Good Example Of Essay On Gender From Clark Gable To Leonardo Dicaprio

Gender roles have been a matter of controversy almost as long as time itself. Back when Homer was writing about the tales of the Greeks’ adventures in Troy and on the way back, it only took the wiles (in the case of Odysseus) or the looks (in the case of Paris) of a dashing man for goddesses to fall in love, and when they did, all sorts of chaos ensued afterward. In the centuries since Homer wrote his pair of epics, the interplay between the genders has been an area of focus of storytelling, and when film became an important narrative genre, gender roles naturally were important there as well. One of the most popular romance films of all time, It Happened One Night, features a woman fleeing a forced marriage to a tycoon whom her even wealthier father hates, but she finds herself in the grasp of an ultimately impotent newspaper reporter, leading to a kaleidoscopic carousel of gender confusion that the woman’s father finally steps in to solve. Several decades later, when Alfred Hitchcock made The Birds, the ways in which the film binds the heroine, played by Tippi Hedren, suggest that patriarchal gender roles are alive and well, even to the point of being a fetish of the famed director. It Happened One Night and The Birds have both become popular films in the Western canon in large part due to the ways in which they manipulate and exploit gender roles.
It Happened One Night is the story of Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert). Warne just got fired by his newspaper, and Andrews has just fled her father so that she can elope with her tycoon; they have had their secret wedding, and now she is running away to join him. Warne meets Andrews on the bus from Miami to New York City, and he agrees to help her get there – so long as he can get exclusive rights to the whole story (and get his job back with the newspaper). As one might expect, the two fall in love along the way, but as the story goes by, quite a few gender reversals take place, as well as class-based ones. Given that this movie came out during the early part of the Great Depression, everyone who was in the theater would have noticed that both of the main characters used to have access to cash but are now broke – Warne having lost his job, and Andrews having lost her allowance from Daddy (without having gotten much in the way of seed money from that tycoon husband of hers to help her get to Gotham). In a way, their journey across the country becomes eerily similar to that of the Okies, crawling their way west across the nation in order to scrape for work in the fruit groves of California. Warne gives his last $10 to a penniless boy on the bus with his mother, who faints from hunger because they spent their last money on their fares.
In addition to that inversion of class roles, the film also turns gender roles on their heads as well. There is a scene where the two have bunked up at an auto camp (think Motel 6 but with individual cabins and a communal shower that is a long walk through a bunch of mud, after which you stand in line with other people waiting for your turn). In the morning, Ellie wakes up wearing Peter’s pajamas. Peter is standing at the tiny stove cooking breakfast for the two of them. In our own time, this would not seem like an unusual scene. However, at that time, this was an unbelievable reversal of traditional gender roles – even without the men’s pajamas.
Add that scene to the fact that Peter is impotent to help Ellie at just about every point in the movie, except when he pretends to be her husband in front of a sweet-talking guy. During a break, a man sneaks up behind Ellie and steals her bag. Peter sees it coming and pursues the guy but cannot come back with her bag. When he heads out into the night to find something for her to eat (this being well ahead of the fast food era, and for some reason the highway where the bus breaks down appears to be in one of the most rural parts of the universe) all he can come back with is a handful of carrots. Consider the scene where the two of them are trying to hitch a ride. Peter has his theories about how to get a car to stop, but none of them are working. It just takes one attempt for Ellie, who slides her skirt up to flash her (stockinged) leg to get the car to stop. So Colbert’s Ellie puts up with Peter Warne’s hamfistedness, but it still took the intervention of her father to get the two of them together, since Warne was too hardheaded (ultimately too impotent) to win her back himself. Ultimately, the story is about two people who are mismatched for one another, which is the story of how they fall in love, but it is also an indictment of the ways in which the silly Warne falls so short of the expectations of his generation.
