Women in Film

Govindini Murty has an interesting post up about the paucity of good roles for women in the current incarnation of Hollywood. For those who don't know, Murty and her husband, Jason Apuzzo, are the movers and shakers behind the Liberty Film Festival, last October's celebration of conservative and libertarian cinema. The event was an enormous success, and Murty/Apuzzo have now started a blog that will discuss film and "the industry" from a conservative point of view.

This issue of roles for female actors is one that Murty discussed at the flim festival itself, and I remember having mixed emotions about her central thesis: that there is something intrinsically degrading about a woman taking her clothes off, or having to utter four-letter words—probably due to the fact that I take my clothes off and utter four-letter words every day. Of course, Murty is a real conservative, and I'm a libertarian warblogger. (And in the wake of Bush's electoral victory and the elections in Iraq, we will see debate heat up between the two wings of the GOP that we represent; this is as it should be. No problem, as long as we are all respectful.)

The larger point, of course, is dead-on: good roles for women are becoming rare, particularly for an actress who doesn't care to engage in gratuitous sexual scenes. And the "interesting" roles are very often only so because they run completely perpendicular to the traditional values of this country: certainly there's a huge market out there for stories about women that are life-affirming, and that reflect the variety of human experience.

Would I call the current situation "misogynistic"? Probably not. But there's a huge market segment that's being underserved: it's possible to make stories about strong women that do not have to be ghetto-ized into "chick flick" status. To take an extreme example, Alien and Aliens were very successful in showing a strong woman character without fundamentally denying Ripley's femininity: in Aliens, her entire motivation for needing to destroy the mother-alien reflects her role as a surrogate mother to the child Newt and a desire to protect the families in the colony. She fights fiercely precisely because she is a woman.

No one wants to take women back to the June Cleaver model, but there is a wide world out there between the stereotypical notions we have of traditional women's passivity and the types of images we are getting now (outside of some very creative movies for children that we should be thankful for). There are stories to be told that a lot of people would like to see: some of them even live on the coasts!

Time to explore, boys and girls: there's money to be made.