The Mission at Hand: A short note on the direction of Hollywood.

The Mission at Hand

I feel the need to give a brief introduction of myself before I get started; I’m currently a student at UCO, studying Mass Communications and Film. My ultimate goal is to be a director, and to quote the father of narrative cinema, D.W. Griffith: “To make you see.” D.W Griffith with that when asked about the task he was trying to achieve. What Griffith said sums up the logic behind every auteur director, and every aspiring auteur director alive today. I’d like to acknowledge the friends that encouraged me to start this blog, I appreciate all of you, and all that take the time to read what I have to say. Furthermore, I hope this challenges your idea of cinema as a spectator, and challenges you to not view films at face value, there’s a lot more beneath the surface.

The inspiration
The inspiration to write this blog came from, “The Women That Knew Too Much”  a book written by Tania Modelski that I cited multiple times in my term paper. The Women That Knew Too Much tackles the ideas of feminist film theory, and directly applies it to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock has been criticized for decades for the portrayal of violence directed at women in his films. Laura Mulvey, the woman that set the foundation for feminist film theory, argued that women in Hollywood Narrative Cinema are treated as passive sexual objects that exist only to fulfill the voyeuristic desires of the men in the audience, along with their sadistic impulses, and that women can only view these films by subconsciously becoming masochists.(Visual Pleasure, and Narative Cinema) While this essay set the feminist film theory in motion, it has been debated by other feminist film scholars such as Modleski that the representation of women in film is far more complex in nature.

A question I have asked my peers as well as myself is, how do women view movies today? Granted, not everyone is a film scholar, not everyone knows whether or not they are a feminist; they do not analyze a film, or the characters in it. This is a reality that every female should realize sooner or later, Hollywood does not value the romantic comedy. It’s clear to see the obvious majority of movies that cater to the masculine spectator. However, in these movies that cater to the masculine, how are women portrayed? Are they passive, are they objects, are they victims? In most of these films....Absolutely not. This year featured a very deflated line up of Hollywood films; a few of the highlights were Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Mockingjay: Part 1. If we look at the female leads of these movies, it’s apparent that women are no longer “passive” or victims. From Gomorra to Katniss, females are the aggressors, females kick ass. Women are given masculine qualities, and the playing field is in some respects leveled. So if women can identify with a female lead, that has both masculine, and feminine qualities, is the same thing true for men and masculine male leads? The success of these films is directly related to the audience (masculine and feminine) and their ability to identify with at least one character, subconsciously.