This is a highly condensed version of the lecture given for Radboud Reflects on June 18, 2019
Cinderella, Carrie Mathison, Alexis Colby, Claire Underwood, Madame Bovary, and Medea—world-famous women who all share one thing in common: they don’t really exist. They are fictional women. They were created and designed by storytellers and later portrayed by filmmakers. They serve to entertain but also to inspire or to be feared.
What do women on the big screen tell us about our image of women? What can we learn from these fictional female characters about real women? How is our ideal image of women influenced by films and television? What makes a good woman, and what makes a bad woman?
Ideal images, including that of women, are always changing. Hollywood productions from the 70s-80s show a different ideal image of women compared to today’s Netflix productions. What are the differences? Let me take myself as an example.
Once upon a time, there was a princess
The first “female role models” that I and my peers were presented with as children showed a clear black-and-white image of good and evil. The “bad” woman is the jealous stepmother, busy with poisonous apples. A woman who feigns love for the father but is actually a common gold digger. The sweet princess is always hard at work, never curses, listens to her father, and eagerly waits for her prince. She is “good.” The battle is for beauty—there can only be one who is the most beautiful, both outwardly and inwardly. The most beautiful and kind wins the prince in the end. Copyright Disney Studios. These fairy tales have little to do with the original Grimm stories.
The latest trend in Hollywood is live-action, where the classic animated films are portrayed by flesh-and-blood actors. The interesting thing about the adaptation of Cinderella, with Lily James as Cinderella and Cate Blanchett as her evil stepmother, is that director Kenneth Branagh chose to give Cinderella the moral high ground. At the end of the movie, she forgives her stepmother. “I forgive you,” she says to her tormentor, while she walks toward her happiness, her true love, her prince, and his castle. You can watch it for yourself.
By speaking these noble words, Cinderella acts completely in line with the morality she learned from her mother: “Have courage and be kind.” Yet, this scene provokes resistance. Most viewers find it an unjust ending. It makes me cringe too. This final scene wasn’t appreciated by test audiences either. “Some people were vocal about wanting to see a different movie ending,” Branagh said, “[They preferred] punishment and revenge […] People wanted scenes where the stepmother was definitively stripped of her wealth and seen begging on the streets,” Branagh said in an interview with Bryan Alexander of USA Today. Branagh found it fascinating to see how the audience was divided into two groups: those who preferred forgiveness and those who called for punishment and revenge.
The mixed reactions to this final scene show how much difficulty “ordinary people” have with selfless spirits, those who can forgive, who are willing to sacrifice themselves and turn the other cheek to the villain. This high moral standard, to say the least, irritates. Many Hollywood films therefore prefer to cater to the desire for revenge. Typically, the outraged viewer is rewarded, not educated. We are used to seeing the villain shot down mercilessly in the final scene. That’s what we consider normal. Forgiveness is not a highly valued moral virtue in the entertainment industry.
Sandy 2.0
When I was a little older, that Disney ideal was radically disturbed by Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) in the film Grease. Sandy was a real design problem. At the start of the film, she looks exactly like those Disney princesses—a good girl in a pink or yellow dress with a white collar and matching white socks, longingly dreaming of her true love. But Sandy wasn’t good enough. With that look and that prim behavior, she would never get her prince, Danny Zuko (John Travolta). Therefore, by the end of the film, she undergoes an extreme makeover. Sandy 2.0 wears black leather pants, heavy makeup, earrings, and has a cigarette in her mouth. She is unmistakably a sex bomb. Completely cool.
The underlying message of the film is: go along with the crowd. If you don’t smoke and drink, you’re a loser and don’t fit in. Then, true love will remain out of reach. So: redesign yourself!
A similar message was conveyed in Desperately Seeking Susan, the film that launched Madonna in the mid-80s. The film revolves around the transformation of two very different women. Roberta is a good woman. She’s bored to death because she’s married to the dull Gary. Susan is a free-spirited punk type who prefers to hang around with semi-criminal types and constantly gets into tricky situations. Long story short—go see the movie if you haven’t already—Roberta bumps her head, suffers from amnesia, and is mistaken for Susan, leading her to experience love and excitement.
