Introduction: Talking about "feminism" in one of the most heroic and mythological genres is actually a particularly annoying thing. What's more, "gender awareness" and film quality are often not directly proportional. As a warm-up for Red Dead Redemption 2, this article was originally intended to take a shortcut to objectively and linearly tease out the female characters in the history of Western cinema — an often overlooked genre element.
However, once the title is determined, and the film is looked at or reviewed from such an angle, the "historical phased ideas" that previously felt "can be understood" suddenly become less natural. What the female character is holding in her hand is not just a question of "what to hold" – why is she holding it? Did you keep holding it, or did you take it as a plot twist, or was you forced to take it? In this genre with the deepest symbols and symbols, and the life span is about equal to the entire history of film, through the examination of the above issues, it is enough to outline the changes in a country's thinking, culture, and the values nurtured by a set of Hollywood mechanisms.
Q: When it comes to female characters in Western movies, what is everyone's first impression?
If you can't think about it for a moment, it's okay, let's go back to the first seven minutes of the first episode of The First Season of Westworld. Teddy stepped off the train, and the camera slowly rose behind him, giving the town a big panorama: cowboys on horseback, blacksmiths, and sheriffs discussing the case with their men. Later, Teddy entered the bar and asked for a glass of rye whiskey, and a prostitute entered the painting from the side and took the initiative to seduce him; when Teddy declined, the camera turned to the left, aiming at Maeve, the old bustard who was talking behind the two; and further to the left, we saw Dolores outside the window.
At this point, the most typical elements of the Western have been presented (wasteland, train, town, cowboy, horse, gun, sheriff, bar, woman). The three women Teddy meets also correspond to the two most common types of women in traditional Westerns: prostitutes and ladies.
Generally speaking, good girl represents comfort and stability, playing the former in the orderly "civilization" and the "wildness" of barbaric freedom. They may be courteous ladies from the East or industrious peasant women who have settled in the West; bad girls represent the wild, they are prostitutes who often appear in small town bars, and sometimes dancers, but in any case, in the era when the Hayes Code[1] ruled Hollywood, dancers were only synonymous with prostitutes.
whore
lady
Woman
Sometimes, good girl and bad girl will appear in pairs and become antagonistic factors - such as "Clement" in "Chivalrous Tenderness", who follows the male protagonist all the way to the west, and the sexy dancer "Chihuahua", who has been accompanying the male protagonist, who is deeply disturbed and angry because of the arrival of the former, and angrily throws each other's clothes into a suitcase to force her to leave; more symbolic is "High Noon": the sheriff who has just taken off the police badge and put on the wedding ring receives a telegram. It is learned that the villain who has been sent to prison by himself will arrive in the town at noon to seek revenge. The gentle and decent wife wanted him to take on the duties of "husband" rather than "sheriff", while the enthusiastic and mature Mexican woman asked the good girl in front of her with a serious face: "Why do you want to leave?" If Kane were my husband, I would say nothing to leave him." In the end, the wife chose to go forward and backward with her husband, she even took a gun and shot a gangster by the window alone, the balance of civilization and wildness fell slightly to the side of violence, and good girl also completed a conversion to bad girl.
But this is not always the case, because in most cases, people prefer to see a relatively decent ending: the prostitute Dallas in "The Mountain Crossing" accepts the marriage proposal of John Wayne's cowboy, and what is Wayne's marriage proposal line? "I have a ranch on the border where maybe there can be a man... And a woman. It is conceivable that when the two drove away at the end, Dallas also realized the transformation from "prostitute" to "peasant woman", from wild to civilized.
From bad girls to good girls, there is another situation that is more poignant: good girls always seem to live long, but bad girls will "redeem" themselves with a bullet - winning the hero's first and final kiss in the second of becoming a good girl.
As for Native American women— who rarely get a chance to speak in the film, sometimes they're shameful thieves who steal white husbands' property, sometimes exotic prostitutes who please cowboys, sometimes soul mates of unworthy heroes—most of them are quickly shot. Yes, Indian women always have sex with white people.
Interestingly, most of the Indigenous women in westerns are played by white actresses
Whatever symbolic and episodic functions prostitutes, ladies, and Indigenous women each assumed, one thing is certain, at least during the classic Western period (before the forties), the existence of female characters was entirely in the service of heroes. They are deported, kidnapped, shot, and put in danger just to give the hero a chance to save himself. To put it nicely, this is called "Hollywood-style perfect victim", and to say it is ugly, why is Dolores raped and killed day after day? Because that's the script for most Westerns.
