While writing Female characters exist to promote male leads for network profits, I realized something I had never quite put together in so many words. It’s important enough to deserve its own article (thanks, Bellatrys!), so here it is: my screenwriting professors taught me not to write scripts that passed the Bechdel/Mo Movie Measure/”Dykes To Watch Out For” test, and I can tell you why, and this needs to be known.
The “Dykes to Watch Out For” test, formerly coined as the “Mo Movie Measure” test and Bechdel Test, was named for the comic strip it came from, penned by Alison Bechdel – but Bechdel credits a friend named Liz Wallace, so maybe it really should be called the Liz Wallace Test…? Anyway, the test is much simpler than the name. To pass it your movie must have the following:
1) there are at least two named female characters, who
2) talk to each other about
3) something other than a man.
So simple, and yet as you go through all your favorite movies (and most of your favorite TV shows, though there’s a little more variety in TV), you find very few movies pass this test.
It’s not a coincidence. It’s not that there aren’t enough women behind the camera (there aren’t, but that’s not the reason). Here’s what we’re up against (and for those who have requested a single post that summarizes my experiences in film for linking reference, now you’ve got it).
When I started taking film classes at UCLA, I was quickly informed I had what it took to go all the way in film. I was a damn good writer, but more importantly (yeah, you didn’t think good writing was a main prerequisite in this industry, did you?) I understood the process of rewriting to cope with budget (and other) limitations. I didn’t hesitate to rip out my most beloved scenes when necessary. I also did a lot of research and taught myself how to write well-paced action/adventure films that would be remarkably cheap to film – that was pure gold.
There was just one little problem.
I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see.
I was stunned. I’d just moved from a state that still held Ku Klux Klan rallies only to find an even more insidious form of bigotry in California – running an industry that shaped our entire culture. But they kept telling me lots of filmmakers wanted to see the same changes I did, and if I did what it took to get into the industry and accrue some power, then I could start pushing the envelope and maybe, just maybe, change would finally happen. So I gave their advice a shot.
Only to learn there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters).
At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation from an industry pro: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”
“Not even if it advances the story?” I asked. That’s rule number one in screenwriting, though you’d never know it from watching most movies: every moment in a script should reveal another chunk of the story and keep it moving.
He just looked embarrassed and said, “I mean, that’s not how I see it, that’s how they see it.”
Right. A bunch of self-back-slapping professed liberals wouldn’t want you to think they routinely dismiss women in between writing checks to Greenpeace. Gosh, no – it was they. The audience. Those unsophisticated jackasses we effectively worked for when we made films. They were making us do this awful thing. They, the man behind the screen. They, the six-foot-tall invisible rabbit. We knew they existed because there were spreadsheets with numbers, and no matter how the numbers computed, they never added up to, “Oh, hey, look – men and boys are totally watching Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley like it’s no big deal they’re chicks instead of guys.” They always somehow added up to “Oh, hey, look – those effects/that Arnold’s so awesome, men and boys saw this movie despite some chick in a lead role.”
According to Hollywood, if two women came on screen and started talking, the target male audience’s brain would glaze over and assume the women were talking about nail polish or shoes or something that didn’t pertain to the story. Only if they heard the name of a man in the story would they tune back in. By having women talk to each other about something other than men, I was “losing the audience.”
Was I?
There certainly are still men in this world who tune out women when we talk, but – as I and other students pointed out – this was getting less common with every generation, and weren’t we supposed to be targeting the youngest generation? These young men had grown up with women imparting news on national TV (even I can remember when that was rare), prescribing them medicine, representing people around them in court, doling out mortgages and loans. Those boys wouldn’t understand those early ’80s movies where women were denied promotions because “the clients want to deal with men” or “who would take a woman doctor/lawyer/cop seriously”? A lot of these kids would need it explained to them why Cagney & Lacey was revolutionary, because many of their moms had worked in fields once dominated by men.
