Tag: Women in Hollywood

Emmy Week 2011: Jane Krakowski and the Dedicated Ignorance of Jenna Maroney

“I’m prepared to do a nipple slip if you need it.” –Jenna Maroney, played by Jane Krakowski

Female comedic duos never go out of style. First, there was Lucy and Ethel, followed by Mary and Rhoda, then Roseanne and Jackie. What makes these comedy pairings so successful is that no matter how different each woman is from the other, they somehow balance each other out. It also does not hurt that both women are given equally funny moments, and usually leave the men with the dialogue that follows the riotous laughter. There is no grandstanding, no upstaging or pissing contest. It’s not about who’s the funniest, but who’s going to crack up the other. Simply put, a woman can be funny, but women can be hilarious.
That’s what I love about 30 Rock. Sure, it’s Tina Fey’s baby: she created the series and has written a majority of episodes while also starring as the show’s protagonist. But what makes her funny is the company she keeps. Tina’s straight-woman, self-conscious, prudish Liz Lemon is the complete opposite of the outrageous Tracy Jordan or confident Jack Donaghy. But it’s her interaction with Jane Krakowski’s Jenna Maroney that is most comedic. Of course, they’re both women, but what works is their chaos/order dynamic: While Liz maintains the order of TGS (the fictional sketch-comedy show-within-the-show), Jenna brings the chaos and gets freaky with it in a public bathroom stall.

For the third year in a row, Krakowski has been nominated for an Emmy as Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and is totally deserving of such recognition. She’s funny, and she holds her own with Fey without hogging all the laughs, as both women are equally comical. Fey’s Liz Lemon is the frumpy, repressed, writer of TGS, the faux comedy show that is supposedly taped at 30 Rockefeller Center, while Krakowski’s Jenna is a narcissistic, delusional lead actress on the show. The reason Liz is constantly attempting to hold everything together is due in part to Jenna’s hare-brained schemes. Of course, Tracy Morgan’s Tracy Jordan puts an equal strain on Liz’s patience—his shenanigans often involve the outrageousness and ridiculousness of celebrity lifestyles (extravagant purchases, questionable infidelities, hazardous health concerns, etc), whereas Jenna’s usually revolve around an actor’s internal conflicts (sharing screen time with new cast members, relationship issues with family and lovers, holding together what C-list stardom she has left). Tracy Jordan is the star of TGS, but Jenna is the fading has-been. She is a character who gets both laughter and pity, sometimes at the same time.

30 Rock has some of the best one-liners of contemporary comedy, and Jenna Maroney has had her fair share:
“Everyone shout out words that describe my beauty.”
“I can play dead. I watched my whole church group get eaten by a bear.”
“We’re actors. If we didn’t exist, how would people know who to vote for?”
“Look at our biological clocks: You’re going baby crazy, and I keep getting turned on by car accidents.”
“I’ll do it! But only for the attention.”
If you have never watched an episode of 30 Rock (and judging by the show’s low ratings, it’s more than likely), these quotes give you an idea as to what kind of character Jenna is: she’s vain, she’s unintelligible, she makes one bad choice after the other and, like most actors, is constantly begging for attention. She gives her profession a bad name, yet in all honesty her character sheds light on the conceited persona of any actor, male or female. As a character created by a woman (Tina Fey), Jenna is the embodiment of the challenges faced by actresses as they age. Jenna is relentlessly trying to maintain her youth and beauty through the quack-products of overseas companies that have adverse after-effects and is always at odds with Cerie, the young, twenty-something assistant with a slender figure. 30 Rock doesn’t shy away from the fact that Hollywood is not favorable to “women of a certain age,” and there is an on-going joke about how old Jenna really is, for fear she will be defined by her number and not by her talent. Jenna will do (and probably has done) anything in order to maintain her youth and celebrity, even if that means sleeping with Mickey Rourke (another ongoing joke). No matter how far Jenna must go to keep her career alive, she seems to always land on her feet, in a blissful state of naiveté that jibes with her ambition to perform—be it acting, dancing, or singing at inappropriate times. Hell, she even tried getting the Tony Awards to add the category of “living theatrically in real life” because she knew she’d be a shoe-in for the honor. In this way, Jenna is not just a comedic character, she’s also a one-woman commentary on both sexism and ageism in Hollywood.

