Ripley's Game

[my_daroga]

Last night on All Things Considered, I heard a story called Heroine Chic: When Star Power Trumps Gender. It was about how certain film roles, even iconic ones, were originally written for men but became vehicles for female stars: Weaver in Alien, Jodie Foster in Flight Plan, Jane Lynch in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, to name a few. It mentions that being tough or funny is necessary for a genderswitched role, and also that it almost NEVER goes the other way. Men never take roles written for women.

What they did not mention was the overwhelming reason why this is. Which, for me, is what's actually interesting about this story. The reason women sometimes get roles written for men is because all roles are written for men by default unless the theme is explicitly woman-centric. That is to say, the default position for "action hero" or "working person" or "courageous lawyer" or "stranger coming to town" or "person with dark secret" is male. Women's roles, as leads, are wives, mothers, teachers--if you're writing about a child or about a certain kind of relationship, chances are it'll be a woman you're writing about. Everyone else? Is a guy unless someone decides Weaver or Foster or Jolie are a big enough star to transcend that default. (Obviously there are exceptions. But I don't think this is a controversial opinion.)

This is fascinating to me, and very frustrating. I always loved Alien because Ripley is so great, so unexpectedly a woman (when dammit, I shouldn't be trained to find it unexpected at all), and her heroism is very natural. She's not a superwoman who has had powers conferred upon her by The Watchers' Council someone who can't figure out how else to make a woman powerful. But see... She is, after all. She is, because that part was specifically written for a man until a powerful white guy decided to confer it upon Sigourney Weaver.

It puts a different spin on things, to know for sure that these parts were written for men. To know that the only way to get a female hero or double-agent or even pot-smoking boss is to write a man, then concede that a woman might be able to pull it off. And the thing is, the roles mentioned up there aren't even necessarily masculine. There's nothing in them that requires them to be thought of that way. These aren't Rambo or Patton or anything where you have to stretch your imagination or even go against society's roles. It just seems to be the only way for the predominately male-driven Hollywood machine to get into a female zone: write as if everyone's a man, and then, when Tom Cruise is busy, see if you can find a woman with enough B.O. cred to overcome this apparent inability for people to see past that default.

Comments

[holyschist]

all roles are written for men by default unless the theme is explicitly woman-centric.

This, I think, is at the root of many of my current issues with the media.

*sigh*

[my_daroga]

It's interesting, too, because it's needless. I mean, I can look at Ripley and say, "huh, it's unusual that that part is played by a woman," but I'm not saying, "huh, that's not very realistic, for a woman to be/do/survive that." Audiences will accept it, but is it only if it's Weaver or Jolie? And if it's a vicious audience/media cycle (and I think it is), where do we halt it?

[holyschist]

Yeah--and in books, those kinds of roles are often written as women, and not genderflipped partway through drafting the book. Sometimes well, sometimes poorly. But it happens. (Which is why I have a much less, um, conflicted relationship with textual media.)

I find it simultaneously cheering and depressing that the most gender-balanced, feminist TV show I've watched recently is a kids' Nickelodeon cartoon. (Cheering because I'm really, really glad this is there for kids...depressing because it should be a lot more common.)