The Bechdel Test is commonly used to measure an authentic (or relatively more authentic) representation of women’s lives and experiences on film. I employ it usually when I’m on the fence about watching a movie. It generally works, at its simplest, to measure the value of women to the story, and at its most complex, as an exercise in realizing how undervalued women are in the movie business at large. Until I watched The Family That Preys, I never considered that a movie might pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors yet still ooze stereotype and misogyny. Or how my joy for a film stacked with amazing, but terribly underused female actors, may be despite the net effect of sending awfully negative messages about women. Talk about conflict.
Maybe it’s telling that my first FemFilm review centers a male writer-director as a point of discussion, but I couldn’t NOT write about this movie considering the irony of getting what you ask for as a feminist movie buff — top-billing and greater representation of women in film — in such a shitty package. I’ve seen some of the other movies in the Tyler Perry franchise and liked them fine, so I watched Family last night on TV without intending to write about it for this project. For one, it’s fluffier than what I was intending for the project, and two, it’s frought with a larger discussion about black filmmaking and art, especially with its creator, that I’m not expert enough to comment on any more than I do here. Others can elucidate why Tyler Perry, this movie’s writer and director, is so controversial, but if one wants to get a picture why he elicits so much vitriol for his stories, this one isn’t a bad place to start. As a storyteller, Perry relies heavily on cliche. Most of his movies are packed full of soap operatic drama, unbelievable twists, and schlocky moments that are meant to evoke themes of redemption, humility, and perseverance. There is little care in how a story develops, or whether it is believable, as long as everyone learns their place in the end. In a word, dude is hamfisted. On the other hand, much of Perry’s work seeks to represent the black middle-class family in a way that is mostly warm and funny and just not seen enough elsewhere. If you want to sit your brain on the shelf and watch a silly movie with your family, you could do much worse, but when your analyst brain is in function, Perry has serious problems with gender.
There are so many story lines in Family that it’s hard to explain how they all co-exist together. Let’s just say two matriarchs (Bates and Woodard) embark on an adventure so akin to Thelma & Louise that Tyler Perry probably owes someone for story rights, imitating the aesthetic down to the cowboy hats, honky tonk bar, and a photo of the pair taped to the dash of a sweet vintage convertible driving into the sunset. This teaches us, because there is always a moral to the story, that we need to learn to take risks (groan) because life is short. Another character (Sanaa Lathan) has an affair with a white guy, the guy who played a white supremacist in Higher Learning, no less, because she looks down on her husband’s blue collar job. She further emasculates her husband by having a fat bank account he doesn’t know about. In the end, she is punished thusly for being uppity and self-hating and adulterous by watching her husband become very rich while she becomes poor. This teaches us that (get ready for it) money isn’t everything, but also that while interracial friendships are okay, interracial fucking is not. And so on.
I mock the patness of Perry’s employ, but his work is not much different than many of the family comedies or romantic comedies that use cliche and stereotype to tell a story, and it’s certainly not different in its sexism. The big picture problem with Perry, as Alyssa Rosenberg writes, is the hegemony of his methods and his need to center a moralistic point of view (and himself!) in every story, and so his storytelling is flat and self-centered, which sucks because he commands such a huge market and could spread the wealth considerably for other African-American writers and directors more than he has so far. But what he does and does well, really well, is fill a huge gap in representation of black actors on screen. He has a knack for casting incredibly talented actors that aren’t getting steady, valued work in Hollywood, such as the primary actors in Family, Saana Lathaan, Alfre Woodard, and Kathy Bates.
I’ll admit, I probably enjoyed this movie more than I should have just because I was treated to Woodard and Bates. It’s hard to appreciate how difficult it must be to be a middle-aged woman in Hollywood of any size, shape, or color, unable to secure solid jobs despite the level of respect you command or the number of accolades you receive, until you realize how little you’ve seen either of these commanding women in the last ten years. It’s shameful that we lose out on their talents. And they shine in this movie, they do, even with the flat writing and hokey hijinks. Their invisibility, and my delight in rediscovering them, also reflects just how standardized white patriarchy is in movies altogether.
