Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

J. Gwynne, N. Muller, J. Gwynne, N. Muller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137306838
• eBook ISBN: 9781137306845
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

By analyzing the negotiation of femininities and masculinities within contemporary Hollywood cinema, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema presents diverse interrogations of popular cinema and illustrates the need for a renewed scholarly focus on contemporary film production.

Part I

Postfeminist Femininities

1

Neo-Feminism In-Between: Female Cosmopolitan Subjects in Contemporary American Film

Ana Moya

According to Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, transnational cinema respects cultural specificity as a powerful symbolic force at the same time as it transcends the national as an autonomous cultural particularity.¹ Transnational cinema, therefore, finds its scope in the gaps between the local and the global, arising in the in-between spaces of culture and problematizing the notions of national and cultural purity. Homi K. Bhabha uses the notion of ‘in-between’ when he argues for the need to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘inbetween’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.²

Bhabha’s argument follows on from Gloria Anzaldúa’s, who dissects the notion of the borderland in her groundbreaking work in the following terms: ‘Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an “alien” element.’³

National borders are certainly becoming increasingly permeable as individual subjects are characterized by a mobility that, more often than not, allows them to cross those borders. As a consequence, the transnational experience is central to a large number of contemporary films. Within them, identity is often deconstructed to be reconstructed again, becoming mobile rather than fixed and, following on from postmodern notions of identity, emphasizing multiplicity instead of uniformity. This transnationalism suggests that we may have to think of the world as borderless from now on, not only because national borders become progressively blurred but also because subjects constantly cross them and become, in doing so, transnational.⁴

This is especially true where the study of film is concerned. Ezra and Rowden argue that film has become a ‘textual emblematization of cosmopolitan knowing and identity’.⁵ Similarly, Stephen Vertovec and Robin Cohen suggest that cosmopolitanism, as a form of transnationalism, offers the possibility of handling cultural and political multiplicities, characterized as it is by a capacity to transcend the nation-state model; to mediate between the universal and the specific, the global and the local; and to be culturally anti-essentialist as well as to give voice to different and plural identities.⁶ Cosmopolitanism is a defining feature of the culturally and linguistically diverse contemporary world. It invokes a vision of world citizenship and suggests that individuals today may in fact be multicultural in a similar way to that in which they become multilingual. This leads David Held to argue that cultural cosmopolitanism becomes the capacity to mediate between different cultures (national, religious or social).⁷ For Held, cultural cosmopolitanism brings to the fore the fluid nature of individual identity – its capacity to reshape through the exposure to diverse cultures. Equally, Stuart Hall contends that cosmopolitanism describes the capacity to draw our cultural discourse from a plurality of sources and from varied cultural systems, affirming that it is impossible to absolutely preserve cultural identity intact, and that the mere idea is artificial and even absurd.⁸

Even so, it is important to recognize, as Ezra and Rowden argue, that ‘the significance of crossing borders varies according to the identity of the traveller, most often along color-coded, gendered, and religious lines’.⁹ They observe that in most American as well as European films, ‘white women travelers are usually positioned as tourists, while white male travellers are presented as either figures of salvation or as James Bond-like adventurers’.¹⁰ This female tourist is invariably a white middle-class heterosexual woman. In this way, the contemporary Hollywood cinema that Ezra and Rowden refer to here is aligned with post-feminism, which, as Sarah Projansky contends, ‘celebrate[s] depictions of white, middle-class, heterosexual women’s success as markers of all women’s supposed success’.¹¹ In a similar observation, Diane Negra makes the point that ‘romance in recent American cinema is implicated with the fantasy of transcendence of US borders’.¹² She analyses the interrelations between popular film and tourism in so far as they create suitable arenas for the dissection and resolution of identity problems in the contemporary world. Negra argues that the tourist experience may be a stimulating opportunity for personal enrichment, for experiencing local culture through integration and also for attending to the problems of everyday life. Negra is referring here to a very specific group of women, namely that constituted by the white, middle-class heterosexual American female, proving Projansky’s view that post-feminism is tied up in race and class.¹³ Negra argues that when women travel, their immersion in new spaces occurs mostly via romance. The heroines are presented as rootless, and their tourist experience finally results in stabilization, often in ways that ‘camouflage the problems that catalyzed their identity quests’.¹⁴ In contrast, the men these women come across in their travels bear powerful associations with the land, holding a sense of identity strongly linked to their environment. The female tourist film, Negra concludes, departs from the assumption of the female body as hysterical, neurotic and holding a disrupted relationship with the natural. Ironically, this problematic body repeatedly seeks establishment through a romantic engagement with a male one presented as in close relation with the environment and by extension with the natural.

