What's the Rumpus? #2 - What Women Want

As is the wont of Internet pseudo-journalists the world over, towards the end of last year I compiled together my best films of the proceeding twelve months. Having settled on what I considered to be the ten finest efforts, I couldn’t help but notice that three of them - Winter’s Bone, The Kids Are All Right and Please Give -  were directed by women. This, I’m sorry to say, surprised me.

A few days into 2011, I happened to catch the first twenty minutes or so of Michael Bay’s Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Around five minutes in, Megan Fox’s character, the female lead of a major American film made by a major Hollywood studio, is introduced. Our introduction, such as it is, has the leering camera creeping up behind her as she is splayed out, legs akimbo wearing nought but a grubby vest and a pair of denim hot pants, bent over a greasy Harley Davison. This, I’m sorry to say, did not surprise me.

I could not help but feel that these two events were inexorably linked. 

Women directors have always got the shitty end of the stick. In 2009, only 7% of the top 250 highest grossing films were directed by women (source: Centre for the Study of Women in Television & Film). This is an obscenely disproportionate figure and is actually down from a paltry 9% in 2008. Last year, Kathryn Bigelow scooped the best Director gong at the Oscars, becoming the first female recipient in the awards’ 82 year history. During that eight decade stretch, Bigelow was only the fourth female nominee out of more than 400. Whether or not Bigelow’s win marks a sea change remains to be seen. This year’s DGA nominations, which do not include a single woman despite universal critical acclaim for the three films on my list, suggest not.

This fantastic piece of data analysis by the good folks at Metacritic suggests that whilst women directors more than punch their weight critically, they are hampered by lack of opportunity and rarely backed with sizeable budgets, effectively ghettoising those directors who do get the chance to the world of the introspective indie flick. The box office successes of Twilight, Deep Impact, and Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel goes to show that when entrusted with the GDP of a small African nation, women directors can churn out tacky Hollywood nonsense just as well as men. However, the opportunities to helm these big budget projects are few and far between. 

At this point, you may well be wondering where Megan Fox’s arse comes into all this. Well, whilst there appears to be an exciting new wave of female directors emerging, the depressing thing is that Fox, bent over a motorbike in tiny shorts for the gratification of a (perceived) mostly male audience, is an apt reminder of the ingrained sexism in the film industry. The giant throbbing cock that is the Hollywood machine has always marginalised minority groups, but it feels bizarre to marginalise a "minority group" when it constitutes the majority of the world’s population.

The combined budgets of Winter’s Bone, The Kids Are All Right and Please Give total a meagre $9m. Transformers 2 cost north of $200m. I wonder how much they paid Megan Fox to bend over.