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Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, you're listening to The Takeaway. For decades, women over 30 have been rendered invisible on the big and small screen. Past studies have shown that women's careers peak at about 30 while men's they get another 15 years. According to a 2020 study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, men experience only a 3% drop in representation for characters over 40 compared to 13% drop for women. That's starting to change. Thanks in part to streaming platforms like Netflix and HBO Max. Today, there are more complex and interesting roles for women of a certain age. From Kate Winslet police detective in Mare Of Easttown.

Kate Winslet: You know what it's like when a case gets beside you like that, it's not a switch, you can just turn it off.

Melissa Harris-Perry: One of my personal favorites, Sandra Oh, Department Head in The Chair.

Sandra Oh: I'm not going to sugarcoat this, we're in dire crisis. Enrollments are down more than 30%, our budget is being gutted.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Of course, Regina Kings, Sister Night in Watchmen.

Regina King: I got a nose for white supremacy and he smells like bleach.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For more, I'm joined now by Helen Lewis, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. Helen, it's great to have you here.

Helen Lewis: Thank you for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As a middle age and very difficult woman, talk to me a little bit about what constitutes middle age in Hollywood.

Helen Lewis: I framed this piece around the idea of what I called the dry decade. There's a great quote by Emma Thompson, where she talks about the fact that when she just reached over 40, she was deemed too old really to be a romantic lead anymore. She couldn't be the love interest, but there was sort of nothing there until she got to [unintelligible 00:01:57] really, being kind of a hag. Meryl Streep has said the same, the role she's been offered post 60 have often been, I think the word she used was gargoyles.

They're often these kind of monstrous roles, which can be very, very, very fun, if you've seen Cruella, you'll know that Emma Thompson because [unintelligible 00:02:13] having the absolute time of her life in that. What I felt was missing, particularly in films, was those middle decades of a woman's life. Often when she's juggling a career, maybe elderly parents, maybe kids as well. Films in particular really struggled to represent women at that time of their life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is it because this period of our life. I'm right in the middle of that sandwich. The sandwich, isn't that interesting as a representation in film, or is it that we're failing to find the interesting?

Helen Lewis: This is why some of the-- The premise of my piece is really the TV has changed all this because the thing that's most obvious when you look at film scripts is that they're largely very protagonist-focused. They've often got one central character. The famous test, the Bechdel Test about female representation and film is about, are there two female characters? Are they named? Do they have a conversation together about something other than a man? One of the reasons that test is so often failed in films is if you have a man at the center of the plot, everything revolves around him, so even if you have women talking in that film, they're usually talking about him.

What's really changed, I think, particularly, you can date this back to the beginning of prestige TV, but I think the huge streaming competition between Apple and Amazon, and the other streaming services is really turbocharged these big, impressive roles for women that really go out and spread their tentacles into all the bits of women's lives. I'm really glad you mentioned Regina King because Watchmen is a really great example of that. I think it has a lot in common actually with Mare of Easttown. You're seeing women who are trying to be detectives or superheroes, but they're also trying to manage the school pickup and the laundry.

It used to be that that was kind of, well, how on earth can you be a spy if you've also got to be home in time for tea? Actually, what the TV revolution has now done is gone-- That's actually an interesting challenge. Let's talk about that. Let's put that in the script.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Helen, you've been talking a little bit here about, particularly in film, the ways that women have been portrayed and how TV is opening that up a little bit. Talk to me about how that's different for men. Is there also a dry decade for men or are young men, middle-aged men, and older men all equally represented in Hollywood?

Helen Lewis: I was surprised when I looked at the analysis by Clemson University. They looked at all of Hollywood, 1920 to 2011. They found that actually, at the age of 20, women get the big majority of starring roles. The cynic in me says when they're incredibly hot, and you can put them in bikinis, perhaps Hollywood is very interested in women and would very like to hear about their stories. That maybe ebbs away, so by the time we get to 40, that is completely reversed. 4/5 of starring roles go to women in their 20s, but when you get to 40, 4/5 of those starring roles go to men and it stays there and basically until death.

You just do not see women come back out of the other side of what I've called the dry decade and the few that do get into a limited sense of roles. One of the things I did in the article was looked at Tom Hanks, always a pleasant experience, and his rom-com decade as I think. When he was in his 30s, he was in Big, he was in Sleepless in Seattle, he was in Forrest Gump. His female co-stars in those films just did not prosper in the film industry in their next decade in the way that he did when he played-- He was in Toy Story, he was in Cast Away, he was in Road to Perdition.

