March’s Book + Film Club selection pairs The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere with Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman as a part of our Women In Film celebration sponsored by WBHM and SouthState Bank. Courtney Brannon Donoghue is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Arts at University of North Texas. Her text, The Value Gap, dissects how female directors, producers, and writers navigate the challenges and barriers facing female-driven projects at each stage of filmmaking in contemporary Hollywood.
Using the foundational knowledge of how female-driven films are created in Hollywood we will watch Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell’s Oscar-winning film, and discuss the ideas expressed throughout the film. With the themes of sexual assault, female empowerment, complicity, perceptions, and the search for justice, this film explores how women are perceived in the world.
In an interview with The Guardian Fennell says, “There’s a need to politicize women’s work, to make it either a memoir or part of a movement. But the issues in this film have been going on for ever and I’ve been thinking about writing it for a long time. So I wanted to see if it was possible to make a very specific type of genre movie. It just so happened that this project is about something that we’re all familiar with, which can seem innocuous and mundane, but when you examine it in another way is incredibly sinister.” Star Carey Mulligan adds, “This is all very familiar stuff. We’ve all seen it in so many romantic comedies told from the guy’s perspective, who has to get the really hot girl really drunk to persuade her to have sex with him, because sober she wouldn’t go home with him. We’ve seen it in films and thought it was totally normal. Well, I did. I never thought: ‘Oh, that’s actually quite fucked up.’ I’ve always watched it and thought: ‘Yeah, that’s life, that’s what we all do.’ This film is saying: ‘Hang on, wait a minute.’”
Further Reading:
Funding For Women In Film: New Study Peels Off Layers Of Inequity | Forbes
WIF Study Finds Women-Led Companies Receive Less Funding Than Male Counterparts | Variety
How Do We Define the Female Gaze in 2018? | Vulture
The ‘female gaze’ is not a thing. Please don’t make it a thing | Honi Soit
On the Disempowerment of Promising Young Woman | Features | Roger Ebert [Spoilers]
Sidewalk’s Book + Film Club unites movie and book lovers for a monthly film screening and discussion about famous films and the people who make them. At the end of the month, we host a screening of a film related to the book and host a round-table discussion.
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