Women Vs. Hollywood: The fall and rise of women in film
No female directors were nominated in the 2020 Golden Globes — an award that has only ever had five women nominees and just one female winner, Barbra Streisand, way back in 1984
In an early section of Women Vs. Hollywood, Helen O’Hara recounts the tale of a director so obsessed by the after-hours behaviour of his leading lady that he had someone follow her off set to monitor her activity. The same man made sexual advances on another actress, becoming vengeful and outraged when she turned him down.
No, this wasn’t Harvey Weinstein; it was Alfred Hitchcock, and the women were Grace Kelly, and Tippi Hedren — who starred in his thriller The Birds. Hitchcock was known for his desire to exert control over actresses, and once playfully remarked, “The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough”.
This sweeping book details the ambivalent relationship between women and the US film industry, both as actors and behind the camera. O’Hara traces the fate of women in Hollywood from the 1910s to modern times, looking at the #MeToo movement and beyond. It’s a revealing and fascinating, if often depressing, tale.
As an editor-at-large at Empire magazine, O’Hara is an established critic; but the book, she acknowledges, is fuelled by anger. Her goal is to probe how and why the voices of women and other groups have been sidelined or silenced in Hollywood over decades, to “rebalance the stories endlessly written about Hollywood men”. The impact of this exclusion is felt far beyond film, she explains. Trends on the big-screen percolate across our culture, and play out even in kids’ cartoons. Her account is underpinned by a crucial observation: “The stories we tell reflect what we value, who we empathise with and how we see the world.”
Since its inception, Hollywood
has viewed itself as a haven of liberalism, and it’s appropriate to be reminded of just how selective this right-thinking has been. O’Hara notes that disabled actors are almost never visible on screen and when they are, are played by able-bodied people. Black and other ethnic minority actors have rarely been able to expect three-dimensional roles. Women have too often been limited to a portrayal of sex objects, while black women are doubly restricted, playing maids or characters living in poverty.
O’Hara’s account begins with the era of the silent film, in which women enthusiastically participated as actors, writers, producers and stuntwomen, often several at once and to great acclaim. Influential director-producers like Alice Guy-Blaché shaped how early films developed. But when the talkies arrived, movie-making grew more lucrative, and women found themselves pushed aside. It became difficult to make films unless they were married to men who could represent them on the business side. They were written out of film history, and many of these early silent films have been lost.
Today the statistics for the representation of women in the Hollywood film-industry remain astonishingly askew. Just two films by female directors featured at the Venice Film Festival in
2019, up from one film in 2018. No female directors were nominated in the 2020 Golden Globes — an award that has only ever had five women nominees and just one female winner, Barbra Streisand, way back in 1984.
The result is an industry that favours a certain kind of film, and caters to uniform tastes. “War movies, crime dramas, gangster stories, biopics of great men, portraits of damaged men, men’s struggles. Not just male stories but stories about male anger and male violence,” O’Hara writes, which have been the focus of much of Oscar-winning history. Pushed to the background are not just tales of female experience and women’s ambition, but also, she says, stories of “men working towards some sort of grace or peace”.
O’Hara lists several key tests of
whether a film portrays women fairly, the most famous of which is the Bechdel-Wallace Test: Does the film feature at least two women? Do they talk to each other?
And do they talk about something other than a man?
More than 60pc of Hollywood films fail. (Variations of this test can be used to assess the portrayal of ethnic diversity.) My favourite, though, is the so-called Sexy Lamp test. As O’Hara puts it, “Could a female character be replaced by a sexy lamp (like the famous leg lamp in A Christmas Story) without significant impact to the plot?” All too often, the answer is, yes.
Women Vs. Hollywood is encyclopaedic, illuminating and passionate all at once, and O’Hara’s erudition and love of film shine throughout. She ably names dozens of little-known female producers, directors, writers and actors, going some way towards rehabilitating them and returning their names to the public realm.
Despite its frustrating content, the book ends on an optimistic note, suggesting that social media along with movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp have loosened Hollywood’s control, and opened new perspectives on how the film industry could improve.
O’Hara has eloquently shown that portraying the diverse reach of human experience matters not just for diversity itself but for the pursuit of a good story.
She herself remains a bedazzled fan of film, and a hopeful one. “If you truly believe in the power of cinema,” she writes, “then you should want to hear a plurality of voices in your local multiplex because there is more chance that something extraordinary will occur.”
Guilt-ridden for having abandoned his daughter when his marriage broke up, middle-aged Irishman Paddy embarks on a haulage truck journey through France. The purpose of the journey, ostensibly to deliver a load of condiment sachets bound for Wolverhampton, is really to try to restore his relationship with his twentysomething rootless daughter who he brings illegally with him. The daughter gone AWOL and Paddy persuades her to come back to him. His daughter’s lack of ease with the world is graphically illustrated by a tattoo of barbed wire on her arm. But she is not without humour in the frequent banter with her father as she chides him, for example, on St Paul’s Letter “to the chrysanthemums”.
As the truck ploughs the AutoRoute with its tasteless takeaway food “their cup of time forever full, forever lukewarm”, the rhythm of the journey unfolds stories and deeply emotive fragments of family history joltingly captured in the stop and start manner of trucking.
The dialogue of the fractious relationship between father and daughter is interspersed with incomplete sentences stabbing at our imaginations. And there are lots of simulated square boxes of text messaging in the novel to synchronise with the clipped prose as his boss Carl texts instructions about tachographs and deadlines, or his brother texts about the whereabouts of his god daughter.
Sometimes the narrative jars as it jumps from second to third person and occasionally there can be confusion as to whether Paddy is referring to his mother or his daughter, as both are named Kitty.
His brother Arthur, the favoured son, was sent to boarding school, effectively leaving home at 12.
This enabled Paddy to spend a lot of time with his mother with whom he shared a very tactile relationship, hinting of the risqué. And as he drives his truck, he longs for those lost intimacies of their “mutual littoral solitude” when he used to go swimming with her.
But his mother was not always of this world and could be “lost in Proust”, which has reverberations for Paddy as, on the road, he weaves in and out of his own past life. Paddy’s brother, a successhad ful businessman, and executor of their mother’s will, was the “responsible centre” to Paddy’s “sleazy periphery”. He addresses Paddy as Fredo, like Al Pacino’s ill-fated brother in The Godfather. When he coldly puts their aptlynamed family home Tír na nÓg up for sale, it invokes moments of nostalgia from Paddy.
It is left to the reader to fill in the obvious gaps in the prose. They are there partly to avoid clichés perhaps: “Your father would be grateful for a moment of your precious.”
In an interview O’Callaghan said: “As writers, trying to write — heaven help us — real literature, as Frost says ‘that they can’t get rid of too easily’, the job is not to be competent in what you know you can already do. The job is to actually find a whole new level of selfhood in which, in a way, you never knew you were capable of.”
And true to that dictum, in this novel there is original and almost Joycean playfulness with words such as abstract nouns, for example, being used as activators – “Every togetherness would arrive”.
O’Callaghan, an outstanding poet of collections such as The History of Rain and winner of the Patrick Kavanagh award, shows his poetic skills here with Paddy on the fringes endowed with some wonderful insights: “Our elders are the buffers between us and our own mortality. Once they’re gone, we’re next. And yet in spite of that, perhaps because of, we’re hardwired to daydream their non-existence into being.”