Princesses, Post-feminism, and Hollywood

A recent New York Times article about Nancy Meyers praised the director for rising to the top of the romantic comedy genre. Its an achievement to be sure, for any female director (in a Hollywood system in which women comprise 9% of all directors) to rise to the top of the heap. Yet the article has many up in arms. Some say that praising the director for her accomplishments loses sight of the struggle women are still going through in Hollywood, while still others take issue with calling her success an achievement at all.

The plight of women in the film industry is well known. To put it in perspective, women have been about three times as successful in politics than as directors, where they have for some time made up close to a third of the senate and house and still never come close to becoming a president. Why this is true is something of a mystery, in 2008 women comprised 22% of directors working on films appearing at the major film festivals compared to 9% on top grossing films. Why are they more successful in the art-house market than in a studio one? Manohla Dargis of the New York Times in a recent article wrote,

The usual line on Hollywood is that it cares only about box office, which is at once true and something of a convenient excuse. Money makes the movie world go round, sure. But there are exceptions to this perceived rule, as some of my favorite male directors, including Michael Mann, have routinely proved with various box office disappointments.

Many in the industry have written the problem off as simply due to a lack of interest on the part of women towards film-making. Sure, the image of director is that of Wellsian enfant terrible, but that sort of image hasn't stopped women from crashing all sorts of parties before including the political and corporate. I fail to see how film-making can be compared to jobs like midwifing or logging, which have a similar gender parity (for more obvious, if not necessarily good, reasons). The problem certainly has no easy answers, but a broad first stroke is offered, again, by Manohla Dargis,

It's hard to know why women have fared so badly in Hollywood in the last few decades, though any business that refers to its creations as product cannot, by definition, have much imagination.

Hollywood has always done what worked before. There are few industries which have at once given the impression of change so frequently without ever really changing. If anything it has moved backwards in many ways. The movies it produces are universally geared towards a much younger audience and feature considerably less artistry than was seen in the past, and if Nancy Meyers represents a victory for women directors, she also represents a betrayal of women in the theaters. Charles Taylor, responding to the article I mentioned right at the beginning wrote,

The trouble is that Meyers presides over the betrayal of the romantic comedy, which as a genre has gone from a hardheaded acceptance of life's contingencies to a place for the privileged whining of a culture infantilized by identity politics and complaint as a way of life... Meyers' heroines are independent basket cases, affluent and alone and miserable instead of, as the classic romantic comedy heroine usually was, competent and sharp and surprised by love when she stumbled over it.

We live in an age dubbed "post-feminism" in which many books and, yes, movies portray strong women who do indeed stumble into love, something which is both unnecessary and meaningful. Films like Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Bright Star, and Amelie show that there are films out there to represent this "post-feminist" movement. The problem is that hardly anyone saw these films (and I chose the most popular films I could think of). There is no audience for films about strong independent women. So why then would a strong independent woman make films in Hollywood? The studios certainly aren't going to let them make the films they would want to make, and even if they did, they wouldn't have an audience. Charles Taylor again hit the nail on the head when he wrote,

And uncomfortable as it is to admit, it has to be said that since women are the audience that makes these movies hits, it's women who are colluding in reaffirming the stereotypes of women as timid and prudish, awash in princess fantasies... Of course, it would be great for women filmmakers to challenge the status quo of the mainstream, but is there an audience of women moviegoers ready to support the ones who do?

So what is there to do? How can these issues be resolved? Easy, even though, as Manohla Dargis pointed out above, Hollywood doesn't always function as a perfect moneymaking machine. They are still a business which must respond to their customers. So boycott films which speak down to the modern woman by marketing to her in the same way they Barbies are marketed to little girls (show the beautiful girl, show the boyfriend, show the beautiful house, show the boyfriend, show how perfect life can be if you succumb to the fantasy). Its time that we stopped allowing Hollywood to turn women into little girls and men into little boys (a different article maybe, but its the same idea... Transformers anyone?) and started to dictate what we want in our movies instead of allowing admen to do it for us.