Men vs. Women: A Movie Title-Off

Last weekend I returned to the movie theatre for the first time since the summer blockbuster season began. The film that beckoned me back as well as stirred me from my Six Feet Under stupor — I’m foolishly watching the entire depressing series in 2 months — was Solitary Man (Koppelman and Levien, 2010). Starring Michael Douglas, who looks every bit his 66 years (I mean that in a good way), Solitary Man, I’ll warn you, is not a feel-good movie. Throughout the 90-minute film, Douglas’s character sulks about his failed marriage, failed career, failed parenting skills, failed infidelities, failed body, and failed friendships. And, yeah, it’s all his fault. See, not so uplifting. On the other hand, what Solitary Man achieves, like last year’s Crazy Heart (Scott Cooper) and A Single Man (Tom Ford), is a compact, well-paced story — a nice “slice-of-life plot,” to borrow from the Italian Neorealists. For that reason, I’ll take it over mindless summer flicks any day.

Before Solitary Man began, however, I had a couple of thoughts: (1) Wow, I’m the youngest patron here. As I looked around the theatre, every person looked to be in his/her 50s, 60s, or 70s. Guess I’m not the target audience… (2) It seems as though a lot of films have been released recently with the word MEN or MAN in the title. While sitting in the dark trying to avoid eye contact with the creepy Screenvision guy, I came up with several male-gendered titles in my mind: the aforementioned A Single Man, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, I Love You, Man, X-Men, Yes Man, and Children of Men.

When I returned home, I thought more about all of these MENs/MANs and did a little research on the matter. According to the Internet Movie Database, 376 English-speaking movies feature the words MEN in their titles; and a whopping 1,120 feature the word MAN. While we’re at it, only 30 film titles employ the word MALE, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999) and I Was a Male War Bride (1949) being the two the most well known. That means, since the inception of cinema (c. 1895), nearly 1,500 movies have included in their titles the words MEN or MAN. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose 1,500 isn’t that huge a statistic, but then I wondered how that compares with the number of movies that feature the words WOMEN or WOMAN.

According to IMDB, 433 English-speaking films feature the word WOMAN, and 258 feature the word WOMEN. Honestly, I thought this total, nearly 700 movies, would be much less. Still, what is somewhat surprising (or maybe it’s really not) is that many of these pictures, you’ll notice from the posters below, still center on male characters. See, for example, Dr. T and the Women, The Man Who Loved Women, When a Man Loves a Woman, Scent of a Woman, and His Kind of Woman. Moreover, as one can tell from the promotional shots for Chain Gang Women (possible girl-on-girl action!) and Jesse James’s Women (cat fight!), these movies are created specifically for heterosexual (white) males. Finally, all of the female-titled posters except two (yeah, I’m assuming Lily Tomlin’s ape is male) prominently feature men in them, and some don’t even include women at all. [NOTE: These statistics include "Adult" movies as well; I'm sorry to say that IMDB's advanced search engine (not so advanced, eh?) does not allow users to deselect certain genres.]

What may we conclude about the MEN/MAN posters, one might ask? First, many of the males pictured look directly at the viewer, suggesting their active status in the film. Contrast this with the women’s posters for a moment: only three depict a female character looking outward; in fact, most of the women look away from the camera or longingly at the men with whom they will likely be involved in the film’s narrative. Second, when women are featured in some of the MEN/MAN posters, they are positioned, as we might except, both passively and seductively (e.g., Grumpy Old Men, Of Mice and Men, Three Men on a Horse, The Thin Man). Third, several of these posters portray men wielding guns; again, this is no surprise since a man’s virility is often denoted onscreen via weapons, agility, and muscles. Finally, virtually of these movies — whether containing the words MAN/MEN or WOMAN/WOMEN — feature white, heterosexual characters/actors. Unfortunately, no surprise there either.

One more discovery before I wrap this up. A quick scan through my IMDB lists reveals that the 1980s and 1940s produced a large number of films with the words WOMAN/WOMEN in the title. When one considers cinema history and the cultural events of those decades, this seems about right. For example, as Joseph Sartelle argues in “Dreams and Nightmares in the Hollywood Blockbuster,” the 1980s brought about a strong “commitment to multicultural consciousness and political correctness” (519). This is a result of, Sartelle points out, the Reagan administration’s neglect of domestic problems, particularly those regarding urban African Americans. During this time, movies went from fetishizing the triumphant white male hero (e.g., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, The Empire Strikes Back) to portraying a more balanced representation of race to appeal to both white and minority audiences (e.g., the Lethal Weapon series, Beverly Hills Cop, The Color Purple). At the same time, the 1980s encouraged renewed levels of representation from women (e.g., Nine to Five, Flashdance, Sophie’s Choice, Desperately Seeking Susan, Beaches, Steel Magnolias). It’s no wonder, then, that 1980s also gave us films entitled They Call Me Macho Woman, High Finance Woman, And God Created Woman, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Woman in Red, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

The other decade that seemed to produce a large number of films with the words WOMEN or WOMAN in their titles is the 1940s. There’s a logical explanation for this as well.  The 1940s are what some historians call America’s “age of anxiety.” See, for example, our country’s entry into WWII and the end of isolationism, paranoia about communism and McCarthyism, the popularization of Freudianism and Existentialism, and perhaps most significant to this post, fears of male displacement. Regarding the latter, WWII changed the role of women. Wives and mothers were no longer confined to the home, cooking/cleaning and taking care of children. Because their husbands were fighting overseas, women joined the workforce, some gladly and some forcibly. As my film noir students know, this new economically and socially independent woman, which men apparently feared — or perhaps more appropriately, misunderstood — was embodied onscreen in the figure of the hypersexual, self-sufficient, and scheming femme fatale. This is one reason, then, that the 1940s produced such films as Women in the Night, Forbidden Women, The Trouble with Women, Women Aren’t Angels, A Woman’s Vengeance, The Spider Woman Strikes Back, The Tiger Woman, The Spider Woman, Weird Woman, Cobra Woman, Captive Wild Woman, and Two-Faced Woman.

Truthfully, I don’t know what I expected to gain from this little experiment sparked by Michael Douglas and his sulking character from Solitary Man. Having taught about and researched onscreen representations of gender for several years now, I expected there to be a drastic difference in the number of film titles that include the words MEN/MAN (approx. 1,500) and those citing WOMEN/WOMAN (approx. 700). After all, 80%-90% of Hollywood releases revolve around (white, heterosexual) male characters and are created for predominately (white, heterosexual) male audiences, e.g., see the “Top Ten Movies” charts at any given point in the year but particularly summer. Still, I must admit that I was surprised by a few of the posters, taglines, and film titles, for example

• Chain Gang Women and their “trashy, filthy, sweaty, primitive cravings”;
• Cobra Woman, the so-called “Temptress of Terror”;
• Jesse James’s Women who apparently fight one another in “the lusty West”; and
• Weird Woman whose extremities emit some sort of black magic (tagline: “Does voodoo death strike from her arms?”).

Voodoo death by a bicep?! Well, I’ve gotta admit: it sounds like more fun than Solitary Man.

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