From Confessions of a Shopaholic
Beauvoir famously denoted that `` One is not born a woman, but goes one, '' in her 1949 treatise The S Sex. She might hold added: `` But it takes Hollywood to turn one into an hysteric fashion-mongering man-craving anorectic imitation. '' For, increasingly, the modern Hollywood women 's image or supposed biddy flick holds gone place to the worst sort of regressive pre-feminist stereotype and misogynous clich.
Movies such as the recent Anne Hathaway/Kate Hudson catfight Bride Wars or the extroverted Confessions of a Shopaholic are trained exclusively at women, and yet feature female characters who are variously neurotic, crackbrained, label-obsessed, weight-obsessed, man-obsessed or weddingobsessed, and oft all at the same clip. In Confessions of a Shopaholic, for example, the talented comedic actress Isla Fisherman plays Rebecca Bloomwood, a aspirer Manhattan fashionista who dwells merely for decorator dresses and will happily struggle to the decease for a brace of sale-price Gucci boots.
Rebecca wears pink and leaves the important material such as intellection, to her patronising male co-workers: at a employment interview she hilariously confounds the word `` fish '' with `` financial ''. The boys, to a man, bump her endearing, even though her greatest accomplishment regards jibe a black Saint Laurent coat with a purplish frock.
Other incoming biddy flicks will hardly give the women 's motility much cause for jubilation. Pictures such as He Holds Only Not That Into You ( Jennifer Aniston and Drew Barrymore guided a cast of women despairing for committedness from their manpowers ), All About Steve ( Sandra Bullock plays a semi-stalker who tracks her one-night base nationwide in the hope that he 'll wed her ) and The Ghosts of Girlfriends Yesteryear ( the rubric tells plenty ) all point to a version of muliebrity that at the best is mired in clich and at the worst in hateful imitation.
`` The heroines are getting dumber and dumber, '' tells the feminist historiographer and Bloke of Oxford Diane Purkiss, who proposes that these sketch boosters are merely reflecting a diminution in our ain civilisation into one that, for women, is image-obsessed ( see celebrity civilization, size zero frameworks, Heat mag, etc ).
`` Women 's lives today experience oppressive, more so than they maked ten ages ago, '' Purkiss tells. `` And the more oppressive they experience, the dumber these portraits of women get. ''
Biddy flickers, she states, expand on a descriptor of institutionalised Schadenfreude. `` The show biz permits you, the audience member, to chuck yourself on the dorsum and tell: I 'm smarter than her, I 'm more together than her, and I 'm not equally stupidly anorectic as her. ' ''
Things were different in 1998, when the modern-day chick flick was born. Ten ages ago Bridget Jones 's Journal was still a best-selling novel and the victor of the British Book of the Yr awarding. The first season of Sex and the Metropolis holded only commenced on HBO and the Spice Girls were in the midst of their Spiceworld circuit.
The chick-flick heroine that emerged so was oftentimes ditzy, yes, but she besides holded refuge to irony, self-satire and intelligence. When Bride the picture seemed in 2001 and finally scooped to a higher degree 150 million at the international box office, the chick flick went a hot Tinseltown belongings. Yet, for every smart-thinking Bridget Jones, Legally Blond or Satan Wears Prada there looked a mickle of movies that appealed to the genre 's baserinstincts.Films such as 27 Dresses, Made of Laurels, Licence to Wednesday and What Haps in Vegas were cookie-cutter movies delineate by lazy stereotypes ( espouse overkill, anyone? ) and expressed chauvinism.
The ground for all this sinister strife is finally, course, workforces. `` Fewer than 10 per cent of Hollywood pictures are indited by women, and fewer than 6 per cent directed by women, '' explicates Melissa Silverstein, a film merchandising advisor and laminitis of the company Women & Hollywood. `` So verily what you are seeing is a white male version of women. And that is only unacceptable. ''
It is however a version of muliebrity that appeals to an tremendous sum of female moviegoers, reason Archie Thomas, foreign correspondent for Miscellany mag. `` Chick flicks such as Sex and the Metropolis get repetition concern from female audiences, '' Thomas tells. `` Which intends that women attend see it together the first clip so they travel back with their mothers, sises or girls to see it again. ''
`` Women attend these movies, because they desire to attend the movies, '' Silverstein counters. `` And most of the clip there are no other options out there. ''
And certainly last yr Sex and the Metropolis 's blunderbuss merchandising run, which were a account 35 million, left women in to be sure that there was merely one must-see film around that summertime. She adds that, consequently, the existent powerful line to be maked is to move women offly from chick flicks and towards the few edgier, more interesting movies that might normally locomote unnoticed. `` I simply worked on Emma Thompson 's film, Last Opportunity Harvey, '' Silverstein tells. `` So the message I 've got to get across to women is: You 've got to travel and support this flick. It may not be perfect, but no flick is, and if you make support it so you 'll hold the opportunity to see more movies like it in hereafter. ' ''
The counterpoison to the chick-flick encumbrance, tells the former Hollywood agent Gayle Nachliss, is to inhabit the production sector with women. `` In the boardroom we 're making o.k., '' states Nachliss, who is now executive of the LA-based Women In Movie organisation, which further women 's engagement altogether facets of moviemaking. `` And we hold successful women agents, directors and publicizers. But this is not the instance creatively. And it Holds why we land up with a situation where Hollywood conceives that all women care about is nuptials and shopping. We comprise one-half of the population, and we 're famished of amusement. ''
The good intelligence, for right-thinking women everyplace, is that the modern-day cardboard biddy flick may yet eat itself without any aid from feminist manufacturers or militant audiences. If the surfeit of such pictures keeps there Holds a really existent danger that the genre will implode in a marketplace filled with oinking, pratfalling heroines.
`` It passed earlierly, to some extent, with the horror genre, '' Thomas tells. `` The marketplace can take justly a certain sum of these types of movies. If you deluge it with them the audience appetence is decreased. There is, finally, not that many Sex and the Citys to be holded each year. ''
The women 's movies that would be left in a post-chick-flick macrocosm are not difficult to envisage, Silverstein tells. They 're already here. `` There are astonishing movies out there, but you need to encounter them, '' she tells, indicating to the Michelle Williams route flick, Wendy and Lucy. `` These are not overtly serious movies or supposed libber movies. They 're but pic about women - but fullly organise women. ''
Kevin Maher
Times Online
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