You may not agree with the views in the article below - there are many points I'd disagree with - but you will certainly find useful material to help contextualise your own work as filmmakers putting representations of gender on-screen, and reflecting (probably still quite unconsciously at this stage) contemporary ideas and ideologies in doing so.
Article URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/mar/22/heathers-mean-girls-hairspray
The Observer,Talking about bad girls
Michael Lehmann's 1988 masterpiece Heathers ushered in a new type of film, one in which schoolgirls were not simply one-dimensional caricatures, says Eva Wiseman
- Heathers
- Production year: 1989
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 18
- Runtime: 102 mins
- Directors: Michael Lehmann
- Cast: Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Winona Ryder
Girlhood is a horrid thing, a time awash with sebum, diaries read out loud and all your friends a desirable nine out of 10 to your un-gorgeous six. Lunch hours spent with your arms folded to mock up a cleavage and notes in the margin of a GCSE poetry textbook that, in the dim light of your parents' TV, take on such meaning, such teenage magnitude, that you're tearful by teatime.
The years before you leave home are largely nightmarish, or at least, through the haze of alcopops and hormones, for many of us they seemed that way. I never really knew the girls who were having the times of their lives - they moved faster. They got the boys they wanted, they learned to manage and maintain all the embarrassments of puberty within a single half-term. But one thing they never "got" the way we did, with our lank hair and uneven skin tone, were certain films. Heathers (the 1988 murder comedy starring 16-year-old Winona Ryder as Veronica Sawyer, a breakaway member of a popular girl gang), with its poisoned cheerleaders and vision of high school as a Technicolor battleground, spoke to us, the girls who didn't quite fit in.
The teenage girl on film, says Kate Random Love, a feminist theorist, "is a wonderful barometer for measuring a culture's fantasies and anxieties about femininity at the time. For example, it's surely no coincidence that in the 1970s - the decade that began with the second wave of feminist uprisings - the most notable representations of female adolescence were in horror films such as The Exorcist and Carrie. Femininity itself became a monstrous force rising up with the potential to destroy everything." In the 1980s, the teenage girl on film (Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club) was obsessed with cash; in the 1990s and early 2000s she was a beacon of spiritual development (Clueless, Legally Blonde) and dangerous sexuality (But I'm a Cheerleader, Boys Don't Cry). "Since then, teen girls in film have become more complex and less one-dimensional, and invite a much more ambivalent response from the viewer - in Mean Girls [2004] we spend a lot of our time actually hating Cady Heron, the main protagonist," says Random Love.
