Where are the good role models?
In the new movie “Nancy Drew,” the heroine (played with style and grace by Emma Roberts) uses and celebrates her intuitive and intellectual abilities as a teen sleuth, and comes to accept the fact she is exceptional, and does not fit in with her high school peers mainly concerned with cliques, clothes and crushes.
Yes, it is a lightweight PG film, but it still provides a welcome example of a young woman who values ethics, civility, truth and self-direction; who commands respect and courtesy from adults; enjoys having retro tastes in spite of that helping to keep her an “outsider,” and successfully uses her positive obsessions to solve mysteries.
“I liked how square she is,” says director and co-writer Andrew Fleming [in a USA TODAY article: New 'Nancy Drew' anything but clueless, By Anthony Breznican, June 13 2007.]
“Nancy Drew is on it. She’s focused. She’s alpha,” Fleming says. “She’s what we — or I — aspire to be. She gets the job done and keeps her moral compass at all times.”
The article author (Breznican) writes, “A hallmark of Nancy Drew is her perfectionism. In the books, she speaks fluently whatever language she needs at the time. She is not only perpetually equipped with a flashlight but also is a certified scuba diver when necessary…
“That could quickly become annoying in a character, so filmmakers decided to poke fun at her obsessive tendencies.”
“We make a joke about it, but it really is about sincerity,” Fleming says. “Self-destructive characters are always being romanticized, but you can be a well-behaved, intelligent, independent person and be happy. We could have said, ‘Let’s sex her up,’ and people might have gone along with that. But that’s not what’s interesting.”
With so many media images and stories of Hollywood “bad girls” saturating even news programs, it is encouraging to see a movie - and even the film poster, which features a relatively ordinary looking girl - certainly very pretty, but no tart or paparazzi target.
And just that poster image as a star may have a positive effect on other girls, even if they don’t see the movie.
What does Emma Roberts, 16, think of the complex, intelligent character she portrays so well?
“We are both alike in some ways. We’re determined, ambitious, curious - but I think she’s much more of a neat freak than I am…
“I think Nancy Drew is so cool because… when she first came out in the books there weren’t a lot of young teen girls that independent and that sure of themselves and stuff like that, at least not in movies and books.
“There still aren’t many; I can’t think of any. So, I think that’s really cool about her.” [From collider.com interview 6/11/2007]
Andrew Fleming also thinks “Young female culture has swung so far out now, with Lindsay, Britney and Paris being the center of attention, in a very self-absorbed and worrisome way.
“So many girls are more like Nancy Drew, but they’re living in a world right now where they don’t get any kind of validation for being kind or thoughtful or conscious of right and wrong.”
[From It's a green light for stand-up girls' roles, By Sheigh Crabtree, Los Angeles Times latimes.com June 10, 2007]
Sure, characters who are “mean girls” or sexy “bad girls” can be fun for movie viewers, teens and adults.
But characters like Nancy Drew, with her values of reason, order, gentility and respect for both herself and others, can also be fun - hopefully even for young people still exploring what values to, well, value.
It seems limiting and unfortunate that such characters and people are typically not the newsmakers that celebrity journalism headlines.
And “normal” teens (and adults), when written about at all, may be trivialized and dismissed in the media as some variant of “wholesome” - implying they are insubstantial, not really in the ‘movers and shakers’ club.
Girls and women - “good” or “bad” role models - are not anywhere near as present in films as men.
Geena Davis’ organization See Jane, which addresses the lack of female characters in television, movies and other media, issued a report [pdf: Where the Girls Aren't: Gender Disparity Saturates G-Rated Films] that found:
- There are three male characters for every female.
- Fewer than one out of three (28 percent) of the speaking characters (real and animated) are female.
- Less than one in five (17 percent) of the characters in crowd scenes are female.
- More than four out of five (83 percent) of films’ narrators are male.
[From blog post: Geena Davis takes on sexism in the media, feministing.com May 05, 2006]
So what makes for a “good” role model, especially for young women?
Kathleen Noble, Ph.D. points out in her book The Sound of a Silver Horn: Reclaiming the Heroism in Contemporary Women’s Lives that “while women and girls can derive strength and inspiration from stories of heroic men, the dearth of similar stories about women leaves many of us believing that should we strive for adventure and self-awareness, we have no alternative but to model ourselves after - or be rescued by - men.
“The stereotype of the heroine reinforces the restrictive attitudes toward women in patriarchal cultures. The power of this myth makes it extremely difficult for women to be seen as strong, resourceful, courageous, and real, the ingredients of true heroic stature.”
[From my Women and Talent post With or without role models.]
Screenwriter and director Robin Swicord (”Little Women”, “Memoirs of a Geisha”, “The Jane Austen Book Club” etc) commented years ago [LA Times, May 30, 1999] : “If we understood that this is a time of national emergency, we would quickly limit the sheer volume of products that contribute to the culture’s atmosphere of violence and incivility…
“We’d create a wealth of movies and programs that inspire and challenge teens, cause them to think and question, that help to counter the national funk of cynicism, and show human beings solving problems without resorting to violence… Stories and images do change lives.” [Quotes from the page Socially conscious filmmaking.]
Natalie Portman says she found her role of Queen Amidala in “Star Wars” so meaningful because, “You don’t get to see young women on film as rulers, ever.
“I don’t think there’s ever been someone who’s that young as a queen and I think that’s so wonderful, because young girls don’t have that kind of role model in their lives…
“Girls lose a lot of confidence in themselves as they grow up. They become much more worried about their looks than their intelligence or their personalities or their kindness or their souls.” [From my article Being A Role Model.]
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