The early days of Hollywood were filled with women in crucial creative roles. In the intervening century, women were muscled out as Hollywood became an aggressively masculine force of cultural production. The twenty-first century has seen a slow shifting in the tides. With the culture of identity politics in full swing, large studios are exploring the profit motives of better representation. The disparity is still large, but mainstream and blockbuster movies are seeing more and more women take center stage. Unfortunately, that shift comes with three significant caveats.
1. The women taking center stage are overwhelmingly able-bodied cis white women.
2. Most women written for mainstream films are either wholly generic, or stuck in a cycle of performative masculinity.
3. This wave of diverse representation onscreen seldom extends to the writers, directors, or producers who are shaping the narratives offscreen.
So it is that most of our contemporary examples of 'strong female characters' onscreen are cynically designed. This piece will explore a range of failures and successes, and expose the shallowness of liberal identity politics that avoid substantial structural commentary.
No better place to start than the biggest franchise in the world. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has released twenty-two movies. One of them has been anchored by a woman. One. More than ten years after the inception of the franchise. And they had the gall to publicize that film as some huge feminist triumph, rather than bitter and obligatory reheated leftovers. At least we finally got a compelling woman superhero on the big screen to look up to, right?
Well...
As I wrote about more extensively in my review, the story that Captain Marvel saddles its hero with is not only dysfunctional, but a prime example of pandering. Carol is given fist-pumping moments of Woman Power, but they are hollow. Does her empowerment emerge from her physical form, like a fascist god? What does she stand for, exactly? What are her fatal flaws, other than the lazy conceit of amnesia, that she must overcome in order to achieve heroism? None of these questions are addressed: she is a blank slate, an empty cipher, a woman-shaped demigod where a character should be. Never is this more apparent than the climax of Avengers: Endgame. Having been written out of the entire film because she was 'away doing stuff,' she gets a triumphant spaceship-exploding entrance--and a stylish new haircut to boot! Making a woman your franchise's most powerful metahuman means nothing if you don't bother to make her a human first.
Despite all these complaints, Carol Danvers is not even the worst example of the corrosive gender roles in the MCU. That spurious honor goes to Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. Truth be told, I like Johansson's performance, but her character gets saddled with all the trite baggage women always get in these movies. Let's break down this Strong Female Character movie by movie.
Iron Man 2: Black Widow is introduced to the MCU as a sex object and nothing more. Her character traits range from 'smirking' to 'wrapping her crotch around the necks of thugs.'
The Avengers: She is fun to watch in this movie and feels like a significant member of the team, but Joss Whedon's thematics surrounding her are appalling. Of course the woman superspy is motivated by the fact that she was sterilized. Why else would a woman fight wars alongside a group of superhumans if not for her lack of babies? Tying into her infertility, I am certain that the famous "I've got red in my ledger" line is a triple entendre referring to period blood.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier: The only movie in which she gets to play a character. A character that spends the whole movie mediating a conflict between two men, but we take what we can get...
Avengers: Age of Ultron: Yes, let us suddenly make her and the Hulk an item so that her role becomes 'the only one who can calm down a raging man.'
Captain America: Civil War: I don't think she does anything in this one? So that's a win, relatively speaking.
Avengers: Infinity War / Endgame: She is the second woman in as many movies to be thrown off the same cliff. Worse yet, she throws herself off to save the life of Hawkeye. Is that childish sociopath really more important to keep alive than the only level-headed strategist on the team? I realize they're friends, but... wait, why are they friends again?
Kevin Feige and Disney treat representation as exogenous to the movies themselves--meaning that it's supposed to be progressive when a press release tells you that Captain Marvel is the most powerful superhero, or when a producer insists that queer representation will be coming at some point down the line. This is an artless way to string an audience along with the bare minimum, and it's working far too well.
Elsewhere in institutionally misogynist Disney production companies, we have Pixar's first attempt at a strong female protagonist in Brave. The result was a marginally better movie than Captain Marvel, but that small victory putrifies when you learn that they bothered to hire a woman director only to fire her partway through production.
In most ways I have more respect for an exploitation franchise like Resident Evil, because it doesn't pretend at progressiveness. Dropping the mask and indulging in shallow entertainment isn't the way to solve sexism, but at least it's more honest. There is even something a little sweet about director Paul W. S. Anderson and star Milla Jovovich getting married halfway through the franchise. Compare this to a film like Sucker Punch, from the notoriously woman-hating mind of Zack Snyder, which thinks it can have its objectification cake and eat its empowerment too.
We see the most mythic version of these self-consciously exploited heroines in films like Kill Bill and Atomic Blonde. Both films' protagonists are objectified by the men behind the camera, but the way they exert power in a patriarchal world isn't shallow and unconsidered like the above examples. The Bride (a signifier of all women who are defined by their relationship to a man) spends the entire duology violently, furiously fighting her way out from under the thumb of the titular Bill. In Atomic Blonde, Charlize Theron's covert agent is portrayed as powerful and intelligent, but none of this comes easily. We see not only her determination, but the tremendous amounts of pain she endures as she leverages her body in every conceivable way to gain advantage. By the time we arrive at the incredible centerpiece single shot fight scene, we believe she has depleted all of her resources, mind body and soul.
