评论
打印
The numbers are stunning: From 2007 through 2014, women made up only 30.2 percent of all speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films released in the United States. That’s bad enough to repeat: For every 2.3 male characters who say “Dude,” there is just one woman saying, “Hello?!”
这些数字很惊人：从2007年到2014年，在美国票房收入前100位的虚构类电影中，所有有台词或有名字的角色里女性只占30.2%。换个说法也同样糟糕：电影里每出现2.3个男性角色开口说“伙计”，才会出现一个女人说，“你好”。
That is one of the findings in a study, “Inequality in 700 Popular Films,” being released on Wednesday, that looks at gender, race, ethnicity and what one of the report’s researchers, Stacy L. Smith, describes as an “epidemic” when it comes to lack of diversity. The report was produced by the Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
这是周三发布的一项题为“700部大众电影中的不平等现象”报告中的一个发现，这项调查关注性别、种族、民族问题。同时，报告的研究者之一，斯塔西·L·史密斯(Stacy L. Smith)还提出了所谓“流行病”的概念，意指缺乏多样性。该报告由南加利福尼亚大学安娜堡传播与新闻学院媒体的多样性与社会变革倡导组织( Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative)制作。
The report is crammed with numbers that show the extent of this misrepresentation when movies like “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” hit screens:
这项报告提供了大量数字，表明《美国队长2》(Captain America: The Winter Soldier)等大片中存在的歪曲之处：
The movies are white: 73.1 percent of all the speaking or named characters in the top 100 movies were white.
电影是白人的：前100部票房大片中，所有有台词或有名字的角色里有73.1%是白人。
The movies are straight: Only 19 total characters were lesbian, gay or bisexual — none were transgender.
电影是异性恋的：只有19%的角色是女同性恋、男同性恋或双性恋，没有跨性别者。
The movies are young: Only 19.9 percent of female characters were 40 to 64 years old.
电影是年轻的：只有19.9%的女性角色是40到64岁。
The movies are male: Only 1.9 percent of the movies were directed by women.
电影是男性的：只有1.9%的电影由女性导演。
Even many casual observers may now be aware of the hurdles facing female directors, particularly when they try to storm the big studios. Yet those problems, as this latest study confirms, are simply part of a far larger picture. In 2014, not a single title in the top-grossing 100 fictional films starred a woman over 45. One reason is that Meryl Streep, the hardest-working woman in cinema, had only supporting roles, including in the Disney musical “Into the Woods.” That fractured fairy tale at least featured several women in pivotal roles, which isn’t the case in most movies, family-friendly or not. According to the “Inequality” report, for 2014, “girls/women make up less than a third of all speaking characters on screen and less than a quarter of the leads/co-leads driving the story lines.” For instance, that year, women made up only 21.8 percent of the speaking or named characters in action and adventure movies, where male superheroes and all manner of other bros dominate.
甚至很多随意的观察者都能注意到女性导演所面临的困难，特别是她们需要和大制片公司打交道的时候。然而正如这项调查所证实的，这些问题只是更大的问题中的一部分。2014年，在前100部票房大片中，没有一部是以年过45岁的女人为主人公的。原因之一是电影界最勤奋的女人梅丽尔·斯特里普(Meryl Streep)当年只演了一些配角，包括迪斯尼的音乐片《魔法黑森林》(Into the Woods)——这个支离破碎的童话故事里至少还有几个主角是女人，大多数电影却并非如此，不管是不是合家欢的类型。根据这项“不平等现象”报告，2014年，“在有台词的角色中，女孩/女人只占1/3，在推动故事发展的主角/联合主角中，女性角色不到1/4”比如，2014年，在动作类和冒险类电影中有台词或名字的角色里，女人只占21.8%，占统治地位的还是男性超级英雄和各种弟兄们。
A lot of the information in the report isn’t new, even if it remains newsworthy. Among other things, the findings are a blunt reminder that female-driven blockbusters like “The Hunger Games” and African-American dramas like “Selma” remain exceptions in a largely homogeneous field. Art may be a mirror of life, but it is often a badly distorted one in mainstream American cinema.
这项报告中的很多信息都并不新鲜，不过也仍然颇具新闻价值。比如，这些发现直率地提醒人们，《饥饿游戏》(The Hunger Games)等由女性主导的大片和《塞尔玛》(Selma)等非裔美国人题材的情节片在这个同质化严重的领域内仍然属于异数。艺术或许是生活的反映，但在美国主流电影界，它也常常是一种扭曲的反映。
And, while women may be about half of the population — and for years have bought half the movie tickets — they remain a persistent minority on screen. The same is true of certain races and ethnicities, despite the utopianism of movies like the “Fast & Furious” series. The report found that 4.9 percent of all speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing movies of 2014 were “Hispanic/Latino.” As the report points out, this low number is at odds with off-screen demographics: Latinos were 17.1 percent of the population in 2013. And in 2014, they were also 25 percent of what the industry calls frequent moviegoers.
