was “born to serve” this man isn’t an anomaly–in patriarchal cultures steeped in tradition, the idea that women should be indoctrinated to be subservient to men is endemic. (Just last week, a U.S. congressman suggested that young boys and girls have segregated classes to be taught gender norms.)
When Akeem pushes back to his father and tries to get out of the marriage, saying he’s not ready, the king assumes he means sex. “I always assumed you had sex with your bathers,” the father says. “I know I do.” Again, the king is presented as misogynistic and patriarchal, without considering that his son may be trying to break free. He allows Akeem to go and travel for 40 days, assuming he wants to “sow his wild oats,” and that he’ll come back and marry the bride they chose for him.
As they prepare to leave, Akeem tells Semmi that he plans to find a wife during his travels. “I want a woman who will arouse my intellect as well as my loins,” Akeem says. They decide to go to New York City, specifically Queens, because he assumes there’s no better place to find a queen.
Akeem is excited to be in Queens; Semmi is less than impressed.
It’s a priority to Akeem that no one knows he’s royalty. He wants them to stay in the most “common” part of Queens, and asks the landlord to choose the “poorest” apartment for them to rent. When a woman throws garbage out of her window, Akeem exclaims, “America is great indeed–imagine a country so free, one can throw glass on the street!” Observations on wealth and ethnocentrism are also peppered throughout the film.
The two drape themselves in New York sports teams jackets and hats, and are mesmerized by a commercial for Soul Glo. Akeem goes to the barber shop (a gathering place near their apartment, where Murphy and Hall both play other parts). He gets his long princely ponytail cut off. The barber is impressed with his natural hair, and Akeem says he’s never put chemicals in it, just “juices and berries.” Later, the barber would rant and rant when Akeem asks for a Jheri curl, touting the importance of keeping hair natural. Between that and the brief rant by a white Jewish man in the barber shop (played by Murphy) that a person should be able to choose his own name, important facets of African American history and identity are touched upon in the barber shop (which were often official gathering places during the civil rights movement). 
After a night of meeting women of various disaster levels, Akeem and Semmi end up at a Black Awareness Week rally (specifically, the Miss Black Awareness Pageant), where Akeem immediately becomes enamored with Lisa McDowell (Shari Headley), the organizer of the rally and daughter of Cleo McDowell, who owns McDowell’s (a small fast food restaurant that borrows a lot from McDonald’s). She takes the microphone to stress the importance of individual expression (somewhat belittling the pageant, even if tongue in cheek) and asks the crowd to donate to a park for children to be able to express themselves. Akeem puts a giant wad of cash in the collection basket, and the next morning, Akeem and Semmi show up at McDowell’s to get jobs.
Akeem learns how to mop, and tries to flirt with Lisa, who is hard at work on a computer in her office. Akeem clearly, and immediately, values a woman with a sense of identity and purpose beyond serving a man.
Soul Glo heir Darryl (Eriq La Salle) is Lisa’s boyfriend, and the audience immediately knows he’s an ass–he puts no money in the collection basket (and lets Lisa think he was responsible for the large donation), he buddies up to Cleo and is condescending toward Lisa. If Akeem was more like Darryl, or even Semmi, his life would have been easier–he could have simply married his chosen wife and followed in the footsteps of what’s expected of powerful, wealthy men because “tradition.” The film presents these men to be critical of how patriarchy works–or doesn’t–within a culture (or cultures). 
The film continues to present these entrenched ideas: “Is this an American girl? Go through her poppa… Get in good with the father, you’re home free,” the barber tells Akeem. “I don’t know how it is in Africa, but here rich guys get all the chicks,” says a McDowell’s clerk (played by Louie Anderson).
Akeem goes along to a basketball game with Lisa, Darryl and Lisa’s sister, Patrice, who is presented comically as shallow and very interested in sexual conquests and wealthy men, unlike the noble Lisa. Can’t have a romantic comedy without a little virgin/whore dichotomy action!
Darryl makes disparaging remarks to Akeem about being from Africa, commenting about how it must be weird to be wearing clothes, and asking if they play games like catch the monkey. Earlier, the landlord says to Akeem and Semmi that the apartments have an insect problem, “but you boys are from Africa so you’re probably used to that.” When characters reinforce the African savage stereotype, it’s clear that these characters are not good.
Akeem is a good friend to Lisa when Darryl is forceful and misogynistic.
And when characters act like women are to be subservient sexual objects without their own identities, it’s also clear that they are in the wrong. From the king’s bawdy suggestions and adherence to the tradition of submissive, chosen wives, to Darryl pressuring Lisa to quit her job (“My lady doesn’t have to work”) or announcing their engagement without asking her if she wants to marry him (he went through her father, after all), men who don’t respect women are not the good guys–they are the ones who need to change.
When Akeem stands up to a robber at McDowell’s (Samuel L. Jackson doing one of the things he does best–wielding a gun and saying “fucker” as many times as possible), Darryl makes light of the fact that he hid, and suggested that Akeem knew those moves from fighting “lions and tigers and shit.” He then says, “They might not admit it, but they [women] all want a man to take charge–to tell them what to do.” Akeem smiles at him, but knows that’s not true. 
Lisa’s affection for Akeem grows when he quotes Nietzsche and when he is a thoughtful, sensitive listener when she’s angry that Darryl steamrolls their engagement, which she refuses. 
“I’m fine,” she assures Akeem. “I’m just not going to be pressured into marriage by Darryl, my father, anybody.” Akeem says he understands, and that he doesn’t think anyone should get married out of obligation. 
When they go out to dinner, Lisa says how nice it is to be with a man who knows how to express himself and she insists on taking the paycheck. Lisa’s attraction to these stereotypically not-masculine traits serves as a reminder that there is value to these qualities in both men and women. 
Lisa is smart and independent, qualities Akeem isn’t supposed to want.
Cleo pressures Lisa to marry Darryl as he sees her drifting toward Akeem. “You only like him because he’s rich,” Lisa says. Cleo–who has positioned himself as the ultimate bootstraps-pulling American dream–tells her that he just doesn’t want her to struggle like he and her mother did. 
Akeem’s charade begins to unravel as his family arrives in Queens via motorcade. Cleo is elated that Akeem is actually a prince; Lisa is devastated that he’d lied to her (and the fact that the king told her Akeem was only sowing his “royal oats” in America before he got married). 
Akeem chases after Lisa, and begs her to marry him. He offers to renounce his throne, and explains that he only wanted someone to fall in love with him for who he is, not for his money or royalty. She hesitates, but refuses, and runs off.
Queen Aeoleon (Akeem’s mother, played by Madge Sinclair) begins pushing back against her husband, challenging him about how he knows Akeem doesn’t love Lisa, and that the arranged marriage is a “stupid tradition.” “Who am I to change it?” asks the king. “I thought you were the king,” she says. 
Back in Zamunda, a royal wedding has begun, and Akeem is waiting for his bride, looking resigned and sad. A bride in an enormous pink dress and veil walks down the aisle. When he lifts the veil from her face, Lisa’s face is smiling at him. He looks elated, and his parents are smiling (the queen’s logic reigned), and Cleo steps up to join the king and queen. 
Akeem is surprised that Lisa is under the veil.
As they ride off in a carriage among a crowd of cheering partygoers, Lisa asks if she would have really given all of this up for her. “Of course,” Akeem responds. “If you like, we can give it all up now.” She says, “Nah,” and they laugh, and live, I’m sure, happily ever after.

The plot is pretty predictable. Female subservience is challenged, but standards of female beauty aren’t. The characters aren’t remarkably complex, but their motives are clear and almost always understandable. That said, this is a romantic comedy. I don’t mean to demean the genre as a whole, but I think it’s safe to say most blockbuster romantic comedies are pretty damn problematic, so to have a romantic comedy that subverts the notion of valuing wives who are simply beautiful and submissive while featuring a predominantly black cast and depicting Africa positively, I’d say that’s a win. 
Lisa is OK with her royal title.

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Wedding Week: ‘Father of the Bride’ Values Relationships With Women

Steve Martin and Kimberly Williams-Paisley in Father of the Bride

This is a guest review by Mab Ryan.

Father of the Bride (1991) is aptly named, as its focus is not on the wedding itself or the couple involved but on the titular character’s neuroses and journey to maturity. The wedding is the backdrop and the incident that provokes growth in the main character; it follows the wedding script in toto, so if you’re unfamiliar with any of the conventions of a traditional US wedding, this movie is a great primer. It’s an outrageously expensive, white wedding for thin, wealthy, white folks. People of color and gay men exist as support staff and magical queers. But the movie’s take on gender roles is constructive. Despite its focus on a male character, the movie is really about the affection a father feels for his daughter. He’s always recognized her as an individual person; now he must recognize her as an individual adult person.

The opening credits roll over champagne bubbles, flower petals, and the flotsam of a finished wedding strewn about the house, before honing in on George Banks (Steve Martin), the narrator and protagonist. He speaks directly to the camera, rubbing his weary feet, sitting in a floral armchair, surrounded by pale pink and ecru, a color scheme prevalent throughout the movie. Weddings are womanish, the décor screams. But that’s okay, because femininity is never portrayed negatively.

