But Who's Counting?

 So, let's start with the obvious: I am a man and I am writing this. I would like for you to read it and take what is being put forth here to heart. 

My wife and I watched a documentary last weekend called This Changes Everything. The title refers to a phrase that gets repeated a lot each time a film comes out with strong female leads, harkening back to Thelma And Louise. That movie is thirty years old, and every couple of years when a woman directs a major motion picture with lots of box office, someone will invariably insist "this changes everything." Changes the number of women allowed to write, direct, produce and yes even speak in Hollywood. 

I confess that very little of this came as a shock to me, having been taught way back in my undergraduate days that "women are lit like objects" in western cinema. What I saw in the documentary only put numbers to the shame. Let's just start with one of the most telling statistics: In the ninety-three year history of the Academy Awards, only two women have ever won the Oscar for Best Director. That's two percent, if your a fan of percentages. Seven have been nominated. That brings it all the way up to eight percent. 

Maybe now is the time where I point out that women comprise approximately fifty percent of the human beings on the planet. 

It was Geena Davis, Thelma from that movie that first started changing everything, who took up the question of why things still haven't changed. She created an institute to study Gender in Media. With those previously posited percentages in mind, it probably won't come as a revelation that women are underrepresented across film and television production. In 2019, of the two hundred fifty top grossing films, only thirteen percent were directed by women. This could be considered good news, as twenty years before that the number was only five percent. Or maybe we cold examine the case of Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams and the reshoots done for the film All the Money in the World. Marky Mark was paid one and a half million dollars while Ms. Williams was paid one thousand dollars. She has also been nominated five times by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for her acting. Marky Mark not so much. 

I could go on and on, but instead I feel that pointing you all in the direction of this documentary and outrage you can share with me is sufficient at this time. I happen to live with a very talented woman, who would very much like to have her voice heard and her stories shared. At the very least, I hope you will take a moment after your next film experience and see if it passes the Bechdel/Wallace Test. It's pretty quick and easy: Are there at least two named female characters? Do they speak to each other? Do they speak to each other about something other than a male "love" interest? In a database created in 2019, fifty-eight percent of the movies within it passed all three. And since that amounts to good news, I'll leave that there.

For now.