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Something’s Gotta Give: Hollywood, Female Sexuality and the “Older Bird” Chick Flick
Margaret Tally, Associate Professor, Empire State College, State University of NY
Introduction
In a Feb. 23
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, 2004 article in The Guardian, cultural critic Cherry Potter identified a
new film genre for women, the “older bird” chick flick. Commenting on these films,
Potter compared this term to another recent coinage, “chick-lit”:
Sorry, that [“older bird”] doesn’t have quite the same ring as “chick-lit”.
But what else are we to call the recent trend for comedy dramas about the
sexual awakening of middle-aged women, particularly those who discover
that some men actually find them beautiful without their clothes on? The
question is why these comedies are appearing now.
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Diane Keaton, who starred in one of the recent “older bird” chick flicks, Something’s
Gotta Give (2003), thinks these films may be appearing now, in part, because they
explicitly speak to the questions of relationships and sexuality in middle age. Despite
these relatively positive assessments that Hollywood has finally begun to create films
with older female audiences in mind, the overall Hollywood film line-up is still
dominated by films with more conventionally “male” themes of the hero or anti-hero on
some kind of quest, either alone or with a buddy figure. Women, where they are
portrayed, are usually young women who play a supporting role; middle-aged women are
relegated to even more subsidiary roles.
The dearth of good roles for women may be due, in turn, to the fact that men still
predominantly hold positions of power in Hollywood. Younger men especially are
increasingly occupying more positions of decision-making than ever before. As film
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