Media marketing, women's fiction, and men as the target audience.
So, this weekend, I watched a fun Bollywood movie where I became ridiculously fond of the female protagonist. The narrative encouraged her to not only use her sexuality for her ends, but also encouraged her to marry well with the intention of rising up financially, and despite the fact that she's in a 'questionable' profession, the movie sees her as the heroic figure and it's clearly her story. It was like someone went down a list of my fictional kinks when it comes to female characters and just started checking them off. So, naturally, I was going to spread the love, but when I looked at the summary on Netflix for it, it...sounded like a completely different movie because the premise is all about the male hero's dilemma in the movie and no word about the heroine that the movie is actually about except in the context of his story.
Which reminded me of "Agora" and the summary I read for it on IMDB. "Agora" is a historical drama set in ancient Egypt about the life of Hypatia, a female philosopher from antiquity, but the summary states this: As Christianity gains steam in Roman Egypt toward the end of the fourth century A.D., a young slave (Max Minghella) weighs his desire for freedom against his growing love for his mistress (Rachel Weisz), an atheist as well as a professor of philosophy. "Agora" has a lot of fail, but the movie still thinks it's about her, and the guy who is given the subject position in the blurb has maybe five scenes in the movie?
I've had people recommending "Tin Man" to me for years, and I just never had any interest in watching it? When I did get around to it, I was utterly surprised to find out that the movie, in fact, was about Dorothy and not the man pain of the Tin Man. I...would've watched it a lot sooner if I had known that? There’s just no good reason why a movie about a female heroine and her conflict with another female figure is named for a supporting male character when it could’ve easily gone with a non-character based title instead. Except to maybe appeal to people who would not watch a movie titled for a female protagonist?
I haven't really researched this enough, but I suspect it's a trend? Where even when things are by/about/for women, they're often being marketed as 'neutral,' which, of course, means for MEN/about men.
I remember vaguely that one of the major reasons "Wonderfalls" was canceled was that there weren't enough men watching, even though it was doing much better with the female audiences than expected. Something about how the men are expected to spend more money on dvds/products/etc than women. Which…makes no sense at all?
A quick look through Netflix revealed the following fail:
Wide Sargasso Sea: In this lavish adaptation of the Jean Rhys novel, Rebecca Hall stars as Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress in 1830s Jamaica who finds her life transformed when she weds brooding Brit Edward Rochester (Rafe Spall). Soon after the wedding, young Edward discovers a disturbing secret about his wife that may destroy their marriage. (Note to the world: *never* watch this movie. It has more fail in it than the summary could ever cover.)
Pride and Prejudice (1995): We all know that "Pride and Prejudice" is all about Elizabeth and her conflicts, primarily, yes or yes? Look at the Netflix summary for the 1995 version: In this beautiful made-for-television adaptation of Jane Austen's much-loved novel, wealthy and proud aristocrat Fitzwilliam Darcy (Colin Firth) matches wits with witty but prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle), who believes him to be boorish and rude. To win Elizabeth's hand and heart, Darcy meddles in the love lives of each of her sisters. But just as Elizabeth begins to realize her true feelings for Darcy, she risks losing him forever. Notice how he's the subject, and she's pretty much only in the object position, grammatically speaking.
Both of these summaries have the same problem: The men are presented as the protagonists with an actual conflict to resolve, and the women are mentioned only in the context of their relationship to/feelings for the said men. This, of course, is a major problem in fiction already, but the fail is somehow more when even when fiction gets this right, the marketing blurbs still want you to think that women only exist to serve men's plot arcs. And at least with "Pride and Prejudice," that's just not true at all in the movie or the book? And the book version of “Wide Sargasso Sea” is all about the woman.
Randomly, I noticed that the women in object positions (grammatically) is an issue with summaries even when they indicate that the woman is the primary protagonist. Look at the summary for "Bleak House:" The wealthy and kind John Jarndyce (Denis Lawson) takes orphaned Esther Summerson (Anna Maxwell Martin) into his household, where she befriends two of his wards, Richard (Patrick Kennedy) and Ada (Carey Mulligan). Which is a different issue, but still a bit problematic in terms of the blurb person seeing the men as subjects? And it's possibly a bit of langague fail because I know that feminists have written about this issue, too.
I expect to find a lot more fail of this variety as I continue to look through Netflix with this in mind for the future, but I'm wondering about the implications of this as far as marketing and the success of these things go. Of course, the two above-mentioned examples are popular enough that people looking at them already have an idea of what they're about? But what about the less popular stuff where people need the summary to decide if they want to watch it? I firmly believe that you need to market things to people who would actually like them and not to a general audience of...men, because apparently, all audiences are made up of men. Because then the people who would actually like these things might not ever watch it, as was the case with me and "Tin Man." And then OF COURSE the movies with female leads would fail because you're just not marketing them to the right audience because everyone conveniently forgets that it's a major problem in our society that at least half of our population is trained to ignore the narratives of the other half, and the female half is exposed so much to the male narratives that they learn the same thing by implication. Not to mention the whole culture of devaluing anything women do produce/consume in terms of fiction. And it's even more problematic that no one is interested in changing this.
