The Martian

This film is really tricky. On the surface it looks great: it stands out for having strong, visible female characters in positions of authority. In particular, Jessica Chastain’s character is the commander of the space ship Matt Damon is lost from. Depicting both female astronauts and female commanders is, alas, still something we need to celebrate. The film also offers smaller ‘yay’ moments, such as one of the closing shots sweeping around a classroom of trainee astronauts. At least half are women.

So far, so good.

Digesting the film over dinner, though, we started scratching the surface of those female characters. Apart from Chastain, the others are all in subordinate positions. All other major positions of authority are held by men. The heads of both the American and Chinese space programmes are male. The chief engineer is male. The head of astronauts in male. The president is male. (Okay, the president’s not really a character – he’s spoken to once on the phone – but how hard would it have been to say Madam President?)

Each space programme has one significant female in its team and both those women hold seemingly advisory positions. As NASA’s press secretary, Kristen Wiig provides the ongoing voice of reason about how everything will play out to the public. Is this to avoid the tricky implication that she might have to understand some science? Or is it so the men can make the heart-over-head, heroic decisions?

What particularly pissed me off, though, was the engineering team. There was not a single visible woman in the team building the probes and working out the technology to communicate with Damon. If I’m being cynical I’d say maybe that’s because you can put a woman in Lycra up in space, dress her in a snug fitted suit in a press room or formal meeting, but how can you make an overworked, unwashed, coffee-downing engineer look sexy?

Am I nitpicking? Is it ridiculous to complain that our other female astronaut, Kate Mara, had to be sexualised, given a love interest and finally shown babe in arms by the end of the film? Hey girls, follow your dreams, go to space, but don’t forget your clock is ticking, so make sure you find a husband while you’re up there and remember you won’t really be complete until you’re a mother.

For all my grumbles, this has scored fairly high on the test. Like Mad Max, I think, The Martian needs to be celebrated for being so, so much better that almost everything else out there. But we also need to ask, is this really the best we can do?

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

So this week’s must-see “offbeat” teen tragi-comedy doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test.

Let that sink in.

It wowed at Sundance and has scored a consistent 4 stars from Mark Kermode, Telegraph Film and Empire, yet at no point do two female characters actually talk to each other.

It’s a fun, somewhat devastating, easy watching film that Peter Debruge predicts will “endure as a touchstone for its generation”. It’s exactly the sort of film we forgive for its lazy approaches to gender and race. It’s exactly the sort of film that makes me cross.

And, thankfully, not just me. The wonderfully fuming Natalie writes:

“For a film that presents itself as ‘modern’ the women in the film don’t really have scenes that don’t involve the main male character or motivations that don’t in someway relate to a man… The dying girl’s Mother is a bitter and divorced drunk who hits on teenage boys. The main character’s Mother is overemotional toward her son to compensate for her Husband who is detached and really associates himself with the cat. The main character’s atypical crush’s only conversation is to make sure he makes a film for Rachel, the dying girl, and brush her boob against his shoulder causing him to have a momentary stop-motion animation sexual flutter. And, finally, Rachel. Instead seeing how this young girl deals with the fact that her life is about to be cut very short, we see only how it affects the main (male) character. By the time we’re shown Rachel’s breakdown, we’ve had little or no time getting to know the character; therefore lack any real dedication to her plight.”

What’s troubling is that I want to like this film. I want to think maybe its opposite could be made. Me and Ella and the Dying Boy, where two oddball schoolgirls make funny movies and befriend a sick boy defined only by the number of cushions in his bedroom. Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?

And the more you unpack this film, the easier it is to rant: Greg and Earl create things while Rachel passively consumes their creations; Greg and Earl experience things (drugs, fights, friendships, grief), while Rachel licks an icecream and observes; Greg in particular gets to be funny, contradictory and three-dimensional, while Rachel and Earl are the typical, unexamined Pixie Dream Girl and unlikely-childhood-friend-from-the-dodgy-neighbourhood-down-the-road. They, along with Greg’s indulgent parents and Rachel’s flirty-and-fucked-up mother, exist only to further flesh out Greg. The film itself even recognises this, presenting Greg with his own self-absorption when he discovers Rachel’s creativity and psychological complexity only at her wake.

Have you seen it? What did you think? Am I being too harsh?

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.

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.

What’s on at the Women’s Cinema?

Welcome to my virtual cinema.

NOW SHOWING

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.