The Film Industry is Sexist
Women are terribly under and misrepresented in film, and we need to talk about it.
From the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope to only one woman ever winning best director, the film industry was build against women.
According to Independent, in 2019 a measly 35% percent of films featured 10 or more female speaking characters. That means 65% of the films that were put out in 2019, were majority male. And of this 35%, I would venture to say just about half do not pass the Bechdel Test.
The Bechdel test is a test created to study the way women are portrayed in fiction. It studies how long two (named) women can talk about something in a film without bringing up a man.
Easy, most films have to pass it, right?
Wrong: the majority of female characters are written in for their sole purpose to be shedding light on the male characters.
The most obvious example of that is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
According to Medium, an MPDG exists solely to shed a light on a male protagonist's life experience. She serves as a facilitator for his growth and never develops as a character herself. An MPDG may seem strange, eccentric, or troubled, but viewers never get to learn why an MPDG is a way she is. But rather, her issues and complexities act to supply the male protagonist with a learning experience.
One of the most popular examples of an MPDG is in 500 Days of Summer, where Summer (portrayed by Zooey Deschanel) is Tom(the male protagonist)’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She helps teach him to embrace his life and to follow his dreams, but other than that we learn very little about Summer as a person, and she serves as nothing more than a catalyst for Tom to grow.
The main issue with MPDG (other than the blatant misogyny that goes into writing them) is that they teach adolescent boys, watching these films, that they should be looking for their own Manic Pixie Dream Girl. A girl that can fix them, that can be their idea of perfection, but does not have to exist has a real person to him, he doesn't have to see her layers and needs, but rather only the parts of her that make her his dream girl.
Beyond the one dimensional female characters we see on screen, there are large discrepancies regarding gender equality when it comes to what happens behind the camera. As I've said above only one woman has ever won the Academy Award for best director. According to Guardian, 99% of women in the film industry have experienced sexism. With countless women being turned away from jobs in the film industry simply because of their gender.
Much like most other industries, the film industry is sexist. Plain and simple. The film industry needs to start recognizing more females in positions behind the camera and writing more complex female characters. The Times Up movement went viral in 2018, but it is far from over.
