Earlier today a friend called me to pass the time with idle chat. I told him I couldn't at the moment because I was writing an article about the dearth of complex roles available to women in Hollywood films these days. His oh-so-clever response: "What do you know about women?"
He was just being an ass, of course (I'm happily married, so I must at least know something), but it did get me wondering: If recent -- for the sake of brevity, we'll define "recent" as the last 12 months -- Hollywood's studio films were my sole source of information data set, what would they teach me about women?
I would basically learn that women are indecisive, weak-willed, too forgiving of infidelity, allergic to more than two layers of clothing, manipulative, easily dispatched with a whole host of sharp objects, and apparently an endangered species after they turn 35. That may sound callous, but what else is hypothetical-me to glean from the likes of New Moon's Bella Swan (who is meek and selfish to the point of hurting pretty much everyone around her, which I've been repeatedly told is endearing in the books but is hardly so in the film adaptations); or the career-minded women in The Proposal, Amelia, Leap Year, and The Time Traveler's Wife, who discover men are the actual key to their happiness; or the pieces of eye candy that occasionally deliver lines in Transformers, Friday the 13th, and Sorority Row; or the female cast members of Valentine's Day and Couple's Retreat that seemingly exist only to embody long-standing behavioral stereotypes?
Now obviously, I'm not of the position that all women are like that, but if a faraway alien race is somehow tuning into Cinemax, that's pretty much what they'd deduce about the female of our species. But what if we step outside the studio system? What if we take hypothetical-me and feed him a steady diet of independent film? The picture changes drastically. Women start to face far harder decisions, beyond "Should I date the long-haired guy with the rippling six-pack or should I date the short-haired guy with the rippling six pack?" and their characters (and performances) reflect it. Just look at the Oscar nominations. Of the ten nominees for Best Supporting Actress and Best Actress, only three mainstream films were apparently capable of delivering complex performances by women: The Blind Side, Julie & Julia, and Up in the Air -- and that's in a year when the Academy actively sought to branch out to more accessible films!
The task always falls to the independent and foreign filmmaking sectors to fill the void. For every lame, spineless romantic comedy Hollywood puts out, there are five indie gems waiting in the shadows to be discovered. Sadder still is the fact that most of these movies never do get discovered outside of the festival circuit. Without an Oscar nomination to guide them there, most moviegoers would never find women making the difficult life choices that, sticking with the Oscar theme, are made by Carey Mulligan's character in An Education, Gabourey Sidibe's in Precious, or Maggie Gyllenhaal's in Crazy Heart.
That's not to say that without films like An Education your average moviegoer is going to assume that all women are supposed to be bubbly, man-craving and man-pleasing vessels without lives and dreams of their own, but it does beg the question as to whether or not this cycle is in any way a good thing. I suppose you can argue that Hollywood's poorly-executed romantic comedies are just as fanciful and dismissible as all the stupid action movies they release each year, but I don't buy that. With dumb action movies there exists a mutual understanding along the lines of, "You don't call us on this bullshit and we won't pretend that we're smarter than you are." Studio romantic comedies don't operate that way, though.
No one is supposed to relate to Jason Statham surviving a fall to earth in Crank, but most romantic comedies are banking on the hope that women will relate to their characters. That's why they stack them with broad and basic archetypes for viewers to latch onto (I'm totally a Samantha). Once that's done, however, they never challenge the characters with tough, real-world problems. In doing so, they only perpetuate the notion that all women filmgoers want is to live in a romantic fairy tale, where everything is wrapped together in a tidy package within 90 minutes.
Well, I'm not a woman, but even I'm getting tired of that thought process. I'm not saying that the major studios need to mimic their independent rivals, and I certainly don't want to see every movie saddled with the heavy emotional grit associated with the indie roles I mentioned above, but they at least need to step up their game. I thought maybe things were heading in the right direction after a couple of rare, mold-breaking studio comedies with both heart and brains arrived fairly close to each other (here's looking at you, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Juno), but then a $56 million opening-weekend haul for the deplorable Valentine's Day reminded me that little had changed. The mostly-women audience of date-draggers have voted with their dollars, once again opting for basic, interchangeable female characters over the flawed beauties so commonly found in smaller films. And when I ponder that, I can't help but think my friend was right: I really don't know anything about women.