Things to make you chew on the walls
Jan. 12th, 2010 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerBack in September of last year, I wrote a post for SF Novelists about the Bechdel Test. Well, a few days ago I came across a post -- don't remember how I found it -- from Jennifer Kesler, written in 2008, about why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass that test.
Short form: "The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about."
(Which is a direct quote from either a film-school professor or an industry professional -- it's not clear from the context who said it.)
There's a lot more where that came from; follow the links in the posts, and the "related articles" links at the bottom. Like this one, in which Ms. Kesler relates how her screenwriting classes instructed her that "The real reason [...] to put women in a script was to reveal things about the men." For example, the female characters have to be attracted to the male lead in order to communicate that he is a babe magnet and therefore worthy of being admired by the target audience, which is of course male (and straight).
Ms. Kesler eventually quit screenwriting, not because nobody around her wanted to do anything other than straight white men's stories, but because the machine is so finely tuned to crush any attempts to do otherwise. Criticize Joss Whedon's gender depiction all you like -- there's plenty to chew on in his work -- but never forget that Buffy was seven seasons of a show with multiple interesting female characters, who regularly talked to one another about something other than men (or shoes). How many other creators have managed to get anything comparable through the industry meat-grinder? And apparently one of the rationales behind canceling Firefly was that it rated too highly with women. You see, advertising slots aimed at women go for cheaper than those aimed at men, which meant Firefly brought in less revenue for Fox. So off it goes.
Because the female audience doesn't matter. We're talking about an industry where a WB executive can say that he isn't going to make movies with female leads anymore, because they just aren't profitable enough. (Sorry, I lost the link for that quote. Mea culpa.) An industry where they can write off Terminator and Alien as non-replicable flukes. Where they look at the droves of women who flocked to The Matrix and conclude, not that women like action movies too, or that Trinity appealed to them, or even that they wanted to look at Keanu Reeves, but that they were accompanying their boyfriends or husbands. Where they look at the failure of, say, Catwoman, and instead of swearing off Halle Berry or the director or the committee of six people who wrote the script -- instead of saying, "hey, maybe we should try to make a movie that doesn't suck" -- they swear off superheroines. Because clearly that's where the error lies.
There's no particular point I'm trying to arrive at, here; the topic is a kraken, and all I can do is hack away at a tentacle here, a tentacle there. And try to feel good about the fact that at least the situation in fiction isn't a tenth so dire as it is in Hollywood. (One of the most valuable things that came out of the intersection of my anthro background, my interest in media, and my professional writing is that I became much more aware of how texts are shaped by the process of their production. I wish more criticism, of the academic variety, took that into account.) Anyway, read 'em and weep, and then look for ways to make it better, I guess.
Short form: "The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about."
(Which is a direct quote from either a film-school professor or an industry professional -- it's not clear from the context who said it.)
There's a lot more where that came from; follow the links in the posts, and the "related articles" links at the bottom. Like this one, in which Ms. Kesler relates how her screenwriting classes instructed her that "The real reason [...] to put women in a script was to reveal things about the men." For example, the female characters have to be attracted to the male lead in order to communicate that he is a babe magnet and therefore worthy of being admired by the target audience, which is of course male (and straight).
Ms. Kesler eventually quit screenwriting, not because nobody around her wanted to do anything other than straight white men's stories, but because the machine is so finely tuned to crush any attempts to do otherwise. Criticize Joss Whedon's gender depiction all you like -- there's plenty to chew on in his work -- but never forget that Buffy was seven seasons of a show with multiple interesting female characters, who regularly talked to one another about something other than men (or shoes). How many other creators have managed to get anything comparable through the industry meat-grinder? And apparently one of the rationales behind canceling Firefly was that it rated too highly with women. You see, advertising slots aimed at women go for cheaper than those aimed at men, which meant Firefly brought in less revenue for Fox. So off it goes.
Because the female audience doesn't matter. We're talking about an industry where a WB executive can say that he isn't going to make movies with female leads anymore, because they just aren't profitable enough. (Sorry, I lost the link for that quote. Mea culpa.) An industry where they can write off Terminator and Alien as non-replicable flukes. Where they look at the droves of women who flocked to The Matrix and conclude, not that women like action movies too, or that Trinity appealed to them, or even that they wanted to look at Keanu Reeves, but that they were accompanying their boyfriends or husbands. Where they look at the failure of, say, Catwoman, and instead of swearing off Halle Berry or the director or the committee of six people who wrote the script -- instead of saying, "hey, maybe we should try to make a movie that doesn't suck" -- they swear off superheroines. Because clearly that's where the error lies.
