INTRODUCTION

This project analyzes Hollywood's representation of women and evaluates the representational quality of female portrayals in contemporary cinema in comparison to those in films produced during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Comparing feminine representaion throughout these two cinematic periods uncovers the ways that women continue to be objectified in contemporary films.

This project consists of both quantitative and qualitative research methods that will allow for a better understanding of the similarities between female portrayals in Hollywood's most popular content from the past and present:

• Quantitative techniques for identifying the highest grossing films from 1930 to 1949 and from 2000 to 2020
• Qualitative techniques for analyzing feminine representational quality in films released throughout these time periods

Data Sources:

• Box Office Mojo
• Self-collected data for measuring representational quality

The shifting gender landscape in the post-Weinstein era of contemporary Hollywood has given way to more opportunities for women to make movies about women. Though the number of actresses credited in feature films has increased since the 1930s, the representational quality of female portrayals still greatly reflects those from Hollywood’s past. These representations often objectify the women who are presented on screen and in turn, they reflect poorly on the female gender as a whole by reinforcing stereotypes generated through male dominance.

With the crumbling of the male dominated studio system in the late-1940s, the film industry gradually became more feminine as women began assuming roles as Hollywood decision-makers. With this gradual shift, increases in actress credits have also occurred. The ever increasing number of female roles should be celebrated, however, the representational quality of their portrayals must not be overlooked. Just because a film displays an adequate number of women on-screen, does not mean that these female characters represent feminism in a positive light.

There is much literature pertaining to the various ways in which female representational quality may be evaluated, but it does not analyze the direct comparison of those presented at these two critical points in cinematic history. In order to understand how cinema's representation of women has changed since Hollywood's Golden Age, it will be beneficial to utilize the practical ideas proposed in the literature. Doing so may also provide updated analyses of the most recent (and most popular) cinematic texts as contribution gender and media fields of study.

To contextualize the research question, a selection of literature on media representations of gender have been carefully reviewed:

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey’s "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" provides insight on evaluating representational quality of female portrayals. Mulvey establishes an idea that women are often put on screen for the purpose of satisfying the “male gaze,” a masculine point of view toward female characters that provides men with voyeuristic pleasure (Mulvey, 2012).

Vivacious Vixens and Scintillating Super Hotties: Deconstructing the Superheroine - Richard J. Gray

Richard J. Gray focuses on the emergence of the heroine in 21st century superhero-action genre. Gray’s “Vivacious Vixens and Scintillating Super Hotties: Deconstructing the Superheroine” expands on Mulvey’s ideas in an argument that the heroines of the 21st century serve little purpose other than attracting male consumers to theaters (Gray, 2011). Such films often come off as progressive vehicles offering more empowering female roles, but they are simply efforts to generate huge sums of money by targeting sexually driven audiences.

Together, the literature provides practical ways for evaluating the progression of feminine representation. As it is detailed in the sections below, Mulvey's work will serve as a basis for understanding and evaluating the representational quality of women in the various films that this project analyzes. Moreover, Gray's theories serve as supplement to Mulvey's as they apply male gaze ideology specifically to the "superhero" genre. Gray's work may provide more specific insight when analyzing the vast amount of contemporary films that feature superheoroines in leading roles.

Applying these ideas to the research question provides the understanding that though women might be represented on camera, they often receive objectification and their representational value is weakened.

Overview

This analysis utilizes quantitative and qualitative techniques for comparing the representational quality of women in the ten highest grossing movies for each of the cinematic eras. While quantitative techniques are used to identify the highest grossing films in each period, the quality of female portrayals will be determined primarily through qualitative methods inspired by Laura Mulvey’s idea that women are often put on screen for the purpose of satisfying the “male gaze.”

The sections below will walkthrough the specific techniques used for:

1. Making the project more managable
2. Data collection/analysis

Making the project managable

Providing an effective answer to the research question is no simple task. After re-reading the question, one might begin to ponder on where to start, what movies to analyze, what sort of things qualify as feminine objectification in a movie. In order to narrow the project's scope, I have decided to approach the research question with a few key ideas that stay prevelant throughout the analysis.

Below are strategies adopted to make understanding how the representational quality of women in feature films changed since Hollywood's Golden Age a more managable proccess:

I. Analyzing the representational quality of women in the ten highest grossing films from 2000 to 2020 as well as 1930 to 1949.

