Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014).
There is a mania to the way we talk about female characters and their complexity. Born out of the necessary work of adding depth to flat, underwritten protagonists, the "complex female character" has now become a trope of its own, epitomized in the last decade by Gone Girl's Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). After faking her death, framing her husband for her murder, and adopting a new identity, Amy delivers the now infamous “cool girl” monologue, soliloquizing about the traps of making yourself in the image of a man's desire. "I drank canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies," she says. "I ate cold pizza and remained a size two." Her admission of effort culminates in an articulation of the scope of her wrath: "You think I'd let him destroy me and end up happier than ever? No fucking way."
Amy's storyline—from spoiled rich New Yorker to bored Missourian housewife to cold-blooded psychopath—is at its most interesting when pushing the stereotype of the scorned wife, but the lasting reaction to it sees audiences projecting something else onto her. For some time after the film came out in 2014, a flurry of think pieces debated its feminist bona fides. Though we might recognize in Amy's rage the injustice of a system that sees women as both disposable (there will always be another cool girl) and indispensable (as objects of male power), her violent anger hardly suggests inner depth, strength, or—even more outlandishly—a feminist project. After all, this is a woman whose motivations are selfish rather than predicated on the liberation of women; Amy is quick to throw other women under the bus when they threaten the integrity of her plan. Besides, apart from her revenge plot and the deranged codependency she envisions for her life with Nick—"I can say I killed for you," she reminds him—Amy's life is just a blur. We cringe when Nick can't tell the police what Amy's hobbies are, because it communicates his lack of interest in her. Even after we hear her soliloquy, we may wonder: what are those hobbies? Who is this woman, if not a villain?
In these readings, to be “complex” is a vague but totalized state, both a point of departure and an endpoint, superseding every other attribute a woman may have. It's fairer and, in truth, more interesting to look at Amy as a killer than it is to justify her as a model of feminist ideals, or claim that she is “symbolically taking back power for women everywhere.” In other, more ambivalent modes of storytelling, depth arises from the attempt to grasp the truth of human experience. The project of forging one's own life comes with the burdens of hurting oneself and others; of welcoming, replacing, and even disposing of people according to temporary needs and desires; of balancing the attention a person might pay to herself with the attention she might pay to others. For those in heterosexual relationships, there is the inevitable and insoluble negotiation of power. There is commitment to instinct, which can complicate the conciliation between how a person sees herself and how the world, with a limited grasp of her innermost motivations, might interpret her. These factors make life a knot of hard decisions whose untangling can give us a clue to who we are, but this knot is forgotten when a female character is announced from the get-go as a vessel for a corrective, moralist position. This isn't to say that a woman can't be self-assured, strong, or even psychopathic, but in a truly vivid character, possessed of contradictions, these traits are all part of a larger constellation of characteristics that make her whole.
Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980).
A useful, if unexpected, example is Maurice Pialat's 1980 film Loulou, which is able to elevate its central woman both above and beyond the men who trail after her without making her into a symbol. Though it's titled after one of its male characters, it centers on Nelly (a phenomenal Isabelle Huppert) caught in a love triangle with her bourgeois husband André (Guy Marchand) and bad-boy Loulou (Gérard Depardieu). In her way, Nelly bounces between the two men, dwelling in her dilemma without letting them on to her uncertainty. Her complexity emerges not solely from her ambivalence, but from the fact that her autonomy runs parallel to her desire to share her life with others. A woman of her own, Nelly commits, too, to togetherness: lounging with Loulou in front of the TV, one of his arms draped across her collarbones, or leaning on the edge of the bathtub with a cup of tea while laughing with André, she sinks into the comforting ease of familiar affection.
Isabelle Huppert has a recognizable gait; a clippy way of walking, keeping her arms close to her torso, shaking her bangs out of her eyes as she marches onwards to her destination. The best directors working with her know to track this movement, and in Loulou, Nelly walks and walks. Between leaving André and taking up with Loulou at a hotel, an unidentified amount of time passes: the rules of her new relationship aren't so much established as they seem to be malleable, shaped according to will. One evening at a bar, Loulou's former girlfriend Dominique laments to Nelly: "Can't change him." Covering her face with her hands, Nelly replies, "I don't want to change him." People don't change in Loulou, least of all Nelly; what's at stake is the chance to love and be loved without compromising autonomy.