Whether or not Jane Krakowski wins at this year’s Emmy Awards remains uncertain; she could be out-voted by another Jane (that is, Jane Lynch who plays Sue Sylvester on Glee) or by sentimental favorite and TV legend Betty White (from Hot in Cleveland). Regardless of the outcome, Krakowski has crafted a character both memorable and three-dimensional—even on “cam-urr-rah!”—but most importantly, funny. Tina Fey will always be recognized as today’s funniest female, but without Krakowski on 30 Rock, Liz Lemon would have nowhere to “go to there.” As a supporting character, Jenna Maroney has earned her own spotlight—even if she had to pay an NBC page to shine it on her 24/7.

Kyle Sanders is a graduate student in the English Department at Western Kentucky University. He contributes to the online Bowling Green publication, SKYe Magazine. Under the pseudonym of Mike TeeVee, he writes about television, film, and other aspects of pop culture he finds “water-cooler” worthy. 

From the Archive: The Power of Representation

Given the Obama administration’s embarrassing failure to discuss—hell, even mention—the War on Women, I thought Amber’s following post, which was first published here on February 16, 2009, would warrant rereading.  

This Is What a Feminist Looks Like?
Representing President Obama as a “Super-feminist” has ignited a debate over who the savior of feminism ought to be (see here for a good overview), and likely sold a lot of copies of Ms. magazine’s January edition. Praise for the new president’s political aspirations regarding women’s rights isn’t contended; it’s how the feminist magazine chose to portray Obama: tearing open his Clark Kent clothes to swoop in and rescue us. It’s the representation that has people peeved.

For our purposes here at BF, two articles were published last month—the weekend before the inauguration—about the impact the movies had on Obama’s election. Not that the movies got him elected, but how roles black American men play in the movies have a real effect on the people who see them, and how we can see, through the movies, our own cultural values reflected back on us.

If you ever question how important representation in film really is, I think these articles make the point well. While they specifically focus on male presidential aspirations (and on the unique history of black Americans), they also remind us how pop culture permeates our society and informs opinions and values.

The New York Times published “How the Movies Made a President,” written by A.O. Scott and Manhola Dargis, in their Film section. The article provides an overview of black male roles, from the “Black Everyman” of the ’60s to the “Black Messiah,” currently played and re-played by Will Smith.

Make no mistake: Hollywood’s historic refusal to embrace black artists and its insistence on racist caricatures and stereotypes linger to this day. Yet in the past 50 years — or, to be precise, in the 47 years since Mr. Obama was born — black men in the movies have traveled from the ghetto to the boardroom, from supporting roles in kitchens, liveries and social-problem movies to the rarefied summit of the Hollywood A-list. In those years the movies have helped images of black popular life emerge from behind what W. E. B. Du Bois called “a vast veil,” creating public spaces in which we could glimpse who we are and what we might become.

We hear from the likes of Elizabeth Banks and Katherine Heigl that the only roles really open to them—genuinely talented, lovely young actresses—are that of sidekick, buddy, and romantic object. It’s not that there haven’t been good, meaty roles for women; there have, for sure. But what movie roles do young girls imitate? What fictional figures can women look up to?

The Root’s “Hollywood’s Leading Man: From Sammy Davis Jr. to Dave Chappelle’s Black Bush, how pop culture tested the waters for a black president” offers a more nuanced and contrarian view of the power of pop culture (and reminds us of the egos of those who really believe their art makes a difference). The article surveys the satirical representations of a black president as representative of the racial divide in America, but cites the series 24 as a shift—although one not without its problems—and questions how television and cinema will change.

So now that we have a black president, how will we react to media portrayals? Will there be pressure among writers and producers to create black leaders who feel real and black-led administrations that feel plausible? Will we, as viewers, be able to enjoy over-the-top portrayals of black presidents, such as Terry Crews’ wig-wearing wrestler in Idiocracy, as merely fun entertainment, devoid of racial and social commentary?

Might we perhaps see a black actor playing the lead in a complex drama like The West Wing, or a romantic comedy along An American President, where the president gets to be a fully fleshed out human, and not a cardboard icon? And isn’t it about time that we saw a portrayal of an African-American president who just happens to be a woman, too?

I, too, would like to see that woman. And I think we’d all like to see her on the cover of Ms., wearing a t-shirt that reads “This is what a feminist looks like.” 

Call for Writers!

We’re turning back time to the first couple of years of Bitch Flicks to plug some holes–namely, we want reviews of Best Picture nominees from the 2008 and 2009 Academy Awards.

As for guidelines, reviews should be from a feminist perspective and (when applicable) focused on the films’ female characters. If you’re still not sure, take a look at reviews of the Best Picture nominees from 2010 and 2011.

