Of all the many extraordinary qualities that eighties Hollywood movies possess—the glorious hairstyles, their respect for power ballads, the endearing amount of confidence they had in the acting abilities of Steve Guttenberg—their depiction of women is not generally cited as being among their strengths. Eighties movies, the theory has long gone, were absolutely awful when it came to women, and no one argued this more vociferously at the time than feminist critics. “The backlash [against feminism] shaped much of Hollywood’s portrayal of women in the eighties,” Susan Faludi writes in the 1990s Backlash, in her famous chapter looking specifically at mainstream eighties movies and how they expressed the social backlash against second-wave feminism. “Hollywood restated and reinforced the backlash thesis: women were unhappy because they were too free; their liberation had denied them marriage and motherhood . . . [whereas] in the 1970s, the film industry would have a brief infatuation with the feminist cause.”
Faludi is right about one thing: between the seventies and the eighties movies did change their attitude toward feminism. In the seventies there was a slew of overtly feminist films about independent women, such as Private Benjamin, My Brilliant Career, Norma Rae, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Marriage was shown to be a prison for women in films such as, most famously, The Stepford Wives. Of course, not all movies were so charmed with feminism: in 1979’s bafflingly much-lauded Kramer vs. Kramer, feminism is portrayed as something kooky and selfish. It is explicitly blamed for the breakdown of Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and Joanna’s (Meryl Streep) marriageI and, the movie insinuates, will probably result in the couple’s doe-eyed son spending the rest of his life hating women BECAUSE FEMINISM RUINS EVERYTHING. But it is fair to say that movies weren’t as explicitly interested in feminism in the eighties as they were in the seventies—with the noted and glorious exception of 1980’s 9 to 5. In this still very funny film, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and the glorious Lily Tomlin fight their sexist pig of a boss (Dabney Coleman) for equal pay, flexible working hours, and an in-office nursery. (Come back, Dolly, Jane, and Lily! We working women of the twenty-first century still need you!)
The popular argument that the eighties were terrible for women in movies is primarily based on one ridiculously OTT and all-dominating piece of evidence: Fatal Attraction. Directed by British former adman Adrian Lyne, Fatal Attraction was so clearly designed to needle liberal women that it might well have been written by Fox News. The film’s message is that women who work and aren’t married by the decrepit age of thirty-six are pathetic, crazed with baby hunger, and deserve to be shot by good and humble housewives (I am not exaggerating—this is literally the message of the movie). Along with S&M romcom 91/2 Weeks, which was also directed by Lyne, Fatal Attraction tends to skew all discussions about women in eighties movies, and that’s a shame.
Sure, Lyne and his fantasies about how all women are masochistic bunny boilers are pretty attention-grabbing, but to let them grab all the attention is essentially doing Lyne’s work for him.II Because, contrary to what Lyne seemed to think, there is a lot more to eighties women than stalkers and masochists. There were so many interesting female film characters in the eighties, and so many great movies about women. Not all of them were explicitly feminist, but the fact that these films were made at all, with largely female casts, featuring female stories, feels so feminist compared with today’s movies they make Andrea Dworkin look a bit watered down. So much so, in fact, that feminist critics—ones who grew up reading Faludi—now look back to the eighties as the last high point for women in movies: “The status of women in movies has gotten worse since the 1980s,” wrote journalist Amanda Hess, in a 2014 discussion of Backlash and eighties films.
“Just look at 1983, for example. I don’t know what was going on but you had Yentl, Terms of Endearment, and Silkwood—all big films for women. Then there were movies like Frances, Places in the Heart, Gorillas in the Mist. . . . But now, well, we know what’s happened now,” says film writer Melissa Silverstein.
This is all true, and it is dismayingly impossible to imagine these films being made now. But let’s not underestimate perhaps an even more mainstream depiction of women in eighties movies, and one that is equally difficult to envisage existing today: the classic women’s movies.
