Interview with Helen O'Hara: Empire Critic
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| Helen O'Hara |
Yes and no. I always loved film, and started reading Empire in my teens, but I was far too sensible to aim for that originally. I actually went all the way through college and law school and qualified as a barrister before giving up in sheer boredom. As luck would have it, an internship came up at Empire a couple of months later and I managed to get it despite a total lack of qualifications or experience. It helped that I read the mag and website religiously and knew their style very well, and my basic film knowledge was good, so that saw me through.
Were there any particular reviewers whose work you appreciated/admired?
I didn't really pay attention to named reviewers before getting into journalism myself, but I'm a big fan of Anthony Lane and Dorothy Parker's collected work. I enjoy reading anyone with a different perspective from me, so I try to read widely and read work by people of colour, LGBTQ people etc. I want to at least be aware of the controversies out there and not just go into things unthinkingly from a white, straight, middle-class perspective. I also enjoy people who are much more knowledgeable on geeky points than me: The Daily Dot, for example, or Jo Robinson on Vanity Fair. I don't always keep up on that sort of granular, exacting detail and I am in awe of their ability to do so.
When you started out in your career, was the gender imbalance in film criticism immediately apparent to you?
Oh yeah. Empire had three staffers called Ian and about the same number of women (not quite. BUT CLOSE). During my *entire* tenure as a staff writer/editor I was the only woman on the writing staff. At screenings, the balance suggested that Empire was not unusual in this respect. The only exception was screenings of chick-flicks, where staffers from womens' mags were evidently invited and suddenly I'd see all these new, female faces among the usual, male suspects.
In your experience, do you feel that your reviews and critical voice have been received and treated differently in comparison to your male counterparts work?
Sometimes. I've had readers tell me that I didn't like Ghost Rider 2 because I'm not the target audience, as a woman (!Ghost Rider 2!!!) and people try to dismiss my takes as some sort of niche, feminazi grudges. Men are quicker to dismiss women's authority to express a definitive verdict on a film than they are a man's voice. I think that's maybe slowly changing, but sloooooowly.
The discussion of film remains a heavily male pursuit, do you think that's a reflection of the film industry that, as we all know, greatly favours men? If so, why?
No, I think it's a wider problem. I think women in our society, in our world, are discouraged from expressing opinions clearly and loudly - and that is, of course, what a review is. Men find women with Opinions rather threatening, even now, and slightly novel, and get quite hurt or rather taken aback if a woman does not defer to his opinion. This is true even within film circles. Women with opinions are dismissed as strident, mouthy, bitchy, difficult, belligerent. Men with opinions are strong, forthright, honest, whatever. It's the same reason that female directors and cinematographers are few and far between, because both roles call for someone who can form an opinion and argue why they're right to anyone who questions them, and men still hate it when we do that (not all men. But a startlingly high proportion) I'm lucky that I have a very supportive family and friendship group, and a generally thick skin, so I tend to ignore all that feedback.
A report by Dr. Martha Lauzen titled Thumbs Down 2016: Film Critics and Gender revealed that job titles (e.g. staff writers or freelancers) made no difference when it came to gender discrepancy. Have you found this to be the case?
As in there is gender discrimination all up and down the line? That would not surprise me. But I think women have to fight harder to get good job titles, and pay rises, and fair pay! I suspect that women are still more likely to be made redundant or forced out if they are difficult, and are more likely to be judged harshly for asking for things that men are just given.
Why do you think that female voices are so crucial and necessary in film criticism?
Simply put, we need to rebalance the scales. There has been a tendency to give, eg, average action movies a pass and absolutely slate, eg, average rom-coms. There is such an assumption that "white, straight male" is a human default setting that anything designed to appeal to those who are other is seen as niche, weird, or somehow //smaller//. And that' simply not the case. Women are now half, or just over half, the cinema-going audience, and they need to know what sort of films are going to work for them. We need to move on from patronising male critics airily dismissing some romance because it didn't work for them, and unthinkingly praising some war film because it ticks all their boxes (though no one else's). Female voices (and those of people of colour, and LGBTQ+ people, etc etc) make criticism better by making room for more of humanity inside it. Diversity is not just a moral good; it makes for better entertainment and more surprising outcomes to old stories, and a whole wealth of new ones.
How can the gender disparity affect cultured critical response?
I think I've talked about this above, a little. But I think male critics are sometimes rather snooty at work that is not made for them. Tyler Perry's films are one example: they have an //enormous// audience but every single hit he had was treated as some shocking surprise. I'd put any Twilight film against any Transformers film (apart from maybe the first Transformers, which I really like) but they were treated with utter contempt by some male critics. Same with the first Fifty Shades, which is perfectly fine but was again treated like the end of days. There's a tendency by some men to review the target audience, and if it is teenage girls, or older women, they feel free to sneer in a way that they would not if the film were aimed at, say, middle-aged men.
What advice would you give to girls and women who are considering a career in film journalism and criticism?
First of all, go for it; we need you. Secondly, my experience is that you can control your career only so far, and then it's entirely down to luck. So you can ensure that you have good grammar and spelling, great film knowledge, journalistic skills like editing yourself, writing to a word count or even video and audio editing these days, etc etc. But then you have to get lucky, because this is a competitive industry and even really good people don't always make it. So do work experience if you can, make contacts if you can, pitch where you can, and work hard - but accept that you're still reliant on luck. That said, if you've done all that and worked hard and gotten good, your chances of being lucky increase a thousandfold.
Now that conversations are happening regarding the gender imbalance, are you hopeful that there'll be a noticeable shift in this professional disparity?
Yes. I think my younger colleagues are a noticeably more diverse bunch, and not everyone now looks like a public schoolboy. I read a lot of exciting writing online by younger writers and it's great to hear new points of view, and I look forward to how they're going to change the industry. I just hope that they can make it because financially it's getting insanely hard, especially for newbies - and of course that once again risks marginalising anyone who is not already rich. Young writers now will have a much harder time than I did, just as I had a much harder time than journalists in the 90s did (Oh, to be a journalist in the 90s or before! Lunches! Adequately-staffed newsrooms! Relatively high pay!). But I have to hope that something will come along and improve matters in that respect, because these people deserve it.Bibliography
O'Hara, H (2018). Research/Film Criticism Enquiry. [email]
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