Secondary Research Book Extracts

Extracts from Secondary Book Research

Terms of Endearment Edited by Peter William Evans and Celestino Deleyto

Theory - Bourgeois Feminism
‘Interestingly enough, Rowe’s ‘women on top’ syndrome echoes, in caricatured or magnified form, the slogan ‘woman at the top’ which integrates goals and aspirations of bourgeois feminism. In political terms, bourgeois feminism asserts that women, if really want to, and try hard enough, can make it to the top. Basically, this political strand of feminism simply seeks a larger share of social power for women. In practice, bourgeois feminism accepts the world as it is, in other words, what men actually do is seen as the norm, which usually means that from this ideological viewpoint, the real basis of power relations between the sexes remains concealed.’

Generic Conventions
‘Marriage or some promise of a permanent relationship between the protagonists has traditionally consisted the happy ending of romantic comedy’

‘Even though like all mainstream cinema, the genre is ultimately conservative, it does manage to give expression to the contradictory nature of women’s desires concerning romantic love and the relations between the sexes, reminding us of the doubleness of all cultural forms, the intermingling of ideological and utopian within them.’

‘Romantic comedies tend to focus on either the male and female protagonists as the main subject of the process of learning.’

I Love You But… By Cherry Potter

Costume grants representational for both men and women in the romantic comedy genre – extract in which writer speaks about Four Weddings and a Funeral (Directed by Mike Newell, starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell)

‘Charles is looking particularly soft in a loose floral patterned shirt and baggy shorts; Carrie’s wearing a man’s check shirt and casual trousers. As if to emphasize even further how, in life as well as in fashion, the gender differences appear to be increasingly overlapping, over coffee Carrie lists all 33 of the men she has slept with in her life. She rates each of them according to their sexual performance…’
‘So the new woman of the nineties knows what she wants and she wants everything. Not only has she moved into the traditionally masculine territory of promiscuity but she also insists on the traditional wife’s right to faithfulness. Could this be one of the reasons why men line Charles appear to have retreated to a position of passive bewilderment?’

Analysis of Survey

Ethical Issues – There are no issues concerning this survey
Practical Issues – The survey will cost little money but may take a lot of time and labour to complete. Also specifying my results might take time too.
Validity – People may be less willing to give up their time at college to answer questions, particularly this age group of girls.
Advantages – To gain quantitative data adding to my primary research and this will go towards my critical research. Also this data can go towards my postal questionnaire which will be much more qualitative helping me gain more opinion and information from a wider age of target audience.
Disadvantages – May not be very valid and not be the most useful source of information.

Primary Research Survey

Survey for female representation in romantic comedies

I will ask a large number of girls at college aged 16 to 19 these questions concerning the four films that I am looking at for my critical research. These are; The Devil Wears Prada, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Bridget Jones' Diary and Bend it Like Beckham. These results should help me in looking at the different representations of women in romantic comedies there are in terms of this section of the audiences' feedback.

1. Is the female lead represented as a sex object?
2. Is the female lead representative of empowerment?
3. Would you associate yourself and your own qualities to be present in the female lead’s character?
4. Do you agree the stereotypes of women are displayed through the female characters?

Primary Research - Textual Analysis - The Devil Wears Prada

Textual Analysis – The Devil Wears Prada

Directed by David Frankel

Based on the novel by Lauren Weisberger, which is mainly based around the main character’s career and the film does do this to some extent but also tries to convey the relationships which become ruined by her demanding job. This includes her family, in the scene with her father and her and her friends and boyfriend, Nate. The film has been specifically adapted from the novel to become a romantic comedy, but still maintains dignity in doing so.

The film begins demonstrating a happy, independent looking woman who is living with her boyfriend in New York and getting ready for a job interview. The sequence is intercut with model-looking women who are also getting up and performing their morning routine, which is quite opposite to Andy’s. We see a concentration of make-up, clothes and attention to what they are eating with the model-looking females, whereas in Andy’s case we see her fling on drab and less thought-out clothes to putting on chap-stick instead of carefully applying lipstick as the other women do. The director achieves this distinct contrast through mise en scene and lighting creating a more affluent and appealing looks for the models, then a messier and rougher light on shots of Andy. The representation of the female lead, in comparison to the other women, demonstrates a normal person as opposed to preened and perfect model-looking females. This sequence also sets up the indifference and rejection she faces when acquiring her job at Runway magazine. Also the sequence uses shots of mainly clothes and make-up and food which are obsessed over by these fashion women, but Andy does not even consider them until she realises she has to.

