You started it. Show me everything. I can handle myself.

Just an observation on something that's been bothering me on my own blog for some time now- not enough quotes from female characters in movies as post titles.

First a quick note on the quotes themselves. I really don't have any methodology to how I pick quotes to go along with whatever I'm blathering about that day. Sometimes I'll read about something in the news and a quote immediately springs to mind. On rare occasions I'll build the post around a quote from a movie I've recently watched.

As you probably suspected I grab the majority of my quotes off of the IMDB. Again, there's little methodology. If I've written something about FISA for instance then I might immediately go look for a quote from "The Manchurian Candidate." If I can't find a good quote from that film then I may follow the link to Frank Sinatra's book of work and pick another movie he's been in to find a quote. It's a bit of a zen thing.

I have some rules for myself that I try to follow when I pick a quote and picture to head my post. It has to be a movie or television I've actually seen. The quote has to have subtext. Finally the picture has to be on or near to the point when the line used in the quote was actually spoken. (That last one is the toughest to hit and I often have to "cheat" with the picture.)

Recently I realized that the vast majority of the quotes I've used these past years were from male characters. Part of this isn't that surprising in that, as liberal and non-sexist as I try to be, I'm still a guy. I like action movies. It follows that the characters I identify with on a conscious/ subconscious would be strong male leads.

With this in mind I recently set out to deliberately find and use more quotes from women characters. I decided to use a Sophia Loren quote last week. I had a devil of a time finding a good quote from a movie with Loren to use. It didn't help that 2/3rds of the movies on her resume were Italian.

But the exercise tickled my curiosity so I spent a couple of hours thinking up the names of famous actresses, checking their filmology and then the memorable quotes from their individual films. What I found from that little admittedly non-scientific exercise is that, with the exception of women like Elizabeth Taylor or Katherine Hepburn, actresses don't have as many great lines as actors in movies. Here's some of the stuff that I think contributes to that conclusion--

• Nerds -- Quotes on the IMDB are compiled by fans of the individual movies and not some group of movie scholars who dig through the movies looking for great lines. Point is this could be a group of guys who live in their parent's basement.


• Who has the conch? --Most writers, especially in the golden age of Hollywood, were men. As such they wrote FOR men.


• By men, for men -- There aren't that many strong characters who are women written for movies. Strong characters, regardless of gender, get the best lines.


• And your little dog too -- Along those same lines characters that are strong that happen to be women are usually villains.


• It blowed up real good -- Hollywood makes action movies and most action heroes, with the exception of films like Thelma and Louise and Aliens, traditionally are men.

While I readily admit my little study was nowhere near empirical, I don't doubt for a second that any actress who has spent any amount of time around Hollywood would back up what I found.

As for myself-- I'm going to continue to try and utilize more quotes from women here. I can't promise that it will ever be perfectly distributed just because of my Schwarzenegger fixation.

At least I'm admitting I have a problem. That's a start.

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Off topic but in the course of doing the above mentioned research I did come across this long, beautiful anti-war quote from Elizabeth Taylor Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor in The Lion in Winter. It's too long to use in it's entirety as a post title and too great to break up.

Prince John: A knife! He's got a knife!

Eleanor: Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

What's important to us?

That's the question we've all had to ask ourselves again and again for over a year now as this presidential primary has dragged on longer than a Bergman film. It's the question we use to check ourselves against the candidate we support to make sure they conform to our own values in the leadership they espouse.

I don't think it's too much of a leap of faith to say that most of us who consider ourselves progressives answer that question with some more nuanced and detailed version of the following --

• Ending the war in Iraq and focusing on the projection of influence through diplomacy and the return of our international prestige.



• Appointing progressives to the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court.



• Working to fix our broken health care system.



• Returning the role of science and education to the forefront of our national priorities.



• Tackling the economic challenges of the middle and lower classes of the United States.



• Taking seriously the threats to our environment and enacting appropriate energy policy to save same.



• Returning some sense of a constitutional government to the United States.
  

These are just some of the things we as progressives hope will come to pass under a Democratic President. These are our dreams.

My list of progressive dreams is by no means comprehensive. For example; on our side of the aisle there are those whose biggest dream is that we will someday have a woman or a black man sitting in the Oval Office. To these progressives all the other progressive dreams are secondary to seeing this worthwhile goal realized.

How can we take issue with that? The hope that someday a woman would break the through the ultimate glass ceiling in the Oval Office or an African-American would put the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow by taking the oath of office of the presidency has been at the forefront of the the progressive movement since this country was founded. I would go so far to argue that this is why this country was founded, even if our leaders have spent every day since then denying that truth.

It is to our great shame as a nation that these final barriers to the presidency still exist in the 21st century. We lag behind Pakistan (PAKISTAN!) in our gender bias towards who will lead this country. It's been thirty years since the other great English-speaking democracy has had a woman at it's helm. For all of our talk about the great melting pot of the United States the portraits of the faces of our U.S. presidents since the inception of this country are embarrassing in their lack of diversity.

In his wonderful speech on race in Philadelphia Barack Obama returned again and again to the idea that "my dreams don't have to come at the expense of your dreams." For the most part I agree with that sentiment.

But there is a blind spot to Obama's formulation. The biggest dream of the grandchildren of suffragettes and slaves cannot both be realized in this presidential election. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama can't both have the nomination. Somebody's going to have to set aside their dream for now.

In a year where the Democratic candidate for the presidency is a virtual shoe-in, you could see why this idea is doubly difficult for many of those who see their dream just out of reach. This could go a long ways towards explaining why this campaign has gotten so ugly these last few months.

This idea became clear to me in an exchange with the the fabulous BAC last month. She's fought tooth and nail for Hillary Clinton this primary season and you couldn't find a bigger Clinton booster on the net. In her comment section I glibly wrote something to the effect that "we'll see a woman as President in our lifetime." BAC responded something along the lines of "in your lifetime, maybe. I'm getting up in years."

This broke my heart. I realized that in arguing for Obama, I was asking BAC not just put her dream on the back burner but in a sense to give up that dream. At least the opportunity to see it fulfilled with her own eyes.

As this primary winds to an end I would ask you to please keep BAC in mind in your discussions with friends and family, or your posts to your own blogs. It behooves those of us who supported other candidates to demonstrate a bit of magnanimity in light of the gravity of what we're asking of Clinton supporters. By all means celebrate Barack but don't tear down Hillary. She represents a hell of lot more than a gas tax holiday to millions of people. Please remember that.

Ask yourself what's important. Most of us as progressives, Clinton and Obama supporters, would answer with the same checklist of dreams. We want to fix all the garbage from the Bush years. We want to heal this country.

We are family, after all.