Ellar Coltrane, left, and Ethan Hawke could be up for Oscar acting nods for Boyhood, but Hawke could also be nominted for two songs he wrote for the movie.Matt Lankes
I have been acquainting myself with classic Iranian film lately in preparation for a showcase at the TIFF Cinematheque next month. As I immerse myself in films about children embarking on quests and villagers facing tragedies, I am encountering poignant stories about how small people survive difficult lives.
But I can't help noticing that all the protagonists are either boys or men. Indeed, if Asghar Farhadi's Oscar-winning A Separation stands out from the crowd, it is partly because its plot is propelled by the determination of its female protagonist, a middle-class woman seeking a divorce. That was a movie that surprised many in the West: Iran is a paradoxical place, with powerful currents of feminist activism and female education running underneath its notorious state oppression. Still, it's hardly news that a society that officially separates men from women and censors its artists has produced a film culture that is largely male.
What is shocking is that Hollywood is no different. Take a look at this year's Oscar nominees. In the best-picture category, American Sniper is a psychological drama about a male soldier suffering post-traumatic stress disorder; Birdman is a black comedy about a washed-up actor; Selma is a drama about Martin Luther King's voting rights campaign; The Imitation Game is a drama about Second World War code-cracker Alan Turing; The Theory of Everything is a biography of physicist Stephen Hawking; Whiplash is a drama about a male music student and his demanding male teacher; Boyhood is a piece of cinéma vérité following a boy from the age of 5 to 18; and The Grand Budapest Hotel is an ensemble comedy in which the male characters outnumber the female 14 to three.
Why bother veiling women when you can make them disappear altogether?
Each of these films has its own legitimate artistic reasons for choosing a male protagonist, but the overall effect is devastatingly out of touch even for a dream factory. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University does an annual survey of mainstream movies and has just released its 2014 numbers: Women accounted for only 12 per cent of the clearly identifiable protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films of the year. Men accounted for 75 per cent of protagonists (defined as the character from whose perspective the story unfolds) while a male/female ensemble covered the remaining 13 per cent. These numbers show no signs of having improved over the past decade: The male protagonist category is down only four points from 2002, and three points from 2013.
Hollywood clearly believes that male lives are more dramatic than female lives and not merely because men are more likely to be criminals. They are, according to the movies, much more likely to take action, to lead others and to discover things, they are the people who engage in quests, conquests and battles of the will. Wild is a highly unusual movie because it's a solo adventure film in which the protagonist is a woman; that part has earned Reese Witherspoon an Oscar nomination for best actress, the one category in which movies driven by their female characters show up.
Of course, women do appear in the other nominated movies, but usually in roles defined in relationship to men; they play the wife, the girlfriend, the mother. They function as the helpmate, sidekick or goad, playing characters such as Turing's colleague Joan Clarke; Stephen Hawking's wife, Jane; or Birdman's recovering daughter Sam. Female characters may hold the map but they don't take the wheel.
The San Diego centre's numbers reveal how this kind of stereotyping runs throughout movies: Male speaking characters are more likely to be identified by the jobs they hold while the women are more likely to be identified by their relationships to others. When the movies depict a leader – which the study defines as the formal head of an organization or group and someone who directs the action of least two others – it is usually a man. Sixteen per cent of male characters could be identified as leaders compared with 5 per cent of female characters.
If the movies are blind to women, they are doubly blind to minority women. The researchers calculated that moviegoers are almost as likely to see an extraterrestrial female on screen as they are to see an Asian woman or Latina.
If there is anything to be done about this, short of boycotting Hollywood or screaming in the face of the next movie director you happen to meet, it lies in the advancement of women in the film industry. The San Diego centre found that films directed or written by women cast significantly more women in speaking parts, and are much more likely to have female protagonists. The centre also compiles figures about the number of women working in the film and TV industries and the link is pretty clear: The more women make films, the more women will become visible on screen. Until then, Hollywood will keep living in its offensively alternate reality.