Women are getting more leading roles in Hollywood movies. Among those responsible is director Kathryn Bigelow.

Leading roles for women suddenly surge in films to 33%

2019-07-14 - By Mick LaSalle

In 2018, 33% of the American movies released in theaters featured a woman in a starring role.

That doesn’t sound that great, does it? After all, women make up at least 50% of the population. And it’s true that if you look at the broad sweep of American cinema, 33% is nothing to brag about. But compared to what we’ve seen in recent decades, that 33% statistic isn’t bad at all. It might even be the beginning of something.

Look at 1990. Women starred in just 13% of the American films made that year. That was a bad year, but not bad enough to be an anomaly. In 1995, the percentage climbed to 17%, still fairly pathetic. In 2001, the percentage was back down to 15%. By 2010, it was up to 18.5%.

This is the situation women have been dealing with for many years: Despite being half the population and buying more than half of all movie tickets sold (52% in 2016, according to the Motion Picture Association of America), women are the stars of only 10 to 20% of movies made in the United States.

Obviously, this is horrible for women who want to act or direct, and I’m not even going to get into what this might mean to young women who grow up and see their gender constantly presented as adjuncts to men, as objects of male interest, but rarely as ends in themselves.

But I can give you my gut reaction. Sometimes when I look at the list of films from a year such as 1990, it feels like I’m looking at madness, like a culture in the midst of an effort to deny the experience of half its members, and to deny what might be called the female principle.

Nor do I feel much better when I see that much of the recent increase has come from women playing what would otherwise be men’s roles. Captain Marvel is a woman now. Good for her. And so what?

Yet it wasn’t always like this. It’s just been like this for a long time — about 60 years. The early 1930s were a golden age for women in American cinema. In that era, the biggest stars were women, and it was a rare month when a man was featured on the cover of a fan magazine. Many of the stars of that period are still legends today — Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Constance Bennett, Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, Miriam Hopkins, Claudette Colbert — and Marie Dressler, a lovable, heavyset comedienne in her 60s who was totally outside the traditional glamour mode.

In 1933, women starred in 61% of the films made in Hollywood.

Women dominated the early 1930s box office for a number of reasons. First, there had been a social and sexual revolution in the 1920s, resulting in huge changes for women. Suddenly, women drank, smoked and wore makeup. They cut their hair. They got jobs. Their hemlines went from the floor to just below the knees. Women were attending college as never before. And more were having sex before they were married. Understandably, both women and men in the early 1930s found these changes interesting and wanted this new woman reflected onscreen.

Fortunately, she could be. Movies weren’t censored in this period, and so the movies were frank, and female stars were popular. When censorship did come to movies on July 1, 1934, in the form of a rigid Production Code, many of these women stars went into box office decline.

Yet here’s something odd. There was a social and sexual revolution in the 1960s, too. And by the end of 1968, following the death of the old Production Code and the beginning of our current rating system, there was no censorship, either. Yet there was no corresponding increase in the number of women’s starring vehicles in the films of 1969 or the early 1970s.

It would take a separate study to figure out all the reasons for this, but it’s clear that women in movies suffered when women in America started going to work in greater numbers. The matinees that had continued through most of the ’50s, showing the kinds of films made by Rosalind Russell, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, had been attended by women. When women went to work in increasing numbers throughout the 1960s, they were no longer around to watch these movies on weekday afternoons.

So we’ve had a 60year slump, but this year we had an uptick. What does it mean?

When I first started looking at the numbers, I imagined I was seeing a gradual phenomenon. From a separate project I conducted years ago, I knew about the paltry 15% number in 2001. So when I saw the 33% figure for 2018, I was encouraged to assume that the increase had been gradual. That would have been the best scenario, because it would suggest a barely perceptible but unmistakable shift in audience taste, something that might be difficult to reverse.

In fact, that’s not the case. Look at the numbers for 2015: only 20% of the movies starred women. In 2016: 22%. And 2017: 21%. What happened to create that surge in 2018?

