Are Our Movies Sexist?
At least two journalists this past month have said yes. First, Meghan O'Rourke wrote an article in Slate picking up where Knocked Up star Katherine Heigl left off. That particular movie, they both agreed, is "a little sexist":
Two different critiques, but I find both to be entirely persuasive. There Will Be Blood certainly follows The Departed as both the best film of the year and the most sexist. Whereas Scorsese's film features one bumbling, unprofessional, and "emotional" woman, Anderson almost literally wipes them off the landscape. (The absence of females is so ubiquitous that it resembles more than just "there weren't many women working in the oil industry." The protagonist is presumably a virgin, while the central family has a weak father yet a mother who does not utter a single line of dialogue.)
That the Gangster and the Western are eternal cinematic leitmof does not help the female cause. Nonetheless, it is odd that they have not been successfully reimagined in a way that places women more at the core of the story.
It seems unlikely that we'll be treated to more dynamic women in film until we have more female directors. Where are they? Why does the film industry resemble a 1920s ... film industry?
Women, by contrast, are entirely concerned with pragmatic issues. We never see Alison or her older sister, Debbie, pursue or express her own creative impulses, sense of humor, independent interests; their rather instrumental concerns lie squarely in managing to balance the domestic with the professional. It's as if women's inner worlds are entirely functional rather than playful and open. Knocked Up was, as David Denby put it in The New Yorker, the culminating artifact in what had become "the dominant romantic-comedy trend of the past several years—the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow."Next came Times reviewer Manohla Dargis. In a parenthetical remark midway through her review of There Will Be Blood, she wrote, "Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. Anderson makes little on-screen time for women."
Two different critiques, but I find both to be entirely persuasive. There Will Be Blood certainly follows The Departed as both the best film of the year and the most sexist. Whereas Scorsese's film features one bumbling, unprofessional, and "emotional" woman, Anderson almost literally wipes them off the landscape. (The absence of females is so ubiquitous that it resembles more than just "there weren't many women working in the oil industry." The protagonist is presumably a virgin, while the central family has a weak father yet a mother who does not utter a single line of dialogue.)
That the Gangster and the Western are eternal cinematic leitmof does not help the female cause. Nonetheless, it is odd that they have not been successfully reimagined in a way that places women more at the core of the story.
It seems unlikely that we'll be treated to more dynamic women in film until we have more female directors. Where are they? Why does the film industry resemble a 1920s ... film industry?
posted by Robot at 12:17 AM
1 Comments:
I think "Juno" manages to incorporate the very themes -- the depth of the female character, the subversion of typical gender roles -- the absence of which you very nicely point out here wrt other popular current movies. On the surface, the relationship of the shiny happy upper middle class couple of Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner seems to mirror that of the couple in Knocked Up: maternal, fretful female and hipster dude.
But the point there is that Bateman's character (who I'll admit I found *a lot* in common with -- horror movies, rock records, etc) is ultimately a loser and a jerk, and, moreover, that *Juno just is him*, in terms of interests and creativity, but she manages to be both more responsible and, in an interesting twist, more fully developed because she is maternal. Also, we might complain superficially that Michael Cera's character is a typecast one -- bumbling, sweet, innocent -- but he ends up looking quite good, despite his various "unmanlinesses" (smoothing his legs, "receiving" Juno's sexual advances). Juno's stepmother is also quite a strong personality. The fact that all of this played in my mind as totally natural and is only coming up now that I ponder your post makes me like this movie even more.
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