“Counter cinema” in the mainstream

ABSTRACT

Hollywood’s women directors have received very little academic attention. The focus of much feminist scholarship is on those women filmmakers who have produced politicised films, and Hollywood histories have focused on the work of male filmmakers. This article argues for attention to be paid to Hollywood’s most financially successful directors as they have the potential to disrupt the patriarchal structures that govern the Hollywood film industry. Using writer-directors Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, and Nancy Meyers as case studies, this paper considers the industrial context within which these filmmakers have worked, and their films, in order to demonstrate the way in which women working within mainstream cinema have offered a form of counter cinema. The paper argues that Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers have capitalized on industry discourses that position them away from blockbuster cinema and that they offer a knowingness in their representation of romance and desire in order to create women’s narratives that function as a counterpoint to Hollywood’s dominant values.

KEYWORDS:

• Women directors
• hollywood
• counter cinema
• desire
• romance

Introduction: writing women into Hollywood’s history

This article explores how the films of Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, and Nancy Meyers, three women writer-directors who have worked within Hollywood, can be understood as counter cinema. This is evident through the way in which women’s films are regarded within the industry and through the film texts. The paper will argue that women filmmakers who have been positioned by the industry as “counter” to mainstream blockbusters have capitalized upon this in order to highlight their exceptionalism and draw attention to the potentially subversive content of their films. In making this argument, the article contributes valuable scholarship to the fledgling area of film and media studies focused on mainstream women filmmakers.

The films, and experiences, of women filmmakers working within Hollywood have had limited academic attention. In recent years there have been publications focused on individual directors—including Frances Smith and Timothy Shary’s edited collection about Amy Heckerling (2016), or Deborah Jermyn’s Nancy Meyers (Deborah Jermyn 2017). However, women directors who have been commercially (if not always critically) successful in mainstream Hollywood are rarely the subject of sustained scholarship. They are also largely absent from studies of popular Hollywood—such as Geoff King’s New Hollywood: An Introduction (Geoff King 2002) where the names of no women filmmakers can be found in the index, although one or two of their films are briefly cited.

It was during this period of New Hollywood that opportunities for women directors were more widely available within the mainstream. In the years between 1939 and 1979 only 14 Hollywood feature films had been directed by women (Dana Kennedy 1991), but in the 1980s this started to change with directors such as Penny Marshall and Heckerling gaining box office success and critical attention. In 1988 Marshall became the first woman to make 100 USD million at the US domestic box office with the comedy-drama Big. Despite this, King does very little to address the gender imbalance of directing in New Hollywood, bar recognising that there are “few if any women directors” with enough power to put their name behind an auteurist movie “package” for a studio (2002, 92). King’s work is symptomatic of Hollywood histories in which women’s movies are largely absent and very little attention is paid to their films, or the limitations the industry has placed upon women filmmakers (see also Barry Langford 2010).

The absence of Hollywood’s women directors is also seen in accounts of women’s filmmaking such as Geetha Ramanathan’s Feminist Auteurs (Geetha Ramanathan 2006) and Sue Thornham’s What if I had Been the Hero? (Sue. Thornham 2012) that focus on feminist filmmaking and therefore predominantly on independent films. Thornham cites Martha Lauzen’s Celluloid Ceiling report, noting: “women were most likely to work in the romantic comedy … and romantic drama genres” (2) that often perpetuate postfeminist values, and as such mainstream women’s films are not often celebrated in feminist scholarship.

This article offers a counterpoint to the critique of women’s mainstream filmmaking, moving beyond the focus on individual filmmakers to outline how women’s work has been positioned in the industry, before considering the collective intervention women have made in Hollywood filmmaking. The filmmakers of this case study were chosen because they are writer-directors and as such they have a certain amount of authority over the content of their films.

A few brief words about terminology: counter cinema and feminism

Before continuing to an analysis of these directors and their films, it seems necessary to discuss the terminology associated with counter cinema and feminist scholarship that is employed throughout this article. Although this work represents feminist scholarship—and a feminist intervention into the study of contemporary Hollywood—the intention here is not to define the films of Meyers, Ephron and Heckerling as feminist, but rather to borrow a phrase from Jermyn, to outline how these films offer “feminist-minded moments” (emphasis in original 2017, 9). As such these filmmakers challenge the values of the mainstream by offering feminine, if not always feminist, interventions. Although feminist critique of mainstream film is important and opens up discussions of the limitations of women’s narratives it is an increasingly complex theoretical space, with the terms second-wave, third-wave, and neo-feminism all being used in contemporary discourse, not to mention the ambiguities associated with postfeminism. When the phrase postfeminism is employed in this work it is with direct reference to the work of the scholars cited, and therefore follows their individual definitions. That said, this work is cited with the recognition that postfeminism implies a past-ness, whereas neo-feminism and third-wave feminism place an emphasis on active empowerment—on an acceptance of feminist values, but from a skewed perspective that focuses on empowerment through consumer capitalism and sexual experimentation. These latter “waves” emphasize individual choice rather than collective, political action. There is, then, a distinction between notions of postfeminism that are not active but rather describe a set of ideological values emphasised by societal trends and the intentional action of neo- or third-wave feminism, although in many cases, there are similarities across the values of postfeminism and neo-/third-wave. It is also a point of note that the films of Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers focus on the experiences of white, middle-class heterosexual women and as such do not embody the intersectional politics that are central to the feminist cause that prioritizes equality between people of different genders, races, classes, sexualities, and abilities. Issues of race, class, and sexuality are not discussed in this article, but the analysis of resistive moments comes with an acknowledgement that none of these filmmakers challenge the dominant representations perpetuated by Hollywood that are entrenched in modes of white, privileged femininity.

