CINEMA AND THE CYCLE OF BIAS

Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test | the Hathor Legacy

Ok, so I deserve a real late pass on this since it was originally published 11 months ago but it's not like the relevance of it has changed. In summary, the author is discussing how, while in film school at UCLA, she was constantly instructed to:

"understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) - as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see."

What is really powerful in Kesler's analysis here is something that is also quite simple (and thus insidious): biases in the media are the product of self-regenerating cycle of logic.

To use her example, if Hollywood has traditionally catered its products to white male moviegoers, it builds an expectation amongst audiences - and executives - that the only successful movies are those that cater to...white male moviegoers. Thus, there is no financial incentive to break the cycle and the very bias that exists helps to perpetuate that bias into the future.

In class, I talk about the relationship between ideology and structure and how ideological bias - the idea that women are inferior, for example - influences structural inequalities - say occupational segregation - that then can be used as "evidence" to support the very ideological bias that helped produce the structural inequality!

And this seems rigidly enforced in mainstream cinema especially. I think the added dimension Kesler is providing is the fact that film schools are deliberately training their graduates to bend to this bias as well which means you have a huge amount of energy being exerted by powerful institutions to maintain a status quo. And moreover, even when "exceptions" arise (women-centered, non-"chick flick" movies that turn out to be big successes), they're always seen as "exceptions," or as one commenter, quoting William Goldman, calls them: "non-repeating phenomenon."

Except that the phenom of successful movies NOT catering to white wen does seem to keep repeating. Hmm...

--O.W.