First Impressions

Notes on Watching Women: Part One

For the past seven years, I’ve been on a kind of media diet to force myself to watch more movies made by women. I made a rule: half of everything I watched had to be written or directed by women. I started this diet in late 2017, because I was furious when the Harvey Weinstein allegations came to light. That was a wakeup call for me to think more deeply about the sexism of the film industry. I also started a blog, Thelma & Alice, to track and review the films I watched. I thought I would do it for a year or so, but I ended up keeping my media diet for seven years. I decided to write about the experience here, in a series of posts called “Notes on Watching Women.” You can read the introductory post here.

Today, I’m focusing on my early impressions of watching films made by women, and how they gave me a new lens on mainstream cinema.

Part One: First Impressions

Lily Gladstone in Certain Women (2016), directed by Kelly Reichardt

The Most Obvious Difference

One of the first things I noticed when I started to watch more movies made by women is that there are simply more women on screen, in a greater variety of roles. It’s not only that a woman is more likely to have a lead role in a film directed by a woman, it’s also that you’re more likely to see women in all the other roles—the small bit parts, the comic relief, the authority figure (traffic cop, judge, principal, etc). In mainstream films, there is “the girl part” (usually a love interest for the male protagonist) and then there might be a few other women who are defined by their social role, e.g. mother, daughter, friend, etc. Sometimes you see women cast as care workers, or in jobs that are coded as female, e.g. nurses, waitresses, secretaries. But you rarely see a bustling office or workspace where most of the workers are women. If a movie is about people doing something scientific or technical, there’s usually one woman, maybe two. Sometimes the woman is super smart, or an authority figure keeping the men in line. Rarely do you see multiple women working together unless the movie is specifically about women in the workplace. (Hidden Figures, 9 to 5, Working Girl.)

Less Violence Against Women

Is it too obvious to point out that movies directed by women are less likely to include scenes of brutality against women? Maybe. But until I watched a number of movies where women were fully clothed, safe, and not subject to violence or the threat of it, I did not realize how many mainstream movies I’d seen where women were raped, beaten, badly hurt, or killed. Maybe I didn’t even realize how much I disliked these images, how there was often an undertone of excitement that didn’t sit right.

Styling of Women is Different

In mainstream movies, women have to be pretty and sexy—but pretty and sexy in a certain coded, highly feminine way. Their prettiness and sexiness transcend plot, characterization, and logic. You’ll see women waking up and going to bed with a full face of make-up and moms running errands in coordinated outfits, jewelry, and fresh manicures. Sometimes this is part of the film’s aesthetic or an expression of the woman’s class and personality, but in general, the women in mainstream movies have a very feminine presentation, no matter their age. In movies directed by women, I found that the female characters were more likely to be styled in a way that made sense for the character. I also noticed that women tended to be more covered up and weren’t required to telegraph sexiness and/or physical fitness in every look. This kind of styling often comes across as more expressive and free-spirited, and the actors often seem more comfortable in their own skin.

More Older Women

Female directors are interested and curious about women over the age of forty and believe that their lives are full of dramatic possibilities. You’ll see a lot more older women in movies made by women—and a lot of great acting by older women, who have had several decades to practice their craft. This is very subjective, but I think that watching more movies made by women has made me feel better about the aging process (I’m 46) and less fixated on trying to maintain a youthful appearance and figure.

A More Expansive Definition of Masculinity

This is also a subjective impression, but women directors seem to have a more expansive definition of what makes men attractive and interesting to women, and this shows up in storytelling as well as casting. One example is Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. I don’t think a man would have cast Bill Murray as a romantic lead or written a story about an intimate relationship between an older man and a younger woman that isn’t sexual or physical. Coppola instead lets her characters bond over their shared spiritual malaise as they both struggle with loneliness and a lack of purpose. There’s a vulnerability and openness to Murray’s performance that is striking even twenty years later, a reminder that men are as hemmed in by rigid definitions of masculinity as women are by strict ideas of femininity.

Cher, Christina Ricci, and Winona Ryder in Mermaids (1990), written by Patty Dann and June Roberts

The Power of Female Screenwriters

One of the pleasant surprises of this whole project was discovering that some of my favorite movies from childhood and teen years were written by women: E.T., Mermaids, Dirty Dancing, Beaches, Reality Bites. All these films were directed by men, but the screenplay shines through as distinctly female, with well-rounded female characters. I’ve noticed that even when just one woman is in the mix of writers, the screenplay has better, more complex female characters. I’m thinking of Gillian Flynn’s writing with Steve McQueen on Widows and Nicole Holofcener’s contributions to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s The Last Duel. Some other examples: Julie Delpy’s contributions to Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, Zoe Kazan’s to her partner Paul Dano’s directorial debut Wildlife, and Jane Adams’s and Greta Gerwig’s collaborations with Joe Swanberg.

My Pet Theory of Male Screenwriters

Men write the vast majority of screenplays. Between the years of 1975 and 2023, women earned, at most, 25% of screenwriting credits. (Most years, women wrote less than 15% of all films.) Once you know this fact, you suddenly understand why so many films do not pass the Bechdel test. Most films fail to pass the test not because they don’t have enough female characters (you only need two named characters to pass the test), but because their female characters do not exchange dialogue. I think, maybe for perfectly logical reasons, many male screenwriters are not comfortable writing dialogue between women. I have a pet theory that many male screenwriters stopped being friends with women after marriage, because so many conversations between female characters (of all ages) sound like conversations I had in my teens and twenties, not my thirties and forties. (There’s also the fact that most mainstream movies are not focused on women over forty.)