We had a whole generation too young to remember why we needed second wave feminism, for cryin’ out loud, and here we were adhering to rules from the 1950s. I called bullshit, and left film for good, opting to fight the system from without. There was no way Hollywood really believed what it was saying about boys who’d grown up with Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor as action heroes, and so there was no way to change the system from within. I concluded Hollywood was was dominated by perpetual pre-adolescent boys making the movies they wanted to see, and using the “target audience” – a construct based on partial truths and twisted math – to perpetuate their own desires. Having never grown up, they still saw women the way Peter Pan saw Wendy: a fascinating Other to be captured, treasured and stuffed into a gilded cage. Where we didn’t talk. To each other. About anything other than men.
Follow-up post: Why discriminate if it doesn’t profit?
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I think it’s awesome that the first comment on this post – inspired by Alison Bechdel – was about a 17th-century Spunky Heroine named Alibech.
Erik Ostrom(Quote) (Reply)
@bellatrys, those snarkkeys can get stuck for weeks on end.
@Patrick, what you say is true. BUT how many movies contain the following:
–A scene that establishes our villains, who haven’t even met our hero yet. Naturally, they’re not talking about him. What they are talking about sets up the story and forwards it, even though he’s not touched upon. Take Star Wars – 20 minutes before we meet any of our three main heroic leads, during which time we get to know the droids and Vader fairly well.
–A scene in which incidental or supporting male characters are talking about their jobs or their damn taxes or their wives when in walks the hero and THEN the scene is all about him. This can be a scene to establish the supporting players as nice guys, mean guys, or average guys. Or they could be talking about the plot – “Did you hear there’s been a rash of burglaries?” which our hero is eventually going to solve. These scenes forward the stories while passing the test of two named characters talking to each other about something other than men.
It’s not just the lack of female leads that causes the Bechdel test to be failed. It’s the perception that women aren’t interesting, period. Check out how many people made just that argument in the Reddit thread that linked to this post.
Or perhaps it’s the fear that we are interesting, and if everyone finds that out, they’re going to stop centering our entire cultural lens on white men.
Keep in mind, too, that this test could be applied to a lot of other groups, with a few tweaks. For people of color, for example: does your story have two named people of color who talk to each other about something other than white men (and/or the Issue of being Of Color)? That test would be rarely passed, too, because it would expose people of color to be just as interesting as white people.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I agree fully about the villains; female villains would enable a film to pass just as well as a female lead would. It again becomes a question of how often we see those.
Personally, I’d avoid the type of scene you’re describing where supporting characters have a conversation before the lead walks in. I see it as unnecessarily extending the scene (get in late, get out early) and any characterization can be worked in with the lead. So when I see this sort of thing in a movie, I don’t think of it as a missed chance to feature female characters as sloppy screenwriting.
(Obviously, though, everyone comes at films from different angles. One need only look at five different people’s lists of the greatest of most overrated films to realize that different people value very different things in film.)
Regarding the race/other groups point: my thinking applies the smae way there. The industry-wide focus on straight/white/male/other “default” leads is the factor, not any individual film.
Again, I don’t think there’s anything remotely wrong with a film not passing the test. What gets me up in arms is the fact that so very, very few films pass it overall.
Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Actually, scenes like that can be almost necessary to a well-written script. Let’s say Sidekick is going to turn on Hero or make a big mistake, but Hero has to be utterly blindsided by it – the audience must not think Hero could’ve seen it coming, but to raise suspense, we have to give the audience a chance to think something’s wrong. So Sidekick has an interaction with a friend about something that has nothing to do with the plot or with Hero. But in that interaction, Sidekick tells a lie or reveals a character defect through her behavior. The penny drops for the audience; now we have suspense, and a clueless Hero, all from a thirty second scene.