Most people know about the Bechdel Test, which was coined by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel to ascertain how well represented women are in a film by posing the following rubric:
1. It has to have at least two women in it . . .
2. Who talk to each other . . .
3. About something besides a man.
Well, I’d like to coin the Magnolia Test, named for a movie that is particularly close to my heart, which judges whether or not a movie is a proper women’s movie:
1. The cast is largely, maybe even solely female . . .
2. The female characters talk to each other about a million things other than men and genuinely like each other . . .
3. And the relationship between the women is far more important than any they have with a man . . .
4. Bonus points if any of the following are in the film: Shirley MacLaine, Dolly Parton, Bette Midler, Olympia Dukakis. Triple for Sally Field.
In an ideal world, these films would just be known as “movies,” as opposed to “women’s movies.” But as the ongoing success of Michael Bay proves, we do not live in an ideal world. And so, for too long, when it comes to leading roles in movies, women have been seen as the exception rather than the norm. Movies that focus on women’s stories are—now more than ever—dismissed as “niche,” even though women make up more than half the human race and (arguably more to the point) cinema audiences. So the gendering is, gratingly, necessary, just as, apparently, Michael Bay is to Hollywood’s current financial success.
Some people snark about women’s movies and dismiss them as “domestic,” as though that were a negative thing. Home is a place most of us know and to write off “domestic” as an embarrassment is to dismiss the lives that millions and millions of women lead as worthless. I’ve also heard complaints that whereas men get action movies and westerns, women “only” get domestic dramas and big ol’ weepies. Well, if I want to see movies set in jungles or outer space, I will, and thanks to eighties movies I can see those movies starring kick-ass women in the form of, respectively, Romancing the Stone and Aliens.
What I love about classic women’s movies is that they tell women that their daily lives are interesting. Westerns and action movies and other genres considered to be the area of menfolk do not, because they do not depict lives led by most men, although heaven knows there are plenty of other movies out there that depict nothing but the daily lives of men. Women’s movies show women living normal daily lives—raising their children, dealing with breast cancer, laughing with their friends, contending with unfaithful husbands, fighting sexist bosses: in other words, things that women around the world deal with every day.
These movies also respect the value of women’s emotional lives and show women talking to each other about things other than men. Men see this about themselves in pretty much any other movie. Women? Not so much. In women’s movies, women exist in their own right, not as appendages, not as lonely spinsters, or idealized quarries, or someone’s wife or someone’s mother, but as funny, sad, angry, kind, supportive, independent human beings—and how many movies can claim that? So yeah, sure, men have their westerns and their stoicism and tumbleweed. But women get to bond over cheesecake with Dolly Parton. If men make sneering comments about women’s films, it’s because they’re jealous, and I really can’t blame them.
9 to 5 amply passes the Magnolia Test, as do those ne plus ultra eighties women’s movies, Terms of Endearment and Beaches, two of the most classic women’s weepies of all time. These movies starred women, were made for women, told distinctly women’s stories involving breast cancer, straying husbands, and motherhood, and the few men on-screen are repeatedly shown to be a disappointment, whereas the women are there for one another until death. Beaches comes with the obvious added bonus of being the last film to provide truly great hairbrush-microphone-in-front-of-the-mirror singing, thanks to Bette Midler’s irresistible soundtrack, a quality frustratingly lacking from movies today, and it serves as some distraction from Barbara Hershey’s lips seemingly inflating and deflating during the film. Terms of Endearment is probably not a film you’ve seen recently, but you should—it is as delightful as you’d expect a movie to be featuring Shirley MacLaine as a crotchety busybody and Jack Nicholson as her astronaut (!) lover. But the real heart of the film is the relationship between MacLaine and her charmingly daffy daughter (Debra Winger), who, while married to one useless man (Jeff Daniels) and being wooed by another (John Lithgow), develops breast cancer. These two films are both sad but, like the best weepies, they are also very funny, and this brings me to a quick defense of women’s weepies.
American feminist film critic Mollie Haskell, writing a decade before the eighties, was very dismissive of women’s movies and, in particular, women’s weepies in her classic text From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies:III “The woman’s film,” she writes, “fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. The weepies are founded on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative aesthetic whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but by self-pity and tears to accept, rather than reject, their lot. That there should be a need and an audience for such an opiate suggests an unholy amount of real misery.”
