What Do We Do Now?

There is a gap between female- and male-driven roles in the movie industry. On average, there is only one female protagonist for four movies. In a world that is increasingly absorbed by screens, equal gender representation influences the way that people will act. Gender equality and fair chances are still unbalanced in most professional fields. A way to build towards a better future might be through movies. If a woman sees herself on a screen having agency and leading a plot, especially in her formative years, she can be socialized to believe in herself in real life. At Glamour’s Woman of the Year Awards in 2015, Reese Witherspoon said: “I dread reading scripts that have no women involved in their creation because inevitably I get to that part where the girl turns to the guy,and she says, "What do we do now?!" The reason that women are misrepresented in movies, in my opinion, is because of a lack of female screenwriters. Screenwriting is the beginning of the long process of making a movie; if women are cut out of that crucial step, they are less likely to be adequately represented later on. This begs the question: why this lack of female screenwriters? More specifically, why are female screenplays being refused blockbuster level funding? An easy answer to this question would be that there is simply not a market for female driven material. In 2016, America spent $11.3 billion on movies. Blockbuster movies, like any economic good, should work in a supply and demand model. Creative media should be funded and published only if the public is receptive to the material. On the other hand, famous movies such as Thelma and Louise, Legally Blonde, and the The Hunger Games franchise prove that many consumers are receptive to female driven material. In this essay I will analyze the underrepresentation of women in mainstream blockbuster movies, striving to answer the question: who profits from the underrepresentation of women in media, and why? First, I will provide historical context of women in media and film. Then, I will detail gender and economic dynamics in the current film industry. Finally, I will draw conclusions on who profits from the current state of the industry and how this can or cannot be changed in the future.

Before detailing the current underrepresentation of female screenwriters, it is important to understand the broader context of women in media. John Berger, an important name in the study of visual art, writes in Ways of Seeing:

“men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particwularly an object of vision: a sight” (47)

In Berger’s analysis, women are defined, both by men and by themselves, as a sight. They are always aware of others looking at them and they shape their behavior to accommodate this male gaze. Although Berger was writing about oil paintings, film is the modern extension of what used to be paintings and novels. Robert Mcluhan, one of the most cited social scientists on the topic of media, says in The Medium is the Massage that “All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.” (26) Screens, like books, are extensions of our eyes. Part of the way that we experience life more generally is by watching screens, because media has become part of our environment more generally. Ideas showcased through media delve into our subconscious and teach us behaviors and expectations.

This context is crucial in understanding any fact about the current place of women in film. Media is bred for women to be put on display and looked at, not to showcase real stories about them. This becomes clear when applying Berger’s readings to early cinema. Take the example of Curtiz’ Casablanca (1942), a movie which still today is considered as many cinephiles’ favorite. The first time that we meet Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, we see his hand signing a check. The shot is in deep focus, emphasizing his interaction with his environment and his body language. We see his body and his actions before we see his face. He is defined by his economic power and his nonchalance. On the other hand, the first time that we meet Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, the shot is in shallow focus on her pristine face. She is lit in such a way that she looks angelic. As she walks across the crowded room, every man’s gaze follows her. She is defined by her appearance and by her controlled grace, perfectly illustrating Berger’s point in Ways of Seeing. This trend continued in other cult movies such as Vidor’s Gilda (1946), in which upon meeting Gilda, played by Rita Hayworth, we see a shot of men looking at her in amazement before we even see her. She eventually looks at the men seductively, proving her awareness of their gaze. Both Casablanca and Gilda prove that women have been put on display in a sexual and aesthetic fashion from the very beginning of mass produced film. Some modern examples of films could be analyzed in the same way because this trend is not over. In an increasingly screen-based media consumerist world, women live life seeing themselves put on sexual and aesthetic display.

As a woman, and more generally a person who has met women, I know that this representation is not accurate. Most real-life women do not walk into a room followed by everybody’s gaze. They do not always glance seductively at the men that they meet.

Although some women do, consistently representing women in media as such forgets the nuanced experience of half of the human population. A reason for this might be the lack of female screenwriters. Out of the top 100 grossing films of 2017, only 10% of the writers were women. We cannot expect men to accurately depict the female experience any more than we can expect women to depict the male’s. Stories about women need to be told by women. The lack of female screenwriters might manifest itself in the rest of the production process. In the 100 most popular movies of 2017, women accounted for only 3% of composers. Only one woman, Katheryn Bigelow, has ever won an Academy Award for Best Director. Only one woman, Rachel Morrison, has ever been nominated for an Academy Award in Cinematography.

This lack of female empowerment recently came to light during the #MeToo movement. Allegations against Harvey Weinstein, a head of a big Hollywood production company, created a domino effect of women coming out about their male sexual assault perpetrators in Hollywood. Kevin Spacey, Aziz Ansari, Ben Affleck, Bob Weinstein, and Charlie Sheen are some of the many culprits. Stepping on women, both sexually and creatively, is an unfortunate trend in Hollywood that could change if we empowered women to write screenplays. Movies tell a story. If more women were to tell their stories through accessible and widespread movies, better gender representation and female empowerment would likely be more prevalent in the rest of the movie industry.

