Everyone knows there’s a huge disparity between roles for
men and women in TV and film. We’ve all seen the stats – 80% of the speaking
roles in movies this year were male, there are more non-human roles on TV right
now than roles for women – and it doesn’t look like much is going to change in
the next couple of years. To find female led films you have to steer away from
the blockbusters and look towards indie film and to find the TV show with the
most female cast and crew you have to go to Netflix and watch Orange Is the New
Black. Major corporations just don’t want to invest in women or in female led
projects. This trend is maddening and I have taken it upon myself to enact my own
small, personal protest and make sure my money only goes to films with female
leads. This hasn’t been a difficult choice to make as I’m finding myself
increasingly disinterested in the dude-oriented blockbuster fare filling my
local cinema regardless of my feminist sensibilities. This isn’t to say that I
won’t watch any male led movies, just that I won’t be seeing them in the
cinema. I will not be funding the erasure of my gender on screen any more.
This abject lack of women on screen is a huge problem, but
there is another, more evasive issue plaguing female representation in film and
television – the issue of likeability. There has been an overwhelming trend
recently – in television especially – of unlikeable male characters, of stories
revolving around men who are serial killers or drug dealers, men who live
squarely in the moral grey. These characters like Walter White, Dexter Morgan
or the definition of the anti-hero cliché Ray Donovan, are not supposed to be
liked by the audience. It is the show’s goal to make these characters
relatable, to make you root for them despite your better instincts, to show the
complexity of the world’s villains, whilst ensuring their characters remain
just as selfish, violent and sociopathic as they began. Another example is the
NBC show Hannibal whose eponymous character is both a serial killer and a
cannibal yet has earned the sympathy and borderline obsession of many of the
show’s fans. Sherlock Holmes is a sociopathic narcissist, self-absorbed and
arrogant, yet he is seen by the audience as complex, interesting and layered.
It seems with this type of programme that the more unlikeable the protagonist,
the more skilled the writing and production team are seen in order to get the
viewer to sympathise with them. If you look over the most highly praised TV
shows of the past decade, an awful lot of them revolve around unlikeable male
leads and are praised for their deft handling of difficult subject matter and
construction of a compelling anti-hero. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, House
– all celebrated for their complicated male leads.
However, this is entirely not the case when it comes to
female characters.
There are very few outright female anti-heroes on screen in
the vein of Walter White and Dexter. Unlikeable female characters tend not to
be psychopaths or murderers, rather they are average people with difficult
personalities. There are not many of them, but they exist and they are almost
universally derided. Take Lena Dunham’s Girls for example. Leaving out the
racial diversity issue (which I have discussed in this previous post: http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/post/42382454900/in-defence-of-lena-dunham-and-girls
along with why I feel the backlash was mostly caused by misogyny) the main
problem Dunham’s critics seemed to have with Girls was that the characters were
unlikeable and “too privileged”. Now I’ve never seen anyone complain that
Batman was “too privileged” or that Superman “only got where he was because of
his parents”, but that’s another issue for another post. What those critics
didn’t seem to understand was that Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna were
supposed to be unlikeable, they’re supposed to be self-involved and annoying
and naïve – they’re 20 somethings, we’re kind of like that. Hannah Horvath
never murdered anyone like Dexter, she didn’t rape anyone like Walter White
raped his wife on Breaking Bad, she hasn’t eaten any corpses like Hannibal and
she’s not even as selfish and narcissistic as Sherlock Holmes yet her
unlikeable qualities render her unwatchable, unrelatable and badly written.
Girls is brilliantly written and Hannah and her friends are endlessly
watchable. They are far more realistic than the male anti-heroes flooding our
screens, they are far more relatable but their gender means that audiences will
always expect them to be likeable and will be angrily disappointed when they
are not.
Another current example is the character of Piper Chapman in
Orange Is The New Black. I’ve already written extensively on Orange on this
blog but Piper’s character warrants a mention here too. I’ve seen so much
criticism of her character online, about how self-involved, naïve and privileged
she is, without anyone noticing that she is supposed to be that way. People
seem to think this was a mistake, that no one could ever have intentionally
written a woman to be annoying or unlikeable whilst still making her the
protagonist. Women are allowed to be unlikeable as long as they are the
villains or figures of hatred. Female characters are allowed to be selfish and
annoying if they are the nagging wife or girlfriend of a “more relatable” male
lead, they are allowed to be sociopaths or violent as long as they are the
antagonists who a male (or occasionally female) hero has to destroy, but if the
women are themselves the protagonists or the heroes of the story they must be
immediately likeable and perfect. Piper’s annoying traits, her naivety and her
privilege are crucial to the story OITNB is trying to tell – the story of a
woman who thinks she is a good person, imprisoned and forced to confront her
flaws and her privileges. Just because a character is the lead of a programme
doesn’t mean they have to be liked by the audience, their position as
protagonist doesn’t mean they have to be perfect, always do the right thing and
never annoy anyone. This has been proven by the success of the anti-hero trend
with shows like Breaking Bad, Dexter and The Sopranos. A main character can be
contrary to every social value we hold dear but still be compelling enough to
make us watch the show and even begin to understand their motives – as long as
that character is a man of course.