There's no particular point I'm trying to arrive at, here; the topic is a kraken, and all I can do is hack away at a tentacle here, a tentacle there. And try to feel good about the fact that at least the situation in fiction isn't a tenth so dire as it is in Hollywood. (One of the most valuable things that came out of the intersection of my anthro background, my interest in media, and my professional writing is that I became much more aware of how texts are shaped by the process of their production. I wish more criticism, of the academic variety, took that into account.) Anyway, read 'em and weep, and then look for ways to make it better, I guess.
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Date: 2010-01-12 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 11:24 pm (UTC)And, of course, the HK female actions stars were big names attracting big budget films, particularly Michelle Yeoh Chi-King, while their US counterparts -- Cynthia Rothrock, Tanya Roberts -- were straight-to-video and low-status.
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Date: 2010-01-13 09:25 pm (UTC)You're definitely right that Michelle Yeoh et aliae have better careers than any U.S. equivalent.
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Date: 2010-01-14 11:40 am (UTC)I think it's more down to the star system, in fact -- Jackie Chan's films are all about him and his character. It's not precisely sexism, though: there are sometimes women who are not there as a love interest -- women cops and so on -- and whose dialogue is about the plot of the film -- but they tend to interact with his character, not each other (hence the women in Who Am I?, are competent and professional (a rally driver and a spy) and not interested in Jackie as a romance, but they act with him to deal with the bad guys and so on. (Police Story 3, which is pretty feminist in a lot of ways, fails simply because the two main female characters only meet in terms of a misunderstanding over him -- Michelle's character otherwise is a great image of an active woman with her own life).
Having said which, there is a lot of fail, too, and the lower budget ones do indeed seem to fail less. The Police Sotry spin-off for Michelle Yeah -- Project S, is an awful mess which takes as read that the heroine needs to be motivated by her love for a dodgy man. (I find this weird, in that her earlier films avoided that, as did the wonderful Righting Wrongs aka Above the Law, which latter fails on a technicality, but is all about a woman as a competent adult professional.)
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Date: 2010-01-12 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 11:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 11:33 pm (UTC)However, most female targeted movies don't appeal to me. Chick flick is a derogatory term precisely because (aside from gender associations of inferiority) generally of pretty low quality, and targeted at a very stereotyped narrow subset of women. When they do poorly, Hollywood execs think women don't go to movies on their own, and so female targeted movies aren't worthwhile. These people don't understand the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy, or else they're willfully blind. Given that when a female targeted movie does well, they dismiss it, I tend to go with the blind.
The sad thing is that mediawise the United States has gone backwards in gender terms since the golden age of cinema. The 30s, 40s, and 50s offer better female characters than the 2000s.
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Date: 2010-01-13 04:49 am (UTC)Several of the posts I read -- not sure how many of the ones I linked -- pointed out that, hey, maybe chick flicks don't make money BECAUSE THEY SUCK. Not universally; there are some that are good. But as a genre, yeah, they're kind of made out of cardboard and pink spray-paint, with all the depth of a slick of nail polish. It would be such a novel thing, having actual quality created for women . . . .
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Date: 2010-01-13 05:02 am (UTC)and spray painted cardboard is cheep.
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Date: 2010-01-13 04:04 am (UTC)Sadly, I have attended almost exclusively Lord of the Rings movies since 2001, so I haven't really helped whatever statistics the H'wood types are basing their misconceptions on. (In fact, I'm pretty that *no part* of Tolkien's life would pass the Bechdel test.) I attribute at least a part of the movies' appeal, however, to the fact that a team of two women and one man were the driving creators of the screenplay and movie scenario. I'm betting that team passed the Test, a lot, and even more so if one takes characters as not being, literally, men.
I have, however, bought a lot of DVD movies dating back to that golden age you speak of, with a distinct emphasis on Bette Davis and Myrna Loy. And Ginger Rogers and Katherine Hepburn. And so on...
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Date: 2010-01-13 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-13 09:55 am (UTC)I ran a panel at DragonCon this past year in the Alternate History track about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. We were largely talking about why the movie was so bad compared to the graphic novel, and investigating what liberties they took from the source material and why, when one of the attendees said, "We should just stop going to see stupid sci-fi movies that aren't made very well, so that they know we want something of higher quality."
I had to stop what I was talking about and tell them that no, that's not what would happen. It's exactly what you said about the Catwoman fiasco. If people didn't go to see LXG, the studios wouldn't say to themselves, "Oh, clearly this was a bad movie, therefore we should make more like this, only better." Instead, no more movies like that.
Steve Johnson, who worked on the film, was on the panel as well, and could only apologetically offer that the reason for the film's problems were likely due to everyone who worked on it being on drugs.
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Date: 2010-01-13 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-13 04:58 pm (UTC)Tony
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Date: 2010-01-13 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-13 09:28 pm (UTC)