Women still have a long road to Hollywood equality
Despite movies like Thelma & Louise, men are in Tinseltown’s driver’s seat
It’s been 25 years since Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon hit the desert highway in Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scott’s rollicking road flick that dared to put women in the driver’s seat — and kept them there to the iconic end, soaring into the open maw of the Grand Canyon in a turquoise Thunderbird convertible.
Finally! said feminists, excited to see complex, stereotype-busting female characters.
Revolutionary! said reviewers, acknowledging the unprecedented.
Misandry! said a few (mostly male) detractors, who thought the film vilified men and glorified violence.
Thelma & Louise told the story of a bored waitress and a disillusioned housewife whose road trip spirals into a crime spree after one kills a man who was attempting to rape the other. But it was also funny and action-filled and thoughtful — and a box-office success after it opened in May 1991, grossing $45 million in the United States. And it seemed to mark a cinematic and cultural milestone that could change the role of women onscreen.
“Judging by the women of all ages who relate so strongly to Thelma & Louise, there is still a real hunger for all of the basic elements of those classic movies of rebellion against society, but translated this time into women’s terms,” wrote critic Roger Ebert.
“Ten years from now it will be seen as a turning point,” said the Boston Phoenix’s Peter Keough.
Davis was definitely eager to believe it. She had already logged a decade in Hollywood and won a best-supporting actress Oscar, but Thelma & Louise was her first marquee role in such a high-profile film. “We were so unprepared for the reaction that it got, and it was sort of overwhelming and exciting,” she said, speaking by phone from her home in Los Angeles. “I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, things are going good for women.’ I just assumed things were getting better all the time.”
So much for that. Two new studies of current cinema recently underscored the lingering sense that women have lost their grip on the big screen.
One found that women have a disproportionate share of the nude scenes — three times as many as men. The other found that men have a disproportionate share of the dialogue.
Even more startling, the latter study, from the website Polygraph, found in its analysis of more than 2,000 films that male characters speak more than women even in women-centric movies. Disney’s smash hit Frozen might celebrate sisterhood, but 57 per cent of the dialogue comes from male characters.
The nudity data points came in a larger study from L.A.’s Mount Saint Mary’s University, which also found that of the top-grossing 100 films of 2014, only 12 per cent featured a female lead character.
The new reports dovetail with research conducted by Davis’s own advocacy organization. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that the percentage of female speaking characters in the top-grossing movies hasn’t changed in roughly half a century.
The industry is starting to catch on, Davis says. Just not fast enough.
“It’s going to take forever to get Congress to be half women, but there could be a half-women Congress tomorrow in the next movie somebody makes.”