We are looking for reviews of:

2009
Slumdog Millionaire
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader

2008
Atonement
No Country for Old Men
Michael Clayton
There Will Be Blood

Email us at btchflcks(at)gmail(dot)com if you’d like to contribute a review. We accept original pieces or cross-posts.

From the Archive: Pay Discrimination in Hollywood, Who Knew?

In honor of the recently released Forbes 2011 List of the Highest Paid Actresses, I thought I’d repost this little gem from 2009. Enjoy!
Forbes recently published a list of Hollywood’s top-earning actresses, for films completed within the previous year.
Please note the following:
“As is still typical for Hollywood, our actresses earned significantly less than their male counterparts. Harrison Ford was the top-earning actor this year with $65 million, $38 million more than Jolie earned. All told, the top 10 actors earned $393 million, compared with $183 million for the top 10 actresses.”
Take a look at the 15 Top-Earning Actresses, along with their respective career Oscar wins and Oscar nominations (as of 2009).

1. Angelina Jolie: $27 million

1 Oscar win, 2 Oscar nominations

2. Jennifer Aniston: $25 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

3. Meryl Streep: $24 million

2 Oscar wins, 15 Oscar nominations

4. Sarah Jessica Parker: $23 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

5. Cameron Diaz: $20 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

6. Sandra Bullock (tie): $15 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

7. Reese Witherspoon (tie): $15 million

1 Oscar win, 1 Oscar nomination

8. Nicole Kidman (tie): $12 million

1 Oscar win, 2 Oscar nominations

9. Drew Barrymore (tie): $12 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

10. Renee Zellweger: $10 million

1 Oscar win, 3 Oscar nominations

11. Cate Blanchett: $8 million

1 Oscar win, 4 Oscar nominations

12. Anne Hathaway (tie): $7 million

0 Oscar wins, 1 Oscar nomination

13. Halle Berry (tie): $7 million

1 Oscar win, 1 Oscar nomination

14. Scarlett Johansson: $5.5 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

15. Kate Winslet: $2 million

1 Oscar win, 6 Oscar nominations

Total Amount of Money Earned: $212.5 million
Total Number of Oscar Nominations: 35
Total Number of Oscar Wins: 9

***************************************************************

And, just for kicks, here’s the Forbes list of the 15 Top-Earning Actors:

1. Harrison Ford: $65 million
(0 Oscar wins, 1 Oscar nomination)

2. Adam Sandler: $55 million
(0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations)

3. Will Smith: $45 million
(0 Oscar wins, 2 Oscar nominations)

4. Eddie Murphy (tie): $40 million
(0 Oscar wins, 1 Oscar nomination)

5. Nicolas Cage (tie): $40 million
(1 Oscar win, 2 Oscar nominations)

6. Tom Hanks: $35 million
(2 Oscar wins, 5 Oscar nominations)

7. Tom Cruise: $30 million
(0 Oscar wins, 3 Oscar nominations)

8. Jim Carrey (tie): $28 million
(0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations)

9. Brad Pitt (tie): $28 million
(0 Oscar wins, 2 Oscar nominations)

10. Johnny Depp: $27 million
(0 Oscar wins, 3 Oscar nominations)

11. George Clooney: $25 million
(for acting: 1 Oscar win, 2 Oscar nominations)

12. Russell Crowe (tie): $20 million
(1 Oscar win, 3 Oscar nominations)

13. Robert Downey Jr. (tie): $20 million
(0 Oscar wins, 2 Oscar nominations)

14. Denzel Washington (tie): $20 million
(2 Oscar wins, 5 Oscar nominations)

15. Vince Vaughn: $14 million
(0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations)

Total Amount of Money Earned: $492 million
Total Number of Oscar Nominations: 31
Total Number of Oscar Wins: 7

***************************************************************

In the past year, the top-earning men made over twice the amount of money as the top-earning women. Perhaps the Oscar info might seem arbitrary; the films that usually gross the most money (summer blockbusters, Apatow, etc) don’t necessarily line up with the many low-budget films that garner Oscar nominations for the performances (The Reader, Rachel Getting Married).
But I still find it disheartening, to say the least, to look at a list where the highest paid women in the previous year, who have won more Oscars overall (arguably the most prestigious award in the history of fucking filmmaking), and who have been nominated for more Oscars overall, still earned less than half of what their male counterparts earned.
***************************************************************
Now, to get really super-crazy, let’s look at the highest grossing films that the top five earning actors and actresses released last year, specifically noting who starred, the exact box office gross, and the overall “fresh” rating on rotten tomatoes (a high percentage means critics thought it rocked; anything lower than 60% usually means it was a piece of shit).

