Raising Awareness Through Mockery in Thelma and Louise In Brenda Cooper’s article “Chick Flicks,” she argues, the film, Thelma and Louise employs mockery as a narrative tool, and functions to produce a defiant narrative which fiercely confronts and denounces patriarchy. Societal norms are able to create a kind unconscious compliance, resulting in self-imposed coercion and oppression. A film like Thelma and Louise brings consciousness to women’s own complicity in social norms like patriarchy, so they can no longer blindly follow these norms. This leaves women in either a state of denial and resistance or a state of evolution and change. Through mockery this film sheds light on accepted norms, and in some, causes a defensive response, as it …show more content…
Thelma and Louise turn these ideas upside down throughout the film by both reversing these social constructs and violently rejecting them. For example, when Thelma asks the police officer to get into his trunk, she takes on the, dominate, gun wielding outlaw, and traditional male role. Police officers are usually characterized as the epitome of macho, but in this scene the police officer adopts the traits of a usually feminine character. He cries and begs, using his wife and kids as a way to gain sympathy. Perhaps the scene with the most blatant mockery of female objectification is the truck driver scene. After waving his tongue at them and shouting obscenities throughout the film, the women lure him into a trap. They call him out on his behavior and ask him to apologize, he responds by calling them crazy and yells, “Fuck You!” In response they blow up his truck. Cooper claims, the behavior of the truck driver, both mocks the male gaze and demonstrates its latent sexism. Furthermore, had the truck driver narrative been more subdued, with perhaps a smaller truck, or less obnoxious language, the point may have been lost. Without exaggeration of things like male dominance and sexism, the exaggerated responses of the women do not seem justified (Cooper 44). In other words, critics who call out the film for being overly feminist or too violent are simply missing the
Many are too quick to write off Thelma and Louise as a typical “chick-flick,” or “man-hating” movie. “Complete opposites who will by the end of the film have switched gender, grown closer, and develop to be opposites again. But always flying through life with the same end or common means to end the oppressive male tendencies of their lives,” (Kirkomatic). The men in the movie present themselves as suave, charming or abusive, domineering men. Yes, the director chose typical macho men to play the male characters. Yet, I believe Thelma and Louise treated them as “scum of the earth” because of there ...
This essay argues that the film Bridesmaids transcends traditional representations of feminine desire that exhibits women as spectacles of erotic pleasure, through the symbolic reversal of gender identity in cinematic spaces. By discussing feminist perspectives on cinema, along with psychoanalytic theory and ideological narratives of female image, this essay will prove Bridesmaids embodies a new form of feminine desire coded in the space of the comedic film industry.
" Hollywood producers influenced by the backlash trend in the media, created a series of movies that pitted the angry career woman against the domestic maternal "Good woman"."
Today’s culture sees a gap between the male and female gender. This is evident in everything from the films we watch, music we listen to, and even in our everyday lives. Historically, this issue has seen an even larger gap, and can be observed in the films that were made during that time. Vertigo and Citizen Kane both show the objectification of women by controlling them, writing them in supportive roles, and placing their value in the way that they look.
The genre of melodrama has been fuelling debate for decades as it is being constantly redefined at a critical level. Rick Altman claims that melodrama has "a syntax but lacks a clear semantic dimension,” while Linda Williams sees it as a "mode" or a "tendency," its formal and stylistic motifs varying according to both its era of production and its medium.” (Griggs, April 1, 2007, p. 101). Melodramas are written for the enjoyment of women and aim to appeal to their sensitive nature and emotions. Bearing that in mind, the way by which women are represented in certain melodramatic films is interesting. From a feminist’s perspective, melodramas sit closely beside romantic comedies and chick flicks and it could be argued that they are in fact a combination of the two. It does seem though that these films are destroying everything feminists have been fighting for decades for. They tend to stereotype women, portraying them as desperate and incredibly reliant on men. An obvious example of this is Jane Wyman’s character, Cary Scott in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. Cary is a widow living in ...
movies are about men’s lives, and the few movies about women’s lives, at their core, still
American commercial cinema currently fuels many aspects of society. In the twenty-first century it has become available, active force in the perception of gender relations in the United States. In the earlier part of this century filmmakers, as well as the public, did not necessarily view the female“media image” as an infrastructure of sex inequality. Today, contemporary audiences and critics have become preoccupied with the role the cinema plays in shaping social values, institutions, and attitudes. American cinema has become narrowly focused on images of violent women, female sexuality, the portrayal of the “weaker sex” and subversively portraying women negatively in film. “Double Indemnity can be read in two ways. It is either a misogynist film about a terrifying, destroying woman, or it is a film that liberates the female character from the restrictive and oppressed melodramatic situation that render her helpless” (Kolker 124). There are arguably two extreme portrayals of the character of Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity; neither one is an accurate or fare portrayal.
