Gals poop in sinks, feminists applaud

Rating: Null/10 (23 June 2012)

"They're closing up girl land, some say its a shame. It used to be busy, then nobody came." - Shirley Jones
Written by and starring Kristen Wiig, "Bridesmaids" is a supposedly "ground-breaking" and "revolutionary" comedy which "charts new territory" by being simultaneously "feminist", "funny" and "raunchy". The film was produced by Judd Apatow, who specialises in R-rated, sex-obsessed "bromance" movies.
The film is mostly generic. Wiig plays Lillian, a woman stuck in a formulaic plot in which she is desperate to "find mister right", "get married" and be her best friend's best bridesmaid. The film also sports a weird sub-plot about "baking"; Lilian's cake store falls apart and goes bust when her partner leaves her, but things go well for her again when she meets a new man who likes her cakes and likes her baking. It's a new type of feminism, see. Being a woman sucks, unless your in the kitchen and cooking for your man.
The film's characters are mostly stock, either bickering women, jewellers, cooks, butch chicks, frigid ladies, workaholic moms or sex obsessed gals who are desperate to get married to rich men and live happy lives. Penises and nuptial hyper-consumption are the epitome of fulfilment.
The film is praised for "being about women just hanging out", but that is itself the point of the whole romantic comedy, chick-flick genre (the plot here is your typical Kate Hudson, Jennifer Aniston, Sandra Bullock "girl meets boy", "girl loses boy", "girl reclaims boy" formula). The late 1970s and 80s were themselves dedicated to the "woman's picture", most of the best ones of which raised the flag for ovaries and sisterhood without seeming idiotic. Nevermind the screen sirens of the 1940s and 50s (Hepburn, Stanwyck, Bacall et all), trail blazing rock-chicks and comediennes of decades past, or current work by Almodovar, Holofcener, Champion and Claire Dennis, just four contemporary filmmakers who deal well with women.
So why exactly is "Bridesmaids" ground-breaking? Perhaps because the film – like "Sex and the City", the previous highest grossing R rated "female comedy", and "Bad Teacher", a total flop - makes it okay for women and girls of all ages to act like foul-mouthed jocks at a frat party, which is ironic, because your typical bromance buddy movies makes it okay for rowdy guys to act like sensitive women. That, supposedly, is progress: everyone can be anything any time. Total equality. Gals can be both raunchy poop-joke making princesses, and guys can be macho beer chugging momma's boys. This is a very postmodern take on gender; if all gender is performance, if all gender is programmed by externals, then there is nothing intrinsically "feminine" and "female". It is all an act, gender endlessly mutable and malleable.
This kind of thinking goes back, at least in the mainstream, to Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble", an influential book. For Butler, the mistake of feminism was in asserting that "women" were a solid group with fixed, common characterises and interests. This notion, she said, "performed an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations" which "reinforced a binary view of gender relations in which humans are divided into two clear cut groups". Feminism therefore closed options down. Feminists rejected the idea that biology is destiny ("women are not intrinsically inferior to men"), but then developed an account of patriarchy which conveyed, either consciously or unconsciously, that masculine and feminine genders were either biologically coded or that masculine and feminine genders would inevitably be built by culture upon "male" and "female" bodies. Butler opposed this. For her, gender isn't a fixed attribute, but should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times. As she famously said, "gender is a performance, it's what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are." From here on, gender began to be thought of as a kind of reiterated acting, one that simulates the effect of a static or "normal" gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person's gender "act". This effect produces what we can consider to be "true gender". "True gender" is thus a "fake" narrative that is sustained by the implied, collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders. Today this "social agreement" simply offers more leeway such that everyone's essentially "pansexual", gals just one of the guys and vice versa.
This kind of stance, according to biological essentialists, is total crap. One just has to look at transsexuals and homosexuals – for whom sexual preference (but not necessarily gender behaviour) is not a choice, for whom Butler's stance is an insult – to see that gender (not sex) has biological foundations. Whatever the truth (gender identity is most-likely somewhere between the hard-lined stance of essentialists and the nuances of Butler, though leaning heavier in Butler's direction) both stances are pessimistic. In both cases identity is built on the invasion of the "self" by the gestures of others, who, by referring to other others, are already social beings. The individual's will, and the individual performance, is always subject to the dominant discourse of an Other(s). Meanwhile, it is precisely because men and women think of "themselves" as independent, fully autonomous, individual subjects, that the Other is created and therefor conflict arises. "Bridesmaids" is feminist insofar as it rejects a certain type of essentialism, but hardly liberative insofar as it ignores larger forces working on bodies.
Beyond this the film sports funny and touching performances by Melissa McCarthy and Chris O'Dowd, and works whenever they're on screen. Everything else is handled ineptly by director Paul Feig. For all its raunchiness, what the film conveys to modern women regarding expectations toward friendship, courtship and marriage is mostly conservative and depressing.
5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "2 Days in Paris", the romances of Linklater and Holofcener, "In Search of a Midnight Kiss" and Antonioni's "Beyond the Clouds".