I tossed out a throwaway sputter about “audience” in the conversation debating — or, rather, digressive chatter circling around — Gio’s pointed, repeatedly noted complaint that we seem stuck in a manly-man rut. Gio notes that we boys watch an awful lot of boys’ films, and she wishes there were a little more engagement with women’s films. This usually cues my self-deprecation, a bit of nervous collar-pulling, a fair amount of defensive listing-of-women’s-films-we-love, a lot of “deconstructing” of the premise of genre (and avoiding the issue), etc. I tend to take it the way John did, smartly noting how his tastes do tend with film to veer toward a range of films (and techniques, filmmakers, genres) shaped with male audiences in mind… when his iPod might be far more diverse.
I could say that my iPod and my netflix queue are chockablock full of shoot-’em-ups and cock-rock, and sure tons of great stuff that shouldn’t be simply reduced to gender debates, but very few works coming out of or aimed toward viewers other than people like me. My bookshelf is another story (ahem), and I think John raised a very interesting question — let’s stipulate that our tastes aren’t wholly reducible to our subject positions in cultural categories, but those categories sure as hell inform our tastes. Why in some forms do we find a more catholic or eclectic openness. . . and in other forms less resist than fail to be at all attracted to such alternatives?
Which is not to say we should beat ourselves up about this, nor is that Gio’s point. She’s lamenting, not criticizing, I think. I’m not keen to expand my engagement with crap films to include not just the action shite I already enjoy but also the rom-com crapola that bores me silly. But . . . I wouldn’t on the other hand sidestep the fact that my cinematic tastes are thoroughly enmeshed with/embodied in visions of masculinity. Gio wishes this blog weren’t so man-centric in its reviews and discussions; I’m not sure we get around that completely, nor do I feel we need to–but it would sure be nice to try consciously to do more than have the occasional “women’s-film month” discussions. It’d probably work best if we just simply had more members (not a pun), so that the weight of our collective interests was more widely distributed.
That said, how do I think about gender within the conventions (some might say constraints) of the forms I do tend to adore? Kick-Ass seems a really interesting test-case for how we might be inside such gendered genericity but destabilize and disrupt the conventions. The protagonist is, as Big Daddy notes, more an Ass-kick than a Kick-Ass. The two adenoidal main figures (Kick-Ass and Red Mist) are prototypically geeky — and never escape a general ineffectualness. (And I don’t read the big conclusion as K-A actually becoming more heroic. Nope. It is, as Chris notes, Hit Girl’s movie.) Kick-Ass gets his hetero love interest by being mistaken as gay. Sure, sure: he gets his love interest. (And she’s not anything more than that kind of narrative addendum, the “love interest.”) Meanwhile Hit Girl is an ironized absurdist exaggeration of certain fantasies but not really a substantive grrrl-power disruption. Still, the film does something to comics–that bastion of silly reductive American male fantasy about being an American male–like what Taxi Driver did to the revengers’ fantasy: reiterates but riddles with flaws and exposes functions and makes the whole structure far less certain or substantive. The movie is not a mindless embrace of masculinity but in many ways a reflective engagement with it.
That said, it may not be all that feminist to replace the centrality of films about/aimed at Manly Men with a centrality of films that ironize Manliness. A not-terribly-effective case-in-point: 44 Inch Chest wants to be disruptive, but fails–partly from its flawed stagy pretentiousness and partly from its flawed strategies for achieving that disruption. Sure, the tough-talking crew of men is comprised of a somewhat doddering old homophobe, a has-been thug who still lives with/cares for his mum, and (the central protagonist) a cuckold who has been thoroughly “unmann’d” by his wife’s infidelity. The most well-adjusted fella in the bunch is openly, unextravagantly gay. They rage on and on about “cunt” this and “cunt” that, but their misogyny pretty pointedly derives from their increasing impotence.
