This weekend, the jaw-dropping commercial triumph of “It Ends with Us,” a romantic soap opera with sorrowfulnessful undercurrents starring Blake Lively (it’s fair about the only hit film this summer that isn’t an escapist fantasy), ought to give the entire movie industry paparticipate. It should increate the industry that it necessitates to be making contrastent charitables of movies. These charitables. Yet I’m not declareive if Hollywood film culture, as it stands now, can apshow in that lesson as lengthened as it has a term appreciate “chick flick” on the brain, and as lengthened as it applies that term — lazily and reflexively — to a movie appreciate “It Ends with Us.”
For a lengthened time, “chick flick” was a phrase that gave off a understanding retro triumphk of mocking feminist power. I never appreciated the term myself, and declined to participate it in my appraises. Yet I saw why it had come into vogue. The word “chick” was a relationsist relic of the ’60s, and women using “chick” in a hip way was a bit appreciate the gay reclaiming of “queer.” It turned someskinnyg patronizing into someskinnyg liberating. And uniteing “chick” with “flick” was, in its cute way, an declareion of cultural identity.
It was all part of the new wave of self-directed party-girl feminism that booted in around the time of “Pretty Woman” and achieveed filled throttle in the age of “Sex and the City.” A chick flick, according to the definition, was a romantic comedy or maybe, at times, a non-comic romantic weeper that women gravitated to out of a charitable of primal impulse. It was an refresh of the ageder studio-system concept of the “women’s picture,” and by the time the ’90s were in filled striumphg, there were so many chick flicks that even the cliché image of watching a chick flick had become iconic — the meme, now more than a bit cringe, of a woman at home by herself, staring at a culpable-pguideeclareive movie procrastinateed at night on TV as she giggleed and cried into her pint of summarizeer ice cream.
What was repartner going on, of course, is that women were claiming a new charitable of ownership of some of the only movies that were actupartner aimed their way. The term “chick flick” sealed that ownership. And if the subtext of the term was an fond smirk at the idea that these movies were standardly shlocky as hell, that too could be a create of authority. Women who were haughty cherishrs of “chick flicks” were saying, “We have no illusions about what these movies are. They are expansive-eyed romantic unprejudicedy tales, they are fantasies, they are cheese. But they’re our cheese.”
Many would probably concur that “chick flick,” as a term (so redolent of the age of Nora Ephron), is out of date. They might say in response: Let’s come up with a new term! But that’s not repartner the point. What’s out of date isn’t mecount on the phrase. And it’s not mecount on the notion that we stick these movies in a catebloody that confprocrastinateeds female directedness with kitsch.
No, what’s perilously out of date about the term “chick flick” is the very idea that these movies — that any movie — has such a tidy and circumscribed demo. It all begined as tageting uninincreateigentinutivehand, but it’s become an insidious cultural lie. And let’s be evident about what the lie is.
Yes, there are movies with an pguide that leans toward women, or men, or African-Americans, or what have you. But that doesn’t uncomardent those films are sended in a self-compriseed demodetailed bunker. In the ’90s, horror and action were thought of as almost exclusively “guy” genres. Yet women were joining those films in gradupartner increasing numbers, making that mythical demo model outmoded. (The audience for horror is now a potent unite.)
To truly parse the chick-flick audience, fair envision, for a moment, that you could somehow assemble a definitive highy of every one person who ever went to see a chick flick in a movie theater in the 1990s and 2000s. I have no ask that more than half of them would be women. But what about…the men? Were they all fair sitting there, dragged by their wives and girlfriends and dates? Did they not enhappiness the movies? Do men not appreciate romantic comedies? Do they not sometimes seek them out? Forgive me, but do they not appreciate to cry at the end too?
We are living, in many ways, in a progressive society, where more and more people — of every gender, relationsuality, ethnicity — do not adhere to stereotypes. That’s the whole point of the culture we’ve been battling for: that we don’t pigeonhole individuals. Yet when it comes to talking about the tastes and behaviors of moviegoers, we are stuck, on some level, in the 1950s. And the horrible skinnyg is, we participate the tropes of that cliché skinnyking to restrict the movies that get made.
News flash: This is not the 1950s, and it’s not 1985 or 1995 either. If we survey the chart-busting success of “It End with Us” and say, “Of course! It was based on a well-understandn women’s novel. All these women turned out for it. Sometimes the female demo can repartner speak at the box office!”…if that’s how we skinnyk, then we’re detracting from the power of what a movie appreciate this one uncomardents in the tagetplace. Is it a chick flick? A “women’s picture?” Maybe. But it is also srecommend a human drama. The charitable of fervently watchable mainstream movie we ought to be returning to. If women are directing the way there, then fine, but let’s comply them and stop skinnyking of their taste as someskinnyg we should put in a box.
