Not made for me

We really need more women auteurs.

Initially, I was a David Lynch fan. I was only eleven when The Elephant Man came out, so I probably saw it when it came to TV, and was old enough to think it was good. I’d read the Dune books and was infatuated with Sting, so of course I enjoyed his film version, though, even at 15, I could tell it was bad. But in 1986, when Blue Velvet came out, my interest in becoming a filmmaker was budding. It was the year I started college and part of the reason I applied to Stanford was because I was interested in film and didn’t know the geography of California well enough to realize it was actually six to seven hours from L.A.. I had never seen anything like that film: it was a shocking combination of sex and violence, beautifully shot in rich technicolor. At 17, I was just starting to become a sexual being, and thought the sex was daring. It was definitely disturbing, sure, but that was the point. Plus all my male friends talked about how amazing it was, and I had a lot of male friends my freshman and sophomore years of college. But I noticed that I never wanted to go back and watch it again.

When I saw Wild At Heart, I was much less of a fan. Maybe it was the Nicolas Cage of it all (so over-the-top when he does drama), but I think it was that the combo of sex and violence wore on me differently — partly because, as many reviewers wrote, the characters were too cartoony to give us anything to hang on to through all of the carnage. But I was starting film school when it came out, and now fully surrounded by male cinephiles, for whom Lynch was a hero. They all raved about Twin Peaks, which I never watched because I didn’t have a TV at the time. I was too busy, wasn’t going to pay for cable, and thought 90s network TV was a wasteland of crap, which it largely was. But I was still trying to be a David Lynch fan.

It was Mulholland Drive in 2001 that finally made me realize that his films were not for me. So it took me until I was 32, which is kind of embarrassing, considering that I grew up in a feminist household where my mom was always pointing out sexism on TV. But it was clear to me that all of these men who wrote these fawning reviews about him or discussed him ad nauseam actually didn’t see what I was seeing in this gratuitous male fantasy that made zero sense, with one actress who seemed to have been cast purely because she had huge breasts and a lesbian sex scene that is basically soft-core porn.

It was kind of cool to realize that I had a type of insight that those men didn’t have, but I also knew, from experience, that I couldn’t say anything to most of them about it. I was working in the film business by then, and even in the new millennium, I was still nearly always one of only one or two women on set. In that environment, I needed to blend in, not stand out. If I tried to have a conversation about my views on Mulholland Drive, I’d be told that I needed to overlook my “political” viewpoint and just experience it — as Roger Ebert said, that “This is a movie to surrender yourself to” (lie back and enjoy it, perhaps?) — or that I didn’t get it, or, at best, a shrugging “everyone is entitled to their opinion.” Most of them wouldn’t like me telling them that I saw it differently than they did, and they certainly wouldn’t try to see it through my eyes.

I can’t give Lynch credit for my revelation, though. I’d already started to see everywhere how much media was not made for me. Scorcese. DePalma. Lyne. Von Trier. Hitchcock. Allen. Every James Bond movie, and every horror movie until maybe the 2010s. 95% of the movies and tv shows of the 80s — sure, I liked Trading Places, but the Jamie Leigh Curtis happy hooker and toplessness of all the women? Sigh. And it wasn’t that a lot of these movies weren’t good. Rear Window and Purple Rose of Cairo and Goodfellas and Melancholia still rank highly for me, and some even have strong female characters. But there are just so many moments that make clear that they weren’t made with women in mind as an audience. And because I work on set, I know for a fact that it’s only recently that women became at least some of the creatives at ad agencies who make commercials, and it shows. Car commercials, mini-vans being a notable exception? Not for me. Beer commercials? I’ve found exactly one aimed at women. Ever. Tampon commercials, supposedly aimed at me, but seriously? Not until Amy Schumer started doing them.

Have you been to Autozone? Do you see products here that would make you think any women own cars?

Things are certainly getting better, but…well, are they? Poor Things. Oppenheimer. Killers of the Flower Moon. Mank. The Power of the Dog. Challengers. Again, good movies in many ways, but in terms of the female characters and how inexplicably they behave or how they’re treated? I recently tried to explain to a male friend, who at least wants to be a feminist, my feelings about Anora. Was it entertaining? Sure. But did I understand any more about the inner life of this woman lead character, who the film is named for, by the end than I did at the beginning? Nope, I had a better handle on pretty much all of the male side characters than on her. My friend said, But the final scene! How moving it is because it shows she doesn’t know how to have a relationship that didn’t involve sex! And I said, Oh yeah I got that that was what the director wanted it to be. But to me, that shows that he doesn’t understand his own main character — who has family and friends, and has demonstrated that, in fact, most of even her sex work relationships don’t involve intercourse, and she certainly wouldn’t choose to suddenly have it for free with someone she doesn’t like. The fact that this director is obsessed with mostly woman-identifying sex workers is disturbing enough, but the fact that he still can’t get inside their heads proves that that obsession has very little to do with their humanity.

All of this is to say, don’t assume that everyone out there, and certainly not every filmmaker, thinks that David Lynch was a genius. File that under all the other assumptions that come with life in a patriarchy. I don’t mind if you like him, and I don’t in any way think that you’re wrong for feeling that way. But my dude, instead of explaining to me why you think his work is so great — because, as a filmmaker and also just a smart person who’s always loved movies, I see and understand what you like in there, I really do — I would like you to just try and understand why I don’t. And why, even while there are plenty of great films made by men that don’t exclude me, I’d like to see more women auteurs making more films. Not just because I want to be one, but because — like Jane Campion, Lucretia Martel, Michaela Coel, Greta Gerwig, Chloe Zhao, Catherine Bigelow, Jenji Cohan, Sofia Coppola, Celine Song, Lynne Ramsay, Sarah Polley, Ava DuVernay, Mira Nair, Nicole Holofcener, Maria Schrader — they’re making films and shows for me.