Feminism is broadly and nebulously defined in popular discourse and as such it is difficult to claim a popular culture text as “feminist”—feminist to whom? On what terms? That is not to say that mainstream films should not be termed anti-feminist where appropriate, but a focus on moments of resistance avoids becoming bogged down in discussions of how a feminist film can be understood. Christina Lane refers to Annette Kuhn’s seminal work on women’s cinema as she writes that defining a feminist film might rely “on a consideration of three central factors: female spectatorship, feminist address, and feminist intervention on the part of the filmmaker” (Christina Lane 2000, 23). However, as Lane explains, “the social construction of feminism changes over time and geography” (23) and as such notions of feminist intent may be contested. There is ambiguity in these factors that rely on subjective, or personal, interpretations of what constitutes feminism and feminist address. Focusing instead on the idea of resistance, the films of Meyers, Ephron, and Heckerling can be read as working against the grain of Hollywood productions and therefore offering a type of counter cinema.

It seems necessary at this point to also outline how the term “counter cinema” is being employed. Claire Johnston’s writings on women’s cinema as counter cinema directly critique the Hollywood “dream factory” (Claire Johnston 1973, 24), arguing that woman “is presented as what she represents for man” (25). She recognises that cinema is ideological and therefore the apparatus of cinema can be used to challenge the dominant (patriarchal and bourgeois) values, as well as uphold them. Johnston’s manifesto calls for a women’s counter cinema, but she recognises that “a strategy should be developed which embraces both the notion of films as political and film as entertainment” as “for too long these have been regarded as opposing poles with little common ground” (31). What can be gleaned from Johnston’s writing, then, is that her vision of women’s counter cinema could exist within the parameters of entertainment and thus mainstream film, as long as it challenges the signs and ideology of its dominant values.

More recently, Lane chooses to use “counter cinema” to refer to film style and “independent cinema” when referring to issues of economy (2000, 21). As she recognises, terms like “counter cinema” “avant-garde” and “experimental” have long and complex histories (21), and not all counter cinema is feminist as “not all attempts to critique commercial Hollywood cinema do so with feminist goals” (41). The critique of the mainstream is central to Lane’s understanding of counter cinema as both industrial and theoretical accounts of Hollywood and counter cinema suggest “that mainstream film and counter cinema are inextricably connected because the latter is always a response to the former” (2000, 31). The films discussed here can be understood as a sort of counter cinema that is significant for the way it stands against dominant genres, the masculine focus of Hollywood, and also through the intentions and working practices of the three writer-directors.

Women and authorship

As writer-directors it might be assumed that Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers should be considered auteurs; however, I will not be discussing these women in this way (as the issue of authorship and women’s filmmaking is a complex one). The auteurist potential of their filmmaking is certainly recognized in existing accounts, for example Liz Dance’s monograph about Nora Ephron, Everything is Copy (Liz. Dance 2015) argues throughout that her filmmaking is deeply personal, and shaped by her experiences. The same can be said of Heckerling and Meyers’ work that features older, single women working as writers and producers. But these films are not autobiographical, instead they draw on the writer-directors’ experiences. I do, therefore, recognise that their position as women directors within Hollywood is central to the stories they tell and the films they make. As such I am drawing on arguments put forward by Lane, Shelley Cobb and Ramanathan who offer revised concepts of authorship in relation to women’s films. Lane recognises an ideological impetus behind women’s films (2000, 46), and Ramanathan writes: “feminist critical strategy insists on the historical author but concentrates on the ideological traces of the auteur in the text” (2006, 3), whereas Cobb argues that “the cultural context forms art and art is informed by cultural context” and the woman filmmaker’s status, or lack of it, informs the films she makes (Shelley Cobb 2015, 5). Using this approach it is possible to argue that these films are linked to the experiences of their filmmakers—experiences shaped by their gender—without having to label them “auteurs”. As Cobb notes, “auteurism” is “an exclusionary model of authorship” and is “a term that, because of its masculine connotations, has neither been readily available for women filmmakers nor wholly accepted by feminist film theorists” (1). Lane concurs, explaining that “Aesthetic criteria of excellence are culturally determined in a direction that excludes female authors” (2000, 45). Indeed, when the term auteur has been attributed to Myers, in particular, it is often with a caveat that critiques the politics of her films, and draws attention to her gender such as “mainstream female auteur” or “neo-feminist auteur” (Deborah Jermyn 2017, 116).

Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers have collectively directed films from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s during which time they have all had significant box office success as three of the 16 women who, at time of writing, have made over 100 USD million at the American domestic box office with a single, solo-directed film. All three filmmakers are renowned for their romantic comedies, made across a period in which the industry has changed towards one increasingly dominated by the action-fantasy genre and franchise filmmaking, and in which the romantic comedy has become less visible. As Cobb and Diane Negra note “chick-flick output has conspicuously slowed since a peak in the 1990s” (Shelley Cobb and Diane Negra 2017, 764), although they do emphasize that the genre has by no means died out. Despite remaining a much-derided genre in both popular and academic critique, in recent years the romantic comedy has had a resurgence on streaming services. Netflix recognised a demand for existing romantic comedies from their subscribers and capitalized on this by commissioning original films such as To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018) and Always Be My Maybe (2019) (Billy Nilles 2018; Bryn Elise Sandberg 2018). Although Netflix is being celebrated for “breathing new life into a fading genre” (Sandberg), the fact that romantic comedy’s successes are happening away from studio-produced cinema releases positions women’s films as separate from mainstream fare; as somehow “counter” to it.

Counter cinema and women’s filmmaking

The relationship between women’s filmmaking and counter cinema can be traced back to Johnston’s seminal (1973) work “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema.” Although this article will argue that there are various ways in which the work of Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers can be considered counter cinema in the terms put forward by Johnston and other feminist scholars, to begin with it is necessary to consider the ways in which the Hollywood industry has both explicitly and implicitly positioned women’s films as “counter” to the action blockbuster, that represents “Hollywood’s dominant genre since the mid-1980s” (Barry Langford 2005, 235).

Within the industry, and trade press, counter cinema is understood in terms of counter programming: the practice of releasing various films at the same time that might appeal to different audience groups, in order to either dominate the market, or mop up audiences that are not interested in a competing studio’s big action blockbuster. The release patterns of Ephron and Meyers’ films fit this pattern. Sleepless in Seattle opened in June 1993, a week after Jurassic Park and a week before Last Action Hero—big summer blockbusters, the latter of which was released by Columbia, the sister company to TriStar who were behind Sleepless. Meyers’ What Women Want (2000) and Something’s Gotta Give (2003) both opened in December offering counterpoints to Cast Away (2000) and Vertical Limit (2000) and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003). Ephron and Meyers may have been able to capitalize on the opportunities afforded by counter programming, but as Fennessey notes, in recent years the practice has waned and “fewer theaters open for new films” (Sean Fennessey 2018), meaning blockbusters dominate and smaller films are increasingly struggling. With interest in romantic comedies fading Heckerling’s off-beat indie rom-com I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) did not even achieve a cinema release in the US. The success of superhero movies and action franchises means that mainstream output is becoming increasingly limited and those making smaller films in less exportable genres are struggling to get movies made. This particularly penalises women directors because, as Lane notes, it is “non-event” movies “that tend to be the projects assigned to women directors” (2000, 37). This is not exclusively the case, for example, Mimi Leder had significant success in this genre with The Peacemaker (1997) and Deep Impact (1998) and Kathryn Bigelow is known as the director of action films ranging from Point Break (1991) to The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012). More recently Patty Jenkins broke box office records with Wonder Woman (2017)), however women have limited opportunities to direct big-budget films. As Laurie Winer notes the belief in studio boardrooms is “that women are bad at managing money” (Laurie Winer 2000, 91), a claim reiterated by Cobb who explains “the low number of women filmmakers is used as an excuse by the men in power not to trust women with their money” (2015, 36).

This is an unfortunate misconception in an industry that is increasingly concerned with the performance of big-budget blockbusters in the global marketplace. Thomas Schatz recognises that since New Hollywood began to wane in the 1990s the industry has become dominated by

a new breed of blockbuster-driven franchises specifically geared to the global, digital, conglomerate-controlled marketplace, which spawn billion-dollar film series instalments while also serving the interests of the parent conglomerate’s other media-and entertainment divisions (Thomas Schatz 2009, 20).

This transition has affected the output of the major studios, which has become increasingly limited. Although women such as Lexi Alexander (Punisher: War Zone (2008)), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman) and Anna Boden (Captain Marvel (2019 co-directed with Ryan Fleck)) have had success within the superhero franchises that have dominated cinema screens in recent years, few women have the opportunity to direct a franchise blockbuster, furthermore, even when directed by—or about—women, franchise blockbusters adhere to the conventions of a masculine genre. By and large films for, and about, women remain outside the action genre. Helen Warner and Heather Savigny note that women’s cinema continues to be “ghettoised” (Helen Warner and Heather Savigny 2015, 126). Through an analysis of film reviews, they recognise that films deemed to be feminine are heavily derided, even when directed by men. They consider “female-led” projects to include those starring women in central roles, arguing that “Films with women at the fore may well be on the increase, but they are accompanied by a broader mediated discourse that broadly rejects attempts by the film industry to challenge dominant gender norms” (113). With reference to the reception of films directed by Paul Feig, including Bridesmaids (2011) and The Heat (2013), Warner and Savigny conclude that media cultures construct a discourse that “sees men pursue the feminist project to better effect than women” (124–5) because of a need to “conflate masculinity with feminism” (114). As such, all things supposedly feminine—including romance and the romantic comedy—lack value.