This chapter seeks to explore the relationship between transnationalism, feminism and film at the turn of the millennium, developing Negra’s discussion of romantic comedies of the 1990s. For this purpose, Hilary Radner’s conception of neo-feminism seems particularly adequate, as it provides a suitable critical apparatus against which the transnational American romantic comedies of the present may be fruitfully read.¹⁵ According to Radner, neo-feminism arose parallel to second-wave feminism. They both share a concern with the need for financial autonomy for women, yet while second-wave feminism advocated female self-fulfilment within ‘a climate of social responsibility and state intervention’,¹⁶ the neo-feminist agenda supports the individualist and rationalist goals of neo-liberalism. Radner argues that neo-feminism has become one of the major influences on what is commonly referred to as post-feminist culture, which has ‘very little to do with feminism’.¹⁷ Neo-feminism, she contends, has provided women with models to confront the complexities of present-day culture in a more successful way than feminism itself, replacing feminism’s more utopian aspirations for the community of women with a focus on the individual female and her own personal aims. In this way, neo-feminism is not a tangential consequence of feminism and is instead more aligned with neo-liberalism, indeed the dominant cultural, social and economic ethos of the early twenty-first century in the Western world. Neo-feminism stimulates and strengthens the practices of consumer culture as one of the primary means by which women may construct and express themselves in culture to attain success professionally and materially while preserving a feminine identity. Neo-feminism, she posits, points precisely to ‘choice and individual agency as the defining tenets of feminine identity’.¹⁸

Neo-feminism has been influenced by the transnational experience. The turn of the millennium has seen the rise of the cosmopolitan female, a new autonomous and independent woman who seeks personal gratification and self-development, and for whom the transnational experience becomes another consumer commodity. The female cosmopolitan is open to choice and individual agency, and so neo-feminist cosmopolitanism becomes a new form of empowerment linked to the transnational, where the exposure to different cultural systems gives the female subject the possibility of reshaping herself repeatedly. If individual identity possesses a fluid nature with a capacity to reshape through exposure to different cultures, as Held also argues,¹⁹ then female cosmopolitanism may become a route for the female subject towards ongoing development and fulfilment. A discussion of the transnational romantic comedies of the last decade provides a suitable arena for the exploration of the intersections between neo-feminism and cosmopolitanism in the contemporary Western world.

Cosmopolitan females in contemporary film

The first decade of the new millennium has witnessed the growth of a number of films in which the female cosmopolitan, or the experience of women and transnationalism, has become increasingly visible. This chapter focuses on two of these films, Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)²⁰ and Ryan Murphy’s Eat Pray Love (2010)²¹ – films that dissect the role of the borderland in the shaping of female identity in a decade that has witnessed the release of films focused on and aimed at women, most notably Something’s Gotta Give (Nancy Meyers, 2003), The Holiday (Nancy Meyers, 2006), The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) and Sex and the City (Michael P. King, 2008).²²

Vicky Cristina Barcelona introduces us to two young American women, Vicky (Rebeca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johanson), who spend a summer in Barcelona while on vacation. Vicky is an apparently conventional woman, engaged to a successful American businessman. She plans to marry shortly after the summer and is, like the protagonists of other countless Hollywood romantic comedies, white and middle class. She is interested in Spanish (and specifically Catalan) culture, on which she is writing a dissertation. In counterpoint, Cristina is very different from her conservative friend: a dreamer and a maverick when it comes to relationships, she demonstrates an open attitude towards life and is receptive to new experiences, always welcoming the possibility of exploring alternatives. She is a rather unsuccessful actress and travels to Barcelona after recently ending a love affair. Likewise, Eat Pray Love presents another travelling woman through the story of Liz (Julia Roberts), a young American divorcee who takes a year off to travel to Italy, India and Bali in an attempt to make new sense of her self after a traumatic rupture and chooses an experience abroad as inspiration to restart her life again.

