The majority of modern film protagonists are just that: characters, strong or otherwise; and they result from a top down, structurally dictated approach to screenwriting. They're sketches animating flesh. They're a collection of traits wrapped around a couple of driving goals which tend to shift around the mid-point of a screenplay because that's what the books tell the development people to tell the writers to do.
Good writers don't write characters, they write people. They don't write plot, they write stories in which people interact and out of which plot arises naturally, like the subtle shifting patterns of a forest arise naturally from the interaction of thousands of trees or the calligraphy of sand dunes emerges from the interplay of wind and sand.
Critiquing Marvel blockbusters for lack of profundity in protagonists doesn't provide much of a challenge. The muscular male slabs smashing bits of New York into each other in an externalisation of their inner struggle are just as reducible and risible as the female ciphers.
These characters have to be cartoonesque because they have to stand out in the foreground against the increasingly noisome and cartoonesque background of world salvation that drives modern box office blockbusters.
When screenwriters write people, rather than human plot devices, they become nuanced and interesting, whether they are strong or weak. troubled or at peace. That's harder to do when one has to justify 400 million in production and promotion.
A good article, though!
I complete agree.
The issue I have with "strong female characters" is that every blogger and their mom seems to want to see more strong female characters. I think asking for strong characters over weak or purely-for-sex females is moving in the right direction. Female characters have so often been merely toys to play with or to progress the story or to challenge the real characters or so that the story has that necessary romance aspect. They are often caricatures because they only serve a single purpose and they don't need a full personality to serve that purpose. They are simply the girl that the guy must remember and dream about while he is off saving the world. Or the conflict of interest. Or the other person in the room so he doesn't talk to himself.
George R R Martin was praised for having female characters that we weren't able to hold into one box. While I am a huge fan of Martin's writing of dynamic characters and nuanced relationships between those characters, it does say something that he is recognized for having female characters that are as strong as they are weak and self-conscious as they are confident. You don't see authors who write equally dynamic male characters being praised for being able to write male characters. I simply find it interesting that it is assumed that an author is able to write male characters, but praised when they write equal female characters.
By the way, you write beautifully.
Thank you!
Yes, exactly. It seems the yearning for strong female roles is a reaction against weak female roles; and is completely understandable. Too many times a female character will be added as part of the plot (a goal, a reward), part of a 'B story' (romantic interest, mirror for the protagonist to externalise his 'inner journey' in the pauses between his 'outer journey') or by convention. I think this comes about because the appetite for large scale film production requires a certain type of story, serving certain types of theme.
As #kleinbl00 says, even the iconic female roles in film history in which women 'equal' men in male action started out as male because their stories and their solutions to the story problems require violence and conquest rather than communication and reconciliation. But this shouldn't be the aspiring goal of our modern female mythological heroes any more, for my own taste, than our male ones.
Personally I think the issue is more subtle than male/female, for there are many men who yearn for more egalitarian, subtle and complex stories and roles and role models equally shared by both sexes.
Riane Eisler created the paradigm of a tension between dominator culture and partnership culture which respectively attributes traits of power hierarchy, domination and submission and rule of might to certain groups of men and women, and conversely traits of cooperation, communication and negotiation to others. Whilst her paradigm is far-reaching and applies to the entire evolution of humanity, so I'm doing it an injustice to reduce it here, I believe stories written for and about the second group would naturally offer more complex roles to both men and women; for their domain is different and their range of solutions is different.
For better or worse, cinemas, these huge, sacred amphitheatres into which our society makes pilgrimages to sit in silence and contemplate our contemporary myths, do offer us our morals, our emotional and rational teaching. The majority of those myths are now very little different from the eye-popping, exaggerated tales of ancient Greek, Celtic, Vedic, Icelandic cultures.
However it does perhaps offer insight into #kleinbl00's question about what we are supposed to do. We could try rowing out into that ocean, the dominator vs partnership paradigm, to cast our nets and fish for ideas. As #NikolaiFyodorov suggests, novelists have been sitting on the shores hooking out wonders for some time. Novels are quiet and subtle and cultivate the forest of the unconscious like a slowly spreading moss. Cinema is more like a forest fire. If we write stories which offer an alternative to the dominator paradigm, we also offer an opportunity for rapt listeners to be consumed in a conflagration of new themes, new ways of thinking about the world, new solutions to contemporary problems. And all cunningly disguised as a Saturday night's entertainment.
Let's talk about this. Because on the one hand, I've written eight screenplays and a novel and every single one of them pass the Bechdel Test. Three of them have women as the main protagonist. The rest of them have women with nearly as much dialogue as the men. I enjoy writing women; I find them to be a lot more interesting than men. At the same time, I don't write "strong" women for the simple reason that "strength", in my understanding of the Human Cosmos, is not a Prime Motivator for women.