On the flipside, Perry, despite his affection for his female cast members, replaces the usual white patriarchy with black patriarchy disguised as uplift, a consistent message of his from film to film to film. As a feminist, this is one of the most frustrating aspects about Perry considering that his primary audience is made up of black women: the prevalence of messages about what makes a good woman, which usually means speaking softly, never losing your temper, obeying your man, and being a good Christian. Family is no exception. For example, the film excuses the emasculated husband when he hits his wife in anger because he is righteous in his bitterness, and the wrongness of his violence isn’t addressed other than in the desired effect that it puts his wife in her place. By the end of the movie he is righted as family patriarch. Most of Perry’s characters are good or bad with little in between, though it’s far more likely that the women in his work will suffer more harshly for their badness than the men for theirs.
For a long time last night, after I watched the movie and went to bed, I lay there thinking of what a double-edged sword it was, that one little flick can encompass so much of what’s wrong with the representation of women in the movie business while getting one other thing, a thing that feminists pine for, so very right. It also speaks to the limitations of the Bechdel Test, and to the tragic lack of meaningful stories for woman actors to portray.
There are a few men who manage to convey their female characters with a sense of authenticity. This might be a bit off-topic, but the 80′s New Wave group “The Waitresses” (and I don’t mean the single they are best known for, “I Know What Boys Like”) was a collaboration between two close friends: Chris Butler, the songwriter, and Patty Donahue. Butler’s lyrics are seamless and yes, even Feminist, making the listener believe Donahue had written them herself.
As for filmmakers, you’ve now got me thinking.
Oh, Perry is Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott all rolled into one compared to the misogynistic pinheads behind the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man, another film that passes the Bechdel Test yet utterly flunks Feminism 101. We finally get a film where women make up half the cast, and it turns out they’re a pagan cult who likes to kidnap cops for human sacrifice, because hey, women in power are always evil, amiright? It features lots of bees, the dumbest cop in the world as played by Nick Cage, along with Cage disguising himself as a bear, stealing bikes, punching women in the face, etc. so there’s something for everyone. I look at Academy Award winner Ellen Burstyn who had to play the cult leader in this dreck just to keep working, and I weep for humanity.
/rant
I think you missed several points that man people commonly miss when things like this occur:
1) Sanaa’s character not only cheated on her husband- but she caused ANOTHER WOMAN immense pain becase her lover was someone else’s husband
2) Her affair with the white married man was delsional- she thought he’d leave his wife for her when in reality that was never going to happen
3) The affair resulted in a biracial child that she pretended was her husband’s when it wasn’t.
She didn’t simply have an interracial experience- she cheated on her husband, duped him into false fatherhood, caused another woman a lot of pain and thought there was more to the relationship than sex. The white man in all of this is just as guilty of everything as she is except switch paternity fraud with he fathered a child he has no intention of ever claiming as his own.
There are good movies on interracial dating but the movie where the two dating are married to other people and there is a serious power dynamic being ignored I have to say I pray that is NOT the standard interracial dating experience.
Another one that was really frustrating, Bechdel-vs-feminism-wise: “The Women”. Oh my god. (I was on a REALLY long flight, okay?) Just, really bad stereotypes of, like, the four kinds of women that a good woman can be (why is it always four?) – and then the villainess. But they did pass the Bechdel test. To make matters worse, it actually had some worthwhile themes (growing up girl in the world of boys, etc) but didn’t run with them and allowed the inanity to dominate.
Also, I was flying to Lebanon on Middle East Airlines and they did some REALLY awkward cutting in (a) a scene involving nipple-baring lingerie in a fitting room and (b) a conversation about sex and growing up between a young girl and an aunt-figure. Maybe there was other stuff that they took out entirely?
“I never considered that a movie might pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors yet still ooze stereotype”
Seriously? I just watched Bring It On: All or Nothing (one reason why I’m anonymous). That passes the Bechdel Test twenties times over. And it would be hard to be much more stereotypical.
And that’s just the first movie that came to mind, because I watched it last week. I can’t believe there aren’t a whole lot more.
“I never considered that a movie might pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors yet still ooze stereotype”
Or the entire series of Ghost In The Shell: Standalone Complex? It’s great that you have a strong women character, and she has some friends (and later, a female prime minister), but she’s still wearing practically nothing and has ironically been created a lesbian because you’re too homophobic to draw have naked men.
