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American Postfeminist Cinema
In light of their tremendous gains in the political and professional sphere, and their ever expanding options, why do most contemporary American films aimed at women still focus almost exclusively on their pursuit of a heterosexual romantic relationship? American Postfeminist Cinema explores this question and is the first book to examine the symbiotic relationship between heterosexual romance and postfeminist culture. The book argues that since 1980, postfeminism's most salient tensions and anxieties have been reflected in the American romance film. Case studies of a broad range of Hollywood and independent films reveal how the postfeminist romance cycle is intertwined with contemporary women's ambivalence and broader cultural anxieties about women's changing social and political status. Key Features: Offers a new perspective on both popular American romance films and postfeminist cultural criticism by examining the symbiotic relationship between romance and postfeminism. Analyses the recurring narrative and discursive patterns of postfeminist cinema. Includes 13 case studies of popular postfeminist films and other media texts, including television programmes. Continues the tradition of feminist analysis of romance as a significant media genre for women.
eBook
American Cinema of the 2010s
The 2010s were perhaps the most tumultuous decade since the 1960s. The effects of the Great Recession continued to be felt. The administration of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, encouraged many to think that America was now 'post-racial', an illusion broken by the election of Donald Trump. Polarisation reigned, communicated on social media. Netflix and Amazon jumped into production. By 2019, Netflix produced more feature films than the traditional studios combined. Cinema's move from film to digital, in production and in exhibition, was complete by mid-decade. `MeToo and `Oscarssowhite signaled a reckoning with gross gender and racial inequalities in the media, matched by that in the wider culture. The essays of this book explore the blockbusters, low-budget sleepers, and films in between.
eBook
Tiny Life: Technology and Masculinity in the Films of David Fincher
The film's most powerful manifestations of this conflict happen visually: first, the way in which these male bodies appear and behave; second, the way formal elements including cinematography and editing emphasize or deemphasize their embodiment and embodied conflict; and third, the very digital format used to shoot the film, in which the very idea of a tangible body-both human and filmic-is called into question. [...]to what Lorrie Palmer has described as a hypermasculinized, hypermediated use of digital in the contemporary action film (2), Fincher demonstrates in The Social Network how the digital also poses challenges to traditional hierarchies of power wherein physically and socially dominant male bodies are under threat of diminishment and the intellectually driven bodies in control of technology are gaining control.
Journal Article
Conclusion: Beginnings vs. Endings: the Future of the Postfeminist Cycle
Like any conceptual framework, the one I have outlined in American Postfeminist Cinema is not intended to be exhaustive but rather to serve as a jumping off point for future conversations about both romance and postfeminist media. As my breakdown of the structural and discursive elements of the cycle in the Introduction reveals, there are countless texts that have been produced since the beginning of the 1980s that could fall into the binaries that I outline in my case studies, just as there are certainly many other binaries that dominate postfeminist culture that could generate additional case studies. However, I have also argued that we can learn a great deal more about the postfeminist romance cycle, both past and present, if we continue to eliminate the typically iron-clad binary between comedy and drama and the boundaries between film and other media, and even social discourse. For in the preceding chapters, we have examined how the postfeminist period has seen its most potent and contentious concerns addressed and negotiated through romance's narrative structure in diverse forms, of which film remains central.While I hope American Postfeminist Cinema will inspire new research projects, here I briefly consider what our case studies have shown us about endings, which seems a particularly appropriate task for the end of a book about romance. At many points throughout this study, we have discussed how the momentum of romance, in both life and entertainment, moves toward a resolution and conclusion. And indeed, as discussed in the Introduction, the ending of a narrative has a central place in debates over the differences between comedy and drama.
Book Chapter
Introduction: Women, Postfeminism and Romance
Half a century separates the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, the book commonly credited with igniting the second wave of the women's movement, and Facebook Chief Executive Officer Sheryl Sandberg's 2013 best-seller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which assesses the challenges that American working women continue to face today. Reading the two volumes side by side, one cannot help being struck by the dramatically different cultural landscapes they describe. Socially and professionally, American women have soared to unprecedented heights in this fifty-year period, yet the elevated terrain they occupy today is something of a plateau. In 1963, Friedan identified the 'problem that has no name' experienced by those who 'learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights - the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for.' Five decades later, Sandberg admits that in the United States of 2013, 'women are better off than ever' but that the 'revolution has stalled'; women remain 'hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves' by internalizing 'the negative messages we get throughout our lives.' As a result, in Sandberg's view, American women today 'compromise our career goals for partners and children who may not even exist yet.'
