The Burden of #MeToo
Notes on Watching Women: Part Three
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 wake-up 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.” Here are links to the previous posts: Intro, Part One, and Part Two.
The Burden of the “Women’s Issue” Movie
Prioritizing movies made by women has meant that I’ve watched a lot of movies about abortion (Happening, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Call Jane). Also: sexual violence against women (Test Pattern, She Said, Women Talking). Also: the struggle of women to achieve equal rights (The Glorias, On the Basis of Sex). I can’t figure out if these are the movies that female directors want to make or if these are the kinds of films that executives greenlight because they think it’s what female audiences want to see. I of course understand that we are in a fraught political moment, with threats to our reproductive freedom and access to abortion, but sometimes it feels like women are hired to direct movies because the movies are about “women’s issues,” as opposed to a woman being hired to direct movies because of her leadership skills and aesthetic values.
The Burden of #MeToo
It also feels like female directors have been tasked with dramatizing and digesting the events and consequences of #metoo. I’ve liked and admired many of the #metoo movies (The Assistant was a particular favorite) but they weren’t a lot of fun to watch. They felt like work to absorb and discuss, and there were hardly any men at the screenings. It was mostly female writers who critiqued them, as well. I understand how a male critic might not feel that it’s his place to write about “Women Talking” or “She Said.” These are sensitive times. But it makes me wonder, who were these movies for? I suppose they’ve helped to raise awareness, but they never felt as cathartic to me as the initial coverage, which I followed closely as it unfolded. Those first news stories were so wild and raw—as were the stories that poured forth from women I’d known all my life. They stirred up some serious psychic shit. The movies were much more contained and felt a bit like Hollywood trying to rein the story in, and package it up in a tale where the monster is slain. It also just feels kind of bad to watch a movie where womens’ fates are determined by men in power, even if the female characters triumph in the end. In the end, it’s just another depiction of a world where men are the ones in power and women are the victims.
Ongoing Fascination with the Monster
Once when I was in the theater, waiting for a film to start, a pair of men sitting behind me were talking about Harvey Weinstein. They wondered what he was doing while he waited for his trial. What was he thinking? How did he spend his days? As I listened to them speculate, I began to feel annoyed. I thought there was something naïve in their interest, that they didn’t understand the banality of a power-hungry bully. What deep thoughts did they imagine he was having? Did they think he was looking at the stars, contemplating his insignificance? Catching up on his reading? Learning a new language? Most of his day was probably spent on the phone with his lawyer or on his computer. He probably complained a lot about his health and argued with his family. In other words, he was just like any other hard-driving, self-involved person. But these two guys were still invested in Weinstein’s special-ness, in his genius. They were unwilling to dismiss him.
An Essentially Legal View
The #metoo movement revealed that there are many more predators and bullies than most people realize and worse, that some organizations encourage abuse as a means of consolidating power. Women bear the brunt of this abuse and often have specialized knowledge of it, either because they have experienced it directly, or because they are more likely than men to share stories of mistreatment and exploitation. So, there is a collective understanding of abuse among women. We know that it takes many forms and that it is damaging to men as well as women. But the depth of women’s knowledge has barely been broached in mainstream cinema. Instead, we see stories where men are predators, women are victims, and other people are complicit or not complicit. It’s an essentially legal view. If the culture really wants to process #metoo in cinema, we are going to have to allow for some more complex narratives that go beyond good guys and bad guys, innocent and guilty.
Men and Women Post #Metoo
The problem with sticking to a legal view of #metoo is that the story ends when blame is assigned, and justice is meted out. But interpersonally, that’s just the beginning of the narrative. Men and women want and need to be in relationship with each other. A legal verdict doesn’t cut off that possibility, but a story about who is right and who is wrong doesn’t really illuminate how women and men stay together as friends, colleagues, and romantic partners post #metoo. As a viewer, I’m weary of darkly realistic movies about the abusive behavior of men, such as Fair Play, Promising Young Woman, and Anatomy of a Fall. In these films, the women are proven right in some sense, but they are subject to a lot of humiliation along the way. In the end, they’re left traumatized and alone. I’m ready to expand beyond this rather bleak vision of male-female relationships and toward a narrative that is more healing and restorative.
