Every so often a writer shines in our huddled little world of film coverage. That writer this week is Mark Harris, on the Oscar beat at Vulture this year. Harris chose to write up the success of Melissa McCarthy whose films must always be filtered through that “straight white guy” gaze each and every time they come out. I don’t see this as sexist, particularly, or misogynist or anything like that – it’s just this idea that the films might be aimed at women. And if they aren’t aimed at women, they would be aimed at people laughing AT McCarthy. Well, whatever the reason it does seem as though she could be suffering from Hillary Clinton syndrome – it doesn’t matter how successful or ambitious she becomes, she will always be painted as “struggling” or failing somehow.
Harris writes:
Critics can like or dislike these movies and her work in them, but to survey them in toto and perceive uniformity feels like a willful refusal to see her at all, an insistence that the difference between her various performances matters less than the sameness of her strange determination to continue to be Melissa McCarthy while starring in movies. Is it because she looks so different than other movie stars that some people have convinced themselves she’s always the same?
It’s tempting to argue that the coolness with which McCarthy’s success is greeted in some quarters is another example of the industry (and some of those who cover it) having a problem with powerful women. But this is 2016, and we’ve come a long way — today, people understand that they’re supposed to disguise that feeling! Hollywood is now fine with actresses being powerful, as long as it can maintain some control over how “power” is defined. The kind of powerful woman the industry likes is Reese Witherspoon, who uses her power to buy a lot of deserving books and give work to a lot of deserving scriptwriters, and every once in a while takes a role that will get her an Oscar nomination but is fine with doing supporting roles or HBO. It likes Charlize Theron, because she knows how the game is played and she keeps her “brand” current by doing Fast 8 and Fury Road, the big stuff that’s at the heart of the industry, so that she can go off and do the little stuff that Hollywood doesn’t care about, because she’s earned it, just like, you know, a guy. It likes, or at least respects, Angelina and Julia and Jodie because they’ve all been around a long time, and these days they dip in and out of mainstream movies, but they don’t seem to want it that badly and isn’t that a kind of power, the power of graceful middle-aged retreat and occasional return, the power of not having to be No. 1 all the time? And don’t all those women look just great? Aren’t they aging well?
McCarthy is different; she has set fresher terms. Although she is, at 45, roughly in the same age bracket as many of these women, as a box-office commodity she is much newer and younger — she came into her power in a more recent era. And her deal is she wants to work all the time, and she wants to be the star, and sometimes she wants her husband, Ben Falcone, to direct her, and she wants the industry to recognize that she delivers.
Harris is asking the questions carefully, and not pointing fingers or making snap judgments. He’s asking us to ask ourselves what is OUR problem with Melissa McCarthy as a singular box office phenomenon? Is it that sex always has to have something to do with our admiration of a female star? And the fact that with McCarthy, sex isn’t necessarily a driving force except when she decides she wants to play with it? It’s an interesting proposition Harris has laid out, and in many ways his piece has given film journalists an opportunity to catch a wave of change before it consumes them.