I don’t think it’s good screenwriting that dictates everything should come back to the star. I think it’s good star-building. Most movies aren’t supposed to be great stories; they’re meant to be great star vehicles. And as you say, the star is almost always a white man, so that’s whose careers are getting built.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Argh, I had a longer post about comparing/contrasting old Hollywood films and their ensemble setup even in star vehicles, like Arsenic & Old Lace, Casablanca, and some others, but my browser ate it & will have to reconstruct my examples (grrr, argh).
But I think this is why we see so few lasting classics, or even moderately memorable films any more; star vehicles by default are NOT good stories, and as I was making my coffee just now I had an epiphany:
The Star Vehicle setup, with the White Straight Guy as the Little Tin God on the altar of the film, is just a Canon-Stu fic.
And Stus and Sues eat the story. They eat the plot, they eat the other characters, they eat the worldbuilding, b/c EVERYTHING is about them. They’re like No-Face after it gets corrupted by the greed of everyone else around it at the bathhouse. You *need* a world, and other people in it, for your Main Man and Leading Lady to bounce off of – nobody can *act* in a vacuum! (Leading Lady? What’s that? No, nobody in Hollywood today has ever seen Gaslight or Casablanca!)
The more they turn the spotlight on Mr. Straight & White standing there like a lump center-stage (even if he’s doing high-kicks and all kinds of martial-arts cavorting) the more boring the productions become.
bellatrys(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, and actually I don’t think star vehicles are meant to be the best of scripts. You’ll notice how the two never go together. It’s like the theory with fashion magazine articles: you don’t want the writing to be so absorbing it distracts people from the ads, ads, luscious ads, that are the money artery for the magazine.
Great scripts could distract people from how much they like Mr. Star. When you watch a movie and think, “This isn’t great, but I enjoy watching Mr. Star so much I don’t mind”, you come away with the impression they want you to have: that you’ll pay $9 to see anything featuring Mr. Star.
And BTW, this is a really good example of why I did not expect ANYONE to take my claims to be a good screenwriter as boasting. I later realized some people did, and I was all like, dude, have ya seen what gets filmed?
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
It’s actually worse than that in newspapers, based on my experience: there is a war between the publisher on one hand, and the editors/writers on the other, where the publishers simply don’t care what is on the page so long as it doesn’t get them into trouble (which will lose them ads or cost them money.)
They refer to content as “fill.”
Like, what you use in your yard to level it.
(Then they wonder why people would rather read field-specific websites and blogs.)
There is such a whole chicken-egg-chicken madness to this method – I’m going to have to think about it some more, because it fuels itself I think, and yet it’s such a death-spiral. The reason that The Fugitive was so great as a thriller was that it wasn’t just The Harrison Ford Show, nor even the Harrison Ford & Tommy Lee Jones show, tho’ it mostly was – everybody got little moments, little tiny bits of shading to round them, and so much lingering was spent on the “backdrop” – it made me realize that Chicago was also a beautiful city, for the first time in my life. All that made you care about the main men, and made it seem like the stakes were real and mattered, even if it is a total WiR and Bechdel failure it’s less othering in a key way than so many films with token Action Grl chick sidekicks.
Because, after all, we can’t be Gary-Stu: in any Gary-Stu vehicle, There can be only one!!! Nobody in the end can identify with a solipsistic hero whacking away at a bunch of cardboard cutouts.
(And then they wonder why Arnold can’t keep pulling them in to make up for his insanely high salaries. Hint: it wasn’t Arnold that made Conan, it was Conan & Subotai & Valeria & King Osric & Thulsa Doom & the cranky old wizard Narrator & the score & the vast, grand settings…)
bellatrys(Quote) (Reply)
You know, I HATE Harrison Ford (sorry) and I still liked the Fugitive way back when. It did have a better-than-average script, despite following the formula.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
That’s because it was made back when he still played characters, instead of playing Harrison Ford™. It’s almost the guaranteed Kiss of Death as an actor to be treated as A Star regardless of what they actually *do* on screen, what the vehicle is (the same is true imo for directors). I used to like Tom Hanks, but now it’s hard to remember that he was ever in Apollo 13…
bellatrys(Quote) (Reply)
Erik, that’s a wild coincidence! I hadn’t even realized that when I posted it!
bellatrys(Quote) (Reply)
Oh, Patrick, you want to hear a good one?
