After #MeToo, here’s what the movies taught me about being a woman
One of the most ravishing kisses in movies is in The Quiet Man, a John Ford classic. Maureen O’Hara plays an Irish villager who falls for John Wayne’s Irish-American stranger. They first see each other while she’s tending sheep barefoot, and initially, they mostly trade searching looks. But one night he finds that this willful woman has sneaked into his house. She runs for the door. He pulls her to him. They scuffle and, as he holds her right arm behind her back, her left arm goes limp. He leans down to kiss her, enfolding her. It’s exquisite; some might call it rapey.
I was a movie-struck kid, and I learned much from watching the screen, including things about men and women that I later had to unlearn or learn to ignore. I learned that women needed to be protected, controlled and left at home. I learned that men led, women followed. And so, although I loved Fred Astaire, I merely liked his greatest dance partner, Ginger Rogers. I was charmed by her sly smile and dazzled by the curve of her waist as she bent in his embrace. But I saw her as a woman in the great man’s arms, a message I didn’t learn just from films.
In the wake of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo, I have been thinking a lot about what movies have asked me to dream, including the image of the forced kiss and all that it signifies about women and film.
Women are there to be kissed The relationship between women and cinema has always been particularly fraught and not just because it often involves what is called the male gaze. Early on, women helped make American movies as filmmakers, performers and consumers. Yet by the time movies were called talkies, women had been largely pushed out of directing. Hollywood kept churning out fantasies, but the spirited women of early cinema who had been the heroines of their stories were largely replaced by more familiar domesticated female types, For much of the classical era, films pushed romance as the female aspiration, with stories sealed by a happily ever after kiss.
Women need a spanking
In movies, male domination sometimes includes punishment that’s framed as playful. In The Thin Man Goes Home, Nick Charles spanks his wife, Nora, with a newspaper and she jokes about wife beating. John Wayne spanks Elizabeth Allen in Donovan’s Reefand Maureen O’Hara in McLintock! One of his screenwriters once said: “All you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity-toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knee and spank.” In Blue Hawaii, Elvis saves a would-be suicidal woman, whom he then vigorously spanks. Afterward, they eat happily together with her seated on pillows, presumably because her rear is now sore.
Women live to support men
In In the Heart of the Sea, Riley plays both the waiting wife and a thankless stereotype: the cheerleader wife who signals the hero’s heterosexual bona fides and delivers support. “If you don’t speak for them, who will?” the wife played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw asks her pathologist husband (Will Smith) in Concussion. He’s on the verge of greatness, and she exists to help him achieve it. Other filmmakers try to expand the wifely role, as Damien Chazelle does in the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man. But while he gives Claire Foy’s wife, Janet, screen time, it’s her husband (Ryan Gosling) who rockets to the moon, and Chazelle never manages to make these two realities equal.
Women can transcend stereotypes
Of course, if movies were all bad, we wouldn’t love them; I couldn’t love them. One of their miracles is that despite everything, they bring us sublime female characters who surmount often degrading stereotypes and lavish, punishing abuse. This ambivalence fuels the 1937 weepie Stella Dallas, in which Barbara Stanwyck’s good-time gal suffers being her. But Stella is indomitable, like many memorable female characters, and her strength of will connects her to later heroines like Ripley in the Alien franchise. Stanwyck’s performance along with her charisma and her humanity convey a fullness of female life that many movies have tried — and still try — to deny. Women can be heroes
When I was a kid, that love was unconditional. I watched everything, often alone in theaters. (In the 1970s, my pre-helicopter-era parents didn’t monitor my filmgoing.) Then, as now, a lot of what I watched were movies about men. But I always saw the women, the funny and sad ones, the weak and the strong, those who survived to the end and those who didn’t. I adored performers like Cicely Tyson in Sounder, a childhood favorite, and Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure, radically distinct characters who remained with me because they were strong but also because they were strong in recognizably human ways. They felt real to me, like people, not decoration.
Women can be dangerous
This will surprise no one who knows me, but I have a thing for difficult women, who I am drawn to in life and onscreen. I have a particular weakness for the kinds of dangerous, sometimes unhinged femmes fatales in film noirs like Gun Crazy and Out of the Past. Invariably, women like these are put in their place (and a box in the ground). Yet in many movies, they present a vision of female power, however sexualised and pathological. The story is saying one thing, though sometimes just winking. The magnetic performers and characters convey the overriding fear of women (desire, too), but with visions of female unruliness and a life force that no censor could expunge.
Women can speak out
It took me years to understand how I could do more than try to ignore, laugh off or simply rail about onscreen sexism and racism and all of the innumerable outrages that were — are — always there. I learned to find pleasure despite these paradoxes and sometimes in them, to see beyond the goddesswhore dualities, to sometimes love both the simpering patsies and the shrewish man- eaters. I could ignore the ugliness of the movies, wish away the bad parts or watch selectively. Instead, I accept that movies are one way that people make messy meaning of life, and the greatest thing I could learn from them is to refuse to let them or my equally messy pleasures off the hook.