Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood

Description

Hollywood deals in messages big enough to get through to the densest lummox among us. Cracks in the Pedestal ably points out how Hollywood films and television shows drive home the dominant American ideology and mirror rigid cultural sex roles in a million huge and little ways. Even when social transformations brought about by feminism crop up, the screen images are distorted. When Susan Sarandon plays a lawyer tough enough to go up against the government on behalf of an 11-year-old boy in The Client, for example, it's the bantam-weight man-child who heroically saves her from violence. When a muscular Sigourney Weaver plays the woman warrior Ripley in Aliens, her character is redeemed by a maternal streak. And God help the woman who steps out of line sexually: she's apt to be killed or unfulfilled. Frequent academic throat-clearing and sometimes pretentious prose mar an otherwise intriguing, well-argued book. It reminds us that while movies and television may be fantasy, they enforce a certain world view, beaming it nightly into our homes and around the globe.