Actresses

1. Angelina Jolie: Kung Fu Panda
Box Office: $215,395,021
RT Rating: 89%

2. Jennifer Aniston: Marley & Me
Box Office: $143,084,510
RT Rating: 61%

3. Meryl Streep: Mamma Mia!
Box Office: $143,704,210
RT Rating: 53%

4. Sarah Jessica Parker: Sex and the City
Box Office: $152,595,674
RT Rating: 50%

5. Cameron Diaz: What Happens in Vegas
Box Office: $80,199,843
RT Rating: 27%

Total Box Office Gross: $734,979,258
Average RT Rating: 56%

Actors

1. Harrison Ford: Indiana Jones … Crystal Skull
Box Office: $316,957,122
RT Rating: 76%

2. Adam Sandler: Bedtime Stories
Box Office: $109,993,847
RT Rating: 23%

3. Will Smith: Hancock
Box Office: $227,946,274
RT Rating: 39%

4. Eddie Murphy: Meet Dave
Box Office: $11,644,832
RT Rating: 19%

5. Nicolas Cage: Knowing
Box Office: $79,911,877
RT Rating: 32%

Total Box Office Gross: $746,453,952
Average RT Rating: 38%

***************************************************************

Basically, the women made much better films according to critics. And while the men grossed more at the box office, by $11.5 million, it’s hardly worth mentioning when you’re talking about $746 million versus $735 million. And yet, the top five actors still earned more than double ($245 million) what the top five actresses earned ($119 million).
Will someone please explain to me how this isn’t blatant gender-based discrimination?

Quote of the Day: ‘Movie-Made America’

Movie-Made America by Robert Sklar
I came across this interesting piece from Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, in which author Robert Sklar talks about a fairy-tale aspect of acting (being “discovered”), the patriarchal foundation of casting, and the behind-the-scenes women of the 1910s and 1920s. I’ve added some links to the original text for further reading.
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.

2011 MTV Movie Awards

The 2011 MTV Movie Awards aired last night (Sunday, June 5), and something interesting happened: a lot of young women won awards.
I didn’t watch the ceremony. I’m too old for MTV, and didn’t even realize the show had happened until I came across a mean-spirited article, published last year, unironically lamenting “Why Twilight Ruined the MTV Movie Awards.” Because no other movie with a lousy script ever won an MTV Movie Award? No one would argue that MTV awards are based on high art and excellent filmmaking, but, like most major awards, they’re worth looking at for their cultural significance. And, for some reason, this year’s winners give me something to feel good about.

Here are a selection of the winners (you can see the full list here).

Best Comedic Performance: Emma Stone for Easy A

Best Female Performance: Kristen Stewart for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Best Scared-As-S**t Performance: Ellen Page for Inception

Best Line from a Movie: Alexys Nycole Sanchez for Grown Ups

MTV Generation Award: Reese Witherspoon

Best Breakout Star: Chloë Grace Moretz for Kick-Ass

Biggest Badass Star: Chloë Grace Moretz for Kick-Ass

Only one of the above categories is gender specific, and though we could endlessly debate The Twilight Problem (Stephanie did just that in her review of New Moon), it’s worth noting that Stewart won the Best Female Performance award for a film geared toward a female audience. If you have nothing at all positive to say about The Twilight Saga, you still have to admit that this film series is wildly popular with and unabashedly made for young (and some not so young) women. This shouldn’t be remarkable, but it is.
Young women are highlighted in these awards for being funny, for being iconic, for breaking out, and for being badass. What other awards are recognizing women–particularly young women–in this way?
I’ll admit that many of the films these actresses won for (the ones I’ve seen, at least) are problematic. I’m not really celebrating that Easy A (which I found virtually unwatchable) won an award, but I am celebrating that a film with a female lead is being recognized as containing a great comedic performance. There was a lot of controversy surrounding Kick-Ass and the way the character Hit Girl was portrayed, but I am thrilled that a teenage girl (who was 12 when she made the film) is being recognized and rewarded as “badass.” 
Even if MTV continues to make us shudder with their programming, they are highlighting young women in film. Hollywood and other awards shows: take notice!