When Andy does decide to change her appearance she becomes accepted more by her colleagues and by her boss. In one way her transformation is clever on her part, demonstrating empowerment, but there is an underlining issue of conformity and stereotypes to receive acceptance. Although the plot seems to spur the reasoning for her change as she is in the fashion world and working for a very important magazine and boss, the change in herself is not accounted for.
It seems during the course of the film as she becomes more interested in Runway, the magazine, and taking her job more seriously she begins to loose her relationships. The segregation is apparent in a scene where she meets her friends after being late from work and apologizes by giving them expensive gifts that ‘Miranda didn’t want’. When her boss rings her, as we see her cell phone make that awful beeping that is identifiable as Miranda, her boyfriend and friends decide to snatch the phone from her. They look and Nate exclaims, ‘Oh yep, it’s the dragon lady’. Andy meanwhile is constantly trying to grab the phone back getting angrier and angrier. Finally she retrieves the phone and says, ‘why do you all have to be such jerks’ then walks away on an errand for Miranda. This segregation in herself and her friends is then apparent and although in later scenes they seem fine, cracks begin to show in all of her relationships from that point. Her dedication to her job and boss is also shown when she is in Paris and discovers that Miranda’s job is in jeopardy. Her determination to find and tell Miranda, are demonstrated and she is shown as a committed employee. This representation of women as hard working goes against early stereotypes and modernises the ideologies of women in the home, far from it her boyfriend is in fact a chef when she works in an office.

Andy’s progression as Miranda’s assistant continues as she becomes responsible for more and more things. We also see Andy’s positive attitude and consistent need for approval, almost contrasting the idea of empowerment as she progresses in her job. The change in Andy is also recognised by her friends and boyfriend as Lily admits she doesn’t know who she is anymore and Nate says that se has become one of the Runway girls. In these scenes Andy tries to deny this assumption but knows that it is true.

The relationship between Andy and Nate seems mainly based on sex as we see many of their scenes containing sexual references towards one another. For example, Nate is angry due to the fact that Andy has not quit her job and she seduces him with her new lingerie to make everything good again. Although we do discover after this that her ‘personal life is hanging by a thread’ as she tells a colleague at work, their relationship seems very sexually based. The directors and writers could have used this to demonstrate the passion and love they feel for one another, or just to demonstrate the nature of their relationship. These disintegrating relationships are due to her job and although she knows this she continues to keep it. This career enforces the idea of a job as a priority for the lead female in the film. Although it is an obvious strain and sadness she feels form her loss of relationships. But it seems her priorities change at the end of her journey and we discover that she puts her relationships ahead of her career to some extent.

When we see Andy’s fling with Christian we see her need for sexual attention as she is complimented by his chat up lines which before she rejected with a laugh. This then demonstrates a vulnerability which is common in the representation of women in romantic comedies. Although she is seemingly under the influence she does sleep with him, giving her lead a sexual empowerment. She also becomes empowered near the end of the film as we see her fling her phone into the large fountain in Paris as it ring same tone that you can tell its Miranda. The phone is a key part as it has been a constant annoyance for Andy and her relationships during the film, so throwing it in the fountain is almost the ultimate empowerment and release from her demanding job and boss that has destroyed her relationships.

Secondary Research - Romantic Comedy Video 2

Secondary Research - Romantic Comedy Video

Secondary Research - Today Programme Transcript

Transcript Today Programme

BBC Radio 4 – Today Programme 11/02/09

Presented by Edward Stourton and Evan Davis.

Section of the show in which feminist historian Diane Purkiss and Stacey Abbott, of Roehampton University, discuss women in Hollywood films.

Are women in Hollywood movies dumb and getting dumber? If you go to the cinema then you could be forgiven for thinking that all they care about are boys, weddings and shopping. Titles like; ‘confessions of a shopaholic’ and ‘Bride wars’ demonstrate the point, but Diane Purkiss is a feminist historian at Keebel College Oxford and with me in studio is also Stacey Abbott who is a lecturer and teacher in TV and film studies at Roehampton University, Good Morning to you both

Women: Good morning, good morning

Edward: Diane Purkiss, light weight depictions of women in movies, is that a new thing do you think?