Well, first, unlike Haskell, I don’t see too much wrong with providing fodder for masturbation, especially if that other person is frustrated. Seems like simple generosity to me. Second, the idea that crying at sad movies is a form of transference is, to be frank, grade-A baloney. A movie that makes you both laugh and cry is as satisfying as a pop song that is both moving and ecstatic.IV It’s about the pleasure of experiencing the full gamut of emotions from a single piece of art, that feeling of standing up at the end, exhausted by the emotional pummeling but still giggling at some of the jokes. After all (cue stirring instrumental eighties women’s movie theme song), isn’t that what life itself is like? I can understand why some critics—and especially feminist critics—object to the trope of a woman dying in the women’s movie (belated spoiler: someone dies in both Terms of Endearment and Beaches). But that is, in fact, only a tiny part of both of those films: they are really about female friendship and mothers and daughters. It’s just that the deaths ramp up the tears and the tears are part of the way female audiences (by which, once again, I obviously mean “me”) bond with the movies and bond with each other while watching the movie. A movie that makes you cry is a movie you have to love, and crying while watching a movie with a female friend is as intimate as getting drunk with them.
But the really telling detail is that these movies make (the largely female) audiences cry over the death of a woman. So often, women who die in movies (and books) are either idealized or completely anonymous, and it’s impossible to cry over such characters today (I have never, for example, cried over the death of tedious Miss Melanie in Gone with the Wind). But with the women in Terms of Endearment and Beaches, we got to know them pretty well—their sexual desires, their flaws, their jealousies. That female audiences still cry at the end of these films is a testament to how hard the films work to make these female characters feel real.
This is why, of all the great eighties women’s movies, my favorite one is Steel Magnolias. I watch this film at least twice a year (and always if I happen to come across it on TV). It still makes me laugh out loud (“I’m not crazy, M’Lynn—I’ve just been in a very bad MOOD for forty years,” Shirley MacLaine’s character, Ouiser, says to Sally Field’s M’Lynn at one point, and that quote in particular has proven astonishingly useful in real life) and, yes, I still cry, every time, at the end. “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion,” says Dolly Parton’s character, Truvy, in the film, which could be the motto of the film, and it’s apparently everyone else’s, too. Twenty-five years on, this film is still adored, so much so that it was remade (badly, sadlyV) in 2012 with an all-black cast.
“People still talk to me about Steel Magnolias today—today!” says one of the film’s stars, Olympia Dukakis. “At benefits I ask women to put their hands up if they’ve seen the film five times, ten times, fifteen times. The other day I got up to twenty-seven times. These women had seen the movie twenty-seven times! What a draw that film has. It tells women that female friendship is profound, and women watch it together and cry together, still.”
But even more important than weeping and hooting is the way it teaches audiences to expect more from movies when it comes to the representation of women.
For a start, this movie stars six female characters and there is not a single bitch fight. Not once do they even fight over a man. Imagine that! What next, a movie suggesting women can work together without throwing tampons at one another? A movie suggesting women like and respect each other—get outta town! Each of the six female characters gets her own story, some more lightly sketched out than others: Truvy (Parton) has to deal with a deadbeat husband and son; Annelle (Daryl Hannah) is coming out of a bad marriage and making a new life for herself; Clairee (Olympia Dukakis) has just entered widowhood; Ouiser (MacLaine) is starting a new relationship; M’Lynn (Field) is facing the loss of her daughter; and Shelby (Julia Roberts) is giving everything she has to have a much-longed-for baby. These are all classic women’s stories, acted by six actresses who, between them, had an average age of fifty when the film came out.
It is impossible to imagine a studio film being made today featuring such everyday, even “domestic” stories about women so unforgivably north of thirty-five. The only vaguely equivalent film that has been released in the past decade is The Help, in which the five leading actresses (Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard) had an average age of 34.8 between them when the film came out and instead of just focusing on real women’s lives, it took as its plot one of Hollywood’s most beloved storylines: white people solve racism. In fact, Hollywood hasn’t made a classic women’s movie since the nineties with Fried Green Tomatoes and A League of Their Own.