A Darker Theory of Screenwriting

It could be that many male screenwriters are not especially interested in women’s souls. By soul, I mean: women’s spiritual concerns, their intellectual queries, their vocational calling. If “not interested” seems cold, then maybe it’s fairer to say that many screenwriters do not see much drama in women’s existential questions. In most Hollywood screenplays, the dramatic possibilities of woman’s life are shaped by the prerogatives and needs of the men who surround her. That is why the second rule of the Bechdel test—that the conversation between the two women must be about something other than men—is often the thing that disqualifies an otherwise seemingly equitable film.

Dee Wallace, who played the mother in E.T.

Brief Aside About E.T., Written by Melissa Mathison

Rewatching E.T. as an adult, I was startled by its insight into the mother and how her loneliness is central to how the plot unfolds. She’s a working mom, newly single, trying to raise three kids on her own while her ex is off in Mexico with his new girlfriend. Naturally her house is a mess, naturally she’s distracted, naturally she’s frazzled. It’s under these very realistic circumstances that her son befriends an alien from another planet and hides the creature in his sister’s closet, among the stuffed animals. (An iconic scene, burned into my child-brain.) Now that I’ve seen Spielberg’s autobiographical film, The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s unusual attention to the mother character makes a lot of sense. But I don’t think he could have written the script for E.T. at that time in his life. Part of his genius was hiring Melissa Mathison to do it for him; he seemed to understand that he didn’t yet have the language for the mother—only the images. 

Brief Aside About Kramer v. Kramer

My friend and fellow substacker, Edan Lepucki, recently wrote about watching Kramer v. Kramer and appreciating the humanity that Meryl Streep brought to the role of Joanna Kramer, the mother who walks out on her marriage and then returns to fight for custody of her son. Knowing that the film was directed by Robert Benton, I wondered if a woman had a hand in the screenplay. I checked the credits and was surprised to discover that Streep had a writing credit. This led me down a rabbit hole as I learned that Streep, then a very young actor, had insisted on rewrites for Joanna Kramer, feeling that the character was a cardboard cut-out villain, not a real person. When the rewrites weren’t convincing enough, she rewrote a key speech for herself—and won her first Oscar.

Uncredited Contributions of Women Actors

I wanted to tell the above story because I am sure that many female actors have encountered flat female characters in their work and have pushed for script and line changes—not only because they found their lines displeasing but because it was impossible for them to do their work with so little information. On Marc Maron’s podcast, Glenn Close spoke about her difficulty in playing Alex, the obsessive spurned lover in Fatal Attraction. Alex’s actions, as written in the screenplay, were so extreme that Close felt she had to invent a traumatic past for Alex in order to make sense of the story. Like Streep’s Joanna Kramer, Close’s performance in that role became iconic. Is coming up with a backstory for your character a kind of screenwriting? I don’t know, but I felt it was illustrative of how women smuggle deeper meaning into poorly written roles. 

Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally (1989), directed by Rob Reiner and written by Nora Ephron

The Power of Male-Female Collaborations

This may be too anecdotal to be significant, but something special seems to happen when men and women collaborate as a writing and directing team. In the writing-directing scenario, men usually end up in the director’s chair, but as I mentioned above, a film’s screenplay is very important in terms of representing a woman’s point of view. When you have both in the mix, there’s the possibility for a film that has well-developed male and female characters. Barbie is a recent example, with a screenplay by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. A more classic example is When Harry Met Sally (written by Nora Ephron, directed by Rob Reiner). But I’m also thinking of director Jason Reitman’s work with screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Kelly Reichardt’s collaborations with writer Jonathan Raymond, and the documentary team of E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. Two of our recent family favorites, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and Theater Camp, are also the result of men and women working closely together. Finally, last year, the New York Times noted “at least six couples scored his-and-hers nominations” working together in a variety of roles including directing, writing, and producing.

The Unseen Women

Some of my thinking about male-female collaborations was informed by Karina Longworth’s podcast “The Invisible Woman,” which follows the career of Polly Platt, who worked closely with Peter Bogdonavich and James L. Brooks on a number of acclaimed films including The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, Terms of Endearment, and Broadcast News. Platt’s contributions as a producer, art director, and screenwriter were a big part of what made these films stand out, but her influence has been overshadowed by the careers of the men she worked with. After hearing Polly’s story, I wondered how many unseen women have had a hand in the career of the great male filmmakers. It’s an old question in the arts, a common question, but it still hasn’t been fully answered and so I’m asking again.

On Co-Directing

The ideal of a genius director with a single-minded vision seems at odds with the collaborative nature of filmmaking. I’ve no doubt that some directors prefer to work in this way, but it seems to me that many people work better in partnerships or small teams. So why does the industry cling to the idea of a lone director, whose vision makes or breaks the film? To what degree has women’s influence been obscured because of this ideal, and to what extent is the ideal coded as masculine? Since the Weinstein allegations, there has been an emphasis on promoting female directors, but I’ve wondered if the role of director needs to be defined more broadly with less emphasis on one person’s individual genius.

---