The latest issue of
The New Yorker contains a profile on actress Anna Faris, who starred in
The House Bunny, as well as having roles in the
Scary Movie franchise,
The Hot Chick,
Take Me Home Tonight, and
Lost In Translation. While the article is ostensibly about her upcoming movie,
What’s Your Number?, which tells the story of a woman who fears she’s slept with too many men, it also delves deep into Hollywood’s persistent misogyny.
Those of us waiting for a movie with a female character who has a high-powered job, isn’t a psychotic bitch, isn’t man obsessed, and who is smart, funny, and who (gasp!) has sex once in awhile, had better hunker down. It doesn’t appear this mythological creature will make its debut in a Hollywood film any time soon.
According to the numerous actors, writers, directors and executives interviewed for the piece, here are the basic rules of the female movie character:
#1 A female lead has to be “adorable.” Being adorable means a woman either doesn’t have a job or, if she does, has a nice non-threatening one, can’t get a man, and isn’t particularly sexually active. She cries a lot and knows everything is her fault. She tends to fall down, trip, bang her head on things, etc. In the article, a successful female screenwriter is quoted as saying, “To make a woman adorable, you have to defeat her at the beginning… abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity… It’s as simple as making the girl cry fifteen minutes into the movie.”
#2 A female lead cannot be sexually active. Sex is so verboten for women in movies that Anna Faris’s character in
The House Bunny, who was a used-up Playboy centerfold, was somehow, presto, made into a chaste den mother—but still one who tottered around in spike-heels and pink baby doll dresses.
#3 Women cannot have sex and be funny. Faris’s character in her comedy,
What’s Your Number?, which opens in September, has slept with 20 men. She then reads in a
Marie Claire piece that this is the exact number of lovers that dooms a woman to never bagging a husband. (The optimal solution here would be to not reveal the amount of men you’ve slept with, or to lie, but this is Hollywood.) In the
New Yorker piece, Faris and the film’s director, Mark Mylod, watch a scene from the film. In it, Faris’s character declares that she’s a “whore,” and wants someone who will “appreciate that” about her. During a test screening, the audience laughed at the line, but the director remained wary. “Younger women lap up the nudity and sexual humor,” he was quoted as saying. “Women over 25—some are worried by it.”
Unclear is how the director (or anyone else for that matter) would know the birth dates of the women in the audience doing the guffawing.
#4 Female leads cannot have a career and a man. In
What’s Your Number? Faris’s character has just lost her job. Other examples the article gives include Anne Hathaway in
The Devil Wears Prada, who gives up her high-powered job to keep her man; and Renee Zellweger, who pines for her boss in
Bridget Jones even after he ruins her career. While sports fanatic Cameron Diaz was the ultimate object of male obsession in
There’s Something About Mary, she was also a doctor. But we never see her working, or even talking about her career.
#5 Women must be klutzes. If a female lead is to be likable, she cannot have a sense of balance. “The studio note is always more physical comedy,” Faris told
The New Yorker. “Which means more falling down.” She adds: “She has to fall down first, and at the end she can be smart and crafty.”
The article also delineates something called the Bechdel Test, created in 1985 by cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace. This test, which examines movies for sexism, poses only three questions: Does a movie contain two or more female characters who have names? Do those characters talk to each other? And, if they do, do they discuss something other than a man? Not surprisingly, few movies pass the Bechdel Test.
Yet what about the successful female-driven movies with characters that often have jobs, can be either funny or smart or raunchy (sometimes all three), and even, on occasion, are less than virginal? The article points to movies like
Sex and the City,
Juno,
Julie & Julia,
The House Bunny,
Mean Girls,
Easy A,
Something’s Got to Give and
It’s Complicated.
“Studio executives think these movies’ success is a one-off every time,” Nancy Meyers, who wrote and directed
Something’s Got to Give and
It’s Complicated, is quoted as saying. “They’ll say, ‘One of the big reasons that worked is because Jack [Nicholson] was in it.’ ”
Funny how that never goes the other way. Can you imagine a studio exec saying, “Part of the reason
Knocked Up worked is because Katherine was in it”?
One top studio executive summed it up with candid, if depressing and scary, frankness: “The decision to make movies is mostly made by men, and if men don’t have to make movies about women they won’t.”
But there is a simple solution to all of this: men may make the movies, but women don’t have to go to see them.