Still, if Nelly knows that she can't change Loulou's volatility, she at least knows to protect herself against it. While apartment-sitting for a friend, Nelly gets irritated by Loulou's constant talking and touching when she is trying to read. She is literally kicking Loulou off the bed when her friend's girlfriend knocks on the door: she was left by her boyfriend at a café, may she sleep there with them? Loulou is a little too accommodating, so Nelly leaves under the guise of going out for cigarettes, taking the girl with her. "Serves him right," she snarls. Though their intimacy often veers into violence, Nelly embodies that unyielding knot through her insistence on her right to whim: leaving when she wants, going to André's when in the mood for material comfort, refusing to choose definitively between one man or the other. Leaving Loulou wouldn't feel right because she loves him; staying with him to be talked down to isn't right either. So instead, she walks and walks.
The poignancy of Pialat’s portrayal emerges powerfully towards the end of the movie, when Nelly, pregnant with Loulou's child, resolves to get an abortion. This decision is neither stretched out nor is it a plot point from which Nelly finds no return. Pialat is less interested in depicting the abortion itself—the sequence is short and firm—than he is in exploring how her choice contributes to Nelly’s assertion of a life of her own. Maybe the tenderest moment of the film is when, at a family gathering of Loulou's, he is asked when he'll get a job to support the child. Loulou evades the question, and Nelly retreats into herself, implying that she is still pondering whether it would be wise to bring a child into their dynamic. Noticing her withdraw, Loulou looks at her with the warm concern of someone who knows when to ask if she is okay. The next time we see Nelly, she is calling Loulou from the hospital to tell him she's doing well after the abortion, though she doesn't mention the procedure by name. She reads the newspaper in bed, looks out the window. Loulou's tenderness can't possibly make up for his fickleness. Though she doesn't leave him, her decision establishes the terms of their relationship: she will only rely on herself.
Blonde (Andrew Dominik, 2022).
Since its release, a scene from Andrew Dominik's Blonde, a fictionalized biopic of Marilyn Monroe based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, has been circulating relentlessly on the Internet. It sees Marilyn (a halting Ana de Armas) in a blue sundress, sitting in her yard, picking roses from a bush and talking to the unborn fetus she is carrying. Earlier in the movie, Marilyn had an abortion she had resisted, but was nevertheless forced by her management and studio to go through. Quite literally shifting the perspective into her uterus, as an instrumental metallic shriek builds on the soundtrack, the camera sees the doctors and nurses looming above Marilyn, ignoring her pleas. "Please, won't you listen? I've changed my mind," she cries, softly. "This will put you into a twilight sleep," a doctor says, armed with a needle. Dreaming of an agency that is forever out of reach, she pushes her way off of the operating table, running and screaming (as she often does in this movie, when not indulging in breathy whispers) through the hospital halls, which finally leads her into a nightmare: a vision of her childhood home, up in flames. Later, while Marilyn is happily pregnant with Arthur Miller's child in the yard, the fetus—a recurring presence throughout the film—derides her for the earlier abortion, appealing to her guilt. Both sequences, and the movie at large, are off-puttingly sadistic in their approach to Marilyn's difficulty.
In an interview for Sight and Sound, responding to Christina Newland's statement that "there is a gray area between victimhood and empowerment," Dominik said, "I think [Marilyn] was clearly an extraordinarily powerful person… People want to say that she took control of her life. But she wanted to destroy her life." It would be a stretch to insist that Marilyn Monroe was some kind of misunderstood girlboss, but the implication of Dominik’s claim seems unfair: that she took no part in the making of her image, even for a person so severely and historically mythologized. Between her first catastrophic meeting in Hollywood, in which she is sexually assaulted, and the full formation of Marilyn Monroe as a personality, the timeline of the film collapses. However present and relentless adversity might have been in Marilyn's life, Dominik doesn't grant her the grace of facing any of it. Instead, this Marilyn is characterized by distressed reactivity; when bad things happen to her, she cries, screams, and submits.