George narrates amidst girly wedding décor

George reminisces about his daughter Annie (Kimberly Williams), now 22, as a little girl, then refers darkly to her first signs of adolescence. He engages in a little gender essentialism, stating that boys are only after one thing because it’s the same thing he was after at their age; and the only thing worse than a daughter meeting the wrong guy is her meeting the right guy. That sentiment could come off as creepy if it wasn’t followed quickly with: “Because then you lose her.”

George hates change, he tells us, expounding lustfully on his comfortable, familiar life. Banks is not a misnomer; from my vantage point it’s difficult to tell the difference between middle class and rich, but this family falls somewhere in between. Annie has been studying architecture in Rome, George owns his own athletic shoe factory, and the family resides in a large home in Los Angeles. The factory is full of smiling (mostly) white people, so I guess we should think of George as a good guy, keeping jobs in America rather than opening sweat shops in Malaysia, though I don’t know that the filmmakers thought any more deeply about it than indulging in our shared fantasy that the materials we consume are the product of happy white labor, rather than deleterious off-shoring.

The Banks’ million-dollar house

Annie has come home with news she can’t quite figure out how to say. It is just so awkward to come out to your parents as … engaged … in a heterosexual relationship. Sorry non-heteros! If you want a movie that hits closer to home, feel free to imagine that fiancé Brian is a lady. Honestly, it feels like the movie was written about a gay couple, but they couldn’t sell it unless they changed one of the characters to a different gender. (I’m thinking it’s time for an update on this movie, but considering that Behind the Candelabra couldn’t land a theater release, I’m not holding out much hope.)

Despite cleaving to traditional wedding customs with sexist origins, the characters show signs of social awareness. “I thought you didn’t believe in marriage,” George says to Annie, “I thought it meant that a woman lost her identity.” He’s obviously repeating a line of thought she originated. Annie’s feelings have evolved to accept an egalitarian marriage, which is fine. It’s great that she’s thinking about this stuff and that she’s developed in an environment supportive of her aspirations and self-worth.

Supportiveness has its limits, apparently. After a fight in which George declares that Annie is not getting married and that’s final, the two make peace over a game of basketball. As a girl who grew up shooting hoops, it is this scene, more than any other, that I find redemptive of George. Rather than treat sports as a “boy thing,” George has obviously spent years playing with his daughter. Each performs a goofy dance when they score a goal, and slow-mo high fives are de rigueur. It feels real and comfortable.

Annie and George come together by facing off in basketball

Brian scores a good first impression with Annie’s mother Nina (Diane Keaton) when he declares his desire to marry and produce children and grandchildren. Nina is predictably thrilled with his promise to follow a normative script. Annie points out that he’s willing to move wherever her career takes her. Score one, Brian.

If you think the Banks are well off, wait ‘til you meet the new in-laws in Bel-Air. “We could have parked our whole house in the foyer,” George narrates. Yet, he refuses to accept contributions from this family in paying for the wedding because it is traditionally the duty of the bride’s father to pay for everything, including flying some of the groom’s family in from Denmark, one of whom is large enough to require two seats. “She can lop into the aisle for all I care,” says George. This cousin later lifts him off his feet in an unexpected hug. Fat people: always disrespecting peoples’ boundaries, amirite?

George meets the groom’s family in a dark sport coat, while the décor and everyone else’s clothes are pale, muted pastels, making it obvious how out of place George and his feelings about the wedding are. Brian’s father conveniently lays out the lesson that George must learn by the end of the movie: “Sooner or later you have to just let your kids go and hope you brought them up right.” Hijinks ensue as George does some snooping and winds up chased off a balcony by the resident Dobermans. The dogs are deep black, the only other dark color like George’s coat, drawing a parallel between their snarling reaction to an intruder and George’s reaction to this wedding.

Franck is flamboyant

No wedding movie would be complete without an over-the-top, flamboyantly gay character. This movie features two as wedding consultants. Howard Weinstein is actually played by gay Chinese-American actor BD Wong and is the only person of color with a speaking role (and he’s just the assistant to the help). Franck (Martin Short) has an indeterminate European accent that the women have no difficulty penetrating but that George finds unintelligible. Foreign people are so funny! Gay people are also so funny! Of course, neither character’s sexuality is explicitly stated. In 1991 it was perfectly acceptable to laugh at quirky gay people and let them help accessorize us so long as we don’t have to consider them as real people with feelings or desires or (shudder) romantic lives.

The cost and the hassle of preparing for the wedding drives George to freak out and wind up in jail. Nina bails him out but not before reasoning with him to act his age. She has a huge smile on her face and speaks to him patiently, when most women would be rightfully furious. But this isn’t her movie. She exists to coax George along his journey to maturity.

Good news, George! Annie calls off the wedding because that sexist asshole Brian bought her a … blender? Maybe it’s because I never really used a blender until after age 21 that I don’t understand this as an allusion to a 1950’s housewife mentality. All it says to me is daiquiris, and I’d be thrilled to receive a functioning model (Do all of your blenders also break after two uses? Just me?), but Annie has to be reassured that Brian didn’t mean this in a regressive get-thee-to-the-kitchen-wench kind of way before we’re back on again. The highlight is that this is not a bitches-be-crazy message. Instead it’s explicitly portrayed as a character flaw she inherited directly from her father, while Brian provides emotional stability like Nina does. That’s actually a fantastic message, separating personality traits from gender.

The night before the wedding, George shares a moment with his son, apologizing for ignoring him the whole movie. It’s definitely a reversal to see the relationship between father and daughter receive the emphasis over father and son. I think this placing of the (non-sexual) relationship with a woman as central—rather than the wedding theme—is what makes a movie a “chick-flick” and therefore unsuitable for Manly Men™

Wedding in Father of the Bride

George once again daydreams about Annie as a small child, but this time it launches into a montage of her growing into a teen, and then a woman. She’s grown up, and he’s finally recognizing that. But that doesn’t mean their special parent/child relationship is over, which is delightfully represented by Annie walking down the aisle in the pair of wedding sneakers her father designed for her.

Has George grown up as well? It’s hard to say. At the actual wedding, he cares only about being there for his daughter (though events conspire to keep him away). We never do see him return to the chair from which he began narrating the movie as a flashback. But every snide and petulant remark was made after the events of the movie occurred. Perhaps George was just being honest about his feelings at the time. I’m not convinced he’s really changed but merely suffered through one life-altering event. The existence of a sequel seems to confirm this. But if the sequel continues this trend of showcasing the value of relationships with women, I might have to dig up a copy.

Mab Ryan is a fat, geeky, queerish, rainbow-haired feminist currently studying Art and Creative Writing at Roanoke College.

