I yell about a lot of things, but I don’t have the fight in me for much. Yet I get really, really pissed about the state of women and cinema. How women are represented on film, why we’re not marketed to more often when “women’s pictures” are almost always cheap to make and hugely successful even when they’re not good (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), but mostly I get all in a tizzy about why more women are not directing and writing studio films.
The New Yorker‘s David Denby recently wrote a piece that got shot to shit on feminist blogs. I didn’t read the whole thing because it stretched too far back for me to care — how It Used to Be is not the point or even much of a comparison. And CNN recently posted a well-sourced story on women directors, which interviewed one of my heroes, Nicole Holofcener (pictured) and includes this choice quote from Julie Delpy, who’s made her writing-directing-editing-scoring debut with 2 Days in Paris (which I saw a poster for at Bayers Lake the other day but I’ll believe it when I see it):
“What’s funny is, now people are trying to contact me to do movies,” Delpy adds, “like, they’re looking for a female director, and it’s all about a relationship. You know what? I don’t want to make a movie that they want a female director for. To me, first of all, it’s condescending. What does that mean? Is it about breast feeding?”
I spoke with Kasi Lemmons a few weeks ago about Talk to Me, opening here Friday (see this week’s issue) and while I didn’t bring up being a lady filmmaker directly, she said that it’s harder for independent filmmakers as a whole to get shit made, now more than ever. If that’s true, and if women still only make up 7 percent of the DGA, then imagine the tiny percentage able to make films independently in this day and age? (Indies were all we had left!)
Lemmons’ last movie came out in 2001. It’s taken Kim Peirce eight years to follow up Boys Don’t Cry. Tamara Jenkins, who will make a blisteringly funny-sad return this fall with the Sundance/TIFF selection The Savages, has lived nine years since The Slums of Beverly Hills. (At a Sundance panel that included David Gordon Green, Gregg Araki and Hal Hartley, she remarked that she couldn’t believe they crapped out a movie every year. Holofcener has said the same thing — it takes her five years between films because it takes her that long to come up with something new to say.)
CNN points to Nancy Meyers as a success story, but Nancy Meyers sets women back 25 years every time she makes a movie. She’s a case for women not being allowed to touch a camera, with her embarrassing, degrading, all-you-need-is-love bullshit: What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give and especially The Holiday, the worst movie I have seen since Signs, stand up as some of the highest quality shitpiles going. Shut up, Nancy Meyers.
Anyway, it’s not like women aren’t working, but they aren’t working enough, and in this time of the horrible and horrifying geek renaissance, I’m getting scared for the ladies. Judd Apatow, who has eight projects in development (!!!), has somehow snowed the media into believing he writes strong female characters, but I saw Knocked Up and that is bullshit (he made his own wife a shrieking harpy! I thought it was funny, but it was also completely unkind), and if it’d been Jessica Biel or Charlize Theron instead of Catherine Keener in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, it would’ve been a whole different ballgame.
I don’t know what the point of this post is other than to raise awareness about the fact that awareness is being raised, I guess. We need to keep up the chatter, because I’ve been reading this same fucking story since my life was changed by Thelma & Louise (in 1992!) and it has NOT GOTTEN BETTER IN 15 GODDAMN YEARS. I hope people in high positions are paying attention, and I hope creative women out there are helping each other out, because men are not going to. And why should they? (And more importantly, why would we want them to?) Write great roles for each other, then direct the shit out of them.
Or, if you must, take the route Delpy suggests: “A woman has to make a bunch of blockbusters, one after another,” she said, “and shut everyone’s mouth.”
ADDENDUM: I just tripped across a great “Women’s Impact Report” at Variety.com that profiles a bunch of different ladies, including Tina Fey, and opens with a great umbrella piece about The State of Things that quotes Geena Davis, who was in two of the movies that formed my love of film and especially women in film, Thelma & Louise and A League of Their Own. She closes out the story thusly:
The actress — whose short-lived role in ABC’s “Commander in Chief” fueled the idea that any red-blooded American, regardless of sex, could grow up to be president of the United States — makes it clear that balancing out gender portrayals is not just about showing girls that a range of possibilities is open to them; it’s about shifting the earliest perceptions that boys have of girls.
“If boys aren’t seeing boys and girls sharing the sandbox,” she says, “if they aren’t seeing that girls take up half the space in the world, we’re going to continue to not make progress.”
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2007.