Still, a thesis does not a movie make, nor is it a particularly engaging thesis. Despite a helluva cast, this film feels like a study. These men claim to love women, and they beat them, or leave them aside, and their relationships with one another are predicated on a righteous indignant viciousness about how women treat them. Yeah yeah–blah blah blah. Ray Winstone has a phenomenal face, and there are two moments where he gapes–a landed fish, a open-mouthed corpse, an infant mewling with rage and need. But the dialogue–despite the rich vicious pleasure in the performances of Tom Wilkinson, Ian McShane, John Hurt, and Stephen Dillane–doesn’t bear up to much scrutiny. For all its attention to their childishness, their brutality toward and real hatred of women, their discomfort with sexuality… the film is only ever concerned with these men, and like them it pretty much fails to say what it’s thinking or feeling.
Thanks to Mike for starting this thread, and being prepared to jump all the way into the water when most of us preferred to just dip a toe in. And his strategy of evading what seem to me to be the central questions – what do we mean by women’s films, and why should we watch them – and instead interrogating issues of masculinity within the movies that we tend to watch anyway, has some obvious benefits. But if we are going to stop walking on eggshells, I think we owe an answer to the wider questions raised by Gio.
I must admit to some frustration (which was probably obvious from my earlier post) with the process here. Gio delivers a provocation (to use Mike’s characterization) followed by a gnomic pronouncement, and then we scurry around trying to figure out the boundary lines of “women’s films†(“why don’t classics count?â€). Until we come to a thread initiated by Mike which repeatedly interprets what Gio means or probably means. I think a direct approach would be more helpful.
In any case, what might one mean by women’s films? Or what has been suggested on this blog as potential definitions of women’s films?
1) Films directed by women or involving women in major, possibly starring roles. Gio rejected this definition. Fair enough. But it does seem plausible to me that we get different movies even when Kathryn Bigelow handles a traditionally male film project, or that it makes a difference that Sigorney Weaver is the action hero in Aliens.
2) Films watched more by women. There must be data on this. I found the 50 top movies as chosen by men and women on IMdB and started to code them until I remembered that I had a job. I was surprised by the degree of overlap I detected by eyeballing them but it was a very rough and ready analysis.
3) Films dealing with issues of more relevance to women than men. This is analytically distinct from the previous definition, though it probably overlaps. This is the dangerous, slippery, and potentially essentialist category. So, like, what issues? Movies with more talking and less bang bang? Mike seemed to imply this in his initial response to Kick-Ass. So does that include Tarantino’s penchant for dialogue, or does the dialogue have to be about something other than tipping waitresses? Or Diner? What about The Wire, which is nothing if not talky? How about movies with happy endings? I recall Gio asking for suggestions for movies of this kind recently. Or movies about relationships? Is that what we mean? Who watches Tyler Perry movies anyway?
What I’m saying is that without a working definition of women’s movies – something a little more rigorous than “I know it when I see it†– we can’t get very far with the question of why such movies are little reviewed on this blog, still less whether that is bad thing. Or even that it might be an artifact of small numbers. It is easy for most of us to watch Iron Man within a relatively short period of time. How many of us are going to watch Vers Le Sud within a close enough proximity that it is likely that we will get any kind of dialogue going?
Cool. 1 seems interesting to me, but maybe most when it seems to counter expectations (from 3?). But Gio expressly forbade this, and there is something perhaps too easy about talking about Bigelow. She does stuff I like. I don’t like other stuff. What makes me like the stuff I like, and not like the stuff I don’t like, and how does gender affect that?
So 2 seems good to me, to try and get at something. Imdb’s a lousy place to do reception studies–data affected by various concerns. (Like how many total male vs. female voters, and how many of those voters are telling the truth, or maybe even more complex issues like does a “new” media venue reflect a viewership that is more or less like conventional audiences? Which might open up things like–do my students read Kick-Ass as a boy movie? Most of my conversations have been with women who’ve seen it, and adored it. But my mom ain’t on imdb.)
We could also try to track based on marketing, trying to read the “codes” of ads/trailers (as well as the venues where ads run), as well as tracking production. A whole lot of Iron Men get made, and very few Vers le Sud; even the “women’s” equivalent of cheap commodified product, like most Sarah Jessica Parker movies, are far fewer in numbers. That says something interesting about what is assumed to be profitable, who’s the target. (We all know: 14-18 year-old boys.) But the interesting implications here are how these forces of production end up shaping our pleasures. I was for a long stretch a key target audience, and now I still like all that stuff. We’re sneaking toward what Chris called essentialist,
…but I might see prop 3 as more constructed. I like these movies, not because I’m a guy, or because they’re oriented toward guys, but because the process defining masculinity depends on my constant … shit, I was going to say interpellation, so kick me in the head. My subjectivity was shaped by, through, and is still reinforced via these texts. So there is something of merit to say–‘though, as you with appropriate frustration note, something both troubling and terribly vague–about the idea of a “women’s film” or “guy flick.”