2013 Oscar Week: The Women in Whip Whitaker’s Life: Representations of Female Characters in ‘Flight’

Guest post written by Martyna Przybysz.
It is difficult to talk about strong female characters in a film, where one male actor overtakes the screen completely. Flight is indeed a tour de force performance by ever so excellent Denzel Washington. His protagonist, Captain Whip Whitaker is a pilot with many years of experience, and I am not necessarily referring to flying here – he’s become an expert on covering up his abuse of alcohol and drugs while on duty. 
The opening scene finds Whip in a hotel room with his co-worker, and lover, an attractive and visibly younger than him flight attendant, Katerina, as they awake at the crack of dawn after what looks like a heavy night of alcohol and sex. With its brave nudity, and seeming objectification of a female body, the scene sets the tone of the film, or rather introduces us to our leading man – middle aged, evidently hedonistic, as well as arrogant and reckless in his approach to work, and, well, life. It is hard to shake off the feeling that Nadine Velazquez (known to some as ditzy and very likeable Didi from the CW Network’s show ‘Hart of Dixie’) fills in a stereotypical role of a young hot ethnic woman, and her nude body only accentuates the male lead’s aforementioned characteristics. It later becomes apparent that Whip has a tendency to go for younger women of different ethicities, but sadly, interracial relationship element never develops into a discourse here. It is the substance abuse that is placed at the heart of each relationship that Whip has with women in the film. 
Katerina is not just any sexy Latina to Whip – she’s his partner in crime, a relapsing acoholic and a confidante of sorts, who covers up for Whip’s addiction, as well as hiding her own. His relationships with women for that matter are nothing but simple – as the director wants us to believe – but on screen they fall short of that ambition, and simply feel flat. What he has with Katerina is ended abruptly by the plane crash. At first glance, it’s a casual arrangement between the two, but we are later left wondering whether it is really just that. The cues are perhaps hidden in the way Whip’s friend, Charlie, looks at him when the NTSB delivers the news of two fatalities on the crew (one being ‘Trina’, as referred to by Whip), or it may be those few moments later when he quietly sheds a few tears when left alone in the room. And it is in relation to Katerina that Whip feels an enormous sense of guilt, that subsequently makes him break the vicious circle of lies: ‘Katerina Marquez did not drink the vodka, because I drunk the vodka’ he confesses. 
There is also a cliched ex-wife figure lingering somewhere in the background. Deana (played by Garcelle Beauvais) is the ‘one that got away’, and the one who probably got hurt the most by Whip’s self-destruction. It’s one of those ‘he never got sober for her, so he lost her’ stories, and we have heard it all before. Then, there is a loving mother figure and a loyal colleague, Margaret (Tamara Tunie) – a woman who, in a seeming resignation, for years of working together with Whip watches as he drinks himself into oblivion. We never really find out whether she stays loyal or moral, and that is how yet another female figure in Whip’s life dissolves into the background. Finally, in the films most poignant scene, Melissa Leo, in a role that feels more like a cameo – she is only on screen for about 10 minutes – is Ellen Block, a NTSB’s Hearing Officer for Whitaker’s hearing. She is the only female character in ‘Flight’ that demonstrates some traces of depth – she is confident yet composed, direct but subtle in her approach. She already knows the answer to her questions, but could it be sadness and compassion that we see in her eyes as she looks at Whip as he admits to his crimes? 
I would like to think that, as the only real ally that Whip has had in a female up to this point was a rather unconvincing Kelly Reilly’s Nicole. A character previously described by critics as “lyrically melancholic” and a “fragile heroin addict who embraces rehab and Whitaker at the same time, with patchy results.” And rightly so, because the central love story between the two is devoid of romance. Yes, there is an element of some kind of higher power bringing them together – they meet at the hospital stairwell, and after listening to a rather unconventional cupid, a dying cancer patient, Nicole says to Whip: ‘That was a trip, ha? He made me feel like, I don’t know, like you and me were the last people left on this planet’. There is also a theme of ‘sameness’, a common ground – her relationship with a needle is analogical to the one Whip has with a bottle of vodka. But Nicole is a few steps ahead of Whip, she has already faced her problems and is desperate to redeem her mistakes. It isn’t until the morning after she comes home to Whip pass out drunk on the floor (only to repositions his chin so that he doesn’t choke on his own vomit) that we learn that in fact, Nicole does have a bit of a personality. Or does she? It is all rather bleak, very underwritten, and however she may exhibit some hugely likeable (by nerds like myself) traces of being a melancholic artistic soul – it is all too dubious to put one’s finger on it, let alone relate to. 
I did like how unobtrusive she remains throughout her slowly developing bond with Whip, however frail that bond may seem. On the other hand, that is what proves how self-absorbed she actually is (both of them are in fact!) – helping Whip is not really on her agenda, because she is the one looking for acceptance and love. It may be that she sees what she is looking for in him, because, and in spite of, the demons that they are both dealing with. This would then make this into a beautiful tale of love and redemption, but that is an entirely different movie, and it certainly wouldn’t be called Flight. However predictable in terms of the direction the relationship is heading towards (Whip fesses up, she visits in jail, all live happily ever after), I give kudos to the writer John Gatins for the effort put into creating an unconventional romantic subplot, however superfluous. And to the casting director for allowing us to indulge in the redhead beauty that Kelly is. It is still however disappointing that for a film with so many female characters the potential for developing at least one soulful female protagonist was pretty much wasted. I would like to blame it on Denzel and his breathtaking performance, but for the love of Denzel…may I blame the scriptwriter? 
———-
Martyna Przybysz is a Pole, living in London, UK. She works in media and the arts. A sucker for portrait photography and a salted caramel cheesecake. This is her blog: http://martynaprzybysz.tumblr.com.

Guest Post: ‘Women Without Men’: Gender Roles in Iran, Women’s Bodies and Subverting the Male Gaze

Guest post written by Kaly Halkawt.

The author Sharnush Parsipur wrote 1989 a novel that would become what could be called a modern classic in contemporary feminist literature. The book entitled Women Without Men is a story about how five women living in Iran during the 1950s end up in exile from the male-dominated society they live in that has in different ways deprived them their freedom. Although along their path into exile is not a simple one. They must all go through a painful metamorphosis and accept that the freedom they ask for alienates their bodies from society. All five protagonists come together in a garden which serves them as a space free from male domination.

This story has been visualized once as a video art installation consisting of five different videos by the artist Shirin Neshat. The video installation went under the name “Women Without Men” and was created from 2004-2008. The five different videos where entitled after the characters names; Mahdokht (2004), Zarin (2005), Munis (2008), Farokh Legha (2008) and Faze (2008). However the content of the entire constellation has varied based on where the installation has been exhibited.
Based on these five videos, Neshat retold the story once again but this time in a more linear narrative film. However this time she choose to exclude the story of the character Mahdokt, although one could argue that she appears in the film in form of a tree, but before we go into that I want to share my experience of the video installation that I saw at the Stockholm Culture Institute in 2009.
The video for Mahdokht was told through three different screens. Mahdokt fantasizes about planting herself like a seed in the garden and growing into a tree and literally erasing her body into the idea that manifests her spiritual character. Her desire is to through detaching her body from civilization, intellect and culture touch the freedom that seems impossible to gain with a female body in the world the way she experiences it. Mahdokt’s story can also be seen as a comment to the myth about the nymph Daphne who figured in Roman mythology. The myth of Daphne has been told in many different ways, but basically it goes something like this: The god Apollo is captivated by the beauty of Daphne. She refuses to give in for his sexual desire and as punishment the god Zeus transform Daphne into a tree.
A still image from the video Mahdokt

Mahdokt’s character can here be read as a representation of the female body and an attempt to erase the values and symbols the female body has embodied in mythology as the object. Parsipur/Neshat has rewritten the myth of the female body by making it the subject and not the object of the story. Mahdokt is the narrator of her story and she is not a victim. She actively chooses to offer her body to her ideal by becoming a tree in contrast to Daphne who is a victim who is being punished for not sacrificing her body.

Mahdokt’s action is stating that we can imprison bodies, but not ideas.
From a book to video installation and narrative film, Women Without Men is a work in motion. The adaptation for the screen that was directed by Neshat was highly praised by film critics all around the world and won the Silver Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.

The film takes place in 1953 which politically is an unforgettable year in Iran’s history. The democratically chosen Prime Minister Mossadghe was overthrown by the CIA which created enormous protests. The political background story serves as a tool for creating what will be the revolution in the mind of the characters.

Shabnam Toloui (Munis)

In the first shot we see the character Munis committing suicide by jumping down from a roof, however she lives on in the story as the narrator. Later on in the film, we learn that one of the reasons for why she committed suicide was because she lived with a conservative brother who aggressively wanted her to stop following the protests by listening to the radio. He encouraged her to instead get married and “start a real life.”

The day of Munis’ suicide, we learn that her brother organized a suitable man that would come and ask for her hand in marriage. When Munis’ brother refuses to let her go out of the house, she decides to take control over the situation. By sacrificing her body for the sake of her integrity and political conviction, her death does not necessarily need to be read as a forfeit. Munis’ death leads to her freedom and becomes her politics. Its through her eyes after her death that we get to see the protests and demonstrations on the streets of Tehran.

 Pegah Feridony (Faezeh)

It is also Munis action that leads to the awakening of her friend Faezeh. From the beginning, Fazeh is portrayed as a traditional girl who wants to live a “normal life” aka get married and have children with Munis’ brother. However when she finds Munis’ dead body on the street and sees how her brother digs it down in his garden to prevent the news of her suicide spreading and leading to an official shaming of the family name, Faezeh’s world is turned upside down. She gives up the idea of marriage and men and just decides to look for her own piece of mind. Munis’ ghost serves literally as the guide and takes Faezeh to the garden and leads her into exile.

Arita Sharzad (Fakhri)

Fakhri is the eldest of the gang and arguably embodies what Second Wave feminism has criticized: upper-middle class ladies who are bored serving as some sort of poupée (doll) for their husbands. Fakhri’s journey towards change starts when she meets an old friend who reminds her of the freedom that can be the price of getting married. She remembers how she used to write poetry and hang out with people who believed in culture as a political tool for change, an opinion that makes her husband laugh. So in her own “eat-pray-love” escapade, she buys a big house in the garden and leaves her relationship so that she can put energy and time into rediscovering and recreating herself.

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ The Turkish Bath via Amiresque

The fourth character Zarin is a prostitute who decides to escape the brothel when she sees a client’s deranged face while they are having sex. Zarin never talks during the film and like Munis, she uses her body to free herself from the societal norms. Zarin is just her body, we don’t get her background history. I think one possible reading of why she is just reduced to a body in this film is a comment on the stereotypical images of women that have been created within the frames of Orientalism.

Some of the films key scenes are focused on Zarin. In one of the most visual scenes, Zarin is in a Turkish hamam (Turkish bath) and scrubbing her body until it starts bleeding. The misé-en-scene is an exact copy of Jean-Augustue Dominique Ingres’ painting The Turkish Bath (1862). This is a direct comment on the representational prevail of white upper-middle class men. This painting, among others, led to the creation of myths about women from the Middle East. Neshat literally tries to erase this myth in this particular scene.

Orsolya Toth (Zarin)

Another important scene that serves as a commentary for the male gaze is an image of Zarin floating in a river, alluding to John Everett Millais’ painting Ophelia (1852). In Millais’ painting, we see the suicide of Hamlet‘s Ophelia where she falls into the river and dies. Ophelia has been the subject of a lot of debate. How should we interpret her character? What values does she embody? This Shakespearian character is either referred to as a sick young damsel in distress or completely ignored and just seen as an object for male dominance in Hamlet. I think Neshat is trying to criticize the fact that Ophelia is almost never seen as her own character and only read in relation to Hamlet. Once again, Neshat tries to turn the female object into the subject.

Neshat uses Zarin’s body to criticize the stereotypical imagery of women in a few key scenes of the film by reproducing the exact same scenery as some historical paintings. However Neshat transforms Zarin’s body from object into subject, thus giving her the tools to go through a metamorphosis and take control over her body so that she can erase the values and ideas represented by men.

