by Andi Zeisler
This conversation wasn’t particularly productive, but it deftly illustrated some of the disquieting facets of marketplace feminism. One is that the descriptor “feminist” now seems to be used to lavish praise on anything that isn’t overtly degrading, demeaning, or exploitative to women. Another is that arguments over whether a movie is “feminist” or “not feminist”—especially when that movie never intended to claim either1—suggest that feminism is not a set of values, ethics, and politics, but merely an assessment of whether or not a product is worthy of consumption. Fury Road was undoubtedly a triumph of marketplace feminism. It was a boon to people who love big, dumb explosions but could do without the damsels in distress. It was a telling window into the mind of chauvinists and their fear of a world where women stand on equal footing with men. But it’s not clear yet whether it will have any effect on what has for almost a century been one of pop culture’s most openly unequal industries: Hollywood.
The Feminist Fallacy
Marjorie Ferguson coined the term “feminist fallacy” in her 1990 essay “Images of Power and the Feminist Fallacy” to describe the belief that representations of powerful women in media translate into “cultural visibility and institutional empowerment” for actual women, asking, “Do we . . . study depictions of women in literature, film, television, and print media as an end in itself? Or do we study those depictions as a means to an end?”
More than twenty-five years later, this question seems more relevant than ever. There’s been no lack of what are now called, sometimes with the verbal equivalent of eye-rolling and/or air quotes, “strong female roles” in the history of cinema, and thanks to specialized film festivals, streaming services, and sites like YouTube and feminist video portal nist.tv, they’re more accessible than ever. An incomplete list of movies often referenced on feminist blogs and listicles as feminist classics includes expected fare like Queen Christina, The Color Purple, Thelma and Louise, Born in Flames, 9 to 5, and the Alien franchise, but also Clueless, Waiting to Exhale, Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes, Set It Off, The Accused, and Real Women Have Curves. In other words, the elements of what makes a film feminist can be as varied as the characteristics of the people who watch them.
But though there are endless forums where you can make a case for, say, the stealth feminism of Legally Blondes 1 and 2, it’s been frustratingly clear that there is indeed a glaring feminist fallacy in the big-screen realm itself. There is a difference between a movie offering a clear feminist lens on a subject—a way to “read” its text as something that reflects or is informed by feminism—and the film itself being feminist. After all, strong women on film—and resonant, powerful, nuanced stories about them—are not new. They’ve been in existence since film has been an industry. But their long-standing presence has done little to change the contemporary values and assumptions of that industry. In Hollywood history, cycles of women contributing to and then disappearing from central roles both in front of and behind the camera don’t reflect the feminist movements of the time so much as they speak to an anxiety about the market for movies—anxiety that, over time, has become increasingly gendered.
In the silent-film era, Hollywood’s film industry grew quickly to meet audience demand, and thus it was more pragmatically welcoming to women writers, editors, directors, and producers than it would be at any other time afterward. Directors like Dorothy Arzner, Lois Weber, and Alice Guy-Blaché (the latter widely considered to be the first true “auteur” of cinema), and actor-producers like Mary Pickford (founder of United Artists studios) and Clara Bow created films that weren’t the escapist fantasies Hollywood would come to prize, but human stories that included complex relationships and forward-thinking subject matter: Weber’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, for instance, was about the need for legalized birth control. At one point, women headed up dozens of production companies. But, as film journalist and historian Melissa Silverstein notes, “As it became more about money, the women behind the scenes disappeared.” The expensive technology that turned silents into “talkies” beginning in the 1920s necessitated the involvement of Wall Street, which invested in young studios and became the big bosses of directors and producers, imposing a masculinized and increasingly sex-segregated workforce as part of the burgeoning corporate studio system. Women in powerful creative and decision-making roles were suddenly seen as amateurish and unprofessional; for the male-dominated financial forces that took charge of the Hollywood economy, and with larger and larger amounts of cash at stake, they were simply too much of a risk.2
Onscreen, representations of women followed a similar trajectory. In what’s now known as the pre-Code era of Hollywood films, women were smart, professional, ambitious, forthright, opaque, tricky, even criminal. They blackmailed bosses, had babies out of wedlock, seduced other women—and the thrillers were even steamier. Jean Harlow’s Red-Headed Woman was a brazen social climber more than willing to seduce any man to get what she wanted; Barbara Stanwyck, in Baby Face, was an exploited young woman who used sex to move from penniless to paid (“She had IT and made IT pay” leered the film’s poster). And, of course, there was Mae West, the bombshell vaudevillian, playwright, producer, and model for every one of Samantha Jones’s Sex and the City single-entendres, whose winking catchphrases—“Come up and see me sometime”; “When a girl goes bad, men go right after her”—have long epitomized pre-Code Hollywood’s sassy repartee. It’s not that the heroines essayed by these dames were like men; they weren’t. They were simply as human onscreen as the men, as full of appetite and humor and stubbornness and fallibility. And that was part of the problem that the Hays Code was enacted to fix.
