Matt Damon narrating Women, War & Peace |
The radical notion that women like good movies
Matt Damon narrating Women, War & Peace |
One place where gender-typing is most vivid is the baby doll section, filled with baby dolls that drink bottles of formula, crawl, talk, wet their diapers, and cry until pacified. They are marketed and targeted at an audience of girls. None of the packages shows boys taking care of the dolls; the boxes display beaming, blissfully happy girls rocking their crying “babies” to sleep. In this realm, it is clear who is supposed to care for children. Despite the tremendous strides that women have made in society and the greater freedoms they now experience, this gender stereotyping of dolls has changed slowly in recent decades. Karen Klugman writes, “For all that some members of society advance notions of empowering women and making responsible caregivers of men, girls’ collections of dolls reinforce the traditional female preoccupation with physical appearance and homemaking, while the boys’ collections embody conflict and superhuman power.” She continues, our “childhood experience with fantasy play remains forever segregated into bride side and groom side.” Countless toys, including baby dolls and army soldiers, are resistant to change, perpetuating gender roles that seem to have changed little since the 1950s.
The traditional gender roles that children are usually immersed in when young remain lurking in their psyches as they mature. Although a boy might not want to become a gun-toting G.I. Joe when he grows up or a girl a mall-hopping Barbie, those gender roles influence how children and adults construct their identities, even if they choose to question or reject such stereotyped roles. Also, this stereotyping proves remarkably durable in mainstream American society, where millions assume that females are responsible for child care and males for warfare. Myriad forces shape such stereotypes, but toys are one of the earliest and most influential for young children. Thus, action figures–and all toys from board games to baby dolls–deserve more scholarly scrutiny to tease out their gendered messages. If we are to understand how girls and boys mature into adults, we must explore the process through toys.
I think the problem is very broad, that in media in general, all that we’ve seen from when we were little kids, and all that’s shown now, are very, very imbalanced fictional worlds where there are far more male characters than female characters, and the female characters don’t really get to do a lot. So kids take this in, they internalize it, and they end up not being able to picture women doing interesting and unusual things because they’ve never seen it before. You can only accept it and take it in as a reality if you’ve seen it. So what we need to do is, first of all, add a lot more female characters because we really do take up half the planet, and we’re not like a rare subgroup like we’re shown in movies and television. And also, to show a breadth of occupations and aspirations and interests in these characters, so that boys and girls get used to seeing girls doing interesting and challenging things.
Well, I guess I’ll divide the audience into women and men, and I’ll say to the women: Come! Help me. Be my sisters, and help me do this because this is really important. And for the men: Don’t be afraid. We love you; we like you; we want you. We asked Matt Damon to narrate the Bosnia episode, and the Bosnia episode is a lot about sexual violence. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but here’s why we did it: I’ve spent my adult life working on these issues, and I’ve heard a lot of women, and the sound of what it is when they’re indignant about a woman being raped. And I don’t hear that from men. I would like to hear a man’s voice in indignation around the rape of women. If you think about social movements through history, you know, nothing has ever really shifted until people have involved themselves in movements that they had nothing to gain by succeeding—white people in the North going to the South to help in the civil rights movements; yuppies in California protesting for the end of apartheid. We need you guys. You are really important. Because the fact is that women are still being raped in the United States and sexually harassed in the United States in the same numbers they were being raped in the 1960s and 70s. Until you guys come with us, the world just won’t shift.
Visit Barbara J. Berg’s Web site for more information. |
Which brings me to our Quote of the Day.
The one notable exception to the hailing males of Hollywood is the movie Sex and the City (SATC), a smash hit racking up fifty-seven million dollars on its opening weekend. Just about every reviewer mentioned the gal pals responsible for this spectacular success, just as they made much of male absence (except for gay men, who are presumably big fans).
Of course, there’s the old adage in Tinsel Town that women will see a “male” movie, but not vice versa. Still, the way men dissed SATC (most without having seen it) hints at something deeper going on. Perfectly wonderful men shuddered in horror at the very mention of the movie. They seemed absolutely phobic, as though watching a movie about four devoted friends who together wielded power and authority was an affront to their manhood.
