Back in September of last year, I wrote a post for SF Novelists about the Bechdel Test. Well, a few days ago I came across a post — don’t remember how I found it — from Jennifer Kesler, written in 2008, about why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass that test.
Short form: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”
(Which is a direct quote from either a film-school professor or an industry professional — it’s not clear from the context who said it.)
There’s a lot more where that came from; follow the links in the posts, and the “related articles” links at the bottom. Like this one, in which Ms. Kesler relates how her screenwriting classes instructed her that “The real reason […] to put women in a script was to reveal things about the men.” For example, the female characters have to be attracted to the male lead in order to communicate that he is a babe magnet and therefore worthy of being admired by the target audience, which is of course male (and straight).
Ms. Kesler eventually quit screenwriting, not because nobody around her wanted to do anything other than straight white men’s stories, but because the machine is so finely tuned to crush any attempts to do otherwise. Criticize Joss Whedon’s gender depiction all you like — there’s plenty to chew on in his work — but never forget that Buffy was seven seasons of a show with multiple interesting female characters, who regularly talked to one another about something other than men (or shoes). How many other creators have managed to get anything comparable through the industry meat-grinder? And apparently one of the rationales behind canceling Firefly was that it rated too highly with women. You see, advertising slots aimed at women go for cheaper than those aimed at men, which meant Firefly brought in less revenue for Fox. So off it goes.
Because the female audience doesn’t matter. We’re talking about an industry where a WB executive can say that he isn’t going to make movies with female leads anymore, because they just aren’t profitable enough. (Sorry, I lost the link for that quote. Mea culpa.) An industry where they can write off Terminator and Alien as non-replicable flukes. Where they look at the droves of women who flocked to The Matrix and conclude, not that women like action movies too, or that Trinity appealed to them, or even that they wanted to look at Keanu Reeves, but that they were accompanying their boyfriends or husbands. Where they look at the failure of, say, Catwoman, and instead of swearing off Halle Berry or the director or the committee of six people who wrote the script — instead of saying, “hey, maybe we should try to make a movie that doesn’t suck” — they swear off superheroines. Because clearly that’s where the error lies.
There’s no particular point I’m trying to arrive at, here; the topic is a kraken, and all I can do is hack away at a tentacle here, a tentacle there. And try to feel good about the fact that at least the situation in fiction isn’t a tenth so dire as it is in Hollywood. (One of the most valuable things that came out of the intersection of my anthro background, my interest in media, and my professional writing is that I became much more aware of how texts are shaped by the process of their production. I wish more criticism, of the academic variety, took that into account.) Anyway, read ’em and weep, and then look for ways to make it better, I guess.
