Film and Feminism

Copyright - 

Central Illinois Feminist Film Festival

Hey guys and girls, this is an guest article I wrote for my friend Suzy's blog "Eeep! I'm A Blogger" and I highly recommend you give it a look, it's a very fun and informative read!  Suzy often posts articles on Fridays dedicated to the topic of feminism and I thought I'd share my opinion regarding feminism in relation to film. 

Now of course, I'm not the first person to have touched upon the idea of feminism in movies, especially the usually derogatory and exploitative horror genre. Women such as Carol Clover and Laura Mulvey pioneered the study of feminist film theory, whose articles highly intrigued me during Film Studies in my college years. This interest carried on into my University lectures where I delved deeper into the ideas of Hollywood films becoming more focussed upon women becoming sublime objects of ideology and imagination, but there was another issue that I noticed. When I was growing up, fictional film heroines such as The Lord of the Rings' Eowyn and Pirates of the Caribbean's Elizabeth Swann were receiving plaudits from critics for finally giving young girls aspirational heroines to admire. They were apparently representing the type of woman who is too often pushed to the sidelines and not valued as a valid member of society, standing up for their rights and showing they can fight just as well as the men. But they were simply women who throw themselves into danger for the men who they admire and love. Hardly Sigourney Weaver's iconic 'Ellen Ripley' or Jamie Lee-Curtis' final girl 'Laurie Strode' of yesteryear.

If all the other Avengers posed
in the same way as Black Widow... No, Hulk, no...

Over the past few years, I have started to analyse films in more depth, attempting to study them to find their strengths and weaknesses to review them as best I can. However, all too often I find myself criticising films for mistreating their own gender equality. Sometimes the female characters' potential is underutilised and they are cast simply as window-dressing, such as Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow in the recent Avengers Assemble or Angelina Jolie in nearly all the films in which she features. Here is a woman who has won an Academy award for her skills in dramatic acting in the fantastic Girl, Interrupted, and yet she is often bookmarked as “Mrs. Brad Pitt, the curvy Tomb Raider who shot bullets around corners in Wanted”.

Along with Hollywood's obsession with stereotyping women as either blonde bombshells or terrified damsels in need of rescue, my main pet peeve with Hollywood lies with male screenwriters. They simply don't know how to write female characters. Being written from a male perspective allows for the characters to quite easily fall victim to lazy clichéd writing. I know it's a long complained point, but it is backed up with countless pieces of evidence. To quote Jack Nicholson's character in As Good As It Gets, when asked how do you write your women characters so well, Nicholson replies, 'I think of a man... and I take away all the reason and accountability!' Films that have equal input from two writers of opposite gender have always been credited with delivering realistic and approachable dialogue, such as the Julie Delpy/Ethan Hawke-written 'Before...' trilogy or the upcoming Frances Ha, currently gaining large critical acclaim due to the script, co-written by real-life partners Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.

Three fantastic, realistic and touching films - I highly recommend

But in an industry so male-dominant as Hollywood, do we have to put up with films such as The Hangover Part Two, The Last Kiss and Knocked Up, where marriage and women are seen as inherently emasculating and castrating presences whose only job is to make the men behave and not run wild? Or are there any Hollywood films that won't disappoint in delivering equality?

She mostly talks about aliens...
Mostly...

Recently I have discovered a film gender test called the Bechdel Test and you can find it on www.bechdeltest.com. The point of The Bechdel Test is to see how biased or unbiased a film may be towards the different genders. If the film passes all three parts, it is thought to pass the test and be worthy of merit. Well, within reason. The three tests are as thus:

1. The film stars at least two named women...
2. Who talk to each other...
3. About something besides a man.

And that's it.  Sounds simple?  You'd be surprised which films don't pass The Bechdel Test.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Magnolia, Good Will Hunting, Forrest Gump, Back To The Future, Jaws, The Godfather, Psycho, as well as the Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones and Star Wars trilogies all fail The Bechdel Test, even though they contain very strong female characters such as Spotless Mind's Clementine and Star Wars' Princess Leia.

Not all family reunions are fun...

So why have so many loved and critically-acclaimed films failed the Test? Why can't the audience simply have several engaging female characters to bond with and admire? Like I mentioned earlier, feminist film theory became increasingly synonymous with the horror movie genre in the period following the resurgence of the Slasher movie. Slasher films such as Halloween and I Spit On Your Grave featured young, vulnerable girls being terrorised by spontaneous violent attackers and suffering a great amount of physical and mental torture. However, they climatically manage to fend off their molesters and monsters to emerge victorious and triumphant. This was coined as the Final Girl Theory, and singled out these horror movie heroines such as Jamie-Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode as feminist icons to be admired in film. Clover and Mulvey theorised that the Final Girl in these horror movies survives because she does not conform to the social norms of her friends, and manages to avoid the fate they all share. For example, Laurie Strode in Halloween refuses to disobey her parents' rules on drinking and partying when tasked with babysitting her neighbour's children, unlike the rest of her babysitter friends. Consequently, she is the pure and innocent outcast that manages to outwit and defeat the terrifying evil that slaughters all the irresponsible and promiscuous others. More importantly, the audience want to see her succeed. They cheer when the Final Girl overcomes the Big Bad coming to get her and that's an emotional connection missing in most of the recent Hollywood production line.