Book Chapter
Past vs. Present: Temporality in the Postfeminist Cycle
Katie, the female protagonist played by Barbra Streisand in the 1973 romance film The Way We Were, is presumably the subject speaking the lines from the film's theme song. In the song, she expresses ambivalence about the role of time in the process of making sense of romance. She suggests that events from the past, in this case, a romance from the past, can only be seen via ‘misty water-colored memories,’ which obscure the clarity of the events as they really occurred and diminish the intensity of the emotion that accompanied them. She goes on to question, ‘Could it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line?’ suggesting the muddled distinction between a memory of the past as it really happened, and the sort of revisionism inherent in recollection that transforms the historical and personal past to fit one's own present subjectivity.This notion of ‘the way we were’ suggests that romance is simultaneously specific and universal, timely and timeless. It is a form that has remained constant throughout history but that has also maintained its ability to reveal a great deal about historically specific social and political tensions, particularly those that hold significant ramifications for women such as Katie, who is representative of both the primary players as well as the primary consumers of romantic fantasies. The song's expression of ambivalence toward time and its close association of fictional subject Katie with real person Barbra Streisand bring to mind Chapter 2's discussion of the postfeminist romance's proclivity to break down distinctions between fiction and reality and past and present.
Book Chapter
‘Both Glad and Sorry’: Romance Cycles and Women's Politics
As we have seen, the postfeminist romance cycle has a reliable, known set of conventions that mythologizes the redemptive qualities of love and heterosexual coupling. It is by relying on and adhering to this known formula or structure that it negotiates historically contingent shifts in the Hollywood film industry, and the social and political terrain for women over the last thirty years. In this chapter, we will look more closely at what the postfeminist romance cycle has inherited from the romance film cycles that have preceded it, and what makes it unique. Close case studies of three female-centered films, the classic romance film Kitty Foyle, the ‘feminist’ romance film An UnMarried Woman, and the postfeminist romance film 27 Dresses, demonstrate how their respective eras of romance negotiate women's personal and political issues within the confines of classical or post-classical filmmaking.Most studies of romance place films from different historical periods in separate chapters with their continuities merely implied or discussed in passing. Here the commonalities as well as the differences reveal how much Hollywood romance has stayed the same and the subtle but important ways that it has changed. Indeed, these three seemingly different films have a great deal in common. They all focus on strong and autonomous female protagonists who try to balance personal fulfillment with professional aspirations, ideas of fantasy with reality, and the past with the present. Whether by choice or circumstance, the protagonist is put in a position where she must overcome dreams and patterns that have shaped her past and opt for a different kind of future. This decision is intertwined with a wish for a romantic partner.
Book Chapter
Pragmatism vs. Sentimentality: Amelioration in the Postfeminist Cycle
To get a snapshot of the function of film in the contemporary cultural conversation about women's relationships consider the following 2012 story featured on the feminist website Jezebel, entitled ‘Meet the so-called nice guys of OK Cupid.’ The story discusses a Tumblr blog created by a disenchanted female user of the online dating site OK Cupid that superimposes innocuous quotes from men's dating profiles over their pictures, highlighting the juxtaposition of words and visuals. Both the original Tumblr site, and the Jezebel story about it, suggest that men disingenuously describe themselves as ‘nice guys’ on their online dating profiles to play on a recurring trope in the romance genre wherein the nice but boring male friend character is overlooked by the female protagonist, only to be revealed be her best love match at the end of the film. In other words, the two sites contend that the OK Cupid men are adopting vocabulary and conjuring archetypal representations from oft-seen romantic films as a tool to persuade potential female love interests that they are the ideal mate.A female reader with the screen name rokokobang responded to the Jezebel story in the following way:Maybe I'm crazy, but I feel like women are actually bombarded with the whole ‘The nice nerdy quiet shy guy right in front of you – HE’'S the one you should be with!!!’ via movies and television. I know I always felt this way growing up, and it led me to stay in a super shitty relationship with a guy because he had me convinced he was the nice nerd, when in fact he treated me like shiiiiiit. But I had known him since we were little! We were good friends! He wasn’t the popular guy, he was a film geek! He MUST be the guy I’m supposed to be with!! Maybe I’m just way more susceptible to movies and TV than most people …
Book Chapter
Sexy vs. Funny: Sexuality in the Postfeminist Cycle
If you spell sex in marketing materials, it doesn't sell. If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. Laughter covers up insecurity. Sex sells, but not serious sex. Films can be sexy, but they can't portray the sexual intimacy most people crave. In the movies, you have to make safe sex palatable to a younger audience. The portrayal has to be violent or funny.Producer Peter Guber, The Hollywood ReporterFor those who presume that Hollywood's ideological inner workings operate at an unconscious level, Peter Guber's comments regarding sexuality in the above quote, while disturbing, are refreshingly transparent. Sexuality, he contends, has a particular place in contemporary Hollywood films. It must be presented in one of two styles, either comedic or violent, in order to put the audience at ease. However, sex portrayed in a ‘realistic’ manner cannot be represented in mainstream films because it does not sell, particularly, as Guber goes on to say, to a very important segment of the population – men. This chapter reflects on the implications of Guber's sentiments by examining the discourses in and around female sexuality in the postfeminist romance cycle. In the post-Code era, sexuality is both highly visible and increasingly invisible, depending on the media form that one is considering. On one end of the cultural spectrum we have what Ariel Levy has identified as ‘raunch’ culture, wherein women and young girls' sexual identity revolves around being seen as a sexual object.
Book Chapter