Movies are a big part of people’s lives; everyone has a favorite movie, or set of movies. They have impacted people’s lives since they were first made, and continue to do so today. In recent years, movies have cast women to play the roles of heroes. Although women have been playing heroic roles recently, they have always been role models in movies, which have set examples for future generations, empowered women, and have shed light on the feminist movement in the U.S.
From past to present, men have dominated women in media. Media is a big part of people’s everyday lives. It influences how we see ourselves and the world. There are many different types of media like movies, television shows, newspapers, advertisements, etc. In these different forms of media, there are images of men and women who are represented in different ways and characteristics. In both films, Changeling (2008) and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005), a woman, not a man is the main character. These two movies are based off of a true story from a woman’s perspective. This type of genre portrays women in the past and very well may be the same as the present. This movie shows the life of a mother in Los Angeles in 1928 who works constantly
This essay argues that the film Bridesmaids transcends traditional representations of feminine desire that exhibits women as spectacles of erotic pleasure, through the symbolic reversal of gender identity in cinematic spaces. By discussing feminist perspectives on cinema, along with psychoanalytic theory and ideological narratives of female image, this essay will prove Bridesmaids embodies a new form of feminine desire coded in the space of the comedic film industry.
The Ugly Truth, a film which was released in 2009, displays many particular stereotypes and gender issues which we find within American society. Gender is made up of socially constructed ideas which are reinforced by society in regards to what it means to be masculine or feminine. We first learn gender from our parents; however they too had to first learn it from their families and society. Within the American society, the media takes on a large role in creating gender norms. The media is made up of films, magazines, television programs, and news papers. The Ugly Truth, although a funny film, perpetuates these stereotypes and ideas of gender provided by our society.
Using the theories I have discussed regarding feminist film theories , I will apply it to two of the most commercially popular Hollywood Romantic comedies, Pretty Woman and Bridesmaids. Since they both fall under this genre, I will be able to apply these theories and compare them accordingly.
A foundational argument made in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) by the well-known feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey posits that in cinema the ability to subject another person to the will sadistically, or to the gaze voyeuristically, is turned onto the woman as the object of both (23). Mulvey asserts that the female figure as cinematic icon is ultimately representative of sexual difference, a signifier of the male castration complex. The woman is “displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look,” yet threatens to evoke castration anxiety. The male unconscious escapes castration by disavowing it, substituting a fetish object so that “it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (21). Mulvey describes this phenomenon as fetishistic scopophilia, which emphasizes the physical beauty of the object and converts it into something satisfying in itself. Mulvey argues that Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958) uses identification processes and subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist, John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewa...
In the household codes of the New Testament the traditional patriarchal social order is reaffirmed, not simply for secular society, but for Christian community. The concept that children are to obey their parents, wives their husbands and slaves their masters is restated in no fewer than five places in the New Testament: Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Timothy, Titus, and 1 Peter. Conversely all subjugated persons can be viewed as relations of wives to husbands, children to father, and servants to masters. Patriarchalism refers to the total structure of society in all theses types of relations of domination and subjugation; sons to father, wives to husband, and slaves to masters. Also, there is delegated domination and subjugation within the paternal
There are so many codes of cultural context to learn, social rulebooks to observe and accept norms to understand. It’s flung at us in disjointed bits and pieces, seemingly offhand phrases and at informal moments. Maybe the core stereotyping role we are all passed from birth is based on gender and the norms that surround it, that never leaves our side. Director Siebel Newsom is no newcomer to gender issues. With 2011’s “Miss Representation,” a study of the damaging effects of mainstream media on women and girls, she addressed the frequently accepted underdog gender in an inspirational