Miss Representation is an American documentary motion picture. It was released in 2011 by Girl’s Club Entertainment, to a limited theater release. It was shown at the Sundance film festival and several other film festivals, while also signing a deal to run on the Oprah Winfrey Network. The screenplay for the film was written by Jennifer Newson, Jessica Congdon, Claire Dietrich, and Jenny Raskin. Jessica Newsom also directed, and shared production duties with Julie Costanzano. With a running time of 85 minutes, the documentary had a shooting budget of $750,000, and box office earnings were not reported or released to the general public. The film was mildly received by critics, and did not receive any awards of note.
Miss Representation is a documentary film which explores the role of women in American media. According to the women really have not progressed very far, and they are still represented in a negative way on television and in the movies. Screenwriter, director, and producer of the documentary, Jessica Newsom, was interviewed in the progressive magazine Mother Jones, which supports multiculturalism. In the interview, Jessica Newsom, who has an MBA from Stanford, said that American culture, “objectifies women and sees women's value in their youth or beauty or sexuality, and not in their ability to lead” (Oatman, 2011, para 8). Thus, in terms of multiculturalism, Newsom and Miss Representation see the issue less in terms of ethnicity and more in terms of gender. Both genders are not represented equally in the media.
The film opens with a quote from Alice Walker, the award winning African American novelist. Thus, right off the bat, the film is presenting multicultural discourse. However, in the opening montage which follows the quote, all of the speakers, men and women, are white, and the vast majority of images of women in media shown in the background while the speakers are talking are white, except for one commercial for African American women, and one image of Oprah.
The documentary then presents a short clip of Michele Malkin, an Asian American woman who sometimes appears as a political segment contributor on the Fox News Chanel (Newsom, 2011). She only remains on screen for a moment. Malkin was an interesting choice to include, as her ideology opposes the concept of multiculturalism, and she opposed any programs which sought to increase multiculturalism or diversity. The segment, however, is about exposing how even the news media presents women as sex objects before any other characteristics are taken into consideration.
Throughout the documentary, Jessica Newsom talks about her own experiences facing gender bias and oppression. She was the victim of a sexual assault, and she was certainly the victim of gender oppression (Newsom, 2011). Likewise, she had body image problems, and developed an eating disorder, because of the cultural biases about how women are supposed to appear. The film does an excellent job exploring how these biases affect the vast majority of women, and that they have real world consequences life eating disorders and depression. This continues in great detail and depth through the film. Without a doubt, these are very important issues and the film is doing the country a service by exploring and exposing them. However, for most of the film, all women are treated as a homogenous group.
While the film does not appear to have a cultural or ethnic bias, it does present the experiences of white women, and white teenagers, as the normal experience of all women. The film does not explore if this is truly a cultural norm, or if this is another bias. Do girls and women from the many ethnic groups which make up America all have the same experiences as women? Is the experience of gender bias the same for African American women as it is for Asian women or for white women? Among white women, do Italian-American women experience the culture’s definition of beauty the same way Scandinavian-American or Russian-American women do? Do African-American women experience the same body image problems that white American women do, or do they face a different set of body image problems? Do sexual assaults and sex crimes occur at the same rate or frequency in all ethnic communities? The film does not seem to answer, or look into, any of these questions, and simply presents the experience of woman as a universal.
Margaret Chou appears in the documentary and discusses her struggle to gain a job in entertainment as an Asian-American woman. Yet, instead of focusing in the lack of Asian-American women on American tv, or how few Asian American women get major roles in Hollywood, Miss Representation instead chose to focus on her arguments with the network about her weight (Newsom, 2011). Again, while this is a real bias, and a source of body image problems, the film acts as if the experience is a universal one for women. For example, the show did not bring up the fact that women like Rosanne Barr and Mellissa McCarthy, neither of whom are skinny, had major television and movie careers. One difference between Margaret Chou and Rosanne Barr or Mellissa McCarthy is that they are both white American women. This would seem to be a major issue to explore, yet the role that Margaret Chou’s ethnicity or culture played in her problems with the network is never even mentioned (Newsom, 2011).
Miss Representation also makes the very important point that woman are highly underrepresented in politics and public service. The under representation of one half the population is a major problem for a representative democracy, however, the underrepresentation problem also exists for ethnic and cultural groups. Again, this raises the logical question of the number of women from various cultures in the government, but again, Miss Representation focuses only on the universal experience of women, and only defines bias and oppression in universalized terms.
The documentary does a great job of exploring and exposing this important issue and the
problems facing women in media. For, the film's makes the very important “claim that 65 percent of women suffer from disordered eating behavioras a result of comparing their own looks to those of airbrushed models” (Oatman, 2011, para 2). Likewise, the film reveals that “the average teenage girl consumes upwards of 10 hours of media a day, while women hold just 5 percent of clout positions in the industry” (Oatman, 2011, para 2). However, even though the documentary did an excellent job presenting this sort of information, viewing it leaves one with the feeling that a great opportunity was missed in the film. Because the writers, producers, and the director made the choice to treat the female experience as a universal norm, a chance to do even greater good was lost. Instead of acting as if all women are faced with exactly the same problems no matter which ethnic community or ethnic culture the woman comes from, the film could have been much more realistic, and informative, by actually exploring the way women from different communities’ experience gender bias, and how women in each of the various ethnic groups and communities that make up America deal with gender bias and gender oppression. Another thing the film completely failed to do was to point out the fact that all the horrible things that were said about female politicians in the media originated from conservative news sources.
On the other hand, the documentary Trekkies did an excellent job of exploring both a universal group, and the many different types of people that make up that group, including the fact that women are as equally involved in the Trekkie culture as men (Nygard 1997). The documentary celebrated multiculturalism instead of ignoring it. Furthermore, the movie Trekkies explored how the experience of being a Star Trek fan was different for different cultures and ethnic groups. The film also examined the role Star Trek played in representing the actual multiculturalism of real life America. While Miss Representation is a powerful film, it could have been far more powerful by continuing its analysis of American culture.
References
Newsom, J. (2011). Miss Representation. (Motion Picture). United States. Girl’s
Club Enterainment
Nygard, Roger.(1997). Trekkies. (Motion Picture). United States. Neo Motion Pictures.
Oatman, M. (2011). Miss Representation shows ugly side of women in media. Mother Jones.
Retrieved April 25, 2016 from http://www.motherjones.com/media/2011/10/miss-representation-doc-shows-ugly-side-women-media
