Movies For Women, and The End of Internet Anonymity Syndrome

While I was letting this post stew for a few days as I put my thoughts together, I left a half-formed comment on Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch Blog (www.popwatch.ew.com), a micro-version of my argument for why there are few well-known female directors. One of the Popwatch writers took half of that half-formed comment and posted in in their "makes us think" article, inviting other EW readers to comment on, um, my (half-) comment. I discovered this not due to my daily jaunt over to ew.com, but by Googling "Jane Campion interviews" and finding my name crop up at a publication called Bitch Magazine, commenting on how stupid my comment was (I can now say that I've been bitch-slapped by Bitch Magazine. Tell me that's not entertaining). The Lesson? People do in fact read what you write on the Internet, so be smarter about it, and remember that anything can be misquoted. So here's the whole argument, fully-pondered, fully-rendered, for your consideration.

The Toronto International Film Festival has been upon us for several days now, and with it a new piece (the Keats bio-pic Bright Star) from Oscar-nominated director Jane Campion (The Piano). Campion's presence at the festival brings with it an expected spree of interviews in which both interviewer and interviewee at some point complain about the lack of female directors, lack of films for women, and the need for more female empowerment (whatever that really means. I haven't figured it out yet. EW.com film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum describes Bright Star as "womanly-wise." I haven't figured that one out yet, either.

Now, this rubs me the wrong way for two reasons. First of all, it would appear that when people complain about a lack of female directors, what they're really complaining about is a lack of female directors who are also household names. The thing is, the number of male directors who are household names - i.e., who you can name-drop in conversation with anyone you know regardless of their film knowledge and get an "oh yeah, him!" in return - is very small number indeed. Spielberg...Lucas...Michael Bay...Clint Eastwood...maybe Cameron or Scorsese or the Cohen brothers. Out of the huge number of men who direct films, a very small number succeed in directing films that go on to see cinematic distribution, and within that very small number, very few make big waves in the general public mind. Which leads to the question of how many female directors there are to begin with by comparison, because that does matter in such a conversation. If, in a sampling of a hundred film school students, fifty men and fifty women, fourty-five of those men want to be directors, but fourty-five of those women are more interested in cinematography and screenwriting, bemoaning the significantly larger number of male directors is meaningless. Now, if fourty-five men and fourty-five women all want to direct professionally, all work equally hard at perfecting their craft and making connections, and all want to make high-quality, interesting films that reach a broad audience (or crappy films that also reach a broad audience, like Transformers or Cold Mountain), it would be a bit strange, yea even suspicious if thirty men but only two women wound up directing widely-distributed films. But this conversation means nothing without a grasp of how the number of directors seeking to make films for broad audiences is divided across gender lines in the first place.

That idea of "broad audiences" is my second point, and a big part of my theory on the lack of household-name female directors. In my experiences as an artist, and a life-long big consumer of art, be it film, literature, music, or video games, an overwhelming number of female artists tend to focus their art on "women's issues." The result is often a work that is made strictly for consumers with the same approach to feminism as the artist, and has little concern for actual art. One of the most famous female fantasy authors to date is Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose The Mists of Avalon (1982) is a highly influential tome that female fantasy authors like Mercedes Lackey have taken their cues from since. I may have read way too many Bradley imitators in junior high; let's just say they didn't leave a mark in the good way. The Mists of Avalon is a re-telling of the Arthurian myth based on, well, the premise that all men are patriarchal pigs whose sole apparent purpose in life is to make women miserable, and that girls rule and boys drool. The story is merely a vehicle for Bradley's manifesto, and as such its quality is a secondary concern, by which I mean it's a rather bad book. In general, any book or film whose focus on "issues" supersedes its concern for making quality art tends to be shoddy, regardless of the artist's gender. I think the American feminist movement is one of the worst things to happen to art, because its message of "empowerment" also promotes the message that it's every female artist's solemn duty to make art about women's issues and only women's issues. There's nothing wrong with niche art - one of my favourite films, Brick, is a bizarre production that I can't imagine appealing to anyone other than a film geek, a Dashiell Hammett fan, or someone so obsessed with Joseph Gordon-Levitt that they'd watch him wash the dishes and consider it time well-spent - but if the art is bad, and never moves past the paradoxical attention-seeking/navel-gazing nature of niche art, who the audience is doesn't matter. I personally feel that making a great movie is far more useful than obsessing over the fact that there are still sexist men roaming free even in today's enlightened society.

What do directors like Jane Campion think about female directors who make films for wider audiences? Beats me, because the pro-empowerment directors never mention these ladies in their interviews. Everyone's favourite manly-man high-octane thrill ride, Point Break, was directed by one Ms. Kathryn Bigelow, who also directed everyone's less-favourite manly-man high-octane thrill ride, K-19: The Widowmaker (featuring Harrison Ford doing his best "Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October" impression), as well as James Cameron's Strange Days. There are also a lot of women doing great work behind the camera other than directing. Veteran film editor Thelma Schoonmaker has been assembling Martin Scorsese's films since before Taxi Driver, and won an Oscar for The Departed - but since she's not the boss, she and women like her don't seem to count as "women behind the camera". In the world of fantasy literature, former Neverwinter Nights game-writer Naomi Novik recently burst into the scene with her Temeraire novels, entertaining and well-done historical fantasy that has something for everyone and seeks to tell an engaging story (though in fairness, I can only apply that description to the first three; her two most recent ones have faltered a bit).

I think what offends and entertains me the most about this whole business is the thoughtless sexism of "empowered" women promoting the bizarre idea that movies not made specifically for women are lesser films that we tolerate, that we cannot identify with these films, and that we all secretly crave and prefer "women's films" above all others. I guess I must be a man trapped in a woman's body, because my favourite films include The Seven Samurai, The Big Lebowski, The Great Escape, John Carpenter's The Thing, Stargate, Escape from New York, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the Rock, Die Hard, Get Carter, and most of the films to come out of Marvel Studios in the past decade. I didn't see the A&E Pride and Prejudice until my husband convinced me that it was amazing. And there are a goodly amount of women in the video game industry, which pro-empowerment feminists tend to write off as being just for men. Alyssa Finley is the lead hand on the BioShock series, an extraordinary work of art and tech. Google "Rapture City" for a visual, and prepare to have your socks knocked. Susan O'Connor is the game writer responsible for BioShock, Gears of War, Far Cry 2 (which I've recently put my hand to, and is brilliant), and many other solid shooter titles. Those alternately funny, morbid, funnily morbid, and overall genius Vault-Boy, Vault-Tech, and skill book illustrations from Fallout 3? You can thank Natalia Smirnova, who's also responsible for the entire user interface of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Bioshock, Gears, and Far Cry are all first-person shooters, to boot - the epitome of the "just for men" genre. But with the kind of credentials these ladies have, there's no good reason to assume they're not making the games they love to make. All of the titles listed above are "game of the year" winners in some way.

To blame the ratio of big-name female directors to big-name male directors on sexism is an easy out. To ignore the female directors who aren't big names but who make well-loved films that aren't just for women is humourously sexist. To ignore skilled women behind the camera who don't happen to be directing is just insulting. To attempt to write off films, books, and games that aren't made specifically for women as being just for men is sexist and insulting. To make good art, whoever you are? Now that's empowering. Whatever that means.