虽然女性或许占人口的半数，同时多年来也是一半票房的贡献者，但她们仍然是银幕上的弱势群体。同样，对于某些种族和民族也是如此，尽管《速度与激情》(Fast & Furious)系列等影片中有着乌托邦般的景象。这项报告表明，2014年票房前100位的电影中，有台词或名字的角色里，只有4.9%是“西班牙/拉丁裔”。这项报告指出，这么低的数字与生活中的人口调查数据完全相悖。2013年，拉丁人口占据全国的17.1%，2014年，他们占电影业所谓的“经常观影者”人群的25%。
The “Inequality” report comes at a time of increasing criticism about the industry’s on-screen and off-screen practices, giving further empirical support to what has become a steady stream of righteous complaint. In May, the American Civil Liberties Union sent letters to state and federal agencies seeking an investigation of the hiring practices of the major Hollywood studios, networks and talent agencies. That same month, Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, and four other female senators sent a letter to the major studios asking them to respond to an earlier Annenberg/University of Southern California study that found that only 4.1 percent of top-grossing films over the last decade had female directors.
这是一个对电影工业在银幕内外做法的批评越来越大声的时代，这份关于“不平等现象”的报告，对于源源不断的正义抱怨提供了进一步的来自经验主义的支持。五月，美国民权同盟(American Civil Liberties Union)给州立和联邦机构发去信函，要求调查好莱坞主要制片公司、网络和人才经纪机构的雇员情况。同月，加利福尼亚民主党参议员芭芭拉·伯克瑟(Barbara Boxer)以及其他四位女性参议员发信函给各大制片公司，要求他们对安娜堡/南加利福尼亚大学的另一项更早期发表的研究做出回应，该项研究指出，在过去10年的100部顶级票房大片中，只有4.1%是由女导演执导的。
The “Inequality” report is part of a growing wealth of data about the industry’s practices that are, study by study, making the case for change. Dr. Smith also helped write that earlier study and was one of the principal researchers — along with Marc Choueiti and Katherine Pieper — on a widely publicized multiyear study done with the Sundance Institute and Women in Film on the crisis facing female directors. For the “Inequality” study, they were joined by a team that swelled to an estimated 70 to 80 people; most of the team members are undergraduate students. Dr. Smith said on Friday that it was one of her students who had inspired her to start looking at the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters, which is in keeping with studies that show that young Americans tend to be liberal in their political and social views. (She declined to name the student, citing privacy concerns.)
通过这份“不平等现象”报告和其他的类似研究，关于电影工业的大量数据不断累积，成为了推动行业变革的力量。史密斯博士和马克·库埃蒂(Marc Choueiti)及卡瑟琳娜·皮珀(Katherine Pieper)同为核心调查者，参与了圣丹斯学院与“电影中的女人”项目的另一项广为宣传、历时多年的研究，内容是关于女性导演所面临的危机，她还协助撰写了研究的早期报告。为了做这项“不平等现象”研究，他们三位参与到一个团队中去，这个团队最后扩展为大约七八十人，其中大部分是大学在校生。周五，史密斯博士说，她的一位学生给了她启发，让她开始研究电影中的男女同性恋、双性恋和跨性别角色，这与多项研究的结果是相吻合的——美国年轻人倾向在政治与社会观点方面持有自由主义立场（出于隐私考虑，她没有透露这位学生的名字）。
As that outspoken student suggests, moviegoers are doing their activist part, as exemplified by Every Single Word, a Tumblr by Dylan Marron that uses videos to underline the (often few) words spoken by nonwhite movie characters. What Every Single Word underscores is that the roles often available to nonwhite performers — think of the ubiquitous black friend, the Latina waitress and the Asian storekeeper — are often little more than casting tokenism. The point isn’t that the mainstream studios are deliberately racist or sexist. As Mr. Marron said in an interview last month in The Washington Post: “I’m not saying that any of these films are racist. I’m not saying that any of these filmmakers are racist. I’m saying that the system that they’re contributing has some deeply racist practices.”
这位坦率的学生说，观影者正在采取行动。比如说，Tumblr上有个名叫“每字每句”(Every Single Word)的账号，是由迪伦·马龙(Dylan Marron)维护的，内容是电影中非白人角色说台词的视频，他们的台词通常寥寥无几。“每字每句”强调的是，那些非白人演员经常能够得到的角色无非都是象征性的——比如普普通通的黑人朋友、拉丁美裔女招待和亚洲小店主。马龙并不认为主流制片公司是刻意的种族主义或性别歧视。在上个月接受《华盛顿邮报》(The Washington Post)采访时，他说：“我不是说这些电影都是种族主义的，我也不是说这些电影人是种族主义者。我是说，他们为之工作的整个体系有着根深蒂固的种族主义行为。”
The question now for anyone who loves movies is obvious: What next?
对于热爱电影的人来说，问题很明显了：接下来应该怎么办？
