Erin Brockovich: Film and the Gendering of Citizenship

Because we Monkeyfisters (eww, first time I've said that in public) have bigger pretensions than most Web sites in this genre (hmm, don't ask, I'm not sure what genre we're in exactly), we tend not to like to point to reviews of movies and books by other people, but, rather, to try to just point to our own reviews.

But Salon's review of "Erin Brockovich" is too good not to point to, not only because it gets the movie right, but also because it makes some interesting points about the film critic business, and women's roles in the history of film, along the way.

Re: "Erin Brockovitch", I love nearly all the movies in its genre ("little guy or girl against the system") like "Norma Rae", " Silkwood", the classic "Roger and Me" ("little guy" against the system indeed!), John Sayles's masterful "Matewan", " Salt of the Earth," last year's fabulous "The Insider", and, my personal favorite, " Germinal," a film based on Zola's class novel of the same name, starring Gerard Depardieu (in a role he's perfect for, and giving a performance as good as any I can think of). I can't help but wonder how much longer this list might be without McCarthy and the "red scares" and blacklists in Hollywood, which ruined the careers and lives of so many great artists of the Left.

One wonders, though, about the gender dynamics in some of these movies. While I acknowledge the important role women have played and continue to play in achieving social change, I'm not sure that the history of American cinema has always depicted this fairly. There seems to be something slightly askew about the way really strong women's roles seem so often tied to this genre of film, I'm just not sure what it is. Maybe it's the fact that these women (Sally Fields in "Norma Rae", and Meryl Streep and Cher in "Silkwood") always seem to be rather overtly sexualized; or, rather, since nearly all women in film are overtly sexualized, it's that somehow these women's power to effect social change is attributed, or attributable, to their sexuality. This is certainly the case in the media campaign around "Erin Brockovitch" where Julia Roberts's décolletage seems to become a character in its own right.

I've seen pictures of the real Erin Brockovitch, and she is a blonder version of Julia Roberts, actually; so, apologists for Hollywood will no doubt suggest, it's appropriate casting that I'm really complaining about. The absurdity of this defense is made plain when one asks a simple question: had the real Erin Brockovitch not been very attractive, would Julia Roberts stil have gotten this role? In other words, a prerequisite to be a woman lead in a big Hollywood movie is to be sterotypically "beautiful," cinematic verisimilitude be damned!

While I'm happy this movie was made, and happy that pro-citizen, anti-corporate films can still be made, I'm far less happy that it seems to depict yet another case of a woman having to sexualize herself to engage in citizenship.

I'm clearly still trying to figure out the gender dynamics in this genre of film (someone needs to do for these films what Stanley Cavell has done for the comedies of remarriage, particularly in two books (each of which I own dog-eared, heavily-underlined copies): Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman), so if you've thought about these or related issues at all, tell me what you think..