I read an interesting article the other day by Sarah Churchwell, a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia (The Guardian, last week) about women in cinema. She’d been to see the new Bourne movie, which has Julia Stiles in second billing, and noted sadly: ‘The most amazing thing Julia Stiles does in The Bourne Ultimatum is to get second billing. She has approximately three scenes, in which her character runs the gamut from concerned to worried…she does nothing else of practical utility, except bring Damon a washcloth.’
It’s a familiar complaint – why do women in movies never get heroic parts? There are honourable exceptions – like Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs, and Jodie Foster in Panic Room; and of course,
Sigourney Weaver in all the Alien movies. 
But the pattern tends to be – women star in chick flicks, while men kick ass.
Churchwell acknowledges that ‘there are some female action heroes these days. In TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess and now Heroes, and movies such as Catwoman, Elektra and the Matrix films.’ But then she adds, ‘these are all science fiction fantasies, they take place in imaginary worlds, and several of them were notable flops.’
That seems just a tad dismissive. Yes, Catwoman was a flop, but Elektra is a movie which has plenty of admirers (like Ariel, who wrote this about it) – and the Matrix was a huge huge hit. But the key conclusion I would draw is that audiences for SF movies are not sexist, they positively like women to kick ass, and they are, generally speaking, proper grown ups.
Even in the SF movie world, though, the best parts do tend to go to women (Trinity is not the lead character in the Matrix). But there is a reason for all this. Movie studio executives are not idealists, pursuing a secret cultural agenda; they are greedy money-grubbing so and sos. And so if they thought there was money to be made out of making movies with strong, kick ass women at the helm – they would make those movies. But their audience research tells them that spotty boys don’t like girl heroes, so they play safe, and they keep casting guys in the lead roles.
But is this true? Are viewers of the male persuasion really so narrow minded? As an erstwhile spotty boy, I’ve always loved strong female characters in movies, novels, and graphic novels. (My dream would be to see a movie solely devoted to the great heroine of my teen years Ororo, aka Storm of the X Men, preferably with Wolverine as her romantic lead. Scene 1 would feature…okay, okay, I’ll get back to the point…)
On a couple of occasions, when teaching large groups of screenwriting students, many of them in their twenties, I’ve done a straw poll of favourite films; and my anecdotal evidence is that most women of that age and many women of other ages love kick ass action movies as much as men. The cliche (and it’s a brilliant cliche) in the movie Sleepless in Seattle is of a yawning chasm between women, who weep at soppy tear-jerking chick flicks, and men, who weep at The Dirty Dozen. (Such a great scene!) But my suspicion is that these days the dynamic is different, and there is a vast audience of women and men and boys and girls who would relish movies with strong, morally compromised, kick assing female heroes at the helm.
Am I right? Would you buy a cinema ticket if Matt Damon became the hapless, ineffectual sidekick in The Bourne Sister? Would you turn on the telly if Dr Who were reincarnated as a woman? Are the studio execs right in thinking there is no market for movies with female action protagonists?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’d also love the studio execs to hear them, but that’s a tougher proposition….
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Well, to be fair, I’m an admirer of the first half of Elektra – the half in which she’s a reasonably true to the graphic novel, stone-cold elite ninja killing machine… but then she has to go and get all pie-eyed over some bloke and it all, frankly, fell to all too predictably Hollywood-tainted pieces…
I would generally agree that women get something of a raw deal. However, I would suspect there is a strong constituency that prefer to empathize with protagonists of their own gender and thereby pander to their own fantasy view of themselves. How many teenage boys want to imagine themselves as Julia Stiles and ending up with Matt Damon? How many teenage boys want to be put in the position of being an emasculated Matt Damon? While it may seem a little iniquitous many people do seem to want to be the gender stereotype.
I am sure there is an audience for kick-ass heroines, however, I would question the motives of the males watching (and making) the same. Would Buffy have got such a large male audience if Buffy was played, not by Sarah Michelle Gellar, but by the female equivalent of the Elephant Man. To quote a previous comment, ‘Allyson Hannigan- yowzer! She’s hot!’. While Trinity was a strong kick-ass character she was also corseted up in the most fetishistic of clothing (like Tilly and Gershon in the Wachowski’s Bound before her). Ditto the Monica Bellucci character in the Matrix sequels. Are such kick-ass women in these movies more about fulfilling a sexual fantasy for the male audience and makers rather than playing on an empathetic male connexion with the female character?