Tyler Perry’s a helluva good analogous example. Probably one of the most profitable filmmakers working right now, if not THE most. Ask any 10 white Americans if they’ve seen his films, and they’ll say no. Remove race and talk about their plots, and pitch it at any audience–and bet you most would say, sure, I’m for that. But white American audiences “identify” across racial lines in only a few limited fashions; a film with white people is a film, a film with black people is a black film. That issue recurs here, with the same fucked-up logic. We can name that fucked-uppedness without completely dismissing the category. Practically it has some impact on real viewing and viewers, on production and on interpretation.
It may even have bearing on “genre” and conventions.
I’m rambling. I did indeed sidestep the question of “women’s films.” You know, … I tried to be honest: I don’t really beat myself up about what’s on my ipod, or what films I enjoy. I think that’s worth examining and reflecting upon, but I don’t see it as a failing. (And I don’t think Gio meant to assert that at all.) But I’d much rather be talking about the issues Chris raised than slipping sideways into meta-Male chatter.
Wow. This is a lot of tizzy talk. From guys. Mike and Chris seem to be trying to save this blog for feminism. But I wonder if they’re just cutting male verbiage an even wider swath. Ease up guys. I mean, Tyler Perry? What, really?
What’s tizzy mean? I don’t understand your street talk.
Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life got a great new Criterion release–gorgeous transfer, lots of extras. James Mason is a struggling good middle-class father–teacher, husband, father, working a second job to make ends meet–stricken by some arterial inflammation (a subset, I believe, of the necessary-for-the-plot syndromes). He’s got about a year to live, or he can try this new miracle drug–Cortisone. The drug, however, distorts his personality, leading him into increasingly self-aggrandizing flights of aggression at school and home.
There’s so much here worth playing with: Ray’s gorgeous use of color, these stark reds constantly playing around the composition; its still-relevant attention to the fear of health care costs and the American perversities around class and consumption; the revelation of a sickness at the heart of the American ideal…
But I’ll throw it in this thread, hoping that John and Arnab might throw some more passive-aggressive taunts my way.
Mason’s father quickly becomes an Old-Testament Father, and the movie’s happy curative ending seems as feverishly uncertain as the rest of the film: the pathologies revealed are barely contained by the mechanics of plot but seem instead always lurking around, behind, within the familial images. I love the way the film suggests the aggression at the heart of the tough-talking patriarchal authority figure — as Mason goes off in a PTA meeting about coddling youth and the decline of moral values, I flashed on images of a few hundred politicos and pundits, Daddies telling America where it went wrong. (And thought of Susan Faludi’s arguments in _Stiffed_ about the struggles of masculinity in the wake of feminism.) And as wife Barbara Rush and stock ‘fifties-era blond son resolve to try to deal with this aggression so that Daddy doesn’t get sick again, there’s no subtle argument being made about how abuse gets internalized and accepted.
But where this film seems of its era–less relevant to ours than one might imagine–is in its embrace of the melodrama. In 44 Inch Chest (above), Ray Winstone weeps–and the other men mock him, and his weeping, his grief, is only accessible after his aggression, and in his cups. Mason is caught sobbing in the living room before things go awry; the aggression builds up on top of that grief. Even more than this shift in character development, there seems to be a generic difference — Ray’s film is a male melodrama, a domestic weepie, very much about the histrionic embrace of outsized emotions. (John’s written a great post before about melodramas and Jimmy Stewart…. but I couldn’t find it.) I don’t think we tell this kind of story any more. Male emotions are sublimated in/through violence. The point in Ray is that the shift to violence comes out of such constant personal and social repression of emotions; that psychological track isn’t explored at all in contemporary narratives.
Or am I wrong?
No.