The Money Piece
It’s simpler to fund a movie about #metoo than to seek out women to produce, write, direct, and shoot movies. It’s easier than restructuring an organization and business culture so that it’s more friendly to women. And it’s a lot cheaper than starting a long-term mentorship process or putting more money into the marketing and distribution of films made by women. I don’t mean to suggest that #metoo movies are lacking in sincerity or artistry. I just don’t think that audiences flock to them—they are talked about more than seen—and as a result, the women who direct these films don’t get much of a career boost.
Brief (okay, it’s kind of long!) Reflection on Dirty Dancing
I rewatched Dirty Dancing a few years ago after I realized it was written by a woman, Eleanor Bergstein. I’d always thought of it as a guilty pleasure, one that I associated with teenage sleepovers and girlish ideas of romance. But when I watched it again, I was surprised by how insightful it was. It felt, in a strange way, like the kind of feminist movie I’d been craving, one that doesn’t traumatize its characters or its audience but still shows how women’s voices and experiences are minimized and disbelieved.
If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, let me refresh your memory: Dirty Dancing is a coming-of-age story about a young woman, Baby, who goes with her parents and older sister to a resort in the Catskills. Baby is very innocent, with naïve ideas about the good she is going to do when she finally goes out into the world. She worships her father, a doctor, and thinks he can do no wrong. The feeling is mutual: she is the baby of the family, her father’s favorite.
At the resort, Baby is encouraged to date the resort owner’s son, an Ivy League-bound guy who is considered appropriate for a doctor’s daughter. But instead, Baby falls for Johnny Castle, a dancer who works at the resort. (With names like “Baby” and “Castle,” and the cloistered kingdom of a resort, this movie is ripe for symbolic interpretation!) Johnny is not initially interested in Baby, but Baby is determined to be a part of his world. When she learns that Johnny’s dance partner, Penny (another symbolic name), is pregnant by one of the resort’s waiters—a sleazy guy named Robbie, also headed to an Ivy—Baby offers to pay for the abortion and to fill in as Johnny’s dance partner while Penny gets the procedure. Baby gets the money from her father (without telling him what it’s for) and then, over the course of several glorious days, she learns to dance with Johnny, and they fall in love.
This is the part of the movie that most of us remember, because it’s so exhilarating, but upon rewatching, I was surprised by how much the plot was driven by the need for an abortion, and by Baby’s relationship to her father, whose anger and disapproval she must withstand in order to defend her changing values. Her love affair with Johnny is more than a sexual awakening; through that relationship, she discovers her father’s sexist and classist attitudes, and she also learns that a woman’s access to abortion—and therefore, her self-determination—depends on her class status. But Baby doesn’t ever make a big speech to this effect, and she doesn’t experience heartbreak firsthand; in fact, her relationship with Johnny grows more egalitarian over the course of the movie. Her father even apologizes to her for not trusting her knowledge of the world. By the end, she has a better understanding of herself and she’s also repaired her familial relationships. (There’s a side plot, where she tries to warn her sister about Robbie.) She drops the name “Baby,” and takes her adult name, Francis. (Again, the symbolism!)
I feel a bit silly writing so much about what I still think of as an overly girly movie—but where do I get these self-loathing ideas? I’m pretty sure that, growing up, most of the adults in my life thought the movie was dumb and/or inappropriate. Certainly, reviewers at the time regarded Dirty Dancing as trifling. Roger Ebert rated it one star, feeling that it lacked necessary elements of social realism. At the New York Times, Vincent Canby gave the film a warmer reception but described Penny’s abortion as “a quite awful subplot.” Both men were unable to see the movie’s symbolic elements. I think they couldn’t take the movie seriously because it revolved around Baby’s desires—not only to be with Johnny but to break out of her family structure and into the wider world.
Women got it: Dirty Dancing became a sleeper hit and has grown in status over the decades. Hollywood, of course, learned very little from its success. The takeaway seemed to be that Patrick Swayze was a star, not that women liked to see stories written by women, in which a female character’s actions drive the story. Of course, both things can be true, but Hollywood has trouble identifying women’s contributions to a film’s success. More on that next week.
We watched Dirty Dancing this year, my guys had never seen it, whereas I had every word and every outfit memorized from many viewings many decades ago. It’s an abortion rights classic! Teenage girl wisdom rules :)