This morning I read Dan Fienberg’s “gut reaction” to the pilot for “The Blacklist,” a new series coming to NBC this fall starring James Spader. He doesn’t call it a review, because pilots can and do change. He just gives his two cents on what he’s already seen. And he points out something about the pilot that tells me this is going to be bad, because the writers have started with some straight-up bullshit.
There’s an adoption storyline that screams “Smash” in the worst way possible — Does anything scream “Smash” in the best way possible? — and if you’re a writer attempting to give a character professional credibility, having that character plan to take a long lunch break for adoption counseling on THEIR FIRST DAY AT THE FBI, you’ve done something very wrong. I get that they’re trying to show that the character is trying to prioritize family, but IT’S HER FIRST DAY AT THE FBI and she’s apologizing for not being able to have an all-important adoption meeting. When I actually write this review, it’s going to be 2000 words about that adoption meeting and the soullessness of attempting to simultaneously maternalize a main character and build tension through an endangered child.
Just, for a moment, try to imagine that plot on a TV show…only the FBI agent is a male character.
That idea wouldn’t get proposed, let alone written, let alone filmed. No one would take that seriously for a minute.
What year is it, again?
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You may have heard about The Bechdel Test. If a movie passes the Bechdel test, it has three things:
- It has to have at least two [named] women in it
- Who talk to each other
- About something besides a man
If you follow that link above, you find out how many movies fail the Bechdel test and fail it quite spectacularly. (The Bechdel test page, by the way, has limited itself to female characters who have names, which was not in the original. And a female character having a name is more rare than you might think.)
The only reflections women get in modern culture — if they get them at all, which women over 35 basically do not, trust me — is that they must be hot, they must be available sexually any time and anywhere, they are there for the man’s pleasure, and they take care of the home. They have no desires, dreams, wants, or lives of their own. Women are the support staff in someone else’s story.
Simply having a female character in a movie is a problem already. Linda Holmes (“Monkey See” at NPR) wrote a terrific piece: “At the movies, the women are gone.”
In most of today’s movies, men do things, and women stand around and wait to react to whatever the man does. There’s even a term for the female character whose sole job it is to make the man’s life better: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s wacky! She’s sexy! She doesn’t exist outside the need of the male character to have her there!
Imagine a Manic Pixie Dream Boy, wacky and loving and ready to retreat whenever the main character is ready to go out on her own, fully actualized. Yeah, I giggled.
Let’s look at one of the biggest characters in YA culture right now — Katniss Everdeen. She’s supposed to be responsible for bringing down an entire society, and the biggest question for her is Team Peeta or Team Gale?
No wonder girls still feel like they can’t do anything.
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This cultural setup — men do stuff, and women are charming companions — is pretty much why I think a Wonder Woman movie is Dead On Arrival. We can’t have women saving men — viewers (primarily young males) won’t accept it. And imagine a movie where Diana Prince walks away from Steve Trevor, because saving the world is kind of incompatible with knitting by the fire, waiting for him to get home.
(I read the recap of the script to David Kelley’s pilot for a Wonder Woman TV series. And sure, it got turned down a lot of places, but it didn’t get turned down enough. Wonder Woman, sitting home and eating ice cream and mooning over Steve Trevor? Um, wut? Imagine a Wonder Woman who had zero time for a guy who wasn’t going to keep up with her…and you’re looking at the end of Western Civilization, I swear.)
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At USC, one thing that always bothered me in one of my writing classes was that the writer got to pick who read what, and in this particular class only women read the women’s parts, and only men would read the men’s parts.
Here were the main problems with this:
- The male writers often only wrote male roles.
- When they wrote female roles, the females had nothing to say or do. Even on paper, they were placeholders, and the place they were holding was a spot marked “The lead is heterosexual; here is the proof.”
I wish I had said something then. I wish I had yelled and said, “You know, you don’t have to do this yet, wait for the studio to make you do it.” I wish I had said, “Can we reread this scene, only Jane and I will read the male characters and Bob will read the female character, and you can hear how fucking ridiculous it is to have someone standing there saying, ‘Um,’ ‘Okay,’ ‘Whatever you want’?”
Change your characters from male to female or vice-versa: how does that change how things play out?
Or: Change the sex object from a woman to a man — how does that shake up the dynamic?
I do bring that up more, a little bit, now, at my playwriting groups. It’s not always a male/female thing — sometimes the writer just falls in love with one character, who then gets all the moves, all the good lines, all the showy stuff. But it’s often a male/female problem.
I am not an idiot: I’m well aware that men and women behave differently, given different circumstances. But it’s useful to know when a character is breaking a stereotype and when he or she is being a stereotype. It’s also really useful to make sure you have made an actual character. One who stands around and says, “Whatever you want, honey,” isn’t a person, that’s a blowup doll.
Let’s take Elysium, which I saw yesterday: Matt Damon’s character, who’s a lowlife and gets screwed over by a Big Corporation, so he wants to take revenge. He has to tote some massive machinery around, which might be more of a guy thing, except half of this character is the exoskeleton they put on him that makes him a badass, so that could be a woman or a guy. Jodie Foster’s character is the Secretary of Defense, a role normally played by a man, but there’s no reason for it, so why not have it be a woman? (Because women can’t plot to grab power? PLEASE.) Sharlto Copley is a thug who rapes and murders and is a general sociopath…and yeah, guys, you get to have that one, straight up, those are pretty much guy characteristics. (No, not that all men are that way; the vast majority of people who are that way are men, however.) Alice Braga is the Girl In Jeopardy, the least interesting character in the movie.
Let’s imagine that character a guy, a man whose sole function in the movie is to protect his sick son, and who gets batted around by the bad guys for fun.
Yeah. Me neither.
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Women can actually have a life for two seconds without everything being about who they’re sleeping with or whether they’re going to have a baby. It would be nice to see this reflected in our culture for two seconds. It might also be nice to see more of the other side: men who wonder how they’re going to be able to have careers and be a loving partner and have a family.