Earlier today, I linked to a Jezebel article, which was written in response to a Daily Beast article, and after my headache from the semi-incestuous linkage of every news blog, feminist site, and feminist blog/news site subsided, something occurred to me. Both articles surround the oft-made comment that with The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow has made a film that, from an unsuspecting viewer’s perspective, could easily have been made by a man. This brought up two questions for me:

1. What kind of movie is made by a man? Action, adventure, fantasy, suspense, and horror movies tend to be made by men, with a few notable exceptions; however, men also direct most comedies, including romantic comedies and, yes, chick flicks. Of course, women are directing more and more of the chick flicks on the market, but generally, those are the only films they’re directing. Even Twilight, a high-budgeted and high-grossing sci-fi/fantasy picture directed by a woman, is ultimately a romance. The message that’s being sent is clear: men can direct whatever they want, from Legally Blonde to any and every film in the Bourne and Harry Potter franchises. Women, on the other hand, are relegated to films about nabbing boys, having sex, shopping, and eating.* When one strays outside of that boundary, it makes headlines.

2. What’s so good about a woman making a movie that looks like it was directed by a man? I know I might sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m not so sure it’s really a positive step for women to aim to direct “man films.” Sure, I’m all for breaking up the gender stratification in film direction, but if we as feminist filmgoers take that the ultimate way to break the glass ceiling would be to infiltrate the realm of men, aren’t we suggesting that the realm of men is the superior realm, the one in which we should strive to compete? Wouldn’t it be better if, as a community, we made it a goal to diversify and expand the category of “woman films” (or, okay, “chick flicks”)—to change our perception of what constitutes a movie for women?

Because … I’ll admit it. Films that are made for men generally don’t interest me. I’ve turned up my nose at plenty of the more critically hailed contemporary films because, as I’ve told my boyfriend about The Big Lebowski and many of Tarantino’s early works, there’s just nothing in them for me. Those films, to me, were made without any reference to or consideration of a woman. They might depict women as beautiful, and maybe they display aspects of beauty that are slightly unconventional—characteristics like dangerousness, intelligence, and cunning, as in Pulp Fiction—but they still present beauty as a woman’s greatest attribute, play into tired and oppressive femme fatale stereotypes that only support the virgin/whore dichotomy, and sexualize every seemingly individual, powerful, independent woman in the very same prepackaged way.

This brings me to the male gaze. It’s kind of hard for me to describe it in a professional or scholarly way; to me, it’s just straight-up groady. It makes my skin crawl, and since it’s so prevalent in male-directed films, it’s not often that I go to mainstream film in a conventional theater and sit through the entire thing comfortably. To an extent, I’ve become used to it, and I’ve been able to excuse it in what I might otherwise consider a good (read: Oscar-worthy) film. And, unfortunately, my mind tends to be blown! when I encounter a movie that doesn’t employ a male gaze, as it was with Whip It.

Whip It is another film that could be, by all of the most superficial standards, a man’s movie. It’s about a sport—a brutal sport, actually. It features young women in tight, short Girl Scout uniforms. Its plot centers around catfights, hair-pulling, bruises, welts, and blood. Of course, its cast is almost entirely female, so perhaps at best it’s just a woman’s movie that men can also enjoy. (It wasn’t marketed as such, however, and for that reason it fared miserably at the box office.) At any rate, I found it incredibly refreshing that a film could deal with such content without making me queasy; Whip It felt, at least to me, deliberately respectful of its actors and characters, and this respect was obvious even in the film’s camerawork. It is so rare to see a film in which the camera is respectful because it is rare for the person behind the camera to be respectful, and this is because women are still so rare behind the camera.

It’s also important to note that women, both in film and in everyday life, are taught to discriminate against other women, and that simply adding more female directors into the mix isn’t going to fix everything. Gay men, too, are exposed to the same movies and filmic schools of thought as women and heterosexual men, and the male gaze is perpetuated by exposure: the films to which we are all exposed—men and women of all sexual orientations—sexualize and depersonalize women. It’s not taught deliberately, but it’s taught nonetheless, and it’s no mean feat to separate ourselves from what we’ve learned unconsciously.

I may have gotten a bit tangential there, but my intent was to establish the difference between films directed by women and pro-woman films. No matter how many we see of the former, they won’t matter until we see at least as many of the latter. So when we speak of films that look as if they have been directed by men, what do we mean? Are we strictly referring to content and genre? I’m not so sure we are. And besides, why not make films not for men or for women, but for everyone?



*Originally, I wanted each of these phrases to be a link to a female-directed movie that would fit that description. However, when I Googled the phrase “female-directed films of 2009,” I found not a concrete list of films but dozens of pages praising Kathryn Bigelow and analyzing The Hurt Locker, as if she and it were, respectively, the only female director and female-directed film that has ever existed. My point about making headlines has just reinforced itself.

Related: Dead and Immortal: A Brief Entry on Whip It