By giving each character their own voice to tell their story, Neshat questions the classical representation of women in Arab and Persian cultures. These women start off by being dominated in the patriarchy they live. Socially and politically, Munis is restricted by her brother. Intellectually, Fakhri does not have the freedom and the hope she had before she got married with an idiot (ie a man with power) and Zarin, before entering the garden, is just reduced to a sexual body used as a tool to control her position on a bigger scale since being a prostitute doesn’t always receive a lot of respect from society. But they all find their way to reinvent themselves in space free from male dominance. In case it’s not clear enough, this film is the queen of awesome films about women.

However one thing a bit fuzzy in Women Without Men is the portrayal of men. To sum it up, this is how Iranian men are characterized: men that live in Iran are uncultivated, uneducated rapists who crave control over women with no nuance of humanity in them. This contrasts with the Iranian men who have moved abroad, cultivated by the Western World and who see the value in educating women and treating them equally. But this is a post about the female characters so I won’t comment further other than to say the stereotype of men from Iran is not being questioned.

I never thought I would write an essay where I would find the female characters more well-written then the men. Deux point, Neshat.

———-
Kaly Halkawt is 24 years old and has a BA in Cinema Studies. Before starting work on her Master’s, she moved to Paris for two years, working as a Montessori Teacher and studying French at the Sorbonne. Planning a big academic comeback this semester, she is currently writing her Master’s thesis on a geneology of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University.

2013 Golden Globes Week: ‘The Newsroom’: Misogyny 2.0

I am a great man.

Written by Leigh Kolb

During the first episode of HBO’s The Newsroom, news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) delivers a rousing monologue about why America is not the “greatest country in the world.” He renders the crowd of college students speechless as he lashes out at the “sorority girl” who asked the question, bashing America’s current “WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period.” Soft piano music plays in the background as he laments America’s past greatness:
“…We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered.” (emphasis added)

Most of the speech is eloquent, and will have audiences of all political persuasions nodding in agreement (as they should–American exceptionalism is misguided). 
What the audience of college students can’t see, and what no one seems to focus on, is the fact that Will, in all of his “great men” bravado, got this idea from a woman.
I’m not sure if Aaron Sorkin, The Newsroom‘s creator and writer, got the memo either. In  “How to Write an Aaron Sorkin Script, by Aaron Sorkin,” by Aaron Sorkin in GQ, AARON SORKIN (in case you missed it) writes:
“A student asks what makes America the world’s greatest country, and Will dodges the question with glib answers. But the moderator keeps needling him until…snap.”

In reality, Will sees what he thinks is an hallucination of MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) in the audience. As he struggles to answer the question, she writes him a prompt and holds it up: 

“IT’S NOT. BUT IT CAN BE.”

Then he launches into his “great men” manifesto, and the story begins.
IT WAS HER IDEA!
Much has been written about the “hostile” misogyny of The Newsroom (see here, here, here and here), and rightfully so. 
While all of the characters are flawed, Will is a hero, but the female characters are incompetent, clumsy and hysterical. Will goes on the air stoned, is condescending toward dates, tricks MacKenzie into thinking he was going to propose to her years ago, changes MacKenzie’s contract to allow him to be able to fire her every week, but he is our good guy, our hero.
The women? Again, critics have been deconstructing the show’s misogyny from its inception, but the women are unbelievable. Will’s ex-girlfriend and new executive producer MacKenzie is especially baffling. She has returned to America after reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq for two years to serve as the executive producer of News Night. She’s a well-respected reporter and producer, but throughout the first season she consistently unravels into a heap of one-dimensional stereotypes. Is it believable that an esteemed journalist doesn’t understand how to work email? That she doesn’t know anything about economics? 
MacKenzie frequently has emotional breakdowns in front of her staff.
It doesn’t make sense. Unless you’re Aaron Sorkin–then this is who women are. They are the flighty associate producer who mixes up the state Georgia and country Georgia and writes “LOL” on a funeral card. They are the gorgeous woman with a PhD in economics who is only convinced to anchor after being seduced by the Gucci wardrobe. They are the women who think an important news tip is a pick-up line, don’t understand the acronym or are too preoccupied with being jealous to get the news (thank goodness there were men to decode the message). They are the women who love Sex and the City and blow up if Valentine’s Day doesn’t go their way. They are purveyors of gossip, and love reality TV.
Maggie earned her position at News Night by being promoted accidentally before McHale promotes her for being “loyal.”
Will has flaws, of course. However, he is consistently portrayed as competent and heroic.
After Maggie’s (Alison Pill) roommate is a guest on News Night and goes on a tangent about abortion rights (which would have been a welcome conversation had it made any sense), her boutique is emblazoned with “Baby Killer” graffiti. Will literally walks out of the steam of the streets to go comfort her. It was was an overly dramatic visual reminder that he is a hero–in fact, he is a “great man.” 
“Don’t worry. I got this.”
If Sorkin’s sexism isn’t clear enough in his writing, an interview with The Globe and Mail serves as a persuasive character study. He refers to his interviewer as “Internet girl,” and tells her:
“I think I would have done very well, as a writer, in the forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then, or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.”

There it is. Greatness was a time before women’s liberation and before the civil rights movement. And while I’m sure he wouldn’t admit to meaning that, there is clear white male American privilege and hubris that allows someone to truly believe that America was greatest in the 1940s. 
In the final episode of the season, Will ends up hiring the “sorority girl” from the beginning (after accusing her of ruining his life) and telling her she is what makes America the greatest country. He learns that seeing MacKenzie in the audience wasn’t his imagination–she was there with the prompts. She shows him the signs, and he says, “It was you?” She says,

“No, it was you, Billy. I was just producing.”

How unfortunate. His defining moment was prompted by women, yet he finishes with all of the power, even claiming or being given the power from their own contributions. Of course an audience of a news program only sees the glory of the anchor, not the leg work of the producers. But when a show revolves around the behind-the-scenes work of a news program, it’s disheartening and infuriating that MacKenzie–who prompts Will’s monologue and remakes News Night–is the fool, and Will gets all the glory for “civilizing” America.

It’s easy to laud the accomplishments of “great men” if you’re so sure that you are one yourself (Will McAvoy and Aaron Sorkin certainly do). And while the show features good acting and interesting critiques of media and almost-current events, it’s hard to fully appreciate all of that through the cloud of self-importance.

Is The Newsroom the best dramatic television series?
It’s not. And unless Sorkin quickly figures out his issues with women, it can’t be.

—–


Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Amber‘s Picks:

Hollywood’s Year of Heroine Worship by A.O. Scott via The New York Times

Oscars and casting: Hollywood insiders discuss diversity by Solvej Schou via Entertainment Weekly

30 Lessons We Learned From Amy Poehler in 2012 by Krutika Mallikarjuna via Buzzfeed

Megan‘s Picks:

7 Ways Women and Girls are Sexualized, Stereotyped and Underrepresented On Screen by Dana Liebelson and Asawin Suebsaeng via Mother Jones

“There Is an Audience for Our Films”: Four African-American Female Filmmakers Speak Out by Lorenza Munoz via The Daily Beast

Surprise! Attempted Rape Scene in Episode of ‘The Walking Dead’  by Tizzy Giordano via Fem2pt0

TedX Women Talk about Online Harassment and Cyber Mobs by Anita Sarkeesian via Feminist Frequency

Is Historical Accuracy a Good Defense of Patriarchal Societies in Fantasy Fiction? by Dan Wohl via The Mary Sue

Google Grants $1.2M to Help Analyze Female Roles in TV, Film by Angela Watercutter via Wired 

Hollywood’s Power 100 Mingle at THR’s Women in Entertainment Breakfast by Sophie A. Schillaci via The Hollywood Reporter

The Divine, Difficult Women of ‘Treme’ and David Simon’s Female Characters by Alyssa Rosenberg via ThinkProgress

Dreamworks Animation Is Proud of Having an 85%  Female Group of Producers by Susana Polo via The Mary Sue

Sexist Quote of the Day by Bret Easton Ellis Melissa Silverstein via Women and Hollywood

What have you read (or written) this week that you’d like to share?

Women in Politics Week: Politics Is a Man’s Game: The Trope of the Great Woman in Early Hollywood Narratives

This is a guest post by Tom Houseman.
Movie still from The Great McGinty
Since the 1990s the sight of female politicians, both in real life and in films and television shows, has become more and more common. Women are making great strides in the American political landscape—when new congressional representatives are sworn in in January there will be a record number of candidates in the House—and the film and TV industries have done their best to keep up with that trend, if not necessarily pave the way. Dramas from The Contender to Commander in Chief and comedies including Veep and even Political Animals show the unique struggles that women face when they rise to positions of power, some more insightfully than others.

This change has been both rapid and recent, as well into the 20th Century women were barely present in politics, at least on the front lines as elected leaders. And while women have been a growing presence in the House of Representatives since 1917, Hollywood was less than progressive in its depiction of women serving in political offices. Politics in films made in the ’40s and ’50s was strictly a man’s world, with the men taking charge as both the heroes and the villains, the bosses of the corrupt political machines and the up-and-comers either succumbing to them or fighting back against them. But these films were not devoid of women, but those women had their own roles to play.

