Fettered by a faux stereotype

EARLY last month, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary added the term “chick flick” to its 11th edition. But I still don’t know what it means. The dictionary definition -- “Chick flick (noun) 1988: a motion picture intended to appeal esp. to women” -- doesn’t describe a type of movie or define a genre or even identify an audience by its tastes or interests.

It doesn’t do much, actually, beyond legitimize the already generally accepted notion that there are movies for everyone, and then there are movies for women. Like a miracle household product, it marginalizes as it defines.

Maybe the dictionary is just shy, but it fails to mention what just about anyone could tell you: That “chick flick” is a term that originated, and is still commonly used, as a way to dismiss a movie so sappy or saccharine only a girl could like it. The term was later reclaimed by women to describe any movie that attempts to reflect contemporary female experience, deals with issues of importance to women, or lampoons a certain type of girl or girly predicament. Nora Ephron even used it as a tongue-in-cheek joke in 1993, when in “Sleepless in Seattle” Tom Hanks calls “An Affair to Remember” a “chick movie.”

But in the last decade or so, “chick flick” seems to have once again become the dread “communist” or “terrorist” of cinematic allegations -- one random accusation and it’s all over. If the definitions remain somewhat unclear, the result of their overuse is not: “Chick flick” herds vastly different films into one cramped, unventilated ghetto. If a movie meets one of the above criteria -- be it as serious as “North Country” or as fluffy as “The Wedding Date” -- someone, somewhere, will call it a “chick flick.” The term has created a category, in other words, not the other way around.

And it’s a blanket category at that, the smothering kind. It has made it so that a movie like “Wedding Crashers” is simply considered a comedy, whereas movies like “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion” (a satire with female characters) or “The Sweetest Thing” (a raunchy comedy) are considered chick flicks -- even when they share more in common with contemporary mainstream comedies than with the “women’s pictures” of the 1930s and ‘40s from which, Athena-like, they are supposed to have sprung.

Like many reclaimed pejoratives, “chick flick” remains a volatile term. You can tell by the way some handle it gingerly and others lob it like a grenade. For example, in July 2004, O magazine published an article ranking the “50 Greatest Chick Flicks of All Time,” which included Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” at No. 11. That point was echoed in an interview on Canadian television in which Daldry said of his movie, “I don’t think this is a chick flick at all. I think there are real serious issues about how we live our lives and change our lives that are relevant to everybody.”

Similarly, Curtis Hanson’s “In Her Shoes” was praised for being “no mere chick flick” (Yahoo News); “a chick flick with both substance and style” (the Hollywood Reporter); and “the fall’s blue chip chick flick” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer). The Detroit News was happy to report “it’s a chick flick for non-chicks, too” and the Gannett News Service called it “A Chick Flick With Manly Appeal.”

In other words, by lumping all movies about women into the same category, quality female-centric movies are put in the awkward position of having to assert their quality by denying the female-centric label. So much for reclaiming.

Molly Haskell put it perfectly when she wrote in the Guardian, “in simultaneously arguing for the ‘seriousness’ of women’s concerns, then relegating the films that address them to a ghetto, we find ourselves caught in a conundrum.” It’s that conundrum that leads to evaluations such as Roger Ebert’s description of “In Her Shoes” as being “ ... no soppy chick flick, and anyway what is a ‘chick flick’ but an insulting term for a movie that’s about women instead of the usual testosterone carriers.”

If the term is indeed insulting and meaningless, why mention it at all? Why cite a separate standard by which not to judge a movie you happen to like? Because it has become a compulsory addition to any discussion about movies about women -- and anyone, male or female, who makes one winds up spending at least some of their promotional time living the label down.

On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Michele Norris introduced an interview with Hanson using the new Webster’s entry followed by the question, “Does the film fit that definition?” No wonder Hanson “resists the chick flick label,” as Norris says, “even though high heels are a central theme, he says the story that follows the sisters and their grandmother played by Shirley MacLaine has universal appeal.” [NPR-ish mock-ingenuous emphasis theirs.]

A PERCEPTION ENCROACHES

BUT where male directors may wave it away with a grumble and move on to something else, the threat may be more serious to female directors trying to bring women’s experiences to the screen. In a recent interview in Slate magazine, writer Pamela Paul posed this question to director Niki Caro, whose movie “North Country” tells the story of the first class-action sexual harassment suit: “Both ‘Whale Rider’ and ‘North Country’ are stories about female empowerment. Do you worry about being marginalized as a woman director of films for women?”

“Yeah, I do,” Caro replies, “because that’s not what I do. I don’t see myself as a crusading feminist filmmaker. Not at all.... Personally, I have nothing to prove. But I’m tremendously curious about human nature. Female life is so incredibly under-explored in cinema, so these stories feel very exotic.”

Forget, for the moment, the weird characterization of Caro’s movies as being about female empowerment. (Are “Free Willy” and “The Insider” stories about male empowerment, or are they just stories about a boy and his large sea mammal, and of a lone crusader and his big, bad corporation, respectively?) Think instead about the philosophical gymnastics required to present oneself as a cool enough chick to be OK with being called a chick, but not with one’s movie being called a “chick flick,” because that would imply it’s silly, or histrionic, or a turnoff. Caro’s carefully worded response is incredibly freighted with the difficulties of trying to make art from human experience when the experience in question is female.

What’s interesting about the idea of chick flicks is not just that it assumes that audiences are easily split down the middle by gender, but that it implies that any man -- especially a young one -- who enjoys a film about women is somehow an anomaly.

