Whatever happened to the female antihero?

Dear readers,

This is not a foilo piece for you, but my Master’s Thesis from 2006. Figured I’d better put it somewhere, so here it is! Do take a look through if you fancy a long read, but of course I would write something much much punchier for you. Of course!

I believe that what is covered in this exegesis explains why the US is struggling to write good characters in films and comics today, though a few more factors have come to the fore since I wrote it.

Plenty more factors worth exploring from here: How has Inclusion been detrimental to film writing? What effect of the Hero’s Journey? What of treating the audience as homogenous, as opposed to segmented and with different tastes?

How does the commercial success of films and comics (Manga) that don’t conform to the current US philosophy on media prove that the US is out of touch with their audience?

We could then also investigate how the players’ choice of male or female characters in video games shows that the audience knows what they want better than Hollywood film makers.

So come, take a trip through my 2006 brain. Enjoy!

The Hollywood Production Code and the Female Antihero

Introduction:

The focus of this exegesis will be to examine the concept of the female anti-hero or, as could be more accurately described, the complex female character. I will be drawing from the writings of Rene Denfield in her book The New Victorians[1] to discover her theories of new societal conservatism and its origins as it relates to Western society, and applying these theories to the trends throughout the history of film to determine if the same trends can be observed in the various eras of filmmaking. By this, I will attempt to ascertain what is the current environment for screenwriters wishing to include main female characters in their scripts.

I will be looking particularly at films produced in the United States, being what I see as the major producer and the strongest influence on market forces when it comes to English speaking films over the last hundred years, and what effect the censorship and cultural climate in America has on the filmmakers’ freedom to portray complex female characters.

This piece will delve briefly into the effects of the Production Code era of 1934 to 1968, its effects on characters and audiences within this ‘Hollywood era’ and its subsequent effects within these topics on filmmaking over the four decades since its dissolution. During this piece, when ‘Hollywood’ is mentioned, it refers to the American studio style of film production, dominant in America throughout the years of the Production Code and still prevalent today.

This document will discuss the effects of moral conservatism on film, particularly in regard to the absence of the female anti-hero and the effect this has had on a watching audience and Post-production code filmmakers. The term ‘anti-hero’ is here defined as a main character whose behaviour and attitudes would typically be seen as morally corrupt or flawed, particularly by the attitudes of the viewing audience of the time.

The questions raised by this exegesis are:

1. What effect has the era of the Production Code (1934-1968) had on the attitudes in today’s society as regards male and female identities.

2. What factors are still inhibiting the freedom of filmmakers in terms of content and characters, in particular to women on screen.

3. Leading up to very recent times, what have been the films that have been challenging the conventions of the Hollywood convention or formula, and what is the current climate for screenwriters’ characters. 

As a specific example of the effects of the convention of conservative filmmaking in regard to female characters, this report will look closely at the issue of aggressive women in film, and the various means that the Hollywood system uses to qualify her behaviour. The term “Anti-hero” is effectively defined by Susan Mackey-Kallis (2001) as "a protagonist who lacks the attributes that make a heroic figure, as nobility of mind and spirit, a life or attitude marked by action or purpose."[2]

To accompany this study is a feature script that hopefully challenges these conventions by featuring a male as victim of domestic violence to his partner who is a successful career woman. The challenge will be to make her into a morally questionable strong female character who does not suffer by the end, possibly gains sympathy from the audience yet in a way which does not condone nor justify the violence.

Part One: Conservative filmmaking

In order to understand the causes of repressive censorship throughout the 20th century, and with it the gender imbalances that still affect films today, it would be useful at this point to reflect on some of the social conditions that were operating before film came on the scene.

The reason for this is that, as Rene Denfeld (1995) has observed, periods of conservatism followed by a period of liberalism has often resulted in a subsequent throwback to the conservative values of the previous generation. I believe that the same pattern can be seen throughout film history and it would be very useful to examine this phenomenon to determine what scripts and characters would be accepted by which kind of audience today.

In her book The New Victorians[3], Rene Denfeld gives her account of what times were like throughout the Victorian era.

Throughout the 19th century, says Denfeld, from the start of Queen Victoria’s reign to the end of it, an all-pervading conservatism was upon both men and women throughout the Western world. The industrial revolution had created a whole new style of middle-class with time and money at their disposal, and this was turned into pursuing what they thought was the height of human morality and hence spirituality. As a result, and oppressive conservatism was prevalent throughout the era. The Victorian man was sexually constricted, but the Victorian woman was absolutely chaste, raised shielded from thoughts of sex and was thus seen as undeniably morally and spiritually superior to men and “lesser” women. The Victorian woman’s duty, Denfeld states, was to produce babies, and to do nothing that would take energy away from that task, which included work, leaving the house or excessive thinking. 

Thus, according to Denfeld, men were seen as immoral sexual predators, and the women as pure bastions of innocence, and if taken to bed by a man, must, by reason, have been taken there against her will. Thus women, who were always seen as good, were always victims of men, who were seen as bad. Thus the great polarisation between men and women on either side of the moral fence.

In film history, Mick LaSalle in his books Complicated Women[4] and Dangerous Men[5], describes the production code era of 1934 - 1968 and how it represented similar conservative gender polarisation in film as we have just discussed regarding society in the 19th century. Through conservative legislation, the National Catholic Legion of Decency condemned and banned the showing of all films featuring even slightly questionable ethics, and this included many attributes to the female character that had just been gathering strength in the Pre-code era of 1929-1934. This left a polarisation similar to that described in the Victorian era, as women in mainstream Hollywood films were to be regarded as innocent, therefore victims of men, and could therefore not drive a film plot.

The decades of relative freedom before 1934 were brought about largely by the efforts of the Women’s Rights movement at the end of the 19th century. According to Denfeld (1995), in an attempt to correct this polarisation of the sexes, the first wave of feminism gained women control over their earnings, property, marriage rights and, a few decades later, the right to vote. The first generation of women to grow up enjoying the freedom to attend universities and have control of these other aspects of their lives were the foundation of the sophisticated, educated and opinionated ‘flappers’ of the 1920s. According to LaSalle (2000), the films of the late 20s and early 30s reflected a new generation’s willingness to test moral conventions. LaSalle highly praises the work of all these liberal ideas that were making it onto screen, the wonderfully sophisticated characters and complex plots, often having a well-deserved shot at the ills of the society at the time.

Similarly in the post-code era from 1968, according to many filmmakers of the time, some of whom will be discussed later (Robert Towne, Julie Christie)[6], the fall of the production code meant a sudden freedom of filmmakers to explore concepts that were taboo only a few years before. They had the freedom to question authority, gender roles, moral values and many other issues, and they did so, with independent filmmakers being the hit at the box office for most of the 70s. Films like Klute, M*A*S*H, Easy Rider and Sweet Sweetback’s badass song all contained a point or a character that would not have been allowed a decade earlier.

In the Victorian fight for liberalism, however, Denfeld (1995) points out this very important twist in that near the end of the 19th century, the new feminists who joined and took over from those who had started the movement kept the idea that women were morally superior, and that women’s role was as the guardians morality. These conservative women shut down a lot of the progress that was made regarding personal freedom using the same organisations that had been started to oppose oppressive conservatism were now fighting for tighter moral constraints. They argued against birth control, for tighter control of women’s behaviour, for censorship of ideas, for making it harder for women to apply for divorce and did enormous damage to personal freedom by heavily persecuting women who would have sex outside of marriage. Thus if caught doing so, a woman’s only defence was to make a case that she were completely a victim of men, which prompted women to go against anything that would incite male lust. They outlawed anything they could to protect what they saw as capable of inciting lust including pornography, free speech and literature.

Similarly, for various reasons as discussed later, the freedoms that were enjoyed by filmmakers outside of the Hollywood system at the start of the 1970s were eroded by the end of it. For the most part, this had to do with the Hollywood studios gaining back power and audiences with the discovery of the ‘blockbuster’, but there were also other factors involved. 

Denfeld’s (1995) next point in her examination of Victorianism, and one that will be revisited throughout this exegesis, is that what happened back at the end of the original Women’s Movement happened again at the end of the modern feminist movement from the 1970s. As pointed out by Christina Hoff Sommers (1994) in her book Who stole Feminism[7], this is contrary to the intentions of the original second-wave feminists such as Betty Freidan and Sylvia Ann Hewlett as they are attacked by writers with their own agenda such as Susan Faludi. This, according to Denfeld (1995), is exactly what happened one hundred years ago to destroy a lot of the advancements to the freedom and equality of women made by the first feminists at the start of the movement in the 19th century.

