What Happened to Strong Female Protagonists?

When I was writing up my review of Prey, I started to go on a bit of a tangential rant about the various issues involving the main protagonist. It got me thinking that it would be better to discuss the topic as a whole, rather than bog down my movie review. I don’t watch many TV shows, and there are plenty of movies I skip, but I will still take a look at a reviewer’s criticism to better understand why someone thinks it is good or otherwise. There’s something I’ve noticed in the past six years in movies and entertainment in general from watching movies and reading reviews: The world has become so politicized that it’s had a really damaging effect on storytelling and characterization in entertainment. This certainly leads to a much bigger discussion, however, for this article, I’d rather just focus on one aspect of it with the simple question posed by the title.

I will be discussing multiple movies and spoiling some events in this lengthy two-part article, including: Gone with the Wind, Terminator 1 & 2, Alien & Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, Predator, and Prey. I’ll be discussing successful uses of strong female characters and comparing them to how modern writing has failed to replicate this success, using Prey and its protagonist, Naru, as the primary examples (aka scapegoats). This is mainly because Prey is still fresh in my mind, even though there are plenty of other examples of poorly-written, strong, female characters in modern action movies or shows. I could use Rey from the Star Wars movies, for instance, but those films have gotten enough hate and I don’t want to watch them again to recall the necessary details. I haven’t paid much attention to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but those who have tell me it’s rife with these types of characters as well. Regardless, I still like Prey despite its shortcomings, and I’m sure you can probably come up with your own examples in its place while reading this lengthy diatribe.

These days, it’s very common for the next action movie in theaters to have a woman at the center of it, doing choreographed fight scenes and incredible stunts that used to be reserved for beefcakes like Stallone or Schwarzenegger. It also wasn’t long ago that Hollywood started pumping out remakes/sequels of popular movies with a predominately female cast, as though that were anything other than ticking a box on a pandering checklist while trying to capitalize on a recognizable franchise name. This can still work if it’s done right and with enough respect for the material and characters. In fact, it has been done well on occasion—for example, Bridesmaids is the female version of The Hangover and it did quite well. Most often, however, it falls flat because the people making the film are so hung up on their own politics or the desire to “empower women,” that they forget to make the characters interesting or to even think up more compelling situations that make sense for them. Unless your female protagonist has some otherworldly superpowers or is built like an MMA fighter, I’m going to have a hard time believing she can do the same things as the beefcake heroes of yesteryear.

What I’m saying is, that I don’t have a problem with the “girl power” message, or even any political message you want your movie to have, so long as the story is good and the characters are compelling. Some of my favorite characters from my favorite films are women who do incredible things in their stories. Movies like that are rare these days, though, because the creators are too focused on the wrong things as storytellers. That’s my problem with Prey and other modern movies. They don’t do enough to make their female protagonists believable or interesting. The filmmakers are so busy trying to move the culture in a certain direction and continuing to fall in line with what is an acceptable “message” for their audiences, that they’re forgetting basic storytelling and characterization techniques in the process. It’s gotten so bad that even mediocre films are getting endless praise for just being better than terrible.

It’s not like having a message or a political agenda in a film is new. Hollywood and film have long been the driving force of American culture, much more so than the people elected to office. For decades, the messages that came out of Hollywood and onto the silver screen, subtle or otherwise, influenced audiences around the world and pushed viewpoints that often clashed with traditional perspectives. However, up until now, there was always still a desire to entertain at the core of it. In fact, the best films and shows would not dare sacrifice a good story or character for the sake of making a political statement or pushing a message. That’s why people didn’t really have a problem with politics in the films in the past; the stories were still compelling and the experience more entertaining. An example that immediately springs to mind is the movie recognized as being the one in which an Academy Award was given to a black actress for the first time.

Gone with the Wind is a film that takes place during the American Civil War—and depicts slavery in a way that apparently someone felt made it necessary to add a disclaimer about it on streaming services when you attempt to watch it. But it’s much more than a war film. It’s an epic story of a young lady transforming from a posh and entitled child into a ruthless and cunning businesswoman during a violent and turbulent time period in America. It doesn’t happen overnight either. Gone with the Wind is a four-hour tale told over the span of years.

Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) starts out as a naïve, spoiled, arrogant, vain girl pining for a young man when the world and all its dangers are thrust upon her. We see her mistakes. We see her flaws. We see the tragedies that unfold before her and how she has to adapt to the situation, sometimes choosing help from the wrong people or making the wrong choice and having to make up for the mistake later. She loses her first husband and is eventually married and widowed a second time. She has to shoulder the burden of her family’s financial troubles after the northern troops sweep the south. She has to help her sister with a difficult pregnancy and delivery as well as escape the town as the northern troops invade. At one point she kills a man who attacks her and she has many other struggles follow her after that. It’s a difficult journey for a young lady who had only aspired for a simple life with a man she loved. This changes the character of Scarlett to the point of being nearly unrecognizable to how she was at the beginning of the movie. Despite being the same actress in the same film, look at the image below and tell me that doesn’t look like two different characters.

It’s a physical transformation that we as the audience are able to witness and understand over the course of the four-hour epic film. It makes the character believable as a human because we see all the flaws and weaknesses of Scarlett and how the harsh external influences challenge her, forcing her to change and grow. What’s even better is that who she grows into, while being a far more thoughtful person, is not necessarily a better one. She is still flawed as she was before. She has the same arrogance, vanity, and selfishness. She’s also flawed in new ways. The experience has made her jaded and more desperate for wealth after having suffered through a moment of poverty in her life. Even worse, the same childish love that she had for a man who would never be hers ends up costing her a great deal of happiness in life as a result. The imperfections of Scarlett and her metamorphosis make her a compelling protagonist and someone who seems believable as a person.

How does this tie into what I mentioned about politics? Well, the message and plot of the film can easily be interpreted in a certain way. Gone with the Wind is an incredible story of a woman struggling to survive in a patriarchal society who is determined to keep her down and tell her “no” at every turn when she attempts to solve her problems. She has to navigate the workings of a society in a time period in which women were rarely allowed to succeed. If you want an example of a woman “smashing the patriarchy” this is it. She doesn’t become president or bring about the Women’s Suffrage movement, but she is a shining example of a strong female protagonist (SFP) overcoming the odds, even if she ends up not being the most likable person.

Gone with the Wind was released in 1939, a year in which many of the rights women have in America today were considered taboo. Yet, the strength of the story and Scarlett O’Hara as a character could not be denied. Gone with the Wind received 13 Academy Award nominations that year and won 10 of them. It’s also still considered one of the top-grossing films ever made when adjusted for inflation, showing that audiences had little issue with the themes of the movie because it was so entertaining. Despite being a politically-charged film with politically-charged subjects, it never sacrificed its writing or its characters for the sake of its messages.

I know I started my argument with action films and went straight into something else entirely, so let’s flash forward multiple decades and into a genre with which I’m more familiar. Alien, directed by Ridley Scott, is released in 1979 and brings perhaps the most ubiquitous example of a strong female protagonist: Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). When I think of an SFP, Ellen Ripley is the first person that enters my mind. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she goes through a number of changes. However, Ripley starts out very different and never comes across as naïve at any point. The most interesting aspects of her transformation also happen to take place over the course of two films.

Her character, in the early workings of the Alien script, was actually written without gender in mind. All the characters were written that way, in fact. Gender just wasn’t something the writers were concerned with. They were more concerned with how to get the alien on board the ship in an interesting way. Eventually, when the script was ironed out and it was time to cast actors for the film, they made the best choice they could have and made Ripley a woman and got a great actress to portray her.

In Alien, Ripley starts out something of a loner amongst the crew of her cargo ship, the Nostromo. She’s a by-the-books, by-the-numbers type of person who doesn’t feel the need to get involved in every conversation. We get this from the opening scenes of the film in which everyone is gathered for breakfast and she’s mostly staying quiet to the side. In another scene, she’s talking to the engineers about things that need fixing and they’re giving her a lot of attitude. When a facehugger latches onto the crewman Kane (John Hurt), and the expedition crew requests to be let back on board the ship, Ripley denies them entry, citing infection quarantine protocol. Obviously, that gets overruled and the alien gets onto the ship.

When things start to go bad for the crew of the Nostromo, ranking members are killed off and Ripley steps into the leadership role. She has to deal with the rest of her team getting nervous about their survival odds. She has to deal with an unruly android that tries to kill her. She has to deal with the revelations that the company she worked for considered the crew expendable for the sake of securing the xenomorph alive. And, she inevitably has to deal with the alien herself when she shoots it out of the airlock of her escape shuttle. Ripley is not an action hero in Alien. She’s a simple woman who is trying to survive a terrible situation while navigating the leadership role she was forced to adopt.

