HEROINES NOT HEROES.

HEROINES NOT HEROES.

BY STEVEN THORLEY.

 Having recently noticed Film4 were producing a season on women in film, it inspired me to consider which starring roles by women resonated with me. The following list contains a few films from memory which I thought displayed strong female characters or do.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night 

This is a horror film set in Iran, in the ghost-town of Bad City. It’s in a category all its own, but its central character, referred to as ‘The Girl’ (played by Sheila Vand) is a vampire who becomes a key figure in this complex, dark and blackly comic tale which involves murder, drugs and, of course, vampirism.

She’s provocative and frightening in equal measure and a strong female character, one that uses her ‘beauty’ to her advantage whilst exploiting the male characters. It’s original, well crafted, has an accessible change of pace and a great soundtrack.

Scary and sinister, it’s a real breakthrough in independent horror cinema.

Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, was also a homage to African American exploitation driven cinema of the 1970’s.

Pam Grier (an actress famous for her roles in 1970’s blaxploitation cinema like Foxy Brown) plays an air stewardess embroiled in a complicated plot involving dirty cops, drugs, guns and stolen money.

Whereas actress Grier was over-sexualized in the ’70s, here she is tough, uncompromising, driven and smart.

Tarantino pays homage to this period while updating it for a modern audience, and it’s all done so stylishly. Credit to all involved, but this film is particularly well edited by the late Sally Menke, and I've not seen anything quite like it since. The whole structure of the film smacks of the 1970's, and the casting of Medium Cool actor Robert Forster just fits perfectly.

This is a really laboured work of film, and I've seen it countless amounts of times. I watched it just the other night, and it was actually more enjoyable than the first time I watched it. This film just gets better with age.

Many critics suggest Jackie Brown is director Quentin Tarantino's strongest film, and one of the highlights of the 1990's and I'd be inclined to agree. It's more mature than Pulp Fiction and has a tighter script with good sharp dialogue.

 On the critical side, I think the film is so good that it almost doesn't work as a homage to anything. It just stands alone in my opinion. So perhaps the director himself was motivated by this period in cinema, but the end result certainly surpasses it, which is quite a compliment.

Overall, a truly remarkable work of cinema, and film that will grow in importance as we go forward.

Orange is the New Black 

This one is a TV series, but its scope is not unlike a film. It wishes to cover a great deal for a television series.

The plot in short focuses on new inmate Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), on her first experience in a women’s prison, where she gradually finds out more about herself as a person, both good and bad, and experiences personal changes and situations, some of which benefit her, some which make her worse than before she was imprisoned.

As the series progresses the focus shifts towards all the different characters inhabiting the prison and importantly the staff and prisoner owners.

Where Orange is the New Black peaks is in its portrayal of the inequalities and injustices of the justice system. We see how the women lose more than just their freedom, in some instances their lives, and for no other reason than mis-management and an inability to see the women as anything other than inmates.

It’s a dark comedy, so there’s some hilarity, but when it is playing out its drama, it’s amongst the

most serious and thought-provoking depictions of any television series I’ve seen in recent years.

The mostly female cast are perfect, and the show isn’t afraid to step outside of its comfort zone in its portrayal of the inmates.

I think there’s some very strong female characters in the show and it knows it, but it isn’t afraid to add glamour to the mix amongst the sordid setting, and in doing so, the film has a balance of the need to portray women as strong characters in the show, whilst not sacrificing style, which makes it quite a bold and unique show.

Piper is a particularly strong female character and, ironically, finds out more about her life outside prison while inside, ultimately bettering herself in the process.

 

Stick with it up till Season 4, as then it falls apart.

Working Girl 

Working Girl feels not just like a movie about a transitional period for women, but a transitional period for America.

  Despite growing problems in the 1980’s, it was a period of change for women in terms of their portrayal in cinema. In the sense, the  60's and especially the 1970's were and still are considered a very controversial period for cinema concerning the depiction of women, especially in Britain, and it is certainly debatable if we've returned back to that 1960's mind set that reduced women into stereotypes in Britain  and undermined the national audience and the world's intellect. You know the guy with the suit and the cropped hair, or that vile British show featuring a Scottish transvestite versus Benny Hill...not much difference is there?

American cinema did the same exploitative thing in the 1960's but it had a unique ability to be tongue in cheek and it got away with it. Our equivalent of this type of  cinema is a different beast altogether.

