Introduction to Part III

A key thread running throughout Heckerling's film and television work has been the exploration of the changing expectations of women's identities during the last three decades. From the start of her directing career, with the release of Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982, Heckerling's work differed from that of the majority of teen film directors in that she focused her attentions on female rather than male characters. As many contributors in this collection note, the proportion of female directors working in Hollywood remains stubbornly low, and indeed the vast majority of Hollywood films fail to achieve even the meager criteria for Alison Bechdel's infamous test, which requires that a film feature two women talking to each other about something other than men.

Heckerling's films frequently find autobiographical echoes in the director's own life. For instance, the Look Who's Talking films (1989, 1990), on which Claire Jenkins focuses, followed soon after the birth of Heckerling's daughter, Mollie Israel, in 1985. Jenkins compares the focus of Heckerling's family films favorably with the contemporary focus on father figures, and finds that, even today, her work possesses a liberal attitude toward motherhood and romance that stands in sharp contrast to the majority of what she terms “mom-coms.”

In retrospect, of course, it's possible to see Heckerling's career as reflecting the rise of postfeminism and the concomitant demise, or at least the dimming, of second-wave feminism. Mirroring the contradictory impulses of postfeminist discourses, Mollie (Kirstie Alley) is the self-sufficient breadwinner of her small family, even as she searches for a romantic partner, and thus to recuperate the nuclear family unit. Nonetheless, as Betty Kaklamanidou observes in the second essay of this section, it is in Heckerling's latest work, which deals with the construction of femininity and the aging process, that the postfeminism of her work is most apparent. I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) once again reflects the biography of the director in centering on a television producer of a successful teen show.

The final essay in this section, by Murray Leeder, focuses on the construction of femininity and aging in Vamps.