Quote of the Day: Roseanne Barr

Roseanne Barr
In her recent New York Magazine piece, Roseanne Barr talks about creating and starring in a number-one sitcom, and relates her experience to the breakdown of Charlie Sheen, the state of comedy today, and the hostility Hollywood has toward women–and especially working-class women. Here’s an excerpt. I highly recommend reading the entire piece here.
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.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

DGA Says ‘No’ to Women from Works By Women

‘Thelma & Louise’ at 20 from Macleans

The Tony Awards, 2011 from The Feminist Spectator

Tropes vs. Women: #4 The Evil Demon Seductress from Bitch Media

At Cannes, Women With Diverse Visions from the New York Times

Hollywood’s Diversity Problem Predictably Blamed On The Recession from Jezebel

Magazines, T.V. and Disney: The Negative Portrayal of Beauty in the Media from fbomb

The 10 Most Powerful Women in Television from Ad Week

Achilles Effect: Boys, Pop Culture, and Gender from Achilles Effect

Rape Is Still Rape, and No Still Means NO! from Ms. Magazine

Sound-Off: Is Beyonce Sending the Wrong Message? from Essence

Leave your links in the comments!

[UPDATE: All links should actually work now.]

Guest Writer Wednesday: The Hollywood Concept of Collateral Beauty

This guest post also appears at Djelloul Marbrook’s web site.
One of the reasons I like the television series Bones is that women are doing well there, something you can’t say of Game of Thrones, The Borgias or Camelot or the many other shows where women are de rigeur decoration.
I don’t know if it’s occurred to filmmakers, but they’re a lot like museum curators who keep the work of women artists in their basements and then claim women are well represented within their four walls.
Emily Deschanel

On the other hand, women are doing quite well on The Good Wife, where the estimable Julianna Margulies creates a memorable woman with a few spare brushstrokes. Her riveting understatement is ably complimented by two other remarkable women, Christine Baranski and Archie Panjabi.

And then there’s Mary McCormack as the eccentric and poignant witness protection agent in the series In Plain Sight. She’s so genuine you think you’ve met her.
All to the good, but on the more problematic side, in eleven major television series corpses are the real stars of eight of them. And in The Borgias and Game of Thrones women are reduced to barn animals, while they’re chic accessories in some of the CSI, Law and Order, and NCIS shows.
But cameras have minds of their own. They gravitate towards actresses like Cote de Pablo, who is also a recording artist, in the original NCIS series. She gets more out of her role by underacting than her showier colleagues, and the producers are often obliged to team her up with the equally understated Mark Harmon, the show’s magnetic star.
Julianna Margulies

It’s to the great credit of actresses like Stephanie March, Diane Neal, Marg Helgenberger, Emily Procter, Mariska Hargitay and quite a few others that their presence transcends the weak hands they’re dealt by directors, writers and producers. They illuminate their series in spite of the best intentions of the director to contain them. March, for instance, in episode after episode of Law and Order stood out from the ensemble because of her gravitas and aura of integrity. As for Helgenberger, the camera celebrates her no matter what hand the producers deal her. And who wouldn’t rather follow Procter into the jaws of hell than the show’s star, the one-note David Caruso? The same may be said for reserved Alana de la Garza, who first appeared in CSI: Miami, went on to Law and Order in New York and now plays in its spin-off, Law and Order: LA.

What many of these women have in common is a restraint we used to assign to laconic Western stars like Gary Cooper and James Stewart, a sense that while they have no wish, in spite of their beauty, to fill a room, it would be ill-advised to step on their toes. They are in many ways women of the century, liberated in spite of society’s hesitancy to license their liberation.

If you compare them to the women stars of the 50s, you’ll see that they’re more like Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield than Barbara Stanwyck and Ida Lupino. Their feminity has a touch of the divine, and I’m not talking about looks, I’m talking about empowerment. These actresses, like Lena Headey in Game of Thrones, should be leading armies, toppling empires, governing our destinies, not playing second fiddle to writers who evince a palpable inhospitality towards women.
Mary McCormack

If we truly wanted to be a great nation the filmmakers could lead the way. But first they must acknowledge that the Marlboro Man could be a boob, his looks being no warranty of anything but Big Tobacco’s preconceptions, Anglo-centrism and misogyny.

