There’s a New Kind of Woman Onscreen, Thanks to Women Behind the Camera

Anderson likes to be makeup free; away from work, so does her character. Shelly loves being a showgirl — “feeling beautiful, that is powerful” — but when she puts on her costume, she’s cosplaying an old-fashioned ideal of femininity. Onstage, she plays a fantasy. When she’s offstage, Shelly is a person with a life, everyday concerns and friends, mostly women, who look at one another with gazes that find common cause. Coppola sees the world of “The Last Showgirl” as a metaphor for the America dream, one in which commodified bodies come with expiration dates. It is also an emblem for women in film, who have long fought against their perceived disposability and continue to find common cause in female-driven work.

IN A CRUCIAL CHAPTER in his 1972 book “Ways of Seeing,” the art critic John Berger surveyed the figure of the female nude in Western art since the Renaissance and argued that “the essential way of seeing women” hadn’t changed. “Women are depicted in a quite different way from men,” he writes, “not because the feminine is different from the masculine — but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.” The obviousness of this is evident to anyone who’s strolled through, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its figurative and abstract representations, its Madonnas, courtesans, queens, servants, dancers, bathers and come-hither nudes.

The same could be said about the movies, with their sweethearts and vamps, adventurers and homebodies, mothers and wives, dutiful and defiant daughters. The early 20th century brought new women with new looks, sensibilities and desires to the screen. In her film history “From Reverence to Rape,” the critic Molly Haskell writes that as the 1930s got underway in Hollywood, women “were conceived of as having sexual desire without being freaks, villains or even necessarily Europeans.” Soon after, the industry instituted more rigorous self-censorship to stave off government censorship. It wasn’t until the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, Haskell writes, that grown-up women “began to return to cinema”; it’s been a slow re-entry.

Actresses — in Jim Crow Hollywood, most were white — lifted and broke hearts while sustaining a studio system that turned some into goddesses but that could be brutal. In her memoir “The Lonely Life,” Bette Davis writes that after her 1931 debut in “Bad Sister,” she learned that “according to all existing Hollywood standards, my face was not photogenic.” And while Judy Garland’s addictions are well known, when the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz” plays, it should be prefaced with this stark revelation from her: “From the time I was 13, there was a constant struggle between M-G-M and me — whether or not to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. I remember this more vividly than anything else about my childhood.”