Female characters in these political films found a niche into which they could be fit, a trope on which sufficient variations could be introduced that it ended up showing up multiple times over the decades. When considering this type of character the phrase “Behind every great man is a great woman” comes to mind. That is where the women in these movies stood: behind the man, attempting to push him toward greatness, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. These Great Women did not achieve anything on their own, or draw attention to themselves, but were behind-the-scenes players using the power they had over the protagonist in pursuit of their goals.

The most generic and straightforward example of this type of character appears in the 1940 film The Great McGinty, the directorial debut of Preston Sturges. As blunt a political satire as they come, the film tells the story of a bum who walks the crooked path to political stardom. Dan McGinty (Brian Donlevy) is hired by a political boss to help rig elections, and ends up so impressing his superiors that they keep on promoting him. McGinty is convinced to run for office, and arranges a marriage of convenience with his secretary, Catherine (Muriel Angelus) as a way to make himself more appealing to voters.

But Catherine, who is a widow with a child, does more than just help McGinty’s political status. She begins to exert her influence on him, eventually convincing him to stop his illegal methods. This does not end well for McGinty, who ends up abandoned by his bosses in prison before he manages to escape to the Caribbean. But at least we know that he escaped with his soul, thanks to the conscience instilled in him by his wife.

While the major female character in The Great McGinty is extremely one-dimensional, other films were able to find more interesting ways to explore this type of role. The year before, in 1939, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was released in theaters. While the traditional Great Woman represents the film’s moral compass, Mr. Smith goes in the opposite direction in developing its story. Jefferson Smith is a bright-eyed idealist from the midwest who is chosen to be a United States Senator by a corrupt Governor who assumes Jeff will toe the line. But Jeff has ideas of his own and quickly gets in trouble with the political machine built on bribery and graft.

James Stewart and Jean Arthur in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Saunders (Jean Arthur) is Jeff’s secretary, bitter and jaded, announcing at the very beginning of the film her intention to quit. She sees Jeff as a rube and a bumpkin who has no business in politics, and when he comes up with an idea for a bill to turn a stretch of land in the midwest into a Boys’ Camp (using the exact land that his corrupt bosses want to use for a dam) Saunders attempts to put him in his place by explaining to him how difficult getting anything done in Washington is, but she ends up fueling his passion by giving him the knowledge to accomplish his goals.

When Jeff’s idealism clashes with his fellow senators’ cruelty and perfidy, it is Saunders, her faith in democracy restored, who stands up for him and helps him take on the political machine. Several scenes feature Saunders standing in the balcony of the senate chamber, shouting and waving to give Jeff advice on what his next move should be. Of course it is Jeff whose valiant stand and day-long filibuster are able to overthrow the corrupt politicians and save the day, but Saunders is extremely active behind helping and supporting him every step of the way.

Perhaps the most complex and powerful take on the Great Woman character is in the 1956 film A Face in the Crowd, which was directed by Elia Kazan. Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) is a young Arkansas journalist who finds alcoholic bum Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith) to perform on her radio show. After she nicknames him “Lonesome Rhodes” he becomes a local sensation, with his folksy charm, homespun wisdom, and disregard for authority making him a star.

As Lonesome becomes more and more popular his ego inflates drastically, and Marcia watches on as he succumbs to his lust and alcoholism. At the same time she sees how he is blatantly manipulating his audience and using his popularity to become a powerful political figure. Despite realizing that he has become a pedagogue who uses everyone around him, including her, Marcia is too willing to indulge Lonesome because she is in love with him. When he is feeling weak and relies on her for comfort she takes him in repeatedly, against her better judgment.

Lonesome becomes a major political figure thanks to his national television show, and becomes the advisor to a presidential candidate, helping shape his image to seem less elitist and more “of the people.” Marcia realizes how dangerous Lonesome has become, and when he reneges on his proposal to her by having a quickie wedding with an eighteen year-old he meets while judging a pageant, she accepts that she has a responsibility to knock him off his pedestal. During a live taping of his show Marcia turns the speakers on while Lonesome is mocking his audience, destroying his reputation and his political career. As a Great Woman Marcia was unable to turn around the man who had fallen from greatness, and so she had to destroy him, or rather, set him up to destroy himself.

What do these three women have in common, other than that they stay in the background while the men in their lives do great or terrible things? All three women have a power over these men that no other characters in the film have. In The Great McGinty and A Face in the Crowd it is an emotional power; Catherine uses hers to convince McGinty to do the right thing, and Lonesome frequently admits to Marcia that he relies on her, although she is unable to save him from his hubris and instead helps bring about his downfall. In Mr. Smith Saunders becomes the only character that Jeff can trust, and her knowledge and guidance leads him to victory.

Movie still from A Face in the Crowd
None of these three women is overtly sexual, at least compared to the other women we see in the film. Catherine is seen as chaste and pure and even when she and McGinty fall in love there is no hint of lust in their relationship. Saunders intentionally de-sexes herself around her co-workers, none of whom even know her first name, and she deeply resents Susan, the daughter of a corrupt senator who uses her feminine wiles to distract Jeff from the shady dealings going on around him. And while Marcia does have sex with Lonesome (coming out in the ’50s gave the film the leeway to imply, if not show, extramarital sex), the film clearly gives her the moral high-ground over the other floozies with whom he has sex, as well as the very young woman he marries instead of Marcia.

There is even a motherly quality to all three women, each guiding and protecting the men in their lives in a distinctly maternal manner. Even though all three relationships have a romantic undertone, these women’s interactions with the protagonists have a protective, loving yet chiding and slightly condescending quality that is reminiscent of how a mother might treat a child. In Mr. Smith Saunders at one point describes her pride in seeing Jeff take the Senate floor by storm as being like a mother watching a son’s impressive feat. That motherly pride is one of the defining traits of the Great Woman, as a way to differentiate her from the harlots who might try to lead the protagonist away from the right path.

As the ’60s progressed women began taking roles of greater prominence, still often acting behind the scenes, though, exerting their influence outside the public eye. Characters such as The Manchurian Candidate‘s Eleanor Iselin (Angela Lansbury) showed how roles were evolving for women in political films, and would lay the seeds for characters in films from G.I. Jane to Legally Blonde 2, which include female politicians who still pulled strings in the background. But there are still female characters whose roots can be seen in films like The Great McGinty, Mr. Smith Goes to Washingon, and A Face in The Crowd. So every time you are watching a political film and the most important female character is a wife or a secretary or a journalist (think State of Play or The Ides of March), remember the influence of these early films and cringe at how far we haven’t come.

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Tom Houseman was born white, straight, male, cis, and rich. He has done a lot of work unpacking and understanding his many forms of privilege. He is far from perfect, but he is learning. He writes film reviews and analysis for BoxOfficeProphets.com. If you want to officially like him, you can do so at Facebook.com/tomhousemanwriting.

Guest Post: Movie Review: ‘Think Like a Man’



This guest post by Ela Eke-Egele previously appeared at Black Feminists and is cross-posted with permission.

The film is a romantic comedy based on Steve Harvey’s book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. It follows four couples and each woman is dating a different type of man as defined in the book, “The Player,” “The Non-Committer,” “The Mama’s Boy” and “The Dreamer” respectively.
The women follow relationship strategies for the given type of man they are dating and all seems to go well, until the men discover what they are up to. They get a copy of the book and attempt to counter the women’s plans but ultimately, end up alone. Following some reflection and regret, the couples make up and the movie ends with a joyful reunion and uplifting music.

Think Like a Man is unsophisticated and dated. It’s blatantly self-promoting with Steve Harvey appearing several times to talk about the ideas in his book (K-Ching!). The film’s soundtrack is a lot more entertaining than the script which in places relies more on sexism than realism. Chris Brown has a minor role in it and for me, it’s still too soon. The last person I need to see in a film dealing with relationships is Chris Brown.

L-R: Mya (Meagan Goode), Sonia (La La Anthony), Zeke (Romany Malco) in Think Like a Man

Think Like a Man operates in a heterosexual world and works on the premise that women have an innate need for commitment while men are all about sex and that men are in a position of power today because sex and women have become too available. This is made clear at the onset, with James Brown’s It’s a Man’s World opening and a voiceover by Kevin Harris.

The impression that Think Like a Man gives is that a black woman’s primary focus is on finding and keeping a man and that we’re prepared to lie, cheat and manipulate in order to get one. But, I have to say, the men in this movie aren’t very appealing. They are sexist, emotionally immature with little potential for growth. The “Happily Married Man” is portrayed by a white man who in fact does seem more enlightened when it comes to relationships and more willing to compromise. But, I wonder what is this trying to tell us, that black men are not this sophisticated by nature and we just have to work with this?

Admittedly both the men and women in Think Like a Man are overplayed stereotypes. To suggest this is the best that men, particularly black men, have to offer is very bleak and to assume that black women are so desperate is insulting.

Think Like a Man roots for a playing field that favours men while it pretends to empower women. Conforming to some basic stereotypes and predefined rules makes women easier to understand and also removes the need for men to relate to us as individuals. Steve Harvey is unapologetic when he says that “we need to talk” are the four words most dreaded by men. This is following a scene where one of the men gets a call from his girlfriend who says exactly that. The scene also makes it plain that men have no such reservations when it comes to talking about strippers and ‘titties and ass.’

