There is a serious lack of female buddy flicks out there. Beyond Sex and the City: The Movie, well it’s worse than kielbasa night at your local sports bar (i.e. total sausage fest). But why? Before I rant let me be clear that by “buddy movie” I mean buddy movie as a subset of the comedy genre. With apologies to Susan Isaacs, who wrote on the subject for the New York Times back in the 80s, Steel Magnolias is not a buddy movie. And while Thelma and Louise is about buddies, the — spoiler alert — attempted rape and attempted/completed double suicide ending kind of put a damper on the laugh-o-rama.
In “Lament for the Female Friendship Flick” — and please, gag me if I ever use that phrase again — Leah McLauren proposes that perhaps the lack of lady buddy movies is due to “our discomfort at watching women get along.” But that’s oversimplifying. It’s not like buddy movies are all about two simpatico bros getting along unproblematically, because gee, that’d be fun to watch. No, they are about dudes with different notions of a good time trying to embark on an epic sexventure. The entirety of a buddy movie is fraught with tension as one friend submits to the other in spite of his better judgment, only to get in an insane, untenable, and often ilegal situation. And what woman hasn’t found herself talked into a terrible idea (speed dating, bikini waxing, watching Eat Pray Love) at the hands of a convincing girlfriend? Terra cognita.
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These films share a singular, cohesive vision that is entirely masculine. What drives these men to misadventure is the pressure to get laid and resist commitment at any cost; pressure sends these guys running into each other’s arms at first sign that they might be heading to the altar. Of course, when all is said and done, the resolution is that our male protagonist will almost inevitably settle down, because better to live in happily wedded blaséness, if not bliss.
This works well for dudes because there’s something for them to run to (sex with scores of nameless disease-free chicks) as well as from (monogomy). In a film like this, you can’t just sub women in for men, since women aren’t seen as social creatures dying to escape marriage. This formula with ladies at its center would have to have them running toward something (typically marriage) at the expense of fun and discovery, which makes for kind of a boring second act. And it’s hard to make this formula, or any variation of it, work (take Bride Wars) without generating an instant loathing of said female characters. The equivalent of fun and games for men (dancing with strippers, stealing tigers) does not translate as well for women (dress fitting, overdoing it on the spray tan).
Not to mention that to have a film about a couple of women bonded together by their desperation to get married and repulsed by casual sex cries out not just as antiquated, but also as plain out-of-touch. This formula doesn’t work for women because we wouldn’t buy it for women, possibly because we know they’re not like that. Too bad we don’t think enough about men in general to let male characters act outside the proverbial box.
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So where does that leave us? I hope it leaves us to push the envelope. If transposing men and women won’t work and reversing the formula won’t work, then we need a fresh infusion of shared female journeys that are funny. Think Baby Mama. Think House Bunny. Think anything that doesn’t involve being a bride or being afraid of being a bride. Let’s try thinking outside the box and not just about how to get into that box.
Thanks for the comments Luisa. As I hope is obvious, I totally agree that women have moved past the marriage as the one and only singularity ruling their lives and that it would be nice to see something other than women bonding in/over/around weddings onscreen (keep your eye out as this topic broaches again around the release of the Kristin Wiig vehicle “Bridesmaids.”) I would love nothing more than to see a litany of well written scripts make it to the Black List that feature stories about women reaching for the corporate top, hunting for treasure, taking on the government – anything that doesn’t involve a white dress and bad cake.
To your point about the competitive nature of female friendship, Leah McLauren article’s (http://tinyurl.com/6ej6nk4) addresses this pretty well. My point to wit is that the buddy film has conflict in its formula (as the two characters butt heads over the course of their journey), so I don’t see that the (albeit twisted) world view that sees women as competitive and spiteful is *necessarily* what’s holding back women from the genre. I think the trouble is that you can’t really cut and paste a movie like “The Hangover” and simply swap out the male characters for women, and when you invert the goals of the protagonists to make it more women-centered, you get “Bride Wars,” a film that’s buffoonery that doesn’t at all ring true.
And that leaves us without a formula for what works. Without a strong recipe for success, we won’t see this genre come to the fore any time soon – that is until some brilliant writer shows us what we’ve all been missing. I am an optimist. I think that there’s a precedent our there waiting to be set, and if someone can crack this and break the bank, we’ll see a lot more female buddy movies ahead. And I modestly like to think of this article as a call to arms so that this happens soon. And by soon I mean before I’m dead.
Good article, great subject! I would love to see you explore this subject a lot more because it is something that has always bothered me. I really think that there would be a huge demand for more of these movies if the film industry actually attempted to tap into this market. I know I’m not the only one whose netflix queue almost always lists the handful of movies “with a strong female lead” over and over again.
However, I also think your analysis is a bit cursory. While our entertainment industry staunchly sticks to the idea that a woman’s main goal in life is to get married, I think that many women today have moved beyond that and even a traditionally male buddy movie–what you described as “one friend submit[ing] to the other in spite of his better judgment, only to get in an insane, untenable, and often ilegal situation” –could easily apply to a movie about modern women.
I believe that the biggest thing standing in the way of this genre of movies is the inability of our entertainment industry to think of female friends as anything but competitive and maybe even spiteful towards one another. While, this is often reflected in our culture and reality, I think that most self-aware women maintain healthy and strong friendships that are ignored by popular culture in favor of ripping on women in any ways we can. Combining true female friendships, modern trends towards more open sexuality, and the many audacious and spontaneous modern women out there, I think there’s a ripe ground for humorous female buddy movies involving crazy situations, conquests, and unintended consequences.