Authors: Hadley Freeman
Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (23 page)
The sexualisation of young women onscreen is – as will surprise precisely no one – getting more extreme. In a study of the top 500 films of 2012, 31.6 per cent of female characters were featured in sexy clothes (compared to 7 per cent of male ones) and 31 per cent were at least partially naked (compared to 9.4 per cent of male ones). Even more creepily, actresses aged between thirteen and twenty are more likely to be sexualised than those between twenty-one and thirty-nine (ugh – twenty-one! Who would want to see such a hag naked, amirite??), and the number of near-naked female teenagers increased onscreen between 2007 and 2012 by 32.5 per cent.
In 2011 women accounted for 33 per cent of all characters, but only 11 per cent of protagonists. In 2013 one journalist calculated that 90 per cent of the film screenings showing near her in Washington DC were stories about men, and the ratio would have been even worse if she didn’t live in a major city. That year, women made up only 15 per cent of protagonists in the biggest movies from the US. And as
New York
magazine pointed out, it has been thus for the past twenty-five years.
Statistics don’t necessarily tell the full story, of course. For a start, the figures from 1980–89 don’t look much better: according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center in Pennsylvania, only 29 per cent of the ‘main characters’ in a movie were women. But as Amy Bleakley, who conducted the more recent study, points out, they did not take into consideration the context of the women’s roles, such as whether they were the protagonists or near nameless girlfriends.
‘We can see that women are not onscreen any more,’ says Melissa Silverstein, founder and editor of the blog Women and Hollywood. ‘They are not protagonists in films and they’re not leaders, and this says a lot about how women are valued in our culture.’
‘Women have advanced, while much of the movie industry has not,’ writes the
New York Times
’s film critic Manohla Dargis.
The theory that women are being pushed out of movies in order to appeal to the Chinese market doesn’t necessarily stand up, Davis says. After all, according to the latest report from the institute, China has a pretty good record in featuring women in its own films: in films made by China aimed at children and young people released between 1 January 2010 and 1 May 2013, 30 per cent featured casts with a gender balance. In equivalent films from the US, precisely 0 films featured a gender balance. In fact, according to the study, it’s not China that’s the problem, but America. When looking at, again, equivalent films made by the UK, 38 per cent featured a female character, 30 per cent featured a female lead and 20 per cent featured casts with a gender balance. In US/UK co-productions, these figures plummeted to, respectively, 23.6 per cent, 0 and 0.
But Davis stops short of suggesting that any kind of nefariousness lies behind this. Instead, she puts it down to something that is, in fact, worse: blitheness. ‘There is no plot against women in my industry; creators are simply not aware of how many female characters they’re leaving out!’ she says.
Amy Bleakley suggests that the increasing reliance on violence in movies also plays a part: ‘Some of the more profitable movies (including PG-13) feature a lot of violence content, which historically has primarily involved male characters,’ she says. ‘[Also], most successful writers and directors are men, and they may be drawn toward telling stories through perspectives and characters they are most familiar or comfortable with – i.e., other men.’
Kathleen Turner, Davis’s cast-mate in
The Accidental Tourist
, also played an extraordinarily wide range of roles in the eighties, and this was a conscious decision on her part: ‘Once I have explored and created a character, I have no desire to repeat it so I automatically look for the thing that’s the opposite,’ she says, in that voice that’s only gotten more impressive with age. ‘So from playing a femme fatale in
Body Heat
I went to
The Man with Two Brains
which is a take-off on the femme fatale, to
Romancing the Stone
, which is a woman who doesn’t know anything about her sexual power, then to
Crimes of Passion
which is a woman who sells herself on Sunset Boulevard for $50. Pretty much each role is a contrast to the one before.’