Years ago, in the mid-90′s, I was doing coverage (reviewing) scripts for agents. Speed was a runaway hit, so the trend of the day was to write a script you could pitch as “Speed in a train/submarine/airplane/other fast-moving vehicle” (making it ironic that Speed 2 was set on a slowboat to China, I know, but that’s a whole other thing). Out of the steaming heaps of “Speed” rip-offs came one very good script. Even I thought it was good, after having read so many bad rip-offs I was ready to hurl at the sight of another Speed-like script.
Two studios got into a bidding war over it. At the beginning of one sunny workday, it looked like the script might sell for a couple hundred thousand, which was great. By the end of the workday, it had sold for $1 million. Which was very rare back then (screenwriters do not make the kind of money most people imagine).
It was never filmed. To this day. It never will be.
Reason? One in forty sold scripts actually gets filmed. Scripts are bought for all sorts of reasons. For example, if you can’t afford the $50 mil to make that movie and you know it could kick your studio’s ass next summer, you’ll gladly spend $1 mil to keep someone else from making it. Or they buy it with the full intention of making it, but it falls apart. Or two departments are in a weenie measuring contest. Or whatever. There’s so much money flying around, it doesn’t always make good business sense.
That one always struck me as sad because it was actually a very good script.
You know, I just realized something. Speed passes the Bechdel test very early on. And features a competent female lead. Graham Yost must be responsible for Annie not being the usual dimwit damsel, but guess who Yost said was responsible for “98% of the dialog”? A young, uncredited screenwriter named Joss Whedon.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I agree on the issues of actors vs. movie stars; the movie star does pretty much always play a Sue!version of themselves. You can often tell when an actor is trying very hard to avoid becoming a star, even to the detriment of their career.
Thinking of actors that I’ll see in pretty much everything, pretty much none of them are Movie Stars. (I can’t even imagine Paul Giamatti being called a movie star.)
And yes, Hollywood does try to write star vehicles, because stars are the main factor they perceive as being “bankable.” This is probably why there are so few ensemble pieces being made compared to during the years of the studio system.
bellatrys: Conan the Barbarian is probably my favorite movie for many of the reasons you listed. It’s also a great example of characterization where you have a monosylabbic lead in nearly every scene.
Jennifer: I’ve been reading a lot of screenplays lately, and the lack of understanding of the craft in major Hollywood scripts is simultaneously aggravating and disheartening. Agrravating because so much money was spend on movies with bad scripts, disheartening because I think “Sure, I can write a better screenplay… but will anyone with decision-making power be capable of recognizing that?
Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer, I love that final sentence.
I may want to scream at young Mr Whedon on a regular basis, but I do still love him.
Have you read Brown Betty’s Dear White Feminists?
Anna(Quote) (Reply)
Anna, thanks for highlighting Betty’s post – I’m behind on my blog and LJ reading right now. She’s right on. A couple of years ago, I thought you could (carefully) draw those analogies to show how a subtle form of sexism became quite blunt when you made it a race thing instead of a gender thing. But the analogy falls apart when you consider that there’s a group experiencing both sets of prejudices (and often a whole special third collection of stereotypes about women of a particular race), and the subtle bigotry of your failure to account for her in your analogy reveals more about insidious bigotry than your analogy does.
It’s much better to use analogies that are sort of silly, but get the point across, such as: “Just replace every instance of ‘woman’ in that sentence with ‘People whose names end in R.’ Now, would you ever say such narrow things about such a diverse group of people?”
