Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture by Hilary Radner (review)

Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture argues that the “girly film”—a film for female audiences, featuring a girlish main character who transforms her life by exercising her skills as a consumer—provides a clear picture of the circulation of discourses about women and the feminine in Western culture over the past forty years. Hilary Radner locates this genre in its relationship to postfeminist culture by repurposing the term neo-feminism. Neo-feminism, “the tendency in feminine culture to evoke choice and the development of individual agency as the defining tenets of feminine identity,” is coincident with, but only tangentially related to, feminism after the second wave.¹ Neo-feminist cinema is crucially important as an object of study because, in Radner’s view, its consumer-oriented pragmatism has been “much more influential” than feminism’s utopian ideals in creating and disseminating gender ideology across mass culture.² As such, it is crucial for feminist film scholars, particularly those invested in issues of genre and representation, to study neo-feminist film. Radner’s case studies of films for primarily female audiences show how “the girly film underlines the unwillingness of women to reject femininity and the ways in which a neo-feminist paradigm, unlike feminism, offers women a means of retaining “femininity” while evolving a definition of femininity that can respond to the social and economic shifts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”³ In Radner’s reading of the neo-feminist girly film, the female-oriented narratives and spectacles popular in the era of conglomerate Hollywood frame womanhood as “girlishness” and thus emphasize those kinds of “self-fulfillment” and “empowerment” that can be achieved only by participating in consumer culture.⁴

The book begins with a lengthy discussion of the work and life of Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown (HGB), whom Radner identifies as a foundational model for the neo-feminist paradigm. The following three chapters illustrate this paradigm by performing close readings of Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (David Mirkin, 1997), and Legally Blonde (Robert Luketic, 2001) that illustrate the common conventions of the girly film and begin to fill in the contours of the genre, with its emphases on career girls, consumer competence, magical spaces, transformation, and nostalgia. The generic themes and tropes that Radner locates in these films shift in the following two chapters to encompass a discussion of race and star image. Jennifer Lopez’s evolution from Latina niche-market favorite to paparazzi-hounded movie star is read as an exemplar of conglomerate Hollywood’s integration of product placement, cross-market enterprises, and the message that “‘race’ can be accommodated through the acquisition of appropriate consumer culture items.”⁵ Radner then follows this thread by engaging the synergistic relationship between fashion and the industrial histories of girly films such as The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) and Sex and the City: The Movie (Michael Patrick King, 2008). She analyzes these films’ paratexts, budgets, marketing campaigns, and costumes as crucial links between consumer culture and conglomerate Hollywood. The final reading of director Nancy Meyers’s film Something’s Gotta Give (2003) frames both the auteur and the film’s embrace of girly film commonplaces as an effect of the way that the feminine subject’s appropriation of neo-feminist standards and beliefs allows her to “intervene in a dominant system of governmentality that privileges a masculine subject.”⁶ This last chapter emphasizes the way that the “largely indifferent, if not hostile environment” of neoliberal culture has forged a discourse of progress through self-fulfillment that makes it extremely difficult for women (even those rare creatures—female film directors) to make ethical choices about their role in culture.⁷

Radner reads neo-feminism as a counterpoint to feminism, calling it a movement that developed out of the “conditions that produced second-wave feminism” rather than a consequence of or response to...