Can Anybody Make a Movie for Women? Part Two

Chick Flicks by B. Ruby Rich

My post today is a continuation of my writing about women directors in Hollywood, specifically Nancy Meyers, writer and director of It’s Complicated. It is important to note the emergence of feminism in film as a political movement, social practice and area of academic study in regard to this post (see part one). I will quote the New York Times article Can Anybody Make a Movie for Women to further explore the concept of women as filmmakers. I will also, as promised in the end of Part One, discuss Nancy Meyers’ directorial style as a Feminist Film practice and as a Hollywood director or auteur.

In the NYT’s article Daphne Merkin discusses Meyers’s filmmaking process and her stylistic sensibilities, like her “trademark aspirational interiors (referred to as “architecture porn” by one disparaging poster on an Internet message board)”. Then there’s ageism. What’s great about Nancy Meyers is that she taps into the desires of an unrepresented demographic of women. Merkin writes the films of Meyers are “postmenopausal chick flicks,” and quotes Diane Keaton, “she’s a pioneer with regard to representing older women…. She’s the only one delivering the fantasy for women over 55. You’re beautiful, charming and you get two guys instead of one.” Merkin then delves a bit deeper into a recognizable feminist tone by mentioning Meyers’s casting choices, “she has also mined a subtler subtext in her habit of picking male stars with a slightly misogynistic buzz to them, Mel Gibson, Nicholson and Baldwin, and then having these stars ‘relearn’ how to read women during the course of the film.” When reading this, I consider the directing of Meyers as genuinely evoking the spirit of Feminist Film from the 1960s and 1970s. I consider the casting of Meryl Streep to also have an underlying intention. The practice in Feminist Films of designating an actress to represent a woman emerging at a particular cultural moment is still being perpetuated here. Meryl Streep, the lead actress in It’s Complicated is such an actress, where the strength that lies in all her prior film roles cannot help but influence our reception of Streep’s character, Jane. Jane is the divorcee that women want to channel.

I consider Nancy Meyers to fall into the category “auteur”. When the term “auteur” became part of film history’s terminology back in 1940s France, no woman filmmaker was referred to as an auteur. Today, beyond gender wars, the term auteur is seldom used since it diffuses the credit to the army of people it takes to make a film and raises the role of director to an even higher authority, celebrity or genius (another word designated for men). The auteur theory believes authorship is not shared and asserts that a film retains it’s definitive style only by its director. Since Nancy Meyers writes her scripts and has directorial control of that script the term auteur is appropriate. Aesthetically speaking, Nancy Meyers retains a style all her own, which is not merely visual but retains a rich subtext much like her casting choices. Meyers’s use of rich home interiors speak to the woman’s domain, especially those of Meyers’s generation. The aspirational quality of Meyers’s interiors refer not to the lack of woman’s lives but of the richness, status and beauty.

Meryl Streep

Can Anyone Make a Film for Women? This question suggests something political. I have gone into the history of Feminist Film, one may see how valid and important this question was to answer during Second Wave Feminism when women were struggling for a voice: one to be heard, but also one they recognized. It was important based on the fact that films were saturated by male stories, communicating their desires and struggles, consequently left women’s experiences in deficit. This grew into a sincere effort to reflect woman’s desire and how better to represent these experiences than women themselves taking the role of author. Nancy Meyers is certainly projecting her fantasies on-screen, knowing full well that there are women hungry to see it too projected.

Nancy Meyers directing imbd.org

Films about the power struggles of the sexes in intimate life were not exclusive to Feminist Films. Male directors made films which touched upon these subjects, there was Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 Masculin Feminine about a couple’s “social and emotional politics” (imdb.org) and Eric Rohmer’s The Six Morale Tales, which touches upon the power plays between men and women from dating to marriage and infidelity. To me most relevant in this discussion is Scenes from a Marriage (1973) by Igmar Bergman. Bergman draws with such a sensitive hand the woman’s story, one sympathetic to the collective consciousness of women at the time, the way in which they felt their true identity was sublimated, nearly lost- never to be found or splintered between too many identities generated by society’s demands. Scenes from a Marriage is about a couple that divorces, but continues to carry on a relationship afterward, a subject that It’s Complicated takes on playfully and comically. The husband, Johan, has left his wife, Mia, for another women, a younger one, but ends up back in the arms of Mia repeatedly. The clip below is when Mia reads from her journal to Johan (post separation). At the end of the clip, you will notice Mia’s inner thoughts have fallen upon deaf ears. Bergman takes the opportunity to prove the feminine interior to be incomprehensible, which is not a dig at Johan, because Mia mystifies her own self.

In todays mainstream film world, woman are still catching up with gaining notoriety and securing a firm place behind the camera. Finally, in 2010 a woman has won an Oscar for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow for her film The Hurt Locker. The NYT article Can Anyone Make a Movie for Women is challenging an old debate by writing about the successful box office feature of a female auteur heavyweight in Hollywood. Merkin is careful to keep the debate alive since I detect a hint of 1960s style rhetoric, in the way she recounts Meyers getting her table downgraded in a Hollywood restaurant by a prominent male director. Merkin writes, “But it still gave me pause. You know, the whole sexual-politics thing rearing its timeworn, fractious head: a powerful man trumps any woman. (‘When you describe how influential I am in Hollywood,’ Meyers ruefully observed to me, ‘say we were thrown out of our booth.’)” Political movements are employed out of need and this incident is supporting evidence that there is a crisis on the position of woman in the film industry and is still a relevant issue. Certainly, upon reading about the incident, one may get nostalgic for the works of B. Ruby Rich, a Feminist Film theorist whom still retains her activist spirit of the 1960s and 1970s (read Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement, by Rich) or for the Guerilla Girls circa 1985.

Guerilla Girls protest of the Oscars 2006

Nancy Meyers has paid her dues in Hollywood, but would she have gotten to where she is now without starting out with her long time collaborator and husband, Charles Shyer? It is no secret that Kathryn Bigelow’s boyfriend was James Cameron. This detail is not to imply that these woman are not talented, but would they not have gotten a chance without close relationships to men who were already established in the industry? Meyers is undoubtedly competent, Merkin observes Meyers at a scoring session of It’s Complicated, she comments, “watching Meyers at her rigorous fine-tuning, I was struck by how deftly she got her point of view across without grinding anyone down in the process.”

I will end this post by saying I think man or woman,an artist communicates what is being held up in his/her psyche, some are universal and humanistic while other issues are bound by other forces. In the alchemy film-making, issues can be resolved for the filmmaker, and as a result, can even affect the psyche of society, a quality that feminist films in the 1960s and 1970s wished to exploit. Films made by women perhaps at times retain something characteristic in a woman’s psyche that is lacking in a man’s, not because men and women are inherently different, but it is in the way society produces “man” and “woman”. We are all much more complicated than the roles we are appointed to, and when you push aside all that society has imposed on us, are we not the same? It is definite that women are still in need to see their experiences saturate the mainstream, progress has been made, but let’s not stop here!

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