So you may say that "genre" is originally a formulaic film composed of a series of stereotyped characters, and john Wayne's role is not the same? Isn't Eastwood's character stereotyped?
Whether good men or bad men, at least there are more complex characters among them who are in the gray area and have room for interpretation;
This really brings the source of the problem to genre films – it is precisely because of the absence of female creators off-screen that the female characters on the screen lack change and depth. The large number of female creators who quit the film industry began with the rise of genre films.
In fact, before the end of the 1920s (the silent film era), there were more than 20 independent film companies run by women around the world. In a naïve era when Wall Street consortia had not yet meddled in the film industry and there was no gender distinction in the responsibilities of the industry, there were more than 300 films directed by female filmmakers like Alice Guy-Blache (and that doesn't include the hundreds of films produced under his name)." There are also actresses like Mary Beckford who play the role of one of the founders of United States. From screenwriters and photographers to producers and investors, female creators not only go in and out of various fields, they also make films for women:
《where are my children?》，1916 ，lois weber导演
Until the birth of sound films, the film industry began to turn to large-scale production development, the five major studios came into being, and female filmmakers who could not override capital faded out of the screen.
The only female director who has successfully made the switch to the sound age is Dorothy Azna, the only female director in pre-40s Hollywood
Interestingly, Dorothy often showed herself on the set in a suit tie + cigar, and her films rarely had a female perspective
In fact, it is not only the lack of bright female characters in Western movies, basically, before the forties, few female protagonists in genre films could escape the setting of prostitutes, ladies and girls next door.
Leo Braudy said this in One Frame World:
Genre films are essentially testing the audience: "Do you still believe in these kinds of stories?" The public usually replied, "Yes." "And the change of genre films happens when the audience changes their mouths - they will say, this kind of film is too pediatric, can you come up with some new tricks?" This is when it's time for genre films to find a way out.
Fortunately, from the mid-forties onwards, such a "way out" finally emerged. On the one hand, the turmoil of the war has made people turn their eyes to themselves, and the pure legend story has not been popular in wartime and post-war; on the other hand, the Western has developed to an almost perfect degree before the war, which means that it itself urgently needs to re-attract the attention of the audience by transforming itself. As a result, a number of "psychological Westerns" such as "Scalper Massacre", "High Noon", and "Sun Blood" began to enter the audience's field of vision, and in terms of themes, there were also precursors to rehabilitate the Indian people such as "Abach Fortress", "Grass Hero" and "Folding Arrows for Alliances".
"Folding Arrows for Alliances"
General: "Actually, the president wants to make a fair treaty with them to maintain peace." Stewart: "So you tell me, what is fairness?" "I think it's equal." "Isn't it equality for the Apaches to live freely on their own land?"
Returning to our theme, the change in the role of women in the West, it is clear that the female image of this period was significantly enriched and her status improved, sometimes even to the extent that intelligence and ability matched that of men. There are many such examples in the "Peasant Woman" character: the daughter of the rancher in "One-Armed Dragon Slayer" originally pinned her hopes of resisting the bully on her fiancé, and when the man quit the action, Connie decided to embark on the road to revenge herself.
Maria in "Rangers in the Wilderness" is a real cowgirl, she inherited the family land, defeated the man who wanted to take the farm from her own hands, judging from her speech to the male protagonist, Maria is really proud of the land she lives in and her identity:
"This is a country built on herds. Ever since we settled here, cattle herds have become our home and given us a livelihood. To protect this herd, our father died in the war, so now that someone wants to take them away from us, where is your loyalty and courage? ”
And for some reason, the role of a cowgirl who transforms from a prostitute/dancer to a cowgirl with a gun:
Tess in Red River
Winnie in Bloody Frontier
The stories of two Western goddess gunners, Martha Jane Andy and Anne Oakley, have also been brought to the big screen (Wild Girl Quinn and The Flying Swallow Golden Gun). It is a bit of a pity that both films are for dramatic effect, so that the heroine finally put on the lady costume of the East, Martha and Annie do not seem to be portrayed as heroes, combined with comedy, the two look more like two uncivilized wild girls.
Perhaps the changes that take place in the female characters in the film can be found in real life. With the onset of world war II, young men mostly went to the battlefield, and the female labor force gradually replaced men and took on the responsibilities that men had assumed in the past – so we found that in "One-Armed Dragon Slayer" and "Rangers in the Wilderness", women inherit farms and carry guns, all due to the death of their husbands or fathers.