By setting these two date ranges, I am able to narrow in and build a comparison between recent films and those that were produced at a time where representational quality is often considered to be at its lowest point in the history of cinema (Hollywood's Golden Age). There is much contrast between the ever changing social understandings in the #MeToo motivated environment of contemporary cinema and the male dominated studio system era of the 30s and 40s. Such contrast should provide a solid understanding of the ways in which female representation has changed within the past century.

Moreover, analyzing the ten highest grossing films in these two periods is both appropriate and managable for the scope of this project. As the the highest grossing films may also be considered the most popular (or most viewed) movies for each period, the analysis will be focusing on the films that have been most widely consumed by Americans. These films (mostly blockbusters) represent the media representaions of women that have been received by the largest audiences.

II. Using Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory for measuring representational quality.

There are a number of ways the representational quality of women could potentially be understood. In order to narrow the project's scope this analysis will determine the representational quality of these portrayals primarily through Laura Mulvey’s idea that women are often put on screen for the purpose of satisfying the “male gaze.” Including qualitative methods will serve as a reminder that quality does not always correlate with quantity when it comes to the representations presented by cinematic females. The proccess for determining representational quality is detailed below.

Data collection

As I have mentioned in prior sections, this project consists of two data sources:

• Box Office Mojo
• Self-collected data for measuring representational quality

Let's discuss the proccess for gathering data and the ways that such data helps at answering the research question.

I. Box Office Mojo

In order to figure out the highest grossing films for the time periods defined as Contemporary and Golden Age Hollywood, this project sources data from BoxOfficeMojo.com. Under the IMDbPro label, Box Office Mojo is "the leading online box office reporting and analysis service that tracks box office receipts both domestically and internationally" (IMDbPro). Moreover, the data base includes daily, weekly, weekend, monthly, yearly, seasonal, and holiday domestic box-office grosses, as well as international box office grosses (IMDbPro).

Below I have laid out my step-by-step process for gathering data from Box Office Mojo:

1. Navigate to the dataset containing "Top Lifetime Grosses" (This dataset ranks in descending order the all-time top lifetime grossing films. Dataset consists of columns for film titles, rank, gross dollar amount and release year)
2. Dataset is copied and pasted into an Excel file where it is then converted into a CSV file format
3. CSV file is exported into a Jupyter Notebook environment for data cleaning and analysis using Python
4. All rows that are not represented by a release date within one of the two periods being studied is eliminated from the set.
5. Data is split into two datasets:
• Movies released from 1930 to 1949
• Movies released from 2000 to 2020
6. Both datasets are reduced so that they only include the ten highest grossing live-action films (animated films will not be analyzed for purpose of keeping the topic narrow)

After collecting and cleaning out the data, the following datasets were produced and show the ten highest grossing films for the two periods:

Now that the 20 films have been identified, we may now discuss collecting data for representational quality of the women in each period.

“Home.” Box Office Mojo, IMDb.com, www.boxofficemojo.com/.

II. Self-collected data for measuring representational quality

In order to make claims regarding the representational quality of women presented in each of the films, this project views each film through the lens of Mulvey and records the number of instances where actresses become objectified as their "to-be-looked-at-ness" is exploited in each film (Mulvey, 2012). This can be identified through camera perspectives that linger on the female figure for no other purpose but to allow/invite the audience to engage in voyeuristic pleasure (Mulvey, 2012). In other words, such instances do not advance the plot but instead divert from the story to pause so that sexually driven audiences have the chance to feed their sexual desires.

Male gaze may be identified through three different "perspectives":

• The audience's perspective
• The character's perspective
• A combination of audience and character perspectives

Examples of male gaze instances from each perspective:

Audience's perspective

Note that in this instance the audience becomes their own character (if you will) as a result of camera positioning. There is no character in the film who is simulatiously viewing the female figure from this position, thus we may describe this point of view as the audience's perspective. Moreover, this instance does nothing to push the plot foward, but instead puts up a barrier that distracts the viewer from the dialogue exchange between the characters. There is no point to this shot other than to emphasize Scarlett Johansson's body.

Character's perspective

In these instances the audience observes the female figure from the point of view of the the male character. These shots can either be from over the shoulder or directly mimicking the character's line of sight. This shot sequence from Citizen Kane (1939) features an example of the character's perpective from over the shoulder as well as the character's direct point of view. Like in this instance, the character's point of view is usually preceded or followed by a shot of the character facing the camera in order to establish the idea that this perspective is from the point of view of a particular character.

