FEMALE-LED REMAKES
Are they progress or pandering?
Sony Pictures says it will make a female version of 21 Jump Street on top of its all-female remake of Ghostbusters. All we need is one more, and female remakes of dudely movies will be Hollywood’s newest film trend. So, is this progress? It’s an odd sort of compliment. Having proven they can carry movies, Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy, two of the stars of Bridesmaids (and one-half of director Paul Feig ’s ghost-busting team), are now being asked to helm the same warmed-over cash grabs we associate with male stars. Parity at last!
The success of Bridesmaids, Pitch Perfect, the Hunger Games and the Divergent franchise prove that people will turn out en masse to see woman-led films.
But Sony clearly wants the sweet revenue without having to find and develop new stories. “Female Version of X” seems like an appealing shortcut.
Writing for The New Republic in February, Stacia Brown warned of the dangers of saying one character is the female/black/ gay version of another, and how it panders to audiences.
Brown referred to the labelling of Issa Rae, creator of Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, as “the black Liz Lemon.”
“Framing characters or performers of colour as ‘the black or brown’ version of a white one not only undermines the artist’s originality and narrows the lens through which audiences see a character. It also assumes that audiences of colour want a mere facsimile of a famous white performer — or, for that matter, that white audiences only want performers of colour who resemble white performers.”
There’s a parallel here with actors being called upon to play “the female version” of characters.
Chalk this up to a risk-averse film industry. Success is finding something that works and then squeezing as many franchises and merchandise out of it as possible. It’s a fairly transparent gimmick, with the added gloss of female empowerment.
But there’s a good reason for plunking female actors into stories — the perception that men aren’t interested in stories about women. Meryl Streep touched on it at the Women in the World summit in New York.
Women, she said, are used to empathizing with male characters, but “the hardest thing for me as an actor is to have a story that men in the audience feel like they know what I feel like.
“It’s very hard for them to put themselves in the shoes of a female protagonist, it just is. This is known to the studios.”
But do films like Ghostbusters and 21 Jump Street offer a solution? Studios are counting on women to see them because they have female leads, and men to buy tickets because they are proven franchise brands.
That doesn’t seem so much a solution to the empathy gap as another capitulation to it.
On their own, female-led remakes are fairly innocuous. But if they’re coming at the expense of original stories, it further exposes the problem that there simply aren’t as many opportunities for female actors, something study after study confirms.
“Given the choice, I’d rather not play accessories,” Carey Mulligan told Vogue, explaining her long breaks between film roles. “And waiting for the non-girlfriend/ wife thing usually takes a decent amount of time.”
The obvious solution, then, is to expand the ratio of movies with female leads, which would relieve much of this sort of pressure and would allow for a wider range of stories to be told.
“In terms of the amount of interesting roles there are for women it’s obviously massively sexist,” Mulligan told Time Out London.
Mulligan, who stars with Streep in the forthcoming Suffragette, was incredulous about how long it took to tell the story of women getting the vote.
“The mere fact that it’s taken 100 years is hugely revealing,” Mulligan said. “This is the story of equal rights in Britain and it took years of struggle and women being tortured, abused and persecuted, and it’s never been put on a screen.”