“In an Internet Movie Database poll, 7,197 men voted to give SATC an average score of 3.8–that puts it among the worst movies of the year,” reported Ramin Setoodeh in Newsweek (June 16, 2008). Male reviewers were particularly nasty. Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker that the movie “was more like a TV show on steroids. . . . All the film lacks is a subtitle, ‘The Lying, the Bitch and the Wardrobe.’ David Poland at Hot Button said, “The only genuinely emotional moment I experienced in this film came to pass in a moment where the characters actually shut up for a moment.”
SATC is the first movie in a long time to reverse the formula and put women, not men, at center stage. Is it a big surprise that many males immediately called for them to be silenced? Maybe they’re just pissed that SATC scored more at the box office than their favorite “dick flick,” Indiana Jones.
Thoughts?
Directed by Dorothy Arzner by Judith Mayne |
In the early to mid-1970s, when Arzner’s work was brought to the attention of feminists, her films were deemed particularly important for their criticism of Hollywood films “from within.” Pam Cook and Claire Johnston described how the universe of the male was “made strange” in Arzner’s films, how women’s “rewriting” of male discourse subverted the established conventions of Hollywood. At the time Cook and Johnston’s essays were published, film theory was very much preoccupied with the notion of “making strange,” with the possibilities of a Hollywood film that critiqued itself and its own assumptions. Cook and Johnston brought a strong theoretical approach to Arzner’s work, while other critics of the era were simply delighted to find a woman director among all of the men in Hollywood film history.
The plot of Dance, Girl, Dance concerns the differing paths to success for Bubbles (Lucille Ball) and Judy (Maureen O’Hara), both members of a dance troupe led by Madame Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya). The dance troupe performs vaudeville-style numbers in bars and nightclubs, much to the chagrin of Basilova (who bemoans her status as a “flesh peddler”). Bubbles has “oomph,” a kind of dancer’s version of “it,” and eventually she leaves the troupe and enthusiastically pursues a career as “Tiger Lily White.” Judy, in contrast, is a serious student of ballet, and the protegee of Basilova. However, it is Bubbles who gets the jobs, and she arranges for Judy to be hired as her “stooge,” i.e., as a classical dancer who performs in the middle of Bubble’s act, and thus primes the audience to demand more of Bubbles.
Toward the end of the film, Judy stands on stage and refuses her role as stooge. She defiantly crosses her arms and moves closer to the audience, and she gives the spectators a piece of her mind:
Go ahead and stare. I’m not ashamed. Go on. Laugh! Get your money’s worth. Nobody’s going to hurt you. I know you want me to tear my clothes off so’s you can look your fifty cents worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you suppose we think of you up here–with your silly smirks your mothers would be ashamed of? And we know it’s the thing of the moment for the dress suits to come and laugh at us too. We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks. What’s it for? So’s you can go home when the show’s over and strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see through you just like we do.
I see Judy’s confrontation less as a challenge to the very notion of woman as object of spectacle than as the creation of another kind of performance. Oftentimes the scene is discussed as if the audience were exclusively male, which it is not, even though Judy addresses men in her speech. When the camera pans the reactions of the audience to Judy’s speech, the responses of women are quite clearly visible. Women squirm uncomfortably in their seats just as surely as men do, and when release occurs in the form of applause, it is a woman–Steven Adams’s trusty secretary–who initiates it. Arzner’s view of performance and her view of the relationship between subject and object were never absolute; women may be objectified through performance, but they are also empowered; men may consume women through the look, but women also watch and take pleasure in the spectacle of other women’s performance.
Thoughts?