But if the telltale sign of a classic women’s movie is that it illuminates the reality of women’s lives, then it’s no surprise that Steel Magnolias is so good, because the reason it was written was to illuminate one particular woman’s life. When pediatric nurse Susan Robinson, a sweet-faced brunette from Louisiana, died suddenly in 1985 from complications stemming from diabetes at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind a two-year-old son, her brother, Bob Harling, was distraught. But when his sister’s widower, Pat, remarried a mere five months after Susan’s death, he knew he had to do something. “It was very, very hard. I mean, it was just five months which was a little, you know,” says Harling, from his house in Natchitoches, Louisiana, his and Susan’s hometown. “Susan had gone through all this out of devotion to her son and when I heard him call another woman ‘mama,’ I thought, No way, he needs to know the story of his mother and his grandmother.”
Harling had worked as an actor and had never written “a thing” before. But he became, he says, “obsessed” with telling Susan’s story. So, with the encouragement of some friends who were writers, he wrote it as a play about six women set in a beauty parlor, renaming his sister “Shelby.” “I wrote it very quickly because I wanted to capture how the women spoke. But I had no idea that anyone would do anything with it, I just wanted to make a document that celebrated Susan,” he says in his gentle Louisiana accent.
The first thing that someone did with it was to turn it into an off-Broadway play, and it opened to huge critical praise. To Harling’s amazement, Hollywood studios then approached him, asking him to adapt it as a screenplay. This being the eighties, the fact that the play had an all-female cast did not dissuade producers from thinking this play could make a hit film, and there was a bidding war. “I think it spoiled me for the rest of my career, actually, because we had so many suitors for the film,” Harling says.
But one producer, Ray Stark, knew that for the movie to work, it had to feel real, and the best way to start that was to film it in the town where the story actually happened. And so, when Stark suggested making the movie in Natchitoches, among the places that Susan had known and the people who had known her, Harling signed with him.
Harling and his parents, Robert and Margaret, then had the extraordinary experience of watching their lives and the lives of their friends being played out in their hometown by some of the best-known actors of their day: “I had what was called ‘casting consultation,’ and they were very generous about that and let me hang around for all that.” He smiles. “But when they come to you and say, Sally [Field] wants to play your mother and Shirley [MacLaine] wants to play Ouiser, and Olympia [Dukakis]—she just won the Oscar two or three weeks ago [Best Supporting Actress, in Moonstruck]—she’ll be Clairee, well, you’re not going to say no.”
Being a southern family, they were, understandably, especially excited at the prospect of Dolly Parton playing the beauty parlor owner, Truvy: “Dolly was a little more glamorous than the original woman Truvy was based on, but that’s just to be expected,” says Harling, with southern sangfroid.
Meg Ryan was originally cast to play Shelby, but she dropped out when she got the lead in When Harry Met Sally. The near-unknown Julia Roberts was cast in her stead “and as soon as I saw that smile I said, ‘There’s Susan,’ ” Harling recalls.
Roberts visited the Harlings frequently, looking through their family albums and hearing stories about Susan from people who knew her in the town. Field, on the other hand, kept more to herself, wanting to create her own character, “and my mother, being a southern belle, would never want to impose. Also, if you’re a woman from a small southern town and Sally Field is playing you in a movie, you go, Okay, you go, girl, whatever you do is fine by me.”
Although some things in the film were changed for dramatic effect—whereas Shelby collapses at home with her baby son, Susan in fact fell into a coma in the hospital—the movie was remarkably true to the women and their stories, Harling says. His mother did in fact donate her kidney to her daughter, his sister did risk everything to have a baby, and the women the characters were based on talked just as they do in the film, in “bumper sticker slogans,” as Harling puts it: “Your husband is a boil on the butt of humanity”; “If you can’t say anything nice, come sit by me.”
