Movies contain a multitude of bodies in different sizes, colors and muscle tones, bodies that are trim, bulky, parched, surgically altered. Talking about them, though, especially women’s bodies, can be understandably fraught. For some observers, writing about them is unnecessary and objectifying, even if a lot of other people — politicians, activists, influencers, Supreme Court justices — can’t stop talking about them. “We’re always talking about the feminine condition and the role of women,” the filmmaker Agnès Varda once said. “But I want to talk about the woman’s body, about our bodies.” I want to talk about them, too.
That’s because some of the most memorable movies that I’ve seen lately are from female filmmakers who are also clearly thinking about women’s bodies and helping expand what kinds of women we are seeing onscreen. One such movie I keep returning to is Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl,” a recently released drama set on the frayed edges of Las Vegas. In a scene that keeps playing in my head, a cocktail waitress, Annette — played by a soulful Jamie Lee Curtis — climbs atop a small platform in the casino where she works and begins dancing. As slot machines ping around her, she slowly gyrates to the 1980s hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Annette looks like she’s in her own world. She looks glorious.
Curtis, who’s 66, has said the scene shows the “degradation of women at the end of their lives,” adding, that “nobody cares.” Scarcely any casino patrons glance at Annette as she dances, true. But I did care, and I suspect I wasn’t alone. I get it, though; older women can feel invisible — I do. Yet here Curtis, who’s bathed in beautifully diffused light during the scene, the camera pointed up in seeming adulation, is mesmerizing as she shimmies and dips into a squat, her thighs tense and strong. I adored watching Curtis play Annette, and I think Coppola wants us to love this character as much as she clearly does. That is also glorious.
“The Last Showgirl” touches on mothering, friendships, the commodification of beauty and the role that women play, willingly or not, in their own objectification. It explores how identity is partly created, sustained and jeopardized by the gaze of others, and what it means when women gaze — at others, at themselves — which puts the film in dialogue with recent movies like “Babygirl,” “Nightbitch” and “The Substance,” which received five Oscar nominations. The protagonist of “Showgirl” is Annette’s friend, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) a dancer whose revue is shuttering. Clouded with worry, Shelly — like Anderson, the character is 57 — is anxious about her future and sense of self. Who is she, after all, if no one looks at her?
Anderson likes to be makeup free; away from work, so does her character. Shelly loves being a showgirl — “feeling beautiful, that is powerful” — but when she puts on her costume, she’s cosplaying an old-fashioned ideal of femininity. Onstage, she plays a fantasy. When she’s offstage, Shelly is a person with a life, everyday concerns and friends, mostly women, who look at one another with gazes that find common cause. Coppola sees the world of “The Last Showgirl” as a metaphor for the America dream, one in which commodified bodies come with expiration dates. It is also an emblem for women in film, who have long fought against their perceived disposability and continue to find common cause in female-driven work.
IN A CRUCIAL CHAPTER in his 1972 book “Ways of Seeing,” the art critic John Berger surveyed the figure of the female nude in Western art since the Renaissance and argued that “the essential way of seeing women” hadn’t changed. “Women are depicted in a quite different way from men,” he writes, “not because the feminine is different from the masculine — but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.” The obviousness of this is evident to anyone who’s strolled through, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its figurative and abstract representations, its Madonnas, courtesans, queens, servants, dancers, bathers and come-hither nudes.
The same could be said about the movies, with their sweethearts and vamps, adventurers and homebodies, mothers and wives, dutiful and defiant daughters. The early 20th century brought new women with new looks, sensibilities and desires to the screen. In her film history “From Reverence to Rape,” the critic Molly Haskell writes that as the 1930s got underway in Hollywood, women “were conceived of as having sexual desire without being freaks, villains or even necessarily Europeans.” Soon after, the industry instituted more rigorous self-censorship to stave off government censorship. It wasn’t until the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, Haskell writes, that grown-up women “began to return to cinema”; it’s been a slow re-entry.
Actresses — in Jim Crow Hollywood, most were white — lifted and broke hearts while sustaining a studio system that turned some into goddesses but that could be brutal. In her memoir “The Lonely Life,” Bette Davis writes that after her 1931 debut in “Bad Sister,” she learned that “according to all existing Hollywood standards, my face was not photogenic.” And while Judy Garland’s addictions are well known, when the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz” plays, it should be prefaced with this stark revelation from her: “From the time I was 13, there was a constant struggle between M-G-M and me — whether or not to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. I remember this more vividly than anything else about my childhood.”
My love for “The Wizard of Oz” hasn’t diminished because of what Garland endured; rather, her story helped me turn an abstraction into a person. Knowing what some women went through and how they triumphed, how they expressed their humanity and power onscreen and off, in a male-dominated industry, clarifies the past and present. A predator like Harvey Weinstein became a titan in a business in which the exploitation of performers and especially young women was long the standard operating procedure. As the director Elia Kazan explained, an old-studio boss might quiz his wife and secretaries about the appeal of male actors, but with actresses the bosses had “a simple rule and a useful one: Do I want to [sleep with] her?”
WOMEN HELPED CREATE CINEMA, writing, directing, producing and starring in their own films, which makes their continuing battle for equality on and behind the camera all the more infuriating. One early great was the actress-turned-director Lois Weber, who believed “that there is a screen beauty higher than that of a pretty face — the beauty of character.” By 1917, after a run as Universal’s top director, she formed her own company. But as the industry grew and the financial stakes also grew, production became more standardized, controlled and segregated by gender, and female directors were sidelined. Weber directed her last movie in 1934, and for decades after only two women directed in Hollywood: Dorothy Arzner, who worked for the studios, and the actress-turned-filmmaker Ida Lupino.
