Still Caricatures After All These Years

James Franco in Spring Breakers

It’s hard not to sound prudish when writing about how blatant sexism along with violence have become such a staple in many films, even so called art house films.  Movies like the recently released Spring Breakers, which has received great reviews from respected movie critics (“Beach movie done as art film”, “gleefully debauched”, “mesmerizing”… it’s even on the cover of Cahiers du Cinema). Maybe they like it because it’s directed by art house critic favorite Harmony Korine, or maybe because the movie critics writing the reviews happen to be male.

It’s a film about young women “gone wild” on sex and drugs (as it seems young women do during Spring Breaks these days, according to the entertainment industry), in this case ultimately falling into crime and “in sex” with their male boss. It’s a movie like so many B films made today and, more and more, those made by once serious directors, like Oliver Stone with his film Savages or most of the Tarantino films, where women are secondary characters who have beautiful bodies and very low IQs. In this movie James Franco does the acting, as the critics point out, and the “Disney Girls” do the showing. 

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers in his review of Spring Breakers writes: “The promise of nudity and girl-on-girl action among Disney hotties Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical), Selena Gomez (Wizards of Waverly Place) and Ashley Benson (Pretty Little Liars) is just a porny tease.” So that clarifies the audience this film is targeting.  Or, as another critic wrote, referring to the female actors in Spring Breakers: “The wholesome ingénues would get their all-grown-up moment.” Growing up to become what, exactly? Not Meryl Streep or Emmanuelle Riva. Certainly not role models for all the young girls who admired them and made them stars to being with. That doesn’t seem to bother as many women actors as it should these days.

People will argue that films reflect society, they don’t shape it and that these art house directors are just masterful and creative in brining reality to the screen. Either way, the outcome is the same: in too many films these days women are still the Other -in Simone de Beauvoir’s use of the term in The Second Sex- they are portrayed as caricatures of people, antiquated stereotypes. So, if not creating the sexist stereotypes, these films are certainly perpetuating them by repeating them, to the dehumanization of us all.

In an interview with the Spring Breakers director, Korine states: “There’s also beauty in horror”.    I read this and feel the greatest generational gap ever. What beauty can there possibly be in horror? Just how “chic” and artsy can horror and misogyny be? Sadly the horror is usually directed at women on film and, so much more tragically, in real life. How resigned are women in the twenty-first century to their role as the Other in society that there is so much silence towards making and praising films that objectify women?

In the words of the president of the National Organization for Women (which, since 1923, is still fighting to get a constitutional amendment for the equality of women passed): “Sadly, the degradation of women and girls is ubiquitous in our society. The term "rape culture" is used to describe the casual debasement we all experience and witness every day. In fact, it has become such a part of our lives that it is often invisible.”

Images are powerful. Probably like never before has it mattered so much how women are portrayed in film and media, given our era of instant communication, of texting and “sexting”; where movies, shows and pictures are in the palm of our hands, and there is almost a voyeuristic quality to social media. The more movies, TV shows or commercials are made that objectify women, the harder it will be for women to reclaim self-respect; to be the Self, not the Other, to stop being reduced to caricatures of human beings.