Let me show you the Female Gaze.
Or: NEW CHOICE.
Back in my Second City days, we used to play a game called New Choice. You’d improvise a scene, and at some point the coach would say NEW CHOICE! and you’d have to repeat whatever beat you just improvised, except choose a totally new reaction. The best part was when the teacher would call NEW CHOICE again and again, and you’d pick something different, each time thinking, fuck, I don’t have a single new idea. And then they’d yell NEW CHOICE, and lo and behold, you’d come up with another one. It would often go something like this.
I’m here to deliver your milk. NEW CHOICE
I’m here to deliver your baby. NEW CHOICE
I’m here because look at my balls. NEW CHOICE
I’m here because I want to touch your penis and have gay sex forever!
I’m here because you killed my brother.
I’m a stranger, and I’ve come to town looking for a room to let.
Eventually, when you’ve dug deep enough, the director lets you go on. You start with a cliché, and you end with the beginning of a Tennessee Williams play. How cool is that?
It’s so lovely to watch someone excavate their own subconscious. It often goes from boring, through a crust of received cultural tropes and film quotes, into some real, honest latent homosexuality (this happens 100 percent of the time) right down, down down, to the real stuff of humanity and humor: loneliness, desire, vulnerability, love. It’s so rad to see.
So what does this have to do with the male gaze? When I see film directors (male, heterosexual film directors, I should say) pick their male actors, I see so many faces and bodies, complicated insides and cracked outsides, like priceless antiques, valuable because of their age and authenticity.
But when I see the women these directors often pick, it just makes me want to scream NEW CHOICE. Because clearly, these men have called upon all the angels and demons to pick their men. They’ve picked their fathers, their brothers, they’ve picked Odysseus and Oedipus, they’ve picked tyrants and blind old beggars, they’ve mined their subconscious for the most interesting, wonderful, soul-bearing models of humans. And then the women. They have a feeling — the simplest, first, idea — and they go with it. They pick a woman who, “they just have that something. they’re perfect.” NEW. CHOICE.
That’s it. Just pick the women with the same fierceness as you do when you make your choice for the men. Don’t stop with that first feeling. Try a new choice.
Since I’m a filmmaker, I’ll tell you about the actors I’ve used. And I’ll speak of them in exactly the way I did when I first saw them. I’ll tell you why I fell in love with them, the same way a male director falls in love with his hero.
I would like to start by saying I only put the most beautiful people in my films. I have no tolerance for anything less. This isn’t charity work, this is art. How lucky I am that I see the truth: these are the most beautiful women you can find.
This is Janet Ulrich Brooks. Look at her goddamned face. She is someone who could beat you at a staring contest before it even begins. She has this fierceness and openness that operate simultaneously, so that she could just walk up to you and say, very simply, “please give me the shirt you are wearing.” And you just do it, because my God, look a her. She’s so beautiful, I can’t even. She looks like she should be painted in egg tempera on the apse of a cathedral.
This is Peggy Roeder. She’s like if Susan Sontag ran a pastry shop in Milwaukee. For this character she held her face in this posture that was on its surface neutral, but was carrying so much tension it felt at every moment like a piece of pottery about to shatter. Her brow was knit neutrally, if you know what I mean. She had one large monologue, and when she performed it, she crushed it in her giant paws.
This is Melinda Tanner. Look at that face. It’s perfect. Her fair skin, which now reveals this world of different colors beneath, like a thin, delicate vellum, or a parchment with all of her years written on it. She was someone whose smile can play the sweet melody of a long, shared life, and can at the same time intone the low notes of grief. She does both at once. How do you do that? It was incredible to see.
This is Miranda Noelle Wilson. She’s younger than the rest here, and when I first met her I thought, she might be too pretty for the role. And then she proceeded to destroy me, every hour of each 12 hour day. She played the younger version of Melinda Tanner above, and even in her youth is able to show, without words, that love is patient, and love is kind. Without words she told us, I am so lonely, and I am so tired, but I love you, my darling.
I’m not sure if this is helpful or not. But when I hear stories of the way some directors in film and TV make their casting decisions, I see what’s happening. You’re just going with that first choice, which is always just desire. That’s not good enough. It makes me want to shout, for the sake of their own films, NEW CHOICE.
Do it for me, because I am so goddamned bored of the choices you are making in your female characters. NEW CHOICE.
But mostly, do it for yourself. Because I promise, it will make your work better. Imagine, as you imagine your female character you have that coach yelling NEW CHOICE. Maybe, after 10 new choices, you’re back where you started with your original idea, and that’s fine. But probably, after stepping past that first blush of desire, you’ll find the part of your soul next to where your male characters live. It will be a new and wonderful part of your subconscious, a room in your house you never knew was there.
Sounds like the best discovery a director can make.