It is hardly surprising then that, according to the filmmakers of the 70s (as discussed later), audiences soon returned to the Hollywood formula (assisted by new Hollywood marketing) and that in more recent times, according to Denfeld (1995), the now conservative feminist movement is lending its weight to the same conservative censorship groups they used to oppose, joining them in the condemnation of films they deem ‘immoral’.

Further chapters in this document will discuss how banning a film on moral grounds can be a block against creating complex female characters, particularly morally ambiguous or anti-hero characters, and how this is contradictory to the efforts of the early ‘70s feminists, like the original 19th century feminists before them, in gaining gender equality.

My script ‘A Walnut Tree’ features a strong and aggressive female, admittedly not the protagonist, but a main character, as the perpetrator of domestic abuse. In keeping with the points made in this exegesis, she ought to be morally flawed, but not be either psychopathic or otherwise mentally flawed, must not be stylised into a simple ‘bad’ character, must be able to attract at least some audience sympathy and must not be overly punished for her behaviour. Being a satire against domestic violence and not a moralistic tale of such, and in contrast to the fate of many ‘femme fatale’ characters of the ‘40s and ‘50s, despite her shortcomings, she must win, or at least not lose as much as her forebears.

Part 2: The eras of women in film

Mick LaSalle (2000) is in high praise of the pre-code era of 1929-1934. Amongst some pure entertainment films were what he regards as gems of satire which contained often philosophical and non-moralistic themes which served to open a channel to the psyche of audiences at the time. For example, businessmen, once seen as the untouchable pinnacle of society, were being shown as corrupt whereas crooks in the same film were given a positive light. The nation’s leaders were being questioned for sending young men off to pointless wars. Harlots were taking over whichever part of the city they fancied that day by seduction or power and were revered for it, men were choosing women not for their pristine innocence but for their worldliness and verve. This was not the age of the shrinking violet.

Real-life sexual relations were also being tested with film. Audiences were now presented with moral questions in full context which would challenge the old system of finding a suitable partner while young and raising a family. LaSalle(2000) writes that two great actresses of the time, Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer, had considerable control over the studio’s production choices and were prepared to tackle these behaviour issues head-on such that when they got their careers going, suddenly women in film, and thus in real life, were challenging the preconceived notion of how they ought to behave and doing so from a point of view unadulterated by producers or censors getting in the way.

Women in films were testing moral boundaries by having characters cheating on philandering husbands to a happy ending because of it. Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933)[8] plays a bisexual queen who is promiscuous, strong and complex, facing the dilemmas of a female lover who chooses to marry a man, her desire to do something about it and her duty to the throne. Mae West, with a history of writing and producing many successful Broadway productions turned her hand to writing parts for herself in film and, in the two years before the code came into play, had written and released three films She Done Him Wrong[9], I’m No Angel[10] and Belle of the Nineties.[11]

Greta Garbo, Queen Christina, 1933.

Women in these films were seductive, complex and powerful and, most important of all, lived to the end of the movie and often succeeded within it. They went after what and who they wanted sleeping with whomever they chose, thumbing their noses at society, were often morally questionable and occasionally downright evil and, most importantly, were not punished by the end. They did not meet a sticky end for being who they were or what they did, and quite often got what they were after within it. This brief period, known as the pre-code era, extended from 1929 to the 1st of July 1934.

Part 3: The Era of the Hollywood Production Code

What happened on the 1st of July is one of the darkest hours in film history. According to LaSalle (2000), The Production Code Administration, having been formed by a group of Catholic bishops and lay people calling themselves the ‘Legion of Decency‘, drawing on a lot of political power, and weight added with the backing of what was left of the by now ultra-conservative feminist movement, appointed Joe Breen as head of the PCA, which then deliberately and unapologetically set about to make sure that all films produced and shown in America were as conservative as the ideals of those staunch religious people who comprised it. It was the moment that plunged America into decades of blanket censorship that crippled the power of speech by filmmakers, destroyed complex characters, especially female ones, by outlawing sexuality, making sure that all ’sin’ be punished, and discouraging forceful females.

In the words of the code, as cited by John Belton (1996)[12]:

1. No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin.

2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

Of course, those who decided what constituted ‘crime, wrong-doing, evil and sin’ as well as ‘correct standards’ were the administration themselves, so you could argue all you liked that this film was otherwise in others’ interpretation, but you would get nowhere with this. Section 3, where you are not allowed to ridicule a law, meant that you were not allowed to satirise a decree by the powers-that-be. Again, the voice of opposition to conservative America had been gagged. The occasional guerrilla attack by Orson Welles and scarce few others being the only exceptions. Great public outcry to the banning of films like Scarlet Street (1945)[13], which dealt with a man committing a murder and the wrong man getting hanged for it, were all to no avail. 

But the effect I will be examining mostly in this document is that of female characters, how this censorship regime cheapened all movie plots that were to come, making films into moral lessons with no room for open discussion of these proposed morals, that they made women into helpless victims, chaste angels or, if they did have even one patch of the unsavoury about them, a freak who would be dead by the end of the movie. It was tantamount to propaganda, outlining how people ought to behave, lest they suffer the same fate. 

The Production Code Administration was dissolved in 1968, but with a conditioned audience, trained to expect certain genre-based outcomes from the films they watch such as that crime never pays and a wilful woman always suffered, plus a few other factors discussed later, this conservatism in film did not fade away quickly.

Part 4: The effects of the code

Before the Production Code was enforced in 1934, according to LaSalle (2000), filmmakers were more-or-less free to challenge the morals and attitudes of our society, whilst hoping to attract and audience. Well crafted films of any age can engage an audience, avoid being moralistic, and still serve to convey a message by holding up a mirror to one’s own society or psyche, opening up questions that would allow people to examine and possibly debate aspects of society or themselves.

With this creative freedom, age old questions of morality could be explored such as ‘Is it still stealing if I have no other choice but to watch my children starve?’ or ‘If my partner cheats on me, what if I cheat on him?’ or to find situations where the audience is asked if it is right in a given set of circumstances to kill a man, or question whether it is always right to fight for your country.

And so, in at least a few notable films of the time, criminals were given a heart, many women characters were forceful, capable and complex and engaged in questionable behaviour, were sometimes downright wicked, but still succeeded in the end. With reference to the content of these films, members of the audience could establish their own set of ethics and have some compassion for others’.

So, according to LaSalle (2000), when Joe Breen won his campaign to ban all of this content in films, he did it with the excuse that it was to stop all this moral ambiguity and immoral sympathy in lesser films, but used it to throw out the greater debates as well. It should be noted that Breen, who was the single-minded force behind the administration, might not have acted so much for the betterment of American souls, as hate-filled anti-Semitism. As cited by LaSalle(2000), Breen’s private correspondence before he took up his position included references to the Jewish studio bosses as a ‘foul bunch, crazed with sex…and ignorant in all matters having to do with sound morals.’ For this and his filmic version of book-burning, he was soon called “The Hitler of Hollywood” by Film weekly.

Most notably, as it relates to this document, was the Code’s effects on women:

“Women got the worst of it. Under the code, it wasn’t only crime that didn’t pay. Adultery didn’t pay. Divorce didn’t pay. Leaving your husband didn’t pay. Getting pregnant outside marriage didn’t pay. Even having a job often didn’t pay. Nothing paid. The Production Code ensured a miserable fate-or at least a rueful, chastened one-for any woman who stepped out of line. Accordingly, every female character in movies got her virginity back. If she lost it again, she was in big trouble. The price for non-conjugal relations was either death, permanent loneliness, or a profuse, protracted and degrading apology. At the same time, women became the humble protectors of marriage. If a husband strayed and wanted to return, a wife not only had to take him back, she had to smile as she did it.”

-Mick LaSalle, Complicated Women (2000) p 190

As way of example, compare the fates of two career women in two films put forward by LaSalle: the pre-code Mary Stevens M.D.[14] and the 1935 film The Flame Within[15]:

Mary Stevens establishes herself as a capable and talented medical doctor which is not only compatible with her being a woman, but enhanced by it, and proves it by the end by saving a child from choking on a safety pin with by fishing it out with her hair-pin.