Movie-Made America by Robert Sklar |
In the World War I era–an unsettled period when late-Victorian mores persisted side by side with an emerging image of a “new woman”–it could only have been disconcerting to respectable Americans to see photographs of determined young women in the ankle-length dresses, high-button shoes and broad-brimmed hats standing in long lines outside a Hollywood casting office. The American middle class had only just begun to regard movies as something other than immoral trash for working-class people; and suddenly their daughters were packing up and leaving home to seek their fortunes in the movies.If they had to go, the least one could do was give them sound advice, most of it intended to be discouraging. A girl should plan to have enough money to survive for a year without additional income; authors of advice books and articles for the movie aspirant set the minimum figure at $2,000. She should have resources enough to be able to acquire her own wardrobe, since extras in those days had to supply their own outfits for scenes of contemporary life. She should consider what abilities she possessed and perhaps direct her ambitions to other interesting work in motion pictures.Studios needed talented dress designers, set decorators, film cutters, all jobs that were open to women. In fact, the motion-pictures studios in the 1910s and 1920s gave more opportunities to women than most other industries, far more than they ever did again. Many of the leading scenario writers were women, among them Anita Loos, June Mathis, Frances Marion and Jeanie Macpherson. Lois Weber was a well-known director and independent producer, and Elinor Glyn, Dorothy Arzner and other women directed films during the 1920s. Women were occasionally found in executive positions in Hollywood producing companies. And if a woman possessed none of these talents, there were always jobs as secretaries, mail clerks, film processors, and in other modest but essential roles in the making of movies.But what women wanted was to be actresses. They could see that other girls, many still in their teens, without acting experience, were making it. Why not they? But no one informed them that a fair share of the young girls with film contracts were “payoffs,” as Colleen Moore called them: players who were hired as a favor to influential people or to pay back a favor they had done the studio. Moore got her start because her uncle, a newspaper editor, gave D.W. Griffith help in getting his films approved by the Chicago censorship board, and Griffith repaid him with a contract for his niece. In Silent Star, Moore reports that Carmel Myers, Mildred Harris (a bride at sixteen to Charlie Chaplin) and Winifred Westover, who began acting as teen-agers, were all “payoffs” in similar ways.
From her website:
Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on the image of women in advertising and her critical studies of alcohol and tobacco advertising. Her films, lectures, and television appearances have been seen by millions of people throughout the world. She was named by The New York Times Magazine as one of the three most popular speakers on college campuses. She is the author of the award-winning book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel and co-author of So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids. The prize-winning films based on her lectures include Killing Us Softly, Spin the Bottle, and Slim Hopes.
Bossypants by Tina Fey |
Amy Poehler was new to SNL and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers’ room, waiting for the Wednesday read-through to start. There were always a lot of noisy “comedy bits” going on in that room. Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table, and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can’t remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and loud and “unladylike.”Jimmy Fallon, who was arguably the star of the show at the time, turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, “Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it.”Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit. (I should make clear that Jimmy and Amy are very good friends and there was never any real beef between them. Insert penis joke here.)With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn’t there to be cute. She wasn’t there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys’ scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it.I was so happy. Weirdly, I remember thinking, “My friend is here! My friend is here!” Even though things had been going great for me at the show, with Amy there, I felt less alone.I think of this whenever someone says to me, “Jerry Lewis says women aren’t funny, ” or “Christopher Hitchens says women aren’t funny,” or “Rick Fenderman says women aren’t funny…Do you have anything to say to that?”Yes. We don’t fucking care if you like it.
Roseanne Barr |
Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that’s why you won’t be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I’m not bitter.
Nothing real or truthful makes its way to TV unless you are smart and know how to sneak it in, and I would tell you how I did it, but then I would have to kill you. Based on Two and a Half Men’s success, it seems viewers now prefer their comedy dumb and sexist. Charlie Sheen was the world’s most famous john, and a sitcom was written around him. That just says it all. Doing tons of drugs, smacking prostitutes around, holding a knife up to the head of your wife—sure, that sounds like a dream come true for so many guys out there, but that doesn’t make it right! People do what they can get away with (or figure they can), and Sheen is, in fact, a product of what we call politely the “culture.” Where I can relate to the Charlie stuff is his undisguised contempt for certain people in his work environment and his unwillingness to play a role that’s expected of him on his own time.
But, again, I’m not bitter. I’m really not. The fact that my fans have thanked and encouraged me for doing what I used to get in trouble for doing (shooting my big mouth off) has been very healing. And somewhere along the way, I realized that TV and our culture had changed because of a woman named Roseanne Conner, whom I am honored to have written jokes for.
Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema by Janet McCabe (2004). Part of the Wallflower Short Cuts Series. |
Leading comedic roles for women in film and television are often relegated to “romantic” comedy and these women still, in 2011, struggle to break into the classification of comedy–without modifiers–and remain relegated to the dreaded “chick flick” (a term that the title of this website plays off of).
