Trainwreck

The poster’s awful, but I like Amy Schumer and I spent most of yesterday listening to my colleagues tell me this film was surprisingly good… so I had high hopes.

Perhaps if I was simply reviewing the film, I’d be gentler. I really wanted to like it and some of it was incredibly funny. But some of it was also very lazy.

I spent the entire film waiting for the gender punchline. It set up some great situations – the grotesquely laddy magazine she works for, her brother-in-law’s slut-shaming, the highly gendered sports industry, the scantily clad cheerleaders – and looked it might be about to, at any minute, pass some withering judgement on them.

But the judgement never came. Though we started out with a refreshingly sexual, unapologetically boozey heroine, we ended up with a recognisable rom-com cliche: the woman who signifies she’s changed her wanton ways for the seemingly perfect man she didn’t think she deserved by donning the highly feminised costume of the women she once mocked. In this case the costume is a cheerleader’s outfit rather than a wedding dress, but what’s the difference? The message of the film is that he was perfect, she was a “trainwreck”, and once she changed they could live happily ever after.

I keep looking at Amy Schumer’s name and thinking I must be missing something. Maybe I am. I hope I am. Because if there aren’t subtle, subversive things going on beneath this depressingly conventional narrative, then it’s a truly disappointing film.

Have you seen it? Take the test and see how our scores compare.

Where the test fails

These are the problems I’ve identified so far. If you notice any more or have some ways around them, please let me know.

• Historical fiction: Any kind of war film, or historical cinema based around a mostly male experience is going to score badly. I’m undecided how fair this is. If there were an equal number of films made about women’s experiences of history, then it would seem unfair to criticise these kinds of films for depicting a true historical inequality. But we rarely see films about women’s lives during wars or focused on women’s experiences of history’s great injustices. So I guess it depends whether these films are made to accurately explore history, or to explore yet more aspects of the (often white) male psyche. Was Fury made to examine the truth or to see a bunch of men blow each other up? Answers on a postcard.
• The final question, asking you to consider whether you’d like your daughter or female relative to base her understanding of the depiction and value of women on the this film, may be interpreted as asking whether you’d want the women in the film to be her role models. This doesn’t allow for a film that depicts psychologically believable, totally nuanced, yet utterly unlikable women. I can’t yet figure out a way to phrase this that avoids the implication that women should be depicted positively. Any ideas?

Surprise?

This otherwise brilliant article in Bitch Media examining the findings of a new study by the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at USC Annenberg is titled “NEW STUDY SHOWS THAT FILMS MADE BY WOMEN HAVE BETTER FEMALE CHARACTERS”. It goes on to site some interesting statistics:

“if a film has even just one female writer, the percentage of female characters on-screen jumps from 26 percent to 35 percent. Similarly, when a Black director is present, 40.2 percent of on-screen characters are Black, versus only 10.6 percent when the director is not Black.”

This is fascinating and horrifying, but is it surprising? That women’s issues are only considered when a woman is present? That Black issues are only considered when there’s a Black director? That seems pretty obvious to anyone who’s had any kind of conversation ending in, “Oh really? I didn’t notice.”

Obviously we should be challenging any industry holding anyone back and it’s a no-brainer that we should have more women behind the camera and in the writing rooms. But I feel like there are two ways of tackling this issue. If you attribute the fact that women are so scarce on the screen to the lack of women working on films, then aren’t you letting the men off? If a film does not have a female writer, is it okay for the the percentage of female characters on screen to be just 26%? Of course not. We should be encouraging women to write and direct, but also encouraging men to write and direct films about women.

You can read the full study here.

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What’s on at the Women’s Cinema?

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Some things to address before embarking on this blog

I know there are other issues in the world. I know there are other issues in cinema. I do not believe the representation of women in film is more important or in a bigger crisis than the representation of race, LGBT issues or disability. I don’t believe this issue trumps war and famine, capitalist indifference or the enormity of serious feminist issues across all societies around the globe.

But I also don’t believe the existence of other problems, even bigger, more dangerous, violent or deadly problems, means it’s not worth highlighting, discussing and challenging this one.

I’m not an academic. I’m not an activist. I’m not even a diligent newspaper reader. Many things in the world make me angry. So angry I feel overwhelmed. So angry I wonder if there is any hope, if there is any point trying to fix any of it. But those thoughts lead to lethargy and passivity.

In me, I know, they lead to head-in-the-sand Netflix binges.

I am a person who uses the internet, who reluctantly reads comments sections, passively consumes twitter battles and shies away from confrontation of all sorts. I imagine every word I write may offend someone. For this I am sorry. A part of me is deeply afraid of the conflict. I worry about being called frivolous or ignorant, of being hated by strangers for having an opinion other than theirs. I worry about this enough that I am tempted not to begin.

On the other hand, I also worry that what I am beginning is not nearly enough. That if I care I should be doing something much more meaningful, much more drastic. Only, I can’t quite think what.

I hope what this will be is an open exploration. I offer nothing definitive; I want only a conversation. I imagine much of this conversation will have interdisciplinary links and, if I am singling women and women’s issues out, it is at neither the expense nor belittlement of other categories of experience and existence.

Sadly, the representation of women in film is only one way in which the industry is in crisis. When it comes to cinema, what we don’t have is a world that looks remotely like our own.

Hi

I am an angry feminist. I am a shrill little woman. I am ridiculous and frivolous. I am on my bandwagon. I am the person you must remember not to discuss certain topics with.

I’m often inarticulate. I’m not as academic as I’d like, not as dedicated or informed. I am a woman and my anger is often emotional and instinctual.

Those who know me know how cross Jurassic World made me. (In a nutshell: of its four female characters, three were minor, three cried, two wore ridiculous heels, two shrieked a lot, and one did something heroic then immediately received a kiss from her leading man.) For weeks afterwards I could be found, glass of wine in hand, ranting about the ridiculous systemic sexism of Hollywood. But my rants were unfocused, easily picked apart and often ridiculed. They led to sad what-can-you-do nods, teasing devil’s advocate discussions, and once to an uncomfortable near falling out. They didn’t lead to anyone giving a shit. Not even, I suspect, my friends.

But my anger hasn’t abated. It’s been bubbling at this intensity, I think, for more than a year. I knew the world wasn’t fair, that the fight for gender equality was far from over and that the representation of women in all types of media was pretty abysmal, but watching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes I was genuinely surprised to see so few women. Set in a futuristic world where apes have evolved beyond humans, the humans themselves seem to have devolved to the point where the only female roles are care-givers or mothers. Scroll down the IMDB cast list and you’ll see just 5 credited women, 2 of whom play characters called “Woman” and “Old Woman”. And this is a film released in the same year Beyoncé danced in front of a giant sign reading FEMINIST, Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize, and Emma Watson made this speech: 

Once you start getting angry about this, you can’t stop. How can Marvel release a film in 2015 that doesn’t even pass the Bechdel Test? How can women still be required to wear heels in action films? Is Mad Max really the best we can hope for?

This blog is my attempt to organise my anger, to find a way to articulate the things that make me want to scream and to geek out creating an excel calculator.