There is a famous saying in advertising: sex sells. Indeed, it might seem logical to sexualize women in order to make revenue. Researcher Tom Reichert, professor and head of the department of advertising and public relations in the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, said that "Advertisers use sex because it can be very effective, sex sells because it attracts attention. People are hard-wired to notice sexually relevant information, so ads with sexual content get noticed”. Using this same principle, it would make sense to maintain Berger’s “men act and women appear” model in order to sell sex, or at least sexual suggestion, to the consumers of Hollywood films. Data, however, contradicts this. Female-driven material sells, partly because women like to hear stories that accurately depict their experiences, but also because it is unique and interesting. Pitch Perfect 2 and Cinderella made over $800 million in the same year. The Twilight Saga franchise made over one billion dollars worldwide. Given this kind of success, women cannot be the only ones consuming this material. Back in 2012, Meryl Streep asked about this gender gap: “Why? Why? Why? Don’t they want the money?”. Her words ring true today more than ever.

When discussing the patriarchy maintaining systemic historical power, we are delving into larger psychological dynamics that are not solely related to cinema and media studies. For this reason, I would like to refer to Laura Mulvey’s Visual And Other Pleasures, a founding piece of literature in regards to representing women and gender power dynamics. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she writes:

“But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. (...) Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified.”

Drawing from Freudian concepts, Mulvey suggests that the very physical existence of a woman is threatening to a man. According to her, fear of castration makes women anxiety- inducing to men. In theory, this would make women – especially when they are geared to appeal to the male gaze –threatening and unpleasant. Mulvey then explains that the male unconscious can reconcile this: “by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star).”Fetishizing women is thereby a way to make women’s difference pleasure-inducing instead of fear-inducing.

Mulvey’s writing is extreme feminist literature, and I don’t believe that her argument explains every reason why women are kept inferior to men. It would be wrong and counterproductive to clump all men together as insecure beings subconsciously controlled by castration anxiety. It would also be incomplete, however, to not take this relevant analysis into account. Despite whether one agrees with Mulvey’s specific claims, it is easier for men to maintain power by fetishizing women. When you define a category of people as erotic and visually stimulating, these people lose their agency and their creative recognition. In the context of film, this becomes more complex because movies are inherently voyeuristic. They apply a seemingly invisible “mechanical eye” to the private intricacies of characters’ lives for the pleasure and entertainment of the audience. If women suggest visual pleasure, it will be easily apparent and utilized immediately. This would build an industry defined by its eroticization of women, thus dismissing women out of the rest of the creative process.

This brings us to the inevitable question: what now? Given that men hold a position of power in society, will women ever have fair chances in the mainstream movie industry? Mulvey teaches us that representing women justly does not come down to economic gain or women’s creative abilities. Instead, it relies on the very structure of societal and psychological gender dynamics. Women are meant to connote be-looked-at-ness, not agency and creative power. This is a quality that we construct and enforce through socialization, both as men and women. As long as this characteristic is part of our societal values, it will be difficult for all to be treated fairly in film.

There are two solutions to this that might eventually remedy this systemic injustice, the first of which goes back to the power of female screenwriters. If women insert themselves into screenwriter positions, by luck or forceful determination, interesting material that contradicts Mulvey might arise. Hiroshima Mon Amour, written by Marguerite Duras, is an example of this; the female protagonist is defined by her sexual subjectivity and memory rather than by her appearance. Every time that such material gets published, it is a step towards fixing injustice. The difficulty lies in managing to put women there in the first place. In an industry historically and socially built to disempower and fetishize women, it becomes difficult to stray from the popular narrative.

This brings us to the second solution: changing the system by altering gender dynamics in society. Gender, unfortunately, has historically been used as an excuse to maintain power over others. Instead of needing a gender to maintain this power, I dream of eliminating the binary altogether. This would allow for gender to be fluid and for power to be more equal. Women would not be held back, men could detach themselves from larger masculine social expectations, and people who do not identify with traditional gender roles could exist in an acknowledged and normalized manner. This is a bigger and complex goal that could be – and has been – studied for years. Ray Acheson, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, said during a lunch that social change requires “fear, hope, and humor”. According to her, we must be afraid and devastated by this injustice in order to call it out and raise awareness of the issues it creates. We must also firmly believe that we have the agency to change it. Finally, we need humor to bring out the flaws of the system we want to change and to make it light enough to be able to sustainably address it every day without pushing ourselves too far emotionally. If we have all of these things, we can hope to make a substantial difference.

In our society, women have less power than men. This becomes strikingly evident when discussing women in blockbuster movies. Most women in film are defined by their ability to connote aesthetic and erotic beauty, rather than by their creative power. Studying the underrepresentation of women in films is important because media dictates how future generations will perceive gender and power. Despite the claims that Hollywood works like any business, it is not taking advantage of the big economic opportunity that female screenwriters offer. A way to guarantee a fairer representation for all genders would be to eliminate the binary altogether. This would make gender fluid and power distribution more equal. Although this goal is both ambitious and difficult to achieve, it might benefit all parties involved. Hollywood would make more money, men would detach from social expectations of traditional masculinity, and women would feel represented and acknowledged.