Somewhere, in fictional Europe, a fair-haired despot with mycophobia and a lisp-inducing overbite panics over the elevated humidity levels in her expansive palace. She fears spores more than the backlash over a group of protestors her soldiers recently gunned down. She dreads being seen as ridiculous, even as she converses with her father’s rotting corpse and tortures gala guests with a tone-deaf rendition of a 70s love ballad.
She is ridiculous, but she’s also unlikeable, even to the actress playing her.
In a recent New York Times Magazine interview, Kate Winslet provided a colorful bit of commentary on Elena Vernham – the fascist tyrant reigning over much of the absurdity in HBO’s latest political satire, The Regime.
“God, she’s such an awful, awful cow.”
Just a couple of decades ago, being “awful” was a privilege reserved solely for men. The Sopranos, a show that birthed the concept of “prestige TV,” was rife with them. The show’s protagonist, Tony, was a New Jersey mobster pining for the good ol’ days when he could dump bodies in broad daylight and mow down enemies on crowded streets. Tony was awful, unlikeable even, but, perhaps because men seldom grapple with likability the way women do, he was never stamped with that scarlet letter. (Though his wife certainly was.)
No, Tony’s bad behavior earned him a more respectable label: the anti-hero. Narcissistic, manipulative, and lacking empathy, the anti-hero isn’t concerned with ingratiating himself to audiences. He doesn’t feel compelled to justify his actions. He serves himself, morality be damned, and we either love him or hate him for it. It’s that choice that makes him interesting, compelling, revolutionary. In contrast, anti-heroines have taken a bit longer to find their footing on-screen. For every Don Draper and Walter White, every Travis Bickle and Michael Corleone, few women were allowed to match their depravity.
When they did, they were often pegged as villains, their complexity distilled into something more digestible, uncomplicated. Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Bette Davis in All About Eve, Tracy Flick in Election, Lucy Liu in Kill Bill. We might not have had the right language or precedent to qualify them, but we were drawn to them all the same, these women who challenged critics to invent new archetypes by which to define them. Who were messy, neurotic, misunderstood chaos-stirrers.
Fast-forward a couple of decades to Winslet playing a delightfully unhinged autocrat drunk on her own fascist Kool-Aid. She’s six degrees separated from other unlikeable women who’ve been ruling our screens, large and small, for the past few years.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s foul-mouthed, fourth-wall-breaking shop owner was so shamelessly horny she didn’t even warrant a name, preferring to be known by the comical insult, Fleabag. She fucked priests and brawled with grown men in crowded restaurants, masturbated to Barack Obama speeches, and wondered if she’d identify as a feminist were she blessed with bigger tits. On paper, she was not likable. And yet, she was one of the most fascinating characters on our TVs in 2016. Before her, on film, Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne mused, resentfully, about the aspirational designation of “the cool girl.” Yes, she may have faked her disappearance, orchestrating an investigation that would catapult her cheating husband to the top of everyone’s whodunnit list. Yes, she may have brutally murdered a man who pined over her for years, framing him as her kidnapper before capitalizing on her ruse by blackmailing her husband into continued matrimony. But, for many, Amy’s most damning sin was questioning a male dogma, one that said hot girls like guzzling beer, gorging themselves on dirty hot dogs, watching them play video games, and listening to them talk about sports. Most importantly, they did all this while still wanting to fuck them.
“You are not dating a woman,” Rosamund Pike says in a voiceover directed to these men. “You are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.” Of the women guilty of perpetuating this lie, she rants, “They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.”
Amy, and many of the unlikeable women filling our screens these days, seem done with pretense. Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman, Cate Blanchett in Tar, Rachel Sennott in Shiva Baby, Sarah Snook in Succession, Jodie Comer in Killing Eve, Jodie Foster in True Detective. They’ve all ushered in a sort of renaissance of complex, sometimes irredeemable women. The ones who refuse to shrink themselves for mass consumption. And they’re slowly erasing the silent clause that requires them to fix themselves, to prune any flaws they might have by the end of their story, becoming heroes, or worse, good girls, by its end. Even better, they’re doing away with, what feminist author Roxanne Gay deems the “diagnosis” that makes their unlikability tolerable. For many, there’s no sob story, no long-harbored trauma fueling their actions. We don’t need to know the specifics of their childhood, the multitude of ways in which they’ve been stifled or suffocated or wronged to sympathize or even perversely enjoy the havoc they wreak. Instead, we can just watch (and maybe enjoy) them burning the world down, knowing it was never made for them to begin with.
We should interrupt with a caveat here that, while white women are fully in their breaking bad era on-screen, the ways in which women of color are allowed to challenge conventions of likability are still strictly policed. Generations of fighting against real-life stereotypes like that of the “angry Black woman” mean minority characters face a unique obstacle when embracing the Dark Side. They’re judged more harshly, considered even less relatable, and often not iconized in the pop culture pantheon. Still, when we see Dominique Fishback’s feral killing spree in Swarm, Stephanie Hsu’s multi-verse-threatening nihilism in Everything Everywhere All at Once, or Myha’la Herrold brash bullshit-sniffing in Leave the World Behind, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, and Industry, we believe there’s hope.
Even as leading roles for women wane, as female creative roles are pared back, and male critics judge both more harshly than their women counterparts, TV and film are still finding ways to dismember and bury one-dimensional femme protagonists. In her book, Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate, Anna Bogutskaya relishes listing the categories we put women in on screen. Bitches, sluts, trainwrecks, shrews, witches, mean girls, and psychos, they were the women she was drawn to, the women who “didn’t look, behave, or talk like the blueprint of a ‘good woman.’”
Looking at this year’s Oscar race, it’s hard to find that blueprint.
From Emily Blunt’s booze-addled housewife who pawns her children off to friends and self-destructs over her husband’s many affairs, to Emma Stone’s Frankenstein on a quest of self-discovery (and screaming orgasms), the performances in the running for one of the most coveted awards in Hollywood are far removed from the Susie homemakers and simpering damsels that were once story stand-ins for real-life women. Or, at least, what male auteurs believed women to be. No, the women enjoying the spotlight now are murderers (probably), accessories to war crimes, sex offenders, pretentious actors, single-minded athletes, and posh aristocrats with an abhorrence of all things ugly. They aren’t made in the image of man’s desire. They aren’t mirrors of femininity women are comfortable gazing into for too long. They’re more fascinating than all of that. They’re flawed, nasty, desperate, loud, demanding, uncaring, unfeeling, grieving, and grasping. Wholly unlikeable. Human.
We’ll have more, please.