Greta Gerwig and the Role of the Auteur in Modern Cinema – Lady Bird (2017), Little Women (2019), and Barbie (2023)
Auteur theory is a way of engaging with films that states the director is the “author” of a film. The theory argues a film is a reflection of the director’s personal ideology; so, a movie directed by a given filmmaker will have recognisable, recurring themes, distinct visual cues, and shows a consistent artistic identity throughout that director’s filmography.
Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone recently described Greta Gerwig as an auteur, a term I will be exploring when analysing cinema in the present day. Auteur theory was popularised in France during the 1950s and 1960s as film gradually became legitimised as a proper form of art. The rise of this theory prioritised the singular auteur above other collaborators and created issues of marginalisation and unequal distribution of praise among film crews. However, a repositioning of the auteur theory to include underrepresented voices, such as Greta Gerwig, still yields importance to the critical interpretation of film.
Ladybird (2017) Directed by Greta Gerwig
It is evident auteur theory is useful in showing how Gerwig’s life has impacted her films. If films resemble the experiences of its creator, both Lady Bird and Little Women share similarities with Gerwig’s life. For Lady Bird, Gerwig admits, “I’m from Sacramento. I went to a Catholic girls’ school so that’s all part of my life”, with Lady Bird sharing the same circumstances. For Little Women, Gerwig further acknowledges, “the scene of [Jo] … trying to sell a story … I know exactly what that is to sit in front of somebody and sell them a story, and they’re telling me I need to make changes, and I’m figuring out how many changes I can make … but I need the money.” Auteur theory is applicable here as Gerwig’s biography can help identify specific character circumstances and individual scenes.
Barbie (2023) Directed by Greta Gerwig
Furthermore, Gerwig’s values clearly match themes that run throughout her films. A self-proclaimed feminist, Gerwig’s Barbie explores both matriarchy in Barbieland and patriarchy in the real world, insinuating by the film’s end that instead of either extreme, both societies are in need of change to become equal. In her first two films, Gerwig focuses on the constraints women encounter in society. Lady Bird and Jo March (both played by Saoirse Ronan in an example of repeat casting), face obstacles to their ambition. For Lady Bird, her ambition is to move to New York “where culture is.” For Jo, it is to publish her novel. Relating back to Gerwig, she “realised pretty young that being quite ambitious was considered unattractive in a girl.” If Gerwig believes society views ambition as “unattractive in a girl”, her two heroines defy their own society’s double standard to fulfil their ambition. In Barbie, the protagonist has no initial obstacle facing her ambition, as Barbieland is the inverse of our own society and supports Barbie’s ambition as a woman. However, when she travels to the real world, Gerwig creates obvious dramatic irony for the audience in order to show the ideological differences; such as when Barbie approaches a building site in search of “that good feminine energy.” Through this use of dramatic irony, Gerwig not only creates a comedic disposition, but also showcases the normality of catcalling and objectification. The link between Gerwig’s own views and how it translates to film is a notion supported by film critic Alexandre Astruc. Although his terms are gendered, he argues film allows an auteur to “translate [their]obsessions.” Therefore, through auteur theory, one can interpret Gerwig’s films as an exhibition of her experiences and ideals.
However, auteur theory can prove restrictive, particularly with regard to the type of people who make up the canon and how auteurship restricts Gerwig’s creative expression to that of recreating her life. Auteur theory initially proved useful to the critical interpretation of films as it provided a canon in the same vein as literature canons., Directors such as Orson Wells and Alfred Hitchcock became cemented as great artists, as argued by Andrew Sarris, who labeled Wells as a “pantheon director”, and Peter Wollen, who argued “Hitchcock is at least as important an artist as… Scott Fitzgerald.” The foundation of the canon was initially (and largely still is) made up of white, heterosexual, men, with less opportunity for diverse voices. Female directors are often forced to direct collaboratively , with a man, which was the case for Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, and Nell Shipman. Even Gerwig was not immune from this reality as she co-directed with Joe Swanberg in Nights and Weekends. This forced collaboration directly opposes the notion of individual genius which many within the auteur canon vouch for; such as prominent director Frank Capra, who believed in the idea of “one man one film.”
