Girls On TV

Although I agree with everything in Manohla Dargis' "Is there a Woman in the Multiplex," I have to say that I truly think it's the most shortsighted piece of film writing by a very good writer in a very long time. Frankly, I think it's ludicrous to describe the modern state of film as "post-female American Cinema," when really, it's essentially post-human. Yes, women are underrepresented at the multiplex - but so are non-whites, and old people, and immigrant citizens, and people below the poverty line, and smalltown America.

In these highly politicized times, no one in movies ever talks about politics (that's why it was so bracing when "Iron Man" came as close as possible to re-enacting the history of America in Afghanistan, in miniature, with science-fiction missiles and in the context of a superhero origin story). The internet - perhaps the single most defining social creation of the last century, the semi-abstract zone of consciousness where practically everybody spends some time (and most everybody spends alot of time) at work or at play - appears in movies only as an instrument of villainy (Dian Lane's "Untraceable," "FearDotCom," "Live Free or Die Hard"), if not as an anthropomorphized villain itself ("The Matrix.") Yes, it's hard to make typing on a computer "exciting," but then why is it that so many "cyberthrillers" continue to be made? The thing is that the typing isn't exciting, just like watching people read isn't exciting and watching people listen to music isn't exciting. It's not the medium, it's the message - the information and ideas that are conveyed through the internet, through books, through music. I bet Antonioni could do great things with two people talking on the internet.

Most of all, though, movies used to show people - men and women - at work. One of the greatest of all romances, "His Girl Friday," is really just an office romance where all the guy and gal ever talk about is the job. Bogart was always on the job - he wasn't trying to avenge his dead wife, he wasn't working for a cause. He was working for a daily rate, and he often refused any increase.

Look at all the films coming out this summer - Tony Stark is a billionaire. The Narnia kids are schoolchildren. Maxwell Smart is a superspy. The Love Guru is a guru. Indiana Jones is a teacher, sure, but he takes long holidays. Angelina Jolie in "Wanted" is an assassin with superpowers. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire. Hellboy is a superspy, with superpowers. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are playing men who still live at home in "Step Brothers." Mulder and Scully work for a fantasy FBI with a bottomless budget. Brendan Fraser in "The Mummy" is like Indiana Jones without the teaching job - married to a British billionaire, if memory serves from "The Mummy Returns." The actors in "Tropic Thunder" are playing actors. Nicolas Cage in the wondrously named "Bangkok Dangerous" is an assassin.

I guess you could argue that the characters in "X-Files," "Indiana Jones," "Wanted," and "Get Smart" are doing their 'jobs,' but if that's true, then they're all independent contractors, or work-from-home consultants. What will be missing from all these movies, I think, is the simultaneous grasping love and all-encompassing hatred of your job - love, because it's where you spend most of your time and because it gives you money to sustain yourself; hatred, because it's dull, monotonous, where you spend most of your time, preventing you from doing everything that you would like to be doing. (Part of the fun of the original "Hellboy" was that, in the movie's first half, "being a superhero" genuinely did feel like a job - until they offed his foster father, and it became a fairly typical revenge/discover-your-heart superhero thriller, turning from "Office Space" into "Daredevil" in less than five minutes.)

Movies don't need to be about normal jobs to feel that way, either. Unlike most movies in the post-ID4 blockbuster era, "Men in Black" has aged remarkably well, precisely because the director, Barry Sonnenfeld, cut the fat out of a globetrotting original script and decided to make it "The French Connection" with aliens - a brutish little story about cops on the beat. That's why Tommy Lee Jones is the rock that holds the whole movie together - few actors are as adept as Jones is at conveying boredom, disregard, and professionalism all in the same glance. (Jones needs to make a movie with Michael Mann, a director endlessly fascinated with professionals on the job - his two second best films, "Thief" and "The Insider," tell basically the same story of a guy who's too good for his own job, while his best film, "Collateral," suggests that everyone, from the salt of the earth taxi driver to the high-paid well-dressed consultant with the perfect five-o-clock shadow and the salt-and-pepper silver hair, can be a hero or a monster.)

Because most movies nowadays - certainly most big-budgeted movies - take place in some abstract zone where people either don't have jobs, or have enough money not to worry about jobs, or have jobs so awesome that they only exist in movies, there is a vaguely narcotized sense of eternal security overlaying all of them. Don't get me wrong - I like both "Iron Man" and "Batman," the comics and the movies, but both storylines are utterly bourgeous - Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark are both rich enough to worry about concepts like "justice," much like Charlie Sheen in "Platoon," and we all know what happened to him. In this sense, Wayne and Stark are both descendants of Charles Foster Kane - wealthy enough to do whatever they want, passionate enough to devote themselves to "the people," yet naive enough to not recognize the tremendous narcissism at work in casting themselves as heroic figures.

I'm wandering here, but it's so easy to wander when you talk about what's missing from the movies nowadays, particularly when you compare it to what's been happening on television. Who cares if we're living through a post-Female cinema, when television is fast becoming a womans' world? TNT has started to build itself into a genuine TV network by taking great actresses too mature for movies and putting them on TV - "The Closer" and "Saving Grace" may not be great shows, but they're both marked with genuinely distinctive female characters. FX is getting in on the game, hiring Glenn Close for a great run on "The Shield' and now her own show, "Damages." Showtime snagged Mary Louise Parker for its dark comedy, "Weeds." Sure, "Sopranos" lost sight of its female characters towards the end (and most of the female cast on "Deadwood" were cheap frontier whores), but now HBO's got "Big Love," with its powerful yet distinctive wives, and two psychology shows, "Tell Me You Love Me" and "In Treatment," each with a sharptongued-yet-maternal goddess psychiatrist played by a sharptongued-yet-maternal goddess actress.

"Battlestar Galactica" has, without a doubt, the finest assortment of female characters in television history. Yes, the women in "Grindhouse" were badass, but you could certainly argue that they were a male pop-fetishist's wet dream of female badassity - they were all played by people like Rose McGowan or Rosario Dawson, and enjoyed guns, cars, and fucking on cars with guns. On "BSG," the main female character is Starbuck, the mannish athlete pilot who screws and falls in love with all the wrong and right men, yet at no point is she objectified - there are no cheap boybait shots of her washing herself by the beach (Hi, Kate!), because, well, there are no beaches in "BSG." Elsewhere in the fleet, women have been Presidents, Commanders, traitors, double agents, powermongers, victims, angels, villains. There have been female leaders who resemble Abraham Lincoln, and female leaders who resemble George W. Bush. (Sometimes the same person resembles both.) THAT'S impressive.

"Grey's Anatomy" mashes "Sex and the City" with "ER," and if it's not quite as funny as the former it's certainly much zippier than the latter, and with half as much gore and none of the naughty language of either. "The Office" is fairly balanced by gender, and if the show has drastically ignored its female characters lately, that's to its own detriment (whither Kelly?) "Gossip Girl" came on like an East Coast "OC," but it's becoming more clear with every episode that it's actually a modern-day femmed-up "Rome," with Blair taking over Atia's role as the manipulative villainess who's also, oddly, a completely lovable (even sympathetic) heroine.

"Lost" is probably the only serial narrative show on TV right now that isn't somewhat or largely female dominated - the woman characters tend to be the weakest and least explored, although given the fact that the show has begun to discover "fathers and sons" as its central theme, this is perhaps somewhat understandable (if not entirely original.) Still, I don't think anything in recent women's cinema can compare to this single line, spoken by Juliet Burke, conveying years of hurt and bemusement and wisdom and unbearable sadness, yet spoken with such a quick wit: "You know, he kissed me. It was nice. But it wasn't for me, it was for him."