The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 was created under former Postmaster General Will Hays to ensure that Hollywood no longer produced films that might “lower the moral standards of those who see [them].” The Code detailed ways in which films must be plotted and written so as not to tempt audiences into crime, revenge, or moral ambiguity, and it devoted special attention to issues of adultery, interracial relationships, “impure love” (including homosexuality and transgender relationships), and even dancing. Nudity was verboten, the mocking of religion a no-no. “Art can be morally evil in its effects,” warned the Code. “This is the case clearly enough with unclean art, indecent books, suggestive drama.”
Enforced from 1934 until 1968, the Hays Code’s vision of right-minded filmmaking was an equal-opportunity wet blanket: the catalyst for it was the sensational manslaughter trial of silent-film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who stood accused of the lurid death of a young starlet in his hotel room. As dispatches from the trial buzzed out from radios and wire services, Hollywood’s moral turpitude became a national obsession, and the industry realized that a program of self-regulation was necessary if it was to avoid harsher government meddling.
But there’s no question that the rules laid out in the Code—among them, that “impure love . . . must not be presented in such a way to arouse passion or morbid curiosity on the part of the audience”—had much broader implications for representations of women than they did for men. In his 2001 book Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, film critic Mick LaSalle noted that the Hays Code was especially preoccupied with the lives of women onscreen, seeing portrayals of fulfilling careers, sexual hungers, and lives that didn’t depend on one man as unnatural and—that word again—“impure.” It wasn’t immorality so much as it was gender equality that put the Code’s authors and administrators in a lather—or perhaps the two were indistinguishable. Either way, the fun and the freedom were effectively quashed; as LaSalle puts it, the Code “was designed to put the genie back in the bottle—and the wife back in the kitchen.”
The Code’s enforcement effectively kneecapped the possibilities for female characters and put in place a view of men and women that was literally and figuratively black and white. Its first and most powerful administrator, Joseph Breen, was a devout Christian, and his position and faith combined to mak
e Hollywood films a place where the uncertainties of life and fallibility of human nature found no quarter. Under Breen’s watch, nobody used birth control or got divorced. If a motion picture had a reference to a king-sized bed, Breen was there to suggest two twin-sized ones as a substitute. (That said, his directives did have their upsides: according to Thomas Doherty’s 2007 book Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, Breen was also responsible for removing countless racial slurs from Gone With the Wind.)
This rigid belief in moral rightness and nuance-free humanity created a series of fictions that persist to this day. The belief that “good” marriages were made behind white picket fences, by white men and women who had only enough polite, procreative sex to produce two children—that was Breen’s. The idea that the only truly “good” wife was one who tucked away her own dreams to further those of her husband and children—that was the vision of the Hays Code. The invisibility of and tacit disdain for people of color, homosexuals, transgender people, people with disabilities—that was Hollywood’s neat, uncomplicated, homogenous reality. That these were all committed to celluloid for more than thirty years before the Code was lifted had a profound effect not just on Hollywood’s imagination, but on that of America at large. Politicians campaigning on “family values” platforms have long invoked specters of a tragically lost Dick-and-Jane, Father-Knows-Best paradise to suggest that the country was healthier when women and other minorities knew their places. When talking heads and pundits sanctimoniously blame feminism for everything from divorce rates to child obesity to the death of chivalry, they’re picking up where the Hays Code left off. When the likes of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan blame single parents—specifically, single mothers—for America’s epidemic of mass shootings and other gun violence, they’re using talking points lifted from the Breen playbook, where marriage is a moral shield against untold evils.
The Code’s corrective lens on the narrative possibilities for women was cemented in the late 1930s and 1940s, with the rise of so-called women’s pictures. A brew of romance and melodrama that earned them the label “weepies,” women’s pictures were the original chick flicks, built from the ground up to appeal to what their creators had come to believe about female audiences: They sought out sap; they lusted not for sexual autonomy but for the snare of married love; and, with the advent of World War II and the departure of sons, husbands, and brothers overseas, they were looking for escapism.
The handprints of the Hays Code were all over the plots of women’s pictures: where women had been the architects of their own lives, now they were the victims of them. The chief themes were abjection and self-sacrifice in the pursuit of love and motherhood, often to the point of sickness and madness; and the screen pulsed with a moralism that pitted women against one another, often in the form of doppelgangers. In motion pictures that were written and directed by men like William Wyler and Douglas Sirk, plot points that centered on women’s suffering set the tone for decades of movies where the only sympathetic woman was a wronged wife or mother.
Nineteen thirty-seven’s Stella Dallas, 1942’s Now, Voyager, and 1945’s Mildred Pierce remain three classics of the genre, united in their tacit approval of characters who all but erase themselves for others, no matter the cost. Now, Voyager’s repressed spinster, Charlotte (Bette Davis), emotionally abused by her mother, ultimately finds fulfillment in caring for the similarly scarred daughter of her unhaveable lover. Its most famous line—“Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars”—speaks to that lover’s disbelief that Charlotte, unmarried and with no child of her own, could possibly be happy with her lot. And both Stella Dallas and Mildred Pierce center on women (played by Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford) who do everything they can to make their respective daughters’ lives an improvement over their own, yet are eventually shunned by the bratty, ingrate social climbers they’ve raised.
