“What I’m Thinking About Right Now” - New York, NY
I read an article in Vanity Fair
a while back by Christopher Hitchens. Read it, but be forewarned, it
may cause intense rage. In it, Hitchens explains “why women aren’t
funny.” I don’t even know where to begin! Hitchen’s seems to be missing
the point. There is a larger issue of pervasive sexism throughout the
representation of women in media that Hitchen’s is only feeding into
with his ridiculously superficial evaluation of why “women aren’t
funny.”
It makes this article by David Denby,
all the more important. He talks about the evolving (or rather,
devolving) role of women in romantic comedies. I read this article just
after I saw the delightful comedy, Juno (written by a woman,
about a young woman) and I couldn’t agree more. If you went to the
movies last year, I’m sure you noticed the abundance of blank female
characters in comedies across the board (Juno and a few others excluded). Denby criticizes this trend in a way that I could only hope to articulate.
I wonder how much sway the media actually has over young girls. I
feel as though there is an overwhelming message to women these days,
that to be attractive, you must be rather flat and well, boring. You
shouldn’t be feisty, or funny or smart or difficult. Instead, you
should be incredibly bland, an unwavering straight man to act as a
beacon of maturity for your man to navigate himself by. I don’t want to
give too much credit to the media. I’d like to think that young girls
today have enough sense to see beyond the superficial and hollow
representations of themselves, they see almost every day. I’d like to
think… but I’m not so sure I do. What do you think? How much does the
media actually effect your own self image?
Bob Herbert, in his op-ed piece for the NY Times for the NY Times
asks, “Where has everybody been … We’ve become so used to the
disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous and even violent treatment of
women that we hardly notice it. Staggering amounts of violence are
unleashed against women and girls every day. Fashionable ads in
mainstream publications play off of that violence, exploiting themes of
death and dismemberment, female submissiveness and child pornography.
If we’ve opened the door to the issue of sexism in the presidential
campaign, then let’s have at it. It’s a big and important issue that
deserves much more than lip service.”
I’m proud to have made FLYING and to have shown so many women being
“real,” i.e. complex. And please, if you haven’t seen FLYING - we’ll
send you the first two chapters for free for a House Party
with your friends. Then you can let me know if you think FLYING
portrays women in a unique way and how it makes you feel to experience
that in a film? Too often women are regulated to supporting characters
in both film and the real world. I am curious if you think the flat
female characters in pop culture affect the way you act in real life?
