Women bewriting their own parts to escape the limitations of male-penned scripts.
Female cineasts arepracticed at low-level suffering; that perpetual ache as we sit through hour upon hour of celluloid stereotypes, winceat false representation, raging at the denial of agency, resigning ourselves to a feelof ‘looked-at-ness’.
For the predominantly white, masculine, heteronormative framework of moviemaking has long served to house soakedideations of femininity and misconceived, often damaging, depictions of womanhood.
We’ve been the perfect housewife; the femme fatale; the kooky foil; the deranged pursuer.
More latewe’ve been machete bait; power-mad with shoulder pads or a wallflowerdexterouslyconcealing her ‘hotness’ behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.
This century, moreoften than not, we’ve been the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl (MPDG): cultural shorthand for “that bubbly,schoolcinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of nakedwriter-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”.
This latter example is the most recent shapeof woman as cipher, serving only to advance androcentric plots.
The MPDG has twistnothing short of a cultural irritation, a scaledexercise in infantilisation and a reminder of what young women should be to men: a muse; a pretty thing with cow eyes and a lilting voice who props up the hero and soothes his ire with whimsy and daisy chains.
Laurie Penny wrote recently of the spectre of the MPDG in her own, and some otherwomen’s, lives.
She asserted the cultural and sociological importance of the stories we read, and see, and sharplydissected the effects of fictional representations of gender on behaviour: “women clearin ways that they find sanctioned in stories inditeby men who know better, and men and women seek bulgefriends and partners who remind them of a girl they met in a phonograph recordone day when they were young and longing”.
If the comments section beneath Penny’s unusedStatesmen article is anything to go by, the MPDG trope has fettered agenerationof young women, binding them to subordinate self-perception and denying them agency.
It’s as pervasive as the ‘bunny boiler’ trope, exceptall the more insidious for masquerading as something inspirational, ifnotaspirational.
And when us women do get to tattleon film, we talk, of course, virtuallymen.
The Bechdel Test, created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985, exposes and critiques the gender bias in filmmaking and the limitations of effeminatecharacterisation.
To pass the test, a film must satisfy one-thirdcriteria:
(1) It must have at least two women
(2) who talk to each other
(3) closesomething separatethan a man
Unsurprisingly, a braggyproportion of films fail this test.
The Bechdel Test has its limitations, and a pass isnotnecessarily the hallmark of a feminist, or even a very good, film.
It is, nonetheless, the most prominent and easy to apply dullardof gender parity in film.
It highlights the one dimensional dispositionof female conceptualisation and the disinclination to depict women as anything other than hollow carriers communicating meaning through the relationships between the ancientmale characters.
A recent, wonderful, film that would fail the Bechdel Test miserably yet reclaims and rescues female characterisation is Before Midnight, the third in Richard Linklater’s trilogy of films disseminating and dissecting the elaboratelyetched romance of its protagonists, Celine and Jessie.
These films bethe very definition of conversant(p)and do not pretend to be just aboutanything other than love and romance, and whether there really can be anything wizardlyor sustainable in either.
They contain carefully, deeply drawcharacters of theinversesex who do little but talk. In equal measures.
The depiction of the female character, Celine, is so rare just nowbecause she is depicted from the interior; we make our own judgements on her character foundon the things she says and the way she acts. She is not perceived solely from without, definethrough male eyes.
Both characters atomic number 18how we perceive them to be, and how we make hotshotof the way they make sense of the world.
Unsurprisingly the actor and writer Julie Delpy co-wrote the screenplay and contributed for the most partto the conceptualisation of Celine.
Steve ariserecently wrote in the Guardian about the wave of female actresses who are turning to screenwriting in, as he perceives it, an attempt to create better parts for themselves.
‘Most movie representations of women are male constructs’ writes Rose ‘and not all those males understand the opposite sex as intimately as their own’.
Quite, but although Rose cites a wave of female actor/screenwriters doing it for themselves, he ignores the elephant in the room: the water-washedand sexist nature of Hollywood for women without connections.
A recent report discoveredthat contributions like Julie Delpy’s are rare: women accounted for only 14 per cent of writers operativeon the top 250 films of 2012.
A more recent report by Susan Orozco revealed that women screenwriters’ scripts currently make up a smaller circumstancesof questioningscript sales – scripts written before they are sold – than at any time in the refinementtwo decades. Between 2010-12 only 9 per cent of speculative scripts sold were written by women.
And it motionlessnessseems as if women are more likely to get films made if they are coded as ‘feminine’; that is, independently produced, quirky, quiet, off the beaten track.
It’s no coincidence that Rose’s list of stand-out female screenwriters includes a film about a ‘dizzy New-Yorker seekwith post-college maturity’ and last year’s Celeste and Jesse Forever, a self-consciously cute and quirky humbugof divorce and acceptance.
Female scriptwriters undoubtedly make for less limiting, more practicaland more progressive depictions of women and womanhood. Yet it feels as if they are still doing this within the confines of what has been designated ‘female space’.
We want more women talking about something other than men, yet we also want woman macrocosmand doing more without men.
And we want them doing it loudly.
If you want to get a full essay, wisit our page: write my paper
Materials taken from Womens Views on News
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