There was a pedagogical point to what film historian Jeanine Basinger called the “unquestionably demented” plots of many women’s films: before women could make the right choice—the proper, self-abnegating one—they had to be sufficiently punished for making the wrong one. This is hardly different from the lessons for women scripted into contemporary chick flicks, which find their hapless heroines entertaining audiences with a series of cringeworthy mistakes. Bridget Jones embarrasses herself in front of Salman Rushdie and wears a Playboy Bunny outfit to a staid garden party; What’s Your Number?’s Ally Darling pretends to be British and pratfalls all over the place in her attempts to hide from various ex-lovers; Katherine Heigl, in The Ugly Truth, unwittingly wears vibrating underwear to a business dinner, where the remote falls into the hands of a little kid. And so it goes, movie after movie, each woman rewarded with the right man and the promise of a happy future only after she’s been appropriately mortified by her own terrible decisions. Then, as now, there’s no success without a whole lot of abjection.
And yet the era of the women’s picture remains an anomaly in American cinema. These weren’t movies about women as supporting characters, written to better highlight the story of a leading man; the women themselves were the subjects. Probably no surprise, then, that film critics sniffed at them. Despite their industry recognition (Davis and Stanwyck received the Academy of Motion Pictures’ Best Actress nominations, and Crawford won for Mildred Pierce) and financial success, the critics largely derided women’s pictures as sappy melodramas whose main crime was that they were too, well, female. The minutiae of women’s lives was irrelevant, charged critics. The plots were outlandish, the concerns of women solipsistic, the emotions overblown: over the years, critics used hundreds of words to issue a blanket sneer to women’s films. This reception wasn’t a new one, nor was it specific to the genre; these male critics echoed a disdain for female-targeted media that had been in place since the 1850s, when Nathaniel Hawthorne complained to his publisher about the “damned horde of scribbling women” whose books outsold his own. And those critical assumptions about the worth of female attention persist to this day, where it’s alarmingly easy for both sexes to discredit entire cultural phenomena—Nicki Minaj, women’s basketball, romance novels—by deeming them too “girly” for the discernment of critical eyes that are still, by default, male.
Indie-pendent Women
As with the era of silent pictures and that of women’s pictures, the indie-film boom was one of the few points in Hollywood history where a critical mass of movies were made with a female gaze in mind. It’s hard to think of a time when women had more of a diverse presence on the big screen than they did during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a rapidly growing number of filmmakers working outside the big studios found their work in high demand thanks largely to the success of a Sundance hit called Sex, Lies, and Videotape. All of a sudden it was the age of the anti-blockbuster. Film festivals sprouted up across the country, and small development and distribution outfits focused on amplifying the voices and visions of filmmakers outside of Hollywood’s baseball-capped boys’ club were suddenly on the industry’s radar. The result was that films not only about women, but also about radically varied groups of them, proliferated in small theaters and screening rooms across the country.
Lesbians loved, labored, and lost in Desert Hearts, The Watermelon Woman, Go Fish, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, Heavenly Creatures, and All Over Me. Women grappled with race, love, and identity in Just Another Girl on the IRT, Zebrahead, Mississippi Masala, and Eve’s Bayou. Tough and vulnerable girls navigated friendship, violence, and selfhood in Girls Town, Ruby in Paradise, Trust, Mi Vida Loca, and Gas Food Lodging. Women in remote places created magic in companionship in Daughters of the Dust and Baghdad Café. Punk girls wreaked havoc in I Was a Teenage Serial Killer and The Doom Generation, and femmes fatales vamped it up in Bound, The Last Seduction, and La Femme Nikita. With a rise in independent-minded media like Sassy, Spin, BOMB, and Film Threat pointing the way, it was a great time to be a feminist who loved sitting al
one in the dark: I spent the years between 1990 and 1994 seeing these films, some more than once, in the art-house theater down the street from my college campus or at New York City’s Angelika, feeling inspired and wildly lucky and blissfully ignorant of what was happening at the multiplexes.
Indie film of the 1990s didn’t remain truly independent for long. Just as major record labels in the early ’90s began snapping up the small imprints that gave us Nirvana and Guided by Voices, big studios sought out their own imprimaturs of cool via indie properties. With media conglomeration and vertical integration, indie film was coopted almost as quickly as it had come on the scene. Time/Warner, Twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Universal, and Paramount bought up indies like Miramax (which has since regained its independence), brokered distribution deals, or started their own in-house concerns. By the latter half of the 1990s, most of the majors had independent divisions, like Fox’s Searchlight Pictures or NBC/Universal’s Focus Features; television’s Independent Film Channel was launched by the Bravo network; and the Sundance Channel, created by Showtime, brought alternative goodness to film fans all over the country. And though the Independent Spirit Awards, or “indie Oscars” had been founded in 1984 (as the Friends of Independents Awards) to showcase films that were, as 1990 keynoter Martin Scorsese put it, “innovative out of inspiration as well as necessity,” by 1996 IFC was broadcasting them as a low-key awards-show alternative.