SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: 'I looked that film up in the festival guide," my roommate told me when I returned from a screening of Miss Representation, 'and when I read the description and I thought, 'OK, I get it. I don’t think I need to see it now.’" I had to tell him that he was half right and yet mostly wrong. Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s primer on the representation of women in American culture—in the media, the arts, and politics—is not original, nor is it particularly well executed. And yet the degradation of women endures as a seemingly permanent facet of our culture; we might dutifully acknowledge the problem from time to time, but not as something important enough to merit moral alarm. Maybe should all sit down and watch a new documentary on the subject every week until the sexist grip on our society shakes loose.
That might sound like a useless proscription, and yet one of the more productive dialogues Newsom opens up—about the power of culture to influence political change—echoed the themes of both the 'Film/Movement' panel that opened the festival and a later panel on making art matter that featured Norman Lear and Dave Eggers, among others. At one point one of the several academics and media experts Newsom interviews asserts that teaching kids media literacy is already as vital as teaching them to read and write. And yet, as Eggers pointed out in his panel discussion, arts education is already in crisis, and media literacy is treated as a luxury. 'We have to start where people are," the expert suggested, 'and people are watching television." A little later Katie Couric confirms the potential culture has to shape real change in society: She cites Mary Tyler Moore as one of the biggest influences on her to begin a career in the male-dominated field of broadcasting.
It’s a moment of clarity that is otherwise lacking in Newsom’s (the wife of popular San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who appears among her chorus of feminist voices) rather roughshod approach to her topic. She begins by setting the stage personally— pregnant with a baby girl, she is moved to explore the culture of perfectionism and body consciousness that led to unhappiness in her own life—and then presents a debrief on that culture that is heavy on graphics, numbers, sexist sound bites and T&A imagery. Both fall short of establishing a depth of narrative intention ('I’ve had privilege but I haven’t been immune to the damage our culture does to women," Newsom says, couching her experiences in the clichéd language of victimisation before we know what they are), or an approach that might distinguish Miss Representation from the statistical onslaught that both sides of any debate can use to their advantage.
Which is hardly to say that Ms. Newsom and the very impressive bunch of women she gathers (including Jane Fonda, Margaret Cho, Condoleeza Rice, Nancy Pelosi and Gloria Steinem) don’t have a point. But the argument being made is well known, and it hardly seems necessary to re-articulate it using endless shots of pop stars and anonymous bodies being bent and splayed four ways. More interesting is the case presented against the political climate in the United States, which seems to be regressing in its treatment of women rather than moving forward: How will the next generation of women find the time or the inclination to enter public service when they are huddled before the mirror for half of their lives or too intimidated by the scrutiny that our best female leaders are subjected to when they dare to step up?
Dotted throughout this largely boilerplate, information-packed documentary are a few such apt reminders of the way diminishment of female ambition, accomplishment and desire is manifested in our society and within the lives of young women struggling to find a way to live with dignity and purpose. This is the first time in human history, we are told, that a 256 billion dollar advertising industry has dictated human values and culture. On some level you already knew that; the challenge is staying alive to it as something other than a figure on a screen.