He had all these kinds of either fun roles or professional roles, but if you look at the careers of his co-stars in film, they just didn't have those opportunities. Meg Ryan very famously was in a film directed by Jane Campion, garlanded with Oscar nominations, but this was very poorly received film at the time, and it really tanked Meg Ryan's career. The other two, Elizabeth Perkins are Big and Robin Wright of Forrest Gump, they moved into TV, and they did much, much better. Even then, Robin Wright ends House of Cards, sorry, spoiler alert, as the President having been First Lady, and she relied on her co-star Kevin Spacey's cancellation in order to get there.

That's the only reason she got that opportunity to really move up into the lead role. I think there are still problems out there.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I, as a political scientist have always been interested in the representations of political leadership. You remember right after President Obama was elected, there was conversation about how Morgan Freeman had helped to lay the groundwork for the election of the first Black president, simply because he constantly was appearing in movies just as a president who happened to be Black, but then any time there was a woman represented as president, it was about her being a woman.

One of the things I guess I'm wondering about these new roles in television is, on the one hand, as you describe that challenge of managing parenting and being a spy, but does that just normalize the idea of women in these middle decades doing our professional work and living our personal lives or does it constantly keep referring back to, this is not normal, this is weird and quirky?

Helen Lewis: I think that's a really interesting question. One of the things I think is more interesting sometimes is seeing men in those family roles. I think you're entirely right to point out that we often celebrate women doing it all and having it all, but we're slightly slower to celebrate men who have chosen a different path, men who are interested in domestic stuff. I think that's the other half of it. I agree with you that one of the things that's interesting is if you watch Don't Look Up, the film by [unintelligible 00:07:37], you have Meryl Streep as this sort of very Trumpian president. What's great is having a female president who is dumb, depicted [crosstalk] on film. If you see what I mean.

Women can be awful too, always kind of a feminist thing to depict in film. What you don't want to have with either minority characters or female characters is happened to be shining paragons and one dimensional stereotypes of, you go girl. What you want is for your female characters, your minority characters to be just as funny, flawed, interesting, sociopathic. All of those shades that you get you have had in these great white male protagonist through-- In the last century.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How about at the intersection? When we think about Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, but I'm wondering also about Denzel, and in this case of Regina King. I'm wondering if these age limitations have been at all different for women of color and whether the expansiveness for men of color has been equivalent to their white counterparts.

Helen Lewis: I don't think in any case that actors of color have had the same fair shake, regardless of their gender, but I think particularly for women of color, the idea is much more acute. There were a couple of women who didn't make the cut in my article just simply on technical grounds. Kerry Washington was 35 when Scandal started, so she's a little bit below my age range. Viola Davis was 50 when How To Get Away With Murder started, so she was just at the upper end. One of the things that's really notable when you think about those two women and you think about Sandra Oh, who came up through Grey's Anatomy is how much we owe to Shonda Rhimes as a showrunner.

That's always been one of the arguments about representation, is that it's not just about who you see in front of the camera, it's about who's behind it and who's writing those roles, who's directing those roles, who's producing those shows. I don't think you'll get progress in Hollywood either for women or actors of color without the behind-the-scenes changing too.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Shonda Rhimes has the ability to see the Kerry Washington, the Viola Davis, the Sandra Oh, and see the complex quirky interesting stories there.

Helen Lewis: I think that's exactly right. One of the things I appreciate most about that is her palate is prod as well. Regina King's acting in Watchmen is interesting because that is a story that is all about white supremacy. It's all about racism within a police department, but you also have I think, in a lot of the work of Shonda Rhimes, people for whom their race is incidental. They've learned about their life being a doctor and it comes up occasionally but it isn't the central focus of their life. That is something I think that is hopefully we move towards real representation and real diversity that everything won't be reflected through the prism of race and gender.

Those will become character traits because there are enough Black actors succeeding, there are enough female actors getting leads that is no longer the most notable thing about them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to pop back to young women for just one last question which is I thought your insight here as long as you can put them in a bikini then we're interested in their stories. I guess part of what I'm wondering here is are the roles for young women who are also complex are they sufficiently whole or are they ornamental those roles?

Helen Lewis: It's one of the things that I wrote in Difficult Women is that with young women we look just at the surface and with older women we look straight through them and so they're both different sides of the same coin I think is the idea that men do stuff and women are there to look at. That applies I think in the media and the way that you see stories illustrated and also I think in the way that films and TV have traditionally regarded young women.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. Helen thanks for joining us.

Helen Lewis: Thank you.

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