While ringing up my latest Six Feet Under episodes, the clerk said to me, “you know, it’s a great show.  But every time I see the blond guy in movies, having seen him play a gay guy, it just doesn’t quite work.”

Michael C. Hall, the actor who plays David Fisher, the gay funeral director on Six Feet Under, isn’t blond.  Furthermore, he’s been in exactly two movies in his career, neither of which this man is likely to have seen. Hall is currently best known for playing the title role on Showtime’s serial killer drama Dexter, the mention of which drew only a vague “oh, yeah” from the clerk.  But despite not having a clear idea of who “the gay guy” on Six Feet Under is or where else one might have seen him, this man was sure that having once played a gay man would make any straight role ring false.

It’s disturbing that there are people who think like this, for whom a gay character is like a stain which an actor can never wash off. But it’s perhaps more disturbing that this man felt perfectly at ease sharing this thought with a stranger, as if the idea that I might be offended by the implications of his statement hadn’t even crossed his mind. This comment was delivered in the same carefree tone of voice as our previous exchanges about comic books and Paris Hilton’s storage unit.

Maybe he didn’t see how casting gayness as a trait so foreign any actor who portrays it invites permanent association could be seen as homophobic.  Maybe it never occurred to him that an average looking-girl with long hair and sparkly earrings, who has had multiple brief conversations with him without once mentioning a sexual attraction towards women, could be queer or queer-allied. But it’s clear that homosexuality is still so bizarre to this man that it’s the first thing his brain pulls up after seeing a Six Feet Under disc, despite the show’s numerous quirks and straight plotlines. And it’s clear that some people still have no mental mechanism in place to question their public statements about gay people.

I drove home feeling a little discouraged about the progress of sexual understanding. But more than that, I felt sorry for the clerk, whose thoughtless homophobia no doubt restrains his viewing experiences. Dexter is awesome. And I’ve never once expected the main character to have sex with a man.

Matt and I went to a nighttime showing of Eclipse on the second day of its release. We arrived a few minutes before the previews began and barely found seats.  The next showing, due to begin over an hour later, already had a long line of people waiting to get in.  These were not casual Twilight viewers, the kind of people who wander into a cineplex and pick any old movie to see.  These were people who made specific plans to see Eclipse as soon as possible.  And yet, the crowd was far from the reverent, Robert Pattinson-worshiping, squealing and fainting Twihards the media is so fond of writing about.

When Jacob, he of the impressively if slightly disturbingly toned midsection, whipped off his shirt approximately thirty seconds into a scene, the entire audience dissolved into laughter, not lustful shrieks.  When Edward’s slow-motion appearance was heralded by an extra-intense music cue, he was greeted by giggles, not declarations of love.  The two boys’ long, significant discussion of their deep feelings for Bella was a humorous highlight, not an emotional one.  Taking only the audience reactions into account, Eclipse is more of a comedy than a romantic drama.

While certainly there are the Twilight fans who would be horribly offended by anyone daring to laugh at their beloved series, the vast majority of Twilight enthusiasts welcome and enjoy the humor of the films.  Countless articles have been written by major media outlets about whether or not Twilight sets a bad example for girls and women or is a step backwards for feminism or is creating unrealistic expectations of romance, as if most people who pay to see the movies do so because they buy completely into the contrived plots and grandiose statements about love.  Perhaps the truth is that Eclipse is just like other big-budget summer blockbusters: a movie that people watch and are entertained by, and then exit and return to normal life.

The makers of Eclipse certainly don’t seem to think that their movie needs to be taken seriously. There’s a knowing glee to Jacob’s relentless shirtlessness, and lines like hot blooded-werewolf Jacob’s retort to cold-blooded vampire Edward “after all, I am hotter than you” are obvious winks at the Team Jacob/Team Edward pandemonium. Eclipse is a fun and mediocre movie like countless hit films before it. Maybe the main reason it draws so much scrutiny and criticism is that this time it’s mostly girls who are enjoying.

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Last night, my best friend and I went to see a new documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.  An in-depth look at the past year of Rivers’s life, interspersed with footage from her decades-long career and interviews with family and friends, the film was enlightening in the way that intensive examinations of the day-to-day existence of celebrities generally are.

