women in the movies

[rm]

Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. Anderson makes little on-screen time for women.

Manohla Dargis says this in today's NYTimes review of There Will Be Blood. It is a perfectly accurate observation, but one that I found chilling in that to my eye, it reads as easily as a statement of necessity (much like cliches about men writing about ideas and women writing about feelings) as a benign statement of perhaps less benign fact.

But I'm not here to rant about Dargis's tonal quality (although what a thing to say casually), but rather to look at this quirk of cinema and hold it up against the fact that I too, by and large, prefer to watch the stories of men.

Part of this, surely, has to do more with the presentation of gender than any true preference -- films about women are, by and large, like women's magazines presented with a message (to call it a subtext is often generous) of what my concerns _should_ be as a woman, and lacking those particular insecurities or feeling a deep commitment to the rejection there of -- I don't want to be anywhere near those movies.

But then I suppose the vocabulary of (largely, but not exclusively American) movies remains firmly entrenched in the idea that men do things to be "real" men and women are chosen for things to be "real" women. And if I'm being honest, I have to admit it is less that I don't buy into this stuff and more that I have a personal narrative of having never been chosen for anything (especially by a man), and being an agent in my own life. That is, bad at being a "real" woman, but plausible at being a "real" man, even if not a man.

The question all of this raises, though, other than ugly insights into my gender identity issues (which, I'll thank you to note, the above aside, is definitely more complex than the "self-hating lesbian" trope I see bandied around in fandom), is whether it's possible to make the sort of films -- brutal, stark and spare and often set in a quasi-fictional West (American, European, hardly seems to matter) -- that interest me, and lately critics, in a way that includes, features and stars women. As an actor largely not cut out in face or form for women's work, this is a question that matters to me as far more than a consumer.

Oddly, the two on-screen products I can think of that have achieved this, don't, at first blush seem to be about women -- HBO's prematurely canceled Carnivale, which showed us female wrath and brutality, physical strength and casually practical sexuality even while ostensibly being about a power struggle between two or three men (without the conclusion of the series, this remains somewhat unclear), and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy, which seems to be about the struggles of Gilbert and Sullivan until its last stunning moments in which you realize the women's stories that have lurked under the entire piece are actually its point.

By and large though, movies strike me constantly as if birth control hasn't made it to the screen, at least metaphorically. Women on screen are still shackled to men as deliverers of children, sexuality, wealth and personal value; they are side notes, often, it seems, inserted into films that would otherwise be entirely about men, to break up either color palettes or gay subtext. These women don't represent me, they don't interest me, and I don't want to be them at work or at home, in fact or fiction.

I wonder, a lot, if this will ever change. And if the change will require our world to change far more than it already has, into a place where no one gives a crap about whether Hilary is nice, but whether her ruthlessness is intelligent; or if it's a simpler matter that merely requires writers and directors to have more imagination.

I said once that conventionally straight men never want to date the girl who is one of the guys, no matter how hot and sexy she is, because it creates a homosocial dynamic, no matter how physically gendered she may be. Is this what's happening at the movies? If women step up into being meaningful parts of the current celebrated films of a certain tonal quality, does their splash of color become a sudden nerve-wracking poison to traditional male identity? And if so, isn't that a good thing by sheer virtue of being interesting?

Because I'm queer and gender queer, it's hard to step outside myself to look at all of this, but I do wonder what it feels like to look at someone like Tilda Swinton or Cate Blanchett or Clea Duvall in a lot of their roles. I wonder what wanting them or wanting to be them feels like for the less-/non-queered person, if it's unsettling, and if that feels good. I wonder if the movie makers are afraid to make movies about women in a way that would be disrupting to the stories we all already know about ourselves, or, if they simply believe (or perhaps realize) that even in fiction, those stories may not be there to tell yet.

Comments

[coridan.livejournal.com]

The writings of the Frankfurt school and the situationalists that followed them hit this entire topic squarely on the head - Big Media will always, always send messages that supports the interests of those who invest money in projects or who own the property. And those interests will always include encouraging traditional gender roles that emphasize commercial consumption. Men are supposed to be leaders, bread winners, and the post around which the nuclear family evolves, and women are supposed to care for men and make children, while looking to men for direction. Not one single project gets green lighted that will not see a potential return on investment. Media owners will not act against the ultimate interests of capitalism.

Big Capital has a vested interest in seeing that traditional gender roles are reinforced, while non-traditional roles (gays, queers, transgendered folk, polyamorous folk, folk who do not engage in standard family arrangements) are excoriated or rejected, or simply ignored. You'll never see texts about these people or subjects because they stand outside the economic order under which society functions. Say, for example, Queer folk were to become a large minority, to the extant that they start to form large family units (as in, extended families.) How will transfer of assets across generations be handled? Will people start to question the right of property holders to assign property upon death to offspring? For people who raise children that aren't biologically theres but love them all the same, what counts as a child? How will this disrupt notions of class and race identity? Economic utility and sexual politics are intimately linked, since control of reproduction is control of labor.

Ironically, I look to fan fiction and other not for profit works for interesting stories and texts concerning gender, sexual and race issues, since Big Capital has less of a direct influence on these venues.

I'm sure that Noam Chomsky and related writers have more to say on this subject.

CB