“What I wanted to show was the strength of these women, and the strength they gave each other,” says Harling, who then went on to write Soapdish, also starring Sally Field, in the nineties. “I enjoy writing women’s emotional journeys, but it’s hard today to get movies made that aren’t based on comic books. Character-driven films are the domain of the independents which a studio is never going to attack because they’re all corporations. It’s getting harder and harder to [get films made] with human roles, and a part of that is that it’s much harder to get films made with women’s roles.”
“I don’t think that Steel Magnolias would be considered ‘industry friendly’ today,” says Dukakis with more than a touch of wryness.
Where once studios made women’s movies, now they make “the negative sisterhood movie,” to use Wesley Morris’s memorable phrase. This is what the women’s movie has become today and it is a bafflingly popular genre, one that suggests the women hate each other and should be duly punished for their stupidity by having to spend their lives fighting over men and being humiliated on-screen as much as possible. You know these movies: they’re 2009’s Bride Wars, 2014’s The Other Woman, the toxic glut of overly monikered films like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, He’s Just Not That Into You, I Don’t Know How She Does It, pretty much anything starring Kate Hudson.
One could argue that this genre was kick-started in the eighties. Working Girl, as discussed in the chapter on Baby Boom, is a perfect example of the genre, in which Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver engage in a wearily predictable catfight over their job, ostensibly, but boring Harrison Ford, in actuality. The Witches of Eastwick could also be described as an anti-sisterhood movie, but that film—starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Cher, all obsessed with Jack Nicholson’s penis—ultimately satirized the genre.
Negative sisterhood movies are now the default style for what were once romcoms and women’s movies: movies consisting of women hating each other and competing with one another. What’s strange is that these films are all less successful than the traditional women’s movies such as Steel Magnolias ever were. So if you want to know how little Hollywood cares about women today, watch a negative sisterhood movie.
Everyone knows that the representation of women in movies today is bad. Even Faludi, who raged so passionately against the representation of women in eighties movies, had to admit that, in the early nineties, film roles for women had dropped so far that male characters made up two-thirds of people on-screen, and that number hasn’t changed since. When Faludi returned to Backlash, she wrote in the new introduction to the 2005 edition: “Back in the 80s . . . were single women breaking courtship rules and taking the sexual initiative? ‘You’ll turn into a psycho killer and meet your maker in an overflowing bathtub!’ the Hollywood mullahs decreed. Ah, the good old days.” After all, she concluded, “There are some things worse than a backlash.”
In 2013, women made up only 21.8 percent of the crews of the one hundred top-grossing films in the United States, and that number has remained pretty steady for the past twenty years, although the numbers get worse the higher up the credits you go. In 2014, for example, only 1.9 percent of the hundred top-grossing films released in the United States were directed by women.VI It’s impossible not to see the connection between that and the fact that between 2007 and 2014 women made up only 30.2 percent of all speaking or named characters in the hundred top-grossing films released in the United States. As Manohla Dargis put it, “For every 2.3 male characters who say ‘Dude,’ there is just one woman saying, ‘Hello?!’ ”VII But people within the industry say it is far from the complete picture and what’s actually changed is what studios will allow them to do. “I love directing women but, for so long, it’s just been a nonstarter,” says Paul Feig, the director of female-led hits Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spy. “You’d go into meetings and people would say, ‘Oh, a female lead? Can’t you make her male?’ A movie starring a male is normal but a movie starring a woman is a gimmick, and it just didn’t make any sense to me.”
And this is as true of movies aimed at children as at adults. In 2006 Feig signed on to direct the children’s film Unaccompanied Minors, about a boy and his little sister causing chaos in an airport.
“It wasn’t until I got into the rewriting that I learned it was based on a real story that had happened to a girl and her sister. Again you go, ‘Gosh, they just changed the lead girl to a boy—that’s really aggravating!’ It was never entertained that it could have been a girl in the lead. It wasn’t even an issue,” he recalls with a laugh of frustration. It is actually quite a common practice in Hollywood movies to change the gender of a lead character from female to male. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 director Denis Villeneuve said that the screenwriter of their thriller Sicario had been urged to change the gender of the script’s female lead.