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Reading through this thread, specifically the concept of ‘lead building’, reminded me of another thing which has come up before on this site and becomes relevant: the idea of ‘buddy’ or ‘ensemble’ movies/stories, as opposed to single hero monomyth-heavy stuff.
When you have those setups, which are in no way rare (although good ones can be rare), you have a prime opportunity to play off all sorts of different people of different sexes/genders/races/etc. However, as was pointed out earlier, without the ‘Why couldn’t this character be a woman/PoC/homosexual’ (or perhaps ‘why is this character a man?’) question, even when your script/setup demands a lot of interaction between people who are all equally important, it’s still too often majority white men with a token woman.
So even when people are given the chance to do it without ruining a story by detracting from the ‘leads’, it still happens far too often. That’s a real strong indicator that there’s something else here (such as white straight men being default, or institutionalized sexism, or what have you.)
-Mecha
Mecha(Quote) (Reply)
Excellent post and many, many excellent comments. The roles women play in movies and television is a topic where I get scoffed at constantly. Any time I bring this up, I’m told I’m just being too sensitive.
Anyway, I have a friend who was pitching me his idea for a fantasy series of books. He was telling me about the characters and the themes and it all sounded very interesting. At some point he says something to the effect that he doesn’t know how to write female characters. I said to him to just write the character the same you would a male and for an example told him how any of the characters he described could be female. He still seemed to think that women were too different from him. It was insanely frustrating that I actually had to explain to him that women have mostly the same goals, hopes, and thoughts as men. ::sigh::
Rae(Quote) (Reply)
@Mecha, that’s very true. I’m thinking I need to write a series about how the film industry works. One part would be the vicious circle that is the lead white male star. They mainly attempt to build white men as stars because they believe the audience only wants white male stars (with a few token exceptions). Because white male stars have been built, they rack up high-grossing movies to make them “bankable.” Because they’re bankable, they’re the only stars people want in their films (which is why, when you specify your script’s lead is an African-American man, they ask you, “Why does he have to be black? What if we can get Bruce Willis to play him, thus ensuring the movie’s success?” but no one ever asks, “Why does it have to be a white guy? What if we could get Demi Moore?”), so the films have to accommodate a central white male lead. So there’s no room for women of all races and men of color to star in high grossing movies, thus proving their viability. It’s a vicious circle. We’re told, “Well, as soon as their movies start grossing as much as white men’s, we’ll make more movies with them.” But if you don’t make AND MARKET big movies with them, how can they prove it?
@Rae, the assumption that women are a different species drives me insane, but I understand it a little. I’m intimidated by trying to write people of color, people from vastly different backgrounds than mine, etc., because it’s hard to get a clear view of the lives of those “below” you on the privilege ladder than those above you. If your friend is white, able-bodied and het, then he’s at the top of the ladder and it will always be harder for him to write someone lower down than for them to write him.
But I don’t think that’s an excuse. It’s better to try to write people from other demographics than to avoid it with excuses. If you’re concerned you’ll accidentally send a bad message (it’s always possible, even for the best of us), show a draft to a friend from that demographic and ask them if it rings true. And then listen.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I’m curious as to Hollywood’s explanation for Will Smith’s success as a highly bankable non-white lead. No doubt they’ll have lots of data to explain how he’s an anomaly, and white people don’t really like him.
Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Patrick, I don’t doubt there were some who tried to explain away his success, but the explanation I always heard for his popularity was that he was “an exception.” Another non-recurring phenomenon. They accepted that the target audience really was happy to go see him in a film. They just didn’t extend that to the possibility that the target audience really didn’t care about a star’s race as much as they cared whether he was fun to watch.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Unfortunately, when it comes to entertainment, I’d have to agree with that. Enjoying watching someone on screen is a far cry from respecting them as a human being. In fact, in most cases and to much of the ignorant population, being entertaining is the only thing that allows a minority or gay or handicapped or retarded person (or otherwise within the same realm of the “second class citizen” so to speak) the privilege of being respected.
