WOMEN AND MEN IN MOVIES

Unsurprisingly, women and men’s roles in the movies were generally very similar to their TV counterparts. Here
we’ll gallop briefly through recent decades, mentioning films which were amongst the most prominent and
successful at the time (see box office and other information at (www.imdb.com). This broad-sweep approach, taking
in movies that the largest number of people will have seen, is a deliberate alternative to the method typically seen in
film studies, where single films – often selected for their uniqueness – are studied in depth. Books such as Women
and Film (Kaplan, 1983), Screening the Male (Cohan and Rae Hark, 1993), You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and
Men (Kirkham and Thumim, 1993), Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women (Kirkham and Thumim, 1995),
Feminism and Film (Humm, 1997) and Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (Tasker, 1998, as
noted in the previous chapter) offer detailed analyses of gender representations in particular films. These pieces are
often intriguing and insightful – although the reader is haunted by concern that each film discussed may be atypical,
telling us little about gender in the majority of popular films. Here I will assume that you have seen a few films from
the past and will have your own idea of how gender was typically shown; this is just an attempt to summarise, and
jog the memory.

In the 1950s, the most popular films included High Noon (1952), 12 Angry Men (1957), Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957), Touch of Evil (1959), as well as Hitchcock classics such as Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window
(1954), North by Northwest (1959). The films almost always focused on male heroes. These men typically made the
decisions which led the story, and were assertive, confident and dominant. Women had important roles in many
films but were far more likely than men to be shown as frightened, in need of protection and direction, and offering
love and support to the male lead character(s). The stylishness of the gentlemen at the heart of Hitchcock’s thrillers,
say, can seem more ‘feminine’ than the grunting macho heroes of 1980s action films, but it was tied to a
buttoneddown, statesmanlike, quick-thinking masculinity which contrasted with the feminine beauty and lack of
assertiveness of key women characters. Some Like it Hot (1959) played with the performance of gender, but only
hinted at a challenge to masculine and feminine roles.

The 1960s gave us hits like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Dr Strangelove (1964),
The Sound of Music (1965), Doctor Zhivago (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Gender roles, on average, did
not differ greatly from the previous decade. The 1960s may have been ‘swinging’, to some extent, but the impact on
film scripts, in terms of gender roles, seems quite minimal. As before, it would be wrong to suggest that all women
characters were shown as inept, or were always cast as housewives, but male characters were consistently more
intelligent, more assertive – and much more prevalent.

In the 1970s, Leia in the decade’s top hit Star Wars (1977) was pretty good at shooting stormtroopers, but she was
also the prized princess that the heroic boys had to rescue, and win the heart of. Ripley in Alien (1979), though, was
a superior female interplanetary survivor. Other popular films of the 1970s such as The Godfather (1972), The Sting
(1973), The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), The Deer Hunter (1978) and Superman (1978) fit within the model
described for previous decades. Although Lois Lane in Superman is a successful reporter, for example, it is still the
(super-)heroic man who leads the story and saves the world. Woody Allen found success with films like Annie Hall
(1977) and Manhattan (1979), featuring intelligent women who captured the eye of the famously witty but neurotic
and un-macho leading man – which was, at least, somewhat different to the norm.

The 1980s saw Ripley become stronger in Aliens (1986), and Sarah Connor was courageous in The Terminator
(1984), even if patronizing future-people did send a man back in time to save her. An executive with an instinct for
equal opportunities green-lighted Supergirl (1984) but forgot to make it a good film. Meanwhile, the reliable heroic
male still featured prominently in most films, including the Indiana Jones series (1981, 1984, 1989), the Rambo
series (1982, 1985, 1988), Crocodile Dundee (1986), Die Hard (1988), and many more. The likeable, funny guys in
comedies like Ghostbusters (1984) and Back to the Future (1985) didn’t have any strong female competition. Three
Men and a Baby (1987) – despite being based on the idea that whilst one woman can readily deal with a baby, even
as many as three men are going to have trouble – at least gave us something different to contemplate.