These days, she says, not only does she see fewer studio films for women (‘and that’s just fucking unbelievable’
fn9
) but less variety in the roles: ‘For years I have been rather disgusted by the studio films coming out of Hollywood because the women are such clichés. Women in particular today are encouraged to build on their successes, by which they mean to play the character that sells, and I don’t know if audiences really want to see that. That poor woman, Jennifer Aniston, has been playing the same role for twenty years. I’m like, come on, honey, aren’t you bored?’
fn10
Paul Feig agrees with Geena Davis up to a point: yes, he says, there’s no nefarious plot against women in Hollywood, but women are being deliberately excluded from movies. ‘Right after I did
Bridesmaids
, a very successful producer said to me, “You’re going to have to be careful because you’re going to be put in this niche of directing women and that’s a problem.”’ He continues: ‘You know, Hollywood is not an altruistic town. We are in business and if someone gives you a compelling business reason [for not having women in a movie], then you have to actively change that because the idea of going, “Well, OK, I guess we can’t do it!” – that’s a non-starter for me. You say, how do we solve this?’
The answer, he decided, was to make big commercial movies that starred women that would be so successful that ‘there would no longer be an argument’. But he had to wait a while until he had enough power in the industry to do this. In 2007 his friend and frequent colleague Judd Apatow, who by then had quite a lot of power, gave him the script for
Bridesmaids
‘and I fell in love with it – the idea that all these women have roles in it, it seemed like a dream to me,’ he says.
Bridesmaids
was, fortunately, a huge success (‘And thank God. I was in a terrible panic half the time making the movie thinking, If we fuck this up … But how terrible that there was such pressure!’ Feig recalls), and on the back of that, he was able to make
The Heat
, a female buddy cop movie. When we talk, he has just finished making a female spy movie (‘I’m a huge fan of James Bond and I just thought – Why not make it with a woman? That’s interesting!’) and he has just been confirmed to write and direct an all-female version of
Ghostbusters
‘because that sounds really fun to me!’.
‘You know, if Hollywood thought monkeys starring in movies were the highest grossing thing, then all you’d see is monkeys starring in movies. You can’t look to Hollywood to fight a cause, you have to look to individual filmmakers to care and to do it well enough so that it makes money,’ he says. ‘And the success of [female-led international hit] movies like
The Hunger Games
and
Lucy
starts to open the door. Why just sit there with the door closed?’
Feig’s films are probably the closest Hollywood will come today to making classic women’s movies. In
Bridesmaids
and especially
The Heat
, what’s at stake isn’t whether a woman will Get a Man but rather the maintenance of a female friendship.
Bridesmaids
has plenty of rom with its com, and it does end with the obligatory closing-scene kiss, but the film takes pains to emphasise that the real happy ending comes from the two main female characters becoming friends again and the rest of the bridesmaids becoming friends with each other. Neither of these films has the gentle domesticity of
Terms of Endearment
or
Steel Magnolias
, but they were clearly made by someone who likes women, respects them and finds them interesting. Feig might have to front-load his films with some gross-out gags (
Bridesmaids
) and action (
The Heat
) and a few too many self-deprecating gags from Melissa McCarthy, but if that means good movies are being made that star women and get proper distribution, that feels like a trade-off worth making.
So does he think things are going to get better for women in movies?
‘Oh yeah. It’s so obvious that [women starring in movies] draws people to theatre and makes money. Things just have to change. They have to. People won’t accept it any more.’
TOP FIVE BREAKAGES OF THE FOURTH WALL
5 Eriq La Salle,
Coming to America
Before he was punching the air in the credits to
ER
, La Salle was Darryl, the evil greasy-haired boyfriend in
Coming to America
. At the end of the movie his ex-girlfriend’s little sister wants to get her paws into that greasy hair, and La Salle can only look to the audience for help.
4 Jon Cryer,
Pretty in Pink
When Duckie finally gets his happy ending at the prom, and shares it with the audience, it almost makes up for the fact that the ending doesn’t make any sense at all.
3 Rick Moranis,
Spaceballs
Moranis talking directly to the audience? That’s an eighties peak for me right there.