Ripley doesn’t have the flaws of Scarlett O’Hara, and she doesn’t go through as dramatic a change in a single movie. However, she’s still a believable character in how she has to adapt to the situation, going from the sidelines to the center role. In her case, the external threat of an alien trying to kill her is what makes her struggle so compelling. She doesn’t come across as physically strong, but resourceful and determined. Sigourney Weaver’s thin frame makes Ripley more delicate as a character, but it’s the drive of Ripley’s personality that makes her stand out. Her personality is why it’s believable that she would survive the alien threat, despite not being physically intimidating. The sequel, Aliens, further adds to Ripley’s character in this way, while also bringing in a maternal side of the character that was not present in the original film.

In Aliens, Ripley has been drifting through space for more than 50 years in cryosleep on her shuttle, when she is recovered by a random salvage crew. In a scene that appears in the director’s cut, she later learns that her daughter, who had been waiting for her to return, grew old and died before she made it home. On top of that, the company that employed her does not believe her story about the alien and strips her of her work licenses, forcing her to work in an unfulfilling, dead-end job. When the company loses contact with the colony on the planet where the alien eggs were discovered in Alien, she refuses to get involved in the military’s plan to find out what happened. Yet, perhaps as a method of finding closure or meaning in her life, she ultimately agrees to join the military expedition as a consultant.

Once again, she is trying to stay on the sidelines of everything, avoiding the conflict that the marines have to face and preferring to stay as a passive civilian in this situation. And once again, she is then forced to take the leadership role when the ineptitude of the commanding officer and the prideful arrogance of the marines get a lot of them killed facing the xenomorphs. It’s a familiar scenario that is consistent with an established character. The difference now is that she has to command a bigger group of people who are all physically more intimidating than her in a situation that is getting ever more dire.

Her strengths are complemented by the marine Hicks (Michael Biehn), who has enough military experience and expertise to take her knowledge and turn that into plans for survival. Aliens is able to have two strong characters of the opposite sex and showcase their strengths without detracting from one another. Ripley’s knowledge of the xenomorphs and her natural leadership capabilities work perfectly with Hicks’ understanding of military tactics and weaponry. He teaches her how to fire their weapons, and even tries to avoid showing her things that he’s not sure she can handle, to which she immediately tells him to show her everything. This is a moment in which Hicks is patronizing her a little bit, but ultimately concedes to her demands and it doesn’t make Hicks seem like a bad guy in the process for doing so. When she uses the marine’s rifle for the first time, she gets thrown off-balance, showing her inexperience using a weapon with that power and her lack of physical strength. This short moment does a lot at once. We know she’s not used to the firepower of marine weaponry, and she’s forced to learn to use it on the spot quickly. It allows room for Ripley to improve with her use of the weapon and it also justifies Hicks’ caution without making Ripley look bad. She then uses the weapons to a much better effect later in the alien queen’s lair, demonstrating her adaptability in learning how to use the weapons and her determination to overcome her physical limitations.

Compare Ripley’s use of the marine weapon to Naru’s use of her weapons in Prey. Prey sets Naru up from the start as someone extremely skilled at using weapons with the numerous CGI axes flying at trees. Despite the fact that she’s not actually good at hunting the animals, she’s very clearly skilled at using the same weapons as everyone else in her tribe. Then, she decides to tie a rope to her axe to allow her to quickly yank it back to her hand. She essentially creates a new weapon with this decision by changing how it operates. However, unlike Ripley who struggles the first time she uses the rifle, Naru is immediately good at it. She throws the axe, hits the tree, then yanks it back directly to her hand on the first try. There’s no moment in which it flies past her head, or that she’s unable to catch it. She’s just instantly the best at using the axe with a rope technique without any training or help from a mentor. This makes her less believable or interesting because it makes her seem too powerful to fail in a fight and reduces the tension in future scenes.

