Analysis of The Women - 1939original and 2008remake

Name: The Women
Director: Diane English
Writers: Diane English (screenplay); Clare Boothe Luce (play)
Release Date: 12th September 2008 [UK]

Name: The Women
Director: George Cukor
Writers: Anita Loos (screenplay); Clare Boothe Luce (play)
Release Date: 1st September 1939 [USA]

Synopsis: THE WOMEN is a smart, sparkling comedy about contemporary womanhood and the power of female relationships. It whisks us into a busy pocket of Manhattan society, where the publishing, fashion and finance industries play. At the center of the tale is Ryan’s character, Mary Haines, a thoroughly modern woman suddenly confronted with an age-old dilemma: a cheating husband. The ladies in her life swiftly rally to Mary’s side, led by her best friend, Sylvie Fowler, a dynamic magazine editor played by Bening. But when Sylvie betrays Mary in a Faustian bargain, the entire group is shaken to the core – and two women face the most painful breakup of all - their friendship.


Both the remake and the original film are similar, however one stark difference is the directors. In the 2008 remake the director is Diane English and in the 1939 original the director is George Cukor, this would suggest that possibly the way in which women are portrayed would differ; as the male director would, perhaps, objectify women more in a way that would be appealing to the male sector of the audience, whereas English would focus more on the strength of women and portraying them in a better light to both the male and female sectors of the audience. However, if English is strengthening the women’s power within the film and is going against the male gaze theory, it has to be seen that she doesn’t discriminate against men in the way in which the film industry do so to females.

The 2008 remake, received critical reviews; these reviews weren’t only critical of the film but of English’s ability and that perhaps it was her lack of ability that made the remake “a major dud” [Peter Travers, Rolling Stone]. The critical response suggests that there isn’t many places in the film industry for a female director, also perhaps there isn’t any chance for a director of TV to become a film director “English knows how to get good performances out of her cast, but her pacing is languid and sloppy, so much so that one is tempted to believe that for all she knows about pacing a 30-minute sitcom, English isn't quite ready to tackle the longer form." [David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle]; Wiegand critical response almost reinforces the male gaze, and suggests that it isn’t only incorporated within films, but also happens outside of films and within the music industry.

However, this may not always be the case, because the screenwriter for the 1939 version of “the women” was in fact a woman, “It's a testament to the actresses' skill that The Women is in any way watchable. The script is as funny as a deeply misogynist revenge tragi-farce romp could be - […] Anita Loos furnished the wisecracks. I did laugh. At it. Helplessly, sometimes.” [Al Kennedy, The Guardian]; also Kennedy is stating that it is just as funny as something misogynistic which suggests that, although the male gaze is portrayed as amusing which is a negative thought, just because something isn’t misogynistic doesn’t mean that it can’t be funny. Whereas, in a review of the English’s remake [written in the same year, 2008] “Seth Rogen asserts that weed 'makes shitty movies better', and how I longed to test this out during The Women, a generally excruciating remake of George Cukor's 1939 catty classic” [Jason Solomons, The Observer]. Jason Solomon notes that it is “excruciating” to watch, however there is no indication this is because he feels that it is because a woman has done a bad job, though this could be implied as he doesn’t just mention that is a remake of the 1939 film, he mentions the directors name “remake of George Cukor’s 1939 catty classic” but there is no mention of the female director; he doesn’t say longed to test this out during Diane English’s version of The Women.

Many of the reviews for, both the remake and the original have been written by men hence the film is being viewed through male eyes. The critical reviews could therefore have been written because the male audiences were frustrated by the lack of male dominance and male characters and this made it hard for them to relate to this; also due to the characters all being female, when they have issues – for instance, a husband cheating on his wife – it is women sorting it out with no assistance from the men, this could potentially make a male audience feel inadequate. With the 1939 classic, the male audience had the director to relate to, although there wasn’t any cameo roles and they didn’t see him, George Cukor would have had control over the female cast and would’ve been able to tell them what to do, whereas with the remake, not only is the cast and the screenwriter all female – similar to the original – but the director is also female, and therefore there isn’t any definite male input into the film.

Male Gaze Theory : Laura Mulvey

The 'male gaze theory' is an idea that feminists believe draws attention to the imbalance between male and females, due to living in a predominately patriarchal society and has analysed how women are viewed by men, and because of the what the men believe: how women view themselves.

"Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women"

1. how the male characters view the female characters

2. how the spectators view the female characters

3. the male spectator taking on the perspective of the male character; this is essentially joining 'look one' and 'look two'.

The third way of viewing ('look three') enables the male spectator to become the male character within the film, and therefore allows him to have the female character as his personal sex object, because he is viewing her in the way that the male character is.

"Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.

Mulvey's article engaged in no empirical research on film audiences. She instead stated that she intended to make a "political use" of Freud and Lacan, and then used some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire. In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who tended to be a man. Meanwhile, Hollywood female characters of the 1950s and 60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness." Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'madonnas').

Mulvey argued that the only way to annihilate the "patriarchal" Hollywood system was to radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods. She called for a new feminist avant-garde filmmaking that would rupture the magic and pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking. She wrote, "It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it. That is the intention of this article."

Some feminists criticized "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," claiming that, while Mulvey believed that classical Hollywood cinema reflected and shaped the "patriarchal order," the perspective of her writing actually remained within that very heterosexual order. The article was thus said to have contradicted its "radical" claims, by actually being a covert perpetuation of heterosexual patriarchal order. This was because, in her article, Mulvey presupposes the spectator to be a heterosexual man. She was thus felt to be denying the existence of lesbian women, gay men, heterosexual women, and those outside of these identities.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was the subject of much interdisciplinary discussion among film theorists that continued into the mid 1980s. Critics of the article objected to the fact that her argument implied the impossibility of genuine 'feminine' enjoyment of the classical Hollywood cinema, and to the fact that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorships that were not organised along the normative lines of gender. For example, a metaphoric 'transvestism' might be possible when viewing a film – a male viewer might enjoy a 'feminine' point-of-view provided by a film, or vice versa; gay, lesbian and bisexual spectatorships might also be different. Her article also did not take into account the findings of the later wave of media audience studies on the complex nature of fan cultures and their interaction with stars. Gay male film theorists such as Richard Dyer have used Mulvey's work as a starting point to explore the complex projections that many gay men fix onto certain female stars (e.g. Liza Minnelli, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland).

Feminist critic Gaylyn Studlar wrote extensively to contradict Mulvey's central thesis that the spectator is male and derives visual pleasure from a dominant, sadistic perspective. Studlar suggested rather that visual pleasure for all audiences is derived from a passive, masochistic perspective, where the audience seeks to be powerless and overwhelmed by the cinematic image.

Mulvey later wrote that her article was meant to be a provocation or a manifesto, rather than a reasoned academic article that took all objections into account. She addressed many of her critics, and changed some of her opinions, in a follow-up article, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'" (which also appears in the Visual and Other Pleasures collection)." Source : www.wikipedia.com