L-R: Michael (Terrence Jenkins) and Candace (Regina Hall) in Think Like a Man

The movie denies that men are intimidated by a woman’s success yet we are told that the male DNA is encoded with the need to be the provider and the compulsion to be in control. A view that conveniently ignores evolution and is so worn out that it is completely threadbare. Successful and accomplished women are accused of being too independent and giving off the impression that they do not need men because they are men. The preferable strategy for these women is to downplay their achievements, lower their standards and settle for less. So, this film doesn’t seem as much about helping women get men as it is about helping men get women with minimal effort and undamaged egos.

Think Like a Man is nostalgic for a time when men were men and abundant chest hair and gold medallions were a sign of virility, and I can’t help but feel that it may be a reflection of how hard it is for black men to deal with the much-improved status of women today. Women are more successful, financially secure, sexually liberated and independent than they have ever been and, perhaps for men like Steve Harvey, it makes it seem like male privilege is slipping away, so now there’s a war on.

Harvey’s book was on the New York bestsellers list so it obviously did well, but I think that any women who finds it necessary to resort to these tactics is simply encouraging bad behaviour and buying into the idea that black men are a lost cause. Steve Harvey, instead of looking to women for a solution, should encourage men to look to themselves. Men, even black men, need and benefit from commitment and any who refuse to adapt will lose out in the long run. Women deserve better. Perhaps he hasn’t realised this yet, which might explain why he is on his third marriage. This makes it even harder to take his book and this movie seriously.

———-

Ela Eke-Egele is involved with the Black Feminists group in London. She works full time in the IT industry and enjoys writing part-time. She lives in Hertfordshire with her two children and a goldfish.

The Neeson Identity: What the Release of ‘The Grey’ Got Wrong About Men

This is a guest post by Margaret Howie.
With the release of Taken 2, Liam Neeson impersonations are all over the internet again. You’d think that we had all been starved of Neeson material, but it was only back in January that his Man vs. the Wild movie, The Grey was released. Along with it we got a PR campaign based largely around his qualities as a leading man, and some revealing media coverage about gender roles in cinema.
The trailer for The Grey ticked all the familiar wilderness survival story clichés, right up until one of the last shots. That was the sight of Neeson taping broken bottles to his fists for a head-on confrontation with a pack of wolves. Accompanying this enticing promise of Neeson taking on predators fist-first, the surrounding promotion promised even more from the movie. The Grey was going to be more than an action flick. It would be a profound examination of the state of modern man. Much of this argument centred on the casting of the Northern Irish actor, and the director’s insistence that his star represented something lacking from modern film: authentic masculinity. Eventually much of the discussion of The Grey turned into rants about maleness. It shows how depressingly quickly gender stereotypes can be recycled and reinforced in something as innocuous as movie promotion.
Liam Neeson in The Grey (2012). Beard. Check. Snow. Check. Y Chromosome. Check.
Post-Star Wars, Neeson has become best known for his display of clenched-jaw determination in the face of cinematic adversary. Almost twenty years since Schindler’s List, the audience has faith in his capabilities to release the Kraken, defeat terrorists, get his daughter back and punch out a wolf. Parodies of his line deliveries in 2008’s Taken and 2010’s Clash of the Titans continue to get uploaded to YouTube. With the release of The Grey there was another opportunity to salute his hard-boiled, reluctant-action-hero persona and reflect on how it fits in a survival film.
Directed by Joe Carnahan and co-starring Frank Grillo and Dermot Mulroney, The Grey is described by Open Road Films as the story of “an unruly group of oil-rig roughnecks when their plane crashes into the remote Alaskan wilderness. Battling mortal injuries and merciless weather, the survivors have only a few days to escape the icy elements – and a vicious pack of rogue wolves on the hunt.”
What goes without saying is that the group is all-male. What did go on to get said, across film blogs and in news reports, was that the men of this film were delivering something supposedly missing from the cultural diet. Gender quickly became one of the most-discussed themes of The Grey’s pre-release coverage. Both movie reporters and their interviewees worked lines about masculinity into the discussions. Soon an idea of Liam Neeson’s ‘maleness’ being some sort of scarce resource emerged. The subject was set up by Neeson’s particular popular culture position, the mostly male cast, the genre and the writer/director Carnahan’s strident views of the state of casting in Hollywood. Is there really a dearth of manliness in cinema? Or does Dermot Mulroney get it right when he complained that “all the f–king movies are about the girls”?
The wilderness survival movie tends to be a generically male construction. In December 2011, Collider reviewed the trailer and Matt Goldberg added, “I can’t remember the last time we saw a solid men-vs-wild movie [since The Edge].” But perhaps the title should have reminded him. Men vs. wild films have been coming out solidly, even if you only count ones with ‘The’ in the title. Since The Edge was released in 1997, The Hunted, The Missing, The Way Back, and The Donner Party have all provided stories of steely-eyed male protagonists facing down both the wilderness and the worst of human nature.
Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge. Beards. Snow. Wilderness. Etc.
In a ‘close read’ of the film, posted on the day of the film’s release, Movieline’s Jen Yamato asked whether The Grey was a “welcome return to masculine cinema.” This was explored through quotes from the cast and director. Actor Dermot Mulroney said, “I’ve made a lot of movies that had both men and women in them, a lot of movies that were dominated by the woman’s storyline. And in this case it was a very different experience making the movie and enjoying the movie, when it was completed, because of the fact that there are no women in it… It was like thank God, I get to do a movie with just guys.”
Cast member Frank Grillo said that “It’s tough being a man. It really is tough being a man.” His co-star Dallas Roberts was quoted as saying, “But that’s the problem with discussing modern masculinity, isn’t it, because you’re a moron as soon as you open your mouth and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Mulroney expanded on the subject of cinematic testosterone in another interview with Movieline. It went on to be posted under the headline “The Sweet Relief of Being in a Manly Movie Like The Grey.” His response to a question about representing ‘what it means to be a man’ in the film was:
“So you say this movie has some throwback qualities, or some old school manly-man qualities; that’s intentional… So, guilty as charged on that; if that’s something that needs to be brought back, then let’s bring it back. It seems like people are responding to that about this movie and to my mind there haven’t been enough of them. The pendulum swung the other way since I started in this business and there were men’s movies like whatever those Tom Cruise movies [were]”

He continues “…then all of a sudden Sigourney Weaver comes in the Alien and we have strong women, we have Working Girl, we have all this, we have Best Friend’s Wedding, and before you know it, all the f–king movies are about the girls!”

