There is a sense in which this is a sister essay to the one I published in late April asking the question “Where Have All The Heroes Gone?” In that essay I included a curated list of great cinematic heroes from the 80’s and 90’s… it was fifty or so names long but I could have easily aded another fifty… or a hundred… or a thousand. We were almost literally swimming in great cinematic heroes back in those days.
An earlier version of that list included some great movie heroines as well, but in the end I decided to keep the list male-focused because the problem of modern Hollywood’s movie heroines is, while similarly acute, a very different animal and one I thought deserved its own discussion… its own “female space”, as it were.
A second inspiration for this essay is a quote from WORKING GIRL, which I’ve referenced in two of my last three essays. When Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) first meets Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) in a bar at an after-work function, Trainer says:
“You're the first woman I've seen at one of these things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.”
It occurs to me that Jack (given his voice by screenwriter Kevin Wade… a man, by the way, although to be fair it’s been a while since I checked and things like that have a tendency to change in this fascinating modern age we live in) was presaging a problem that would come to so bedevil Hollywood that it has become one of the biggest reasons why no one seems to want to go to the movies anymore. The problem is that Hollywood very rarely gives us real feminine heroes anymore but rather, they give us a simulacrum of femininity… women who behave like women think men would behave if they were women.
And that has had all sorts of downstream consequences for the culture and for the movie business… almost none of them good.
Back in 2022 actress Jennifer Lawrence gave an interview in which she said:
“I remember when I was doing 'Hunger Games,' nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie, because it wouldn't work, we were told. Girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”
The pushback was instantaneous… “You’re forgetting about Princess Leia, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor!” the cinephiles cried in vain. But of course, Lawrence had not forgotten about them at all, she is well aware of those characters, she simply believes they do not count.
Lawrence, like most young progressive activists, is caught up in a Year Zero frenzy which seeks to eliminate as much of American History as possible so that she and her Comrades can be at the vanguard of creating a new history… one which casts themselves as the heroes who finally brought social justice to a fallen Nation. In that context, the strong female characters that came before her own immaculate birth as a movie star are irredeemably fallen as well, since they are the inextricable product of an unenlightened age.
And when you get right down to it, it’s obvious she’s right. I mean, Princess Leia? Princess!? Come on… tell me you’re a tool of the Patriarchy without telling me, right? And what about that form-fitting gown and all that lip gloss… are you trying to appeal to the male gaze? And it must’ve taken hours to get her hair up into those twin buns… I sure hope she didn’t do all that for a man.
And yeah she did help to defeat The Empire, but she couldn’t even go two full movies without falling in love with acknowledged scoundrel Han Solo and then putting her own life in jeopardy, her career on hold, to save him.
Ellen Ripley is even worse. Not only does she strip down to panties and a tank top to appeal to the male gaze, but throughout the movie she remains essentially feminine in other much more insidious ways. She’s privately uncertain of herself, for one thing… she doesn’t have all the answers. She struggles with her confidence and with commanding respect in the male-dominated field of deep-sea salvage vessel command. She sometimes reacts emotionally to stressful situations, even bursting into tears when she discovers that the Company for whom she works has decided to sacrifice her life for the safe return of the alien.
I mean, sure, these touches makes her a much more relatable and sympathetic character, but we aren’t trying to connect characters to an audience, here… we’re trying to teach the audience a lesson… and we simply cannot have women behaving like women in our movies. Before you know it young girls will want to grow up to be feminine nurturing women instead of hard-as-nails faux men… some of them may even choose marriage and a family over the C-Suite corner office.
Perhaps Ripley’s biggest sin is that when she’s physically attacked by her science officer, she has to be saved by Parker, who is not only a man but her subordinate.
Not even once does it occur to her to simply do a handstand, lock her feet around the bigger stronger science officer’s neck, and toss him across the room like a sack of dirty laundry the way Scarlett Johansson did a million times in all those AVENGERS movies.
But it may be that Sarah Connor is the worst offender of them all. Sure, Sarah is the mother of the future and all that… humanity will literally cease to exist if she doesn’t survive the Terminator’s attempts to kill her, but she doesn’t know all this simply by virtue of being a strong empowered girl boss who knows everything without having to be told. In the end, she commits the unforgiveable sin of needing a man to teach her the truth about who she is and to train her to fight back. And after all of that, she falls in love with him and they conceive a child together. Ugh… how embarassingly Trad Wife of her…
OK, OK… Sarcasm Mode ON / [OFF]
You get the point… these classic characters are so well-drawn, popular and iconic that they have stood the test of time across decades and an ocean of Hollywood output. But they are flawed in all the wrong ways, from a Year Zero perspective. And so even though they very clearly meet every normal well-adjusted American’s definiton of “strong empowered woman” they must be thrown summarily overboard by the new generation of young enlightened creatives… for the greater good, you understand.
And that is how Jennifer Lawrence found herself on a stage two years ago claiming that no one had ever thought to put a woman in the lead of an action movie before she came along.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you’re an aspiring screenwriter, Hollywood is handing you a golden opportunity by ignoring well-drawn relatable female characters in favor of an endless series of unapproachable girlboss Mary Sues.
Go out and write yourself a Tess McGill, Leia Organa, Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley, Marion Ravenwood, Lois Lane, Helen Tasker, Annie Porter, Lindsey Brigham, Lenina Huxley or Joan Wilder.
The audience is waiting.
Yeah I did, but I haven’t seen Furiosa so it wouldn’t have been sporting of me to include it in my analysis anyway
“The audience is waiting.”
True but the delivery system is independent film. The studios/industry @ large is far too left/woke to go against the “approved” meme. We’ve entered a period similar to Soviet cinema, where storylines were sacrificed for “the message” & it became “message uber alles” which makes for boring, preachy films that are wildly un-entertaining.