A few weeks ago the amazing Meryl Streep served as speaker for the Barnard College graduation ceremony.
As usual being her charming, delightful self, she reveals some of her trade secrets and trying to inspire recent graduates comes up with a lovely melancholic look at her own place in life.
Addressing several subjects, without flaunting her intelligence, she eventually hit the spot in one of my eternal causes: the lack of respect for actresses and female characters in our male centric world.
Speaking of how young men nowadays have no fear in identifying themselves with her Miranda Priestly, Streep went on to say,
"This is a huge deal because as people in the movie business know the absolute hardest thing in the whole world is to persuade a straight male audience to identify with a woman protagonist, to feel themselves embodied by her.
This more than any other factor explains why we get the movies we get."
Could she be any more right? But she had much more to say about this!
If you have half an hour to spare, I recommend you see the whole speech, just click here.
3 comments:
I. Love. This. Lady.
She makes an excellent point but then we have to ask ourselves: Are women identifying with male protagonists and if they do, why? Women do account for 55% of movie ticket sales after all so why is it happening one way and not the other?
Simon: me too.
Castor: it's mostly cultural tradition.
We were brought up reading about male heroes and characters as Meryl says in her speech.
Women probably don't identify themselves with Iron-Man or Robin Hood but what choice do they have if they want to see a movie?
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