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September 17, 2005
Just like men, actu
by Stephen Matchett
The Australian
September 17, 2005
WANT a lady in the Lodge, a woman in the White House? If popular culture is any predictor of political trends, it will not be long now. This month sees the US television premiere of Commander-in-Chief, starring Geena Davis as the president of the United States.
Women have been a heartbeat from the Oval Office before. In 1997, in Air Force One, Glenn Close played a vice-president who kept the military commanders under control to save the president, Harrison Ford, on the hijacked presidential jet. In 2000, Joan Allen starred as vice-presidential nominee Senator Laine Hanson in The Contender.
Now Geena's got the job. So that's that, and antediluvian affirmative action activists can stop grumbling about screen sexism.
Not quite. Because if C-in-C runs true to form it will present women in politics as policy paragons who do not lust for power and run their offices like a book club. And ask Congress to impeach people for not being nice.
This is mostly Aaron Sorkin's fault. When it is not Rod Lurie's. Sorkin wrote The American President (1995) and many of the best episodes of The West Wing, which has been running on TV so long that Martin Sheen's President Josiah Bartlet is at the lame-duck stage of his second term. Lurie wrote and directed The Contender and now C-in-C.
In all these productions women in public life have the political and policy smarts to implement agendas that are heavy on social justice and light on economics. They are always elegant, with the occasional eccentric habit more endearing than irritating.
If not actual saints, they are close to canonisation, at least for left-wing Democrats. Because they are always Democrats. (Except, of course, assistant White House counsel Ainsley Hayes in earlier episodes of The West Wing, who was a Republican, but from the well-educated and elegantly attired wing, the one that is indistinguishable from the Democrats.)
Perhaps the two film-makers think the way they present women will place them high on Emily's List by showing voters how much better politics would be with lots of strong women in power.
But they do no such thing. Julia Baird explains why, at least in the local context, in Media Tarts (2004), her book on the way the media seeks to shape the image of Australia's female politicians.
Baird warns of what can happen to women in politics if they adopt, or are attributed, roles for and by the media. They can lose their intellectual independence and be hammered by the press if they step outside the character - glamour puss, earth mother, iron lady, or whatever - they invented or accepted.
"One by one, these woman became caricatures - hyped, sanctimonious saints, heroines, ambitious bitches, shallow party girls - and eventually their work was obscured by a cult of personality over which they had very little control," Baird writes. Sadly, her case is diminished by some of her selections of supposedly talented women poisoned by the reptiles of the press. The real reasons women in politics fail are the same as why men do: bad luck, few factional friends and no policy nous.
But while Baird overdoes the martyrdom of some spectacular political duds who happened to be women, her overall argument makes sense. The way women in politics do well is by working hard, keeping their private life precisely that, not playing dress-ups and being very careful about saying they are being treated according to their sex, especially when in trouble.
The ones who do make it tend to ignore the role play, generally because they are too busy with policy development. No one ever paid much attention to Meg Lees's hair. And it is a fair bet people are much more interested in what Julia Gillard plans for health, as long as she keeps out of her kitchen, and what Helen Coonan will do with Telstra, rather than what she will wear to the company's Christmas party.
But if Sorkin or Lurie made a movie about a minister selling a phone company, there would be a running joke about her dress sense, plus dialogue demonstrating what a compassionate person she was. And none of their characters ever let politics get in the way of their principles.
The heroine of The American President, Sydney Ellen Wade, is a beautiful, brilliant environmental activist who abandons her presidential paramour when he does what politicians do to get legislation through: a deal. In The Contender the vice-presidential nominee refuses to refute rumours about her private life. Although this could easily be done, she stays silent because it is better to abandon great power than compromise a principle.
And in The West Wing, it is the women who believe that the truth of politics is more about principles than power. Like Amy Gardner, who believes social-justice issues can win votes, and like White House spokeswoman Claudia Jean Cregg, whose political judgment can be better than that of the boys.
In none of these naive statements of the transforming power of women in politics is there a bad woman. Certainly, The West Wing's national security adviser Nancy McNally (played by Anna Deavere Smith, who was promoted from The American President, where she played press secretary Robin McCall) proposes tough policies. But only to set up scenes where a black woman can be tougher than a bunch of white generals.
In all three dramas women are on the side of virtue and make politics better for their presence. And the baddies are all blokes. Conservative blokes to boot. In The American President, a rotten Republican presidential candidate plays politics with Sydney's standing as a single career woman and her right to go out with whoever she likes.
In The West Wing the first lady, a brilliant medical practitioner, is denied her right to practise because she put family first and did not report her husband's multiple sclerosis.
The villain in The Contender is a congressman who is trying to block Senator Hanson's nomination by calling her sexual past into question. Additionally demonstrating his villainy, he eats steak and smokes cigars.
And the information on C-in-C is that the machine men try to stop Veep Geena from taking the top job after the president dies, because she is politically independent. But with the help of a brilliant speechwriter - a woman, naturally - she delivers a cracker of a speech that unites the country.
It is all fantasyland feminism, which has nothing to do with the way women in politics, at least those who want to implement their agendas, really behave. Like men.
Posted by Jo at September 17, 2005 01:46 PM