After my recent (glowing) review of Eastern Promises, I got an interesting email from my fellow critic Gwen Ansell, and a stimulating correspondence ensued. The issue was the treatment of women in movies — the way they are often relegated to very particular roles, especially mother, virgin, whore. I take Ansell’s well-made points, in particular that Eastern Promises, for all its other strengths, put the female characters in very limited and stereotyped range of positions.
The young Russian woman who gives birth and dies, thereby getting the plot rolling, is an abused whore; the voice-over of her diary gives her a bit of interiority, but in a possibly rather clichéd way. She becomes an object of our “voyeuristic pity”, said Ansell, with some justification.
The heroine of the film, if one may use the gender-specific term, is a caring, motherly type — a nurse who goes looking for any relatives of the newborn child. Her motivations are “overdetermined” (given a telltale freight of excess meaning, in a way) by revelations that she has herself lost a child — basically, as a character, she’s womb-driven. The rest of the women in the film are very stereotypically whores, except for a stereotypically apron-clad mother.
This kind of thing is an overwhelming tendency in genre movies: even the one-time feminist rehabilitation of the femme fatale figure in film noir won’t quite wash when it’s clear that she’s there as a symbol of a male fear of a devouring feminine sexuality. She is there primarily to seduce and corrupt the hapless male, innocent except for his weakness and corruptibility, and for whom we are supposed to feel sorry. In this sense, Slavoj Zizek is right when he finds in movies many examples of Jacques Lacan’s famous dictum that “woman is a symptom of man”. Or, as Ansell put it to me, the femme fatale “may just be an excuse for male stupidity”.
The “strong woman” idea is, unfortunately, also frequently no more than a stereotype, particularly in genre films. A Lara Croft has no humanity to speak of — she’s an action doll, as are the Catwomans, Elektras and Aeon Fluxes. A figure such as the monster-blasting Ripley (the Sigourney Weaver character in the Alien movies) is slightly more complex in that she’s taking a traditionally male role, doing all that fighting, but her actions are also inflected by her sense of motherhood. Still, it’s not much.
Outside of genre movies, in what is (generically) called drama, there is thankfully a greater range of female characters with some complexity. I think perhaps it’s got to do with how credible an inner life they are given by the narrative, and to what degree they can be seen to be “actors” — that is, agents in their own lives, rather than plot mechanisms in a male narrative. This week’s movie, Juno, is a good example.
The indie outsider nominated for a best-movie Oscar this year, Juno tells the story of, well, Juno. She’s named after the Roman chief goddess, consort to Jupiter (or Jove). There’s a strong woman for you, though in the old mythological stories she’s constantly trying to second-guess her wayward god of a husband. At any rate, this modern-day Juno, who’s 16, has a different kind of problem: after some brief sexual experimentation with a male friend, she’s pregnant. She decides against an abortion, and then the issue becomes adoption. Can she find a couple she wants to give the child to, and how will it all work?
Juno MacGuff is played by Ellen Page, who is about 20 but plays a teenager convincingly, and even looks like one — unlike most of the school-kids shown in American movies. Page had a rather harder-edged role in the scary Hard Candy (a femme fatale of a kind, in fact). Here she has more complexity, and this is very much Juno’s story. Conservatives in the United States have hailed the film, as they hailed Knocked Up, for spurning abortion, but really that’s a side issue. Besides, I can’t see much of a cheery drama in the issue of abortion. How do you tell such a story and not make it very depressing?
Juno is sparky, vulnerable but also very much an agent of her own destiny. She has difficult choices to make, and the processes of doing that are entertainingly told. Her interactions with her best friend, her stepmother, her father, the prospective parents and the father-to-be of her child allow the characters room to develop and to rub against each other in interesting ways. There’s a quirkiness here that helps dissolve the stereotypical problems of such characters in such situations. You could say Juno is all about wombs — about what Juno decides to do with hers, how the adoptive mother (an excellent Jennifer Garner) relates to hers and its apparent dysfunction, and so on. The film offers no simple solutions.
That it proceeds with humour is a major plus, too. We don’t get much sense of Juno’s fellow pupils’ feelings about her pregnancy; perhaps they’re not very concerned. Her parents are also a little too good to be true, though still quirkily alive. The resolution to this story relies on somewhat clichéd romantic solutions, I felt, but I suppose the options were limited, and such things do not detract from a thoroughly entertaining film — fun, but still real, and still serious. Juno what I mean?