@Azalea: I started to detail out some of the finer plot points but got so bogged down in the melodrama that I opted for the more vague touch. :)
But you’re right. There’s a lot more to the story than I wrote here. The Sanaa Lathan character was awful through and through (god, I love her as an actor, too) which in itself is annoying — I’m of the belief that in a regular drama, not horrorcore or something, all characters should be relatable in some way. But Lathan’s character is greedy, full of herself, delusional, sneaky, you name it, which means she functions primarily as a symbol. The end lesson is that if you are these things, you have yours coming to you, re: broke and alone.
And I will argue a bit on the interracial dating/fucking/adultery side of the movie — there are other movies that handle this much better, like “Something New,” also starring Lathan. Casting Cole Hauser as the white love interest was fucking genius. If you have ever seen Higher Learning, EVER, this guy’s face is writ on your brain as the man that will gladly escort you to hell. He pops up on screen in Family and I’m all, “Oh, she’s fuuuuuuucked.”
I finally watched this movie a few weeks ago and my eyes began to bleed from the blatant PROFESSIONAL black woman hatred and disrespect that I saw in this movie. Here are some of the ideas that I found:
1. A black woman w/ more education than her husband is an uppity bitch
2. Black women who sleep with white men are just whores for white dick.
3. [in the scene where cole hauser's wife confronts sanaa's character] a black woman is not good enough to be with a white man, we will never be accepted by the upper (read: white) class and, they only see us as sex objects (and the fact that he used a white woman to spew this hate about black women that is a common argument of black people [read: men] about black women who date white men pissed me off royally)
4. black men are justified in hitting black women whenver that black woman pisses them off enough
and 5. tyler perry ‘probably’ hates (professional) black women
i know i am missing a few, but these were the ones that struck me the most.
kristen
On the Bechdel test: after seeing Sex and the City (and now, out of curiosity and because I love Candice Bergen, The Women), I’m inclined to expand the Bechdel test. Not only do the women have to talk about something other than a man, but also about something other than fashion and beauty. Gag.
Ugh yes this is a very good post.
Indeed the other day I watched in disgust as Chris Rock was on TV waxing hilarious about the crap black people endure. He was really funny and apt. But eventually I realized, as he moved on to what he thinks of women, that he doesn’t mean black PEOPLE, he means black MEN. Because the funny wore out pretty damn quick when he started describing women, who in his brain, are not oppressed or disadvantaged at all. Indeed, in Rock’s skit, it’s not OK for a white person to call someone “nigger” but OK for Rock himself to call a woman a “bitch”. Women, he explains to us, are lazy sluts and leeches who just get men to do everything for them.
It’s very depressing when you see someone who has been on the receiving end of people trying to keep them down out of blind prejudice, who then turns around and pushes the exact same bile on someone else. They know what it feels like!
Lauren – as an aside, re “Something New” (I worked for one of the producers so I read that script way back), I agree it did a good job of handling these issues and also making Lathan’s character more than just a black woman, or a professional woman, she was an individual. Note that it has a female director, Sanaa Hamri, which I think is key.
@ Kristen
“5. tyler perry ‘probably’ hates (professional) black women”
Don’t think that is fair but it may be pretty close aside from the word hate, especially when it comes to his movies. Pretty much all Tyler Perry movies advocate a certain kind of family relationship, and by that, a certain kind of woman. He seems to use the professional woman as the anti-good woman. For his world view, a woman’s priority should be the traditional stay -at-home role and centered around the man and the Christian God. He often uses the professional type woman as an archetype for a woman who has forgotten her proper role in the household, and needs to be reminded of what her “real” duties are.
In his movies, professional women can be good women, so long as they fit into the profile of :submissive to men, good chaste Christians, housewives first, soft-spoken mostly, maternal, etc.
His movies are often criticized, and rightly so, for lacking balance in the characters, especially women and professionals. As a matter of fact, the professional man is also often a villain who is only after money, abuses his wife etc (which if the OP is accurate about the DV scene is highly problematic b/c it means that while treating DV violators of a high class badly in other films he makes DV justified by a blue-collar man). Also, women are often punished in his movies for being with rich men and chasing after wealth, and then find redemption at the hands of a good working-class Christian man.