The “gehttoising” of women’s genres extends beyond popular critique into academic work, for example King’s assessment of romantic comedy, and in particular, Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998), as “textbook genre stuff; expectations [are] entirely fulfilled” (2002, 140), reinforces taste cultures that see the romantic comedy as low-brow and predictable: as Jermyn notes, the romantic comedy is not considered to be a genre associated with auteur filmmakers (2017, 87).

There remains a reluctance to take the romantic comedy seriously. Despite this, though, in the context of high-octane franchise films aimed at a predominantly young male audience, it is clear that the films of women writer-directors offer a counterpoint to dominant trends of Hollywood cinema. Jermyn asks us to recognise the significance of Meyers’ The Intern (2015), noting how unusual it was “in 2015 to pursue a studio film with big name stars where a man and woman develop a relationship in which there is no romantic subtext, and where instead a quietly observed platonic intergenerational friendship lies at the core” (2017, 145). Although she reminds us, citing Jane Gaines, “we must be mindful of ‘the tendency to automatically ascribe transgressiveness to films … when made by women’” (8), Meyers, Ephron and Heckerling do offer a counterpoint to blockbuster cinema.

This counterpoint is often overlooked in feminist scholarship where transgressiveness is more readily attributed to independent films. Some scholars are trying to challenge this, for example, Cobb, Lane, and Thornham all discuss films they deem to be “mainstream” in their work on women’s cinema, although as Thornham notes her focus is largely on films that exist “to one side of the more mainstream fiction films whose postfeminist narratives are the focus of critical interest” (2012, 190). Feminist scholarship recognises a hollow sense of empowerment that underpins the narratives of women’s movies. Cobb notes that “postfeminist culture … often constructs successful subjectivity for women as either neo-traditional femininity or empowered sexualisation” (2015, 15). Yvonne Tasker adds “postfeminist commitment to an imagery of strong, self-defined sexually confident yet resolutely feminine women is potentially rife with contradiction” (Yvonne Tasker 2011, 69). Jermyn recognises how these criticisms are aimed at romantic comedies, as she writes the genre is “held to be both creatively constrained—being predictable escapism tightly regulated by tried narrative and aesthetic conventions—and ideologically compromised—being part of popular culture’s hegemonic weaponry” (2017, 66). The romantic comedy remains a problematic genre in feminist critique. Thornham argues that the heroine of the chick flick is “apolitical, individualistic, and capitalistic” (2012, 3), and with this in mind, it would seem that the romantic comedy is an especially difficult genre with which to make an argument for any sort of “counter cinema” existing within the mainstream. Jermyn argues, however, with reference to the films of Meyers, that the (so-called) “highly traditionalist gender politics” of the romantic comedy exist alongside “other equally striking moments of seeming social critique or cultural commentary” (2017, 7).

Despite these, often negative, characterisations of their films, Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers all capitalize on the position Hollywood has relegated them to as somehow different from, or counter to, blockbuster fare. By seemingly accepting, and even celebrating, this they are able to enhance an understanding of their films as challenging Hollywood norms. Their career success can be understood in terms of narratives of exceptionalism. However, such narratives often focus on the success of minority individuals at the expense of collective progress. As Isabel Molina-Guzmán writes “Focusing on exceptional individuals and events ideologically decreases social and political pressure on Hollywood’s gender and racial structures” (Isabel Molina-Guzmán 2016, 444). Warner and Savigny similarly recognise that “popular and trade press continually proffer the success of certain films or film makers as examples of gender progress in Hollywood in such a way that actually prevents any real development from gaining traction” (2015, 115). Although exceptionalism hinders the collective advancement of women and minority filmmakers, for Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers this narrative works to promote their filmmaking as counter to much of Hollywood’s output. Both Ephron and Meyers have been direct in doing this. In popular accounts, Ephron was always keen to set herself apart from the trends and traits of action cinema. After Jan De Bont, director of Speed (1994), claimed that it was much easier to direct Sleepless in Seattle than an action film, Ephron responded: “why are you knocking my movie? I can’t make ‘Speed’ and guess what? You can’t make ‘Sleepless’”. She continues: “I think I’d rather slit my throat than shoot a person’s hand on a gear shift” (Hilary deVries 1994, 87). Elsewhere she retorted that “she will not be tempted to pander to the American obsession with violence, action heroes and fantasy animals” (Peter Pringle 1993, 21), and in an interview with DGA Quarterly Ephron announced “Effects? I hate them … I really hate them” (Terrence Rafferty 50). Meyers discusses her struggles getting The Intern greenlit by a major studio, explaining “when I finished the script and it sent it around everybody was trying to make Spiderman. I got to the point where I was going to bury it in my backyard” (Rebecca Keegan 2015). Meyers recognises that it was the current industrial context that made it so difficult to get the film made, observing that the studios “have an agenda, they need to make these tentpole movies, they want to be in the franchise business” (interview with Kate Erbland, cited in Deborah Jermyn 2017, 146).