Being famous is often quite unpleasant; the entertainment business is incredibly damaging; celebs cry, too, and so on.  But what makes this movie particularly interesting is that it’s a familiar story told about an unfamiliar subject: an older woman.

While visiting my mother a few weeks ago, I rented Crazy Heart, a movie about an old, past his prime musician struggling to keep his career vaguely afloat.  We decided that it reminded us of The Wrestler, a movie about an old, past his prime wrestler struggling to keep his career vaguely afloat.  The trend doesn’t end there; a few minutes thought produces any number of recent films about older men fighting to figure out where they now fit in the world (Gran Torino, Harry Brown, even terrible broad comedies like Old Dogs).

There’s nothing wrong with these movies existing, of course. Several of them are even excellent. But as older men manage to stake out their place in the youth- and beauty-dominated film industry, it becomes ever clearer how rarely older women are presented as main characters of stories, how rarely their lives are depicted as complex and still developing.

For the numerous easy jokes one can make about Joan Rivers, she is a 77-year-old female comedian and actress who has been working steadily since the 1960s.  After struggles with her career drove her manager husband to suicide in 1987, she pushed herself onward, reinventing herself as a red carpet staple.  The documentary shows us a woman who has no desire or even ability to retire, who is determined to continue working to support herself and her many dependents for as long as she possibly can.  This is not a woman who has settled comfortably into old age but a woman who is still striving, still discontent.

People over the age of 60 in popular culture, especially women, are generally regulated to being kindly advice givers, crotchety neighbors and relatives, or tragic tales of illness.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons why so many women are so desperate to avoid all signs of aging; they know that once they reach a certain age, their lives will cease to be considered interesting and they will cease to be considered a real player in the world.

Though Joan Rivers is hardly a great example of growing older gracefully or even naturally, in her documentary she provides a powerful image of a woman growing older vibrantly.  Maybe if we had more depictions like this in our films and on our televisions, the idea of aging would be less terrifying, less linked to becoming irrelevant.

Originally popularized in Allison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the Bechdel Test is made up of three simple questions, designed to evaluate the presence of substantial female characters in a movie.  The test has been tweaked by many, but here’s the most common version at the present.

When watching a film, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Are there two or more female characters with names?

2. Do they talk to each other?

3. If they do talk to each other, do they talk about something other than a man?

Although this seems like a fairly low bar, a stunning number of popular films fail the test.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that male-targeted action movies like The Dark Knight, The Bourne Identity, Transformers, Terminator: Salvation, Men in Black, all three Lord of the Rings, Mission Impossible, Braveheart, Gladiator, and many, many more don’t pass.

But neither do many broadly-aimed comedies, such as Austin Powers, The Wedding Singer, or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Or many family friendly films, including Wall-E, Home Alone, The Princess Bride, and Shrek.  Even classic chick flick When Harry Met Sally fails to meet this low standard for substantive female presence.

Of course, this test doesn’t determine whether a movie is worth watching or even whether or not it presents positive images of women.  What it does is makes us think about how accustomed we are to the uneven representation of men and women in our films.  Trying the Bechdel Test for men is almost laughable; it’s practically impossible to think of a film without multiple substantial male characters.  But the lack of women is something few notice.

photo credit: CarbonNYC

Obviously, only the most central plot points and themes could be covered. So why, then, would a show which always focused more on building complicated mythologies and dealing with huge life questions than on developing credible romances devote so much of its finale to kissing and flirting?

During the final episode, all of the characters existing in the “Sideways world” were brought back to consciousness of their real lives on the island through a renewed connection with another character. The vast majority of these enlightening encounters were romantic; most of the characters only remembered their past selves once their lips were touched to another’s.  This implies that these romantic/sexual relationships were the most important element of these characters’ existence, that their stories are fundamentally love stories.

