The problem with GENDER SWOPS
Eighties comedies routinely built bits around men harassing, stalking and sexually humiliating women. By giving women the sexual upper hand, these remakes neutralise the most offensive aspects of the originals.
When Russell kidnaps an amnesiac Hawn and convinces her she is his wife in the 1987 Overboard, he threatens her and amuses himself by gesturing at raping her. But in the remake, it’s the playboy (Derbez) who attempts to initiate sex with an uninterested Faris, the woman who has tricked him into thinking he’s her husband.
Similarly, when Dangerfield arrives on campus in Back to School, he barrels into a sorority house, throws open a shower curtain and leers bug-eyed at a naked and screaming sorority girl. (“Take it easy, honey! I didn’t see a thing!” he says as he whips the curtain closed, before opening it once more to add, “You’re perfect!”)
Compare that with Mccarthy’s mid-divorce mom in Life of the Party, who gets it on with a college boy at a frat rager, breaking a taboo without actually becoming a creep. Because middle-aged moms are coded as sexless, Mccarthy’s character needs merely to nudge the sexual envelope in order for her antics to feel unruly.
And when the women of Ghostbusters gently sexually harass their ditsy hunk of a receptionist (Chris Hemsworth in glasses), it lacks the malicious edge of Bill Murray effectively stalking Sigourney Weaver under the guise of busting her ghost. Because real women are physically and socially vulnerable to men, granting sexual power to them on film feels harmless; cute.
One gets the sense that these movies aren’t just fixing up old plots – they’re working as symbolic correctives to Hollywood’s mistreatment of women writ large. But the increased social acceptability often comes at the expense of the story. When the Ghostbusters scientists shamelessly hit on Hemsworth, it strains credulity.
As much as these genderswopped films free women from old Hollywood expectations, they box them into a new one: their female protagonists must be admirable.
No such requirement was placed on the characters of Dangerfield or Murray, who gained admiration from audiences through their thorough commitment to offending.
For women, the demand often manifests itself as typically feminine behaviour – acting nice, and looking it.
In Life of the Party, Mccarthy gets a make-over; in Ocean’s 8, the female oddballs slip into gowns to strut down the steps of the Met. And of course, the women ought to be good to other women.
Mccarthy’s female rivals in
Life of the Party are cardboardcutout mean girls easily converted into allies, and the rifts that emerge in Debbie Ocean’s girl gang are effortlessly smoothed.
Even the self-involved actress Daphne Kluger (Hathaway) is instantaneously redeemed midway through.
There is a slight moral miscalculation here: that in order for a film to be considered feminist, it has to show women fighting men and not each other.
But life pits women against one another and eliding that is just as ridiculous as staging all intra-female conflicts in kiddie pools full of jelly – it ignores what women are actually like.
One of the most intriguing facets of Ocean’s 8 is its implied bisexuality, and the hinted tension between Debbie and her partner in crime (if not more), Lou (Cate Blanchett).
The subtext would have been more interesting as text; it would supply a true conflict and depth of character for the two stars and make the film feel truly transformative.
But for all the female characters in these films, they can shy away from revealing the complexity of female experiences.
The men of Ocean’s Eleven got to do one thing the women of Ocean’s 8 do not: star in a good movie. The construction of Debbie’s supposedly masterful heist is so sloppy that the one rule she sets for it – no men in her crew – is limply betrayed in the climax, when a male member of the franchise shimmies in to execute its most strenuous element. Upon second viewing, the ’80s Ghostbusters and Overboard aren’t lofty critical achievements, either, but at least they’re originals, which gave them the room to become phenomena.
Note to Hollywood: When women complained that they aren’t afforded the same roles in Hollywood that men are, they weren’t speaking literally. – New York Times