To begin to answer that question, we might ask what happened in 2016 that would create such a big number in 2018 — given that production schedules for films are often two or three years ahead of release dates. Forget #MeToo. That’s too recent — 2017 — to have an impact on 2018 releases.

At first, I thought the increase might have been an assertion in the face of Donald Trump’s candidacy and subsequent election. But on second thought, I don’t believe it. Hollywood has rarely been assertive and never collectively assertive.

My guess is that if this did have some overarching cause (and maybe it didn’t) the candidacy of Hillary Clinton was the most likely influence. Don’t forget, most people — especially the sort of people who make movies — went through 2016 absolutely convinced we were about to elect our first female president. Such a prospect might have lifted the general mood.

In any case, it’s too early to say whether the 2018 bump was a souffle that has already dropped or represents a permanent shift. So far, women are only making up about 25% of the starring roles in 2019 movies, but that could change as the more serious films kick in, starting in the fall.

A deeper and more complicated question concerns the roles themselves. Just looking at the films released, some might consider 2018 and 2019 to represent a serious advance for women in American cinema.

For example, the Marvel hit “Captain Marvel” is a franchise built around a woman (Brie Larsen), and “Alita: Battle Angel” treated us to the story of a female cyborg. And of course there were “Tomb Raider,” “Dark Phoenix,” “Maze Runner,” “Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom” and the scifi action film “Annihilation,” which all featured women in lead roles.

And shouldn’t we all feel thrilled that one of the “Men in Black” is now a woman?

I don’t think so.

Yes, I can see the argument that hey,

this is great, women can be action heroes and superheroes, too. But I just see these as guy movies, in which the guy roles have been given a sex change.

Molly Haskell, our foremost feminist film critic and the author of the seminal “From Reverence to Rape,” puts it this way: “The rise of the superhero blockbuster and the endless proliferation of Marvel comic franchises has meant that when women enter (often at the tail end of a fading series) they play men’s roles. Unisex unitard. Since these movies, with their video game plots and visuals, are intended for males, and male adolescents, there’s little room for stories of adult men and women. I know I should feel gratification that women can fly through the air and wreak havoc, but somehow it doesn’t feel like progress.”

Fortunately, even subtracting the superhero movies, 2018 was still a good year, and 2019 might prove to be one as well. But to lock in the progress, more women need to be directing movies. Just as men tend to tell men’s stories, women tend to tell women’s stories. But according to Professor Martha M. Lauzen of San Diego University, only 8% of the top 250 films released in the United States during 2018 were directed by a woman.

Meanwhile in France in 2017, female directors, such as Anne Fontaine and Alexandra Leclere, helmed 27% of the films released that year, according to the CNC, France’s National Center for Cinema.

Ultimately, a healthy environment for women in cinema requires three interlocking elements. You need the screenplays. You need the actresses. And you need the audiences. Each element feeds the other two. Yet without the other two, each can barely exist. In France, women are there already and moving forward. We could say the same of Sweden, in which female directors accounted for 31% of the films made between 2012 and 2017. But the United States? There are green shoots, but they could easily wither on the vine.

Finally, it should be said that the ultimate dividend of women’s participation isn’t equity or fairness, but better movies. For decades, American cinema has been neurotically fixated on everescalating action and explosions. Unique among the peoples of the world, we celebrate the summer months by imagining our own destruction and thrilling to the obliteration of our most cherished landmarks.

What American cinema needs is that which women have traditionally brought, and what women are bringing

to the movies of other countries: reflection, thought, introspection, feeling, a respect for inner life, an appreciation of beauty and a recognition of the ephemeral. Even when women blow things up, they blow them up differently — the way, for example, director Kathryn Bigelow does, with some consciousness that something is happening to actual people.

The dearth of women in our movies has been a stop on creativity and a missing piece within the American soul. If women are really, finally and fully starting to make their big screen comeback, it would be a very wonderful thing.