While Sarris helped to establish auteur theory in Hollywood, and by extension helped validate film as art, Roland Barthes published his influential essay “The Death of the Author”, which encouraged readers to make their own interpretations from art rather than the author’s intentions. T.S. Eliot also diminished the concept of the individual genius as he argued “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” Although both Barthes and Eliot directed their criticism to literature, their ideas remain useful when discussing film. Gerwig seems to support these ideas, having dismissed the notions of her films being a direct extension of her: “[Lady Bird]’s inspired by parts of my childhood, but it’s not literally me.” To indicate a filmmaker can only reiterate their own life experiences on screen is both dismissive and restrictive of the auteur’s creativity: “I spent so long writing [Lady Bird] and I worked so hard on the script to get it just right and I don’t like the implication it’s not an active imagination because it is 100% an active imagination.” Thus, Gerwig rejects the notion of her films being mirrors of her life in order to legitimise herself as an artist and filmmaker.
Little Women (2019) Directed by Greta Gerwig
The most productive way of utilising the auteur theory is through repositioning the discussion to favour collaboration and to actively include minority voices in the film canon. Gerwig is an example of how an auteur can exist while also challenging the outdated expectations behind the auteur foundation. Gerwig has frequently praised her cast and crew rather than taking individual credit. The most prominent examples of this were during her acceptance speech acknowledging the collaborative process throughout Lady Bird and when she gives proper credit for a scene with Timothée Chalamet in Little Women: “Timothée came up with this idea that he would be standing on a chair, and it was a good idea.” During the production of Barbie, Gerwig collaborated closely with Margot Robbie, as she is the protagonist, one of the producers, and a founder of the movie’s production companies, LuckyChap Entertainment. Arguably, Robbie had just as much influence over Barbie as Gerwig, and even if you come to the conclusion that Gerwig had more influence, Barbie still could not be labelled as Gerwig’s alone.
The film also marked Gerwig’s first production where she was not the sole writer of the screenplay, instead co-writing it with her partner Noah Baumbach. This willingness to collaborate separates Gerwig from many classic auteurs, who demanded almost complete creative control; such as Hitchcock’s infamous clashes with David O. Selznick during their adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca. Gerwig also does not neatly fit into the mold of an auteur as a woman. Auteur theory, and Hollywood as a whole, has been criticised for upholding systematic misogyny; as reinforced by Pauline Kael who stated “auteur theory is an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experiences of their boyhood and adolescence.” Whilst Gerwig’s films have a strong feminist message, it is Gerwig herself who serves as a real-life source of inspiration. She has directed multiple Hollywood films, a rarity as supported by USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative who reported that only 34 out of 1,100 films released between 2007-2017, were directed by women, with Gerwig being one of them. However, she does retain some characteristics of a classic auteur. Writer Jack Stillinger notes, “many recognized auteurs were writer-directors”, a role Gerwig has performed in Lady Bird, Little Women, and Barbie. The marketing for her films often uses her role as writer-director to promote the film, such as Sony’s synopsis of Little Women, which sells the film as a product of “writer-director Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird).”. This supports Professor Timothy Corrigan, who argues auteurs also serve as a “commercial strategy for organising audience reception.” However, Gerwig herself retains a unifying understanding of what she wants her movies to be as she refers to “an amazing team of people” to complete “my vision.” The end result is an auteur who oversees the creation of a movie, trusting those she chooses to work with, while the marketing of her films builds her image to maximise revenue.
Although auteur theory can help define themes across Gerwig’s work, it is largely Gerwig’s challenging of this theory through collaboration and not conforming to the founder’s definition of the Hollywood auteur that helps viewers interpret her films by what she is not. The running themes across her films may be traced back to Gerwig’s own upbringing and beliefs, but it is ultimately dismissive to label these films as just extensions of Gerwig. This would be a disservice to the cast and crew who worked on these movies and who Gerwig herself recognises as an essential part of the film process. . Although she rightly credits those working on her films, auteur theory helps a viewer interpret similarities and differences between Lady Bird,Little Women, and Barbie through the lens of Gerwig’s personal psyche.
