Before I Bury Myself In Books

I feel that this week calls for some summary. First of all, It looks that I am in for loads of reading this semester brake. Apart from the books mentioned before, there are some new volumes on my list. Among them Blackwell Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, which I suppose does not need any introduction. Another position is Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West by Kristin M. McAndrews, which as far as I can see has a great chapter on gender and the perception of the female in the west.

Secondly, as you all probably know by now I am all over the place when it comes to making the final decision on my paper, always changing my mind. So let’s settle that my goal is to examine how powerful female characters are portrayed in western movies. I will start with an older example, High Noon (This part, however, might change if I find a more suitable classic. Note to self – watch all the movies from the long long list). Then transition to a more recent example that depicts women as more independent and powerful on the surface, but is rife with objectification and actually is a thinly veiled attempt to pander to the male fantasy (remember what the screen writer Jennifer Kesler  from my Bechdel Test note said about the Hollywood?). My investigation into the female agency is going to end with an dissection of a representative of the feminist western The Ballad Of Little Jo.

Not much time is left until we have to send in our chapters. So I hope that you will excuse my leaving a short summary instead of a lengthy examination of how the idea of power applied to females in the west (which btw is a fascinating topic) and how the cinema reworked those in recent decades or why the Josephine Monaghan’s life (she inspired the Ballad of Little Jo film) was oddly fascinating. All of that has to wait now since so much research still awaits me.

The Bechdel Test

The idea behind the test is to determine whether a film (or any other work of fiction for that matter) displays gender bias. The concept and the name of the test come from Alison Bechdel’s comic.

The rules are:       

1. a film should have at least two female characters who… 
2.  talk to each other about…
3.  something other than a man.

These requirements seem pretty undemanding. However, it is surprising how many popular films do not pass the test. Even worse, according to Charles Stross, approximately half of the films that do pass the Bechdel test have women talk about children or relationships. The Sex and the City seems to be a ‘great’ example of failing the test: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends? It's like seventh grade with bank accounts!", one of the characters of the immensely popular series says. 

The website bechdeltest.com has a database of films with comments on their score. Touted as the feminist film/western, The Homesman, miserably fails the test. Jennifer Kesler notes that in her work as a screenwriter she was expected not to apply the Bechdel Test’s rules because they deterred the audience from the movie – what they wanted was allegedly the white male lead. She comments, ‘According to Hollywood, if two women came on screen and started talking, the target male audience’s brain would glaze over and assume the women were talking about nail polish or shoes or something that didn’t pertain to the story. Only if they heard the name of a man in the story would they tune back in. By having women talk to each other about something other than men, I was “losing the audience.”’ 

Kesler left Hollywood reasoning that there was no chance of changing the system from the inside. She argues that Hollywod is full of immature boys who make films THEY want to see and use target audience as an excuse to fulfil their own desires.

This had pushed her to create thehathorlegacy.com, which aims to demonstrate gender portrayal and positive female characters in works of fiction (TV, books, movies, comics etc.). Here is an excerpt from the site’s mission: “They claim to have incredible amounts of ratings, survey and market research data to prove this is what the audience wants. But after decades of crappy female characters, what else could the data show? If you give a passionate orange lover the choice between a spoiled orange or an apple, she’s going to choose the apple . Only a fool – or someone with an agenda – would conclude she actually prefers apples to oranges. So this site exists to provide some alternate views of the film industry. […]Spread the word.”

Grappling with Theory - the Male Gaze

While I am trying to get the grip on feminist film theory (for that I recommend Anneke Smelik’s Feminist Film Theory article) I thought that it might be a good idea to write about one of the most basic ideas, namely, the male gaze.

The concept of gaze deals with the reception of the characters presented in a film. The notion of male gaze was created by Laura Mulvey (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975) and it argues that film has a tendency to automatically put audiences into a perspective of a heterosexual male. This is reflected in the way camera works (i.e. sex scenes overwhelmingly focus on female body and reactions, non-sexual scenes also feature frequent shots of women’s body parts), fragmenting, and objectification. As a result female viewers experience the narrative by identifying with the male. 

Here is an example and a quick experiment in one.
 

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Now having watched the video try to answer these questions:

-         What color top was he and she wearing?

-         What bowling lane was used?

-         What color belt did he and she wear?

-         What color shoes did he and she wear?

-         What color eyes did he and she have?

You might not have known the answers to all the questions.You were too busy looking at the woman. (Source  http://www.slideshare.net/missSbennett/the-male-gaze-26907936?next_slideshow=1)

The term ‘male gaze’ applies to different visual media. If you are into games you might have heard about Anita Sarkeesian who is a feminist critic of games and popular culture. Her YouTube channel Feminist Frequency is a treasure trove of ideas. 

If anyone doubts the existence of the male gaze phenomenon here is some food for thought – Movies Are for Men – an informative short documentary examining the male gaze with many examples.

On Writing

I have noticed that some of you wrote about the recent writing classes and I have thought I will add my two cents. Boy, was it interesting to have a glimpse into how writing is taught in the US! Given a choice I would probably opt for the whole course of that. 

Certainly I have learnt more than I expected. Although, generally I have little trouble writing anything short big projects tend to give me nightmares. The problem is my brain spews endless chaos of ideas, which impedes progress and clouds the argument rather than helps. A structured way of organizing the whole process of writing is something I needed and will gladly use.

Also the sheer exercise of reading well-structured essays and the assurance that the devil is in the content-review combo boosted my confidence. Now I hope that this new-found practical knowledge will translate to my paper.

Reading List

In my search of books I came across a few interesting titles that may come in handy. One of them is So Much to be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier by Jane Tompkins, which is a collection of accounts of real life pioneer women who came West in the nineteenth century. The picture of frontier life they present is diverse as they come from different backgrounds, end up living in different parts of the west, but most importantly, their views on issues ranging from housekeeping to definition of womanhood are also diverse. Put together they form a very informative picture (and a historical account for that matter) of what it meant to live in the west as a woman. I would like to think that the picture this book paints is more true to the reality than what the myth of the west presents.

Another publication that grabbed my attention was West of Everything : The Inner Life of Westerns. In the introduction Tompkins states that she loves westerns and continues how the West being a symbol of freedom contrasts with the modern industrial society, how it functions as a place that promises the opportunity of self-transformation. In the book the author argues that western as a genre is a response to (and in a sense a continuation of) the 19^th century Victorian  women’s novel that cherished the domestic sphere. It is the antithesis of the cult of domesticity that dominated American Victorian culture. The Western hero, who seems to ride in and out of nowhere, in fact comes riding in out of the nineteenth century. And every piece of baggage he doesn't have, every word he doesn't say, every creed in which he doesn't believe is absent for a reason. (Tompkins. 39) This is a surprising statement, however it certainly sheds some light on the origins of the masculine ‘hard edges’ in the traditional western.
  

Last but not least, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema by Anette Kuhn. I do not know if you would agree with me, but some concepts of feminist critical theory are confusing (at least initially). Kuhn’s book deals with the 80s and 90s cinema and introduces all the relevant issues combined with multiple examples from different films. Unfortunately I have not seen most of the films she discusses, however, as far as I can tell, Kuhn's writing style is accessible and, unlike some other scholars, she does not try to complicate the already intricate concepts.