From the section “Romantic comedy and gender” in the book Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema.
Television comedy is another area of recent feminist inquiry, which investigates in particular star performance, joke-making techniques and the television audience. Alexander Doty (1990), investigating the interplay between the star image of Lucille Ball and the character she plays in I Love Lucy (Desilu Productions Inc/CBS, 1951-57) argues that Lucy Ricardo is constructed as the zany, loveable, ditzy and talentless housewife and mother based on the denial, repression and (re)construction of Ball’s star image. Patricia Mellencamp (1997) is another scholar fascinated by Lucille Ball’s slapstick routines. Recuperating Ball’s performance as an act of defiance from the confinement of the domestic space allows her to locate the radical underpinnings of the show for female viewers. Each week Lucy unsuccessfully attempting to escape domesticity and break into show business. They physical comic routines performed by Ball offered a means of challenging patriarchy as she upstages her husband/other men; and this is what audiences tuned in to see. Drawing on Freud’s theory of humorous pleasures (that is, humour used to avoid emotional pain) enables Mellencamp to argue that laughter directed at Lucy’s performance of being talentless – ‘her wretched, off-key singing, her mugging facial exaggerations and out-of-step dancing [is] paradoxically both the source of the audience’s pleasure and the narrative necessity for housewifery’ (1997: 73). She contends that Lucy’s situation made visible the real dilemmas faced by many women: ‘Given the repressive conditions of the 1950s, humour might have been women’s weapon and tactic of survival, ensuring sanity, the triumph of the ego, and pleasures’ (ibid).One of the most sustained discussions on gender, representation and cross-cultural theories is Kathleen Rowe’s study of the unruly woman (1995). Using theoretical models from Mikhail Bakhtin concerned with the grotesque, Rowe identifies the grotesque body as ultimately the female body – often an outrageous, voluptuous, loud, joke-cracking dissenter or ‘woman on top’. The unruly female is not about gender confusion but inverting dominant social, cultural and political conventions; unruliness occurs when those who are socially or politically inferior (normally, women) use humour and excess to undermine patriarchal norms and authority. Focusing on Roseanne Arnold allows her to suggest how Roseanne’s star image and her television situation (Carsey-Werner Company/ABC, 1988-1997) disrupt and expose the gap between feminist liberation (informed by second-wave feminism) and the realities of working-class family life (those of whom feminist liberation left behind), between ideals of true womanhood and unruliness to challenge notions of a patriarchal construction of femininity. Making a spectacle of herself – her overweight body, her physical excesses, her performance as loud and brash – reveals ambivalence as the unruly woman speaks out. Difficulties faced by Roseanne in the press with the vitriol directed at her ‘make known the problems of representing what in our culture still remains largely unrepresentable: a fat woman who is also sexual; a sloppy housewife who’s a good mother; a “loose” woman who is also tidy, who hates matrimony but loves her husband, who hates the ideology of true womanhood, yet considers herself a domestic goddess’ (1995:91).As I hope is clear, feminist critics disclose how television culture is informed by context and given meaning through the ways in which particular programmes are consumed, how narratives are experienced and what they mean to the female viewer – what television series says about women and how media texts function in their daily lives. Through interviews, Deborah Jermyn (2003) analyses how women talk about the series in an effort to understand what Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004) means to female fans. Pivotal here is the point at which Jermyn’s own fandom intersects with the experience of those she interviewed – it is a moment that allows her to reveal both the pleasures and difficulties involved in understanding how fan culture operates and how to speak about it.
What leading women of comedy since the 90s reach across gender divides and avoid the ghettoization of the “chick flick?” Who are the new “unruly” women? Does Tyler Perry’s Madea count? (I’m only half joking here.) I’d love to hear readers’ thoughts on these matters.
One of the issues that no one wants to talk about is that finally, the most successful political movement in the United States over the last twenty years was really the feminist movement, and that there is a tremendous backlash to feminism that is being enacted on the stage of mass media. So that films like Leaving Las Vegas really are about ushering in a new, old version of the desirable woman that really is profoundly misogynous based and sexist. It’s no accident; we know that when women went into the factories in the World Wars because men were not here–that when those wars ended–mass media was used to get women out of the factory and back into the home. Well in a sense, mass media is being used in that very same way right now, to get women out of feminism and back into some patriarchal mode of thinking, and movies to me are the lead propaganda machine in this right now.