For some characters, such as married couple Sun and Jin or would-be family unit Claire and Charlie, the lovers’ reunion as memory trigger makes sense. But for most, it seems an odd summation of their time on the show.  Is Jack’s will-they-or-won’t-they relationship with Kate truly the key to his character? Are Sawyer and Juliet, both of whom played many different roles on the island and went through drastic changes, best summed up by a reminder of their season 5 romance? Is Sayid’s tortured existence, focused for so long on his search for Nadia, really hinged on his random-seeming affair with Shannon, a character who died back in season 2?

The most exciting and meaningful relationships on Lost were never the romances but the rivalries, the clashes of competing viewpoints.  The show’s flirtations and sexual tensions always seemed an afterthought, lines and moments added in because some amount of romance is expected in a network drama, not because much of the show truly depended on love affairs.  Having seen every episode of Lost, it’s hard not to be a bit disappointed that the finale treads the well-traveled path of making it all about romance.

Watching the last episode of Lost, it’s hard not to wonder if our culture is even capable of telling stories that aren’t about sex or romance.  It’s difficult to imagine a major film without at least a romantic subplot, or a TV show with no love interests, or even a popular song that isn’t about sex or relationships.  While certainly these are important elements of many people’s lives, this cultural obsession with love seems a bit unnecessary.  There are, in fact, other parts of live to talk about.

I reviewed the movie for my school’s newspaper back in January, but my mom is constantly a little behind the times, and I had liked it enough to agree to watch it again.

What struck my mom the most about the film, and what I think left such an impression on me the first time, is the unconventional way in which the major romance, between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga, unfolds.  We are so accustomed to stories about love progressing in certain ways that it can be quite shocking when the plot takes a different turn. [Spoilers ahead!]

For those who haven’t seen the movie and don’t mind having plot details revealed (or for those who ignored my warning), Up in the Air tells the story of a man, Ryan, whose job keeps him flying all over the country the vast majority of every year, a man who resists settling into a home or a deep emotional connection to another human being.  He meets a woman, Alex, another career traveler, whose independent spirit and interest in fun and excitement instead of commitment and rules attracts him immediately.

Ryan eventually comes to realize that he is dissatisfied with the detached way he floats through the world and that he wants something more substantial in his life.  Unprompted, with no warning, he catches a flight to Alex’s hometown of Chicago and shows up at her front door, sheepish smile on his face belying his expectations of a grand romantic moment.  It’s a perfect movie image.

Only Alex doesn’t throw herself into his arms.  With the husband and children she never mentioned to Ryan surrounding her, she pretends not to recognize him and calmly shuts the door.  She calls him soon after, not to apologize for deceiving him or reveal that he is the one she truly loves, but to ask him why he would think that she wanted a more serious relationship from him when she had never said or done anything to indicate she was looking for more than casual dating.

This moment in the movie is great because we are just as surprised as Ryan.  We too expect Alex to be thrilled by his visit, or perhaps so traumatized that she couldn’t bear to see him again.  We certainly don’t expect her to chastise him and then propose they continue with their relaxed affair as if nothing had happened.  But why not?

Our culture, to a large extent because of movies and TV shows,  is used to thinking of men and women in certain predetermined ways.  Women are generally depicted as strongly desirous of commitment and men as less willing to settle down, so even though Alex tells Ryan and us that she doesn’t want a serious relationship with him, we assume that once he figures out his own commitment issues, she will be happy to invest more time and energy in him.  Our ideas about men and women in relationships are so ingrained that we automatically decide that Alex is lying or just wrong about what she wants. She’s a woman; how could she not want a real relationship?

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Lee DeWyze is officially the winner of the ninth season of American Idol.  The triumph of Lee, the third scruffy, low-key, guitar strumming, regular Joe white guy in a row, over the dreadlocked and husky voiced Crystal Bowersox will no doubt cause a certain amount of consternation amongst the incredibly devoted Idol commentators and fanbase.

Many will blame tween girls and their mothers for voting with their eyes instead of their ears, and many will claim that Crystal deserved the win. But Idol is a voting show, a show about giving the people what they want. And if “the people” are young girls and middle-aged women, why shouldn’t their desires count?