This quick skim over films from the 1950s to the 1980s is, it must be admitted, rather simplistic. As the film studies
books mentioned at the start of this section show, masculinity and femininity in films is often rather precarious.
Characters are made more interesting by being imperfectly masculine, or slightly-different-to-what-you-might
expect feminine, and the nuances of these gender characterisations are often worthy of some examination. The
character of Indiana Jones, to take one example, is the typical macho action-adventure hero on the one hand, but we
see him being tender with women in each film, acting as a father to Short Round in the second picture, and
responding as a son to his dad in the third. We can, no doubt, spot homoerotic elements in the films. We can note
that things often go wrong for Indy – his plans are not flawless, and his attractive body may be damaged.
Nevertheless: as with almost all male heroes in almost all films, Indiana Jones is basically reliable and decisive and
victorious. We may find some imperfections or quirks, but he’s basically outstanding as a hero, and unquestionably
masculine.

Women’s roles, also, have much more complexity and value than my summary suggests. The history of movies is no
doubt full of remarkable female characters in supporting roles. Even in a straightforward action hit like Raiders of
the Lost Ark (1981), to continue the previous example, Karen Allen is not simply a ‘love interest’ for the hero, but is
a spunky, assertive and intelligent character in her own right. Nevertheless, she doesn’t lead the story, she doesn’t
make the central decisions, she doesn’t repeatedly save her male colleague. And she’s not the star of the film. And
this, we have to note, has typically been the place of women in films.

Feminist critics have put it even more starkly. In 1973, Marjorie Rosen asserted that ‘the Cinema Woman is a
Popcorn Venus, a delectable but insubstantial hybrid of cultural distortions’ (1973: 10). Rosen charted the changing
representations of women in Hollywood films, noting backlashes against working women in the 1940s and 1950s,
and against female sexual emancipation in the 1960s and 1970s. The representation of women as ‘sex objects’
varied in style but was otherwise constant throughout (Rosen, 1973). The early 1970s also saw the launch of a
journal, Women and Film, in the first issue of which Sharon Smith declared:

Women, in any fully human form, have almost completely been left out of film ... The role of a woman in a film
almost always revolves around her physical attraction and the mating games she plays with the male characters. On
the other hand a man is not shown purely in relation to the female characters, but in a wide variety of roles.

(1972: 13)

A decade later, E. Ann Kaplan (1983) felt able to be just as sweeping:

In Hollywood films, then, women are ultimately refused a voice, a discourse, and their desire is subjected to male
desire. They live out silently frustrated lives, or, if they resist their placing, sacrifice their lives for their daring.

(pp. 7–8)

And at the start of the 1990s, Kathi Maio – in a book of her film reviews – observed that Hollywood’s ideas about
gender were ‘often reprehensible’ (1991: vii). As a jobbing reviewer, Maio had sat through many popular films of
the 1980s (in happy contrast to those film theorists who sometimes seemed to have avoided mainstream films
altogether). She was not impressed (1991: 2):

Women are not only given less screen time, when we’re up there on the screen we are likely to be portrayed as
powerless and ineffectual ... Where are the triumphant women heroes to match the winner roles men play
constantly?
Maio is pleased to find a few exceptions, and notes the roles for resourceful females in Dead Calm (1989) and
Heathers (1989). ‘Strong, victorious women [do] exist in film’, she says. ‘Just not often enough, and generally not in
movies that get much play’ (p. 4).

In her best-selling book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (1991), Susan Faludi went one step further,
arguing that films of the 1980s such as Fatal Attraction (1987) and Baby Boom (1987) were part of a wider backlash
against women’s liberation and women’s careers. She also noted women being ‘reduced to mute and incidental
characters or banished altogether’ in action movies like Predator (1987), Lethal Weapon (1987) and Days of
Thunder (1990) (p. 169). Even the tough Ripley in Aliens is criticised because her motivation to defend the little girl
Newt is ‘maternal’ (p. 145). Faludi marshals an impressive array of evidence to show that the backlash against
women stretched throughout popular media and political culture. Some of the examples seem rather exceptional –
even the archetypal ‘backlash’ film, Fatal Attraction, was rather unique and not representative of many other
movies. Nevertheless, Faludi leaves the reader in no doubt that these ‘backlash’ tendencies were certainly in
circulation.