Hollywood marketing strategies reveal underlying bias

With Oscar week upon us, an eternal conversation resurfaces about how well movies represent society.

This year all acting nominees are Caucasian and all writing and directing nominees are men. Not much diversity.

Although the industry seems to ignore large portions of society, business doesn’t seem to suffer. According to Box Office Mojo, 2012 was the highest-grossing year ever for American movies.

The next year was even better. According to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, 2013 grossed $12.9 billion, exceeding the previous record by almost 20 per cent.

Despite those healthy numbers, the movie industry is ignoring a sizable and growing demographic: the so-called minorities.

During the Christmas break, my wife and I wanted to go to a movie but the local listings didn’t offer anything that appealed, so we decided to download from our cable supplier’s on-demand service.

What happened next was a flashback to the era of video stores, when we sometimes would spend almost as much time wandering the aisles as we would watching the movie we eventually chose. As we scanned the list, I noticed myself using the movie graphics as a sort of shortcut.

Finding Mr. Goodmovie

Part of the reason we had trouble finding something was that the visuals didn’t appeal to us.

Movies seem to be aimed at a very narrow demographic. One often hears people complaining that movies seem to be aimed at 14-year-old boys, but is that true? Do movies predominantly offer variations of a (male) hero using violent action to overcome an evil force, with some semi-naked women thrown in to titillate immature sexual awareness?

As I scanned the movie graphics, that hypothesis seemed to hold water. To test that hypothesis, though, I needed data. I scrolled through the first 100 movies in the recent releases category. I chose this category because it would contain all movie genres (except porn) and because it would not be biased in other ways. 

The results were certainly informative. Of the 100 titles comprising about 20 per cent of the total listing, 80 showed a human figure or figures. Of those 80 human images, 40 showed either males exclusively or males in dominant positions, such as a male in the foreground with females in the background.

A further 12 images were of heterosexual couples. In comparison, only 14 graphics showed female-dominant images. Only three graphics depicted what looked like families.

If you looked at images of a lone or foreground person, males outnumbered females by 21 to six or over three to one.

What about sex and violence? In the sample, 40 graphics contained what I would call violent imagery: weapons, explosions, fire, body parts or damaged scenery.

Twelve to 14 of these images had firearms (some images were indistinct enough to make the exact weapon type questionable.)

People say sex sells but only seven of the images would qualify even broadly as sexual, such as an image of a young woman in short-shorts walking away from view. Violence seems to outsell sex by about five or six to one.

Religious imagery nosed out sex in popularity, eight to seven, but that included religious imagery for horror films and the rather secular image of Christmas trees.

The inclusion game

Finally, to return to the complaints about the distribution of this year’s Oscar nominees, these images support the hypothesis of at least unconscious bias.

Male images dominate the graphics, and this dominance is even clearer when one looks at race. Given that the human image on the graphic is almost always of the star, we can see that male actors are seen as more important than female actors, a notion supported by the leaked emails indicating that Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams were paid less than the male stars in American Hustle.

When one looks at race, the picture is even bleaker. Of the 80 graphics containing human image, 61 were of Caucasians only, and another five contained mixed races.

All of the mixed images had at least one Caucasian, meaning that about 80 per cent of the human graphic images showed the dominant white culture.

In six of the images, the race was unclear, either because of silhouette or the size of the images. Of the remaining images, six were exclusively Asian, one African-American and one was of people of First Nations.

Non-white people looking for movies that reflect their experience would have a long search ahead of them. And although Asians form the second-most popular group, an Asian with no interest in martial arts would be no better off than an African-American or First Nations viewer.

I did not see any images that seemed to be Hispanic, so tough luck to the fastest-growing demographic in the U.S.

Racism has been in the news locally, with most of the focus on First Nations. If someone wanted to view a film that might shed some light on that community, there was just one choice out of the first 100 titles. One.

How many people would scroll past 100?

Kevin Longfield is a playwright and theatre historian who occasionally shows up in the background of films shot in Winnipeg. You can see him in the diner scene in Heaven is For Real.