In the end, he uses badly constructed archetypes to advance his vision of what a good black family should be: middle class with a strong in control man at the helm, a submissive wife who may or may not work but knows her place, Christian, Christian, Christian. Anything else is pretty much demonized and belittled.
I think he could make some good points with his emphasis on regarding family and community as high priorities were it not for his emphasis on Christian patriarchy as the only ways to accomplish these things. I like movies that stress strong relationships, and community togetherness and uplift, but seriously, is there no way to do so without emphasizing only one type of family model and Christian patriarchy? At least in Tyler Perry’s worldview there isn’t, which leads me to believe that while he may see the two as connected, he gives a higher priority to proselytizing than encouraging emphasis on family, and for a woman, there is only way to show commitment to family, and it doesn’t involve professionalism.
For someone so quick to promote quality over money in his movies, TP sure doesn’t give up the chance to turn out cliche movies that have been done by him 100x over in order to make some money. At least he gives roles to Actors of color though, even if those roles are below the actors’ talent and doesn’t utilize them well.
roula, “The Women” was based on a play by Clare Boothe Luce (which eventually spawned the movie that was remade into the movie you’re speaking of, who was kind of a self-hating A-hole when it came to women’s issues. She didn’t write a lot of plays, but instead went into conservative politics. There’s now a really scary conservative women’s organization called the Clare Boothe Luce Foundation.
While I agree with many of the points you all made, I don’t necessarily agree that he was saying this:
2. Black women who sleep with white men are just whores for white dick.
3. [in the scene where cole hauser's wife confronts sanaa's character] a black woman is not good enough to be with a white man, we will never be accepted by the upper (read: white) class and, they only see us as sex objects (and the fact that he used a white woman to spew this hate about black women that is a common argument of black people [read: men] about black women who date white men pissed me off royally)
I think this would have more merit if the white man would not have been someone else’s husband. I mean, how would that have worked out nicely? They ride off into the sunset together to prove that interracial extra marital affairs work out nicely? Because it wasn’t really interracial dating, or even casual hook up. This was a full blown affair that resulted in a child he didn’t want and she tried to pass off as her husbands, In the movie, both Sanaa and the Hauser were greedy, selfish, and manipulative. It’s not like he winded up being the good guy and she the villiain. They both were pretty distasteful. I think the message is more like “you play with fire, you get burned” kind of thing.
I think the Bechdel test needs to add “About something besides a man or their own bodies.” (And usually the insecurities of.)
I have a disclaimer on my movie lists:
Passing [the Bechedel Test] doesn’t make a good movie or a feminist one. Failing doesn’t mean a bad movie. I find this an interesting measure of roles for women.
Resident Evil: Extinction passes. So do The Hills Have Eyes (where even the hero treats women as sex objects) and Grindhouse Presents: Planet Terror, which features a one-legged gogo dancer, a man trying to kill his wife for having an affair and Quinten Tarantino’s zombifying privates dropping off.
Yet several good movies, including Gods and Monsters, do not pass because the female characters never talk to each other. There is never a reason for them to.
I think what kills me about Tyler Perry is that he fills a certain void in mainstream cinema that a lot of other filmmakers simply don’t fill, and often don’t even acknowledge. But then he goes and fills the void in a way that’s imperfect at best and offensive at worst.
For better or worse, a lot of Tyler Perry’s movies are about their female protagonists in ways that most mainstream movies, even ones that contain strong female characters, aren’t. I haven’t seen The Family That Preys, but part of what kept me watching Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea’s Family Reunion all the way through was that it was about a WOMAN’s psychological journey, not a man’s journey that was abetted by a female character. (For example, Avatar has strong female characters in Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana and Michelle Rodriguez, but the movie is still basically ABOUT Jake… I’m sure you could find lots of movies that technically pass the Bechdel test but are still “about” a male character.) Even for all the problems I have with Perry philosophically, there is some emotional part of me that is so starved for stories about women that I find it refreshing to see his female characters front and center.
