Over at Feministe, a couple days ago Jill posted (without comment) part of an article from the LA Times, which says that despite making up half the population, only 29.9% of movie speaking roles are (at least in the top 100 grossing films of 2007). The reason was pretty obvious to me: most of the bad guys in movies are men. While the good guys usually consist of men and women, most villains are male, almost all of their lieutenants are male, and virtually every mook/guard/redshirt is male.
Avatar is an example of this. While there were male and female protagonists, all of the antagonists at every level were male.
JJ Abram's Star Trek is another example. In Starfleet (the good guys), there were both men and women present - on the USS Kelvin, at Starfleet Academy, and on the USS Enterprise. Indeed, it looked like the producers and casting directors had gone out of their way to make the crews seem half-male, half-female.
The villainous Romulans, in contrast, were all male. Lucia Rijker (known for playing a boxer in Million Dollar Baby was supposed to play a female Romulan, but I didn't see her. Anyways, there was no way it could have been accidental that the good guys were mixed male-female and the bad guys all male.
Now, if the good guys are male and female and the bad guys are male, it follows that there will be more men with speaking roles than women. Of course, if films started showing more "bad girls," feminists would probably complain that the film industry is "promoting violence against women."
"Of course, if films started showing more "bad girls," feminists would probably complain that the film industry is "promoting violence against women."
ReplyDeleteYup, you can never win.
Welcome to the blogosphere.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good point, one I'd never thought of. To sum up:
The top 100 biggest-grossing movies featured many action/war movies.
Action/war movies need bad guys, who are guys per se.
(I'd love to think of a minor female bad guy character. I'm sure I can ... I just haven't yet. Maybe the camp followers in Flesh and Blood?)
To this I would add:
There are plenty of movies in other genres with more balanced numbers of speaking parts for men and women. (Romantic comedies and drama, for instance.) These don't gross as big, but a lot of them will make it into the top 100.
The thing is, movies geared to women, and featuring lots of speaking actresses, tend to have smaller casts. That is not a firm statistic but an observation - a romantic comedy is going to have the two leads, a bevy of friends of the female lead, and a few for the male, plus a waiter or two. Six to ten speaking roles, maybe.
A war movie could easily have 50 speaking roles. Every time a guy gets shot and yells, "I'm hit!" he counts, right? And he counts as much as each of the four Sex and the City ladies....
"I'd love to think of a minor female bad guy character. I'm sure I can ... I just haven't yet. Maybe the camp followers in Flesh and Blood?"
ReplyDeleteIn that movie, one of the female followers was killed, but the other two survived (and joined up with the soldiers who besieged them - who were from the same army as soldiers they previously had killed) without any consequences at all.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan comes to mind. There were some women following Khan and they actually paid for their evil ways with their lives.