Conquer or Connect: Power, Patterns, and the Gendered Narrative

Years ago I was seated in a darkened theater trying to watch a film. All The Pretty Horses (2000) was pretty enough, with good production values and appealing music by Marty Stuart. But not only did the narrative fail to engage me, the structure and content of the screenplay positively pushed me away and allowed enough space for my mind to analyze or intellectualize the distance I felt. About halfway into the film, it occurred to me that by examining the interplay between the main character (played by Matt Damon) and his love interest (played by Penelope Cruz), I had come to a more concrete language for explaining something arising from screenplays that bothers me in many finished films. Not only is Damon's character launched on the commonly depicted hero's journey or quest, but his story also is really one of multiple conquests—break the horses, get the girl, beat the (admittedly unfair) system. His success in every case is temporary and contrasts vividly with the decisions made by the beautiful, rich woman who sleeps with him and says she loves him but ultimately chooses to maintain the connection she has with her powerful and close-knit Mexican family rather than strike out on her own with a penniless drifter from north of the border. Within the context of the film, her choice is presented as somehow wrong, but a larger question remains: why should a choice to connect rather than to conquer be presented as wrong? I realized while sitting in the theater that the stories of my own life, not to mention the stories I respond to onscreen, are the underrepresented and underexplored narratives of connection, stories I believe are feminine in form.

It is important to look critically at the implications of various theories of narrative as well as the ideologies contained in the classical narrative structure rearticulated by popular screenwriting gurus such as Syd Field, Linda Seger, Richard Walter, Robert McKee, and Blake Snyder.¹ By contrasting themes of conquest and connection in film, this article explores the implications of gender and narrative that are first expressed in screenplay. Simply put, stories told in a conventional, masculine form are generally linear, hero-driven tales about conquest, whereas stories told with a more circular and sometimes collective feminine structure are often about overcoming obstacles in order to find connection. That connection may be internal, may involve other individuals or groups, or may even relate to larger communities. I do not mean this in an essentialist or reductive sense; men might tell some stories with a feminine structure, and women working in commercial Hollywood most often tell conventionally masculine stories. I contend that there are other ways—good and useful ways that transcend the dominant neo-Aristotelian—to approach the screen narrative, and the structures I suggest reflect the lived experience of women. Examples of how a feminine narrative structure looks in practice include such films as Strangers in Good Company (1990), Daughters of the Dust (1991), Blue (1993), The Piano (1993), Antonia's Line (1995), and more recently, I Am Love (2009). My starting place in exploring gender and narrative is an early essay by feminist literary theorist Josephine Donovan called "Toward a Women's Poetics."² In this essay, Donovan argues that "[t]o understand women's art one must have a knowledge of women's experience and practice" (99), and she delineates six structural conditions that she argues have traditionally shaped women's experience. I follow those categories of experience in the body of this article and tease out implications of the relevant patterns and power relationships as they apply to gendered narrative in the screenplay form. Once again, I want to make clear that I am talking about broad patterns and am not implying that Donovan's conditions represent the experience of all women or that feminine narrative structures are not available to men who find them meaningful.

Donovan's first condition is the shared oppression of women that is imposed by governing patriarchal or androcentric ideologies and the expression of that oppression as the "internalization...