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!