WORKING WOMEN IN FILMS / FILM FATALE: COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

THE SANDRA BULLOCK SYNDROME

Film and TV portrayals of women professionals are steeped in stereotypes. Leading the parade of clichés is one of Hollywood’s most successful heroines of all time

By Anna MM Vetticad

She is not the leading lady of the film. In a small role in Baby though, it is a joy to watch a counter-terrorism operative, played by Taapsee Pannu, single-handedly wallop an enemy agent, while her male colleague (Akshay Kumar) is away. 

Pannu’s character in Baby is unusual in Bollywood for more reasons than her flying fists: (a) her profession is clearly specified in the story (b) she is shown operating efficiently within her professional space (c) her job is not conventionally considered acceptable/suitable/desirable for girls (read: she’s not a student, teacher, nurse, homemaker, writer, designer, beauty expert) and (d) her job is not a ploy to put her in sexy clothing (read: she’s not a model, actor, singer, dancer).

These thoughts rang particularly loud as I watched the film, since I was just back in India after addressing a conference on Women In STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) organised by the Meera Kaul Foundation in Dubai. What was a film journalist doing in the midst of female STEM entrepreneurs? I was reminding them that they barely get representation in films made by the world’s biggest industries, from Hollywood to India’s Bollywood, Kollywood and Tollywood; and that when they are represented, too often they’re steeped in gender stereotypes.

While Hollywood is more liberal than India’s entertainment industries in this respect, it is still a male-dominated, woman-unfriendly world. For proof, look no further than Sandra Bullock, one of the industry’s highest-paid heroines today. Over the years, Bullock has repeatedly played professionally successful women on screen. Sadly, those women have invariably been lonely, socially awkward or downright dysfunctional. In Miss Congeniality (2000), she was a grumpy, frumpy, brilliant FBI agent. In Two Weeks Notice (2002), she was an environmental lawyer, ordering takeout at home for one. In The Proposal (2009), she was a nasty publisher without a sex life. In Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013), she was a surprisingly inept engineer-astronaut with a sad past, who is unlikely to have survived her maiden space mission but for a gentleman colleague (George Clooney). There’s more.

Let’s call this The Sandra Bullock Syndrome: the hesitation to show regular, happy, credible working women helming storylines; the tendency of filmmakers who present leading women in unconventional professions to compensate for their professional success by tailoring them to fit assumptions made about such women in society. C’mon, how could she be good at her job and not be a cliché?

Even TV — which delivers more central female characters than films — is not guiltless. Carrie Mathison in the hit American series Homeland, for instance, is a genius CIA officer who suffers from bipolar disorder, which is perhaps the writers’ excuse for her emotionally overwrought nature. But she is consequently so erratic at work that it is hard to believe the agency would risk retaining such an employee.

To be fair, American TV features many non-Carrie-like women too, but the “lonely/high-strung in success” label is often floating around for the ones in less traditional professions, and too many are glamourised to the point of being unreal. In the long-running show Castle, for example, it’s hard not to wonder how the gorgeous homicide detective Kate Beckett’s knees survive running around New York chasing murderers in those impossible heels.

Here in India, it is not uncommon for a film’s heroine to be of indeterminate profession, hanging around waiting for the hero to find her. If she is visibly working outside the house, she is most likely to belong to a profession that is deemed socially acceptable for women or ups the film’s glamour quotient.

Women like Rani Mukerji’s tough police officer in Mardaani or Priyanka Chopra’s boxing champion in MaryKom last year are rare. Producers may argue that their limited portrayals of women professionals are a reflection of reality. Why be selective with reality then? How come top women bankers such as Chanda Kochhar and Naina Lal Kidwai, industrialist Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and others like them from real India are almost never reflected in films and soaps?

The situation is not without hope, of course. Television journalism has become a popular profession for women characters in Indian films ever since the electronic media explosion at the turn of the century. Perhaps because filmmakers’ exposure to women mediapersons is so inescapable now, portrayals are getting more authentic with time. We’ve come a long way from the days when Raveena Tandon as a print journalist in the Bollywood film Mohra (1994) wore a tiny skirt to interview a policeman, or Tamil actress Karthika Nair’s painted, distractingly long claws and over-made-up face overshadowed her actions in the newsroom in Ko (2011). Today belongs to Anushka Sharma’s more believable TV reporter in PK (2014).

Let me be clear: I am not dissing homemakers, nurses, teachers or models. I’m merely demanding more onscreen female leads in other fields, whose work is significant in the story (as it is with male characters), who are emotionally stable and at peace with their family/personal choices. Film and TV have great power to influence minds. The struggles and fulfillment of Arati from Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (Bengali, 1963) and Nirupama Rajeev from Rosshan Andrrews’ How Old Are You (Malayalam, 2014) are more inspiring than their creators could imagine. If even one little girl or grown woman out there sees a character on screen and thinks, “if she can do it, I can too”, that is a huge achievement.

(Anna M.M. Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column by Anna MM Vetticad was first published in The Hindu Businessline newspaper on January 31, 2015.)

