I don’t think women like “Futurama.” Katie Meyer, our esteemed guest, let curiosity get the best of her and requested that we watch a few episodes, having heard glowing things from her boyfriend. Predictably, it didn’t go over well, we were quickly onto something else. I was almost grateful, because if my wife came home and saw Lady Meyer locking eyes with Bender and Zap Brannigan, she would quickly reconstruct the following scene:
Me: Hey Katie, let’s watch Futurama.
Katie: I’d rather not.
Me: You’ll love it! Come on! It’ll be your favorite show ever!
Katie: Well, okay, sure.
Me: Now let’s watch twenty episodes in a row.
Katie: Why don’t we go do so–
Me: Futurama Futurama Futurama! And then we’ll have a six hour Batman symposium!
This, of course, is not what happened, but you can’t blame her for worrying. Her husband is, to say the least, an “enthusiast,” a person who unleashes cultural tidal waves upon anyone foolish enough to listen. I inherited from my father a wild, almost manic hobbyist personality, I’m always finding new subjects to become fascinated with on an amateur level. And like all people with this disposition, I lack a pair of human ears which can sustain the output I’m capable of delivering, so any poor soul who dances too close to the fire is going to get burned. You cannot fathom the endless monologues I have prepared on the Book of Job, John F Kennedy, Great White Sharks, the films of Akira Kurosawa, the nature of Time, Buddhism, Ancient Roman aqueducts, and so forth (not a single one of those was made up).
Nonetheless, I did not perpetrate this one! It was all her, Dear Reader, she asked and I delivered. It’s hard to tell someone to their face, “That did not impress me,” and I almost enjoyed watching Katie fumble with that problem. She marks another in a long, sad line of her gender who just don’t connect with this show. I find this very interesting, because when and how men and women can no longer emotionally identify with a fictional world is very relevant to my line of work.
“Gladiator,” you may know, was such a huge success because the majority of its audience was women. This may come as a surprise, but Russel Crowe’s Maximus is really an incredibly appealing protagonist for the average American woman. He’s a tough, masculine soldier, but he doesn’t like killing and would prefer not to; his heart is always back home with his wife and child. If I have to explain to you that “strong” and “sensitive” are highly appealing when put together, then you have a lot more to learn than I can teach you here. The same goes for the Bourne movies: Jason is handsome and masculine, but he’s totally free of arrogance and he wants to live a peaceful life. Again, massive box office returns.
Women, in general, get the short end of the stick from our culture; the movies made specifically for them are absolute drivel, lacking artistic integrity or ambition. It’s almost like we’re throwing them a bone and telling them to stay in their corner, while we hammer the 18-25 year old men until they can’t see straight. “Twilight” has proven that the female demographic is capable of being just as fanatic as any Star Trek nerd in the world, and the next logical step, I think, is to start making a wider array of cinema that speaks their language. I’d like to see what kind of action movies women might get into, what kind of thrillers, what kind of black comedies. We all basically assume that the female population isn’t going to a movie until Colin Firth is on the poster, or until someone falls in love with someone else, or whatever. We’re sure that if there’s guns or explosions or gross-out jokes or really heavy drama, the movie must be a “man” thing.
This is a ridiculous belief. It is scientific fact that women are every bit their counterpart’s equals, so why would they be naturally predisposed to a shallow, ridiculous taste in movies? Do we really expect that they want a single genre, over and over again? Of course they don’t, we just haven’t explored at all what they do want. Almost every movie or television show stars five or six men, with a single woman tossed in for good measure. Why? Why don’t more things star mostly women? Is there really only a single blonde chick for every twelve dudes on this planet?
We’ve got to shake these habits off, people, because whoever figures out that women are desperate for some cultural acknowledgment is going to make a boatload of money. Tyler Perry was smart enough to notice that his entire demographic was utterly ignored, left at the sidelines, constantly watching the black guy die first in every horror film. “Hang on a second,” he thought, “Black people have televisions. Why the hell wouldn’t they want some entertainment built to cater to them?”
A few years later, he is literally buying himself an island for his birthday.
We act like we’re all enlightened these days, but explain to me why 80 percent of the movies made in this country star white effing males. Is that 80 percent of this country? I don’t even think it’s racist, I just think it’s stupid. Mel Gibson (who is not anti-Semitic, I’m sick of hearing that) made a hard-R-rated movie with no English dialogue about the long, drawn-out torture and execution of an innocent man, and he made more money than the producers of action crap like “Eagle Eye” will ever even look at. Why? Because there is still a silent majority of Christians in this country, and an extremely liberal media just refuses to pander to them. Even the recent “Fireproof,” which allegedly sucks, raked in untold scores of money, but magazines like “Rolling Stone” conveniently ignored this fact. This is idiocy in action; so-called “businessmen” depriving themselves of millions of dollars because they’re prejudiced, and they’d rather hoist a dump truck of Caucasian, left-wing crap on the public than shut up and listen to what the ticket-buyers might actually like to see.
The problem is that the business model in play here is fat and stupid, built entirely on fear. We need dynamic, new ways of looking for our target demographics, we need to be honest about who is really in this country and what they’d like to see. Do you know how many black directors are in Hollywood? Or how many women directors? Pitifully few. They can’t get the money to finance their projects, even though there are millions of people who share their life experiences and might like to hear what they have to say. Hollywood is supposed to be greedy, but they’re not even good at it. There are huge stacks of money waiting to jump into someone’s pockets as soon as they start acknowledging this stuff, and there the movie-making engine sits, at a complete stall. They wait until someone has the balls to take a risk that works, then they ape that movie vigorously with slowly diminishing returns. It’s like a heroin addiction.
They’re so terrified of a “flop” that they’ll do almost anything. They have nightmares about Kevin Costner’s “Waterworld” and Ben Affleck in “Gigli,” and they’ll do anything to avoid that. They are missing out.
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