The Flame Within made after the code’s inception features actress Ann Harding playing a psychiatrist but gives up her whole career just because she wants to marry a man who doesn’t approve of working women. It ends with her completely subservient:

He: “What are you going to do?”

She: “You tell me.”  

…to a happy ending with full fanfare.

This subservience of females is exactly what Breen and his goons would put forward as a positive message, while Mary Stevens M.D., with her strong will to succeed in her career, and to have a child out of wedlock to an unknowing father, was ripped from the screens along with many others containing similar messages.

Social attitudes in films, far from representing the great progressive leaps that were evident in real-life society, were taking a regressive sprint. Actresses in the mainstream films of Hollywood were no longer playing any kind of complex or genuine situation nor emotion, or if they did, as in the case of the femme fatale, their character would be dead or brutally punished by the end of the film. It made sure that all women in films were mothers, victims or whores.

Part 5: Role models

“The Hollywood genres represent the fictional elaboration of a patriarchal culture which produces macho heroes and a subordinate, demeaning and objectified place for women.” - Christine Gledhill Women in film noir[16] p22

In society, what were people supposed to make of their role models? Women, by watching films, were watching films where the only females on screen were passive victims or else, in the case of the non-mainstream femme fatale, ended up dead. Barely was there one role model who was not either spineless or homely, or suffer being completely destroyed for even allowing one unsavoury thought. At the same time, men in the movies were being portrayed as the active force. They adopted all the nasty elements that could no longer be bestowed upon females. They became violent criminals, cops or cowboys, wife-beaters, rapists and tyrants. Both these stigma for men and women influenced the consciousness of society such that they are myths of stereotype that are still active today.

It is my contention that the damage caused by the Production Code held back the progress of women’s rights for decades so completely and in such a subtle yet all-pervading way, that women didn‘t know that they were doing a lot of the restricting themselves, fed by images they saw in the movies. The early 70s feminists had a lot of work to do to correct the imbalance between men and women and thud free both sexes, but the New Feminists who would come after them, wage war on patriarchal society for oppressing women, but are doing this largely due to the myths that films under the Code promoted. In other words, their ‘enemy’ doesn’t exist in the form they think it does, and still with quite a bit of work to do, they have spent a lot of time scaring each other and chasing shadows, as well noted by Denfeld (1995) and Sommers (1994) in their response to many of the fabrications of modern feminism, including Susan Faludi’s Backlash[17].

This pressure to conform to feminist ideals relegates women to victimhood in much the same vein as the ideals of the Code or Victorianism. As Rene Denfield writes:

“This is the danger of New Victorianism. This feminist promotion of repressive sexual morality and spiritual passivity promulgates the vision of an ideal woman, sexually pure and helpless yet somehow morally superior to men and all male-influenced institutions.’ therefore, she states that the genders have become polarised as ‘men as wicked demons with sex on the brain, women as defenceless, chaste innocents in need of protection.”

-Rene Denfeld The New Victorians (1996)

How can there be equality in films when filmmakers are not allowed to make women strong, in control and sexually confident? Surely there have been some films in recent times that challenged this one-dimensional stereotype?

In my script A Walnut Tree, while the female character within certainly is not a positive role model for women, given that she perpetrates violence against her husband, she is nonetheless a character for whom some sympathy is gained by the end. Part of the point of this film is that, as opposed to the extrapolated images of women throughout film history, even good women can have a dark side. Once this is acknowledged, rather than allowing stereotypes to continue, something can be done to improve the lives of people caught in such a situation.

Part 6: Challenging the stereotype of women in film

Even throughout the Production Code era, whilst not enjoying the power and influence of mainstream Hollywood, Film Noir was the necessary outlet for the repression of women’s strength.

“Film noir … give[s] us one of the few periods of film in which women are active, not static symbols, are intelligent and powerful, if destructively so, and derive power, not weakness, from their sexuality.” - Janey Place Women in Film Noir[18]

“Myth not only expresses dominant ideologies, it is also responsive to the repressed needs of the culture. It gives voice to the unacceptable archetypes as well; the myths of the sexually aggressive woman (or criminal man) first allows sensuous expression of that idea then destroys it.” Janey Place Women in Film Noir

According to Janey Place, the dominant attitude of women in film throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s ‘A’ films was that of the weak and incapable woman, helpless without a man, but that this repression of women’s power created a film counter-culture featuring the deadly, strong, sexual and invariably doomed antipathies to Hollywood’s female image: the Femme Fatale.

In order to get around the rigid censorship laws prohibiting sympathy or a happy ending for such characters, while they may have blazed across the screen in the first two acts, they always met an uncomfortable end either by death or, as LaSalle (2000) suggests, a humiliating, protracted apology by the third.

The post-code era

In 1968 the Code ended. The big studios were trying to make bigger, more expensive productions that, due to an audience swing away from these epic-style films, were sending the studios broke. At the same time, young American directors were taking their inspiration from the outside-Hollywood auteur filmmakers such as Fellini, Rossolini, Antonini and Kurosawa, which coincided with a great wave of social upheaval in America. This started a surge in independent productions, with independent filmmakers on very little budget capturing honestly common people’s lives, and speaking out against Vietnam, censorship, Nixon, personal freedoms sexual politics, while the second wave of feminism came to the fore.

Referring to the wave of independent American films of the 70s, Julie Christie states:

“One of the main things films were trying to do was to reflect life as it was rather than as authorities wanted it to be.” -Julie Christie A Decade under the influence Documentary directed by Lagravanese and Demme 2003[19]

Everything was held up for scrutiny by Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper and many others. This era continued, with the big, conservative studios losing a lot of ground to these independent filmmakers, and the sanctioned perceptions of people that had been fed to audiences for decades were being dismantled including, importantly, the portrayal of women as more than passive icons. 

This continued until the mid 70s, when Steven Spielberg made Jaws[20]. So successful was Jaws that it invented the concept of the blockbuster and allowed the Hollywood studios to regain their control over film, as pointed out by Robert Towne:

“We’ve never really gotten around Jaws. The trouble is a very talented filmmaker made a very good movie, and I won’t say that the wrong lessons were learned, but the lessons were followed to a fault” - Robert Towne A Decade under the influence Documentary directed by Lagravanese and Demme 2003

Jaws was followed by Rocky and Star Wars and the era of the ’Independent mainstream’ was over. With a return of power to Hollywood to draw so much of the audience and control the cinemas, according to Towne, the mainstream of cinema was back to Hollywood genre films, and thus a second era of conservatism, this time driven by market forces, began.

“The 90s movie is exemplified by the ‘high cost, high-tech, high stakes blockbusters’, a development rooted in the hit-driven decades of the 70s and 80s, when movies like Jaws, Saturday Night Fever, and later, the Star Wars and Spielberg Uber-blockbusters established record-breaking global revenues. The blockbuster movie was in place as the standard form by the early 90s, when movies designed for success in all available markets became a necessity, brought about by the huge costs now involved in producing, marketing and distributing films.”

- Kate Stables The postmodern always rings twice[21]

Where it relates to women in film is that with the return of the Hollywood film, for many reasons as examined below, women were once again relegated to playing passive roles and American film’s progress towards complex female roles was stalled.

Part 7: Resistance to change

It is my assertion that the convention of conservativeness that was established in the Production Code era still has a strong hold over the majority of mainstream movies today, more than 30 years later. Following is a discussion of the several branches of resistance to restoring the complexity of plots and characters, particularly the female anti-hero, as Hollywood Code gave way to Hollywood ‘Formula’.

1. Training of the audience

John Fiske once wrote about the reception of realism on an audience:

“(Realism) finally represents the world to us in a way that naturalises the status quo.”

- Berman, Milton (1961)[22]

This means that films and stories set in a realistic setting serve to cement the idea in the minds of the viewing audience. That whatever societal situation is presented within it is the norm. Thus, without a basis of experience, the audience would find it hard to accept female characters who did not fit into the simplified roles they were used to seeing them in.

This thought, particularly regarding violent women in the movies, is addressed by Susan Knobloch:

“Realism in Hollywood performance must, like other self-effacing codes of filmmaking, draw spectators into a certain “normal” vision of reality. Hence star roles, such as violent women in the movies, which do not easily fit a status quo (as conceived by anyone, feminist or not), would not mesh easily with codes of the serious and the real.”

