Ten Hollywood Movies That Get Women Right

By Sheerly Avni, AlterNet. Posted August 12, 2005.

A few weeks ago, two AlterNet critics asked whether white Hollywood could ever make a good movie about race relations. This in turn led us to another question: Can Hollywood directors -- male or female -- make good movies about women?

At first, it seems like a ludicrous question. After all, we've come so far since the bad old days when Western writer Max Brand summarized everything wrong with the roles we were assigned on film. "There should be a woman," he said, "but not much of one. A good horse is much more important."

Today, we've got our Meg Ryan comedies, our Meryl Streep dramas, and our Angelina Jolie desert romps. We've got girls with guns, girls with laser beams, girls with briefcases, girls with magic powers -- what's there to complain about?

Quite a bit, I think. I'm a woman who makes IMDB.com her homepage, considers popcorn and Raisinets a well-balanced meal, and pays for the "Magic of 8" on her Netflix account because three DVDs at a time just isn't enough. But I've finally accepted that when it comes to putting people who look like me onscreen, Hollywood really only has four movies on its menu, which it reheats and serves to us over and over again:

The Chick Flick. That 90-minute sitcom you're always stuck watching on the plane. Oh, look, they met in a dog park! But neither one of them has dogs! Wait, they love each other online, but hate each other in real life! Oh no, he/she is a hired escort, but in the end, true love will find a way! More exercises in tabloid wish fulfillment than love stories, the chick flick makes you feel like you need a shower, or at least a wardrobe overhaul.

The Earnest Social Commentary. Norma Rae, Silkwood, Erin Brockovich. In which brave women face down The Man, and let us go home feeling exultant, or at least ready to place our bets in the Oscar pool.

The Cancer Weepie. Terms of Endearment, Stepmom, Steel Magnolias. More brave women share their souls on hospital beds, tearing up photogenically as the sisterhood sweeps them up in tissue-soaked arms and ushers them into the great beyond.

The Action Figure. Catwoman, Tomb Raider, Elektra. All the one-dimensional women in three-dimensional popup bras, who seem pieced together to elicit a collective "You go, girlfriend!" from the audience. As if we all thought heroism -- or rather, heroinism -- should be defined by humorlessness, spandex and a good personal trainer.

Throughout my (evidently unrequited) love affair with Hollywood, I've been empowered, encouraged, affirmed and celebrated on screen to within an inch of my life, but I've almost never felt represented in any way that felt plausible. I say almost never, because even in Hollywood, there are exceptions -- ten of which I humbly submit to you here -- in which the women, their relationships or their circumstances, feel somehow authentic, or, for lack of a better word, real.

Beyond saying that they resonate with my sense of what being a woman means, can I define exactly what makes them real? No, and I wouldn't want to, especially because all those attempts to define female authenticity is part of the problem to begin with. But, like Justice Stewart, I know it when I see it.

(This is, of course, my own highly subjective and unscientifically produced list of anti-Max Brand movies that do offer Much of a Woman. It is based entirely, I'm sure, on personal biases and childhood traumas. AlterNet readers are invited to add alternate lists in the comments section.)

Alien (1979) The iconic image of Sigourney Weaver, cursing behind awesome firepower with her sweaty tank top (and butch hair in Alien 2), spawned a whole crop of chicks-with-ammo knockoffs. But the real leap was 10 years earlier, when writer/producer team Dan O'Bannen and David Giler were pitching their script about a monster that steals aboard a spaceship and starts picking off crew members. It was the mid-70s, and when the filmmakers heard that Twentieth Century Fox was looking for strong female leads, they decided at the last minute to make their main character, Ripley, a woman. Ripley was never intended to be a spokesman, a symbol or a poster child; at first, she was just a marketing gimmick. But when Ridley Scott took over the film and cast then-unknown Weaver in the role, he gave us one of the beautiful, powerful and believable heroines we'd seen so far: She fought to keep the ship secure, fought to keep her crew alive, and finally, in a harrowing last scene, managed to blast the terrifying alien into deepest space. Scott made very few alterations to accommodate the new gender of its star and only survivor -- which was exactly the point. It was the first time I ever saw a capable woman onscreen in a way that didn't call attention to the fact that she was a "capable woman."

Sheerly Avni is a film and culture writer based in San Francisco.

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