“The screenplay was written some years ago and people were afraid that the lead part was a female character. I know several times [Taylor Sheridan] had been asked to rewrite the role. . . . But these guys had the guts to keep it as it was.”
Ultimately, the role was played by Emily Blunt to critical acclaim.
“And this whole debate about whether female superheroes can open their own movie—just fucking do it!” adds Feig. “What is the big debate about it? Why does Wonder Woman have to be part of an ensemble? Why can’t she come out of the gate in her own movie? Why are we so precious about it? To me it’s not even an issue, but that’s why it’s so funny that it’s an issue!”
The common argument in defense of the current low representation of women in movies is that studios aren’t sexist—they’re simply looking after the economics. So while women will see movies starring men and women, men will see only movies starring men—in other words, it’s the audiences who are sexist. This problem is hardly exclusive to the film world. The books website Goodreads recently surveyed 40,000 of its members and found that readers overwhelmingly preferred books written by authors of their own gender: 90 percent of men’s 50 most-read books were by men and 45 of the 50 most-read books by women were written by women. Currer Bell, George Sands, George Eliot, and Robert Galbraith didn’t need 40,000 people to confirm that readers judge authors by their gender.VIII
Yet just as the Goodreads survey found that male and female readers alike both rated women authors more highly than male ones, so audiences—male and female—have repeatedly proven how much they like movies with female protagonists. Recent films featuring female protagonists including Bridesmaids, Frozen, The Help, Gravity, and The Heat have all been enormous successes, while male-led ones like The Lone Ranger and After Earth have flopped. In fact, the biggest box-office disasters of all time all featured male protagonists, including 47 Ronin (Keanu Reeves), The 13th Warrior (Antonio Banderas), The Lone Ranger (Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer), Ishtar (Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman), and Heaven’s Gate (Christopher Walken and Kris Kristofferson). As yet, no one has taken the failure of these movies as proof that men aren’t funny, men can’t carry a movie, or that maybe audiences just don’t like to watch men.IX
The fact is, women’s movies—the few that still come out—are generally very profitable. They don’t make as much money as many men’s films, but that’s because action movies (which generally star men) are bigger productions with bigger marketing pushes, but also with higher costs. In fact, Silverstein’s Women and Hollywood blog found in 2013 that movies with a female protagonist that year earned 20 percent more than movies with just a male protagonist, making $116 million compared to male-led ones making $97 million, even though, out of the 100 movies they sampled, only 16 had female protagonists. But as Amanda Hess pointed out: “We still don’t know whether gender equality in films would constitute a smart economic choice for Hollywood, because we’ve never gotten anywhere close to testing that assumption.”
And so one woman, who started acting in the eighties, decided to try to rectify that. “Thelma & Louise [which came out in 1991] was my first experience with the difference between how media respond to something and how it turns out in real life,” recalls Geena Davis. “All of the press was about, ‘Get ready for many more female buddy pictures and road trip films.’ And then . . . nothing. Same thing happened with [1992’s] A League of Their Own: ‘Proof that women’s sports movies can make huge box office!’ Name all of the female sports movies since then, right? This happens every few years, with the press anointing yet another female-starring film as the One That Will Change Everything, but nothing happens.”
Davis made her film debut as a rarely clothed starlet in 1982’s Tootsie, sharing a dressing room with a somewhat embarrassed cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman. Her roles throughout that decade were remarkably, even hilariously, varied, including playing an insect’s girlfriend in The Fly, a temptress of aliens in Earth Girls Are Easy, a rubber-faced ghost in Beetlejuice, and a mercurial dog trainer in The Accidental Tourist, for which she won an Oscar. She still acts occasionally today—she had a small part in 2013’s In a World, about sexism in the movie trailer business—but, like many actresses before her, she found that studios stopped calling once she was over forty:
When I was starting out it was the era of Meryl Streep, Sally Field, Jessica Lange, and Glenn Close getting nominated for movies with spectacular female roles in them. I had heard that great parts for women drop off at forty, but I thought, These women will change everything. It won’t be a problem anymore when I get there. But it didn’t change. Before forty, I was averaging about one movie a year. During my forties, I only made one movie. That’s a big change. But I look back on that decade when I was coming up and there were so many movies about interesting women: Frances, Places in the Heart. They were the anomaly then, which is why women were still in the minority then according to the statistics, but those movies were still made.
