It’s weird being a woman on the Internet. Over the weekend, a post from an X account called World of Statistics went viral, for sharing a “fun fact” about the 1994 movie The Shawshank Redemption. As the tweet reads, “there are only two female speaking roles, totaling about 10 seconds in a 2 hours and 22 minutes film.”
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As plenty of comments pointed out, this is largely a byproduct of the film literally being set at a men’s prison, during an era when the staff and orderlies were largely segregated by gender. But the tweet went viral, in part, because certain men online took it as an opportunity to celebrate movies with little-to-no speaking roles for women. Writer and TV host Chris Gore, in particular, tweeted “John Carpenter’s The Thing is 1 hour 49 minutes and has zero female speaking roles.”
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Gore’s comment isn’t even technically correct, as Carpenter’s real-life wife at the time, Adrienne Barbeau, voices the chess computer that appears in the film. But the sentiment still led plenty of replies from men, joking about how The Thing is even more of a “perfect movie” because you don’t really have to hear women speaking in it. Some replies also brought up other movies with similar gender divides, like 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia and 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
The whole conversation is just bizarre. It’s bizarre because plenty of women love all of the movies I’ve just named, especially Carpenter’s genre-redefining adaptation of The Thing. (It’s also worth mentioning that The Thing From Another World, the 1951 adaptation of the same novella, has multiple women as main cast members.) And it’s bizarre because… this is such an annoying metric to judge a film on.
You’re Being Weird!
It’s certainly no secret that there’s a gender disparity in practically all of entertainment, but especially in the film industry. The onscreen depiction of women has ebbed and flowed ever since the birth of cinema, but has still gotten nowhere near equal, either in front of or behind the camera. But some men online have taken any sort of positive female representation as a slight on them, as evidenced by just the general decorum online for the better part of the decade. Gore himself has become known for expressing this mentality online, especially when it comes to decrying “wokeness” in franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Obviously, these men are going to continue saying that nonsense at virtually any available opportunity. But them now heralding certain classic films for having less female representation — either as an artistic choice, or just as a logical extension of the film’s story — is just weird. It’s not even like this conversation started in response to A24’s Mother Mary, which makes the intentional choice to not have any speaking roles for men. While that fact very briefly caught people’s attention when the film debuted in theaters last month, the film very quickly (and unfortunately) left theaters.
The Thing and Lawrence of Arabia are classic pieces of cinema, not oases to hide away from the “wokeness” of today. And honestly, if you need to hide away from the mere idea of a few women speaking in a movie, that says more about you than anything.
(featured image: Universal Pictures)
