flipping the gender

Thanks to Bad Reputation – a blog that’s become part of my regular reading – I discovered the awesome The Girls on Film.

The team is made up of Ashleigh Harrington (co-creator, actress, editor, effects artist), Cat McCormick (co-creator, actress) and Jeff Hammond (co-creator, director). The trio re-makes scenes from male-dominated movies with the women playing the parts of the men.

Thus far they’ve re-created scenes from Star Trek, The Town and Fight Club. Here is the Fight Club clip in all it’s wicked glory.

The remade scenes – or cocktails as TGOF call them – underline the potential of putting women into roles that are not conventional. Both the actresses are very good, and they’ve chosen scenes that feature strong dialogue and intriguing character dynamics (hat-tip to the writers). This puts an emphasis on the skill of the actresses to bring emotion and drama to the scenes – which still work very well despite the gender flip.

As I’ve mentioned before women are under-represented on the screen, and mostly given a narrow spectrum of characters under the age of forty. The vast majority of the meaty roles in mainstream movies go to the lads. This fascinating project points out that a woman can bring a fresh perspective to a character that is generally given to a man.

And maybe there should be some gender reversal of the typical female characters.

Let’s see men playing women in a scene from Knocked Up or Bride Wars, and notice what light that shines on the type of roles often ascribed to women in film.