Plasma Pool

I agree with Manohla Dargis that women were underrepresented in Hollywood films this summer, but the essay in which she advances that idea—“Is There a Real Woman in This Multiplex?”—is the most shortsighted piece of film writing by a very good writer in a very long time. She describes the modern state of film as “post-female American cinema.” Really, film has become something more like “post-human.” Yes, women are underrepresented at the multiplex—but so are non-whites, and old people, and naturalized citizens, and people below the poverty line, and smalltown Americans. It’s true that anyone looking to popular cinema for a “real woman” is bound to be disappointed. But so is anyone looking to popular cinema to see a real person period. And although women may be underrepresented in Hollywood, they are increasingly dominant—and powerful—on television.

In these highly politicized times, no one in movies ever talks about politics. (That’s why it was so bracing when Iron Man came as close as possible to re-enacting the history of America in Afghanistan, in miniature, with science-fiction missiles and in the context of a superhero origin story.) The internet—perhaps the single most defining social creation of the last century, the semi-abstract zone of consciousness where practically everybody spends some time (and most everybody spends a lot of time) at work or at play—appears in movies only as an instrument of villainy (Diane Lane’s Untraceable; FearDotCom; Live Free or Die Hard), if not as an anthropomorphized villain itself (The Matrix). Yes, it’s hard to make typing on a computer “exciting,” but then why is it that so many “cyberthrillers” continue to be made? The thing is, though, that it’s not the typing that’s exciting—no more or less exciting, anyway, than watching people read or listen to music. It’s not the medium, it’s the message: the information and ideas that are conveyed through the internet, through books, through music. Antonioni could do great things with two people talking on the internet.

His Girl Friday (1940)

Most of all, though, movies used to show people—men and women—at work. One of the greatest of all romances, His Girl Friday, is really just an office romance in which all the guy and gal ever talk about is the job. Bogart was always on the job; he wasn’t trying to avenge his dead wife, he wasn’t working for a cause. He was working for a daily rate, and he often refused any increase.

In contrast, look at the films that came out this summer—Tony Stark is a billionaire. The Narnia kids are schoolchildren. Maxwell Smart is a superspy. The Love Guru is a guru. Indiana Jones is a teacher, sure, but he takes long holidays. Angelina Jolie in Wanted is an assassin with superpowers. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire. Hellboy is a superspy, with superpowers. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play grown men who still live at home in Step Brothers. Mulder and Scully work for a fantasy FBI with a bottomless budget. Brendan Fraser in The Mummy is like Indiana Jones without the teaching job (instead, he’s married to a British billionaire). The actors in Tropic Thunder are playing actors. Nicolas Cage in the wondrously named Bangkok Dangerous is an assassin.

One could argue that the characters in X-Files, Indiana Jones, Wanted, and Get Smart are doing their “jobs,” but if that’s true, then they’re all independent contractors or work-from-home consultants. What’s missing from all these movies is the simultaneous grasping love and all-encompassing hatred of your job—love, because it’s where you spend most of your time and because it gives you money to sustain yourself; hatred, because it’s dull, monotonous, and where you spend most of your time, preventing you from doing everything that you would like to be doing. (Part of the fun of the original Hellboy was that, in the movie’s first half, “being a superhero” genuinely did feel like a job—until they off his foster father and it becomes a fairly typical revenge/discover-your-heart superhero thriller, turning from Office Space into Daredevil in less than five minutes.)

But movies don’t need to be about normal jobs to manifest that dynamic. Unlike most movies in the post-ID4 blockbuster era, Men in Black has aged remarkably well, precisely because the director, Barry Sonnenfeld, cut the fat out of a globetrotting original script and decided to make it The French Connection with aliens—a brutish little story about cops on the beat. That’s why Tommy Lee Jones is the rock that holds the whole movie together—few actors are as adept as Jones is at conveying boredom, disregard, and professionalism all in the same glance. (Jones needs to make a movie with Michael Mann, a director endlessly fascinated with professionals on the job. His two second best films, Thief and The Insider, tell basically the same story of a guy who’s too good for his own job; while his best film, Collateral, suggests that everyone, from the salt of the earth taxi driver to the high-paid well-dressed consultant with the perfect five-o-clock shadow and the salt-and-pepper silver hair can be either hero or monster.)