Movieline’s headline presents The Grey as a ‘sweet relief’ to this abundance of girls, uncritically accepting Mulroney’s point and working it in to the appeal of the movie for audiences. This theme of the ‘masculine’ film continued to crop up in the promotional work surrounding the film’s release. Carnahan went on to frame his casting decisions around an idea of endangered manliness. The HuffPo blog Tribeca Film highlighted it in their interview with him, using the headline “Call of the Wild: Masculinity and Mother Nature in The Grey.” In the article, Carnahan talks about his cast, saying “They are unmistakably masculine as opposed to these vacuous kids in Hollywood right now…For The Grey, I was interested in a very specific kind of masculinity.”
He goes on to summon up this ‘very specific kind’ as embodied by Neeson through comparing him with Justin Bieber. Carnahan positions manliness in terms of dismissal and revulsion with the kind of ‘vacuous kids’ teenage Bieber apparently represents, and links credibility with age. The casting issue comes up again in The Daily Blam, where the writer Pietro Filipponi paraphrases his interview with Carnahan by saying “Casting…wasn’t as easy as you’d think” and quoting the director holding forth again on the seeming epidemic of “shirtless boys…with blank stares.” Filipponi suggests that “movie goers may scratch their collective heads wondering why other well known (and younger) actors weren’t selected for this film.”
In the Film School Rejects interview with Carnahan they discusses the “surprise” fact that younger actor Bradley Cooper (who is 37) was “almost” cast, and the interviewer Jack Giroux also brings up the idea that Carnahan’s “characters are usually very manly.”
The connection between Neeson’s casting (the director calls it the film’s “trump card”) and the “manly” aspect of his character is presented as a given. The contrast between younger Cooper and Neeson, who is 59, isn’t pressed, but in another interview with Moviehole the director continues to strongly connect his leading man with idealised masculinity. He says that “Liam embodied that much more easily than a younger actor would have” and commented on Neeson’s “strength and profundity as a man and as an actor.”
Discussions about The Grey and its portrayal of endangered masculinity originated in the movie blogosphere, but proved to be popular beyond it. When Joe Carnahan told film site Collider that Hollywood “premium on boys instead of men” and that films were “sorely lacking” in Neeson’s “ilk,” his quote was picked up by an entertainment news agency. The line came from a video interview with the director, who had been asked about the decision to cast his leading man. Talking about how “shirtless seventeen-year-olds” are being “passed off as a masculine form,” he goes on to say: “The reason that a guy like Liam, who’s nearly 60 years old, is having this resurgent kind of career swing is because we are sorely lacking in his ilk in this business right now.”
It garnered a decent amount of coverage, certainly more than most non-Tarantino director’s interviews are likely to, even in Oscar season. The quote was picked up by entertainment news agency Cover Media and was recycled on entertainment sites like ONTD and the UK’s Daily Express. Along with the jokes made about Neeson’s wolf-punching virility it became one of the underpinnings of The Grey’s online media coverage.
Magazine website Crushable reposted Carnahan’s quote under the headline “Liam Neeson Is Having a Career Resurgence Because He’s the Most Masculine Actor in Hollywood,” with writer Natalie Zutter concluding: “There are no men in Hollywood.” The same site emphasises Neeson’s skill set by creating a very manly paper doll of him in full action hero pose. He’s pictured surrounded by everyday items he can recycle into “the perfect weapons.” Same as, the writer points out, Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity – an actor and role not mentioned in her other article, probably because it dismantles the point that Zutter (and Carnahan himself) is making. 
Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. Non-existent leading man.
Yahoo’s Shine blog used the line as a springboard to ask “Where Are Hollywood’s Manly Men?” Author Piper Weiss reiterates Carnahan’s idea of a “lack,” referring to Neeson as the “last of the man-hicans” and calling them “a dying breed if ever there was one.” Weiss goes on to list ten other prominent movie stars who fit this particular “breed.” It harks back to Carnahan’s stated desire for a “very different kind of masculinity,” a call for an essentialist gender role of some type that’s now, apparently, unfashionable and endangered. Ironically, eight of them are white, unintentionally reflecting one of the true shortages in Hollywood casting.
Writer Christian Toto, writing for the conservative Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog, used Neeson’s profile to write about “Why Masculinity Matters.” Comparing the profit of The Grey with Taylor Lautner-starring action film Abduction, Toto concludes that “the soon to be 60-year-old Neeson matters because he’s bringing something fresh to theatres, the sense of a fully capable alpha male who doesn’t regret taking decisive action.” How rare this ‘fully capable alpha male’ quality is, and how unique it makes Neeson’s appearance on screen, may appear inarguable when contrasted with the twenty-year-old Lautner’s box office disappointment.
However, Abduction opened up against two arguably manly films, Killer Elite and Moneyball, and only a couple of weeks away from several other testosterone-heavy storylines, Warrior, Drive, Courageous, and Real Steel. All of them featured flawed male leads, many of them (including Jason Statham, Clive Owen, Brad Pitt, and Hugh Jackman) old enough to be Lautner’s father. It also doesn’t take into account that Lautner’s film was beaten at the box office by a movie with negligible alpha-male qualities called Dolphin Tale.
Masculinity definitely does still matter, as the Women’s Media Centre study of gender representation [pdf] in U.S. media shows. It reported the distressing results of a 2012 report by Smith, Choueti & Gall on female representation in mainstream movies. The authors found that female characters made up just a third of the speaking roles in the top hundred grossing films of 2007, 2008, and 2009. Looking at ‘gender balance’ in these movies, where “the girls” contributed to around half of the characters, only one in six films qualified. In films, female leads are still the exception, never the rule, no matter how overwhelmed Dermot Mulroney feels.
Given this, it feels like an overstatement to hear all these announcements that cinema audiences will be shocked at seeing a cast of legal male adults, or even a star – Neeson – old enough to have fathered Bradley Cooper. Particularly considering that a writer who asked where the manly men are in Hollywood could then come up with ten prominent actors, like Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, who fit her misty-eyed description of manliness.
The popularity of Carnahan’s quote shows off the attraction of discussing a non-event like ‘disappearing masculinity.’ This argument makes out that The Grey is a special event, a chance for grown-ups – particularly men – to have a rare opportunity to see themselves onscreen. As well as being savvy PR, there’s almost an ideological challenge in this. The lurking subtextual suggestion is that if the audience does not front up, there will be less and less of the kind of gender ideal that Neeson has come to embody, with his daughter-rescuing, wolf-punching cragged good looks and air of tragic fortitude. Man vs. wolf is also man vs. box office, man vs. the empty calories of what Carnahan dismisses as “shirtless boys with…blank stares,” and by extension a dearth of movies with ‘male’ stories.
Comparing like-with-like, North American January cinema releases have in fact offered audiences plenty of films with central adult male leads facing difficult odds. The Grey was being released on the same weekend as the expanded release of 50-year-old George Clooney in The Descendents, and in a month with new films starring Dennis Quaid, Mark Wahlberg, Ralph Fiennes, and Ewan McGregor, all actors over forty. In January 2011, The Way Back was released, about seven men and one young woman walking 4000 miles to escape the Soviet gulags. In 2010 came the general American release of the Alp-climbing adventure film North Face. In 2009, instead of a survival epic there was Taken, the terrorist thriller that marked the beginning of the recreated Liam Neeson as action hero. In 2008 the most recent Rambo film came out, bringing back the renegade army vet to fight the Burmese military junta in the jungle. In 2007 Joe Carnahan’s mostly-male action film, Smokin’ Aces, was released – as was kidnapping thriller Alpha Dog, a suitable name for a movie where six of the seven top-billed actors were male. The year before that, January audiences were given the option of going to see Eight Below, another survival tale set in the Antarctic, starring two men and their pack of dogs.
Men dominate the blockbuster field, and the cult of youth is not as entrenched as Carnahan makes out. Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., Vin Diesel, Matt Damon, Nicholas Cage, and Will Smith all opened films among the top-grossing of 2011, and are all also on the far side of forty. Harrison Ford is over sixty, as is Sylvester Stallone, and soon movie theatres will see the return of Arnold Schwarzengger, born in 1947.
Willem Defoe in The Hunter. Beard. Snow. Raw masculinity. Rinse and repeat.
In 2012, while The Grey opened in theatres, a trailer for the new film The Hunter was released online. Instead of Man vs. wolf, this ‘The’ movie (starring 56-year-old Willem Defoe) is about Man vs. tiger. Linda Ge, writing for the comic book website Bleeding Cool, compared it to The Grey, adding that the Neeson film may be “paving the way for moviegoers to find their way to this similarly themed movie in their further search of more “bad ass with a beard takes on all predators’ stories.”
Movieline acknowledged this bad ass/beard/predator trope by looking back at The Edge. A few weeks after The Grey opened Nathan Pensky’s essay noted that “this genre is certainly well-trod territory” and comparing the protagonists of both films to Cast Away and Into the Wild. There’s no mention in the short article of how all these films are about men. For his part, Carnahan made a joke during the promotional cycle about what an all-female version of his film would consist of: “The movie would be 15 minutes long. They’d all agree on what to do, they’d walk out and live.”
Pensky, Ge, and Carnahan all made different statements that overlap at the same points of genre and gender. The Grey is part of a film release schedule that is heavily weighted to stories about men, and a popular trope that has become a representative for stories about the male condition. The presence of women would be so improbable that it becomes humorous, detracting from the key narrative tension – Man vs. [some predatory element of nature]. It doesn’t take much Hollywood savvy to guess how few actresses will be considered to play a ‘bad ass with a beard.’
Statistics and the deluge of similar films contradict this idea that we’re losing a masculine identity from cinema. Although the space from Justin Bieber to Liam Neeson via Bradley Cooper seems like a fairly narrow distance to cover, movies focussing on (white) adult men fit in very comfortably with the current cinematic landscape. Grizzled masculinity is so secure in popular culture it’s become a reliable punchline. With the release of The Grey’s trailer, there was a mini-meme phenomenon of lists like ‘What Should Liam Neeson Punch Next?,’ ‘10 Badass Adversaries Worthy of Fighting Liam Neeson’ and ‘10 Crazy Things Liam Neeson Should Fight Onscreen.’ Simon Pegg tweeted that: “If you do get into a fight, just say “Liam Neeson” as you throw a punch, your mittens will catch fire and your enemy’s life will fall off” and that after exposure to the actor’s presence “I was 78% better at fighting swarthy goons.”
Being able to talk about manliness had obvious appeal when it came to selling The Grey to audiences. The ‘toughness’ of being a man was exploited as the theme of the film, then toughness of casting a ‘man’s man’ sparked a ripple of discussion. It was a discussion with a hollow centre. No matter how few sensible adversaries would be willing to take on Liam Neeson, there is no upcoming shortage in films being made about him and his kind. Bad asses with beards are not going to make cinema’s endangered species list anytime soon.
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Margaret Howie cheerfully lives with her love of Robert Mitchum and her feminist sensibility in South London, watching and thinking about as many movies she can see.

Horror Week 2012: That "Crazy Bitch": Women and Mental Illness Tropes in Horror

Vivien (Connie Britton) in American Horror Story

Ladies, how many times have you been called a “crazy bitch?” Once? Twice? 5 thousand times?? Or is that just me? This oh-so-not-lovely term of endearment gets tossed around waaaaayy too often. It’s bad enough when we get labeled the sexist term “bitch” — and it’s very different for us women to reclaim the word and its power, calling ourselves “bitch,” as we do here at Bitch Flicks. But it’s typically coupled with “crazy,” a problematic and offensive ableist term. Put them together and you have the Crazy Bitch, an all-too common trope in the media, appearing as victims and villains in horror.

Horror movies have undoubtedly been influenced by feminism.  Some argue a “stealth empowerment message” exists in horror films for women with lots of ass-kicking female survivors and the rise of the Final Girl. Sadly, not all tropes have fallen by the wayside, including the Crazy Bitch. Ableist and sexist stereotypes of women and mental illness abound in horror movies and TV (American Horror Story, Orphan, Gothika,Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Ring, Misery, etc.).
Now, my mother and some of my friends live with mental illness. For each of them, it’s a part of their lives but it doesn’t define them. So I’m acutely aware of the stigmas, misconceptions and prejudices surrounding mental illness. Mental illness — from bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and depression to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia and anorexia — is a legitimate medical condition requiring medication and/or therapy.
But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say mental illness isn’t “real” or they question why people with mental illness can’t get their shit together. Really, asshole? You wouldn’t dare say that to someone with diabetes or heart disease or cancer. So don’t say that ignorant shit. Ever.
Rather than dispelling myths, pop culture often reinforces mental illness stereotypes. As Bitch Magazine’s s.e. smith asserts: 

“For those of us with mental illness(es), pop culture can be a constant reminder of the fact that we are considered both scary and public property, objects of curiosity, fascination, and revulsion.”