Working Girl manages to explore serious themes of women's role in the American workplace, while being a light popcorn movie at the same time, but there’s more going on here than meets the eye. It’s not just a vehicle for the starry cast.

Melanie Griffith plays Tess McGill, a young, driven woman who has a position at the stock-exchange in America; however, she’s treated very poorly by many of the men she works with, and yearns for a substantial break into something better.

The film follows Tess as she upgrades to a position working as a secretary for an unscrupulous and vindictive businesswoman played by Sigourney Weaver, who Tess eventually sees through. She then literally works her way up the corporate ladder, despite the various pitfalls she faces.

Working Girl is sort of stuck in the late 1980's both in what it tried to convey at the time, and sadly stylistically, but it's still a strong work and its themes are still relevant.

In the sense, 1988's Working Girl was predominantly about  the repressive American workplace environment,  & the  culture at that time, in terms of how it affected women, but today it has grown into more complex issues and, more importantly, these have gone on to include broader definitions surrounding  gender  and some forms of sexual discrimination.

Overall, a brave one off that was a real change of pace for this type of cinema in 1988.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

T2 is bench-mark Sci-fi film from 1991 which deserves a blog all its own. There’s so much to talk about concerning this film and indeed its first instalment The Terminator.

But as far as Sarah Connor goes, this was a huge transition from the nervous waitress of the first film, who was, nevertheless, a strong female action movie protagonist, a rarity in the genre at the time.

T2 has quite an elaborate plot, so we won’t go far into that, but its portrayal of battle hardened Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton),  was something quite different altogether in cinema at the time; her character was tough, smart, and heroic and looked like she could wipe the floor with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his liquid metal counterpart the T1000, and she does just that.

A new Terminator is due out soon entitled 'Dark Fate' and in this film fans opinion, it looks dreadful.

Just going to show there are so many 90's movies that just got it right the first time, and fundamentally cannot be replicated in anyway shape or from.

Monster – Aileen Wuornos

Monster came out in 2004 and garnered much attention from the press due, in part, to actress Charlize Theron’s makeover from blonde beauty to troubled blonde Eileen Wournos.

Some may see this as an odd choice, but not really. Eileen Wournos's choices in life were wrong, but the rationale behind them was tragically sound, so she reflected a violent troubled person who did have great personal strength.

It is not my place to judge her crimes.

It’s a fantastic transformation and the acting is exemplary; Theron manages to capture Wournos’s complex personality and allows the viewer to see beyond her crimes and understand the tough life this woman had and some of the reasons for her unravelling.

Monster's director, Patty Jenkins, recently made the excellent comic book adaptation Wonder Woman.

Incidentally, those interested in Aileen Wournos should seek out Nick Broomfield’s documentaries Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer.

Wournos herself received the death penalty in 2002.

Mad Max: Fury Road – Imperator Furiosa

Mad Max: Fury Road was brilliant.

It wisely moved forward from the Mel Gibson era while remaining true to the themes in the original and managing to create an even more vivid dystopian world, but its crowning achievement was introducing the character, Imperator Furiosa (also played by Charlize Theron).

She’s tough, smart, uncompromising and more than an equal to Max.

Fury Road is an intelligent film and has a good core story, told mainly through its visuals. The dialogue is deliberately sparse; we understand the emotions through the characters faces and the revving of the engines.

It’s almost operatic in its style, like a 2000 AD comic come to life, burning through your retinas and right out the back of your head.

The story is a fight between good and evil, and Imperator, though initially dubious of Max, has enough strength to give him a chance, and they collaborate successfully.

Overall a stand out film from 2015, and the last 25 years of cinema, a real jolt for the senses.

Natural Born Killers – Mallory Wilson Knox

Natural Born Killers was, for me, the penultimate film of the 1990’s and is even more relevant today for its scathing critique of corporate media exploitation than in the chaotic media period in which it was released. But for this section, I’d like to include it for the portrayal of Mallory Knox by Juliet Lewis.

Knox is certainly a damaged character, and in director Oliver Stone’s film, she and partner Mickey represent, in a twisted fashion, the victims or pawns of media sensationalism,but

the other half of the film focuses on Mallory’s troubled family background, and her reinforced awareness of her potential vulnerabilities, which she handles in a comic book-style, heavy handed approach to any men crossing lines of respect.

The film gets away with its depiction of Mallory Knox's violent temper due to its almost comic book like depiction of violence, and the immoral nature of the victims.