- Susan Knobloch 2001[23]

A whole generation was raised to expect certain outcomes, and may feel on unfamiliar ground if they were confronted with something that didn’t fit into their expectations. What this meant for female characters is that as the audience was drawn to what they were used to, in preference to what they weren‘t, that films which featured women taking an active role rather than men would tend not to get made. There would therefore still be a lack of representation of flawed, complex or dynamic females.

2. Money

Paul Burns- “Twenty years ago… the roles that women got were much less complicated, complex and interesting to me than what they get now.”

Andrew Urban - “…I don’t think it’s going to be possible for a place like Hollywood, which really just follows its nose to profit to make any kind of hidden agenda, to say ‘well, let’s just correct this gender imbalance and lets make movies with women stars’. If the scripts came up, if we wrote a script tonight which Hollywood felt would make money, they would take it no matter what the subject matter was, and I think the difficulty is that it’s going to take us a while to have the writers tackle those issues.”

- Women in mainstream cinema Reel to Real series, AFTRS 1992[24]

Andrew Urban’s assertion is that Hollywood acts like a profit-seeking company. This is no surprise, and is the same for any business interested in staying in business. As it relates to film, in general most of the mainstream studios would be interested in a script that is likely to make more money, for preference over one that would represent a risk.

So, when the big studios lost their monopoly on the audience and there was suddenly a new market of curious filmgoers, anyone wishing to could shoot low budget and often avant-garde and politically charged independent films. Actors such as Jane Fonda put pressure on the studios to examine feminist issues. Klute (1971)[25], for example, featured a strong female character who speaks frankly about her job as a prostitute. Offering the audience sympathy for this character, and giving her a happy (although still rather Hollywood) ending, given that she had a profession that would previously have been considered immoral and illegal, would have been impossible ten years prior, and showed the stark difference of honesty in filmmaking that was allowable after the fall of the code.

With their audience being drawn away from them, the studios in the first half of the ‘70s lost a combined total of $500 million[26] , leaving them at a loss for scripts and directors that would reliably make considerable returns on their investment, so when Spielberg and Lucas were discovered, and the film companies leapt upon them, the power swung right back to the studios.

The films that these directors made were not the ‘progressive’ social films of the first half of the 70s, and certainly did not particularly seek to challenge social attitudes when it came to gender or other issues, rather they drew upon a classic formula of the hero winning the day against adversity. They were immensely popular and shaped the direction of films from the end of the 70s.

More than that, due to the increased importance of marketing and promotion in films since the discovery of the blockbuster, independent films could hardly compete with the now large budgets needed in order to successfully compete with mainstream studio films. In a competitive market, independent films could never afford the kind of promotion necessary to draw more than a loyal independent movie fan base to see it.

Thus, the mainstream passive audience would continue to be exposed only to mainstream, thus conservative, ideas in film. Female roles would continue to be two-dimensional or, if they did show some strength, would be provided with an excuse for her character as if one were needed, as discussed below.

Fortunately, as shall also be discussed later, there is a strong alternative growing that is undermining the dominance these big production companies had, such that all that is needed now is for a good idea, well written, to fall into the right hands at the right time.

3. Writers

According to LaSalle (2000): Garbo, Shearer, West and many others back in the ‘30s were able to write their own material, either by developing the script or the character and adding appropriate dialogue, such that they could draw upon their own experiences as women to make their characters come alive and fill them with passion, jealousy, love, hate and anything else that comprised the complex characters they were creating. After the code was introduced, writing scripts became even more male-heavy than it was before, the need to write female characters who were more than pretty objects was not required, and therefore the skill to make these lively female characters faded away.

Possibly the reason why male characters returned with such force to the screen whereas females did not is that by the 70s, the by then almost exclusively male scriptwriting industry could not, being male, write a complex female character with any kind of first-hand knowledge but could most definitely bring forward male characters with all the ideas for plot and character that had been brewing for decades. 

Susan Isaacs puts forward one of her theories as to why our screens are filled with “wimpettes”:

“…there are plenty of writers, directors and actors who lack the imagination or the character to look beyond the stereotypes. For all of these, what is a politically acceptable way of keeping women down on the farm, in the house, out of power? Portray them as put-upon, as helpless, as hurt. Turn them into victims.”

-Susan Isaacs Brave dames and wimpettes p16[27]

More on the victimhood stance will be discussed later in this section, but suffice it to say that it may well be beyond many writer’s skill, experience or desire to do anything with female characters than to get them out of the way and satisfy the status quo at the same time.

Still we see writers managing to make sense of how to create genuine female characters, with a notable few (Tarantino, Scott, Whedon) actually succeeding, and now some female writers are making some superb films (Sofia Coppola), though sometimes just by the mere act of making movies with females in them, they can get caught up as targets for criticism, mostly by other females.

4. Feminism, and the culture of victimhood

Since Feminism made its great surge in the early ‘70s which achieved a great deal for equality and improved the lives of women, men and society as a whole, the players on the feminist team has changed, and it seems they are playing a different game. According to Christina Hoff Sommers (1994) and Rene Denfeld (1995), while the feminist agenda used to be about gender equality, it can now be said to be about feminine superiority in the same way that Victorian era women thought of themselves as morally superior, and appears to be justifying this behaviour by pointing out how hard done by women are and have been for a long time, in other words exploiting the image of women as being angels and helpless victims, which is exactly the image that the genuine feminists were trying to dismiss.  

As Katie Roiphe writes:

“The image that emerges from feminist preoccupations with rape and sexual harassment is that of women as victims, offended by a professor’s dirty joke, verbally pressured into sex by peers. This image of delicate women bears a striking resemblance to that fifties ideal my mother and the other women of her generation fought so hard to get away from.”[28]

The idea of women as victims has become all-pervasive throughout today’s media such that it is impossible to avoid messages about how violent are men, and how much women are victims of men‘s evil. Women who would otherwise, of course, be spotless angels. This has resulted in the same dichotomy of character as was experienced one hundred years ago, where a woman couldn’t be just human, she had to be either very very good, or very very bad, as writes Susan Isaacs regarding housewife characters in films:

“Malevolent moms are usually presented as either sick, defective or plain old evil, since a “normal” mother would be a Madonna.”

-Susan Isaacs (1999) Brave dames and wimpettes p57

And, of course, this feeds back into the cycle of belief that these images and attitudes in society feed into one another. Covering a few points made in this chapter, Isaacs also says:

“Turn on the TV, read a book, or go to a movie, and you’ll find hurt women disturbingly prominent in our art. This worries me. The Big Lie repeated often enough becomes truth. I, for one, don’t want to be assumed to be weak or wounded.”

-Susan Isaacs (1999) Brave dames and wimpettes p6

Writers since the 80s then have tried to push the image of the strong woman without the feminist agenda, with some success, but an audience with new feminist sensibilities often can’t cope when a film portrays a woman as either less than capable or morally questionable. This leaves a writer still with a very limited scope for female characters, since the most interesting characters of the pre-code era were a combination of light and shade, and every character has strengths and weaknesses. Many writers would avoid this debate completely and leave the characters out entirely, as mentioned above, leaving the producers to put in females of their own devising to satisfy the audience, as mentioned above.

Speaking about her efforts to write complex women characters is Mary Wings, crime fiction author:

‘“I decided that the only way I could continue with Emma Victoria was to write Divine Victim.” The author has described Divine Victim as the Stephen King version of Lesbians who love too much, and says it was influenced by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, had Rebecca been a lesbian. “It’s about a woman in love with someone who doesn’t always treat her well. Despite being a critical success, lesbian women stayed away in droves. They only wanted novels that featured positive role models.”’

-Mary Wings Deadly Women p278[29]

A lesbian writer with a lesbian lead role is rejected from her own audience simply for giving her leading lady some negative aspects of character. This is a stark example of how a writer with obviously no ill intent towards females can still have the audience of female readers turn their backs on her for writing a dark, complex character. A female anti-hero. From this we can gather that a piece of writing, and we can assume this includes writing for film, is not allowed to portray women in a bad light, at least when it comes to treating other women badly, even if this does represent reality, or at least a more interesting story.

If we were to attempt to listen to all of these feminist groups, we could never make a film which featured a morally ambiguous female character, and the film characters’ sorority would be sadly lacking. Women would therefore be relegated to continue playing weak victims with realistically unattainable moral standards.

