In the last decade or so, women have been inundated with movies created “for” us — cloying romantic comedies in which the heroine is charming but clumsy/insecure/desperate; in which she can have a “cool” job but can never truly successful. And, as we learned in that Tad Friend piece about Anna Faris in The New Yorker earlier this year:
But with Young Adult, Diablo Cody has thrown the usual tropes out the window. Charlize Theron plays Mavis, who is not the eyelash-batting optimist, but very blunt and fairly ruthless. Cody tells NPR:
I noticed in so many conventional romantic comedies, the women are always getting flustered. She never is. She blatantly tells the saleswoman that she’s trying to break up a marriage.
There are plenty of movies in which the main character is unsympathetic, unlikeable and unappealing, but he’s usually a man (think American Psycho, or Adam Sandler comedies). “I think we’re more conditioned to accept a male curmudgeon or a male antihero,” Cody tells NPR’s Linda Holmes. In an interview with New York magazine, she says something similar:
“I felt like there were a lot of movies out there about the man-child. It had become a kind of genre unto itself,” Cody says, referring to the films of Judd Apatow and his peers, from Knocked Up to The Hangover. “Everybody thinks the man-child is so funny and cuddly and lovable, but I thought there’s something sinister and disturbing about a woman who’s in the same place.”
Could it be that the rise of reality shows — in which women are often nasty-backstabby harpies not here to make friends — have prepared us for feature films with seriously flawed female characters? This year we’ve seen Bad Teacher and the boorish babes of Bridesmaids. Cody tells New York: “I believe in just having as many representations as possible of women onscreen … good, bad, shitty, whatever. There just needs to be volume.”
Diablo Cody Explores The Ugly Side Of Pretty In ‘Young Adult’ [NPR]
The Devil and Brook Busey [New York]
Dialogue: ‘Young Adult’ Writer Diablo Cody Strikes Back at the Haters [Movies.com]
Earler: Hollywood Insiders Admit Hollywood Hates Women