Beyond genre, the content and tone of their films is something these directors are keen to promote as unique. Heckerling explains “I’m just making films I’d like to see. There are movies you come out of where you think ‘That was so good-hearted’ or ‘That person was so nice’—it just makes you feel so good afterwards.” Heckerling goes on to add, with reference to Clueless (1995), “People have accused me of saying this is how it really is, blah blah blah, but what they’re kind of not getting is it’s a fantasy” (Heckerling quoted in Stephen Dalton 1995, 30). Both Ephron and Meyers have been outspoken about the types of stories they wish to tell and the types of women they write. Indeed Jermyn notes that “Meyers’ allegiance to feminist principles is on the record” (2017, 8), and Meyers has said that whilst her films might offer fantasist versions of life the “emotional content is completely real” (66).

Meyers, Ephron, and Heckerling all tell women’s stories and in offering subjectivity to women are defying the trends of Hollywood where a recent study showed that in 2016 only 27% of dialogue in the year’s highest grossing films (worldwide) was spoken by women (Teresa Jusino 2017). As writer-directors whose dialogue-driven films champion quick-witted women of all ages, Meyers, Ephron, and Heckerling challenge this. The focus on women’s stories, however, is not proof of women’s subjectivity. Thornham argues that the nature of women’s subjectivity in romantic comedies occupies a problematic position as the subject of a film’s narration is not necessarily the subject of its actions, writing: “In female-centred narratives the two are in fact more often divorced, as in the romance where, although the focus of narration is on her, it is he who is the subject of its actions, the one who rejects, rescues and, finally, proposes” (emphasis in original 2012, 22). Sleepless in Seattle goes some way to challenging this. Ephron’s film tells the story of Annie (Meg Ryan) a journalist engaged to kind, but boring, Walter (Bill Pullman). She questions her relationship upon hearing widowed Sam (Tom Hanks) and his son Jonah (Ross Malinger) on a radio phone-in. Annie writes to Sam and suggests they meet at the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. Although neither initially intends to do so, fate brings them together. The conclusion implicitly sees Sam rescue Annie from an unfulfilled life and Annie rescue Sam from his grief. It is Annie who leads the actions and who forces the story forward—by writing to Sam and by hiring a private detective to spy on him. It is Annie who rejects Walter and is proactive in her own story. The same is true of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, an updated take on Jane Austen’s Emma in which privileged, Bel-Air teen, Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) attempts to match-make for her friends. Here Cher leads the narrative and is in control of her romantic relationships (as well as those of others around her). As Stefania Marghitu and Lindsey Alexander write, “Cher’s voiceover is established in the opening scene, and she soon begins her morning routine while scanning her digital wardrobe. Audiences quickly understand that Clueless will be seen through her eyes” (Stefania Marghitu and Lindsey Alexander 2016, 181).

Women and desire in mainstream films

Women’s subjectivity, alongside desire and sexuality, is central to feminist scholarship and feminist filmmaking. As Johnston wrote, “women’s cinema must embody the working through of desire” (1973, 31) in order to counter woman’s objectification. Although the mainstream romantic comedies of Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers might not represent feminist filmmaking, they do deal with women’s subjectivity and desire. As Laura Mulvey argued in her pivotal work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Laura Mulvey 1979), women in classical Hollywood functioned as objects of a desiring male gaze. While this work has been challenged since, the core argument that women’s bodies frequently function as objects of sexual desire for male fantasies (on and off-screen) has remained pervasive in feminist film criticism. Furthermore, Thornham argues that women’s desire has been silenced in mainstream cinema, noting that: “The melodramatic articulation of female subjectivity and desire through music, costume, bodily and vocal symptoms and mise en scène, rather than speech, is familiar to us through the ‘woman’s film’” (2012, 70). This silencing of women’s desires and the objectification of women’s bodies has inspired feminist filmmakers. This is evident through the recurring theme of rape in films exploring how women’s bodies and desires are treated in patriarchal society. Of course rape and sexual abuse also exist outside of feminist cinema, with mainstream crime narratives often spectacularising violence against women even in ostensibly female-led films, as in the rape-revenge narrative of a film such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011).

The prevalence of rape as a theme within feminist and mainstream cinema—albeit with very different motivations and outcomes—means that romantic comedies offer a contrasting space in which women’s bodies seem to be “safe,” within the narrative, at least. Yet, Thornham discusses the relationship between the romance and the theme of rape in feminist films such as À Ma Soeur! (2001) as a response to mainstream versions of romance and desire. She discusses the film’s climax when the young Anais is raped, noting that afterwards “there is a moment of muted tenderness as [her attacker] seems almost to stroke her hair” (2012, 172). Thornham argues that “What the film seems to me to suggest, however, is that this is the reality behind illusions of romance” (173), particularly prevalent in this instance as she notes the “film’s contemporary reference points are girl-centred coming of age films and teen romance which have become the staple of postfeminist ‘chick flicks’” (169). The patriarchal genre of the romantic comedy, then, is problematic in its attempts to conflate women’s desire with the reproduction of the patriarchal order.