This double standard is also visible in cinema. There are a
raft of unlikeable male anti-heroes in recent films; we all know how much I
hate Wolverine but he fits this category regardless of my personal loathing of
his character. There’s Batman too – both despite their general hero status are
gruff, anti-social, emotionally stunted loners who are decidedly unlikeable
personality wise, yet they loom large in the box office and in popular culture.
However, when Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman released their second feature
together after Juno – Young Adult starring Charlize Theron – it was largely
ignored by audiences, and critics, although mostly positive about the film, almost
all commented on the unlikability of the main character Mavis Gary. Mavis is a
distinctly awful person. She was the girl you hated at high school and she
never grew out of the bitchy mean girl mould. Mavis ghost writes a series of
relatively unsuccessful YA books and feels she is hugely superior to her former
classmates because she moved to the city and has a white collar career. She is
lazy, addicted to diet coke and the film follows her as she attempts to seduce
her old high school boyfriend away from his wife and newborn child in order to,
as she puts it, “save him” from his dull suburban life. Mavis Gary is not a
good person, she is not someone you would want as a friend or even someone you’d
ever want to encounter, but she is a good character. There are people like
Mavis Gary in the world, you can see how someone might end up like that, she is
complex and interesting and her story is compelling and darkly hilarious. Yet
for many, a female character as unlikeable as her was a dealbreaker, especially
as (SPOILER ALERT) she doesn’t end up changing a bit in the end. Young Adult
was nowhere near as successful as Juno or as talked about as the notorious (but
in my opinion still great) Jennifer’s Body which both featured markedly more
affable female leads. In contrast, the Batman movies got more popular and more
lucrative the darker and more morally questionable his character became, and
Wolverine’s brand of brooding anti-heroics continues to sell out theatres.
It’s clear there’s a huge double standard here. Audiences
find unlikeable male characters complex and fascinating, they praise the
writing and production behind them and, in some cases, manipulate the source
material in order to render that character as “just misunderstood”. Look at the
way that Loki, the villain in both Thor and The Avengers, has been glorified by
the fanbase. In Thor he’s jealous and petty, motivated by revenge and sibling
rivalry. In The Avengers he’s a Hitler figure, bent on dominating the people of
Earth as his minions. Loki isn’t even the protagonist here and he’s still
forgiven for the unlikeable parts of his personality and his villainous
actions. The audience still tries hard enough to understand him, to relate to
him, that they twist his character and his story into one of a misunderstood
outcast bullied by his favoured brother and largely just mischievous instead of
evil. Hannibal – of the NBC series rather than the movies, probably because
Anthony Hopkins isn’t as attractive as Mads Mikkelsen – is undergoing the same
kind of treatment at the moment. Viewers seem willing to go to lengths in order
to turn unlikeable male characters into someone they can root for, or at least
someone they can understand, so why not with female characters with the same –
and in most cases less severe – undesirable traits?
I would argue that this disparity is all down to the way
women are viewed in society as a whole. The patriarchy renders us as objects
for male consumption. We are viewed as accessories or rewards for men and are
reprimanded or shunned when we don’t fit that mould well enough or reject it
altogether. Unlikeable female characters are rejected for the same reason that
we don’t see fat women on screen, for the same reason why actresses are
photoshopped to death on magazines and why words like “friendzone” exist.
Female anti-heroes are admonished for the same reason why women are harassed on
the street and then vilified if they turn down a man’s advances. The patriarchy
requires women to be desirable to men, more often than not at the cost of their
own identities and freedoms. We are expected to change ourselves in order to
become more attractive to men and those of us who choose not to comply with
these expectations are demonised by society at large. So, art mimics life and
life mimics art. If a woman’s sole purpose is seen to be as a prize to be won
by a male or as an object to enhance the male’s experience, a woman on television
is treated in the same way. For the same reason we never see ugly women on
screen (although I would argue that beauty is really only what we’re told is
beautiful and not in any way empirical) but actors like Steve Buscemi have made
a living out of being creepy looking, female characters are expected to be
amenable, to be nice, to be someone a man would want to spend time with. Men
are allowed to be assholes because a man’s life and purpose is his own. Women
have to play nice because why else are they there in the first place?