Not only does this have an impact back on future filmmaking, but also puts pressure on real-life modern day woman who by now is so busy having a career AND family AND active social life AND keeping up diet/exercise/retail regimes that the added pressure to appear as a puritan puts tremendous strain on their lives and serves rather to undo a lot of the advancements made by the women’s movement over the last half-century.

Part 8: Restoring the female anti-hero

It has been close to forty years since the fall of the production code, and the road to restore women has been long and hard. While the job is not yet finished, we are finally seeing some genuinely brave and strong characters emerging in films today.

The goal, as I see it, is to allow filmmakers to use female characters in as wide a scope as they can men. In order to achieve this, at least a few representative female characters ought to be inherently motivated, possibly do some questionable things, maybe even some outright nasty things to get what she has her mind set on.

We need to get over the necessity that characters are moral or immoral, compassionate or callous, selfish or generous, driven or receptive, slighted or doing the slighting based on their gender. Laura Mulvey (1975)[30] pointed out that films tend to have a ‘male gaze’, that is, that males tend to own the ‘look’, to hold the desires and are the subject of the scene, as opposed to females, who then become the object and thus take up the passive role. This may well have been true when she wrote this in 1975, and it is a trend that, as pointed out in this piece, tends to linger, but since then, gradually, this division has worn thin, and has no psychological basis for its existence, as noted by Sigmund Freud:

‘We are accustomed to say that every human being displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs and attributes; but though anatomy, it is true, can point out the characteristic of maleness and femaleness, psychology cannot. For psychology the contrast between activity and passivity [that is in describing the organisation of the drives], in which we far too readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness, a view which is by no means universally confirmed.’

- Freud Civilisation and its Discontents[31]

A character’s motivation is a key factor in regards to how a character can be used. Motivation can shift priorities, make or break allegiances and create good or evil acts. It must be remembered that normal humans are not inherently evil, therefore plausible sane characters are not evil. They are weak, greedy, misled, megalomaniac, self-righteous, insecure and heartless, but never plain evil. So, with an audience not yet ready to accept a fully motivated female character able to do whatever it takes to succeed, filmmakers had to find ways of getting around the quagmire.

Here then is a summary, more or less in chronological order, of devices that filmmakers have used to justify the existence of a strong female in their films:

1. Death, failure and suffering

An old habit from the code era is that any character engaging in what was seen as an unsavoury act, to have drives and passions against what was prescribed by the church, if they broke the law, had sex outside of marriage, or did anything else that one could say was ‘bad’, they had to die by the end of the movie, or suffer great loss, repent and apologise for their wickedness, basically anything which would make sure that immorality went punished. This was the Film Noir era’s Femme Fatale. This convention still carries on to this day, with the larger audience feeling unsatisfied if the criminal gets away with it, or the immoral lives. The freedom here, as with many films under the code, is that, so long as she died, a character could be almost as wicked as you wanted them to be.

2. Horror

The first way is to portray humans as some kind of monster. If it were inconceivable that a female human could do bad things, the obvious answer is no make her non-human, freeing her from the drudgery of a conscience and humanity, unhooking the need for this character to have any responsibility for her actions whatsoever and relegating her behaviour to the horror genre, where everything else is implausible anyway. This set off the spate of horror films in the ‘70s in which women were taken out of their traditional role of screaming helpless victim and made them into vampiric lesbians or other such non-human monsters. Suddenly women were turning to the dark side, baring their fangs, their power and their sexuality. 

While this movement boldly threw up the idea that women can be powerful and evil, it still didn’t get away from the dichotomy that women are either angelic innocents or despicable monsters.  Besides, these weren’t human, therefore didn’t count. Still, women’s power was now on the table, albeit not in human form.

On the point of lesbian vampires, one of the easiest way to denote someone as being morally ambiguous is to make them sexually ambivalent. Female bisexuality did not have the sting it does until sex was outlawed by the Production Code, so that if you wanted sex, you must be bad, so if you wanted a lot of sex, or sex in a different way from the norm, you must be really bad. As a result, scores of evil horror, drama and suspense were bisexual or lesbian which set up such a precedent that, if a filmmaker today wanted to save time and send a definite signal to the audience of a character’s evil nature, you would merely have her playing both sides of the fence.

3. Revenge

Barbara Creed, whose detailed study of females in horror movies can be found in her book The Monstrous Feminine[32], points out the next stage in female killer movies that brings them closer to being human: The rape revenge.

Coming out in the height of the feminist’s movement in the 70s, I spit on your grave[33] was the pure form of the rape-revenge, where a lone woman, without the aid of a man or the authorities, doles out severe revenge against the men who raped her. Not just raped, according to Creed, it was a prolonged and brutal attack, repeated several times, to bolster justification for what the avenging protagonist was about to do. It tapped into the sentiment that this era represented and became a device that many films would use to give their female characters motivation.

But, as Jacinta Reed[34] points out, while citing Creed and Pidduck, having this rape-revenge motivation puts these films in a different category in that the impetus comes from a specific extrinsic person who the woman is seeking revenge against, as opposed to other film characters where the motivation comes from within. Creed’s distinction rests on whether the act is ‘justified or unjustified, motivated or motiveless.’ To this day, the main motivation for females in this kind of film is that something that needs punishing has been done to them first. But there were exceptions.

4. Psychopaths, sociopaths

As mentioned earlier, it would seem far-fetched for any sane person to do intentional harm against someone without reason. An unmotivated person wouldn’t do such a thing. So what emerged in the ‘90s was a collection of psychopathic women.

I would say that the psychotic woman emerged not so much out of the rape-revenge series as that of the horror genre. They are humans, but psychosis allows for humans that are akin to monsters. They are not natural, they have no justification for their actions, they are just plain nuts, therefore an exception to the rule.

We tend to run to the cliché of the psychopathic far too often to justify a person’s criminal behaviour, particularly for female characters since it has been established deep in the audience’s psyche that men can be nasty and brutal just for the sake of it, and that’s normal for a guy. War films, sports films, spy films, teen bully films all lend a hand to cementing this opinion of men. But for a woman to do something unsavoury, very often filmmakers seek to justify her actions by giving her some revenge plot, or else tipping her right over the edge, into psycho/sociopath territory. This all helps the audience accept that there is a reason for this woman’s distance from the pristine image of womanhood. 

Of course there are crossovers, and what happens in real life is that those who are mentally unstable, or even just very insecure, can feel justified in taking revenge against the slightest transgression against them, intentional or otherwise, so when we get to talking about Fatal Attraction, though Alex is the jilted other woman, this is barely sufficient justification for killing rabbits and people, so she must be seen as a psychotic monster, as signified by her crazy-talk while cutting her own leg with the knife she intends to kill Dan’s wife Beth with. Again, not quite responsible for her actions.

Basic Instinct[35] featured an iconic ‘bad girl’, Catherine Tramell, manipulating the cops and getting her way with everything she has done as a matter of course. In keeping with this idea that any woman who uses her sexuality must be evil, her is openly bisexual and flashes and flirts with a room full of cops. Sex was outlawed under the Production Code, but the tradition continued that if you wanted sex, you must be bad, so if you wanted a lot of sex, or sex in a different way from the norm, you must be really bad. Touching close to the traditional repentant femme fatale ending, Tramell’s ending is a happy one as soon as she accepts his rather humble offer to have a conservative family life with him.

5. Cops

Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, many women took up roles as cops, being partnered in The Enforcer[36] with Dirty Harry (who had some choice words to say about her unmerited promotion to detective), Jamie Lee Curtis, in Blue Steel[37] (who, unfortunately, ends up being stalked, and therefore falls back into a victim/revenge mentality), Rene Russo even survived getting shot in Lethal Weapon 3[38], and there were many more. Here, the motivation has shifted from some sense of revenge to one of duty. They took up the job to be a police officer, and that provides their reason for being included in the story, and her goal and motivation for finishing the job.

Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs[39] was an exceptional character. She got involved in the story because she was female (in order to get information out of Hannibal Lecter), but was never again given any breaks on account of her gender. She came through very strong indeed, and initiated the last part of her investigation which led her to the killer while the squad followed a red herring.

But the highest evolution of female cops was Margie in Fargo[40], who was undoubtedly feminine, given that she was pregnant and experiencing morning sickness, but never let that get in the way of her job, showed utmost professionalism in all respects and won the day neither despite nor because of her gender. These were breakaway films, but might not have been possible if it were not for their more simplistic predecessors.