In 2004, while staying at home with her then-toddler daughter, Davis noticed something odd about the movies and TV shows aimed at children: there were notably few female characters, and this “absolutely floored” her: “Then something else shocked me: NO one seemed to be seeing what I was seeing: not my friends (until I pointed it out), and not the decision makers in Hollywood, either. Whenever I brought the subject up, if I happened to be meeting with a studio executive or director, to a person the response was, ‘Oh no, that’s been fixed.’ And they would very often name a movie with one female character in it as proof that gender inequality had been fixed! That’s when I knew I needed the data.”
Davis ended up sponsoring the largest amount of research ever done on gender depictions in entertainment media, covering more than a twenty-year span at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Inspired by this, she then launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2007. The data the research and institute uncovered appalled her: “In family-rated films, crowd and group scenes contain only seventeen percent female characters. Seventeen percent! In animation and live-action. That means the fictitious worlds that are being created for kids have only about a seventeen percent female population. Why, in the twenty-first century, would we be training kids to see women as taking up far less space in the world than men?” she asks.
Nor is it just the numbers of women who are being represented: it’s how they’re represented, full-stop, says Davis. “Female characters in animated G-rated movies [U.S. equivalent of a U], made for the youngest of kids, wear the same amount of sexually revealing clothing as the female characters in R-rated [U.S. equivalent of 18] movies. Astounding, isn’t it? And in research, there are no fuzzy definitions; this is not sexy appearance in a generalized way. It’s specifically revealing clothing. These findings highlight how seemingly innocuous children’s fare can be sending a damaging message to kids: it’s teaching kids to see women and girls as less important than men and boys, and that girls should be judged on their sex appeal,” she says.
The sexualization of young women on-screen is—as will surprise precisely no one—getting more extreme. In a study of the top five hundred films of 2012, 31.6 percent of female characters were featured in sexy clothes (compared to 7 percent of male ones) and 31 percent were at least partially naked (compared to 9.4 percent of male ones). Even more creepily, actresses aged between 13 and 20 are more likely to be sexualized than those between 21 and 39 (ugh—21! who would want to see such a hag naked, amirite??), and the number of near-naked female teenagers increased on-screen between 2007 and 2012 by 32.5 percent.
In 2011 women accounted for 33 percent of all characters, but only 11 percent of protagonists. In 2013 one journalist calculated that 90 percent of the film screenings showing near her in Washington, D.C., 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 percent of protagonists in the biggest movies from the United States. 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, at the University of Pennsylvania, only 29 percent 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 on-screen anymore,” says journalist Melissa Silverstein. “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’ 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 of featuring women in its own films: in films made by China aimed at children and young people released between January 1, 2010, and May 1, 2013, 30 percent featured casts with a gender balance. In equivalent films from the United States, precisely zero 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 United Kingdom, 38 percent featured a female character, 30 percent featured a female lead, and 20 percent featured casts with a gender balance. In U.S.-British coproductions, these figures plummeted to, respectively, 23.6 percent, zero, and zero.
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.
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 violent 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 castmate 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 takeoff 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 fifty dollars. Pretty much each role is a contrast to the one before.”
These days, Turner says, she sees not only fewer studio films for women (“and that’s just fucking unbelievable”X) but also 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 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?”XI
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, okay, I guess we can’t do it!’—that’s a nonstarter for me. You say, how do we solve this?”