Photograph courtesy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Congeniality_(film)

Note: This photograph was not published in The Hindu Businessline

FILM FATALE: SPINSTERS IN POPULAR CULTURE / COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

Headline: SPINSTER OVER SHRIMATI

Introline: Queen’s atypical happily-ever-after is a refreshing change in a sea of gender clichés

Bachelorette, bachelorina, bachelor girl, singleton, single woman…in a bid to avoid the dreaded ‘spinster’, English language users opt for a string of alternative expressions to denote an unmarried female human. Their concerns are easily explained. After all, social prejudice has lent meanings to that word, going way beyond a woman’s marital status. Unlike the coolth associated with the male ‘bachelor’, over the centuries, ‘spinster’ has come to stand for a neurotic, frustrated, ill-tempered, despairing, unattractive woman, unhappy at being unmarried past what is prescribed by consensus as the socially permissible age.

By dodging the word, liberals are possibly succumbing to the very biases they no doubt decry. That’s a subject for another discussion. For the moment though, let’s turn our attention to how mainstream Bollywood keeps away from spinsters as doggedly as well-meaning English speakers do. Single women in Bollywood tend to be 20-somethings who are in the process of being courted, falling in love or getting married to men during the course of their films. Rare is the Bollywood story that dwells at length on a heroine’s singledom and celebrates it, or gives us a leading lady — young or old — who has pointedly opted to stay unmarried. It’s in this scenario that director Vikas Bahl’s Queen, now in theatres, springs a surprise on us.

Queen’s atypical happily-ever-after brings us a Rani Mehra (Kangna Ranaut) who is persistently single and pleased about it. This is a departure from the Hindi film norm of a woman’s position as the heroine being established in terms of her romantic relationship with the hero. Though there are exceptions such as Vidya Balan, Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra (when she chooses well), the filmography of their contemporary Katrina Kaif typifies the Hindi film heroine’s job: to be a pretty showpiece the hero falls in love with, like Kat’s Aaliya was in Dhoom 3 last year.

Bollywood would argue that its sexism merely reflects real life where a woman’s identity is expected to revolve around whether or not she’s a wife; where a man is always the neutral ‘Mr’ revealing nothing to strangers about his marital status, whereas most Indians continue to prefix women’s names with ‘Mrs’ (married) or ‘Miss’ (unmarried) although ‘Ms’ (marital status unspecified) is also available. Queen’s Rani doesn’t want to be someone’s Shrimati for social redemption. She has the confidence to be a spinster — and yes, I insist on using that word.

The arrival of Rani in Bollywood is a welcome baby step for an industry that still insists on pigeonholing men and women. For instance, the carefree bachelor played by Saif Ali Khan in film after film (Hum Tum, Salaam Namaste, Love Aaj Kal, Cocktail) has no spinster equivalent. Cinema and language respond to social diktats. And so, Hum Tum’s Karan and Cocktail’s Gautam would be widely described as a “ladies’ man” with no pejorative intent. If Karan had a female clone, what would she be though? ‘Gentlemen’s woman’ (a non-existent term) or ‘slut’?

My way: Kangna Ranaut as Rani
Mehra in Queen (top) jives to her own
 tune unlike Deepika Padukone as
Veronica (above, centre) in Cocktail 
who, sadly, turns rather
desperate

Cocktail’s heroine Veronica exemplifies this hypocritical attitude. Humour emanating from sexually promiscuous heroes is commonplace in Bollywood. Cocktail was unusual in that it featured a promiscuous leading lady, adopted an equally non-judgmental stance towards her, and made her sex life — like the hero’s — a source of amusement. Post-interval though, the film descended into crowd-pleasing orthodoxy with the happy-go-lucky Veronica getting neurotically desperate for marriage, while the man remains his easygoing self.

Cocktail’s purported liberalism cloaked its deep-seated narrow-mindedness that was mirrored by a less high-profile film in 2011. In Turning 30, Gul Panag’s trite Naina turns frantic when she turns 30, and shreds her dignity as she panics about middle age, male disinterest, menopause (already?), wrinkles and drooping breasts.

To be fair, Bollywood is not alone in steering clear of spinsters or stereotyping them. Popular culture in the West often reflects similar sentiments even while pretending to do otherwise. British writer Helen Fielding’s bestselling Bridget Jones’s Diary and its film adaptation starring Renee Zellweger were widely lauded for their supposedly free-thinking portrayal of a single woman, yet Bridget was literally obsessed with three primary goals: getting a boyfriend, getting a date, getting laid.

Hollywood superstar Sandra Bullock has a track record of playing stereotypical spinsters (Miss Congeniality, Two Weeks Notice, The Proposal). Being career-oriented for her characters inevitably translates into being testy, gauche and — in the case of Two Weeks Notice — miserably eating pizzas at home alone.

Oceans away in Bollywood, Queen turns up its regal nose at that cliché. With the industry now planning to make Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations into a film starring Katrina and Aditya Roy Kapur, it would be interesting to see if Dickens’ Miss Havisham is updated for a modern telling or she is retained as she was in this 19th century classic: a tragic spinster who gave up on life simply because a man jilted her. C’mon Bollywood, prove that you’ve evolved beyond England of 150 years ago and Cocktail in 2012. Here’s your chance to prove that you don’t equate unmarried women with cobwebs and gloom.

 (The writer is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Follow Anna M.M. Vetticad on Twitter @annavetticad)

(Note: This column was first published in The Hindu Businessline’s BL Ink supplement on March 15, 2014)

Photographs courtesy:

(1) Everymedia PR (Queen)

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_(2012_film) (Cocktail)