In 2005 Peter Howell at the Toronto Star wrote a piece called “Women are going backwards” which, on re-reading, is a pretty poor title for the article. What it should have read is “Film is going backwards” or “Hollywood is going backwards”. What Mr Howell’s article dealt with wasn’t the regression of women, but the regression of how women are portrayed in film. Because while women are attempting to go forwards it seems that the portrayals of us keep slipping backwards:

“…it’s sobering to think how little progress has been made. Bewitched and The Honeymooners were both damned by the Women’s Liberation movement in the 1960s and ‘70s, yet they’re considered ripe for renewal in 2005… where are the modern-day counterparts to the classy and confident women of yore?”

While I think Peter might over-romanticize the strength and depth (and role-model-worthiness) of the characters portrayed by Lauren Bacall or Elizabeth Taylor, he surely does have a point about the dearth of strong women in modern film.

So a little thought experiment: off the top of my head, what strong and confident female characters can I think of? And as Peter largely limits his analysis to big budget mainstream movies, so shall I (though, importantly, he does include that “the one place where women still find an important role is in the art films that are the lifeblood of film festivals”).

Scanning my DVD shelves for inspiration, I come up with the following:
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Oh my goodness, two features in one? What’s next, salt and vinegar potato chips? Jay-Z and Rihanna doing a song together? The mind boggles. Call it laziness or ingenuity, but I’ve decided to combine two weekly features into one consideration of a movie about music… kind of.

I finally got around to watching Shut Up and Sing, Barbara Kopple’s documentary about the Dixie Chicks and the uproar surrounding an offhand comment singer Natalie Maines made at a concert in 2003. Before I go into detail, I should mention that I was never really a Dixie Chicks fan - in fact they barely registered on my cultural radar before the whole “I’m ashamed George Bush is from Texas” debacle. But I am a huge fan of documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple - her 1976 doc Harlan County USA is one of the most astounding and heartbreaking films I’ve ever seen (and she made it when she was, like, 12. Okay, 22. But still). So I went into the film curious to see what she would do with a story about pop music, big hair, freedom of speech, and the polemic beast that is America today. Suffice it to say I was not disappointed.

The film is built around the aforementioned comment Natalie Maines made between songs at a concert in London, England - she expressed displeasure at US foreign policy, and then said “We’re ashamed that President Bush is from [our home territory] Texas,”. The fallout from the comment included hate mail, mass burnings of Dixie Chicks CDs (turns out CDs don’t burn so well, so we get to see lots of Middle American workboots stomping on them), radio boycotts, and even a death threat. Kopple’s deft editing and compiling of footage creates what is in fact a fascinating portrait of the media spin machine, and what exactly is meant by “free speech” and “patriotism” (and whether or not the two are in fact totally irreconcilable). There is the usual predictable and disturbing woman-hating, where the Chicks get called sluts and traitors, and several news commentators (guess which network - cough*fox*cough) suggest that what they really need is a good slapping around. You really get to see the opposite ends of the American political and cultural spectrum in all its gory glory. As one of the Chicks, Martie Maguire, sums up near the end of the film, “It had to be from us - it was perfect. It had to be the unlikely voice from what looked like the conservative heart of America.”

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