Silence Of The Lambs was the real watershed: a real world, strong female led story which didn’t dwell on the perceived vulnerability of the character’s gender. Unfortunately, for a real world scenario, it was not capitalized upon. While Kiss The Girls, Murder By Numbers and Twisted (for example) have all continued with the female detective protagonist theme they have tended to revert to the ‘woman in peril’ model.
It is arguable whether Heroes has marked a great leap forward: of nine (?) hero characters just two are female. The male characters are the likes of Policeman, Politician, Nurse, Geneticist (though one who doesn’t know anything about the subject) and ‘Tortured Artist’ (is there any other kind?) while the two women are… cheerleader, who is seemingly surgically attached to what could be described as a skimpy/ revealing/ tight outfit, and an internet stripper. This seemed to me as if it was written by a teenage boy working through their own personal fantasies and stereotypes: boys get to be cops, scientists and artists; girls get to be pretty cheerleaders and strippers (virgin and whore). Why did the men get all the proper jobs and the women get relegated to objects of fantasy? (The internet stripper is also the only one of the Heroes who is, so far, apparently a psychopath.)
Personally, I have no problems with a strong female protagonist and I preferred Elektra to Daredevil but mainly because it was notably less silly.
I must have missed the scene to weep at in The Dirty Dozen! Do tell!
Not answers or even a viewpoint just more questions.
Hi Ariel – yes, good point. Soppy! Who needs it?
Hi Jon.
The Dirty Dozen scene to cry at is when the blokes start to die…though my all-time three-hankie tear-jerking weepie of all time is when Jimmy Cagney goes to the electric chair in ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES.
The ‘Yowzer – she’s hot’ factor is a real hot potato, of course, when talking about SF heroines, who are ALWAYS gorgeous. So yes, I love Trinity because she wears fetishistic leather…but then Keanu is a babe too (he can’t act all that well, it’s looks that have made him a superstar.) So I think sexy heroines are fine so long as they are balanced with sexy heroes. Bruce Willis in a vest…Marlon Brando, in a tight T shirt, Patrick Swayze in DIRTY DANCING, Paul Newman in every movie he ever appeared in. This is equal opportunities sexiness.
BUFFY is non-sexist, in my eyes, because the sexy Gellar is balanced by a cast of remarkably sexy blokes, esp David Boreanaz, as a young and rarely shirted hunk.
How many teenage boys dream of ending up with Matt Damon…good point! Some, but only the gay ones. (Yes? No? I like him as a hero, but I’ve never got him as a sex symbol.) But even as a straight guy, I could imagine, say, falling in love with Brad Pitt in the fight scene in FIGHT CLUB, when he bares his six pack…am I revealing rather too much here? I guess what I’m saying is that in drama I like to fall in love with all the characters, and be all sexes; and in SF, I get to be alien too.
Hi,
I must have a heart made of stone as I just refused to cry at The Dirty Dozen. Mind you, dare I confess, I like a little soppy: I’m a sucker for a good romcom (Breakfast At Tiffany’s with the cat in the rain; the end of Singin’ In The Rain, etc.). I had to like Trinity and her outfit or the Matrix sequels would have completely defeated me… fancy making the hero impossible to defeat!
I can go with equal opportunity sexiness. But still I have a sneaking suspicion that an audience primarily of young males might not quite see it that way.
On a really simplistic level, I want to empathize with all the characters (antagonist, protagonist, male, female, alien- no alienism here) but I can’t make that leap to imagining falling in love with Brad Pitt in Fight Club and although I can see a sexiness I would much rather BE his character and get Helena Bonham-Carter.
Glad to see there’s no alienism…!
It’s an interesting point about Neo being un-defeatable. There’s a whole structure of Christian allegory of course (‘Neo’ is the ‘One’)to justify Neo’s power, but I do prefer flawed heroes.
Robert McKee has a great phrase, which he uses about Harry Potter – ‘overdog’. Harry P is an overdog, so is Neo; I prefer underdogs.