Somehow, Marilyn’s suffering becomes shorthand for depth of emotion, even when Blonde's portrayal of her bypasses interiority completely. If the distinction between Norma Jeane Baker—her real name, and how she's known by her close friends—and Marilyn Monroe is as important as the film makes it out to be, how did this separation materialize between who she was and who she became? Similarly, Marilyn’s commitment to the method is not presented as deliberate craft, but just another facet of her strung-up life, a conduit for the unseemly way her emotions spill from her. When Miller is surprised by her clever reading of his play, referencing Chekhov, she almost looks surprised, too—as if she didn't know she had that thought before he confirmed it for her. Ana de Armas's hesitant, searching cadence is apt for this portrayal in the way it underscores the lack of instinct given to Marilyn. She lights up only when Miller suggests he can call her his Magda, only when the intelligence of her comment has been metabolized and possessed by the man in front of her. The interpretation is hers no longer, and it makes her eyes twinkle.
Taken as a whole, Blonde makes the bizarre argument that Marilyn Monroe's anguish was a direct consequence of her tortured relationship to motherhood. Marilyn's resistance to the abortion is one of the few occasions when her instinct moves her to action—although, of course, her attempt is doomed. The episode becomes her sole (missed) opportunity to assert her will, as well as the film's only referent for her sense of self, which is what finally reduces her life to the fact that she never had children. The implication is that being a mother could have potentially saved her, redirecting and redeeming her trajectory. As a compassionate alternative, the abortion sequence in Loulou refuses to reduce Nelly to one assertion of autonomy in the midst of countless others. It was painful for Nelly to abort the child, but not because a reproaching maternal instinct kicked in, or because she felt moral ambivalence about the choice; but rather because she realized that Loulou would never be reliable enough to count on, to love fully and with abandon.
The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021).
Still, the use of passivity to signal the kind of hardship that adds texture to life is oddly popular in the project to advertise complex women. Albeit from a more empathetic perspective, Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World and its protagonist Julie (Renate Reinsve) suffer from the conflation of passivity with depth. There is much to admire about that film, namely its playfulness and sincerity, but while watching it, I couldn't shake the sense that something was missing; that Julie was kept at too much of a remove from the events that amounted to her story. A few hours into a book launch event for her comic-artist boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), Julie decides to go home, overcome—it's implied—by a sense of inadequacy in her own life and work. She walks the streets of Oslo, stopping to stare out at the river. Framed in profile against the background of the city, Reinsve's sensitivity is deftly attuned to the kind of melancholy that accompanies a sense of disappointment in the self; a desire that something would happen that would make things finally fall into place. Though this sentiment is movingly familiar, Trier's constant fallback on this kind of evocation fails to fill out Julie's character with any interests, aversions, or contradictions that can be particularly hers. The sentiment moves because it's so universal, but by solely relying on relatability, it loses the verve of more specific characterization.
All of this is repeatedly hinted at in moments when Julie runs through the streets of the city, its inhabitants stopped in time, or when she gets a little too drunk at her boyfriend's snooty friends' cabin, but it never finds the relief of precise articulation. The problem isn't necessarily that Julie doesn't know what she wants. She mentions more than once that she yearns for "something more," unable to specify what that “more” is. She moves between lackluster efforts in the arts—she writes a little, takes photos—but doesn't approach them with enough commitment for these practices to become more than first attempts. A visceral kind of inarticulacy in the face of change is fine matter for a movie; in the hands of Marie Rivière and Eric Rohmer, in his 1986 Le rayon vert, this same problem makes for touching, insightful material. Delphine (Rivière), like Julie, wants love—but her obstinacy is her modus operandi, difficult and unshakeable. The kind of romance she is looking for is particular: both mythical and tangible, supposed to appear in front of her like one of the playing cards she finds scattered across sidewalks. When she fails to put the feeling she chases in exact words, she cries (and she spends a lot of screen time crying). By contrast, Julie's obstinacy emerges only when her expectations of a relationship haven't been met, when the men on whom she bases her idea of herself fail to serve as mirrors.