Because most movies today—certainly most big-budgeted movies—take place in some abstract zone where people either don’t have jobs, have enough money not to worry about jobs, or have jobs so awesome that they only exist in movies, there is a vaguely narcotized sense of eternal security overlaying all of them. Don’t get me wrong, I like Iron Man and Batman (both the comics and the movies) but their storylines are utterly bourgeois. Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark are both rich enough to worry about concepts like “justice,” much like Charlie Sheen in Platoon, and we all know what happened to him. In this sense, Wayne and Stark are both descendants of Charles Foster Kane—wealthy enough to do whatever they want, passionate enough to devote themselves to “the people,” yet naive enough to not recognize the tremendous narcissism at work in casting themselves as heroic figures. Kane, Wayne and Stark, in their worlds and in ours, aren’t men; they’re phenomena. This isn’t post-female cinema; it’s post-human cinema.

Mary Louise Parker in HBO's "Weeds"

We must grant Dargis’s point about women’s underrepresentation in film, but television is fast becoming a woman’s world. TNT has started to build itself into a genuine TV network by taking great actresses too mature for movies and putting them on TV. The Closer and Saving Grace may not be great shows, but they’re both marked with genuinely distinctive female characters. FX is getting in on the game, too, hiring Glenn Close for a great run on The Shield and now her own show, Damages. Showtime snagged Mary Louise Parker for its dark comedy, Weeds. Sure, The Sopranos lost sight of its female characters towards the end (and most of the females cast on Deadwood were cast as cheap frontier whores), but now HBO’s got Big Love, with its powerful yet distinctive wives, and two psychology shows, Tell Me You Love Me and In Treatment, each with a sharptongued-yet-maternal-goddess psychiatrist played by a sharptongued-yet-maternal-goddess actress.

Battlestar Galactica has, without a doubt, the finest assortment of female characters in television history. Yes, the women in Grindhouse were badass, but you could certainly argue that they were a male pop-fetishist’s wet dream of female badassity—they were all played by people like Rose McGowan or Rosario Dawson, and enjoyed guns, cars, and fucking on cars with guns. On Battlestar Galactica, the main female character is Starbuck, the mannish athlete pilot who screws and falls in love with all the wrong and right men, yet at no point is she objectified—there are no cheap boybait shots of her washing herself by the beach because, well, there are no beaches in Battlestar Galactica. Elsewhere in the fleet, women have been presidents, commanders, traitors, double agents, powermongers, victims, angels, villains. There have been female leaders who resemble Abraham Lincoln and female leaders who resemble George W. Bush. (And sometimes female leaders who resemble both. That’s impressive.)

Grey’s Anatomy mashes Sex and the City with ER, and if it’s not quite as funny as the former it’s certainly much zippier than the latter, and with half as much gore and none of the naughty language of either. The Office is fairly balanced by gender, and if the show has drastically ignored its female characters lately, that’s to its own detriment (whither Kelly?). Gossip Girl came on like an East Coast The OC, but it’s becoming clearer with every episode that it’s actually a modern-day femmed-up Rome, with Blair taking over Atia’s role as the manipulative villainess who’s also, oddly, a completely lovable, even sympathetic, heroine.

Lost is the only serial narrative show on TV right now that isn’t somewhat or largely female dominated; its female characters tend to be weak and remain unexplored. (The show has begun to discover “fathers and sons” as its central theme, so this is perhaps somewhat understandable, if not especially original.) Still, despite the show’s gender imbalance, nothing in recent women’s cinema can compare to this single line from Lost’s Juliet Burke, a line pregnant with years of hurt and bemusement and wisdom and unbearable sadness, yet spoken with such a quick wit:

You know, he kissed me. It was nice. But it wasn’t for me, it was for him.