I know many whites who talk about how “niggers are so stupid, ugly, violent, and smelly”, yet still break their necks to watch their favorite black quarterback score one for their favorite team. I know many heterosexuals who talk about how “homosexuality is so gross and gay people totally shouldn’t be allowed to get married”, yet they wouldn’t miss Ellen’s talk show for the world because she’s just so funny…
No, being entertained by someone enough to want to see them – even to pay to see them – is not equivalent to viewing them as equal or having a positive view of particular attributes they possess. It only means that for that moment you can put your prejudice aside to satisfy your own desire to be entertained.
I do believe many people enjoy watching Will Smith, but one would be hardpressed to convince me that it’s regardless of his race as opposed to in spite of it.
Hyperphonics(Quote) (Reply)
In the same token, I don’t believe the issue with the way that women are portrayed in the media is that people don’t want to see women in strong, leading roles or presented in a positive light but rather that people don’t object to it when women aren’t given those roles. In a lot of ways, complacency can be considered the same as support.
“You liked this movie where the only female characters in it strutted around half the time in a bikini fighting each other over the rich guy with the sports car, therefore, we’ll assume that’s what you want to see.”
There are many people praising shows, films, and novels with incredibly powerful female leads that have substance and just as much weight in their roles as men if not more so, but only a fraction of that number complains about shows, films, and novels that do the opposite.
As long as people keep “accepting” it, there’s no reason to make changes, and while I do believe that retail stores losing out on customers due to their ignorance is a great point, I don’t believe that translates into film.
The industry is not losing any dollars because of the way they portray women and they won’t because the fact remains that whether the public enjoys seeing something different or not, they still don’t object to seeing the same old thing. Regardless of how progressive a man is in his view of women, it doesn’t mean he won’t watch, enjoy, and spread via word of mouth a movie where the only female character is a hot half naked ditsy chick whose only line is, “Give it to me, daddy”.
It’s obnoxious the way execs like the ones you mentioned try to pawn their foolish bias on the audience saying they do it for the benefit of what the audience wants to see, but until I see the audience objecting by saying, “I’m not going to see the latest piece of crap film you churned out where all the women are imbeciles”, I won’t give audiences a clean record either.
Hyperphonics(Quote) (Reply)
Hyperphonics: Your argument regarding entertainers’ popularity not indicating respect is spot-on. It reminded me of a book I read addressing entertainers like Josephine Baker.
(Oddly enough, the book was mostly about bogeyman folklore, then started talking about the cultural significance of bananas in Europe. It was kind of unfocused.)
Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
First of all, let me say that Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor rule so hard it hurts.
This looks like it’s been an awesome discussion, with lots of potent issues raised. A lot of what I wanted to say has already been said, so I’ll just put in my two cents in response to a couple previous comments.
“Also, I wouldn’t want anyone to fall into the trap of assuming that just because a movie does pass the test means it’s either a feminist movie or a great movie.”
Good point. I’m sure there’s a scene or two in The House Bunny (I haven’t actually seen it, so I can’t be sure) where they talk about something besides men.
“I had a friend who studied writing and his professor told him that main characters needed to be straight white males. If they were female, black, gay, etc, then the work needed to be an “issue piece.” Having a gay main character in a work that wasn’t about homosexuality was just too distracting.”
While this is a highly problematic assertion that is frequently proven false, there may be an unfortunate kernel of truth to it. I’ve often heard film analysis that drew huge conclusions from the race or gender of a certain character, even if it was not important to the plot, or went without mention in the film. It’s certainly an absurdly broad and simplistic assumption on the part of filmmakers to say that the general audience won’t like a film because the characters give off too much of a sense of “otherness”, but they have a basis for fearing that people may read too much into some casting decisions.