Diane: No but I think what’s new is very dumb heroines in movies, everyone’s searching for fun when they go to the cinema most of the time anyway, but it’s hard to have much fun when your watching a shopping obsessed, credit card-aholic with an eating disorder, who’s incapable of walking down a hall without falling over.

E: Is that?...Are you being a bit selective there in the films that you’re looking at because there are a couple of films of course with stronger women in and I think you need to look at some that have been recently written, Juno, that stands out for me as a very strong depiction of a woman in a youngish woman, a teen woman...

D: Definitely, and I am a great supporter of Juno and Little Miss Sunshine where the mother character is bizarrely not a psychotic even though it’s a child centred movie. Nevertheless what I’m talking about is movies like Bride Wars and Confessions of a Shopaholic, He’s just not that into you, movies like the unbelievably awful ‘totty and the notty’ featuring Paris Hilton. I mean these are movies that progressively portray women as obsessed with getting a man in the first instance and after that with maxing out their credit cards and securing a pair of Gucci boots on sale, I’m sorry but I don’t enjoy being forced into an identification with those women by the dynamic of cinema, I don’t believe those women are me, or even in my aspirations, what’s wrong with sassy, strong, intelligent women with goals outside the shopping mall?

E: Men don’t like watching them as much....before we discuss that provocative comment I just made, Stacey Abbott is it a trend that women are like this?

S: I think it has always been an area of Hollywood cinema, particularly the romantic comedy while I’m not really going to disagree with some of the comments and so I’m not going to come on this programme and be one of the defenders for this, but I do think that Hollywood has often taken a lot of comedic pleasure from this dumb heroine and sometimes has undercut that and played with that quite cleverly and I think as some like Judy Holiday played with being dumb but not quite dumb and I mean I’m not sure how new it is, I think of the shopping, I think of the Pretty Woman and the emphasis upon her empowerment of being given a credit card with no limit to go reinvent herself as this proper heroine, so how new is this, I don’t know, because it’s always been there

E: What strikes me, Diane Purkiss, you are like so many people that some on this programme looking back to a Golden age in one way or another and if we melt down all these ages we could save the banking system with all this gold, but it is just film isn’t it, people go for escapist nonsense sometimes and that’s what film makers make

D: I’m all for escapist nonsense, but I think there’s a difference between escapist nonsense and being insulted and hit on the head for a film that you pay good money to see, and I think it’s absolutely the case that I want intelligent entertainment and this doesn’t mean I want to go and see a movie about a holocaust survivor on a Friday night after a tough day at work, I sometimes want a movie that’s funny and witty and fast paced, but I don’t think the movies that I’ve just sighted are any of those things, I think they are just a raw insult. Why is it that we are so dogged with movies in which the female protagonist has these characteristics of obsessive dieting, obsession with a man whom the audience conceive as worthless, shopping obsessions...

E: I made the comment about, that’s what men want to go and see, is there something in the fact that, what is it?, ninety percent of Hollywood films are written by men and most of them are directed by men

D: Absolutely, and without harking back to a Golden age I think it’s dismal that women in movie making have managed to make such little progress in the industry, I mean in the Golden age there were many women directors and there was about as many women directors as there are now

E: How about a comment from Stacey, is it very dominated by men in the production?

S: I think it is still very dominated and I think that influences the kind of representations that there are of women and there are a increasing number of women who, I mean I have mixed feelings about Mamma Mia as a chic flick, but it is a film that has such a strong female input, you know directors, writers, creators, and you see these films and how cinema is having an input on women and a lot but not all mean understand that.

E: Thank you Stacey and Diane

Confessions of a Shopaholic Trailer

In the trailer, in what way is the main character portrayed? e.g Strong female, air headed etc
PLEASE COMMENT YOUR ANSWERS BELOW

Comparing the representation of women in specific American and British romantic comedies

The films I will be looking at are;

• Bridget Jones' Diary
• Bend it like Beckham
• The devil wears Prada
• Confessions of a Shopaholic