So will we soon see some more feminist icons coming out of the Hollywood production line? Will upcoming releases such as female buddy-cop film The Heat, coming-of-age drama The Lifeguard or the previously-mentioned Frances Ha live up to the hopes that the expectant public put upon them?

Probably not. 

But we can always rely on the horror genre to provide us with a lonely, terrified and ultimately Final Girl running away from a maniac with a chainsaw. 

And that's a comforting thought.

Thank you for reading, and for more thoughts on feminism, as well as other lovely topics, please visit Eeep! I'm A Blogger.  You won't regret it!

Top Five Friday: August (Yes, All Of It)

Good Lord, has it really been over a month? I am so ashamed. I promised myself I wouldn’t get back to these lazy ways of only updating every so often. I wanted constant updates, news and reviews coming from this website, which is what I will strive towards once again. Thank you for sticking with me.

Now, since my last review (The End is Nighy) I have been still watching my films, although I have been attending weddings, crashing cars etc., so not as many have been watched as I would like. So I will quickly run through the Top Five films I have seen in August.

5) Now You See Me

Let me just start by saying this crime-caper is only in my Top Five because I only managed to watch five movies this month. It is here by default.  This shouldn't be in anyone’s Top Five Films, unless it’s the Top Five Pale Imitations of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (where it would sit pretty as #1).

Four wise-cracking, obnoxious street magicians form a Las Vegas stage act after being grouped together by a mysterious non-figure with fancy looking blueprints and begin stealing money and distributing it to the public. This attracts the attention of the FBI and Interpol as mad-capped, magic-fuelled confusion unfolds between the hapless police and the seemingly-omniscient magicians.

Magic is a difficult thing to perform on film. With the special effects generated by smarter-than-your-Dad computers, current filmmakers have no problem with showing a woman sawn in half, a coin appearing behind a person’s ear or a rabbit being pulled out of a hat. The secrets are all in post-production editing, but when you see magic in person, there is the temporary suspension of disbelief, which is what films used to inspire in audiences.

The Prestige was such a fantastic and innovative film because it analysed the art of magic and the intricacies behind tricks and misdirection. The main spine to the film was the ultimate dedication to your art, your desire and your profession. Now You See Me may have a few fun special effects, some witty one-liners and an impressive cast, but it is mainly a sloppy mess of a film, too interested in confusing the audience and appearing smarter than it is. It seems to have successfully misdirected the public as it has made $317 million worldwide, despite being The Prestige… For Idiots.

Rating – 3/10

4) A Field In England

I came to A Field In England with a complete blank slate, apart from what I could gather from the title. There would be grass. There would be no need for subtitles. And what followed was 90 minutes of beautiful cinematography, cryptic subject matter and some chilling performances, especially from Reece Shearsmith and Michael Smiley, two actors very close to my television-loving heart.

Admittedly, Field is not for everyone, with some friends of mine justifying their hatred for it by saying that “…it was just five guys standing in a field, digging a hole. It was boring; nothing happened!”

This is precisely why A Field In England stood out for me.   Whilst my friends were correct in their description of the plot’s lack of explosions and car chases, the action instead came within the tensions of the central group of Civil War soldiers and the importance that they gave black magic. It wasn’t a drama film dependent on bleak outlooks; a comedy film that resorted to pratfalls; or a horror film that relied on silence followed by loud noises. However the director Ben Wheatley and writer Amy Jump managed to combine all three genres into one unnerving black comedy that made me physically uncomfortable and gripped to the screen ‘til the end.

Rating – 6/10

3) The Wolverine

Back in 2009, I was very excited to see the newest adventure of the invincible Wolverine in his X-Men: Origins prequel.  However, since that disappointed the hell out of me, as well as critics and audiences worldwide, I was a little worried when I sat down in the theatre, preparing to watch Hugh Jackman’s sixth outing as the adamantium-clawed member of the X-Men. Bryan Singer managed to perfectly balance edge-of-your-seat action with genuine character development in the first two X-Men films, exploring prejudice and inequality issues currently in America.  Brett Ratner took all of that and threw it away with X-Men: The Last Stand, preferring to end the trilogy with an all-guns-blazing approach that left many audiences cold and Origins: Wolverine didn’t do much to convince us that things were going to change. The Wolverine, thankfully, manages to buck that trend.

