“Biggest-Grossing Movie Directed By a Man”

Sound weird? I’ll explain why, with the help of Simone deBeauvoir, in part two of my discussion of “Barbie”

                                                                                

You may or may not have known about those two accomplishments. But I know that you’ve read—over and over and over—that “Barbie” had the biggest opening week-end for a movie directed by a woman.

Is that an accomplishment? Sure—Movies anticipated (by investors, advertisers, etc.) to be “blockbusters” are usually directed by men. But is it necessary to mention “by a woman” every time the film is discussed?

It’s not as though these discussions dive very deep into the difference it makes, in terms of themes, style, number of car chases and explosions, etc.

And: “By a woman” has the unfortunate effect of suggesting (to numb-skulls, but let’s face it there are a lot of those in America today, many in high places) that a movie directed “by a woman” is somehow inferior despite audience appreciation or the credentials of the director. (Like the Supreme Court’s attitude toward affirmative action hires. Or male competitors’ belittling of support for a female candidate for President: “They want to vote for her because she’s a woman.”)

We never see the gender of male directors noted by reviewers, even when it would be illuminating to do so. Why not? Philosopher Simone deBeauvoir, in 1949, had an answer:

“The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality, the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common mon use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion cussion it is vexing to hear a man say: "You think thus and so because you are a woman"; but I know that my only defense is to reply: "I think thus and so because it is true," thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: `And you think the contrary because you are a man,"for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. . . . There is an absolute human type, the masculine.”

There is an absolute human type, the masculine.

What does Beauvoir mean, exactly?

I could start with a philosophical discussion that would bore some of you and be old-hat to others of you. Instead, let me tell you a bit about the book in which she introduced the idea, and my own experience with it, when I was a teenager, looking for dirty books in my older sister’s bedroom.

Mickey was eight-and-a-half years my senior, and once she turned sixteen was granted the privilege of her own tiny bedroom. As I was going through adolescence in the second half of the 1950’s and early 60’s, her room was an exotic, sexy space to me, largely because of the book-shelf, which held titles like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Marjorie Morningstar, Peyton Place, Lolita, Bonjour Tristesse, and—perhaps most enticing of all—The Second Sex, which I of course presumed was about sex.

This wasn’t just a hormonally fueled mistake. My sister had the hardback, but the Bantam paperback edition, issued in 1961, had a blurry but unmistakably naked woman on the front cover, blonde hair cascading over her shoulders, pert breast (and even nipple) very visible, while on the back cover Beauvoir was described as “a Frenchwoman who never loses sight of the needs and desires of both sexes.” “WOMEN AND SEX” announced the frontispiece, and the book promised to deliver an “unorthodox treatment of sex and the feminine personality.”

I snuck into Mickey’s room when she wasn’t home, quickly passing over the dense introduction, full of terms that I didn’t understand, and sought out any mention of body parts. This was pretty much what the original publisher, Alfred Knopf, had wanted, hoping to capture the same readers who were devouring Havelock Ellis, not Jean-Paul Sartre. Instead, the fact that the book was “about women” came to obscure the fact that it was also a work of enormous philosophical importance, one which showed that the “universal” concepts of existentialism needed to be revised.

And, OMG, it was not just “about women,” it was FEMINIST!! English speaking critics were appalled (although Beauvoir had yet to identify with feminism herself).) William Barrett, in Irrational Man, a bible for budding existentialists, described Beauvoir as “that woman, his [Sartre’s] friend,who wrote a book of feminine protest, The Second Sex, which is in reality the protest against being feminine.” Dwight MacDonald called the book a “deformed work” which “carries the feminist grievance too far.”

Beauvoir was seen as both irritatingly masculine and suffering from too large a dose of feminine narcissism. At the same time, the book was described as if it were her biological offspring. Time headlined its review with a birth announcement: “Weight: 2 and 3/4 lbs,” in one economical image associating the book with the bodily realm that Beauvoir describes as continually culturally projected onto women, and women’s “natural” role of child-bearer.

And so Beauvoir, that most unnatural of creatures, a woman philosopher, was put in her rightful place.

The supreme irony of all this is that this branding of The Second Sex as female (if “unnaturally” so) is a jaw-dropping example of precisely the phenomenon that Beauvoir had exposed in the book. In the introduction, she argues that within the social world, there are those who occupy the unmarked position of the “essential,” the universal, the simply human, and those who are defined and marked by their (sexual, racial, religious) difference from the norm. So, there’s “history”, and then there’s “women’s history,” and women’s history (unlike military history, for example!) is imagined as peripheral, outside history proper. There’s “Black history” and then there’s “U.S. history,” which is currently being disinfected, by DeSantis et al, of what is imagined as a dispensable and harmful “Black history” (e.g. of slavery.

“The Other” has many faces. In developing the concept, Beauvoir contributed what is arguably the single most broadly, deeply, and enduringly significant insight of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one that has shaped numerous scholarly conversations (about race, colonialism, heterosexism, and disability, to name a few.) The (admittedly clunky) term has even become something of a media colloquialism; once confined to academic articles and books, Morning Joe now sprinkles his diatribes with “the Other,” “Othering, “Othered” and Other ugly forms of the concept.