I also appreciate, even if he does it in his typical hamhanded way, that Perry is willing to depict women who bear the lingering aftereffects of abuse, both physical and sexual. Again, this says less about Perry’s talent and more about the general landscape of movies, that I find myself going “Wow. He actually acknowledged that abuse can mess up a woman for a long time afterwards.” Far too frequently, when the assault or rape of female characters occurs in a movie, the focus shifts to how it affects her father/boyfriend/spouse/brother. I give Perry some credit for attempting to keep the primary focus on HER journey, even if the actual depiction of that journey is, well, problematic.
Related to that, I was a little surprised to read about the domestic violence in The Family That Preys because Diary and Family Reunion also feature domestic abusers, but in the latter two films the men are unquestionably depicted as villains. I mean Blair Underwood is skirting Snidely Whiplash territory in Family Reunion. In fact, when his fiancee finally responds to a violent outburst by throwing a pot of boiling grits on him and smacking the shit out of him with a frying pan, the movie is pretty clearly on HER side. Taken in conjunction with the DV in The Family that Preys, it seems Perry isn’t so much anti-DV as he is a proponent of the sliding scale of physical abuse, where you’re a monster if you abuse “good” people but it’s okay to abuse “bad” people. Which… is truly creepy to think about.
So like I said, there are all kinds of problems with Tyler Perry and I really hope this post doesn’t come across as an uncritical defense of his movies. I haven’t even gone near the class or education issues. But like I said, he kills me. I think it would be easier to write him off completely if there were NO redeeming value to his movies, but… I can’t deny there are things that draw me in to his movies.
Just chiming in to agree that it’s absolutely possible for a movie that passes the Bechdel Test to be more anti-feminist than one that fails it.
I don’t know, I can imagine a conversation between female characters about their body image could be realistic and enlightening in certain situations. Personally I don’t think the test needs to be *expanded* or clarified with any other rules, just understood that it serves a very specific purpose: illustrating whether women are visible/valued in this movie in the absence of men. Many movies I love fail, and it can be sobering to realize you didn’t even *notice* how driven they are by men. However, the presence of women in significant roles doesn’t mean they’ll be portrayed well. Just as the presence of a female writer or director doesn’t guarantee that either, even though more female writers and directors is something to strive for.
@ Kristen, did you completely miss Robin Given’s character? SHe was the epitome of classy and very refreshing. Ivy League educated, worked her way tot he top and wasn’t going to back down because some dude’s panties were all in a bunch about not getting her hard earned and well deserved position on the corporate ladder. Add to that she was extremely professional about all the unprofessionalism and bullshittery around her and what’s not to love?
And seriously, this was not about love. Come on, that guy made Sanaa Lathan a sex partner that he paid a LOT of money for. He didn’t love her, he wasn’t going to leave his wife and her being black had little to do with it or did you really think a greedy cheating man with NO prenup would divorce his wife with whom he has a child for someone with far less money than he makes in a year? That was pure common sense to me, he and his wife eloped before he could even dare be talked into a pre-nup. He wasn’t planning on ever leaving her without a big knock down drag out fight.
Also remember when Robin Given’s character came along, he was VERY willing to ditch SANAA NOT his wife for Robin Given’s character ASAP but she shot him down.
I don’t think all the black women sleeping with white men are cheating on their husbands with married white men. THAT is offensive, highly. Interracial dating has and continues to exist in monogamous relationships and sometimes monogamous and HAPPY marriages. WHy would you want to see a movie where being the black “other woman” is glorified in the first place? Where a black woman is telling her husband he’s nothing and can’t do better than he’s doing yet complain that he isn’t helping out enough? I mean seriously her character BLAMED her own mother for her FATHER’S adultery and abandoning his family. She was not meant to be the poster child of black woman goodness. If anyone here thinks that, you’ve got some serious self- examination to do.
I got nothing but contempt for Mr. Perry, and it’s nothin much to do with the material he produces. It’s his labor practices. He uses racial solidarity as a lever to get black writers actors techs to work his plays and movies below union scale and without benefits [source]. (I’d heard earlier than 2008 but my Google skills are not finding source for that.) After he became extremely wealthy. How exactly is that giving a hand up?