Treatment of Women in Two Films
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The treatment of women in the films The girl Can't Help It (Frank Tashlin, 1957) and Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) reflects both the attitudes of the time in which the film was made and to a degree the attitudes of an earlier age, notably the 1920s in Some Like It Hot. The films have similarly ambivalent credentials--each film makes full use of the beautiful woman as sexual object, presenting her again and again as a source of titillation for the males in the audience just as she is for male characters in the film, while at the same time the underlying theme in each film tries to downgrade the woman as sexual object and to elevate her to a different status. In each case, there are a number of males who buy into and even live by the stereotype of women, while other males in the films serve as converts to what we might characterize as a mildly feminist point of view. Some Like It Hot is both more daring and more interesting in this regard, for it not only has males who come to understand and empathize with women better, but these males actually experience what it means to be a woman and gain their empathy from that experience. Show business is also the milieu for both stories, and the dichotomy noted above comes into play here as show business often relies on the stereotype as a lure while at the same time offering women a chance to have a career in a man's world that they might not otherwise have been able to have. The Girl Can't Help It is overtly occupied with
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wn creation than with the person who exists before he starts the process of creation. The image is what fascinates all the males in town, while for Tom it is the reality. The film manages thus to have it both ways, to build itself on precisely the sort of sexpot image it tries to undercut as false and imposed. The film manages to do the same thing with the budding world of rock music--it pokes fun at the rock world and sees it as false, but the movie has a dozen or more rock songs in it and features a number of singing groups from the period. The film thus debunks and benefits from precisely the same elements with reference both to rock and to the image of women in the media. It is clear that the filmmakers believe that women do not have to do anything in show business except look good, and looks are exploited in this film as in any other.
The creation of an image is less central in Some Like It Hot, but it is clear that the all-girl band owes more to beauty for its success than it does to musical ability. Indeed, as the band travels from place to place, it serves as a lure to males of all sorts, and this is especially true once the band reaches Miami and serves as the central attraction for a group of lecherous millionair
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Approximate Word count = 1777
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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