In a time where it is hard to even get a likeable female led
show on the air, it must be even harder to get a programme to series where the
lead woman is allowed to be imperfect. When the attitude is “why does there
need to be a woman in it?” as if, yet again, the male is default and female
representation is merely tokenism despite us making up more than half the
population, one can only imagine the difficulty in convincing a studio to
invest in a female character who isn’t likeable. There are however critically successful
unlikeable female characters to act as precedent, even if their flaws aren’t
anywhere near as severe as their male counterparts. Jenna Maroney of 30 Rock is a vapid narcissist with violent
tendencies and a propensity to threaten suicide for dramatic effect. She was a
constant highlight of a series already full of brilliance and was largely loved
by critics and the show’s niche audience alike. Nurse Jackie is the only series
I can think of with a true female anti-hero as the protagonist – Jackie Peyton
being a nurse with a severe addiction to prescription meds who bends the rules
in order to help her patients whilst cheating on her husband with the
pharmacist she manipulates in order to get her drug fix. Weeds could be another
example – Nancy Botwin starts off as a mother trying to do the best by her sons
but loses track of her morals as the series continues and has some decidedly
undesirable character traits. The short lived but critically loved HBO series
Enlightened featured Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a woman who suffers a breakdown
and returns from a retreat determined to force her new “enlightened” philosophy
into her old life. There are examples of unlikeable female characters being
enjoyed by fans and critics, however it’s telling that all these examples are
either comedies or comedy dramas. Perhaps it’s only ok to be unlikeable as a
female character if that character’s purpose is to make viewers laugh. Are
women ever allowed to be both assholes and taken seriously?
A show which exemplifies this double standard is HBO’s Game
of Thrones. GoT features many unlikeable characters, the worst offenders perhaps
being Joffrey and Cersei Lannister. Joffrey is universally despised but he has
reached the status of “the character you love to hate” whereas Cersei, his
mother is largely just plain hated. I love Cersei – perhaps marginally down to
the fact that, as a lesbian, I am obliged to love everything Lena Headey has
done since Imagine Me & You – but also just because she’s such a bitch. She’s
not a likeable character; she had an affair with her brother and gave birth to
his son who she turned into the insufferable and vindictive person he is, she
instructed her brother to throw Bran out of a window when he saw them fucking
in a tower – a fall that ends up rendering him a paraplegic – and she’s
consistently cruel to her brother Tyrion and to Sansa who she forces to be
betrothed to her son. Cersei is an awful person, but she is a good character.
She’s a powerful woman in a man’s world and her actions and personality are
easily justified when you consider the sacrifices she has to make to be as
powerful as she is. It’s certainly less of a stretch to put yourself in Cersei’s
shoes and understand where she is coming from, than it is to turn Hannibal
Lecter into someone who is just misunderstood. And yet, Hannibal has thousands
of fans singing his praises online and Lena Headey is called a bitch at fan
conventions.
Women are not only expected to be physically attractive to
men in order to “deserve” their place on TV, they are also expected to have an
attractive personality as well. Male characters are allowed to get away with
rape, murder, drug dealing, incessant infidelity and rampant narcissism,
whereas woman have to be pleasant and affable in order to be tolerated on
screen. The role of anti-hero is almost exclusively reserved for men, and for
white men at that. There is an argument to be made that it is the whiteness as
well as the maleness of characters like Walter White and Dexter Morgan that
allows audiences to sympathise with them. A black or Latino meth dealer might
not be so well received. So while we’re stuck in this trend of “complicated”
protagonists, it seems the only complex characters we’re likely to see are
white males, thus further erasing women and people of colour from our screens.
As is often the case, I feel an Amy Poehler quote is useful here. As
recounted in Tina Fey’s Bossypants, Poehler responded to the light-hearted
criticism that a joke she had just made wasn’t “cute” so the person in question
(I think it was Jimmy Fallon) didn’t like it, with “I don’t fucking care if you
like it”. It’s already evident that a protagonist needn’t be likeable in order
to be interesting. That logic now needs to be applied to female characters and fast.
So the next time you hear someone complain about how Hannah Horvath or Piper
Chapman just isn’t likeable enough, paraphrase Amy – I don’t fucking care if
you like her, she’s interesting and that’s all that matters.