So that’s the biggest reason why you never see male directors identified as “male directors.” They’re just directors, the fact of their maleness irrelevant. While “Barbie,” directed by Greta Gerwig, a woman, is indelibly marked by her gender.

And “Barbie” Showed That’s a Huge Mistake

“I just can’t believe we’re still having this fucking discussion where movies by men, and about men, and for men are considered default movies. And women’s movies fall into this separate and unequal category. It’s absurd.”

(Chris Miller, director of 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie.)

Thank you Chris, Simone herself couldn’t have said it better. And judging from the box-office takes (although not the critical reception) of both Gerwig’s earlier movie Little Women and the wonderful Are You Listening, God? It’s Me, Margaret, that’s how prospective viewers have seen any films that are advertised, in one way or another (Little Women in its very title) as being “about girls” or “about women.” Both films were critically applauded. But boys, guys, and fathers weren’t going—and neither were many women, finding stories of girls growing up to be too “narrow.” As Elaine Cho says of Little Women: “Even though it takes place during the Civil War, we are hardly touched by outside events other than a few scenes with Marmee.” Didn’t hear that kind of complaint about Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, not to mention the dozens of fictional film about boyhood (Stand By Me, What’s Up, Gilbert Grape, and many, many others, including acknowledged classics like The 400 Blows).

It’s not surprising, then, as Time reported recently, that until BARBIE “only 33% of the top 100 grossing films in 2022 featured female protagonists… and many of those movies slotted into the sorts of genres that typically cater to men: The Woman King is a historical action epic that happens to star women; Everything Everywhere All at Once is a multiversal movie stuffed with fight scenes that happens to center a mother and daughter; Scream 6 is a sequel to a classic horror flick.”

Why is “Barbie” making so much money at the box office? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that despite her white bread beginnings, the doll has been welcomed by so many different demographics, who used their imaginations to make her theirs. But maybe, also, it’s because “centering” the perspective of girls and women is less of a “specialty” market than Hollywood has imagined. After all, we do hold up half the sky.

Advance advertising is powerful. Consider the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, which lured audiences into Oppenheimer box offices with tie-ins to Barbie (and promises of colorful blasts and high-tech flourishes for the bros.) I can’t quantify what Oppie owes Barbie. But had Oppenheimer presented itself as what it is—“a History Channel Movie with Fancy Editing,” as Richard Brody described it—I doubt it would attract the crowds it has.

As I wrote in a stack of mine a week or so back, the market is amoral. It can create habits that make people ill and can certainly reinforce (what are perceived as) traditional values, but it also needs to remain alert to emerging trends and previously ignored demographics. And those discoveries can promote progressive changes. Whenever my students complained about capitalism, I reminded them that the beautiful Black models that now fill the pages of Vogue are not the products of progressive-minded executives, but of the recognition that bypassing the needs of Black women was to ignore a potentially huge market. But—and here’s where the surprises like Barbie come in—it isn’t “just” Black women who find themselves freshly represented when they are given cultural prominence. It’s because of Black women—not the Vogue models but stars and singers with “fuller” bodies (bigger butts, more ample thighs) that “full figure” fashion began to take off. Plenty of white women (most, in fact) are (so-called) “full-figured” too. But it took the Black women who refused to capitulate to an emaciated aesthetic to embolden the rest of us to demand clothes that we’d fit into—and look great in at the same time.

Barbie, like The Second Sex is not “just” a book “about women,” is not “just” about “girl culture.” Few books and films about girls and women are—because girls and women live in a world with boys and men, and a system based on gender difference touches us all, even (perhaps especially) those who reject it. The genius of Barbie was to recognize this—it’s why so many men (especially younger men) are surprised to find out how much they enjoy it—and to make it a central part of the plot. It’s not so much a film about Barbie, but a film about gender and its discontents—some serious, some hilarious, many both.

Maybe the biggest lesson for Hollywood and its investors is: Take a fucking chance. And even if it turns out to be of greatest interest to girls and women, pump it up the way you pump up the male-oriented movies, and see what happens. There are a lot of us, and we come in many varieties. We’re not a unidimensional “Other.” And we may surprise you.

“It’s just about our little life” is a line, taken from correspondence that Louisa May Alcott said about Little Women, that Gerwig puts in Jo’s mouth in her movie. Gerwig also creates an original subplot in which Jo tries to persuade a hidebound male editor named Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts) into publishing her debut novel, which tells the story of the family.

But, as producer Amy Pascal recounts, “Mr. Dashwood just doesn’t get it, and in some ways he stands as a symbol of other men today who stubbornly think the story isn’t for them.He plays the gatekeeper. That guy isn’t doing anything wrong, but it takes his daughters to tell him what matters, and that is true in real life. The real publisher, whose name was Thomas Niles, did say the book was dull until his niece told him that she found it, and she read it, and [asked] exactly what happened to the Little Women? He realized that he had a hit.”

As Gerwig told The New York Times at the time Little Women came out that scene “could have been written yesterday, sitting with an executive at a studio.” But maybe, after Barbie, it won’t happen as often any more.

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