There is absolutely an imbalance between male and female characters in cinema. There are a number of valid and invalid reasons for this:
- The magic market is 15-25yo, and that segment is heavily about BOYS asking out GIRLS (VALID)
- 80% of screenwriters are men (INVALID)
- Men are far more likely to get in fights, point guns at each other, and generally provide the materiel for an action/adventure movie (VALID)
- The archetype of civilization still assigns men the role of instigator and women the role of nurturer (VALID)
It really comes down to the fact that what sells right now is big stupid action/adventure films... and men tend to be big stupid action/adventure heroes far more often than women. THAT SAID:
- Angelina Jolie. There's the Tomb Raider franchise, there's Wanted, and there's the fact that Salt was originally a script about a dude.
- Milla Jovovich. Resident Evil. Ultraviolet. Fifth Element. For someone who sings like Tory Amos she kicks a fair amount of ass.
- Natalie Portman. I mean, hell, her first role was as a waif whose family were gunned down by drug dealers who learns to be an assassin and then goes off to finishing school.
(yes, I just enjoy linking to that video for the hell of it)
"Strong female characters" to be sure... but in that genre of films, the men aren't exactly sensitive either. Tony Stark doesn't even shed a tear for the guy who saves his life in the Afghan cave. Sly Stallone famously would "kill you last" if he liked you. It's not exactly a genre for emotional depth.
And sometimes you don't even know the switcheroo happened. Salt, as previously mentioned. Ripley from the Alien franchise was originally written as a man.
I guess what I'm getting at is this: gender politics are complicated and blockbusters are not. If there is going to be ass-kicking (and in modern movies there's likely to be ass-kicking) there likely won't be a whole lot of room for exploring complexity. Combine that with the fact that if a woman has depth enough to not resort to violence, it's logically difficult to put her in a position where her only way out is violence.
So what, exactly, are we supposed to do?
Agree. McDougall's argument seems to rest mainly on the absence of complex women characters in action films, where complex characters of either gender are hard to find. Sure, Sherlock Holmes is complex, but the novels from which his character germinated are far removed from action as we know it today.
Reading this column I started to wonder whether McDougall actually read any novels or watched any movies outside of Warner Brothers or Pixar, herself.
*Edit: I'd add that I found the author's comments and link about the "strong black woman" stereotype and the damage therefrom informative and enlightening.
And that method that you see in Salt and Alien is how things should be. I feel that for a lot of writers, sexism is internal and subconscious. They can set out to write a female as realistically as they possibly can, and will still fall into pitfalls unless they're well educated in gender studies. I feel the solution is-- if you can't write totally sexless characters and then arbitrarily assign gender after-- to write all your characters as men then. Have them be the people you intend them to be, and then just change the pronouns and such to make them female. If there isn't anything explicitly important about them being female or male, like the oppression they face as a woman or being a soldier in a period piece, then there's no reason to make the distinction, so why not just change 'he' to 'her' on half your characters?
But doesn't assuming a lack of gender take away one of most people's (and therefore most characters') main identity traits? There are differences in men and women; it just so happens that sometimes those differences are relevant and other times irrelevant.
I agree; very often the character's gender is important, because there very well are differences in the genders. I added the addendum "so long as there aren't relevant features" for this reason. I feel the problem aries that we (in media, at least) tend to focus on the fact that there are differences, when by and large they aren't important in the day to day. If we're watching a film like an action film in a situation where it would be rare for a woman to exist, perhaps the American Civil War, and a woman was a character, it would absolutely be important to have the women and men distinguished and discussed, but when every film that has a woman focuses on the fact that she's a woman, that she's different because she's a woman, or they make mention of something that only happens to women, or they shoehorn in a romantic subplot because she's a woman interacting with men, it's absolutely exhausting and irrelevant. It's akin to if you make a film and have an Asian character, and they have to make mention of it somewhere regardless of its relevance-- he's just a character with the same depth and doing the same things the rest of the characters are, but making a point to make a distinction for superficial reasons is distracting and takes away a level of sovereignty the character has from who he is.
For example, if you take a work like Lord of the Rings and made Sam female instead, the work isn't affected. It remains identical and the he still has the depth of character, he's still just as much the protagonist. You could not change the gender of Eowyn, for example, because it's pivotal that she is a woman instead of a man. Or the same of Aragorn, because he is expressly the king of Gondor and a warrior in a time of male warriors (rightfully or not). The problem is, in these situations where someone is writing a female, they'll tend to fall into cliches. They'd have Sam fall in love with Frodo, or have her break down and question herself, or have her be flat and only have the characteristic of 'strong' and unchanging throughout. The dynamics of a person change dramatically when they are actively writing a female character, writing a woman™ instead of a person.
To add a summary, I'd say about 80% of the time gender is irrelevant, but writers make it relevant because they feel they have to as they're writing a female, even if it flattens the character and removes depth. They make far less interesting people in their stories when they do this, subconsciously.