[naez]

So apparently it’s our duty or something? As individuals of whichever gender or gender expression who find the Bechdel Test the bare minimum of acceptable standards?

“Hey A Lot Of Ladies,” began a mass email I received on Wednesday from Emily Bracken, a writer and acquaintance. She was forwarding a message from Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, a producer and the screenwriter of Legally Blonde and The House Bunny, who has no professional connection with Bridesmaids but is nonetheless agitating on its behalf. “I know you get a lot of emails about donating money to worthy causes, but I’d like to draw your attention to one in particular: The Chick Flick,” Smith wrote. “It is currently on the Motion Picture Association of America’s list of Endangered Species and it faces extinction if we don’t act now.”
Urging everyone to buy tickets to the movie, Smith continued, “Let’s show the planet we are capable of queefing out some major box-office lady-power.”
And I mean it is not like there isn’t something to the dire sense of urgency behind this call to arms. To pluck a few points of anecdata from that New Yorker profile of Anna Faris that’s been making the rounds:

”In my experience, girls’ revealing themselves as candid and raunchy doesn’t appeal to guys at all,” Stacey Snider, a partner in and the CEO of DreamWorks Studios, says. “And girls aren’t that into it, either.”

“The reality is, I’m a dude and I understand the dude thing, so I lean men the way Spike Lee leans African-American,” says Apatow.

Seth Rogen thinks Faris is hilarious, is honest about himself: “If Pineapple Express had been about two girls, they wouldn’t have made it. And if I were a woman I wouldn’t have a career.”

To make a woman adorable, one successful female screenwriter says, “you have to defeat her at the beginning. It’s a conscious thing I do—abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun. It’s as simple as making the girl cry, fifteen minutes into the movie.”

But everyone likes a hot girl, if she’s not too successful or intimidating. Of Faris, a “leading agent” says, “What Anna has going for her, to be crass, is that guys want to nail her.”

Faris’s new film with Mylod, What’s Your Number, is about a woman who learns from a ladymag that if she sleeps with one more man than the twenty she already has, she’ll never get married. The studio executive debate over the number is instructive, as they wring their hands over how many would make the character an unrelatable slut.

Much of Backlash is dedicated to demolishing both the Bloom-Craig research itself and Newsweek’s further distortion of it—most famously, Newsweek’s preposterous claim that a single gal was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a mate.

Oh wait! That last one isn’t from the New Yorker piece at all! That last one’s actually from an article written in 1999 about a book published in 1991 about a bunch of stuff that happened thirty years ago. —Sorry about that.

Anyway, Bridesmaids: it sounds like a funny movie and all and it’s getting great reviews, but a social responsibility? I mean really? The fate of big-budget Hollywood films starring women—well, white women—well, white women of a certain narrow set of socio-economic classes—I mean all that really hinges on whether or not we troop out this weekend to put money in Apatow’s pocket? (Well. And Wiig’s. And McCarthy’s. And Feig’s. And Universal’s. And—but I’m trying to make a rhetorical point, here.)

@carlafrantastic My worry about the Bridesmaids “it’s your duty” movement: Apatown planned it as part of their PR.
@kiplet That’s the smart money, yes.
@carlafrantastic Could also be, as u said, smart $. He was attacked for dismissing women, ventured to prove otherwise. Is this about ego, or virtue?
@carlafrantastic or does it not matter?
@kiplet What was that Twain bromide? No good or bad actions, just good or bad results of actions?
@carlafrantastic Somehow, the Bridesmaids “it’s important” movement makes me feel more used than empowered. And, I’m still going to go see it, ASAP.
The thing that didn’t occur to me until later, the reason that Salon piece, this whole campaign, had left me with a nagging deja vu, is that I’ve heard this all before—

Because didn’t we, as geeks, all have a duty to go and see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, to demonstrate there was indeed a market for smart and funny and inventively geeky movies that spoke to us?

And didn’t we as geeks have a duty to go and see Serenity, to demonstrate there was indeed a market for smart and funny and inventively geeky movies that spoke to us, and also to stick it to Fox for killing Firefly?

And I mean that hunger—that hunger to see something that looks like you up on the billboards in Times Square and in the commercials on heavy rotation on Hulu and the posters and the marquees—that’s a mighty goddamn hunger; it might at first blush seem odd to turn the act of buying a ticket to a movie into a duty, a social responsibility, but it’s at your peril that you mock the power of dreamstuff deferred.

But still. —A duty? —And anyway the geeks ate the world already, right? Lord of the Rings winning Oscars™ and D&D jokes on primetime television and in The New Yorker and all those comicbook movies and Lost, amirite? But it’s not enough; the good stuff withers on the vine; we’re told there isn’t any money in it and SciFi has to go SyFy and show a bunch of ghost-hunting talking-to-the-dead reality-show shit and we have to keep begging and Guillermo del Toro can’t get At the Mountains of Madness made.

And women—54% of the population—are in the same damn boat? —Well yes white women of a certain narrow set of socio-economic classes, but that’s still an awful lot of money on the table, going begging; but even so, it’s not enough: women, we’re told, will get dragged to men-movies by men, but men won’t go to women-movies, it’s all in the numbers, you know?

Oh but really if it were really all about the numbers and the money, then one of this summer’s comicbook movies would look a lot different:

To less than 100,000 readers a month the Green Lantern is a white guy—to millions of television viewers he is a black man.
So there’s that. —But there’s also this?

@carlafrantastic esp. as [Apatow] is also producing @lenadunham’s Girls.
Social responsibility; first world problems; seeing yourself; small steps? I guess?

—Filed 50 days ago to Paralitticisms and Poprocks; comment.


With thanks to Liz Wallace.

The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women.

—Dan O’Bannon, Alien (née Starbeast)

FOOM! FOOM! FOOM! With explosions of escaping gas, the lids on the freezers pop open. —Slowly, groggily, six nude men sit up.

—ibid.

Having pretty women as the main characters was a real cliché of horror movies and I wanted to stay away from that. So I made up the character of Ripley, whom I didn’t know was going to be a woman at the time… I sent the people of the studios some notations and what I thought should happen and when we were about to make the movie the producer of the film jumped on it. He just liked the idea and told me we should make that Ripley character a woman. I thought that the captain would have been an old woman and the Ripley character a young man, that would have been interesting. But he said, “No, let’s make the hero a woman.”

—Dan O’Bannon, Cult People

[Veronica Cartwright] originally read for the role of Ripley, and was not informed that she had instead been cast as Lambert until she arrived in London for wardrobe. She disliked the character’s emotional weakness, but nevertheless accepted the role: “They convinced me that I was the audience’s fears; I was a reflection of what the audience is feeling.”

—Wikipedia, “Alien (film)#Casting”

FANTASTIC FILMS
Have you had any second thoughts about doing science fiction pictures in a row – first, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and now Alien?

CARTWRIGHT
Oh yeah. They were both screaming and running and crying films. But they were both very different.

FF
Are you worried being type-cast in the sort of role?

CARTWRIGHT
Well, I have to be very careful in picking my roles. I would like to do something comic next. I’m tired of crying. You know what I mean.