In recent years, as the Idol viewership has dropped, reaching record lows this season, the voting process has become more and more dominated by hardcore, intensely invested fans and less by casual viewers. There is no limit on how many votes a household can call or text in, making it possible for people to vote constantly for the full two hour voting window. Many fans do, some even dialing or typing on two phones at once. And the vast majority of those committed fans are females younger than 18 and older than 35.

As this trend developed, it became much more difficult for female contestants to do well on the show. The last female winner was Jordin Sparks in season 6, a season that offered a particularly weak crop of men. Both the seventh and eighth seasons featured all male final twos, and the eighth and ninth both had only one female in the top five.

This is of course unfortunate for the talented women competing on Idol. DeWyze, for all of his sheepish everyman charm, is a noticeably less polished and prepared performer than Bowersox; he suffers from frequent pitch problems and an embarrassingly awkward stage persona.

But Idol has never been just about raw talent. The show has always been about finding personalities that appeal to the masses of viewers, and by the nature of a voting competition, the person who manages to earn the most votes automatically deserves the title. Bowersox may be a better singer and performer than DeWyze, but he clearly did a better job of drawing the adoration of the Idol audience, so he is the rightful winner.

It is disturbing that the female dominated audience is so uninterested in supporting contestants of their own gender, just as it is disturbing that Adam Lambert’s sexuality was a factor in last season’s voting patterns and that there has not been a legitimate African American male contender for the title since season two. This tendency to choose similar regular dude guitar players as winners is probably also disturbing to the label which has to give them recording contracts, if season 8 winner Kris Allen’s tepid album sales and season 7 winner David Cook’s struggles with radio singles and lack of media presence are any indication.

So maybe the tastes of tween girls and their moms are problematic for 19 Recordings, who has to try to maintain their fickle affections for the cute guy of their year, and for the few Idol fans who for some reason think the show is supposed to crown the absolute most musically talented contestant. But their opinions aren’t invalid, and they’re not ruining anything. They like seeing blandly nice, nonthreateningly attractive boys on their TV, and they’re willing to wear out their dialing fingers to get it. Good for them.

One distribution exec even commented that these were the kinds of female numbers one might expect for a movie aimed specifically at that demographic, such as Sex and the City 2.  So why did such a theoretically male-targeted film draw so many women?  Or should the real question be: why is the studio so surprised?

Conventional film wisdom says that superhero movies, such as Iron Man 2, are mostly movies for men, particularly men under the age of 35.  The constant explosions, gun battles, and macho heroics of this sort of film are thought of as generally male attractions.  Women might get dragged along to something like Iron Man 2 by a husband or boyfriend or male friend; they might even be happy to go spend a few hours being entertained by big flashes and crashes.  But this isn’t supposed to be the kind of material with which women really connect.

The major tip-off that Iron Man 2 wasn’t really written with the expectation of a large, enthusiastic female audience is the lack of compelling female characters.  Women are pretty much always one-dimensional side characters in superhero and other action films, either beautiful damsels in distress or beautiful seductresses luring men to their doom. 

Iron Man 2 is no different. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts is a wimpy and largely ineffectual sidekick to Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, floundering when given a major business responsibility and abandoning all of her fully-justified anger at the hero as soon as he pulls her in for a kiss.  Scarlett Johansson’s Natalie Rushman/Natasha Romanoff gets one rather awesome fight scene, in which she lays waste to several burly goons within a span of about three minutes, but her screen time is minimal and character development practically non-existent. Like Paltrow, Johansson basically ends up serving as just a really hot chick with whom Downey Jr. can flirt.

So then why did so many women see (and judging from the average Cinemascore of A, enjoy) a movie with no relateable female characters?  Maybe in spite of industry thinking that assumes that women can only get truly invested in films with completely female-dominated casts, such as the Sex and the City series, women enjoy “masculine” superhero fantasies just as much as men.  Maybe when women watch Iron Man 2, they don’t try to imagine themselves waiting frantically in the wings like Pepper Potts but flying through the air and saving the day like Tony Stark.  Maybe gender isn’t the huge barrier to enjoyment studios seem to think it is.

In her recently released video for the album’s first single, “Not Myself Tonight,” Aguilera uses a common tool of the female pop star who wants some extra press: getting sexy with another woman.

