Cross Section: Celebrate women in film for more than gender

Joining the buzz around current cinematic releases, director Darren Aronofsky’s mother!  has certainly risen to the top of the filmgoing conscience. Starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, the film is a disturbing tale of a young woman who lives alone with her older poet husband in the countryside, and the horrifying turn of events that takes place after strange visitors come into their home. It’s a story meant to shock and entertain, but also one intended to educate through an extensive metaphor about religion and science.

When one thinks about why directors make movies, it is natural to wonder how many viewers the film was intended for and how many were supposed to like it. With regard to mother!, however, it is very fair to assume that Aronofsky did not consider those questions at all: Unmistakably, mother! could not have been made to be liked. With its ominous, insidious sound design and stomach-lurching cinematography, the film is at once visually and narratively uncomfortable. Not created for the faint of heart, its message is accessible only to those willing to subjugate themselves to learning it.

mother!  is deeply polarizing, throwing audiences and critics to different ends of the criticism spectrum. But interestingly, someone who has managed to crawl out of the barrage unscathed is Aronofsky himself. Recently, The New York Times published an in-depth piece in which Lawrence, Bardem and Aronofsky discussed the movie — the relentless filming process and the action behind the most difficult and alarming artistic choices. The New York Times fairly points out that Aronofsky has a tendency to direct twisted and somber films like Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan. What the piece also seems to imply is that sometimes Aronofsky will make movies that land and sometimes he will make movies that go over people’s heads, but at the end of the day, he is still a wizard of the disturbing and the dark, whose vision will stand up even if viewers did not like it.

The way society talks about artists has always been gendered — the word “masterpiece,” after all, has a very male connotation. Far fewer female directors and far fewer women artists in general have risen to the status of icons, have had their names become adjectives in the cultural lexicon, or have been remembered for anything other than being the first or one of the few in their fields. The last female director to have received a significant spotlight was Patty Jenkins, who helmed Wonder Woman, released earlier this summer. But where she earned, albeit rightfully, far-reaching praise for this accomplishment as a woman, the attention focused wholeheartedly on her gender rather than the immense and unique skill she brought to the job. A tremendous artist in her own right, Jenkins previously directed Monster — a film that earned Charlize Theron a Best Actress Academy Award in 2004 and that showcased one of the most stunning performances in cinematic history. Curiously, Jenkins herself was not even nominated for the directing Academy Award that year, although Sofia Coppola was nominated for Lost in Translation. (To this date, four women have received the nomination. Only one — Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker — took home the statue.)

Whereas Aronofsky gets to be labeled an auteur, Jenkins and her fellow female filmmakers are simply women who direct. In The New Yorker, film critic Richard Brody dissects his distaste for listening to directors explain their own movies in response to mother!. And yes, he is right. It is the imperative for the director to properly convey his or her message — not the responsibility of the viewer to correctly read into it. But still, this reality begs the question: If that doesn’t work, will the director be forgiven? And what will determine if he or she is? As Alissa Wilkinson pointed out in Vox, in a world where Wonder Woman failed to be a hit, the financial disaster would be blamed on the female lead and her female director. Compare that immense pressure to the rose-colored bubble Aronofsky seems to float so peacefully in past criticism: Any disconnect between mother! and its audience is something that just happens when a strong artist has a strong vision. More importantly, a weak box office performance would not be his failure — it is simply a result of artistic miscommunication.

To be fair, mother! and Wonder Woman are two very different movies. The former could never be mistaken for trying to appeal to a mass audience, while the other is indubitably a summer commercial blockbuster meant to rake in millions. But in the grand scheme of things, they are two pieces of art made in the same medium. They utilize the same tools and the same players. Each has its own director, entitled to their own respective visions. So why honor and acknowledge the artistry of one and the gender of the other? The world is undeniably better off for hiring and celebrating more women filmmakers. But when that step has concluded, it is the duty of those who support a more inclusive Hollywood to look beyond the physical markers of progress and into the boundless potential of marginalized artists, for that is where progress is truly made.

Zoe Cheng is a junior majoring in writing for screen and television. Her column, “Cross Section,” runs Tuesdays.