In both cases the female experience is at the centre of the story and is invariably a border-related one and a quest for identity. The films are border conscious; they position themselves against binaries and duality and seek to present a third perspective that is, in Naficy’s words, ‘multiperspectival and tolerant of ambiguity, ambivalence and chaos’.²³ They explore the notion of border subjectivity as necessarily ‘cross-cultural and intercultural’.²⁴ Vicky Cristina Barcelona opens with the arrival of the two protagonists in Barcelona. From the very beginning, the film’s voiceover highlights the contrast between the two friends, establishing Cristina as a dreamer, while associating Vicky and her engagement to Doug (Chris Messina) with notions of seriousness, stability and commitment. At the same time, the camera shows the girls sharing a taxi from the airport to Barcelona where, while Vicky is talking to her fiancé on her mobile, Cristina looks out of the window dreamingly. The girls are presented, then, as oppositional, and this allows Allen the possibility of looking at a tourist experience from two different positions, exploring its multiple ramifications and thus avoiding a simplistic approach to identity and transnationalism. Vicky and Cristina live at Vicky’s conventionally married American friend Judy’s (Patricia Clarkson) during their stay, a way of anticipating Vicky’s future life. Indeed, during their first evening together Judy jokes that Vicky’s conflicts will all be over when she marries Doug in the fall and especially when he makes her pregnant.

Vicky and Cristina become active tourists in Barcelona, where Vicky researches ‘every aspect of Catalan life’, particularly enjoying architecture, food and music. Her tourist experience thus releases her somatic nature, illustrating Negra’s point that Europe becomes a space in American contemporary female tourist narratives where the white middle-class American female may enjoy ‘an easy, settled relationship to food and an untroubled somatic identity’,²⁵ thus feeding back on the American female body as dysfunctional. In contrast with Vicky, Cristina embodies what Felipe (Javier Bardem) calls an ‘in-between’ in Eat Pray Love, someone ‘who live[s] by the border because they renounce the comfort of family life in order to seek enlightenment’. Anzaldúa contends that ‘Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them’.²⁶ She defines borders as ‘a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.’²⁷ Indeed, Cristina enjoys living by the border and is on a quest, seeking the sort of enlightenment that Felipe refers to here, one defined in terms of self-knowledge and personal development and gratification. Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), Juan Antonio’s (Javier Bardem) wife, though, eventually points to the limitations of Cristina’s lifestyle when she describes her as a person who lives in a state of ‘permanent dissatisfaction’. In this way, the contrast between the two female characters opens an interesting debate about women and/in society in the film. Cristina may be read as an embodiment of Radner’s ‘single girl’, which, according to Radner, is ‘a utopian fantasy of a woman freed from the social and sexual constraints that appeared to have limited her mother’.²⁸ Her girlishness, she continues, reflects the anxieties of women within patriarchy to which she responds by keeping herself perpetually immature. Indeed, Cristina may be read as a reflection of Vicky’s own struggles and concerns for the future. The neo-feminist woman becomes, in this sense, a reaction to the anxious, insecure and struggling female that Vicky represents, and which is reflected in her problematic relation with the natural, as is the case with Liz in Eat Pray Love.

Vicky and Cristina meet the Catalan painter Juan Antonio for the first time at a gallery show. The camera shows us Javier Bardem in a red shirt, leaning on a column and holding a glass of wine in his hands. The selection of Bardem for the role of Juan Antonio and his sartorial red suggests both ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
• Part I: Postfeminist Femininities
• Part II: Postfeminist Masculinities
• Part III: Postfeminism and Genre
• Index