As mentioned, there are deeper reasons for this behaviour (not least sexual and physical abuse from her father), but there’s clearly a feminist value system present in the character, even if it doesn’t balance with the violent impulsive behaviour she exhibits.

Ultimately, when somebody comes from an  extremely toxic upbringing, and is then thrown into a chaotic world, the chances of success are 50/50. Mallory Knox, though fictional,

represents text-book real-life behaviour of somebody who has found a psychological safety-net in an emotionally unstable dominant male, a substitute father figure.

This is blindingly obvious in the film, but it was not upon release in 1994, where the film was perceived as glamorising its protagonists and making light of murder. Many people will not except that the characters of Mickey and Mallory are products of the system and their toxic families and cultures.

Natural Born Killers is a smart movie. In fact, Mickey & Mallory are delibrately the only good characters in the movie. The central characters, including the morally devoid ratings obsessed tv presenter Wayne Gayle, the sadistic & bonkers prison warden, and the corrupt and ultra sleazy police officer all represent  evil, with Mickey & Mallory working as extreme examples of anti-heroes.

In 1994, Natural Born Killers felt fresh and original as it was dealing with something that nobody wanted to talk about, and that was crime and killers are easy game for the media, and the media using sensationalism to sell papers and fuel its industry making billions and it would not be able to do this were it not for sensationalism.

Hence the films tagline: The media made them superstars.

The characters of Mickey and Mallory have developed their own value system; this is not uncommon with people from extremely dysfunctional or toxic family backgrounds.

This is because the basic structure or value system your average conventional family consists of would buckle under the complexities of such troubled people. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but certain individuals just need to find their own path in life.

Film deals with ideas, and I don't empathise with these characters, but I do empathize with the message of the film, and felt Oliver Stone combined the artistry of cinema, societal politics and true love really well.

 Ellen Ripley

1979’s Alien was ground-breaking cinema in its own right and in terms of women in film, introduced us to the now iconic character of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who in my opinion is the most important female character in cinema history.

It was a gamble by director Ridley Scott to let the character of Ellen Ripley take the lead, and it paid off. She takes centre stage as an unpleasant alien of unknown origin works its way through the ship she's working on, the Nostromo.

A sequel followed in 1987, which managed to flawlessly catch up with Ripley as she reluctantly returns to planet LV-426 – which now hosts a colony of humans – after communication with the colony ceases. Ripley is joined by a group of colonial marines whose job it is to rescue the colony of workers, or so she is told.

The sequel Aliens took the character of Ripley up a notch, and she is clearly hardened and traumatized by the events of previous film.There’s an interesting relationship alluded to in Aliens between Marine Corporal Hicks, portrayed by Michael Biehn, and Ripley, as well as a development of in the script involving Ellen Ripley bonding with a young girl, and only survivor of the colony, Newt (Carrie Henn).These characters essentially represent an ideal of the family, and form a psychological band aid for the character.

A further sequel followed in the form of 1992’s Alien 3.  Ellen Ripley crash lands on Fiorina “Fury” 161, a penal colony on earth, and assists the prisoners in fending off an alien which has used a dog as a host, leading to a bleak, but satisfactory end to this character’s story arc.

Alien 3 has exceptionally well designed sets. They are all hand built, and just look amazing.

A well-crafted, but meaningless cash-in appeared in 1997 in the form of Alien: Resurrection which, apart from some exceptional visuals on screen (it could have been so much better), is slightly emotionally shallow and disaffecting.

These three films and their plots all link into the growth of the character as woman with the alien acting as a catalyst. She’s not expected to be the only survivor in the first film, and defies all odds in Aliens, becoming stronger and smarter than a group of Marines and destroying an Alien Queen. In Alien 3, she stands up to a group of double-Y chromosome misfits, and ultimately gains some form of respect amongst them.

 It was supposed to end here, and it felt right as Ellen Ripley’s moral crusade to stop this alien organism reaching the wrong hands was successful.

 Ridley Scott is returning to the Alien franchise soon, but as much as I love the series, the last installment was amongst the worst I've seen.

It sadly needs a ree-boot and this should involve letting go of the Ridley Scott created universe altogether and starting over.

 CARRIE MATHISON (CLAIRE DANES) HOMELAND.

Television created a fascinating and multi-layered character in the form of Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) in the television series Homeland.

In terms of cinema, Ellen Ripley is cinemas strongest female character, but Carrie Mathison is the television equivalent.

