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Hollywood heroines are being increasingly portrayed as neurotic, idiotic and obsessed by men, weight and weddings, a professor at Oxford University has claimed.
Dr Diane Purkiss says that over the past five decades the film industry has made its female characters "dumber and dumber". The latest slew of
chick-flicks, including He's Just Not That Into You (see review, E3) and Confessions of a Shopaholic, fall prey to the "worst kind of regressive, pre-feminist stereotype of misogynistic cliche", she adds.
"It's a sad day when you look back at Bridget Jones with some affection," says Purkiss. "But although Bridget Jones was far less emancipated and intelligent than, say, Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, she was a great deal better than the inane women we are getting nowadays. We really have reached a nadir in the way women are portrayed on screen. That is, I hope it is a nadir and doesn't sink further."
Purkiss points to the shortlist for leading actress at the Bafta Awards to support her argument. Angelina Jolie was nominated for her leading role in Changeling, Kristin Scott Thomas for I've Loved You So Long, Meryl Streep for Doubt and Kate Winslet for both The Reader and Revolutionary Road. (Winslet took the prize for The Reader).
"During Hollywood's golden age, Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn and Bette Davis could play fully-formed characters at the same time as being funny and entertaining," she says. "Now, the only way for a woman to have a complex character on screen is to be depressing, tormented and self-sacrificing."
Today's "vapid" depiction of women is, says Purkiss, markedly different from that during the industry's golden age. "Hollywood films used to delight in featuring strong, interesting women," she says, pointing to Rosalind Russell's role as a feisty journalist in 1940 hit His Girl Friday.
"Hollywood had to respect women in those days, because for cinema's first five decades women made up the majority of the movie-going audience. In 1939 four of the top 10 highest-grossing films were about women, including Gone With The Wind."
Relationships between men and women on the silver screen also used to be portrayed as far more equable, says Purkiss. "Hollywood used to enjoy pitting their romantic leads against each other in equally matched power struggles. Most of the films that Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together, for example, revel in the fun that can be had when two equally intelligent and powerful people try to gain the upper hand."
Nowadays, however, Purkiss says, for every Juno, Little Miss Sunshine or The Devil Wears Prada, there is a glut of films that "reduce women to explicitly anti-feminist stereotypes", such as 27 Dresses, Made of Honour and What Happens in Vegas.
But Hollywood is not entirely to blame, according to Purkiss, who claims studios are tapping into the real-life problems facing contemporary women. "When feminists had hope that they might achieve an equal playing field between the sexes, female protagonists on screen were grittier, gutsier and courageous. Now women are gloomier about feminism's ambitions, so it's a relief to temporarily visit a world where the biggest problem is what dress to wear."
But according to Melissa Silverstein, founder of Women & Hollywood, a marketing company specialising in films featuring women, the dumbing down of women on screen has a more earthy motivation. "One-dimensional female characters are created because the men making and directing the films are interested only in one thing: that these women titillate male audiences on the least challenging, most obvious of levels," she said. "That's how scripts are generated in Hollywood now, and how a myopic view of women has been formed," says Silverstein. "Fewer than 10 per cent of Hollywood films are written by women and fewer than 6 per cent are directed by women.
"The fact is, these men don't want to find strong women sexy. They don't want women in films who are fully formed and who deal with interesting issues. I cringe when I watch the sorts of films being made about women nowadays. It bothers me that this is the stereotype being screened across the world. Films have a great deal of power to affect how society thinks."
Silverstein believes women need to take some responsibility for the way they are portrayed on screen.
"We're complicit in going to see these films. There are films being made about women that don't focus on shopping, boyfriends and weight loss," she says, highlighting Kelly Reichardt's award-winning film Wendy and Lucy. "Women need to support those films showing women in a more complex way."
But box-office analyst Jeff Bock is more optimistic about the selling power of strong female characters. He says the successes of the film version of Sex and the City and Mamma Mia! had been "a game-changer".
"These are industry-changing performances. We've awoken a sleeping giant."
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