The difficulty in depicting women’s desire on screen is well documented in feminist scholarship. Ramanathan writes “Female desire, whether authorial, diegetic or spectatorial, has been articulated either as fantasms of the male imaginary, or is underwritten by a male desire which conflates the image of women with desire” (2006, 141). Thornham similarly recognises the difficulty in removing representations of women’s desire from patriarchal structures as, citing Anneke Smelik, she writes “It is, then, a “formidable task” for female filmmakers to “represent female sexuality positively and affirmatively’” (2012, 156). It is, perhaps, for this reason that Ephron’s films Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail both avoid sexual relationships and instead offer very chaste romances.

In interviews about Sleepless in Seattle, Ephron stated “sex killed the romantic comedy,” she goes on to explain that in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s “characters had sex by talking to each other” (cited in David Hunter 1993, 9), and thus she welcomes a return to dialogue-driven romances. The dialogue-driven comedies of classical Hollywood that inspired Ephron are explored by Maria DiBattista, who recognises the subversive potential of women’s “talk” (Maria DiBattista 2001). Ephron’s focus on dialogue rather than sex allows her to depict female characters who are valued beyond their bodies, and whose attractiveness might be understood in different ways. The removal of sex, though, creates a paradox. As Thornam writes, debates around a feminist theory of sexuality began due to a sense that “feminism’s struggle against the sexual oppression of women had created a kind of ‘respectable sexuality’ for women which ignored or repressed women’s actual desires and sexual practices” (2012, 157). A similar lack of sex/sexuality is recognised in Clueless. Marghitu and Alexander describe Cher as “non-sexualised” and attribute this to the film’s authorship: “In Hollywood, it is still rare for a literary adaptation, or any film, period or contemporary, to incorporate a female screenwriter, director and non-sexualised protagonist” (2016, 181). It is important to note that although sex is absent from these films, they still reinforce the patriarchal narrative of romance, described by Hilary Radner as “a masochistic scenario.” Radner explains that the romance genre “might be best summarized as the transformation of [the] loss of “voice” into a dream of love and happiness” (cited in Sue. Thornham 2012, 60).

Despite this damning take on romance, there are various ways in which the treatment of sex, romance, and women’s bodies in Sleepless in Seattle offers resistance to dominant models of representation. Ephron’s decision to avoid the complications of sex extends into the narrative, where she offers a derisive portrayal of sex and relationships, and a critical take on romance and the romance film. When Annie tries on her mother’s wedding dress, following her engagement to Walter, they have a brief conversation about sex in which her mother warned it could take “years” before everything in the bedroom works like clockwork. Later on, Sam’s friend talks to him about dating in the 1990s, concluding that, after a prolonged period of “necking” “you have tests, then you get to do it with a condom.” Sam’s friend Jay (Rob Reiner) sees this version of sex as a let-down. In both examples, desire is absent from sex and it is seen as at best a task to work at, and at worse something potentially dangerous to your health. Although this version of sex, and the extremely chaste union of Annie and Sam, might seem to exalt reactionary attitudes to promiscuous sex, when coupled with the undercutting of romance that is perpetuated throughout the film, it points towards an attempt to critique the traditions of the genre and the inherent tensions when screening women’s desire. Of course, the removal of sex is problematic, as it simply avoids the question of women’s sexual desire altogether, however, coupled with the attitude towards relationships, marriage, and romance in Ephron’s films it becomes significant. Relationships and marriage are critiqued throughout Sleepless in Seattle—Annie agrees to marry Walter because he is nice enough and her brother explains he only proposed because his wife told him they had to break up or get married. Tasker notes this narrative trope to be symptomatic of postfeminist media culture, arguing that “Contemporary romantic comedy must … acknowledge the (repeated) failure of romantic ideals and marriage as an institution, even while it values intimacy and true connection” (2011, 69). Although Tasker associates this with postfeminism, within Sleepless in Seattle the use of this trope offers a resistive reading that specifically challenges Hollywood conventions. As Virginia Wright-Wexman notes “in most Hollywood films, romantic love is a major concern” (Virginia Wright-Wexman 1993, 3), extending beyond romance narratives to franchise blockbusters. In this respect, although the trope of critiquing romantic ideals has since become more typical of the genre, the repudiation of romance and marriage in Sleepless in Seattle sets the film against the grain of the mainstream.

A reading of Sleepless in Seattle as critical of the romance genre is recognised by Dance who argues “Sleepless in Seattle is an exploration of the concept of romantic love as it is understood in Western culture” (2015, 118). This is evident in the film’s ambiguous ending and non-traditional romantic comedy structure. Despite Pringle’s overview of the film describing it as a “long-distance romance” (1993, 21) there are no romantic entanglements in the film. The central couple do not meet (bar a few distant glimpses of one another) until the end of the film, and even then they barely exchange a word. The non-traditional romantic comedy structure is a trope that recurs in the films of the other writer-directors, for example there is a lack of romantic drive in The Intern (2015) and Ephron’s Julie & Julia (2009). These films complicate the generic categories usually associated with women’s films as they bear little resemblance to romantic comedies, or the girly film, a genre, defined by Hilary Radner, as emerging from the female friendship film and the neo-romantic comedy (Hilary Radner 2011, 29).