 The show itself is amongst the best I’ve ever seen and follows Carrie in her role as a committed CIA agent trying to establish the truth or intentions of troubled Marine Nicolas Brody (Damien Lewis), as she battles  debilitating personal and emotional problems.

It’s a very respectable portrayal and she’s an admirable character. She’s more than aware of the sexist gender politics of her position and never gives in.

The show itself is flawless, and I found the story arc involving conflicted Marine Nicolas Brody (Damien Lewis) very engaging.

I’m pleased Homeland has become a success, and people have embraced the character of Carrie and, more importantly, the themes present in the show, proving that American drama can and is willing to lift the lid on serious and significant issues and dramatise them so well.

Game of Thrones – Yara Greyjoy

Yara Greyjoy, portrayed by actress Gemma Whelan is tough as old boots.

There are many strong female characters in Game of Thrones, particularly Arya Stark, and Cersei Lannister, but I feel their toughness conceals vulnerabilities and may be emotionally driven by trauma they’ve experienced.

Yara has also experienced trauma, but she appears tough in her nature alone.

There’s a clear role reversal between her brother Theon Greyjoy and herself where a sister provides more emotional support to her brother, and not vice versa.

This is made clear from the offset, but is emphasised even more when the character of Theon has an experience which, shall we say, takes a masculine edge off him.

It’s one of the stronger story arcs in the Game of Thrones series in my opinion, and I enjoy the gender politics and interplay between the two.

The fate of Yara Greyjoy has remained ambiguous and fans of the show will no doubt be eager to see what becomes of the character when Game of Thrones returns for its final season.

FLASHDANCE (1983)

Could there be a more iconic 1980's film than Flashdance?

Director Adrian Lyne's stylish masterpiece was made in 1983, and the passage of time has been kind to it.

The film itself was so heavily stylized that it has just managed to escape the fate of many 1980's dance films that have fallen into the abyss of cringe worthy movies we used to think were classics.

Actress Jennifer Beals would portray Alex, a hard-working welder who moonlights as an exotic dancer to pay the bills, and help her move towards reaching her dream to become professional ballerina.

Under any other director this film would have fallen to pieces, but director Adrian Lyne gets the tone just right. The film is telling a pretty admirable story, but knows when not to take itself too seriously, whilst retaining a steady style and attention to visual detail.

The film fetishizes Alex's dance routine

from the water soaked nightclub filled with lecherous testosterone fuelled men to her sweaty voyeuristic dance practice sessions, with the light breaking through the windows, and only her dog present.

Meaning expressed purely visually is what film is all about, and

the film succeeds in stylising this story

and making it truly cinematic visually, whilst

having a threadbare narrative to compliment the visual excess.

 Flashdance and the themes it conveys are important. Why?

 Because, as portrayed in the film, the character of Alex represents a working class woman who just isn't in a financial position to put herself through school, and uses her appearance to make extra money to make her dream of becoming a professional dancer a reality.

 Welder by day, stripper by night, Alex is a strong female character because she wins, keeps fit, and earns alot of money in process, and most importanly reaches her dream.

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Overall, I’ve highlighted and discussed some women in film who appeal to me, and whose characters I think reflect women in a positive light, with the odd liberty taken. I’ve deliberately chosen some tougher roles to emphasise how far cinema has progressed from gender stereotypes.

I believe casting  strong women in film against alpha male characters makes for an interesting environment on screen, in terms of gender politics. It’s always interesting to see, and television and film have started doing much more of it these day, which is refreshing.

 I don't know exactly what the ratio is for women on film is compared to men, but they do, and have in the past, complemented cinema more effectively than men. We rarely engage or empathise with male characters as much as we do female characters.

Critically and commercially female driven films are succeeding at the box-office (Wonder Woman) and historically have been successful too.

Cinema is a visual medium, and although in the last decade we have had a wave of political correctness surrounding casting, it continues to follow this rule of aesthetics.

Ultimately, young actresses go to study film and learn to act to get roles they are suited to, not to be ditched because the casting agent hasn't filled his or her politically correct quota.

An actress should be cast on whether she is suited for the role via her resume, and if she matches the requirements of the script, and no other reason at all.

Some of us are born to behind the camera lens, others are not. We should not let politics influence entertainment or the media industry.

https://www.indiewire.com/feature/female-directors-best-movies-directed-by-women-1202045399/