Weapon mastery aside, all of the character-building of Ripley culminates with her connection to the little girl, Newt (Carrie Henn). While Newt is somewhat annoying, she is an instrumental foil in making Ripley’s character complete in Aliens, because she is the primary motivation for Ripley to succeed when they find her. Ripley arrives on the planet with the marines as a woman without a drive in her life. Her daughter is dead, she doesn’t have a job, and she can’t escape the constant nightmares; she’s really only there to find closure and hope they can wipe out the xenomorphs. Newt becomes a surrogate daughter for her and the inspiration she needs in order to come up with solutions for ensuring their survival. The reason I think this is because of how Ripley contradicts herself in the film. When the marines first encounter the xenos and many of them are taken away by the aliens, she tells all of the survivors that, “You can’t help them. Right now, they’re being cocooned, just like the others.” Yet, when Newt is captured, she believes the opposite and sets off to save her, despite what she told the marines. She’s pragmatic about the situation when she suggests leaving the marines behind because she knows that it’s suicide to try to rescue these people (for whom she does not necessarily have an emotional connection). However, her maternal instinct and core motivation to protect Newt outweigh her pragmatism; she refuses to give up and is determined to rescue her, regardless of what she said earlier. Humans are walking contradictions, so this simple example is extremely effective at making Ripley a believable character for whom we feel empathy and a connection. It shows not just a realistic flaw, but it also shows how Newt’s survival and Ripley’s maternal instinct are key motivators to make her more determined than ever to succeed.

I am not a mother. I have never been to space. I have never encountered an alien species. I was not alive during the American Civil War and did not experience what it was like for women during that time period. This, however, does not prevent me from understanding Scarlett O’Hara or Ellen Ripley and appreciating them as strong female characters. Neither of these characters is physically intimidating, but they both have determined personalities with believable flaws that make them and their stories compelling and interesting. They have believable motivations that drive the characters towards their goals without compromising them as characters.

Now, let’s compare that to our primary modern example from Prey. Naru is little more than a petulant child whose only real goal is to hunt like the men because everyone says that she can’t. It’s a #Me2 goal for a character who lives in a hunter-gatherer society in the 1700s. I’m no historian, but I’m fairly certain that if your tribe didn’t want you to do something, they would make sure you didn’t do it or kick you out. If you can’t hunt or gather in that tribe, you are deadweight and risk negatively impacting the tribe’s success. Naru is only successful at killing rabbits and ultimately the Predator, despite the film never really justifying her as that capable. She’s much better at the herbology and gathering side of things, which is certainly fine and impressive in its own right.

Her determination to become a hunter is based on an unlikeable motivation, making her strong-willed but petty in comparison to Ripley. This isn’t inherently bad, because you can still have events of a film change the selfish motivation into something more meaningful. By the end of the film, her motivation could be more about her brother’s death, or the death of her tribe members, or the fact that her tribe’s survival chances have been decimated by the Predator and she needs to protect them. At no point does Naru have a moment to do any introspective thinking in a way that would show some growth of her character, though. Even in the moment when she starts to doubt herself, her brother immediately puts a stop to it and convinces her that she’s the best around by telling her that she was actually the one who killed the mountain lion in the first act, not him. Naru, thankfully, makes some mistakes throughout the movie—showing she’s not a perfect Mary Sue—but some of those mistakes and failures are undone with dialogue like this. I mentioned it in my review that it seemed like there was someone writing the script who wanted to make her more relatable and flawed, while another was doing their best to make her like the perfect modern female protagonist.

Whether the change be demonstrated internally or externally, it needs to happen to the protagonist. It’s fundamental to storytelling. The change doesn’t have to be as significant as Scarlett O’Hara’s, nor does it have to be something intrinsically female like the maternal instinct that Ripley has. It just needs to be a change that is consistent with the character and that shows how the environment and the antagonists significantly challenge the protagonist in a way he/she has not been challenged before. This is why heroes in most stories start off weak or flawed in some way: They have to overcome those flaws to succeed. If you look at the examples of this essay so far, O’Hara and Ripley both faced incredibly difficult challenges, forcing them to adapt and overcome their shortcomings, thus becoming more interesting characters as a result. Naru faces an incredibly difficult challenge as well, but she doesn’t change. She starts so close to the finish line for her character, that there was never enough tension to let us believe she would ever lose the race.

In Part II of this essay, I’ll discuss other examples of strong female protagonists in which they are more physically intimidating, as well as how our modern example fails to achieve what these other heroines have.

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