‘Some Like It Hot’ stars Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Cane. Sugar Cane is a very typical blonde and is the stereotypical image of a blonde woman. She is represented to be very weak and helpless. It makes her seem almost as though she has the mind of a child. She is represented as being very vulnerable and gullible. In ‘Some Like It Hot’ Sugar Cane’s dream is for her to find a man to marry. This shows that all a woman’s ambition is, is to be a wife which represents women to be very shallow and needy. It is ironic that the man Sugar Cane describes as the one she will never fall for, is the type of man she does fall for.
In the film, Tony Curtis plays Joe who is one of the musicians on the run. When he cross dresses, he becomes Josephine and becomes close with Sugar. He lures her in and encourages her to confess her dream husband. He then transforms himself into this character called Junior so he can get her. In the end, when he confesses that he isn’t Josephine or Junior, Sugar Cane doesn’t get annoyed that she was fooled by him. Instead, she runs away with him. This portrays Sugar Cane to be a very narrow-minded character that has nothing else on her mind.
There are other representations of women in ‘Some Like It Hot’. The two musicians who are on the run have to cross dress as they have got jobs in an all female band. Tony Curtis plays Josephine and Jack Lemmon plays Daphne. While dressed as women, the two men experience how much women are discriminated against and used. They react to this by acting how they would expect to women to act and experience yet even more discrimination. However, their minds don’t change in the slightest and both have Sugar Cane on their minds. They both compete to win her heart and both try getting very close to her as women.
An incident in the film which shows them how annoying men can be is when Daphne meets an admirer. A rich man falls for her and does not seem to take “NO” for an answer. The rich man pesters her until she agrees to go out with him. Jerry is horrified to see himself treated as an object by a man. He is not happy about the fact that he is being discriminated. When both musicians cross dress, they see how badly and unfairly women are treated. They see how men look at them to be objects for them to mess around with.
In ‘Alien 3’ Sigourney Weaver is the main character. She is the only female character in the film. She plays character of Ellen Ripley. She is represented to be the very opposite stereotypical image of a woman. She is a very manly person who is independent. The fact that she only has ex-murderers and rapists for company doesn’t make a difference to her behaviour in the slightest. This shows her to be fearless because she is only afraid of the aliens.
As the film goes on, and as the alien kills off the inhabitants of the refinery one by one, Ripley finds that she is pregnant with an alien baby. This is the reason for which the alien has not yet killed her when it had its chance. The alien she is pregnant with is the queen, meaning that it will be able to give birth to a multiple number of aliens. When she finds out that she is pregnant, she realises that she must kill herself. Even thought she is the hero of the film, the fact that she is a woman proves to be a disadvantage regardless of the fact that she is not very feminine at all.
The audience will be able to see that Marilyn Monroe and Sigourney Weaver play very different characters in both films. The characters differ both in their physical appearances and in their level of knowledge and awareness. Sugar Cane is a bright bottles blonde who always looks her best. She has a sweet voice and wears clothes that show off her figure and womanly curves. Ellen Ripley on the other hand is a bald brunette. She dresses in a very manly way with baggy clothes. She is very rough looking and does not show her figure off at all.
Ellen Ripley has more knowledge when compared to Sugar Cane. Ripley is a very independent character and she knows what she is doing. She is fearless and is not squeamish in the slightest. Sugar Cane on the other hand is a very vulnerable character. She is very dependant on everyone else and has a mind of a child.
The fact that both these characters are very different physically and mentally doesn’t change that they are both women. It is because they are women that makes them less of a person in both films. Sugar Cane because she is a replica of the stereotypical image of a ‘dumb blonde’, and Ellen Ripley because of the fact she is able to be a mother.
I think that the roles of women in films have changed over the past. The representation of them also changed over the years. However, I believe that they are still discriminated; just in different ways. The fact that a person is a woman is still shown to be a disadvantage when comparing these two films.