While It Happened One Night seems to be using gender roles as a sort of slapstick routine for the audience to watch, The Birds is almost brutal in its meanness toward the main character, Melanie Daniels. Much has been written about the vitriol that Hitchcock sent to the actress Tippi Hedren because she rebuffed his advances. In a way, it is almost like Hitchcock uses this film to vent his frustration and gain a sort of revenge against her for that refusal. Even from the very outset of the film, everything in the narration seems designed to portray a specific sort of profile for the audience to interact with. She comes across as a brat, in a way, rich and prone to play juvenile games that end up finding her in hot water with John Q. Law. The end result is a woman who, to all intents and purposes, comes across as an antagonist of a universe that is organized and driven by men. This is one reason why Mitch feels a sort of antipathy toward Melanie, and he is not the first man whom her behavior has rubbed the wrong way. Even so, in such cases as this, the audience often comes away a bit ambivalent, perhaps both fascinated but also a little put off. This ambivalent response is in part a product of the way people treat Melanie, but it is also a part of the camerawork. Initially, we see her through diffusion shots that the adventure films and melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s had used to introduce their glamorous heroines. However, we get that effect when Melanie is talking to the pet shop clerk. Another layer of ambivalence comes from the disconnect between the way that she dresses and keeps her hair and the way that she acts. She behaves like an unruly teen rather than the sophisticated young woman that you see. This is going to change over the course of the film, as the audience sees the deeper complexities of her personality. The fact that she never really had a mother figure (until we meet Lydia) and did not have a lot of capacity for love comes out and makes her more sympathetic. Before that, though, she is highly ambivalent for the audience’s reception of Melanie.
It is the arrival of Lydia that serves to round Melanie out as a character. It is only after Melanie meets Lydia that we learn about Melanie’s history with her own mother – and after Melanie learns about Lydia’s disdain for Mitch’s prior girlfriends (and for Lydia herself). It is interesting that this is a uniquely first-person sort of movie. The camera does not look out from Melanie’s own face, but the focus of the film remains tightly on her throughout the movie. We basically only see what she sees and know what she knows, with such brief exceptions as when we can briefly see the story from Mitch’s perspective or when Mitch’s neighbor in San Francisco gives Melanie a frankly sexual gaze. This is important in a discussion of gender roles because it shows us that, as a reasonably autonomous person, she is isolated and alone in her society, truly a sad state of affairs.
When we watch films, we have to remember that we are never actually seeing reality – we do not eve see reality when we watch a reality show. Instead, we see a carefully constructed reality that comes to us through the lens of what the director wants to instill within our minds. If we return briefly to the treatment of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, if you count the number of times that Athena makes him look taller in order to impress someone, by the end of the epic he had to have resembled an Achaean Goliath – unless he secretly resets to original size each time. The idea is that Odysseus looks magnificent – but only through the agency of his patron from Mt. Olympus. The idea that the gods control reality is an important one in Greek mythology and belief. The idea that the role between the genders is one that the patriarchy controls is an important element of modern society, even though we pride ourselves on being egalitarian and treating women as equals. All you have to do is take a look at the world of Tinder, in which men treat women like a sort of sexual app, to see that we really are no closer to equality than we ever were. Now, though, the fact that women can work in professions really means that they can be sexual equals to men as far as finding trysts without the men feeling the responsibility to take care of the woman afterward. While this is a liberating experience for women who are self-sufficient from a financial perspective and do not really want any sort of binding commitment, ultimately it turns the interplay between the sexes into the sort of browsing experience that makes the beginning of Logan’s Run intriguing but ultimately settles into a form of Tetris in which tiles gradually fall, one at a time, hoping to find a spot to land without causing too much chaos to ensue. Film, of course, is a reflection of ourselves in a way, even if it comes through the director’s eye. That’s why the vision of Leonardo DiCaprio snorting cocaine off Margot Robbie’s boob in the back of a limousine makes such gripping visual candy for the audience – but also makes her out to be the fool when, not more than an hour later, she is scandalized by the fact that she would cheat on her and is using a carefully placed high heel to taunt him for his lack of access to the vagina that, shortly before, she was using so acrobatically to lure him away from his first wife. And so the roles that we expect to see in film turn out to be eerily accurate caricatures of our own selves, whether we are on the bus with Ellie and Peter or fleeing some weird avians with Tippi Hedren.