A major magazine like Time or Newsweek just recently carried a story on Spike Lee as a failure. I mean, it just was amazing! How could you talk about Spike Lee as a failure? It was something like, Malcolm X was made for thirty-seven million, but it only made forty-some million. And I thought, well, how is that a failure? You not only paid for your movie, but you had some excess profit–though not a great deal, not what Hollywood would want. But that can become talked about in mass media as a failure, even though Woody Allen, who has made many films that do not make a lot of money, does not then get talked about as a failed filmmaker. And so that is in the interest of a certain structure of white supremacy and patriarchy, to put Spike Lee down at this point in his career, and to make it seem that somehow he could not deliver the goods, because part of that is about sanctioning white people to become the new makers of so-called black film.
As in, for example, a film like Waiting to Exhale, which is sold and marketed in ways that suggest this is a black film. I mean, people kept telling me, this is a film about black women, this is going to be for black people. In fact, this was a typical Hollywood shitty, uninteresting film–the script written by white people, all marketed as being a film by and about blackness, successfully. Nothing Spike Lee has done can match the financial return of this piece of shit. This is how blackness can be done successfully, and the problem lies not with the terms of what makes blackness successful in Hollywood or on the screen, but with Spike Lee as an individual. And that I think is tragic because so many black people are buying into that mode of thinking. That Spike Lee somehow represents a failure, when in fact, Spike Lee will continue to be the most successful black filmmaker in the United States, and he’s not by any means a failure.
Here’s a way in which, as Hollywood decides to occupy the territory of blackness, it becomes very useful to say, “We let black people have that territory, and they just didn’t know what to do with it. They made these strange films like Girl 6–it didn’t even have a plot. I mean, Crooklyn didn’t even have a plot.” Which of course is completely bogus, because the plot of Crooklyn was very obvious and very simple; it was about a family where the mother is dying in the family. But I can’t tell you how many white reviewers wrote that it didn’t have a plot. When what they should have said is that it didn’t have a plot that interested us. That White America is not interested in black mothers that are dying. So I think that is going to have deep ramifications for the future of representing blackness in Hollywood–because it is really almost a public announcement of the white takeover of that particular territory, the issue of representing blackness in Hollywood.
bitchfest. Edited by Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler |
In the 1940s and ’50s, when wartime taught women that they could be economically successful on their own, and as divorcees and widows became more common, Hollywood switched gears. Single moms, here transformed into the dreaded “career women,” were now messing up not their kids’ economic chances but their psyches. The most spectacular example was the 1945 classic Mildred Pierce, in which Mildred kicks out her deadbeat husband and builds a successful restaurant chain, only to have one daughter die and the other turn into an amoral murderess.[…]In Baby Boom, Diane Keaton’s J.C. is a high-powered Manhattan exec who suddenly inherits a baby. Initially, this looks like a radical twist on the Three Men and a Baby concept, as the film introduces the idea, in several comic sequences, that motherhood is no more instinctual for women than it is for men. But before the audience can grab another handful of popcorn, she’s quit her job and fled to a farmhouse in Vermont, a move that the plot reassures us is all for the best: J.C. has always dreamed of a house in the country. In this movie, children don’t entail real sacrifices, just changes that turn out to be redemptive. It’s the baby’s job to feminize Mom and, in the process, save her from the rat race.[…]A single mom and her kids are by definition a family without a father, and the female-headed household is destruction of the patriarchy at its most basic level. Needless to say, in Hollywood, showing its unproblematic success is still a huge taboo. Contemporary single-mom films are truly reflective of our culture: A massive amount of energy is expended in a desperate attempt to prove that single parenthood is not good enough, even as an ever-increasing number of women parent on their own. (It’s important to note that this anxiety manifests itself onscreen with an almost exclusive focus on white, middle-class single moms, despite the fact that more than one-third of American single moms are women of color. Though this is part and parcel of the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood in general, it conveniently allows mainstream films to ignore the factors of class and race that are inextricably intertwined with single parenthood.