A star is born for male taste
Jennie Ridyard
Everyone is raving about A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper’s film starring the luminous Lady Gaga, and Bradley’s pretty blue eyes. Beautifully acted, nice tunes, gritty… Yet I left the cinema in a rage. This is not a movie about a woman; it’s not a movie about women at all. There is one woman in it – Lady Gaga – and not another notable female character. It’s all men.
Gaga plays a waitress and sometime singer who is discovered by an older male rocker, Cooper, and made famous when he invites her onto the stage with him, and into his bed too, because why not.
Her restaurant boss is a man, her best friend is a (gay) man, her mother is dead, her father is a professional driver with lots of manly friends who are her accidental doting “uncles”, and meanwhile her token “aunties” are drag queens: yes, men in dresses and false boobs. She has no female influence at all, ever.
When a record company signs her, it’s a man. All the roadies, the choreographers, the costume people, they’re men too, apart from the odd backing dancer, who she never speaks to anyway. Not once does she have a proper conversation with another woman.
Everyone she’s ever known and ever meets is as male as the film’s scriptwriters. She’s feisty and liberated though: we know this because she punches one of her bloke’s overzealous man-fans in the face. Like women do.
Luckily, while she negotiates her stellar trajectory she has her fella – rocker-mentor Cooper – to remind her what’s real, and to tell her when she’s getting “fake”.
It’s a movie at core about being naturally you – good! – versus fake you – bad! – even when you’re a lady who rather enjoys her new sexy dance, her orange hair, her sequins, her pop music.
Yes, pop – beloved of girls – is bad, while rock – oft an older bloke thing – is good.
Frankly, A Star is Born offers a myopic view of an emancipated woman: a woman without artifice, without the comfort of a girl crew and hair dye, stripped back to basics just like her boyfriend wants her to be … SPOILER ALERT! … Even if that means killing himself so that she gets the message, sacrificing himself to save her. So she learns: she dyes her hair mousey again and finally – quite literally – sings his song, dancing to his tune.
While I rage.