Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Does your script star ‘The’ Woman?
You only need to look at any ‘Best Actress’ category to see the rarity of decent female leading roles in films these days - but what had never occurred to me was a lack of female roles AT ALL. Scriptwriter/scriptreader extraordinaire Lucy Hay recently pointed me towards these statistics which show (amongst other big issues) from 1990-2006, 73% of ALL characters were male.
You can actually see this in a lot of big film’s core casts. You get your identifiable hero, the more interesting mentor/best friend, an idiosynchratic baddie…and look, there’s a woman in it too! Posters for big movies even seem happy to sell it this way:
And, with Hollywood looking back in time for remake inspiration, it’s also increasingly going backwards when it comes to equality of roles. Having Uhura on the bridge in the 60s was a big deal - now it just looks behind the times instead of ahead of them if she’s the only woman there (and you know I hate being mean about Star Trek!) So it’s up to those writing original story worlds to keep moving things forwards.
But this isn’t just about the core cast. Writing decent female lead roles aside (that’s a whole other blog post!), it’s also about fleshing out your supporting cast without resorting to lazy gender shorthand. If we’re imagining characters such as Mayors, Doctors, Chefs, Coppers walking the beat, I imagine most of us (the men, anyway) will have conjured up a bunch of fellahs which is just re-enforcing the stereotypes.
There needs to be more female characters where the point of them isn’t that they ARE female.
If we can balance out our supporting casts with a more equal gender mix, it means that the leading lady doesn’t have to encompass the entire spectrum of ‘being female’. Which surely means we can then write better characters all round, right?
May 27th, 2010 at 10:59 am
bonnie said:
I couldn’t agree more! I’m a fan of the author Iain Banks and I’ve always found his work (straight fiction or Sci-Fi) to be one of the few places where male or female protagonists are treated exactly the same. I suspect this would change if it were adapted
May 27th, 2010 at 11:37 am
Mili said:
Have you come across the Bechdel Test? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dykes_to_Watch_Out_For#The_Bechdel_test
Basically, does your piece of fiction have:
a. At least two woment in it
b. who at some point in the story have an on-screen conversation
c. which isn’t about a man?
It’s shocking how many pieces of fiction or entertainment fail miserably even on a, let alone b. and c. Only about 50% of the books I read last year passed (and that’s because I was scoring generously).
May 27th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
john said:
Mili - I think I’d heard that somewhere before but didn’t know it by name. Reminds me of the scene in Ed Wood where Sarah Jessica Parker doesn’t get to play the lead in Plan 9 From Outer Space so is offered other pivotal roles such as ‘file clerk’ :/
Bonnie - I think film is the worst culprit of all the above so agree that Banks’ stuff could well struggle on screen. Sure they might use some of his great female characters…but they’d probably have to all wear catsuits!
May 27th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Liz said:
It’s not until you pointed it out, that I realised how right you are. Yet, looking at movies from Europe, there are very strong female characters on show, for instance Penelope Cruz in Volver and Vicki Christina Barcelona and even, come to think of it, in Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth in which the housekeeper, Mercedes, played with great nuance by Maribel Verdu, has such a pivotal role.
Do we think Hollywood is to blame or do we think it’s screenwriters who don’t have the capacity to write strong intelligent women for the screen? i.e. that they are so, I don’t know, brainwashed, that they only run with the formula that’s been tried and tested?
May 27th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
john said:
I think a lot of the problem with the big Hollywood movies is that they’re *solely* targetting under-25 males and so when they’re developing a script, one eye is always on squeezing Megan Fox into the film and out of her clothes. It’s not enough for the unlikely hero to save the world, he has to score with the hot girl too! And that’s all that character is…and, well, it sells!
But I do genuinely wonder if (some) male writers aren’t comfortable writing female characters and are only capable of putting them up on a pedestal (ie - they’re the goal of a story) or writing them as some betraying femme fatale (the ’shapeshifter’ in the story archetypes).
These functions can obviously be great characters too but not when they’re the only ones on offer and, quite often, are just reduced to plot devices in a short skirt rather than actual characters.
May 27th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
Chuck Spear said:
Very interesting piece here, John, and it is 100% true. Simply having two women in a film is rare enough it would seem, let alone having them speak to one another. While Joss Whedon has done a good job of introducing strong, independent female protagonists in his works–who speak to each other about things other than men–I find that the sci-fi genre is one of the worst offenders in the “Look, a woman!” filming. I’d say the rom-com genre doesn’t fare much better, seeing as most of the conversations the women have tend to be about men…
As an avid reader of comics, a field dominated by men both from the creative position and in the heroes on the page, it’s even more glaring just how few women are presented as something other than martyrs, damsels-in-distress or sexual objects. Sometimes all three! It’s also made me take a second look at the little Western comics I’ve been writing to see if it passes this test. With what I’ve written so far, it doesn’t yet–although does feature a strong, female protagonist–but will by the time I’m done.
As an African-American, this post brought to mind another Hollywood stereotype I find maddening and saddening, namely “The Super Magical Negro.” This role is typically a black male, cast in a helper/friend/mentor role of the white protagonist, often with mystical or magical powers, closer to the earth or nature and often mentally deficient, who is able to use these powers to help or save or redeem the white protagonist, yet somehow unable to save himself from his plight. The two most glaring examples are John Coffey in “The Green Mile” and Bagger Vance in “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” but there are others often played by Morgan Freeman (as much as I love him as an actor).
As always, John, great post as it gets us writers thinking more and more about what we’re writing means.
May 27th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Chuck Spear said:
Ah, here’s a link to what that stereotype I mentioned above:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/inventory-13-movies-featuring-magical-black-men,1782/
May 28th, 2010 at 8:07 am
john said:
Hi Chuck,
Thanks for the list - a few on there that wouldn’t have occurred to me which is probably part of the problem!
I definitely agree that many negative stereotypes get re-enforced by the lazy shorthand so that becomes ‘the norm’ or first idea people have when they’re developing scripts (’hey, it worked in The Green Mile!’)
Again, I get annoyed when the point of a black character is that they ARE black. I kicked off when a University tutor criticised me for my all white cast. I had to point out that no one’s skin colour was pointed out in the script and two characters were black in my mind because of the actors I had in mind when creating them. But they were all London characters so I didn’t mention it because I don’t cast ‘in script’.
In terms of comics, this is where I become less of a fan too. I don’t know if you ever read Gail Simone’s first run on Birds of Prey but she made a deliberate choice that none of the central female trio had love-lives because she wanted to ensure that she didn’t go down that easy path.
Cheers, chuck!