NCIS: Los Angeles strikes a blow in the right direction by casting the memorable Linda Hunt as director of operations, but the scriptwriters insist she parody herself like Caruso in CSI Miami.
More promising, much more promising, is Mary McCormack In Plain Sight role. Here the script writer lavishes good lines on her, obviously with the sanction of the director and producer, and she emerges as the character who’s got your back, the one who cuts the bullshit.
The dazzling Emily Deschanel as Temperance Brennan in Bones has the benefit of the concept of the show as well as a co-star, David Boreanaz, who steps aside graciously with much good humor. She also has an endearing cast of colleagues, not least Tamara Taylor, her smart and funny boss, and Michaela Conlin, Brennan’s quirky, in-your-face sidekick.
It’s strange that filmmakers freight good-looking male actors with their projections but continue to use women as floral design. Who, looking at Lena Headey, could even think of her in Game of Thrones as a one-dimensional meanie queen and incestuous lover of her brother, in this case the attractive Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who shone in the defunct and much lamented New Amsterdam series?

Unfortunately beauty in a male-dominated society lends itself to incidentality. I wonder if this would be so of males in a female-dominated society. My mother in her paintings created a world inhabited entirely by women. She simply banished men. At the same time she introduced a hint of androgyny. I suspect we may be heading as a species toward androgyny.
But in the meantime I think much evil in the world, including terrorism, is rooted in the hatred and fear of women. In The Borgias this emerges cruelly in the treatment of Holliday Grainger as Lucrezia by her boorish husband Giovanni Sforza. If she was indeed a poisoner, one can easily forgive her. One wishes him the best poisons in Italy.
The question that keeps bothering me as I consider these actresses and how they’re cast is simply this: Don’t the filmmakers see them, I mean really see them? I guess not. It’s reminiscent of the poet Randall Jarrell’s unforgettable poem, “A Sad Heart At The Supermarket,” in which a shopper wonders why the bag boy doesn’t really see her.

Didn’t they cast a chubby Richard Burton as the famously athletic Alexander the Great in 1956? Would they have cast a chubby woman as Olympias? And if they wouldn’t think of Dolph Lundgren or Jason Statham as wimps, why in hell would they think of Headey in that way? And who but an idiot would mess with Eva Green in Camelot? Grainger looks much less dangerous—indeed she looks angelic—but by episode three of The Borgias she has already shown her goon of a husband she is nobody’s chattel. His leg is broken and worse is undoubtedly in his future.
The problem seems to be that the camera all by itself, with little help from the cinematographer, sees what the filmmakers can’t see. Do Headey, Green and Helgenberger look like anybody’s sweetie pie? True, Boreanaz and Caruso don’t treat Deschanel and Procter like sweetie pies, but that’s only because they know the camera can’t wait to quit them in order to linger on the women, so there’s no use being churlish.
I don’t think filmmakers and museum curators live on my planet. The camera keeps offering forensic evidence that they keep dismissing like judges in a kangaroo court. They have lots of precedent, of course. History books have been doing it for millennia.

The filmmakers often treat beauty much as the army treats damage—they collateralize it. But you can fill the original CSI set in Vegas with corpses, with William Petersen, with Laurence Fishburne, and Matt Damon if you can get him, and Marg Helgenberger will still be the only one in the room. It’s not because of her beauty alone: it’s a presence, the projection of a high seriousness that it took far more action and gunplay for Gary Cooper to display in High Noon.
What I’m talking about is the feminine principle and how the film industry goes to great lengths to marginalize it in the same way that the church devotes itself to paternalizing religion. The film industry has taken over where the church left off, handing out a sop here and there, but insisting on women as decor. There have been exceptions, Milla Jovovich in science fiction action films and Maggie Q in Nikita most notably, but the overall picture is that of an industry striving for the appearance of gender equality but unable to embrace it. In a way, the film industry is struggling with what I posit as a root cause of terrorism, fear of women. Perhaps a society whose biggest industries are prisons and war has that much to fear from women.

Djelloul Marbrook blogs at www.djelloulmarbrook.com and is the author of two books of poetry (Far from Algiers, Kent State; Brushstrokes and Glances, Deerbrook Editions) and three novellas (Artemisia’s Wolf, Saraceno, and Alice Miller’s Room). A retired newspaper editor, he lives in New York with his wife Marilyn. 

Quote of the Day: bell hooks

In 1997, the Media Education Foundation produced an interview with bell hooks, a renowned author, feminist, and social activist, called, “BELL HOOKS: Cultural Criticism & Transformation.” hooks discusses a variety of pop culture topics, including rap and hip-hop, Madonna’s influence, Hollywood, and the often negative representations of race, class, and gender within them. You can watch the full interview in parts on YouTube, and you can read the entire transcript of the interview, but I want to quote from just two sections; the first deals with the feminist backlash in mass media:
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.

hooks said this in 1997. Almost fifteen years ago. So have movies gotten better or worse since then in contributing to the feminist backlash? When I try to come up with some truly great feminist-leaning films released (in Hollywood) in those fifteen years, it’s admittedly a struggle–and that doesn’t mean I’m saying they don’t exist. Yet when I think about sexism in Hollywood films, it takes about three seconds to recall a handful of misogyny-laden movies released only within the past several months. In fact, it’s virtually impossible not to find sexist films hitting the mainstream every opening weekend.
hooks continues her discussion of movies, referencing the filmmaker Spike Lee and critiquing representations of blackness in Hollywood:
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. 

