The Women’s Movies
Though watching The Post felt like I was seeing the first major motion picture affected by the Me, Too pop-mob hysteria, Ocean’s 8 is a top contender for the first major movie to either be made with Me, Too favorably in mind or the movement’s looming threats affecting its outcome. The Warner Bros. movie, directed by Gary Ross with an all-female leading ensemble cast, puts in its lead a conniving criminal (Sandra Bullock) that’s one half of a lesbian couple. Together, they assemble an all-female team of criminals that glamorize woman as criminal more than any movie since Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct killer lesbianism in the 1990s.
But it’s Ms. Bullock’s thief leading the way toward revenge against the man who snitched on her, so even though she’s a convicted criminal, she’s supposed to be regarded as a victim. Of course, women banding together to get back at men has a ring to it. Classic Hollywood pictures from Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman to versions of The Women and, eventually, Ridley Scott’s post-feminist road picture Thelma and Louise share certain qualities with the bland, derivative Ocean’s 8.
Women’s pictures, like women’s sections in newspapers, used to relegate women to catty, calculating and hair-pulling stereotypes, though actresses such as Harlow, Stanwyck and, especially in early films, Joan Crawford, elevated the scripts. All-female bands and wronged woman types were often depicted as fallen, tragic figures. This type of depiction started to change with Westerns, film noir and movies such as The Fountainhead, On the Waterfront and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore as well as later, lighter fare such as Working Girl by Mike Nichols. Female characters in these pictures were interesting, different and distinct from previous characterizations. They tended to be highly independent, self-reliant and individualistic; they were complicated. Consider Silkwood (also by Mike Nichols) with its power plant band of unique individuals who were working women, the women in the village of Chocolat, or in the fields of Twister. Around this time, Mr. Scott’s explicitly feminist film, the seminal Thelma and Louise, depicted woman as victim, as doomed victim. In a way, the stereotype of woman as predatory resurged but they often accomplished or stood for nothing. For a while in the Nineties, it seemed like many major female film characters were predetermined to sacrifice themselves or become irrevocably damaged.
Ocean’s 8 glams up the feminism and magnifies the nihilism. And it comes with this downward sensibility that men are mostly, inherently bad unless used for their bodies, muscles and brute strength. Women, conversely, are both perpetually persecuted and inherently superior. According to this view, the sex difference lies in knowing how to subjugate men to women. Read my full review of Ocean’s 8, which opens in movie theaters this week, here.