BASIC REPRESENTATION SCORE: 0
[no significant representation of girls/women]
FEMALE AGENCY/POWER/AUTHORITY SCORE: +5
THE MALE GAZE SCORE: 0
[no issues]
GENDER/SEXUALITY SCORE: -10
WILDCARD SCORE: 0
Is there anything either positive or negative in the film’s representation of women not already accounted for here? (points will vary)
No.
TOTAL SCORE: -5
IS THE FILM’S DIRECTOR FEMALE? No (does not impact scoring)
IS THE FILM’S SCREENWRITER FEMALE? No (does not impact scoring)
BOTTOM LINE: It’s rare that a film makes it this explicit — this much a part of the actual text — that women are little more than supporting characters in a man’s story. One woman actually says, when asked how she knows a man (who turns out to be her husband), “We share a vagina,” as if it belongs as much to him as it does to her.
Click here for the ranking of 2014’s Oscar-nominated films for female representation.
Click here for the ongoing ranking of 2015’s films for female representation.
NOTE: This is not a “review” of Birdman! It is simply an examination of how well or how poorly it represents women. (A movie that represents women well can still be a terrible film; a movie that represents women poorly can still be a great film.) Read my review of Birdman.
See the full rating criteria. (Criteria that do not apply to this film have been deleted in this rating for maximum readability.)
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I think male gaze happens in the movie, there’s a scene of women kissing each other in an odd gratuitous reason, Emma Stone walking about in tank tops most of the time…
You have a point there. However, wouldn’t this be balanced out by Michael Keaton walking around in his underpants – even though it is mainly done for comedic effect? I would think even a middle-aged guy could qualify as female gaze material in MaryAnn’s system… But let her be the judge of that.
The question isn’t whether I find Keaton attractive, but how female nudity is generally treated on film — in the larger cinematic environment — versus how male nudity is treated. As you note, it’s generally comedic, as it is here (and it certainly isn’t actually nudity: Keaton is no more nude than a woman in a bikini would be; less so, even). It’s also nowhere near as prevalent. So male nudity doesn’t generally balance out female nudity (except in the one specific potential case I’ve included in the full criteria, when both women *and* men are fully naked onscreen, and even that doesn’t fully balance out).
A movie doesn’t get bonus points for male nudity on its own in other words. See *Maps to the Stars,* for instance, which features a sex scene in which a man is completely nude but neither of the two women in the scene are. I mean, obviously, they *are* nude, but they are shot more discreetly: none of their naughty bits are on display like his are. But that film gets no bonus points for that.
I’d love to see that film has changed so much in five years that all this will have to reconsidered.
The male gaze happens in almost every movie. The question is, how gratuitous is it? Neither of those examples rose to that, I thought. (The kiss is rebuffed, for instance. It’s not a sexy moment.)
I’d also consider the use of the female actresses as fantasy totems, especially Natalie Gold as a fantasy figure during the “dream sequence” of the play monologuing among the stags (METAPHOR!). There is no nudity in it, but the presentation is eroticized…
I didn’t read it that way, but it’s a valid interpretation.