2 Matthew Broderick,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Nobody has yet bettered Ferris’s skill at talking to the camera, and that includes Matthew Broderick.
1 Eddie Murphy,
Trading Places
The moment when the evil Duke brothers are patronising Billy Ray Valentine about commodities, and he looks dead at the camera. Total Murphy perfection.
Even today, thirty-five years later, screenwriter Bob Gale can still remember the moment ‘vividly’. It was a hot day in August 1980, and he was in the middle of promoting his latest film,
Used Cars
, a very funny satire about car salesmen starring Kurt Russell and directed by Robert Zemeckis. The promotion tour had taken Gale back to his hometown of St Louis, Missouri, and he was at his parents’ house, in a suburb a little way out of the city. ‘One afternoon, I was digging around in my parents’ basement – I don’t exactly recall why – and I discovered my father’s high school yearbook,’ he says.
Gale thumbed through it and discovered, to his surprise, that his father had been the president of his high school class. He’d never mentioned that. This made Gale think about the kids who had been involved in student government when he’d been at school, and how much he sneered at them. In fact, he’d been on the committee to abolish student government.
‘I wondered, would I have liked my dad if I’d been at school with him?’ he says. ‘Would I have even been friends with him?’
When he got back to Los Angeles, he called Zemeckis: ‘Bob, I think I got an idea …’
Despite what most teenagers would like to admit, parents are an essential part of their life, for better or worse. But only smart teen films appreciate that and the bone-deep complications this entails: ‘I rag on you a lot about your family, but it’s only because I’m jealous – it must feel good to have someone looking out for you like that,’ says the parent-less Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson) to her best friend Keith (Eric Stoltz) in 1987’s
Some Kind of Wonderful
.
‘Uh, sometimes,’ replies Keith with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm.
It is nice to have someone care about you when you’re a teenager – it’s just a shame it has to be your parents.
You can always tell whether a teen film is good or not by how smart it is about the parents. Sure, there are some decent teen films that don’t feature parents at all:
The Breakfast Club
is obviously great,
The Outsiders
is OK in a pretentious, overly styled way. But in the main, a teen film that doesn’t have any well-written parental figures feels like a movie that was made by a studio trying to anticipate what teenage audiences want as opposed to a film capturing what teenagers are actually like.
Parents in teen films have gone through more growing pains than any adolescent. In the 1940s, when the word ‘teenager’ was first coined, parents were the helpful patriarchs who the teenagers aspired to become, meaning the teenaged characters (often played by young Mickey Rooney or Judy Garland) would say realistic dialogue like ‘Oh Dad, I hope I grow up to be just like you one day.’ In teen films of the 1950s and 1960s, when studios realised that all these baby boom teenagers preferred films that wholly validated them as opposed to patronised the hell out of them, parents became the representatives of conventional morality that the teenagers were rebelling against with their sexy modernity. By the 1970s, when teen films were being made by filmmakers who were young enough to have once been dubbed teenagers themselves but were now old enough to feel fondly about their youth, parents were either sentimentalised to the point of blandness (
Grease
,
American Graffiti
), or as doomed as the kids (
The Last Picture Show
,
Carrie
).
It wasn’t until the 1980s that parents really came into their own. In the best eighties teen films they are invariably among the most fun characters in the movie, given many of the best lines and played by supremely talented actors momentarily slumming it in a kids’ movie and having a ball with it, such as Harry Dean Stanton all sad-eyed and sweet-voiced in
Pretty in Pink
, John Lithgow enjoyably preaching fire and brimstone in
Footloose
, and John Mahoney playing a very different kind of paternal figure years before he became Frasier’s dad in
Say Anything
.
fn1
Partly this is because they assumed an entirely new kind of role in these movies, and partly it’s because of the social attitudes of the time, and no other film made before or since encapsulates these changes more enjoyably than
Back to the Future
.