The Stories Female Filmmakers (are allowed to) Tell
Notes on Watching Women, Part 2
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.
The Stories Women Are Allowed to Tell
After a few years of watching movies directed by women, I realized I was stuck in certain genres. And I was definitely watching a lot more indie films. In general, I found myself watching movies about women, usually based on screenplays written by other women, or by the director herself. Frequent genres included: domestic drama, rom-com, horror, low budget/comedic sci-fi, comedy, psychological thriller, sports movies focused on female athletes, biopics with female subjects, and literary adaptions (especially of novels by women.)
The Stories Women Are Not Allowed to Tell
Women are rarely hired to make westerns, super hero movies, war epics, historical epics, action movies, crime thrillers, sci-fi thrillers, and sports movies focused on male athletes. Much of this comes down to budget; studios and investors are reluctant to trust women with the amount of money required to make something on an epic scale. But I think there is also a feeling—maybe not totally conscious—that women are not objective enough to tell a story that revolves around war, political intrigue, and world historical events.
The Exceptions to the Rule
It’s worth noting that when female directors are allowed to work with big budgets in “masculine” genres they tend to make a lot of money and/or win awards. (Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Agnieszka Holland, Patty Jenkins.)
Against Strong Women
Many people in my life know that I am interested in films made by women and will often recommend movies that feature “strong female characters.” Something about this phrase gets me a little squirrely. I worry I’m going to be taught a lesson. Extraordinary women are inspiring, yes, but I also want to see regular women who make foolish choices alongside the good ones. I don’t need a woman to be a heroine, or even an especially nice person. I just need her to be real.
Trash Female Characters
On the other hand, I don’t always appreciate it when women are cartoonishly awful. You see this in TV more than film. Whenever I see women whose on-screen twentysomething alter egos can’t comb their hair or are wildly disorganized, I think, but you’re the one making this show. Where’s the show about that person—the competent one who gets things done but also has problems. I liked Insecure for showing a friend group where all the women had jobs they were basically good at, even as they struggled in their personal lives. As a girl, I loved the sitcom Murphy Brown because she was so sharp and competent, but she was also a recovering alcoholic with a lot of vulnerability and sensitivity. And, she was in her forties! She was a full-grown adult. It’s still very unusual to find a workplace show focused on a middle-aged woman whose main concern in life is her job. (The rarity of this kind of show may account for the popularity of The Morning Show, which centers on two women working in TV.)
Men Need Complex Female Characters Just as Much As Women Do
When people talk about female representation in cinema, it’s often framed as something important for girls and women: “If she can see it, she can be it.” But it’s also important for boys and men to see female characters that they can relate to, not just unattainable dream objects. May I offer a corollary: “If he can relate to her, he won’t hate her.”
Character vs. Symbol
That’s not to say we need to get rid of Femme Fatales, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Girls Next Door, or any of the other feminine archetypes that cinema has given us, just that there should be a greater variety of female characters in movies. Most female characters in mainstream cinema are defined by their relationships with men. These women usually have small roles with few speaking lines. We know little of their temperament, personality, or values. Instead of being real characters whose actions affect the plot, they are sounding boards for the male characters—or else they are symbolic of a value that is coded as feminine, such as caregiving, purity, introspection, beauty, warmth, etc.
The Jungian Lens
In certain subjective movies, I think it makes sense for female characters to be used in a symbolic way. I’ve recently been getting into Jungian dream theory (bear with me!) and it’s helped me to understand the roles that female characters play in movies written and directed by men. In Jungian theory, dreams are interpreted symbolically; every character in the dream represents an aspect of the dreamer’s psyche. You can use Jungian dream theory to interpret film by imagining that what you see on screen is one person’s dream and that every character in the story is an aspect of the dreamer’s psyche. Using this lens, the story on screen is a rendering of one person’s interior struggles, rather than an objective representation of reality. Sometimes when I watch films made by male auteurs —The Phantom Thread is a beautiful example—the female characters seem like dream figures, an exploration of the director’s inner feminine. They aren’t fully real characters, but it’s not bothersome because the women are representing psychic energies, not actual people.
The Dream Life of Women
We rarely see movies where women use male characters in a symbolic way to explore their inner psychic terrain. An exception might be Kelly Reichardt’s recent film about making art, Showing Up. Maybe also, Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground. But in general, women are very stuck in the real world.
Brief Aside About Tully (with spoilers)
Even when women make deeply personal films, they are critiqued as if they are objective representations of social issues. I first noticed this with Tully, a domestic comedy written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman. Cody and Reitman have worked together several times, most notably for Juno, a story about a pregnant teenager who decides to carry her baby to term so that she can give it up for adoption. Tully is another story about an unplanned pregnancy—but this time the mother, Marlo, is 40 and already has two kids. She hires a young woman, Tully, to help her care for her infant daughter at night, but there’s something strange about the nanny, and about Marlo’s relationship to her. Eventually, you realize that the nanny is not a real person, but a figment of the Marlo’s imagination, a younger version of herself that she subconsciously summoned to help her find the energy to care for her children. It’s a psychic strategy that backfires, leading Marlo to put herself in danger. A near death experience breaks the spell and helps her to reconcile her past with her present. By the end of the movie, she is on the road to healing.
To me, Tully is a subjective, highly symbolic story of psychic integration that may be unique to middle-aged motherhood. It’s not a perfect movie, but I happened to see it when I was 39 and caring for an infant, and I was surprised by how well it captured the split I felt between my older and younger self. But critics and audiences had a strangely literal response, diagnosing the mother with post-partum psychosis and insisting that the story was morally flawed because Marlo does not seek treatment for her mental health issues. Cody was criticized for not consulting with medical experts so that she could accurately represent and communicate the dangers of postpartum psychosis. Putting aside for a minute that this after-school special version of Tully sounds really condescending, it totally ignores Cody’s artistic intentions. Instead of asking, what did this writer mean to say, critics and audiences asked, is it good or bad for women?
The Cabbage Fairy
“The Cabbage Fairy” (La Fée au Choux) by Alice Guy Blaché, is the oldest surviving film of Blaché, a pioneering female filmmaker who some consider to be the first narrative film director. (It’s hard to say because the industry was so young that role of a film director was not defined yet.) Blaché is one of the namesakes of my blog; I learned about her when I was trying to figure out who the first female director might have been. You can watch a snippet of “The Cabbage Fairy” online. The original movie, which tells a longer story about a couple on honeymoon, has been lost to history, but even this one-minute clip is revealing of Blaché’s talent. (There are many versions of “The Cabbage Fairy” online. I chose one that is cleaned up to make the image sharper; there’s also a musical score added to what would have been a silent film.)
When I first saw “The Cabbage Fairy,” I was immediately struck by how feminine it was. To my eye, it is clearly the film of a young woman, alive with symbols of fertility and artistic potential. I love her use of dolls in the set design, and how they contrast with the live babies the cabbage fairy plucks from her garden. It’s the work of someone who understood that magical things could happen within the camera frame. (It’s also the work of someone who could convince a mother to hand over her baby for a film shoot.) I found myself thinking of The Cabbage Fairy quite a bit over the years, because Blaché made that film before any movie-making tropes had been established. It’s a very happy, joyful, youthful movie, and it puts a woman in the center of the frame. It made me wonder what movies would look like if women were permitted to make films from a place of delight and joy. Certainly, many women have managed to create with a spirit of play—Agnès Varda comes to mind immediately—but women are often tasked with telling somber stories about the impact of sexism and the struggle for women’s liberation.
On Friday I’ll dig into the limitations of an overtly political approach and how women get stuck teaching lessons to viewers instead of having fun.