In compiling a list of movies that feature some of the best female characters available on DVD -- real, live girls on film -- I loitered for a while on the message boards in the Internet Movie Database. Underneath the listing for Jill Sprecher’s “Clockwatchers” (1997), a story about four women with nothing in common but their job hatred, was a post titled, “This is not a chick-flick ... Sheesh.” “I’m a 20-year-old male,” it read, “and for liking this movie since I was 14, people consider me weird or seem to lose respect for me.... This movie doesn’t have to be [about] ... four chicks in an office. It could be four teens at a McDonald’s ... four dudes in a restaurant, four old women in a nurs[ing] home.... The point of this story is about “clock-watchers” -- people whose lives are empty and disjointed

We live in an age in which identity is splintered, in which monolithic forces such as globalism have had a profound effect on who we are. Which is why the general impulse in much high art today is to present the kaleidoscopic nature of self as the defining characteristic of modern human experience -- the problem of individual identity in a culture that has become un-rooted, disjointed and fractured has become our universal subject. So how has the notion of a category that appeals to “the essential woman” but not to men survived in Hollywood?

One possibility is that the percentage of women working in a creative capacity in the movies remains small. Of the 7,400 members of the Directors Guild of America who are directors, only 13% of them are women. According to Cal State San Diego professor Martha Lauzen’s 2004 study, women made up 5% of all directors working on the top 250 films of recent years. And the percentage of women working as directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors on the top domestic-grossing films has declined over the last four years.

Sad as these statistics are, it would be wrong to chalk the problem up entirely to this. There are arguably as many male directors making humanistic movies about female characters as there are female directors churning out pandering, artistically irrelevant product. (Well, OK, maybe not as many.) Nor does it fully explain the studios’ reluctance to make smart and honest movies about women. After all, women have been running studios for years.

GOOD INTENTIONS GONE BAD

ANOTHER possibility is that it stems from an overly simplistic understanding of the political correctness movement of the ‘80s and ‘90s, with its insistence on “positive representations of women” and “strong female role models” -- a well-intentioned bad idea that has yielded scads of movies featuring gorgeous, willfully celibate chicks with guns; gorgeous, reluctantly celibate super-singles in the city succeeding at work but failing (for a little while) at love; and, less often, noble victims who bravely take on the world and win.

Mostly, though, it comes down to marketing -- and the way we have internalized the demographic-obsessed thinking it imposes. As most anyone who lives here knows, Hollywood is strangely susceptible to its own myths, which it reinforces daily. It has become almost impossible to read about the presumed likes and dislikes of female audiences as understood by a nervously deferential member of the film industry without feeling a profound sense of sadness and alienation.

I felt it a few months ago, while reading an article in this paper on the making of “The 40 Year-Old Virgin.” The piece described a scene in which Andy (Steve Carell) and his girlfriend, Trish (Catherine Keener), are fighting because Trish doesn’t understand why Andy won’t sleep with her. Apparently, the scene had been causing Carell and director Judd Apatow some concern because it called for Trish to lash out at Andy and make fun of his bicycle. When Andy defensively replies that Einstein rode a bike, Trish snaps that Einstein also had a wife with whom he had sex.

The article continued: “Some young men thought Trish was too shrewish, Carell says, and he and Apatow worried the Einstein line would turn women against her too ... ‘but it did exactly the opposite,’ Carell said. ‘The women in the audience loved it, and I would have thought the reverse.’ ”

Why the reverse? Why would Trish getting impatient with Andy’s apparent lack of interest in sex “test” badly? Have we so internalized entertainment industry notions of femininity that normal human behavior has become unrecognizable on the screen?

A few years ago, I interviewed comic book writer and screenwriter Daniel Clowes, and he told me about the trouble he and Terry Zwigoff had in making “Ghost World,” the story of an angry, sarcastic high school art-geek, her neglected best friend and the thirtysomething man whose life she carelessly wrecks without entirely meaning to.

“The things that happened were all the things you would think of,” Clowes said, describing his meetings with executives. “They would say, ‘Oh, it’s great, we’ll get Jennifer Love Hewitt.’ And we’d think, ‘Wait, that’s what this is opposed to!’ I’m sure she’s a very nice person, but she’s got the opposite personality these girls have! And they would say, ‘Oh. I thought she was supposed to be really pretty ... ‘ They’d also say, ‘Girls don’t talk like this. Girls don’t swear.’ ... They really refused to believe that these were realistic characters.”

Not having seen “North Country” yet, I can’t say whether its characters are realistic or not. I did see “In Her Shoes” and Jane Anderson’s “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,” though, and didn’t think they entirely measured up to that standard. But while I was writing about them, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that their protagonists, and in one case their director, were women. Considering the prevailing tone of discussion about women’s movies, I wonder if I should have.

That’s the thing about coming of age in the era of post-feminism -- which by now (what time is it?) may have segued into post-post-feminism. As someone who was a kid throughout the women’s movement, I thought feminism had largely to do with whether your mother was anti-Barbie or Barbie-neutral.

So I forget that things weren’t ever thus. I forget that the culture seems to have reverted to a binary system, at least in matters of taste.

We accept the mindless repetition of phrases such as “chick flick” and “chick lit” because they’ve already passed through the purifying filter of irony and appropriation, and -- thanks to lazy journalistic overuse -- into the realm of annoying catchphrase and cliche. But the longer it lingers, the more it irritates, like a piece of gravel stuck in my shoe.

Times film critic Carina Chocano can be contacted by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.