Learning to Love Your Inner Chick (Flick)

The success of chick flicks like Sex and the City and Twilight last year was a boon for many reasons. It should mean a green light for other films geared toward women, but also it's led to some soul-searching about women and film in general. Columns like Lisa Schwarzbaum's ("Why I Love [and Hate] Chick Flicks") are an attempt to come to terms with our mixed feelings about our own representation in film-and our own aesthetic tastes.
But my feeling is that women are only halfway there getting a grip on these things. The very fact that we need to justify our tastes, to defend "our" genre, and most of all to publicly declare our rejection of its excesses betrays a fear of mockery that men rarely worry about.
So I write an open letter to all my comadres in film-love about how to stop worrying and start to love the chick flick, by embracing three potent principles.
PRINCIPLE 1: WE DON'T HAVE TO APOLOGIZE.
A few years back, some researchers experimented with telling an identical joke to two test groups. Group A was told the joke with the classic beginning "A guy walks into a bar . . ." Group B was told the same joke, with only one difference: "A woman walks into a bar . . ." At the end of the joke, Group A laughed and chuckled. Group B merely looked puzzled. What, they asked, did being a woman have to do with it?

In our culture, it's still true that the male is the "default," the norm against which deviations are highlighted. The very fact that women so often declare their discomfort with even the term "chick flick" shows our sensitivity to the way these films hold us up to hostile comparative scrutiny. We don't want to seem vain or superficial, and we cringe at the silliness of our film counterparts, who are shopping for scarves and missing job interviews while their male brothers are off fighting the Nazis and building mafia empires.

My friend, if you've never seen a woman sing into a hairbrush or jump up and down in unison with her friends, take heart. Most men have never been in a gang shootout or participated in grave international intrigue. Male genres are often complete and utter fantasy. And yet it's hard to imagine a male critic writing an article parsing his love of action movies. Critics like Stephen Hunter fairly bask in what they identify as male aesthetics: violence, war, big bangs, and car chases ("a testosterone-packed thrill ride!") They glory in the best of these movies, and feel no need to distance themselves from the worst. Watch and learn.

Of course, acceptance of our cinematic fantasies will be easier for women if we follow Principle 2.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNDERSTAND, WAY DEEP DOWN, THAT WHAT GOES ON IN THE HEAD OF A 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL IS JUST AS COMPLEX AND IMPORTANT AS WHAT GOES ON IN THE HEAD OF A 45-YEAR-OLD MAN.
Quick: Who is the more complex character: Anton Chigurh, or Bella Swan? If your first instinct is to laugh at the mere notion that Twilight's teen heroine could be considered as significant a character as No Country For Old Men's sadistic killer, I beg you to reconsider. What do we know about Anton Chigurh? What does he actually do in the film? Is there really much more to him than a certain cool self-possession and a memorably creepy haircut?
In our annual showering of awards on the Javier Bardems, Gene Hackmans, Robert DeNiros, and Sean Penns, we've somehow come to believe that this is not only what great acting looks like but what significant lives look like: middle-aged, taciturn, tough, and male. But half the population is female, and every single woman started as a girl. The interior life of girls represents, very simply, our lives, not so long ago. And it consists of every good thing that we still value and some that we rue: the joy of hopscotch, the yearning for love, the fun of friendship, the dream of a perfect wedding, the fear of ending up alone, the crippling brokenness of abuse. And these themes, swirling in the head of a 13-year-old (or 55-year-old) are just as vivid, just as much the very stuff of life, as the middle-aged man's will to power, obsession with sex, jaded aging, and need for redemption.

And you don't need to be a victim of incest or domestic abuse to have a significant story to tell. This will be easier to understand if we embrace Principle 3.

PRINCIPLE 3: THE GREATEST OF THESE IS LOVE.
Let me be clear. I love typically male movie genres, like most women I know. Movies about war take us deep into an experience that is harrowing and essential. Movies about violence impress on us the fragility of life and the awesomeness of power that can destroy it. Movies about action make us feel alive and vital. And the Javier Bardems, the Sean Penns? They are great actors.

But the be-all and end-all of life, I believe, hasn't changed since St. Paul wrote, "Now abide hope, faith, and love, but the greatest of these is love." Love may be represented in movies with weddings, sighs, and yearning looks, but make no mistake: It is the central need of our inner existence. It is the difference between happiness on this earth, and loneliness. Between joy and pain. Between dying surrounded by family and friends who are singing you on your way, or ending life alone. When Carrie is in Mexico after her aborted wedding to Big in Sex in the City, she is devastated, and you feel it. Because something huge has been lost. When Bella looks into Edward's eyes after he tells her that becoming a vampire would rob her of everything, she says, "I don't care." Because the intimacy she feels with him is life's greatest gift. And when Edward Ferrars comes back to Eleanor at the end of Sense and Sensibility to announce he isn't married after all, she breaks down with emotion. Because a life of endurance has, in that moment, been transformed into a life of happiness.

My hope is that the chick-flick revolution is just starting, and that success will breed more projects and bigger budgets. If so, there will be not only more good films geared toward women but more bad ones as well. If so, we need to undo the suspicion that chick flicks are either bad because of their genre, or good despite of it. We need to love the chick flick, and the chick inside too.