Shaping reality
Its was hard to work up much solidarity with Meryl Streep when she railed against sex discrimination in Hollywood a couple of years ago. What do the majority of us have in common with a woman campaigning for the right to be paid millions of dollars for a few months' work, rather than merely hundreds of thousands?
Streep was in no need of our solidarity anyway. Her wage claim received considerably more attention than any of our, less glamorous, struggles for equal pay.
But, like all of us, Streep's dissatisfaction with her working conditions was based on more than just economics. She was dissatisfied with the very nature of her work. Perhaps more significant than her wage claim was her indictment of the US film industry for providing female actors with less interesting, less important and less satisfying work than that available to males. This is a resentment shared by all working women.
While our hearts may not bleed for Meryl, we can sympathise, to some extent, when she compares her career to Jack Nicholson's, and notices that while he plays psychopaths, ordinary Joes, astronauts, union bosses, villains, heroes and everything in between, she almost always plays the miserable, abandoned, wronged wife/girlfriend/lover/mother. But the main point is not the discrimination against individuals such as Meryl Streep. The absence of "good roles" for female actors in Hollywood has far broader implications for feminists.
Bertholt Brecht once observed that "art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it". Whether the strips of celluloid which emanate from Hollywood are "art", or not, they certainly shape reality for many millions of people, rather more in the way of an industrial grade jackhammer than of a humble hand tool.
The two big Oscar-winning Hollywood releases in this, the US "Year of the Woman", were probably even more male-centred than they have been in recent years. The "best film", Unforgiven, explored the psyche of an embittered gun-toting ex-cowboy, played by "best director", Clint Eastwood. The "best actor", Al Pacino, explored the psyche of an embittered, blind ex-colonel in Scent of a Woman. Each of these films had women at the margins, playing whores, saints or objects of desire, their psyches left unexplored and their bitterness either denied or given the usual two dimensional treatment.
Last year Callie Khouri won best original screenplay for Thelma and Louise, amidst a flurry of controversy about the portrayal of women's bitterness in such explicit terms (although, of course, Susan Sarandon only shot one man, while it was hard to keep track of Clint's body count in Unforgiven). This year Emma Thompson's best actress award for her performance in the genteel English film Howard's End (which grossed less in a year than d in its first weekend), was the only high point for those appreciative of films which portray women as complete human beings.
Feminists picketed the awards ceremony, but their protest received news coverage only as a "security risk". Meryl Streep may not be underpaid, but Hollywood remains a male bastion.
By Karen Fredericks