Female pop singers are constantly trying to prove how sexually adventurous they are, deliberately positioning themselves as fantasy material for a still male-dominated society. It’s pretty surprising if a female pop star does a video in which she doesn’t appear practically naked.

To see how necessary “scandalous” displays of sexuality are for a woman to make it in current pop music, one need look no further than Miley Cyrus’s new video “Can’t Be Tamed,” a clear attempt to transition her teen queen image into an adult career through bondage gear and sensual writhing.

More and more, women in pop music are using bisexuality to signal their libidinal wildness, placing lesbian sex in a category with stripping and sadomasochism.  These pop stars are often very clear about the fact that their girl-on-girl encounters are naughty novelties. The scenes of Aguilera rubbing up against another scantily clad woman are interwoven with clips of her in fetish wear, with lyrics like “I’m doing things I normally won’t do” reinforcing the idea this is atypical, particularly risque behavior.

Perhaps the most obvious examples of using lesbianism to shock and scandalize are the Madonna/Britney Spears/(and once again) Christina Aguilera liplocks at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards and Katy Perry’s ode to recreational bisexuality, “I Kissed a Girl.” The VMA kisses were clear attention grabs, a symbolic passing of the scandal from one generation’s female sexual provocateur to the next’s, meant to shock an audience, not express actual sexual attraction between the three women. “I Kissed a Girl” features this judgmental comment on Perry’s girl kissing behavior: “It’s not what good girls do/ not how they should behave.”

Female pop stars, though their record and ticket-purchasing audiences are largely female, still rely on the male gaze when designing their imagery.  When Christina Aguilera gets raunchy with a woman in a video, she is not expressing her own sexuality or presenting female-female relationships as an acceptable possibility, she is catering to the large amounts of men who enjoy watching two extremely feminine women kiss and to the large amount of the population who still sees homosexual relations as dangerous and shocking.

She is implying that being with another woman is the kind of thing women might experiment with when they’re feeling particularly wild but not the kind of behavior that fits into normal, respectable sexual conduct.  This and other pop culture displays of lesbian tourism promote the idea that sex between two women is always scandalous.

In a media dominated by images of oafish, layabout husbands and angry, overcritical wives, a film that presents familiar marital issues from both sides, without relying on lame “women are always like this; men are always like that” humor is something to get excited about.

Married couples don’t come off particularly well in popular culture. Movies, TV shows and advertising are littered with confused, incompetent and often even uncaring fathers and husbands. We are constantly being told that middle-aged men don’t have a useful place in modern family life, that ever since middle and upper class women starting taking on full-time jobs, men lost their familial role.

Rather than try to solve the problem or help out more around the house or with the kids, pop culture often tells us that all men want is to hide away with their male friends and drink, or watch football on TV to escape their families, or have affairs.

Wives, on the other hand, are often portrayed as domineering and cold, bitter about the pressures they face and uninterested in sex or fun.  In their quest to do it all, these women have apparently lost the joy in life, and they spend their time ordering around their henpecked husbands and yelling at their children.

Modern couples certainly do face a lot of problems, and the movement of women into the workplace and the public sector, while clearly a huge positive, has caused quite a shake-up in the structure of American families. But a mass media which is dominated by the Jon and Kate Gosselin version of marriage, where both partners become vicious and unlikable, or the Sandra Bullock-Jesse James version, where we’re left wondering if a woman really can have huge career success and a healthy relationship at the same time, is not helping.

So maybe try to see Date Night. The main characters are a surprisingly relateable married couple, who face the same pressures of full-time jobs and full-time parenthood that so many Americans do and who find themselves in a marital rut that many will find familiar. But unlike the Gosselins, or the father on the couch with a beer while his wife deals with the kids, or the wife berating her husband for an honest and small mistake, this couple deals with their problem like caring, emotionally mature adults.

The husband wants to help out more around the house and with the kids, and the wife wants to let him support her more; they just aren’t quite sure how to do that. And so they talk about their problems, and they come up with viable ways for each of them to improve.

It’s a pretty revolutionary cinematic image.