Good girls are not happy
Madonna didn’t become a star because she could sing well. She became a celebrity because she inspired a whole generation of girls to be free and wild. The message I got from Hollywood in my youth was: good girls are (unknowingly) unhappy. So, rebel against your parents, because you don’t want to be like your mother; don’t listen to men like your father. Think for yourself! Be independent! And oh yes, sex isn’t sinful, enjoy it. Having fun is good.
But you still have to act normal. In “my time,” Glenn Close was the actress who played the ultimate bad women. I’d like to discuss here her role as Alex Forrest, a.k.a. the Bunny Boiler in Fatal Attraction. Fatal Attraction is the precursor to a genre of films you might call “crazy lady” films. This includes films like Basic Instinct, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Single White Female, all stories about crazy women doing disturbing things. They are terrifying. However, in none of these films is the “why?” question asked. None of the films pay attention to the motivations of the women, how they became so crazy, why they behave so bizarrely.
Fatal Attraction is about a very attractive woman, Alex Forrest, who has an affair with a married man (played by Michael Douglas). Alex, in terms of appearance and style, strongly resembles Sandy 2.0. She is what you would call “smoking hot.” He falls for her hard. But for him, this affair is just a fling. Today, we call it “casual sex.” She wants more. She doesn’t accept his rejection and completely loses it. Then it gets scary, very scary. She doesn’t listen to him. She doesn’t respect his boundaries and comes to his house. The woman of the house then finds their child’s rabbit boiling in a pot on the stove. It’s an incredible scene—you can watch it for yourself.
Alex poses a threat to the happy family. “Crazy bitch!” The test audience didn’t like the original ending, where Alex commits suicide. The villain in this film deserved something worse, much worse. Glenn Close called Alex “the most hated woman in America” at the time. Alex was the icon of the evil bitch. Would we still see her that way today? I think now we would be more likely to say: that woman has mental issues.
Modern role models on Netflix: women with mental issues
Filmmakers in 2019, post-#MeToo, can’t get away with such portrayals of women anymore. In today’s Netflix series, it seems like all women have mental issues. Think of Carrie Mathison, the bipolar CIA officer from Homeland. Carrie, who is single, also navigates the gray area of casual sex. For that, she has a special fake wedding ring. Unlike men, who take off their wedding rings to increase their chances of sex, Carrie puts one on. It signals that she’s not open to anything more than a one-night stand. That makes her attractive to men.
The simple sexual morality of Fatal Attraction, where men and women stand very unequally—he wants fun, she wants commitment—is, for Carrie, a given she can and may manipulate. She sets the rules, not him. And her mental issue is not a reason to reject her. It actually makes her more human. We don’t need perfect role models. We can’t identify with them. But we can with this flawed and failing woman.
Carrie is not the only imperfect woman I got to know through Netflix. Take Saga from The Bridge, Betty Draper from Mad Men, Alicia Florrick from The Good Wife. These women show that breaking free from the stereotypical role model is a struggle.
Mother, lover, wife, businesswoman, and bitch. Combining these roles isn’t new. “The woman” was never reducible to one aspect. She’s always all of these women. The role models we had to deal with for a long time were unrealistic. Luckily, that’s changing—in stories, but also in real life. Why can’t a woman be strong and kind at the same time, or socially awkward and yet sexually attractive? What Netflix women mainly show is that being a good, and perhaps more importantly, a happy woman in a male-dominated society is a challenge.
Wonder Woman
The creator of Wonder Woman saw this too. Wonder Woman was created during World War II. Her creator, psychologist William Moulton Marston, believed that the world needed strong women. Without strong women, there would be no peace on earth.
Betty Draper from the series Mad Men is, in my view, the icon of the powerless woman. This is most vividly portrayed in the scene where she takes on her neighbor’s pigeons with an air rifle. I find the cigarette in Betty Draper’s mouth phenomenal in this crucial scene, as she seems to rebel against the 1950s housewife stereotype. What do we see here? A woman shooting aimlessly into the air. She’s angry. She doesn’t want to pretend anymore. She doesn’t want to be a housewife, the wife of a cheating man. Only, she has no idea what she could or would want to be.