6. Incredible stories

Since strong sane females are seen as unrealistic, it is only fitting that they exist in an unreal setting. Like theatre, enjoying films often requires a certain degree of suspension of disbelief, which is easier to do when this encompasses most everything about the film, such as science fiction and fantasy.

The science fiction and fantasy genres have thrown forward the idea that women can be more than capable of being in command, rough, strong, and mixing it with the boys on every level. Star Trek’s pilot episode featured a female as 1st officer (strangely, according to Gene Roddenberry[41], to a flood of complaint letters from female viewers for allowing her to give the captain a dirty look), then in the main season it was Lt Uhura, communications officer, who became an icon of encouragement for black women across America.

The Aliens series[42] had Sigourney Weaver going from innocence to commanding strength, Terminator[43] did the same for Linda Hamilton, Red Sonja[44] for Bridgette Neilson, Grace Jones in Conan the Destroyer[45], and many others.

Filmmakers, then, can use the implausibility of an unrealistic genre to include characters that an audience would have previously seen as being implausible in themselves. Starting with fantasy/science fiction, but gradually moving closer to being set here and now through the transition to action movies, which are still stylistically incredible. The films Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon[46], The Long Kiss Goodnight[47] and Charlie’s Angels[48] used this card and, perhaps the pinnacle of all bad-ass female characters to date, Bea from Kill Bill[49].

A difficulty with many female characters in action films is that the female characters are written as male characters, then played by a female, and therefore not female at all. Geena Davis’ ‘Charly’ in Long Kiss Goodnight was more mannish than Samuel L Jackson’s character playing opposite, while Charly‘s alter-ego housewife is as insipid and dowdy as any other passive movie housewife. This dichotomy may be taken as a critique of this era in female characters where Charly’s two-toned character represents each type of female characters mentioned earlier, and by the end of the film learns to incorporate her ‘male’ and ‘female’ attributes into her new psyche.

7. True stories

Breaking through the shackles of an audience unable to accept a forceful female in a real setting, Hollywood occasionally turned to examples in real-life history. It is fairly hard to argue that such-and-such a character is not plausible, or could not be female, as critics of fictional immoral females are wont to do, when the words ‘based on a true story’ appear under the heading.

Truth is stranger than fiction, particularly if you only think you know what truth is. Of course there will always be something to be said for a filmmaker’s interpretation, but at least being based in fact adds a great weight to its credibility. As a result, we have many females doing what would not have been believed had it been a work of fiction. Valerie Solanas was capable of shooting Andy Warhol[50] and believe she was justified in doing so. Queen Elisabeth in Elisabeth[51] performed some ruthless tasks in her reign, as a monarch in those times was occasionally required to do. Aileen Wuornos from Monster[52] was a serial killer. Unimaginable, given what we as a society think we know about women, but true. More subtle, but definitely a character who many women could more relate and aspire to was Erin Brokovich[53], which featured a professional and determined real-life working mother in a modern setting. She was coarse, and swore a lot which, given that she was also very compassionate and caring, added a dimension to her character rather than taking anything away.

________________________________________________

 So we have a range of devices all geared towards justifying an aggressive woman’s behaviour, even drawing upon real-life aggressive women before the audience will accept that humans in real life, whether male or female, can be more aggressive, strong and dynamic. The next challenge is to introduce these anti-hero females back into the credible but fictional realm.

My script, A walnut tree, being a social satire, requires a fictional female character in a realistic setting. In keeping with the tenets of this study, she is a character who is violent but has no excuse for being so. She is not psychotic, has no history of drug or alcohol abuse and is the head of the household and successful in her career.

The question is whether an audience needs some kind of vilification in order to accept an unsavoury female character.

Part 9: The emerging era of women in film

So, once an audience was capable of accepting the factual accounts of strong women, the next step was to introduce strong, pro-active fictional females, set in believable modern times, hopefully remaining feminine, and that there be no qualms about allowing them to tread across the moral boundaries.

As an example of a film using unreal settings to introduce strong females, as mentioned earlier, one of the most positive female action-flicks yet to come out was Charlie’s Angels, which constantly plays on the unrealistic comedy aspects of the genre whilst building up characters who are incredibly intelligent, knowledgeable, talented, brave, ‘good’ in terms of lawfulness and are a match in hand-to-hand combat with any foe, yet keep their individual characters and their varying degrees of femininity and manage to beat the bad-guy. Notable in our discussion of questionable females in relation to these two films is the fact that the bad ‘guy’ twice turns out to be a female they trusted. One the person who came to them first with the assignment, and the other an ex-Charlie’s angel played by Demi Moore with some misguided reason for wanting revenge on Charlie.

This is all notable because having female heroes and female baddies, particularly those without too much justification for their actions allows the two opposites of hero/villain to play out. It is still fairly clunky in terms of the good/bad dichotomy rather than the spectrum of grey areas yet to be explored, but it is an ambassador for tough good and not-so-good female characters, and an inspiration to women.

In the same genre, and definitely worth a brief mention along these lines is the recent action flick Mr and Mrs Smith[54], where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play a married couple, John and Jane Smith and unbeknownst to each other they each work as assassins, working for different agencies.

Both are killers, both are lying to each other, both do despicable acts as part of their job, yet both hold the audience‘s sympathy. On every level, what they do is presented as being just as bad as each other without much concern for the political correctness of it all and, after a slugging, shooting and slanging match lasting for most of the film, reconcile and act as a team. They are neither good nor bad, but somewhere in between, and we accept them for that.

It is lighthearted, featuring plenty of comedy as well as action, and is a parody of the gender war as a whole, with Jane working for a well-organised, gleaming organisation with a large staff of professional women manning the high-tech equipment, compared to John’s company, a run-down shack on the poor side of town with slovenly partner Eddie (Vince Vaughn) on the other side of a large dog-eared pile of manila folders. What is important to this study is that there is no morality bias according to gender, neither die nor compromise their occupations by the end, and their relationship has improved remarkably by the closing scene for their discovery that the other was not as innocent as they thought they were.

A landmark film in this respect, and one that is mentioned often in gender-in-film discussions was Thelma and Louise[55]. This is not a rape-revenge movie (unless you count Thelma‘s distant past), nor are either of them psychotic, and it is by no means their job, but they find the motivation to shoot a man, rob a bank and attempt to flee to Mexico.

The important point in the key scene where Thelma kills a man is that she does so after she stops his attempted rape of Louise, and once the danger is past, more as a reaction to his lack of remorse and his insulting taunts than of the actual act itself. Therefore Thelma takes a vigilante stand which is illegal but reasonable. It is what an angry, sane person would do. In holding up the bank, Louise steps further over the line but, given their set of circumstances, is not out of line with what a reasonable person would do. 

They do die in the end, which would normally be seen as punishment for their characters’ behaviour in any other movie, but the way in which they choose to die rather than face judgement or, worse, a return to their old lives, gives them the power over their own death. In movie terms, it was a heroic death.

But women taking a beating, persecution, or taking all kinds of punishment, even vanquishing the bad guy is not worth as much as willingly putting everything you have on the line, risking your own life with such commitment that you are still glad to have taken that risk even when it all gets taken away from you.

One of these films comes from Quentin Tarantino, who often plays with characters of dubious morality, both male and female, then, in his own words, set about to deliberately make the toughest female character that had ever been and came out with Kill Bill. The film is a revenge film, where Bea tracks down her former comrades who gunned her down at her wedding, but as we find out, in her former life Beatrice was an assassin, so she was already on the shady side of morality before anything happened to her, and she took the risk that retribution might happen when she discovered she was pregnant and attempted to disappear from her lover in order to keep the baby out of his life and therefore, more-or-less brought it upon herself by striking the first blow. The revenge is really for Bill killing her daughter, though we later discover she survived.

Along the way, she pulls herself out of paralysis, gets shot, slashed with a sword, battles and wins against 50-odd Japanese hitmen and digs her way out of being buried alive to fight and kill (or blind) four monstrous females and Bill himself to win the day and claim her daughter.

Whilst unashamedly a revenge story, Kill Bill differs from the revenge story predecessors in that Bea is not an innocent victim, since her job before the story even started was to work as an assassin for the sadistic Bill, who she then broke the heart of by running away. In this way, Tarantino gives her control over her past such that she was never weak, never a victim, always in control of her life with the exception of that brief moment in the chapel when Bill took his revenge that started the story. An overreaction, as Bill admits much later in the piece, but it was still caused by something she had done rather than punishment being randomly doled out to an innocent victim. In short, she drove her own destiny, unlike so many horror movie victims. 