Samara (Daveigh Chase) in The Ring

And the Crazy Bitch trope helps perpetuate mental illness stereotypes. It has many sister tropes infesting horror too. Like the Hysterical Woman, where female characters are depicted as overly emotional and irrational, The Madwoman in the Attic, a trope where a character with mental illness is locked away, isolated from society, and the Nervous Housewife, where men doubt women’s paranormal experiences and patronize them. Jen Doll at The Atlantic Wire gives us “10 tropes about women that women should stop laughing about,” including “the crazy.” As Doll astutely observes, calling someone “crazy” is a way to put people (often women) down and for the accuser to feel better about themselves, all while being insulting to those who who struggle with mental illness.

The second season of the hit show American Horror Story is titled Asylum and set in a psychiatric institution. And of course the usual tropes emerge, like over-the-top shocking caricatures and the crazy nympho sexpots. But one of the most disturbing elements, besides the rampant gore, is when Sister Jude (Jessica Lange) utters, “mental illness is the fashionable word for sin,” reinforcing the pervasive stereotype that mental illness isn’t actually real.

Cait at Feminist Film analyzes the mental illness tropes in American Horror Story: Asylum: 

“To appropriate this traumatic history and use it as a measure of “freakiness”, to scare and shock viewers, as it explores this strange asylum with a serial killer who skins women, a doctor who performs Mengele-like experiments on patients who have no family or friends, nuns who dream about doing the deed and take their sexual frustration out in a weird form of repressed anger, and apparently, aliens, is exploitative and negates much of the positive aspects that the psychological field has accomplished…

“Horror does not equal shock value, and that is precisely what American Horror Story: Asylum is attempting to do. Where the first season left off on misogynistic representations of women and glorifying bad boy murderers, the second season picks up on the exploitation and stereotyping of mental illness. In a world where mental illness is already still heavily stigmatized, this is an ignorant and unnecessary bastardization of mental health practices.”

Lana (Sarah Paulson) in American Horror Story: Asylum

But it’s not just the second season suffering from problematic depictions of mental illness. In season 1, Constance (Jessica Lange) calls her daughter Addie who has Down’s Syndrome a “mongoloid” and a “monster.” When Vivien (Connie Britton) says she was raped and she saw a ghost, her husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) doesn’t believe her and has her committed to a psychiatric ward. You know, because women can’t be believed or trusted. Because bitches be CRAZY!!

Creator and showrunner Ryan Murphy calls his TV series “feminist horror.” And some even claim Sister Jude is a secret feminist. Sure, there are plenty of interesting female characters. But that doesn’t automatically make it feminist.
Now, I don’t expect American Horror Storyto be sensitive or politically correct. Especially as gender and race problems clog up Murphy and Falchuk’s show Glee with its incessant problematic depictions of body image, race, gender and erasure of bisexuality. And the hospital staff in AHS: Asylum seems far more evil and sadistic than any of the patients. But considering the enormity of the stigma surrounding mental illness, the last thing we need is yet another movie or TV show perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
Many killers in horror films are unhinged or unstable, with many explicitly suffering from mental illness. In Orphan, Kate and John adopt Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) after a devastating miscarriage. Turns out, Ester is really a murderous 33-year-old woman with hypopituitarism, posing as a 9-year-old girl, who had been institutionalized in a mental hospital. In Carrie, Carrie’s mother Margaret White (Piper Laurie) has a mental illness and repeatedly abuses and eventually attempts to kill her telekinetic daughter. While never explicitly stated, Misery implies that torturous nurse Annie Wilkes suffers from bipolar disorder, as well as being a “virtual catalog of mental illness.”

Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) in Orphan
Ashley Smith asserts too many horror movies — like Orphan — “send a false message of mental illness.” They correlate mental illness and extreme violence, an offensive and dangerous stereotype. We shouldn’t fear mental illness or people who live with it. Yet that’s the message continually reinforced.
But apparently it’s not just the living we must fear. In Hollywood, ghosts suffer from mental illness too. House on Haunted Hill (1999), Session 9, and Asylum all transpire in haunted psychiatric hospitals or asylums where the former living who struggled with mental illness become terrifying ghosts haunting the living. In The Ring, Samara is the girl responsible for the video tape that kills people. She tormented her adoptive mother as well as driving horses to commit suicide. Before she died, she was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. Then she becomes a murderous ghost. Naturally.

“Why would a mental illness like schizophrenia still plague someone after death?  Would we expect a diabetic ghost to require insulin? A paraplegic ghost to require a wheelchair? Somehow, we’ve decided, the mentally ill are terrifying and threatening even when they’re dead. That seems unfair, given the stigma that they have to endure in life as well.” 

Many horror films take place in psychiatric hospitals with women being committed because of their actions or recounting paranormal events. After protagonist Kristen battles Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, her mother erroneously thinks she was attempting suicide and hospitalizes her. Similar circumstances cause Kirsty in Hellbound: Hellraiser II to be hospitalized. In Gothika, Miranda (Halle Berry) is a psychiatrist who becomes institutionalized after she’s accused of murdering her husband. Her former colleagues think she’s delusional and suicidal after she tells them she sees ghosts. Miranda’s former patient Chloe (Penelope Cruz) — who Miranda didn’t believe was being raped, thinking she was fabricating the trauma — tells her, “You are not a doctor in here. And even if you tell the truth … no one will listen. You know why? Because you’re crazy.”

L-R: Chloe (Penelope Cruz) and Miranda (Halle Berry) in Gothika
In American Horror Story and many of these films, the women aren’t believed. As a result, they’re deemed dangerous and erroneously labeled mentally ill. Removed from society, they are punished for their actions.
Yes, we do see men struggling with mental illness in horror films. Halloween, Shutter Island, In the Mouth of Madness, and The Shining are all examples of men struggling with mental illness or in psychiatric hospitals. But despite the Final Girl in many horror films, we still see a wider variety of men represented. And men don’t have to worry about being labeled “crazy” the way women do.
Jezebel’s Jenna Sauers discusses the impact of calling women “crazy”:

“Reflexively calling women “crazy” is a habit young men need to learn to break. As a term, “crazy” is entirely of a piece with the long and nasty tradition of pathologizing female emotion (and particularly sexuality). Hysteria comes from hystera, the Greek word for uterus, after all: “crazy” has been a gendered trait in Western culture for thousands of years. The male gaze was for virtually all of human history synonymous with the medical gaze, and men assigned themselves the authority to determine which bodies are sick and which are hale.”

In his popular post, “A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not ‘Crazy,’” Yashar Ali argues that men often call women crazy to emotionally manipulate them. He discusses “gaslighting” (taken from the classic film Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman), in which men diminish women’s concerns by dismissing them, making them neurotically question their perception and themselves. I’ve accused many men in my life of doing this — trying to mansplain to me and make me doubt myself. Ali explains why gaslighting affects so many women, regardless of their self-confidence:
“Because women bare the brunt of our neurosis. It is much easier for us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men. It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice. 

“Whether gaslighting is conscious or not, it produces the same result: It renders some women emotionally mute.” 

Society polices women’s appearances, language and behavior. We can’t let the ladies get out of control. Who knows what could happen??? Calling a woman “crazy,” doubting not only her veracity but her very sanity, is offensive. It’s also an attempt to control women, demean them and strip them of their power. Women with mental illness are often silenced, invisible from the media aside from victims or villains in horror. When we do see them on-screen, they instill fear as they are depicted as violent, volatile and uncontrollable.

Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) in Misery
Gender Focus’ Jarrah Hodge writes about mental illness tropes in all films: 

“Because women have been historically branded as “hysterics,” and women are oppressed in the media in general, women with disabilities report feeling particularly harmed by media misrepresentations of their realities…From the Joker in The Dark Knight to Angelina Jolie’s character in Girl, Interrupted, people with invisible disabilities (disabilities that aren’t physically apparent, including mental illness), are often portrayed as dangers to society who need to be contained and/or ‘fixed’.”

Horror movies aren’t necessarily about portraying mental illness (or anything for that matter) accurately. They strive to push boundaries, spurring us out of our comfort zone. They strip everything away to its visceral core. But it’s highly problematic the Crazy Bitch trope keeps appearing on-screen.
It might not be such a big deal if the media showcased positive representations of mental illness to counter or balance those we see in horror movies and TV series. But we rarely do. Women in general are continually portrayed as illogical, overly emotional, unreliable and unbalanced. The media often dehumanizes women with mental illness, depicting them as dangerous, brutal and sadistic. The perpetual message is that we need to be rescued from women with mental illness as they are a threat to not only themselves but to society.
The “crazy bitch” label — in both pop culture and reality — silences and dismisses women while simultaneously shaming and stigmatizing women living with mental illness. So Hollywood, let’s stop with all the prejudicial bullshit and just show us what we all really want to watch…a zombie apocalypse.