If Julie's persistent flakiness and taciturnity in the face of adulthood make her relatable, these qualities also make her annoying; the idea that a woman must be difficult to be interesting is ubiquitous. As a corrective to the incontestable pressure put on women to be meek, the portrayal of a difficult woman can work to good effect. But just as often, it serves as a narrative shortcut, whether a character is simply flaky like Julie or stereotypically bitchy in a way that can be framed as “girlbossing.” Stubbornness is necessary to take control of one's life—particularly when that life is marked by others' efforts to usurp it, as is the case with Marilyn and Nelly. But this stubbornness, like complexity, is a state that should arise spontaneously from a character written to be true rather than conforming, whether to stereotype or to overcompensation. If there is one writer working today who knows this deeply, it's Lena Dunham.
Hannah Horvath (Dunham), the protagonist of Girls, was the paradigm for the 2010s’ "unlikeable female character," another bid to rescue women from the confines of submissiveness. If a likable woman is one who conforms to the expectations put on her by men and society, then an unlikable woman is automatically a rebel, an example of strength. Her refusal to bow down is supposed to signify authenticity of experience, even when the point of whether or not the audience likes the character—and whether or not that feeling connotes moral righteousness—shouldn't matter. At a Q&A with Trier following a screening of The Worst Person in the World I attended earlier this year, an audience member asked point-blank how they were supposed to feel about Julie. "I'm confused," they pleaded, asking for guidance. (Trier was graceful when he suggested, gently, that they take this confusion into their life and turn it into art.)
Girls (created by Lena Dunham, 2012-17).
The genius of Girls is that it makes the question of likability irrelevant, not only because Hannah is such an obvious pest but also because she is so well-defined. In the pilot, as an aspiring writer freshly out of college, she famously declares: "I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a voice of a generation." Over the five years that follow, this kind of delusion never leaves Hannah. Her sense of importance is impossibly inflated; she can only exist in the world by reflecting it through her own experience. But that's part of her allure—like Nelly, she is unwilling to compromise on her idea of herself. It's a form of narcissism, of course, but at least she owns up to it. Having been admitted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the most prestigious creative writing program in the country, Hannah walks away after being criticized like everyone else because she believes she is deserving of special treatment. This is the kind of behavior that drove people to hate Hannah, but it is also so patently hers. From the way her lips tremble, almost cartoonishly, when she's about to cry, to her petulant hair clips and her wobbly, endearingly graceless walk, her childishness never gives way, instead deepening with each year. At the start of the fourth season, watching her walk into the classroom, the viewer expects nothing less than an ill-fated (if hilarious) denouement to her Midwestern adventure.
Dunham's attention to behavioral nuance is so focused that the distance required to see a person as a vessel for something—moral righteousness, female empowerment, proof that the writer regards women as human beings and not playthings—disappears in the closeness she nurtures between herself, the characters, and, crucially, the audience. Hannah is neither caricature nor foil nor symbol. Unafraid of embarrassing herself and of portraying genuine emotion, Dunham is the ideal performer to embody all of Hannah’s contradictions with a frankness that can't help but be touching. As immature as Hannah may be, often to the point of self-sabotage, it's Dunham’s curiosity about this self-absorption—and willingness to push it past the pressure to write the expected—that makes Girls so resonant.
The girls who make up Dunham’s ensemble have their own whims, peculiarities, and senses of humor; they are preoccupied by the challenge of being women who love and suffer, but won't give themselves away. How to be a woman who is true to herself remains one of those questions that can never be answered, only channeled and felt. A writer, especially if male, won't find the answer by desperately signaling his interest in it. Instead, the question is a foundation: it emerges in the particularities that make us who we are. It's Huppert's gait; it's Dunham's unrelenting sense of humor. If they are hard to understand, it's not because they don't know themselves. Quite the opposite.