In keeping with the point made earlier about unreal settings, Kill Bill is an action flick with strong flights into the fantastic, that allow Tarantino, tipping his hat to almost every genre of action film there is, free licence to create these unreal characters. Also note that while Bea is on a revenge rampage, there are five other just as nasty murderous females in this film who are not, and that Bea, while ‘bad‘, is shown to have a conscience, so is not psychopathic.

Critique of Million Dollar Baby

What we are seeing more recently in the process of filmmaking, is that actors are establishing their own independent studios, where people like George Clooney, Drew Barrymore and Tim Robbins are directing and producing the kind of films that they feel passionately about that would never get made inside the system. Recently it was Clint Eastwood who again broke new ground:

Clint Eastwood again came to the fore to damage some icons with his film Million Dollar Baby[56]. In it, we find an example of a strong-willed, determined, feminine woman, Maggie, who is not acting out of revenge, nor her job, but rather a goal that she has set for herself. She happens to enjoy boxing, though is completely untrained, now into her thirties, but is prepared to eat customers’ leftovers to pay for the gym fees and relentlessly hound Eastwood to coach her, knowing that he would be the best coach for her.

From him, she asks for no sympathy nor mercy, and gets none. She gives up on her own family when they ridicule her sport, and the house she tries to give them. She is truly alone, with nobody but herself and her initially reluctant coach. She is not doing this for any romantic interest in anyone, so neither is this her motivation. She just likes boxing, and keeps fighting despite her family, her situation and the many injuries sustained in the ring.

“If there is magic in boxing,” Morgan Freeman’s voiceover tells us, “It is that a boxer can fight on through cracked ribs, ruptured kidneys and detached retinas, all chasing after a dream that nobody can see but you”. With this, and many other indicators throughout the film, the theme is repeated that to have heart is the most important thing a boxer can have, and written across the wall in Eastwood’s office, relevant here in our discussion of the last two decades of women in film, is that “Tough ain’t enough.”

Something we also get to see in this film, though she appears only briefly, is the character ‘Blue Bear’, being the villain of the piece, an ex-prostitute who fights dirty, doesn’t care if her underhanded tactics may kill her opponent and seems to run on purely selfish motivations. Most notable in relation to this discussion of anti-heroes and villains is that she wins, and the character we have been sympathising with throughout the entire film one who has been built up as all that is good, not only loses, but suffers greatly, and dies. It is still held as a triumph of a woman’s spirit against odds, even her death, but in essence, and in contrary to most Hollywood formula, the good guy lost, the bad guy won.

I am in no way saying that all films that feature female characters aspire to include a Million Dollar Baby character. That would be hypocritical and detrimental. But what is needed, now that Eastwood has broken this ice, is to see filmmakers use this character as precedent to allow them to overcome previous limitations on character because of gender. And we are still missing something. What we are yet to see is a woman this strong able to stray onto the ‘wrong’ side of the moral divide. One who is not ‘evil’ in the horror-movie sense of the word, but whose ideals are stronger than her conscience, that therefore she be able to do anything from the morally right to the despicable and that she not necessarily be punished for being that way.

When this happens, and enters into the public psyche, there is an immense range of possibilities that filmmakers can explore. Unencumbered by the idea of women on a pedestal, that woman=moral, and we can get over this idea that one character in a movie represents an entire race or gender, we can begin again to create complex female characters with drives and ambition and get over this cult of victimhood that has held male-female relations down since the ‘70s, and for centuries before.

If we are to restore the power of female characters, what is needed is more films where female characters have fully developed inherent motivations, whether they be for good or ill. It is not enough to have a woman waiting for something to happen, or taking a punishment and surviving it, or anything else that would make them the recipient rather than the provocateur.

In this, again, I am not suggesting by any means that all films be more politically active in relation to women in film at the expense of box office takings, but rather that the further some exemplary films push back the boundaries, the further along filmmakers will be in gaining freedom of expression in films, more complex non-victim female characters that have been missing for far too long, and room for the future development of richer scripts.

A critique of American Beauty

One film that managed to handle this issue well was American Beauty[59]. It was an important film for the motiveless aggressive female, and deals with the issue of the abused male, though cleverly disguised by a great script and excellent characterisation.

American Beauty follows the reclaiming of manhood by the main character Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey). He has a job that numbs him, a daughter who hates him and a wife who keeps him on such a tight leash that he has forgotten what freedom feels like, so when he busts out of this, she, with no more motivation than a feeling of loss of control over her life, escalates her war against him through put-downs, intimidation, threats of divorce, other non-specific threats and finally gets herself a gun with all intention of using it on him, only to find him already dead.

There are quite a few convention-breaking aspects to this film. In particular that the main character is a man who is kept down by what amounts to emotional abuse (and imminent physical violence) by his dominant wife.

Next door, perhaps in order to highlight what is happening in the Burnham house, the next-door neighbours are shown to have been subject to the more commonly depicted man-as-abuser household, with an old-school military father and an emotionally destroyed mother (after, we are led to assume, years of fear and intimidation), and Ricky, who takes a beating but seems so used to it that he plays up to it.

Subtle as it is, in American Beauty, we have a female character perpetrating domestic violence. Once we see a few more believable female characters capable of immoral behaviour without the need to justify their behaviour with the devices noted in a previous chapter, filmmakers can be free to use female characters in a much wider capacity, and thus create more complex characters and plots.

Conclusion

Now that filmmakers have chipped away at the topic for many years, I believe that we are now entering the third free age of filmmaking. The first, 1929-1934 was highly praised by LaSalle and other admirers of pre-code films, the second, 1969-1979 is still referred to by filmmakers then and since (Robert Towne, Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda) as being a remarkably important time not only in filmmaking, but for what having those images in the cinemas meant to the society of the time. Each of these eras were short lived, but I believe that the age of filmmaking we are now entering into, the third of its kind, could be long-lasting enough to allow time to make a notable difference in getting female characters off the shallow-character or perpetual-victim cycle.

That there has been this evolution of female characters returning to our screens since the 70s, and most recently some realistic and complex anti-hero types is important for screenwriters to note as we now see that the audience is ready to receive such characters. With this in mind, film writers who wish to include female characters a little on the dark side may do so without having to justify their nature. Moreover, that screen writers are freer now to draw from real-life people and would be better served to do so than to take as an example scripts from many of the previous eras of filmmaking that have their roots in Hollywood genre films.

“If a positive heroine is to be created, who can speak from and for the women’s point of view, then there has to be a change in the structures of fictional production and these have first to be identified for their patriarchal determinations.” Christine Gledhill Women in film noir p26[60]

Once we clear the table of political correctness about what a woman can and can’t do, or falsities about what a woman is or is not like, and gain the ease of expression in this regard to avoid tokenism, the door opens for vastly more complex female characters to come back to popular media. As these characters become accepted by the audience, we may see more female writers and filmmakers enter the fray, able to enrich our culture of films and make better use of experienced female actors by creating more complex roles.

Bibliography

Belton, John (1996) Movies and Mass Culture Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Benhoff & Griffin (2004) America on Film Blackwell Publishing 

Berman, Milton (1961) John Fiske: the evolution of a popularizer Harvard University Press

Bernstein, Matthew (1999) Controlling Hollywood Rutgers University Press

Blyth, Myrna (2004) Spin Sisters St. Martin’s press, New York

Cook & Dodd (1993) Women and Film Scarlett Press, London, Chapters by Pam Cook, B. Ruby Rich, Carol J Clover. 