Combination of both perspectives

These instances are a bit more complex. They are made up of shots that cut between the point of view of the audience's "character" and the perspective of the male character who's actually in the scene. Both perspectives offered throughout this intercutting of shots are dialed in on the female figure. It might be argued that these shots provide a "better look" as the female character is observed from various angles. In this particular example from Dual in the Sun (1946), the male gaze instance begins from the audience's perpective but then cuts into the character's perspective.

Each of the three perspectives are be accounted for and summed at the end the analysis. Ultimately, an understanding of female representational quality presented in contemporary and Golden Age cinema derives from the comparison between the resulting total number of male gaze instances for each of the periods.

Of course, it must be noted that all self-collected data is recorded from my own perspective. Though this data reflects only my personal understanding of Mulvey's theories and other data collectors' ideas may vary in terms of what may be considered male gaze instances, it is not my intention to claim any absolutes from this analysis. Instead, the purpose of this method for collecting data (and this project as a whole) is to educate its audience so that both women and men have the potential to become better film viewers and gain the ability to recognize such poor representations through their own viewership. Perhaps, they may also speak out against such discrimination themselves.

Overview

After collecting data for each of the films, it may be concluded that the representations of women in the contemporary films are of better quality than those presented in the Golden Age films. Though there are less instances where women receive objectification through male gaze in the contemporary films, it must be noted that such instances are still present throughout the majority of these films. The items below will further explain the findings that have led to this conclusion.

The charts displayed above show the recorded data for the different types of male gaze instances in each of the films. The primary insight given by these charts is the fact the there is much variation between the different male gaze perspectives offered throughout each of the time periods. However, it is apparent that the Golden Age features more male gaze instances not only for total count, but for all three of the perspectives. This is illustrated further in the table below.

Male Gaze Instances by Period

Male Gaze Instances	Golden Age	Contemporary
Audience's Perspective	21	10
Character's Perspective	18	5
Combination of Perspectives	12	9
Total Count	51	24

There are two primary takeaways from this project:

1. In regard to objectification by male gaze, the representational quality of cinematic women has improved since Hollywood's Golden Age.
2. However, this subtle form of discrimination is not just a thing of the past. Hollywood still objectifies women today in order to satisfy male gaze.

Mulvey's male gaze theory is an effective tool for evaluating representational quality. Moreover, as contribution to the field of gender and media studies, this project provides a method for measuring Mulvey's ideas as well as an updated analyses of some of the more recent/most popular cinematic texts. However, one might ask if the number of male gaze instances is the only way to determine representational quality.

Can cinematic women receive objectification in other ways?

The simple answer is yes. This project can only answer the research question to a certain extent and it is important to understand that female characters are not objectified by male gaze alone. This is only one way in which representaional quality might be understood. In fact, there are a number of things that one might search for in their attempt to gauge a film's representational quality of women.

Below is a list of topics that might also be used in future projects that seek to answer the same research question:

• Realism and counter cinema (Claire Johnson)
• The female-in-jeopardy as a key component of the horror narrative (Carol J. Clover)
• Contrasts between feminine and masculine sexuality
• Contrasts between feminine and masculine personality

Though it is imperative that women are adequately represented on-screen in numbers, it is just as important that the gender is represented with accuracy and respect. Whether audiences realize it or not, cinema has a remarkable influence on our understanding of others as well as ourselves. Hollywood does have the ability to reconstruct social understandings for better or worse. We should be able to celebrate the representational triumphs that women have recently experienced, however, the fight for equality in this regard is not yet won. The feminist movement must continue demanding for better repesentation in all media projects, otherwise, Hollywood will continue to resort to what has worked for it in the past.

WORKS CITED

"After the Fall; Hollywood After Weinstein." The Economist, vol. 426, no. 9081, 2018, pp.75,

www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/03/03/the-aftermath-of-the-weinstein-scandal.

Gomery, Douglas, and Clara Pafort-Overduin. “Movie History: A Survey.” 2nd ed., Routledge, 2011.

Gray, Richard J., and Betty Kaklamanidou. The 21st Century Superhero: Essays on Gender, Genre and Globalization

in Film. McFarland, Jefferson, N.C, 2011.

“Home.” Box Office Mojo, IMDb.com, www.boxofficemojo.com/.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, 2nd ed., John

Wiley & Sons, 2012, pp. 267–274.

Schaffstall, Katherine. “Oscars: Women Shut Out for Best Director.” The Hollywood Reporter, 26 Jan. 2020,

www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/no-women-nominated-best-director-at-2020-oscars-1268599.