The Wolverine takes place after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand and Logan has become a vagrant, pining for the loss of his love, Jean Grey.  A powerful dying businessman, who Logan saved during the Hiroshima bombing, tracks Logan down to offer his thanks and repay him with the chance of mortality.

Focussing more on Logan’s time in Japan and his clash with a powerful Samurai-descended family provides ample time for Jackman to sink his claws into a more thought-provoking and interesting storyline, filled with romantic entanglements, bullet-train fights and Wolverine finally realising his inner-demons have led him to be a powerful, yet leaderless warrior.

The film does sometimes lose it way with pointless sub-plots and assassination attempts, and where some X-Men films seem to overdo the number of mutants on-screen, there is a certain lack of superpowers displayed in The Wolverine. However the lack of Logan's invincibility is a nice change of pace. When Logan decides to relinquish his power of regeneration, he is finally put into mortal danger and the audience can actually worry about his safety, a rare treat. Emotional investment means that The Wolverine is a big step in the right direction. Plus, thanks to a mid-credits scene, I ended up squealing like a young teenage girl at a No Direction gig. I really cannot wait for X-Men: Days of Future Past!

Rating - 6.5/10

2) Elysium

Back in 2009, South African director Neill Blomkamp wrote and directed District 9, a film that centred around the tensions between humans and a refugee alien race that landed in 1980s Johannesburg. The film did a fantastic, if sometimes heavy-handed, job of mirroring the real-life tensions between the two main ethnicities of modern South Africa.

Cut to summer 2013 and Blomkamp's second feature film Elysium, just like all good sci-fi films, focusses on other prevalent issues in today's society; namely immigration, health care and class.

The premise is that in the future, society's wealthiest live on the floating space station known as Elysium which is overrun by Jodie Foster and the inhabitants enjoy all of life's pleasures. Meanwhile the rest of humanity live back on the overpopulated Earth and get by as best they can. Often they try and sneak onto Elysium just to access the cure-all medicine tubes but most are arrested or killed trying. After an accident leaves him with less than a week to live, Matt Damon decides to storm Elysium to save his life, making Foster resort to using her secret weapon, a psychotic mercenary known as Kruger.

Let me start by saying that Elysium looks incredible. It is obvious that Blomkamp has an eye for iconic images, as both District 9 and Elysium are filled with them.  However, unlike District 9, the storyline tires pretty quickly and the arrival on Elysium doesn't really seem like such an important goal to the audience, but just to Damon's character.   Foster is wasted in her role, painting her and the rest of the wealthy as two-dimensional, stuck-up snobs who don't care for the lower classes.

Whilst District 9 mainly dealt with the satirical alien discrimination, the film really picked up when the action was introduced, but it is only reserved for the final third and thankfully, Blomkamp doesn't follow the same routine in Elysium. The action is there right from the start, and it is directly in your face.  This is mostly due to the previously-mentioned mercenary Kruger, played with such enjoyment by District 9's Sharlto Copley. Copley’s menacing presence instantly lights up the screen and he is a truly detestable screen-villain, if used a bit too sparingly to properly utilise him.

Overall a fantastic thrill-ride with a memorable villain that is a much better example of true science-fiction than the year’s earlier Oblivion and After Earth.

Rating - 7.5/10

1) Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa

AHA! We come to the best film of the past few weeks, and it’s the long-awaited screen debut of Steve Coogan’s beloved character, Alan Partridge. Set after the mini-series, Mid-Morning Matters, Alan is still a radio DJ, working at North Norfolk Digital as it is being bought out by a corporate mogul, Shape. In the streamlining process, Shape sack Alan’s fellow DJ Pat Farrell, who takes his revenge by holding the employees hostage until his demands are met. Who does he request for a negotiator? The one and only, Alan Partridge.

What follows is 90 minutes of sheer hilarious comedy and a very successful television show adaptation, which is harder than you may think. For every fantastic TV-to-film adaptation such as In The Loop and The Inbetweeners Movie, you get the failures such as Ali G Indahouse, Kevin & Perry Go Large and the abysmal Keith Lemon: The Movie, and this thankfully slots in the former.  Fans of the show will love the attention to detail that the writers Coogan, Iannucci and Baynham have included in the script, as well as how home-grown it feels despite including some inevitable Hollywood tropes. Whilst John McClane is blowing up skyscrapers in Die Hard, Partridge is diving through drywall and creating anti-corporate radio jingles under duress. The story remains in Partridge’s Norfolk roots and his relationships with his ever-present PA Lynn and best friend Michael The Geordie.

Even if you aren’t a fan of Coogan, or ever watched I’m Alan Partridge, the quick-fire comedy and genuine heart at the centre of this film will soon convert you to be screaming “A-HA!” every time you hear Abba’s Knowing Me, Knowing You. I whole-heartedly recommend this film, you won’t regret it.

Rating – 9/10