For example, I’ve heard a lot of negative sentiment about the fact that HANCOCK, the first major film with a central black superhero (Catwoman was a poorly-funded, under-promoted, badly made flop, so I’m not counting that one), happened to present him as an aggressive, homeless, incarcerated drunkard.
Some reviewers found it unusual and anachronistic that in Unforgiven no one in the 19th century West displays any racism toward Morgan Freeman’s character. Simultaneously, they noted that he was killed off while his white partners survived, a common and problematic cliche of non-white supporting characters.
Also, hints of homosexuality in some film villains have been criticized by gay rights activists as an attempt to associate queerness with amorality.
I’m not saying this by any means justifies the white-straight-male trope. It’s ridiculous for this group to be perceived as the “default” for characters, but since that is an unfortunately common perception, deviations from this imaginary norm are sometimes believed to be specifically motivated. I think that’s why sometimes, when in doubt, studios choose to stick with what they know.
“I wonder, if one would write a story, but only assign genders to the characters afterward and randomly… I think there will be some people saying that I am not respecting the differences between the genders. Are they right or wrong?”
Case in point: some feminist critics of Wanted said that Fox, as portrayed by Angelina Jolie, was just an “honorary male”, because there was nothing about her character to distinguish her from her be-penised cohorts. And the film’s negative treatment of the hero’s detestable, fat, unattractive boss probably wouldn’t have raised the ire of feminists had she been male (god knows there are plenty of movies with awful male bosses). The problem I mentioned before comes into play here: even though it shouldn’t be, the straight-white-male is often considered the “default” person in stories. And an individual character failing in such a person could be perceived as a negative stereotype if that character’s gender or race were changed.
It’s a sensitive issue, and I’m not sure what the answer is. As we see from the way so-called “color-blindness” has been used as an excuse to ignore problems of racism in society by claiming to treat everyone equally, there is a difference between equality and homogeneity. While people of all genders, races, religions, etc. should be treated fairly in media portrayals, that doesn’t necessarily mean covering up their identities.
“I’m curious as to Hollywood’s explanation for Will Smith’s success as a highly bankable non-white lead. No doubt they’ll have lots of data to explain how he’s an anomaly, and white people don’t really like him.”
I’m not sure I’d agree with that. There are lots of non-white actors that Hollywood clamors to put in whatever star-vehicle they can. It doesn’t get much more bankable than Denzel, and Halle Berry has had lots of chances to shine. The same goes for Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, J-Lo, and Jackie Chan. I don’t think the problem is so much that Hollywood doesn’t like putting people of color in leading roles. It’s that when they do, they often feel the need to specifically acknowledge the star’s race with unsubtle exposition or even outright caricature (see: Jackie Chan). They picked Will Smith for the role in I Am Legend that they had previously considered Schwarzenegger in. But chances are they wouldn’t have cast a black woman as Schwarzenegger’s wife.
Dan(Quote) (Reply)
Dan, it IS tricky to write “minorities” in fiction if you’re not one because even the best-intentioned among us can accidentally invoke a stereotype we’re not aware of. The answer is: you learn by doing. Try, make mistakes, apologize in the DVD extra, and don’t make the same mistakes again. It’s better than shying away from us for fear of screwing up.
There are lots of non-white actors that Hollywood clamors to put in whatever star-vehicle they can.
That’s true, but I think the original commenter’s point was that each of those non-white actors are thought of as exceptions by the studios and networks. They think the audience continues generally to resist black leading men, except for Denzel (for one example).
I don’t think the problem is so much that Hollywood doesn’t like putting people of color in leading roles. It’s that when they do, they often feel the need to specifically acknowledge the star’s race with unsubtle exposition or even outright caricature (see: Jackie Chan).
This is kind of what is meant by the industry’s notion that “If you do make a movie about someone other than a white man, it has to be an ‘issue’ movie.” Meaning you can’t have a lead who just happens to be a woman or person of color, it has to be a whole movie about being a woman or a person of color. It can’t be about a woman or person of color who stole back the atom bomb from the evil Dr. Zed and saved the world, or whatever.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
@ Jennifer: Good point
For the record, I would totally watch that movie.
