Untitled- On Assigned Roles
Written by Kaelyn Sandifer for Thread FW 22
It’s a sin to break out of your assigned role. As someone who grew up in America, in one of those rural places with churches peppering every street corner, I know this clearly. That’s why people react with fear and aversion when they see another person breaking out of their assigned role or fragile caste. Why? The obvious answer is conformity is comfortable. Not for the individual trying to force themself into a rigid mold, but for onlookers. Living as such a social species, we often have to pacify the people who observe us in order to keep an ounce of harmony. It doesn’t matter if the fracture from social norms leaves them beaming with joy or wallowing in misery. The act of deviance alone will leave them packaged into the same sinful little box. No one escapes the pressure to adhere, not even notable actors and actresses. They too are judged and measured, not just by onlookers but by prominent organizations like The Academy of Motion Pictures which is responsible for the Oscars.
No one performs better than the Oscar-winning actor. They disappear into a character like no one else. It’s always the first thing a critic is looking for in a biopic: is every ounce of the actor lost in their mimicry of an icon? Since the award’s inception, there have been separate awards for male and female actors. Unsurprisingly, there are differences between both awards. The most apparent distinction is how the award for best male and female actors corresponds to the headlining award of every Oscars ceremony: Best Picture. Winning Best Actor is the third highest predictor of winning best picture behind Best Director and Screenwriting. On the other hand, the award of Best Actress is one of the lowest indicators of winning Best Picture, having a similar correlation with awards in music and technical categories.
A 2004 study conducted by Dean Kieth Simonton analyzed this phenomenon and showed how sticking to the norm will be rewarded even without penalties for non-conformity. It’s not surprising that outlandish and highly experimental films don’t win Best Picture. That category is saved for paragons of Hollywood Classicism; beautiful movies that don’t push the boundaries. Male actors can be like Hollywood Classicism, tending to be more predictable; they don’t experiment the way women do and tend to find what works and stick to it. As Simonton points out in his study, female actors are much more likely to have a wide variety of roles in their careers. This could be across genres, archetypes, and prestige. Male actors, on the other hand, tend to prefer finding the genre that works for them and sticking to it (Simonton, 2004).
Yet, when you think of a traditional typecast actor, most people will think of a woman, or female-centered roles, like the “ingenue,” “femme fatale,” or “mother.” Men may often be shoved into archetypes, but most are not gender-specific, like paragons or anti-heroes. This could be that it’s just more notable when a woman sticks to one type of character because it is rarer, but that doesn’t fit with the historical reporting on actresses. Most of the media around actresses tends to focus on whatever niche the industry has decided they’ll fill as if to divert attention from the swaths of actresses that don’t follow that mold.
Of course, this desire for consistency peaks subconsciously as the world around us changes. Simonton found that, too, as his Best Actress Paradox hasn’t steadily declined over time, it peaks when the film industry is in times of change and uncertain about what audiences want, like in the 1960s as television had started to establish itself as a staple in American homes. When there are so many variables changing and flying all around someone, they’ll look for comfort in anything that stays constant. Humans don’t like change all that much; habit is more comfortable and takes up less brain power that could go to something else, so life is just calmer and steadier when the world is predictable.
Bette Davis may have been one of the first actresses penalized for violating such a role. Davis is a Hollywood icon for a reason, the first-ever female president of the Academy – although she was ousted after less than a year – with acting skills rivaled by few and eyes that inspired Kim Carnes’ most famous hit. Her breakout role was in 1934’s Of Human Bondage playing the cruel waitress Mildred Rogers, a role no other actress wanted to play over fears of ruining their glamorous images. Davis turned out to be perfect for the role, even doing her own makeup in scenes where her character was afflicted with tuberculosis to make her portrayal more realistic. She turned out to be a critical success (yet a commercial failure: the film lost $45,000). Still, she was never officially nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, although she had so many write-in votes she was considered an honorary nominee. She didn’t win the Oscar, it went to Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night. Instead, Davis won the Oscar in the following year for the much worse film, Dangerous, probably one of the first “apology Oscars.” However, that fact means that Davis’ first Oscar win is almost universally criticized.
While people might like predictability, it’s actually quite a tall ask for most. Conformity would be easy if humans were a species with little variety, but we’re not. We’ve reached a level of cognition where we develop opinions, desires, and passions that can be so different from the person sitting next to us. But it’s much easier for society to keep people limited to only a particular set of behaviors; they’re much more obedient that way.
Growing up as a Southern Christian, I saw a lot of this firsthand. Nonconformity was a sin punished by eternal damnation. Every person has a role, and they’ll spend their whole lives preparing for it until they finally step into their permanent shoes. For me, a woman, that role was to be a homemaker who could cook, clean, and discipline to keep her future household in perfect order. The perfect woman should be serene, sweet, and agreeable while also wildly capable. Luckily for me, most of these practices I witnessed at other churches, while my own was quite accepting. But I acknowledge that this is a privilege that others did not have.
If I lived in that role, I know most of my spirit would wither away. I’ve seen the aftermath of that conformity in many older women around me, and too few of them could look at me with much honesty and say they enjoyed their roles. Of course, those assigned roles did make a lot of people happy, they fit with tasks they enjoyed and how they wanted their relationships with their families and societies to be. While focusing on women here, it's necessary to understand that everyone has to conform. Men must fit a rigid mold of masculinity that both gives them power and deteriorates their psyche, queer people must be palatable, and people of color must reconcile advocating for themselves in a world where they cannot be intimidating. Societal rigidity affects everyone while seldom benefitting the performer. That’s also the problem with conformity; assigned roles only work for so many people. But since some people enjoy their roles, society can point to them, say that these roles are obviously fulfilling, and stick to the status quo while pulling down their blinders to dissent.
Strict roles make things much easier for society at large, as a stranger can look at a person and have a pretty good idea of what they’re like. But they’re incredibly harmful at the individual level, being the initial salvo in many internal identity wars. They can make someone feel lost, broken, and angry at themselves for seemingly being one of the few who don’t fit in. The truth is that most people don’t fit their molds and that individual variety is one of the defining traits of being a human; they aren’t alone in their struggle to conform.
It’s hard to do more than commiserate on this topic, considering how conformity and strict roles help our brains to make sense of the world faster. This is how our brains are wired, so the concept of conformity in society seems inevitable, but we still need to alleviate the harm it causes. The best thing most people can do is accept that they will not always be able to understand a person based on first impressions. Not knowing is scary, and people breaking from stereotypes can trigger a knee-jerk response, but we can adapt and learn to live with it. People will be happier with the freedom to express themselves and self-assign their roles in society, not based on what others think they should do, but on what they’re good at and what brings them joy. Truly, it is good and it is human to be different.