It’s interesting to look at how films represent blackness in Hollywood currently, and if it’s changed for the better or for the worse within the past fifteen years. Tyler Perry has certainly become one of the most prolific and successful–if not the most successful–black filmmakers in Hollywood, but there’s also much controversy surrounding his representations of race in film. Precious, Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, garnered Oscar nominations and a Best Supporting Actress win for Mo’Nique, and Dreamgirls catapulted Jennifer Hudson’s career after she won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar. And within these past fifteen years, the Best Actress Oscar was awarded, for the first time ever, to a black woman, Halle Berry.

I don’t have the answers. I think it’s important in general to look at the kinds of roles Hollywood rewards women for playing; but it’s perhaps even more important to keep insisting that Hollywood filmmakers create better roles for women. Overall, I’d argue that we’re much more inundated with pop culture imagery everywhere now than we were fifteen years ago, with advancements in technology (and the increased and constant advertising that comes with it). So if the representations of race and gender in the media, and movies in particular, haven’t changed much–or have in fact gotten worse–and the pop culture and mass media machine is churning out this shit faster than it ever has in history, where does that leave us? 

Quote of the Day: Monica Nolan

bitchfest. Edited by Lisa Jervis & Andi Zeisler
Motherhood is a theme we’ve visited before (Black Swan comes immediately to mind, as does the mother character in Rachel Getting Married), and anxieties about it abound in film and television. Mothers can’t seem to escape the same virgin/whore dichotomy structure that plagues all depictions of women in sexist media: either the woman is domestic, passive, nurturing, and selfless, or she’s a monster whose desires ultimately destruct the familial unit. (I’m currently watching the first season of the AMC show The Walking Dead, and waiting to see if the mother character falls into the latter cliche. I suspect she will; stay tuned for a probable Flick Off.)
Thinking about mothers led me to page through bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine and revisit the essay “Mother Inferior: How Hollywood Keeps Single Moms in Their Place” by writer and filmmaker Monica Nolan, originally published in the Fall 2003 issue of Bitch. Here’s an excerpt that looks at single mothers in 1945’s Mildred Pierce and 1987’s Baby Boom.
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.
With the recent mini-series remake of Mildred Pierce in mind, I’d love to see an updated version of this article. (I also can’t help but think about The Kids Are All Right, which is not about a single mother but about lesbian mothers, and how it fits right into Nolan’s description of the “family without a father” in the final quoted paragraph above; here, lesbian “parenthood is not enough,” hence the disruption brought about by the sperm donor’s entrance into their lives, and the family is white and upper-middle class.) 
What movies, in the past decade, have depicted mothers in a positive way, moving forward from one-note stereotypes and bucking the trend of “keeping single moms in their place?” With all the focus on the negative, I’d like to see some positive examples.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Sucker Punch

Sucker punched by “Sucker Punch”– Girls and guns don’t equal female empowerment

This is a cross-post from What Tami Said.

This really is the best movie ever cuz its like hollywood finally said to me Fuk yeah you my man are all we care about heres some awesome shit for you to get off on and everyone else can just go fuk themselves and you get to watch. Read more…