Cooperman, Alan (November 22, 2004) Washington Post Staff Writer, Page A03

Creed, Barbara (1993) The Monstrous Feminine Routledge, London 

Denfeld, Rene (1995) The New Victorians Warner Books, New York 

Doherty, Thomas (1999) Pre-Code Hollywood Columbia University Press 

Faludi, Susan (1991) Backlash: The undeclared war against American Women Doubleday, New York

Gellis, R., Strauss, M., Steinmetz, S., (1980) Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family Anchor Books New York

Girshick, Lori (2002) Woman-to-woman Sexual Violence Northeastern University Press, USA

Giles, David (2003) Media Psychology Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, London

Gledhill, C., Place, J., Stables, K. (1980) Women in Film Noir ed. E. Ann Kaplan, British Film Institute, London

Isaacs, Susan (1999) Brave Dames and Wimpettes: What Women Really Are Doing on Page and Screen Ballantine Books, New York

Jayamanne Laleen (1995) Kiss Me Deadly Power Publications Sydney

Knobloch, Susan (2001) Sharon Stone’s (An)aesthetic in MacCaughey, M & King, N Reel Knockouts Univ. of Texas

LaSalle, Mick (2000) Complicated Women St. Martin’s Press, New York

LaSalle, Mick (2002) Dangerous Men: Pre-code Hollywood and the birth of the modern man St. Martin’s Press, New York

MacKey-Kallis, Susan (2001) The Hero and the Perennial Journey Home in American Film University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia

Mulvey, Laura (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Neve, Brian (1992) Film and Politics in America Routledge, London 

Quart & Auster (1991) American Film and Society Since 1945 Praeger Publishers, N.Y. 

Reed, Jacinta (2000) The New Avengers Manchester University Press

Richter, Hans (1986) The Struggle for the Film Scholar Press, Aldershot, England

Rodowick, D.N. (1991) The Difficulty of Difference Routledge London

Sommers, Christina Hoff (1994) Who stole Feminism Touchstone New York

Susan Mackey-Kallis, (2001) The Hero and the Perennial Journey Home in American Film University of Pennsylvania Press, p 91.

Tasker, Yvonne (1993) Spectacular Bodies Routledge, London

Welehan, Imelda (2000) Overloaded Women’s Press. London

Wings, Mary (1998) in Grape, James & Nehr Deadly Women Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York

Video bibliography:

Cawthorn, Geoff. (1992) Video: Women in mainstream cinema Reel to Real series Australian Film Television and Radio School, Sydney

Lagravenese, Richard, and Demme, Ted (2003) Documentary: A Decade under the influence New Video Group, New York

Alien (Ridley Scott 1979)

Aliens (James Cameron 1986)

Alien 3 (David Fincher 1992)

American Beauty (Sam Mendes 1999)

Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven 1992)

Belle of the Nineties (Leo McCarey 1934)

Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow 1990)

Conan the Destroyer (Richard Fleisher 1984)

Charlie’s Angels (McG 2000)

Crouching tiger, hidden dragon AKA Wo hu cang long (Ang Lee 2000)

Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur 1998)

Erin Brokervich (Steven Soderbergh 2000)

The Enforcer (James Fargo 1976)

Fargo (Joel and Ethan Cohen 1996)

The Flame Within (Edmund Golding 1935)

I’m no angel (Wesley Ruggles 1933)

I shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron 1996)

I spit on your grave (AKA Day of the Woman, Meir Zarchi 1978)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg 1975)

Kill Bill vol 1 (Quentin Tarantino 2003)

Kill Bill vol 2 (Quentin Tarantino 2004)

Klute (Alan J. Pakula 1971)

Lethal Weapon 3 (Richard Donner 1992)

The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin 1996)

Men Don’t Tell (Harry Winer 1993)

Monster (Patty Jenkins 2003)

Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood 2004)

Mr and Mrs Smith (Doug Liman 2005)

Mary Stevens M.D. (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)

Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian 1933)

Red Sonja (Richard Fleisher 1985)

Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1945)

She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman 1933)

Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme 1991)

Star Trek Pilot Episode (Robert Butler September 1966)

Star Trek 25th Anniversary Special (Donald R. Beck 1991)

Terminator (James Cameron 1984)

Terminator 2 (James Cameron 1991)

Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott 1991)

Stuart Black

Masters of Creative Arts

2006

[1] Denfeld, Rene (1995) The New Victorians Warner Books, New York 

[2] MacKey-Kallis, Susan (2001) The Hero and the Perennial Journey Home in American Film University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia

[3] Denfeld, Rene (1995) The New Victorians Warner Books, New York

[4] LaSalle, Mick (2000) Complicated Women St. Martin’s Press, New York

[5] LaSalle, Mick (2002) Dangerous Men: Pre-code Hollywood and the birth of the modern man St. Martin’s Press, New York

[6] Lagravenese, Richard, and Demme, Ted (2003) Documentary: A Decade under the influence New Video Group, New York

[7] Sommers, Christina Hoff (1994) Who stole Feminism Touchstone New York

[8] Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian 1933)

[9] She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman 1933)

[10] I’m no angel (Wesley Ruggles 1933)

[11] Belle of the Nineties (Leo McCarey 1934)

[12] Belton, John (1996) Movies and Mass Culture Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey

[13] Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1945)

[14] Mary Stevens M.D. (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)

[15] The Flame Within (Edmund Golding 1935)

[16] Gledhill, C., Place, J., Stables, K. (1980) Women in Film Noir ed. E. Ann Kaplan, British Film Institute, London

[17] Faludi, Susan (1991) Backlash: The undeclared war against American Women Doubleday, New York

[18] Gledhill, C., Place, J., Stables, K. (1980) Women in Film Noir ed. E. Ann Kaplan, British Film Institute, London

[19] Lagravenese, Richard, and Demme, Ted (2003) Documentary: A Decade under the influence New Video Group, New York

[20] Jaws (Steven Spielberg 1975)

[21] Gledhill, C., Place, J., Stables, K. (1980) Women in Film Noir ed. E. Ann Kaplan, British Film Institute, London

[22] Berman, Milton (1961) John Fiske: the evolution of a popularizer Harvard University Press

[23] Knobloch, Susan (2001) Sharon Stone’s (An)aesthetic in MacCaughey, M & King, N Reel Knockouts Univ. of Texas

[24] Cawthorn, Geoff. (1992) Video: Women in mainstream cinema Reel to Real series Australian Film Television and Radio School, Sydney

[25] Klute (Alan J. Pakula 1971)

[26] Source: Quart & Auster (1991) American Film and Society Since 1945 Praeger Publishers, N.Y. 

[27] Isaacs, Susan (1999) Brave Dames and Wimpettes: What Women Really Are Doing on Page and Screen Ballantine Books, New York

[28] As featured in: Welehan, Imelda (2000) Overloaded Women’s Press. London

[29] Wings, Mary (1998) in Grape, James & Nehr Deadly Women Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York

[30] Mulvey, Laura (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

[31] Freud, as reported in: Rodowick, D.N. (1991) The Difficulty of Difference Routledge London

[32] Creed, Barbara (1993) The Monstrous Feminine Routledge, London 

[33] I spit on your grave (AKA Day of the Woman, Meir Zarchi 1978)

[34] Reed, Jacinta (2000) The New Avengers Manchester University Press

[35] Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven 1992)

[36] The Enforcer (James Fargo 1976)

[37] Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow 1990)

[38] Lethal Weapon 3 (Richard Donner 1992)

[39] Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme 1991)

[40] Fargo (Joel and Ethan Cohen 1996)

[41] Star Trek 25th Anniversary Special (Donald R. Beck 1991)

[42] Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) Aliens (James Cameron 1986) Alien 3 (David Fincher 1992)

[43] Terminator (James Cameron 1984) Terminator 2 (James Cameron 1991)

[44] Red Sonja (Richard Fleisher 1985)

[45] Conan the Destroyer (Richard Fleisher 1984)

[46] Crouching tiger, hidden dragon AKA Wo hu cang long (Ang Lee 2000)

[47] The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin 1996)

[48] Charlie’s Angels (McG 2000)

[49] Kill Bill vol 1 (Quentin Tarantino 2003) Kill Bill vol 2 (Quentin Tarantino 2004)

[50] I shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron 1996)

[51] Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur 1998)

[52] Monster (Patty Jenkins 2003)

[53] Erin Brokervich (Steven Soderbergh 2000)

[54] Mr and Mrs Smith (Doug Liman 2005)

[55] Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott 1991)

[56] Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood 2004)

[57] As published in: Gelles, R., Straus, M., Steinmetz, S., (1980) Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family Anchor Books New York

[58] Sommers, Christina Hoff (1994) Who stole Feminism Touchstone New York

[59] American Beauty (Sam Mendes 1999)

[60] Gledhill, C., Place, J., Stables, K. (1980) Women in Film Noir ed. E. Ann Kaplan, British Film Institute, London

[61] Men Don’t Tell (Harry Winer 1993)