Rethinking romance and desire

Returning to Sleepless in Seattle’s relationship to romance, the film is not only critical of marriage, romance is completely removed from the narrative. It does not follow the standard rom-com structure and there are no romantic moments, no dates, no sexual desire, this is instead replaced by destiny. This is not an unproblematic switch, as Alexia L. Bowler notes, even in those contemporary romantic comedies in which recreational sex and women’s libidinal desire are explored there is “a re-emergence of the belief in ‘soul mates’” (Alexia L. Bowler 2013, 188). This offers a pre-destined version of heterosexual romance that implies coupledom is always the desired ending. Women—and men—need not be desirable people, they just need to be right. This is exploited in Sleepless in Seattle when Annie is seen peeling an apple in one go—a trait Sam announces, in a different scene, to be one of the things he loved about his now-deceased wife. Annie thus fills a rather ghoulish and morbid function as replacement for the deceased wife, being reduced to a few desirable characteristics rather than being valued as the rounded career-woman that she is. However, this can be read as a reference to the gothic women’s melodrama, as typified by Rebecca (1940), allowing Ephron to undercut the notion of destined grand romance.

By removing sexual desire, and almost all contact between the lead characters, Sleepless offers a counterpoint in its depiction of women and romantic relationships. Although Annie does become the object of Sam’s gaze when she travels to Seattle to spy on Sam and Jonah, it is not a sexualised gaze, and the film is at pains not to sexualise Annie. Her body remains covered throughout the film (a trope repeated in Ephron’s later film You’ve Got Mail). When we are first introduced to her, Annie is wearing a buttoned up, long-sleeved midi-dress. When she undresses to try on her mother’s wedding dress she wears a loose fitting slip under her clothes. Meyers’ similarly avoids exposing the woman’s body in Something’s Gotta Give. The film sees feminist playwright Erica Barry (Diane Keaton) fall for her daughter Marin (Amanda Peet)’s older lothario boyfriend Harry (Jack Nicholson) when she has to play host to him at her Hampton’s home after he suffers a heart attack whilst seducing Marin. As 30-something Marin strips for 60-something Harry, she wears a camisole rather than a bra. Meyers was adamant that Marin would be in the camisole so as not to overly sexualise the body of Peet, and to keep the focus on the narrative rather than the spectacle of the woman’s body (Deborah Jermyn 2017, 49). Meyers plays knowingly with the male gaze in both Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated. The opening of Something’s Gotta Give offers a montage of young women’s bodies, objectified by the camera and accompanied by Harry’s voice over proclaiming that he has been dating younger women for over 40 years. However, later in the film Meyers flips this objectifying gaze and refocuses it on the older woman’s body. As Harry and Erica are about to have sex for the first time we see her body from his point of view—a desiring male position. The viewer is aligned with Harry, asking us to also see the older woman’s body as sexually attractive. This recurs in It’s Complicated in which divorced couple Jane (Meryl Streep) and Jake (Alec Baldwin) have an affair and Jake’s sexual desires are diverted from his youthful and slender wife to his middle-aged ex-wife. Here we are aligned with Jake’s point of view as he objectifies Jane, spying on her date with Adam (Steve Martin) and watching her wiggling backside. The subversion of the gaze functions to challenge accepted notions of attractive femininity and invite the audience to recognise the desirous potential of the older woman.

Ephron also toys with the desirous gaze in Sleepless in Seattle, as it is Annie who spies on Sam—both herself, and with the help of a private investigator. Sam is seen through a camera lens and becomes the object of desire for Annie’s character. However because the majority of their encounters are remote—via the radio or a letter—desire is removed from sex and relocated to emotional desire. This is also true of You’ve Got Mail, that tells the story of the anonymous email relationship between business rivals Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). As the couple’s relationship is conducted over email, they are allowed access to each other’s innermost thoughts and feelings with no knowledge of what each other looks like, removing sex and sexual objectification from romance (although they meet and become friends, the email relationship is the basis for their romance).

The ending of Sleepless in Seattle also removes any element of sex. Annie and Sam hold hands, but never kiss and barely speak. It is a relatively saccharine conclusion to the film, as the two gaze into one another’s eyes and Jonah smiles happily as he now has the “new” mother he had wanted. Yet this sickly conclusion is undercut by the knowingness of the film. Earlier on Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) tells Annie that her idea of love comes from a fantasy, telling her “you want to fall in love in a movie.” Ephron manages to critique the values of the romantic comedy fantasy, not only in Becky’s indictment of Annie’s romantic fantasies, but also in the film’s denouement. The ending of Sleepless in Seattle remains ambiguous, as although the couple have united, the logistics of their relationship (the unfeasibility of which are pointed out numerous times in the narrative) remain unresolved.

