Hollywood Knows Women (TM)
The Force Awakens: I have a bad feeling about this.
I lost hope for The Force Awakens a few weeks out. Oh, I was sure it would still be a fun movie if only to be with fellow fans in the moment of anticipation. (I’ve got about 2 hours to go.) I knew there would be some cool parts. But the story would fail. I could feel it.
What dashed all my hope? A throwaway comment from the film’s director, JJ Abrams. Back in November he told Entertainment Weekly that he hoped this would be a film that mothers would take daughters to see, because as everyone knows “Star Wars has always been a boy thing.”
I know of no faster way to annoy a fangirl than to ignore her existence. At this point, anyone paying the slightest bit of attention should know that we are a demographic. Take the banner shot for this post. It is my office wall. Lawyer, writer — vintage Star Wars one sheets, one of which was my second anniversary present from my husband.
But I’m not even that upset that someone in Abrams position didn’t get fangirls. I’m resigned to that kind of ignorance. No, what has me despondent about the film is that if Abrams thinks Star Wars wasn’t a girl thing before, then he’s tried to fix it. He likely applied The Hollywood Knows Women Formula, hereinafter simply The Formula.
The Formula is the basic story elements that people like Abrams think women like. It’s why Titanic and Pearl Harbor have syrupy romances, because Hollywood assumes the actual events weren’t dramatic enough to hold women’s attention. It’s why most rom-coms are the same basic story. And it is often why Hollywood ultimately fails to write good heroines.
We got an excellent illustration of The Formula earlier this year. In response to the near constant complaint that Hollywood doesn’t produce enough girl hero movies, when Scarlett Johanssen hosted Saturday Night Live she did a spoof trailer for Black Widow. It was an exaggeration of The Formula. A quirky but beautiful young woman takes a personal assistant type job for a powerful professional woman in NYC (or Chicago, occasionally Boston or LA), falls in love with a not quite perfect guy who she can redeem with her love as soon as she figures out how to balance him with her job, her true calling, and her BFF and/or her gay male friend.
Fangirls, we laughed. We are tired of every version of this story.
And with pitch perfect timing to underscoring our exasperation, shortly after the SNL Black Widow: Marvel Knows Women skit, the makers of the upcoming TV series Supergirl released an extended trailer. I have embedded both the skit and the trailer for readers to compare. No contrasting, there isn’t much of that to do.
Obviously between “a long time ago” and “far, far away” Rey will not turn up in LA for an internship at Huffington Post, but The Formula problem plays in sci-fi and fantasy. It just looks a little different.
The Sci-fi version of The Formula
For the sci-fi tweak of the formula, writers plop a modern western woman into the fantasy world instead of writing a heroine in that world. They don’t think women in the audience will be able to relate to the character unless she shares their outlook, opinions, and life arc — minus the heroic larks, of course. The modern woman is a hero, right?, so just stick her in space.
(This is actually why I am not sorry to see the Extended Universe of Star Wars novels go by the wayside. In the EU it seems that as soon as the war ended, someone in our time and place sent Leia a small library from The Feminine Mystique to Lean In and plopped her in the middle of our sex wars.)
We see the same generic western woman in all settings. It is both dull and condescending to assume that we cannot relate to a character unless she has the exact problems we do. Furthermore, what would duty require of a young heroine? What power does the constant threat of rape and death have on a woman? What can romance look like in the absence of cultural assumptions? What advantages or constraints does pregnancy and motherhood bring?
If we allowed a character consistent with her setting we might catch some insight about such questions from the story, but instead we just learn how any given screenwriter thinks a modern woman should react in any given fantasy world. This tells me more about the screenwriter than the character.
Tonight I suspect we will learn a lot about JJ Abrams and his writing crew, but not see much in the way of characters, at least for the women. Frankly they will act like men. That is what we expect of the strong modern woman, after all, to ape men. And for a week or so, casual watchers will think it is cool. The fans, however, we will know.
We loved the stories and the characters. If they aren’t there, then the flare lens and the music will only get us so far before we realize that this movie is just a shadow of the ones that inspired it.