Dan(Quote) (Reply)
While a guy who’s not sexist can just hold his tongue and keep doing his best to write non-sexist material around all the assholes, a woman who holds her tongue is immediately pegged as “offended” and therefore incapable of handling the “realities” of the world and her job.
Salma Hayek(Quote) (Reply)
Got 9 minutes of battery left on this laptop; hope I am not covering old ground here.
I’m responding to bellatrys response to spartakos:
[Unread Comment] bellatrys { 07.02.08 at 2:56 pm }
Does the film industry want so much to be “right” that they are willing to shoot themselves in the foot financially? Repeatedly? ‘Cause man, that just don’t make no kinda sense.
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My feeling is that egotism extends to group identity, and selfishness is on behalf of this identity. White people enslaved black people and rationalized it because this helped their own group, that each individual white person ‘belonged’ to.
Am I alone in thinking that Humankind’s total wealth (or if you prefer, power) is like a pie that can only be carved up so many ways? If this model of wealth/power is correct, and, as I suspect, hidden at the back of everyone’s minds, it goes a long way to explaining why humans often do things that financially cripple and disempower other groups. If I am selfish and shortsighted, I will feel (but resist saying or even thinking directly) that anything that hurts some ‘other’ group leaves more of the pie for me and mine.
Particular groups fall in and out of power; is selfishness a constant? Nothing real can be achieved unless selfishness can be tackled, that is my feeling.
Extremely well-written blog, by the way – I hadn’t heard about the Bechdel test and just stumbled on this and was most impressed.
Gordon(Quote) (Reply)
Just reminds me again of a bit of futurama where Bender ends up on TV
Network President: Greetings, gentlemen. You already know my Execubots: Executive Alpha, programmed to like things it has seen before.
Alphabot: Hey, hey, hey.
Network President: Executive Beta, programmed to roll dice to determine the fall schedule.
[Betabot rolls two dice.]
Betabot: More reality shows.
Network President: And Executive Gamma, programmed to underestimate middle America.
The gender thing is a more specific type of this but Film and TV moguls never seem to think we are capable of watching anything challenging or different just a new variation on the same old same old
Laura(Quote) (Reply)
UCLA’s film program is antiquated and overly full of itself. I was there for 2 years for a masters and then I ran for the hills. It’s not you; it’s not your scripts; it’s the school.
pusserboots(Quote) (Reply)
Thank you for this wonderful blog. I was feeling so alone on women in film issues. (Even after joining Women in Film.)
I just wanted to comment on the Joss Whedon thing. He’s cited James Cameron as an inspiration for his tough female characters, and Cameron is from Canada, where we have this stupid women-and-nature thing where if nature is tough (Canadian Shield tough, natch), then so are women, regardless of reality. (Margaret Atwood wrote about this a wee bit in Survival.) So I, as a tough Canadian chick, am not as impressed with tough female characters as someone from softer lands might be. So I’m not as impressed with Whedon as others seem to be, either. The Buffy concept was a blast, but he still prostitutes his talent, same as almost everyone else (I have a big problem with sexualized content in job descriptions), and he completely lost me when he sniggered about a character on Firefly who works as a prostitute.
He does seem to like women, when they’re tomboys. Reminds me a bit of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz books. There is a lot of girl power in the Oz books (a lot), but it’s girls, not women. Preadolescent, mostly.
I think if we want a diversity of strong female characters, we need more strong women to write their stories. There are some good examples in SF/F novels. Of course I’m not sure how they then get to the screen. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
I think most of my screenplays-in-progress pass the Bechdel test. I wonder if this will cause me problems, or whether it’ll be the least of my problems.
Anemone Cerridwen(Quote) (Reply)
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