Lupino became a star over the 1930s and ’40s, but she grew weary of smiling. “I was bored to tears with standing around the set while someone else seemed to do all the interesting work.” In 1949, she quietly took over directing “Not Wanted” — an independent drama about an funwed mother that she helped write and produce — when its original director fell ill. Lupino went on to co-found a production company and direct other independent films like “Outrage” (1950), about a rape survivor, and “The Bigamist” (1953), about two women wed to the same man. “There is an absolute and ironclad caste system in the film capital,” Lupino wrote around that time, that “has as its primary purpose the exclusion of females.”
Women made films outside Hollywood, from the avant-garde to the exploitation circuit, but it wasn’t until after Elaine May signed with Paramount in 1968 to make “A New Leaf” that they began trickling back into view. Many filmmakers remained marginalized and needed independent backing. Among these was Julie Dash, whose 1991 period drama “Daughters of the Dust” was the first film from a Black American woman to receive a national theatrical release in the United States. Dash wanted to show Black families, she said, “particularly Black women, as we have never seen them before.” To that representational end, the characters in “Daughters” wear ancient hairstyles and have myriad complexions, creating what the critic Greg Tate called “a praise-song to the beauty of dark-skinned Black women.”
THE NUMBER OF FEMALE directors has remained frustratingly low since Dash’s landmark film, yet they continue to elevate the art with their visual styles, iconography, formal strategies and characters. In 2023, the juggernaut known as “Barbie” became one of the highest-grossing movies in history. In turning an icon of empty-headed plastic femininity into a thinking woman (with a vagina!), Greta Gerwig created a sensation and an emblem for women in film. “Barbie” became a cultural touchstone, helped resuscitate the pandemic-ravaged box office and earned eight Oscar nominations, but it won just one statuette for the song “What Was I Made For?” In early 2024, Business Insider suggested “Barbie” itself was made for disappointment: “It hasn’t resulted in real change in the film industry — yet.”
The problem isn’t Gerwig’s or any one woman’s to fix: It’s the industry’s. It’s heartening that the researcher Martha M. Lauzen found that 2024 was the first time in recent history that the percentage of top-grossing films with female protagonists equaled that with male ones. Given that most of these were directed by men, male filmmakers are clearly in the mix, too. That might change, I imagine. Yet there have always been women — in experimental film, in independent, exploitation and documentary — who found ways to tell their stories onscreen with or without the blessing of the mainstream, its restrictions and its money. Even with the feverish backlash to the #MeToo movement and commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion policies both inside the entertainment world and out, there is no going back.
Change is more than a numbers game; it’s a matter of the different voices, histories and bodies that filmmakers bring to the screen, and of performers in a wider assortment of colors, sizes and shapes, with belly rolls and line-etched faces. It’s no surprise that one theme some female-driven movies keep circling back to is the construction of gender. In Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” Nicole Kidman plays an executive who has a rejuvenating, sexually submissive affair with a young male intern. It’s titillating yet the most subversive moment in the movie occurs when, while the executive is receiving various spa treatments, you see a needle sliding into her face. As she winces, the production of idealized beauty and its cost are laid bare.
It’s a theme that Coralie Fargeat goes at hard in “The Substance.” In this freak-out, Demi Moore, whose performance is nominated for an Oscar, plays a TV entertainer who, after being fired for the crime of turning 50, pursues a different rejuvenating regimen, one that turns her into a literal monster. In both “Babygirl” and “The Substance,” the unclothed bodies of their famous stars are markers of actorly seriousness and of authenticity: Behold these women, the movies seem to say, these icons — Kidman is now 57, Moore 62 — naked before you. With their flat middles and no visible cellulite, they are superwomen of a sort having vanquished, with hard work and beauty secrets, the ordinary wear and tear of age. I was properly awed.
I’m serious. Like every woman who loves movies — and even like those who don’t — I have been shaped by what I’ve seen onscreen: I have skin in this game. I was reminded again of this recently when a reader called me out for my review of “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” (2004). I loathed the film, but in trying to diagnose its sexism and body shaming, I slid into sexist body shaming. I winced rereading the review, even if it’s clear to me now that when I wrote about Bridget’s “swishing thighs” and the director’s humiliating treatment of her, I was writing about myself. To be fair to that younger self, the film does suck. Yet if I’m less enraged these days, at least by movies, it’s because of some of the directors making them.
AT ONE POINT IN “The Substance,” Moore’s character analyzes her naked body in front of a mirror like a scientist examining a specimen. When I watched the movie a second time, I flashed on the 2022 comedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” about a woman (Emma Thompson) in a gratifying sexual relationship with a younger male escort. Toward the end, she stands alone in a hotel room, drops her robe and also takes a long look at herself in a mirror. There’s a softness in how she regards her image, a sense of compassion and love that I aspire to and which is absent from “The Substance.” It reminds me that in “Ways of Seeing,” Berger writes that a mirror in art was “often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman.”
Sometimes a look in a mirror is just a look, but looks can be transformational. In last year’s “Nightbitch,” to take another example, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel about a stay-at-home mom who thinks she’s turning into a dog, Amy Adams’s character stands before a mirror and pulls a tail out of her backside. It’s surreal and funny, but the most memorable thing about the scene is that she embraces what she sees: a tail to go with her incisors and growing fur. I did, too, partly because while looking-glass scenes in film are common, the relay of gazes in cinema has changed. And when a woman looks at herself onscreen now, there may be other women holding up the mirror, women who are standing behind the camera and sometimes calling the shots as they bring her sharply into focus.
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