The answer, he decided long ago, 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 awhile 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 Spy, a very funny and hugely fun female spy film, starring Melissa McCarthy, Miranda Hart, and Allison Janney, three women all over the age of forty and hugely talented (“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 emphasize 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. By the time Feig made Spy, he had enough clout to go against the grain. The movie features a heroine explicitly rejecting the romantic ending so as to go out for dinner with her female best friend instead. None 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 frontload his films with some gross-out gags (Bridesmaids) and action (The Heat, Spy) and a few too many self-deprecating jokes 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 theaters and makes money. Things just have to change. They have to. People won’t accept it anymore.” And he’s right—they won’t. Ever since it was announced, there have been plenty of online grumblings about Feig’s plans for an all-women’s Ghostbusters, which are all about as logical and convincing as the similar grumpings about the prospect of a black James Bond. “The Ghostbusters were always men!” “You can’t just change a man’s skin tone!” “What next, a gay Superman?” and so on. (It turns out that there are A LOT of adults out there who don’t quite understand the difference between fictional characters and actual people.) But away from the loud and loony fringes of the Internet and right-wing media, most people accept that the current status quo about women’s representation in film has become just too ridiculous to be maintained, and filmmakers such as Feig have proven that there is no economic argument for it to be that way.
As a rule, I can’t stand remakes of eighties films, as they speak of a studio system that has no ideas of its own and completely fails to understand the joy of the original films. And yet, as an adult who just about accepts that Peter Venkman is not a real person, I couldn’t be more thrilled by the prospect of Feig’s film. By casting women in Ghostbusters, Feig not only makes the remake feel like it has something to say beyond just a desire to milk a familiar name, he is showing that women really can, contrary to current Hollywood view, carry a franchise, by giving them the best franchise film of all time. A remake of Ghostbusters with men would feel both sad and pointless—a remake with women feels like a hopeful glimpse into the future, one in which women are trusted with genuine event movies that celebrate friendship as opposed to catfights. With bonus estrogen and proton packs. That’s my kind of women’s movie.
I. Faludi doesn’t mention Kramer vs. Kramer in her discussion of 1970s films as a feminist utopia, but I of all people can hardly criticize her for providing a selective view of a decade’s movies.
II. For a start, there were other movies around that were far smarter about male infidelity than Fatal Attraction, such as, for example, Moonstruck. In this movie, Olympia Dukakis has to contend with her aged husband’s compulsive womanizing. But because this movie was sensible and not stupid like Fatal Attraction—or, more recently, the appalling The Other Woman (2014)—Moonstruck shows that marriage is about more than just point-scoring, infidelity is about more than just sex, and the betrayed wife is a smart woman in her own right. So don’t watch Fatal Attraction—watch Moonstruck.
III. One day I shall write a book about the mighty titles of feminist texts and studies. They are all reliably awesome.
IV. See: the oeuvre of the Cure and New Order—in the eighties, obviously.
V. Says Hadley, madly.
VI. Stacy L. Smith et al., “Inequality in 700 Popular Films,” Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California.
VII. Manohla Dargis, “Report Finds Wide Diversity Gap Among 2014’s Top Grossing Films,”New York Times, August 5, 2015.
VIII. One of my favorite newspaper columns in the world is the New York Times’ By the Book series, in which famous people discuss their favorite writers. Almost invariably, readers cleave to their own gender: Bruce Springsteen, for example, mentioned thirty-seven authors, only two of whom were women.
IX. New York Times’ Manohla Dargis pointed out that when Michael Mann’s 2001 film Ali failed to make back its costs, his career was barely affected and he directed big-budget films for Paramount and Universal soon after. When Kathryn Bigelow’s 2002 adventure film, K19: The Widowmaker, didn’t recoup its costs, she didn’t make another film until 2007 and it was funded by a French company. “Ms. Bigelow is one of the greatest action directors working today, and it’s hard not to wonder why failure at the box office doesn’t translate the same for the two sexes,” Dargis writes in “Women in the Seats but Not Behind the Camera,”New York Times, December 10, 2009.
X. An interview with Kathleen Turner is pretty much all that you want it to be. Sadly I can’t print everything she told me without fear of being sued for libel by half of Hollywood. But if you ever have the opportunity to spend an afternoon with her, I highly recommend it.
XI. Told you.