[QUOTE=Swallowed My Cellphone]
At a Toronto festival of short films, I saw a short called The Porcelain Pussy that was a film noir that was basically a mini-Maltese Falcon, but with diamonds hidden inside a cat figurine (my cousin did some work to help out the film crew, so we got free tickets to the premiere).
It was essentially a 1940s parallel universe to our own, but where women were the dominant gender. While the film was funny, it wasn’t played for laughs (as in, it wasn’t presented as a comedy like a Monty Python parody, or tongue in cheek, or anything. They played it straight.) It was actually well-done. The Sam Spade detective was a woman (and a war vet who had seen heavy combat), the police chief and bad guy were also female. There was an “homme fatale” instead of a “femme fatale”, and what made it cool was that he didn’t play the role effeminately or “weaker”.
Same with the guy selling cigars in the gin joint. The men played all their roles in a masculine way, not at all weak or “pansies”, but socially they had less authority, they were less agressive and less assertive than the women. The film took place in the 1940s, so socially “men were kept in the kitchen”. When a woman grabbed one of the scantily clad waiters in the gin club, the gritty P.I. punched her, totally as you’d expect Bogart to do to a scumbucket pawing at Mary Astor. When the homme fatale actually dared to talk back to the bad guy, he got bitch slapped for his defiance, but again, never acted effeminate. He was just not socially dominant.
That was what was so cool. The women were socially dominant without acting butch, and the men deferred to the authority of women without playing “the weaker sex” in a lampoonish way.
Often gender reversals have a hefty dose of caricature, and this didn’t so much.
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Heh. Reminds me of when the university theater here did a version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. If you’ve never read it, it’s one of those gender-confusion plays, concerning Sebastian and Viola, identical twins of different genders (which we know today is impossible, but anyway…). As I recall the plot, Sebastian is lost at sea, and finding herself alone in the world, Viola disguises herself as a boy to get work as a page. Well, another woman falls in love with “him”, and her employer figures out he’s a she and falls in love with her, but she’s in love with another dude, who loves the woman who…anyway, all very confusing and humorous, especially when Sebastian reappears and everyone thinks he’s Viola.
Anyway, for this particular production, all roles were played by women, even those that were supposed to be men, such as the Duke and the officers of the law (who sported Texas Ranger-esque dusters and five-o-clock shadow). That sorta ratcheted up the gender confusion even more.