Ambiguous endings

The logistical impossibility of the grand romance in Sleepless in Seattle is echoed in the conclusion of Meyers’ The Holiday (2006). The film sees Iris (Kate Winslet) and Amanda (Cameron Diaz) swap houses, one a Beverly Hills Mansion, the other a quaint British cottage. During the course of their vacations, each falls for a local man—Amanda for Iris’ brother, widowed single father Graham (Jude Law), and Iris for Amanda’s colleague Miles (Jack Black). As their relationship develops Amanda and Graham acknowledge that neither travels much for work and relocation is not an option. The film’s denouement may imply the happy reconciliation of two transatlantic couples, but the narrative and dialogue that come before undercut this. As Jermyn recognises, the ambiguous ending is evident in a number of Meyers’ films. She suggests the conclusion of What Women Want (2000) might be read “in a manner akin to what has become known as Douglas Sirk’s ‘false happy ending’” (Jermyn 2017, 84). She goes on to argue that the happy ending, historically associated with the romantic comedy, has had limited interrogation. Furthermore, citing the work of James MacDowell who argues that “The model of the implausible ‘happy ending’ has [been] used to defend ‘happy endings’ in the movies of many auteurs, from Preston Sturges … through Alfred Hitchcock … to Kathryn Bigelow” (cited in Deborah Jermyn 2017, 87), she notes that the same approach is lacking in critique of Meyers’ work as she is not considered an auteur, or a director of serious films. The ending of The Holiday offers not just ambiguity but also a counterpoint to romantic comedies such as The Devil Wears Prada (2006) or The Perfect Catch (UK)/Fever Pitch (US) (2005) in which women are seen to sacrifice careers or personal interests in order to make romance work.

The ambiguous ending is peppered throughout the films of these writer-directors; the romances of Sleepless in Seattle and The Holiday are logistically implausible, and Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman clearly states its romance between 20-something actor Adam (Paul Rudd) and 40-something mother and producer Josie (Michelle Pfeiffer) may not last. However, it is not just through ambiguous endings that these films challenge the expectations of women’s narratives. Consumption is a key theme of women’s films—and a central point of feminist critique, Michele Schreiber argues that Meyer’s It’s Complicated “traverses well-worn postfeminist terrain wherein consumerism is intertwined with both female autonomy and love” (Michele Schreiber 2014, 15). Elsewhere, she uses the phrases “lifestyle fetishism” (146) and “commodity fetishism” (155) to describe Meyers’ films. Ephron’s Julie & Julia relies on the zeitgeist of films about consumption and cookery in its food-based narrative. The film pairs the stories of Julia Childs (Meryl Streep), as she writes her infamous book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and New-Yorker Julie Powell (Amy Adams) as she blogs about attempting to cook all 534 of Child’s recipes in 365 days. Although the film’s ending sees Julie offered a book contract and a promise of better times to come, the ending is not really a happy one. Julie is shunned by her muse and hero, Julia Childs, and her marriage—that appears rocky throughout the film—is not stabilised. Beyond the film’s denouement, one small moment of the film manages to undercut the current popular culture obsession with women’s consumption, as a montage sequence, set across the two time periods, sees all four of the film’s protagonists take antacids as a result of all the rich food they are eating. Kathleen K. Rowe recognises the “conflict women experience in a society that says ‘consume’ but look as if you don’t” (Kathleen K. Rowe 1990, 409), but Ephron pokes fun at this, as she shows the ill-effects of the sumptuous food enjoyed by her characters.

Conclusion

It is not just in these small moments that the dominant representations of women are challenged. This is central to the narrative—and conclusion—of The Intern. This film, that tells of the unlikely friendship between a businesswoman and her “senior” intern, retired widower Ben (Robert De Niro), ends with tech-entrepreneur Jules (Anne Hathaway) turning down the opportunity to have a seasoned CEO come in and run her company. This decision to employ a CEO was made in the hope of saving her marriage, after finding out her husband, a stay-at-home father, was having an affair. The film ends as Matt (Anders Holm) apologises to Jules and encourages her to follow her heart where the business is concerned. This resolution offers no suggestion as to how over-worked Jules and frustrated Matt might resolve their marital problems. What the ending does offer, though, is a strong resolution to the Jules’ career issues. The Intern, much like Julie & Julia, is a film about women’s journeys of self-discovery and self-fulfilment through work. Although this may be problematic in its celebration of neoliberal capitalism, the films recognise the impossibility of women being able to have-it-all. Furthermore, these narratives about women’s experiences seem particularly pertinent in a context in which masculinist action narratives dominate at the box office and in which regular reports tell us women’s dialogue is limited and largely confined to discussions with, or about, men (Amelia Butterly, et al. 2018; Teresa Jusino 2017). In telling these stories, the filmmakers offer a counter-point to the dominant output that is furthered by their challenges to the mainstream representation of women’s desire and sexuality. As Thornham writes: “What matters … is not the nature of a film’s textual structures—whether it is narrative fiction or art cinema—but the intervention it makes into the discursive and ideological field (the ‘historical conjuncture’) which it encounters. It is this which will constitute its radical status” (Sue. Thornham 2012, 28). Within this context it is possible, then, to position women writer-directors like Heckerling, Ephron, and Meyers as “counter” to dominant Hollywood output—not just in the industrial terms that see women’s films as less valuable than blockbuster cinema, but also in the ways the film texts resist certain dominant values.

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Notes on contributors

Claire Jenkins

Dr Claire Jenkins is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at University of Leicester. She has published work on family values in American film, older bird chick flicks, wedding dresses and film, and metrosexuality on British television. She is author of Home Movies: The American Family in Contemporary Hollywood (IB Tauris, 2015). She is currently working on Hollywood’s Women Directors: $100 Million Women (Routledge, forthcoming). E-mail: [email protected]