Another very interesting phenomenon in this situation is that when the war hero returns home, he is surprised that his position has been replaced by a wife and daughter with social responsibilities, so that a variety of charming, indifferent snake and scorpion beauties are born in film noir, which undoubtedly has a super reference effect on western films in the mid-to-late forties, and even all types of films (even a branch of the genre called noir westerns). Therefore, in the Westerns of the post-war decade, there is no shortage of women with vague morals, powerful and sinister, and some self-destructive tendencies, such as Perrell in "Duel in the Sun", Weynard in "Desert Freak", Amy in "Blood in the Moon Palace", Jessica in "Forty Guns", Vance in "Nemesis"...
In "The Goddess of Vengeance", Vance, played by Queen Noir, falls in love with a person who looks like a "father" after his father kills his father
Western cinema began in decline in the sixties, and by the eighties it was almost fallow, so there aren't many classic examples for us to refine for this article (Italian Westerns are beyond the scope of today's discussion). It can only be said that after experiencing various movements such as anti-war, equal rights, and sexual liberation, there are more and more "women riding horses and holding guns", but under the dual influence of reconstruction myths and revisionism, there are occasionally some more extreme examples:
"The Taming of the Wife", "The Great Old Man and the Silly Big Sister"
Time has passed to recent years, and a number of new century Westerns such as "Mick's Short Road", "Sending The Villager", and "Unattended" have presented us with a different west from the perspective of women. Among them, my personal favorite is "Earth Thunder". The girl who left home completed her revenge with the help of two men, but before she could experience the thrill of revenge, she was shot down the cave by the reaction force of the gun. When he was rescued, he took a quick look at the dead enemy on the horse, and then he ran from day to night in a chaotic way, exhausted and killed his beloved dark horse, and had no chance to say goodbye to his companions... The price of riding a horse, leaving home, and taking a gun is to lose an arm forever, and the deal is very fair, which is perhaps one of the reasons why the new version of the film is better than the old version.
Finally, I don't know if you have played here - Dan Houser, one of the founders of r star, said in an interview some time ago that this time", "Red Dead Redemption 2" will create female characters with different images and different statuses, and the plot will also involve the emerging women's suffrage movement at that time.
When I first read this news, I didn't think there was anything unusual, and I flipped down the comments and found that most netizens were ridiculing or even satirizing the political correctness of Lao Mei.
I have no intention of intimidating people, but I still want to say a few examples from the perspective of girls:
In 1975, when "Jaws" was released, Americans suddenly included "sharks" in their "top ten fears"; in 1995, BMW gave James Bond a huge sum of money to let him exchange his car for a BMW z3; this move caused the z3 to be snapped up in an instant, and the pre-sale of BMW alone made $240 million; in 2012, "Legend of Brave" and "The Hunger Games" were released, and the number of women participating in archery competitions increased by 105% compared with the previous year. [3]
Images influence our thinking and behavior with forces we cannot imagine.
Luckily, when we, our son' daughter, play such a classic game, he/she sees more than whore and lady, they may see a woman named "lillian powell", with a wealth of knowledge and independent thoughts, who returned from New York to her southern hometown to write for the land she loved and participate in the affirmative action movement.
Only after two or three generations of people are accustomed to such a role, and two or three generations of creators are accustomed to such a role - he wants to add, or does not want to add such a role, is a reasonable and natural thing.
Then no one will think of political correctness as a comical term. Because they know that this game character called "lillian powell" was the result of the shouts of thousands of lillian powell over the centuries.
Perhaps at that time, the right to subsistence and the right to education of girls in our country will not be excluded because of her gender.
[1] Hayes Code: In 1930, the Catholic cleric Daniel Lauder publicly declared that cinema was corrupting people's morals and drafted a film censorship bill. The act was quickly accepted by the giants of the film industry and handed over to will Hayes, the president of the Producers and Distributors Association of America (later mpaa), hence the history of the "Hayes Code". Its contents include: obey prohibition, do not promote shochu; do not elaborate on the methods of murder, theft, robbery; do not show immoral sexual relations; must not appear prostitutes, etc. - therefore, "Guanshan Feidu" only says that the heroine Dallas was expelled by the townspeople for some reason and squeezed by decent women along the way, but the reason for her expulsion is not mentioned.
[2] Source: Documentary Hollywood Women
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382438/
[3]数据来源：ted：what it's like to be a woman in hollywood