A dramatic change sweeps across the entire office as the words pop up on the computer screens of each cubicle. In a blink, the dormancy of a relaxed office atmosphere shifts to a tensed frenzy as the weightage of the words dawn on the employees of Margaret’s Book Publishing company.
Enter the boss.
Her glossy chestnut-brown hair is tied in a neat ponytail that bobs up and down as she tic-tocs (surprisingly gracefully) on killer heels. The dress is classy, albeit the tad-too-deep V-shaped neck of the blouse. Her most striking feature though is definitely the shapely supermodel like figure. Add to that alert eyes and a hard mouth and voila, you have Margaret Tate-- “the cold, chillingly mean, emotionless boss, incapable of maintaining any relationships.”
The employees, meanwhile, are hurriedly cleaning up their act.
They have all been alerted by the instantly messaged code word for when the boss is on her way to the building: “The witch is on her broom.”
Someone dumps the doughnut with a gasp and hastily picks up the telephone receiver. Someone else cries, “Shhhoot!” and scurries to the cubicle. Magazines are hurriedly put aside and suddenly water-cooler-breaks are up.
The movie being discussed is the 2009 romantic comedy, The Proposal, starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. With a total earning of over $317.5 million, The Proposal was the highest grossing romantic comedy of the year.
Following is the movie’s one-line description on ibmd.com: A pushy boss forces her young assistant to marry her in order to keep her Visa status in the U.S. and avoid deportation to Canada.
And this is where cinematic sociology can be used as an effective tool to explain the portrayal of empowered women in Hollywood movies.
The kind of power symbolized by Margaret (Sandra Bullock) in The Proposal may well be explained by the Weberian “power-over” definition of power. Simply put, it explains power in terms of the ability of individuals to further their will and attain their goals. This form of power “with perhaps the longest history in sociology, philosophy and psychology” was described by Weber as “the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action, even against the resistance of others...” (Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland, What is Power? p 115)
According to Amy Allen, author of The Power of Feminist Theory, this conceptualization takes the form of "a dyadic, master/ subject relation… a kind of masculinized power” (Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland, What is Power? p 115).
The typical “pushy” boss, who embodies a certain masculine- feminity, wrongly exploits her co-worker by coercing him into marriage, just so she is spared deportation. Also, alongside being depicted as a headstrong young woman who has the world on her fingertips, Margaret Tate has also been considerably physically sexualized (remember the dress, the figure and the heels?).
Cold, callous yet stunning: these are the defining characteristics of womanly roles that demonstrate a “power-over,“ one of the three types of the most prominent literary definition of power.
And in case of The Proposal, it takes barely the first 5 minutes to conclude the category of power that the movie is based on.
Although Margaret is “a woman with power, it looks like the masculine version of a power-over that we have grown accustomed to, perhaps the only kind of power we recognize as power” (Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland, What is Power? p 120).
Consecutively, the “masculine woman” dominates, oppresses and exploits. All this to the extent that her assistant Andrew drinks "the same coffee as you do, just incase yours spilled.” (She had cast aside the comment as “pathetic,” with a role of her eyes.)
This kind of power portrayal, however, is the exact opposite of the way feminists would like it portrayed-- their goal is certainly “not to transfer domination and oppression (and masculinity) into the hands of women” (Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland, What is Power? p 116).
Nonetheless, what with movies like The Devil Wears Prada, No Reservations and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider to name a few, the power-over conceptualization continues to remain a popular theme for popcorn flicks.
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