The trippy sci-fi film Annihilation provides a refreshingly straightforward and efficient example. The film follows a group of five women who journey into a mysterious area called The Shimmer that seems to distort reality. Since the Shimmer has appeared, many groups of men have entered (mostly soldiers), but none ever emerged. Early in the film, Natalie Portman's character meets the group that she will be investigating with.
"All women?" she asks.
"Scientists," Tessa Thompson's character responds.
A succinct and welcome reorientation. This is no Ghostbusters reboot that markets itself exclusively on the gender of its main cast. Annihilation is a film about five brilliant and effective experts across many disciplines. You could watch the entire film without considering gender, or you could tie it directly into the film's thesis (the only footage we see of an all-male squad has the vibe of a horrifying frat party). Either way, the film offers substantial roles for women in a male-dominated genre without being condescending.
Slashers and thrillers have a long history of exploiting the most toxic conceptions of womanhood. We are meant to fear for the woman coming up against an implacable male murderer because women are weak, helpless, vulnerable. Fortunately there are an increasing number of films that challenge and upend these conventions. The Cabin in the Woods makes a meta-mockery of the 'final girl' trope; our protagonist plays by the rules of the genre until she gets the opportunity to tear the whole system down from the inside. The Suspiria remake is not the beautiful women dying in beautiful ways showcase of the original, but rather a dissection of the disciplined brutality of ballet, with a climactic dose of the most queasy sort of empowerment.
Crawl is a film that pits a woman and her father against very many alligators in a flooded basement. Her limitations compared to these colossal creatures of destruction are made clear, but also her strengths. She is a competitive swimmer; she will never outswim the gators outright, but she can leverage her intelligence to pick the right moments for a risky maneuver. Hush is a cat and mouse game between a home invader and a deaf woman. The film does not pull punches about our protagonist's severe disadvantage. But to counteract that, she wrings all she can out of her wit, her determination, and her sharp survival instinct.
After all, nobody wants to watch bulletproof characters who can do no wrong like Captain Marvel, or Lucy. So often women are given the dullest characters because they are tasked with nothing more than 'be hot' or 'be cool.' Instead, action heroes must hearken back to the Indiana Jones dramatic principle: 'hot' and 'cool' are the enemies of compelling, because we need our heroes to be flawed underdogs, perpetually on the edge of defeat.
The great excoriation of the flawless Cool Girl mentality is the centerpiece monologue from Gone Girl. For those who haven't seen the film, we spend the first half or so believing that our protagonist is Ben Affleck's character, whose wife has gone missing. Then we are presented with a jarring perspective shift.
Check out the clip here.
When Gone Girl came out many folks argued that Amy Dunne is an anti-feminist figure who plays into hagsploitation tropes. I think the great achievement of the film is that it gives us a woman who can be a violent, scenery-chewing villain--but contextualizes it all within the tangible everyday struggles of women under the patriarchy. Amy is not a sociopath, nor is she shifty and conniving for no reason. She is a woman who is in revolt against an oppressive system, and lays bare all the ways women are forced to defer the self. The Cool Girl monologue is a scathing commentary on gender roles, but also serves as a meta-commentary about the ways that Hollywood boxes women into being Cool and Sexy rather than Challenging and Playful.
Gone Girl is a middle finger of a movie, and I respect it for that. My final example takes Gone Girl's commentary and advances it to the next step.
Hustlers is a 2019 film about strippers who swindle high powered Wall Street bankers out of their money by getting them extremely intoxicated and having them open a massive tab at their club. These strippers, the two most central of whom are played by Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez, embody the wave of feminism that empowers women to weaponize their sexuality in order to level the playing field against men. J-Lo's Ramona wields her mind and body like a scalpel. The cinematography always emphasizes the skill of these women rather than the titillation of their bodies, and the screenwriting is empathetic and sex worker positive. As a sort of revenge fantasy against the powerful men who ruin our world, this would have already been a welcome commentary.
Yet the film does not stop there. The framing narrative is not triumphant, but melancholy, as we are given the years-later ruminations of characters who are realizing that they were trauma-bonded. The film never condemns the protagonists for operationalizing their sexuality in this way, but it also does not flinch away from the complicated feelings and repressions that are bound up in that. Even in the midst of empowerment, there is no escaping the male gaze in a patriarchal society, because internalized misogyny guides us even when we believe we have bested it. Hustlers surprised me with the ways in which it is willing to toy with our sympathies as an audience, occasionally humanizing the villains, occasionally villainizing the heroes. Unlike most films that strive for the empowerment of women, this film offers no easy answers. The men who exploit and the women who counter-exploit are not equally bad, but they are both trapped in the violent, grimy cogs of our fallen capitalist order. Director Lorene Scarafia teases this out subtly in the film's sharply drawn character drama.
Diversity for the sake of diversity is easy, and it is not enough. Feminism without intersectionality and racial awareness is easy, and it is not enough. Representation without critical analysis is easy, and it is not enough. While most of Hollywood spoonfeeds us just enough token white women being badasses to hit their profit margin, we are collectively becoming more critical of the assumptions underlying shallow identity politics. Fortunately, we have entertaining and insightful films like Hustlers, directed written and starring a multiracial coalition of women, to lead the way into a new era of artistic social commentary.
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