Gah, this is enraging and so filled with fail, and dammit, I'm still bitter about freaking "Wonderfalls" getting canceled because not enough men were watching.
Which reminded me of "Agora" and the summary I read for it on IMDB. "Agora" is a historical drama set in ancient Egypt about the life of Hypatia, a female philosopher from antiquity, but the summary states this: As Christianity gains steam in Roman Egypt toward the end of the fourth century A.D., a young slave (Max Minghella) weighs his desire for freedom against his growing love for his mistress (Rachel Weisz), an atheist as well as a professor of philosophy. "Agora" has a lot of fail, but the movie still thinks it's about her, and the guy who is given the subject position in the blurb has maybe five scenes in the movie?
I've had people recommending "Tin Man" to me for years, and I just never had any interest in watching it? When I did get around to it, I was utterly surprised to find out that the movie, in fact, was about Dorothy and not the man pain of the Tin Man. I...would've watched it a lot sooner if I had known that? There’s just no good reason why a movie about a female heroine and her conflict with another female figure is named for a supporting male character when it could’ve easily gone with a non-character based title instead. Except to maybe appeal to people who would not watch a movie titled for a female protagonist?
I haven't really researched this enough, but I suspect it's a trend? Where even when things are by/about/for women, they're often being marketed as 'neutral,' which, of course, means for MEN/about men.
I remember vaguely that one of the major reasons "Wonderfalls" was canceled was that there weren't enough men watching, even though it was doing much better with the female audiences than expected. Something about how the men are expected to spend more money on dvds/products/etc than women. Which…makes no sense at all?
A quick look through Netflix revealed the following fail:
Wide Sargasso Sea: In this lavish adaptation of the Jean Rhys novel, Rebecca Hall stars as Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress in 1830s Jamaica who finds her life transformed when she weds brooding Brit Edward Rochester (Rafe Spall). Soon after the wedding, young Edward discovers a disturbing secret about his wife that may destroy their marriage. (Note to the world: *never* watch this movie. It has more fail in it than the summary could ever cover.)
Pride and Prejudice (1995): We all know that "Pride and Prejudice" is all about Elizabeth and her conflicts, primarily, yes or yes? Look at the Netflix summary for the 1995 version: In this beautiful made-for-television adaptation of Jane Austen's much-loved novel, wealthy and proud aristocrat Fitzwilliam Darcy (Colin Firth) matches wits with witty but prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle), who believes him to be boorish and rude. To win Elizabeth's hand and heart, Darcy meddles in the love lives of each of her sisters. But just as Elizabeth begins to realize her true feelings for Darcy, she risks losing him forever. Notice how he's the subject, and she's pretty much only in the object position, grammatically speaking.
Both of these summaries have the same problem: The men are presented as the protagonists with an actual conflict to resolve, and the women are mentioned only in the context of their relationship to/feelings for the said men. This, of course, is a major problem in fiction already, but the fail is somehow more when even when fiction gets this right, the marketing blurbs still want you to think that women only exist to serve men's plot arcs. And at least with "Pride and Prejudice," that's just not true at all in the movie or the book? And the book version of “Wide Sargasso Sea” is all about the woman.
Randomly, I noticed that the women in object positions (grammatically) is an issue with summaries even when they indicate that the woman is the primary protagonist. Look at the summary for "Bleak House:" The wealthy and kind John Jarndyce (Denis Lawson) takes orphaned Esther Summerson (Anna Maxwell Martin) into his household, where she befriends two of his wards, Richard (Patrick Kennedy) and Ada (Carey Mulligan). Which is a different issue, but still a bit problematic in terms of the blurb person seeing the men as subjects? And it's possibly a bit of langague fail because I know that feminists have written about this issue, too.
I expect to find a lot more fail of this variety as I continue to look through Netflix with this in mind for the future, but I'm wondering about the implications of this as far as marketing and the success of these things go. Of course, the two above-mentioned examples are popular enough that people looking at them already have an idea of what they're about? But what about the less popular stuff where people need the summary to decide if they want to watch it? I firmly believe that you need to market things to people who would actually like them and not to a general audience of...men, because apparently, all audiences are made up of men. Because then the people who would actually like these things might not ever watch it, as was the case with me and "Tin Man." And then OF COURSE the movies with female leads would fail because you're just not marketing them to the right audience because everyone conveniently forgets that it's a major problem in our society that at least half of our population is trained to ignore the narratives of the other half, and the female half is exposed so much to the male narratives that they learn the same thing by implication. Not to mention the whole culture of devaluing anything women do produce/consume in terms of fiction. And it's even more problematic that no one is interested in changing this.
Gah, this is enraging and so filled with fail, and dammit, I'm still bitter about freaking "Wonderfalls" getting canceled because not enough men were watching.