I just “liked” Flick Filosopher Maryann Johanson on Facebook solely on the basis of her Sucker Punch review, written in what oddly sounds like the voice of the guy who sat behind me yesterday afternoon when I went to see the movie. Based on the predominately male and middle-aged audience in the theater, I am likely the only woman who fell for the previews and thought Sucker Punch might be some video game or graphic novel-based film about ass-kicking chicks who slay dragons and other cool shit. Well, actually, that stuff does happen, but it’s surrounded by too many other porny, fetishy, gender- and race-biased tropes to be any sort of empowerment tale. The characters were too cartoonish to be relatable. And the fight scenes and CGI weren’t exciting enough to allow me to forget the analysis and enjoy the fun. Sucker Punch comes off like a slightly twisted adolescent’s wet dream–if said wet dream had the benefit of a cool score and awesome computer-generated graphics.
Set some time in the late 50s/early 60s, Sucker Punch tells the story of 20-year-old Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who accidentally kills her little sister, while attempting to save the girl from being sexually assaulted by their stepfather. The act earns Baby Doll, whose mother dies in the film’s first frames, commitment to a Goreyesque Vermont mental facility, and, after her stepfather pays off a weasly orderly, a date with a lobotomist (Jon Hamm, who seriously must be saying “yes” to every acting job now), due at the hospital in five days. As Dr. Don Draper stands poised above a bound Baby Doll, wielding the long, sharp orbitoclast he will pound into her frontal lobe, Baby Doll (and the audience) escapes into the fantasy that is the rest of the movie, including a second world, where Baby Doll and her fellow inmates are enslaved at a “dance club,” where they are forced to offer sexual favors to keep the moneyed, male clients happy.
Let me concede that the dirty, gothic look of Sucker Punch was arresting. The soundtrack, with an ominous cover of the Eurythimics’ “Sweet Dreams,” was fantastic. I’ve already downloaded it. It’ll be great accompaniment when I haul my butt off the couch and start my spring running regimen. Also, I’m gonna need to explore more of actor Oscar Isaac’s oeuvre. The fight sequences in Sucker Punch were pleasingly flashy and loud with lots of leaping and flashing steel and steampunkery, but ultimately they were made hollow by repetition and uninspired choreography. We’re more than a decade on since The Matrix debuted. You gotta give me more than slow motion shots of a character leaping past bullets and dragon fire.
Since Sucker Punch couldn’t entertain me with its sound and fury, I couldn’t help but notice the larger problem in the movie: A disturbing and regressive treatment of women masquerading as “girl power.”
**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**
We can start with the infantilization of the lead character, Baby Doll, a 20-year-old rendered as woman child–tiny but big-headed, with large eyes and white blonde, pig-tailed hair, perpetually dressed in schoolgirl drag. She is mute and trembling through much of the first half of the film. The result is that Sucker Punch plays on “jail bait” fantasies using the cover that its heroine is truly an adult woman.
So too does the film leverage implied threats to women to titillate–particularly sexual threat. From the earliest scenes, when Baby Doll’s hulking stepfather eyes her lasciviously and tries to push his way into her bedroom, Sucker Punch highlights the protagonist’s sexual vulnerability–not to make a point about violence toward women, but to render her more fragile and endangered, and by extension, to underscore her femininity and desirability.
And it must be said here that the key to Baby Doll’s persona and her place in the film is her whiteness. Sucker Punch genuflects to the traditional views of womanhood that have historically been assigned exclusively to white women (to the detriment of ALL women). It is not a mistake that, of the gang of female characters, Baby Doll is the blondest and most alabaster of skin. She is the most innocent. It is she that is reserved for the most special of the fantasy club’s clients, the High Roller. It is her dancing that is so arousing that it hypnotizes the men who witness it. It is Baby Doll that the swarthy pimp/orderly (depending on the fantasy world) must have and who he intends to take by force. (A nasty nod to the white women in danger of rampaging dark men stereotype.) Conversely, it is the women of color in the film–Amber (Jamie Chung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens)–who are drawn as the flattest of the flat characters, with no back stories or desires, but to serve Baby Doll. And it is those women whose lives are unwillingly sacrificed (literally) so that one pretty, blonde, white woman can live the life she deserves.
The most obvious sign that Sucker Punch is no female empowerment film–not even a Kill Bill (which I really liked and to which Sucker Punch plays homage)–is the plot itself. The idea that a young woman, who has recently lost her mother and sister; who is imprisoned for fighting against domestic violence; who may have endured rape at the hands of her stepfather or just narrowly escaped it; who is about to endure a forced medical procedure would, for relief from her trauma, retreat into a fantasy world where she is a sexual slave who must dance provocatively for strange men…absurd.

Sucker Punch is no female fantasy. Sucker Punch isn’t about women at all, despite the female leads. Josh Larsen of Larsen on Film describes exactly what Sucker Punch is:

…it’s the fantasy of a 14-year-old boy steeped in kung fu, “Call of Duty” and online porn. Read more…

And this is why I should start reading film reviews before I see films not after.
Tami Winfrey Harris writes about race, feminism, politics and pop culture at the blog What Tami Said. Her work has also appeared online at The Guardian’s Comment is Free, Ms. Magazine blog, Newsweek, Change.org, Huffington Post and Racialicious. She is a graduate of the Iowa State University Greenlee School of Journalism. She spends her spare time researching her family history and cultivating a righteous ‘fro.