What's Happening to Me? On Women and Web Searches in Movies
If you arrived here via search engine, welcome! (You may have stigmata.)
by Tom Blunt
[An earlier version of this article was originally published by Penguin Random House in 2011]
Just as we have snickered at references to eight-track tapes in movies from the '70s or at the sight of cumbersome car-phones and cell phones from the '80s and '90s, someday our descendants will be giggling at the silly generation of film heroines who turned to search engines in their hour of greatest need.
I've been saving up examples of this phenomenon ever since Halle Berry typed the fateful words "cats. women" and "the cat in history" into her browser, desperate to find an explanation for her strange new Catwoman powers and canned tuna addiction. (As is often the case in films, her version of the Internet doesn't look like anything most of us have encountered.)
Male characters are less often placed in this vulnerable position; one early example I came up with is poor Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy's character in 2008’s "Wanted") pathetically Googling himself and coming up with no results — a moment that’s supposed to humorously underscore how unimportant he is, but which actually just insults the audience’s intelligence from the very beginning: Do they really expect anyone to believe such a common first/last name combination yields literally zero results?
While the gender spectrum of examples has evened out a bit over the years (especially since the proliferation of smartphones), this is still mainly a woman’s domain, if you’ll pardon the pun. Here’s a mini-history! When Lindsay Lohan's character in "I Know Who Killed Me" decides she's had it up to here with her digits falling off inside her gloves, she types "bleeding wounds unexplained" into Ask.com.
When Bella Swan needs to get to the bottom of that pale hottie's personality quirks, she lets Google do the heavy lifting (though her web interface doesn't look much different from Catwoman's). Frantic Googling also plays a key role in the “Breaking Dawn” adaptation as well, with both Edward and Bella rummaging the web for information about human/vampire pregnancies.
Characters often find made-up social media platforms to be just as useful as search engines. For example, in “The Roommate” (2011) Minka Kelly finds hints about Leighton Meester's stalking tendencies by snooping through profiles on the network Frienderz.
And it’s not just blockbuster schlock that sends frightened women to the web: in Lars von Trier's stunning arthouse bummer "Melancholia," Charlotte Gainsbourg searches the terms "Melancholia, death" to see whether her fears about the titular planet crashing into Earth have any basis in reality, resulting in the discovery of this handy diagram (which, it bears mentioning, she prints out).
In most of these cases, the film’s intention is to paint its heroine as inquisitive and determined, taking matters into her own hands with the limited “real world” tools at her disposal — which is part of what makes the outrageously over- or under-designed web displays so amusing.
As far back as the ‘90s, endowing leading ladies with an easy grasp of made-up computer technology became one of Hollywood's most cliched ways of paying lip-service to gender equality, even as they pandered to male-conceived stereotypes about how women engage with reality, virtual or otherwise. Sandra Bullock may be a no-nonsense programming whiz in 1995’s "The Net," but she still succumbs to feminine longings, dejectedly ordering from Pizza.net while Annie Lennox wails "A Whiter Shade of Pale" in the background.
Bridget Fonda’s character spends a disproportionate amount of 1992’s "Single White Female" trying to convince us (and her clients) that she is equally gifted as a fashionista and a software pioneer. And remember the little girl in "Jurassic Park,” and how her genius computer skills emerged at the eleventh hour, even though she'd done nothing for the previous two hours except scream, and get sneezed on?
In nearly all cases, this search-engine nonsense is really just supremely lazy writing — an inexpensive shortcut to hurry the plot along, revealing information (which is often already known by the audience) in a way that hopefully feels “earned.” And in fact, it’s basically just an extension of the long-suffering microfiche trope, which itself had already been identified as a predominantly feminine pursuit.
By movie logic, women must investigate from a “safe” distance, one which screenwriters and filmmakers rarely think to offer their inquisitive, rough-and-tumble male protagonists who think little of moving directly into the path of danger. Whereas web searching is a quiet pursuit, and often a private one. It puts the searcher in a reactive position: the eyes widen, the mouth gasps.
Sure, men are sometimes called upon to give versions of this performance, but from the very beginning, the psychology of male writers and filmmakers dictated that it would more interesting to view women in this inert position. And isn’t it interesting how often it turns out that a researcher simply can’t be saved by whatever she learns, or escape from it? Or ends up being doomed by her quest for knowledge, rather than empowered by it?
Unlike our real life searches, you’ll note that in movies the results are always 100% relevant and useful. As someone prone to fits of hypochondria and late-night WebMD crawls, I know exactly how gross a misrepresentation this really is. In real life, web searches lead us to dead-ends, to conflicting information, and to strange passageways that catapult us into entirely different subjects.
It might appear perfectly realistic to have characters use the web as an oracle — it has become, in fact, our first line of defense against life's problems, large and small (and thus, is now also the source of our problems, large and small).
However, why should realism remain the standard? As an audience, we engage with fantasy scenarios accepting that fictional characters won't necessarily make the same decisions that we would, don’t have the same tools we do. We are willing to suspend disbelief and embrace someone else’s vision of the world, even if it doesn't reflect, say, the hours of paperwork or app-twiddling that we’ve grown used to in our own. So why do storytellers imagine that we crave see ourselves reflected in this particular way?
Here’s a little game to play the next time you watch a film heroine tapping keywords into a search engine, desperate to find the source of her concern. Ask yourself: by what other means could she have possibly found this information? (Not counting microfiche.)
Whom else could she have asked? What kinds of interactions might such a scene involve? And wouldn’t any of these end up being more dynamic and entertaining than a view of someone staring at a screen, eyes glistening… just like you’re doing?
In the meantime, we are stuck with her, the Searching Woman, so desperate to find out what will happen, so unable to escape her destiny, or to research her way into a better movie.
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