The majority of modern film protagonists are just that: characters, strong or otherwise; and they result from a top down, structurally dictated approach to screenwriting. They're sketches animating flesh. They're a collection of traits wrapped around a couple of driving goals which tend to shift around the mid-point of a screenplay because that's what the books tell the development people to tell the writers to do. Good writers don't write characters, they write people. They don't write plot, they write stories in which people interact and out of which plot arises naturally, like the subtle shifting patterns of a forest arise naturally from the interaction of thousands of trees or the calligraphy of sand dunes emerges from the interplay of wind and sand. Critiquing Marvel blockbusters for lack of profundity in protagonists doesn't provide much of a challenge. The muscular male slabs smashing bits of New York into each other in an externalisation of their inner struggle are just as reducible and risible as the female ciphers. These characters have to be cartoonesque because they have to stand out in the foreground against the increasingly noisome and cartoonesque background of world salvation that drives modern box office blockbusters. When screenwriters write people, rather than human plot devices, they become nuanced and interesting, whether they are strong or weak. troubled or at peace. That's harder to do when one has to justify 400 million in production and promotion. A good article, though!
I complete agree. The issue I have with "strong female characters" is that every blogger and their mom seems to want to see more strong female characters. I think asking for strong characters over weak or purely-for-sex females is moving in the right direction. Female characters have so often been merely toys to play with or to progress the story or to challenge the real characters or so that the story has that necessary romance aspect. They are often caricatures because they only serve a single purpose and they don't need a full personality to serve that purpose. They are simply the girl that the guy must remember and dream about while he is off saving the world. Or the conflict of interest. Or the other person in the room so he doesn't talk to himself. George R R Martin was praised for having female characters that we weren't able to hold into one box. While I am a huge fan of Martin's writing of dynamic characters and nuanced relationships between those characters, it does say something that he is recognized for having female characters that are as strong as they are weak and self-conscious as they are confident. You don't see authors who write equally dynamic male characters being praised for being able to write male characters. I simply find it interesting that it is assumed that an author is able to write male characters, but praised when they write equal female characters. By the way, you write beautifully.
Thank you! Yes, exactly. It seems the yearning for strong female roles is a reaction against weak female roles; and is completely understandable. Too many times a female character will be added as part of the plot (a goal, a reward), part of a 'B story' (romantic interest, mirror for the protagonist to externalise his 'inner journey' in the pauses between his 'outer journey') or by convention. I think this comes about because the appetite for large scale film production requires a certain type of story, serving certain types of theme. As #kleinbl00 says, even the iconic female roles in film history in which women 'equal' men in male action started out as male because their stories and their solutions to the story problems require violence and conquest rather than communication and reconciliation. But this shouldn't be the aspiring goal of our modern female mythological heroes any more, for my own taste, than our male ones. Personally I think the issue is more subtle than male/female, for there are many men who yearn for more egalitarian, subtle and complex stories and roles and role models equally shared by both sexes. Riane Eisler created the paradigm of a tension between dominator culture and partnership culture which respectively attributes traits of power hierarchy, domination and submission and rule of might to certain groups of men and women, and conversely traits of cooperation, communication and negotiation to others. Whilst her paradigm is far-reaching and applies to the entire evolution of humanity, so I'm doing it an injustice to reduce it here, I believe stories written for and about the second group would naturally offer more complex roles to both men and women; for their domain is different and their range of solutions is different. For better or worse, cinemas, these huge, sacred amphitheatres into which our society makes pilgrimages to sit in silence and contemplate our contemporary myths, do offer us our morals, our emotional and rational teaching. The majority of those myths are now very little different from the eye-popping, exaggerated tales of ancient Greek, Celtic, Vedic, Icelandic cultures. However it does perhaps offer insight into #kleinbl00's question about what we are supposed to do. We could try rowing out into that ocean, the dominator vs partnership paradigm, to cast our nets and fish for ideas. As #NikolaiFyodorov suggests, novelists have been sitting on the shores hooking out wonders for some time. Novels are quiet and subtle and cultivate the forest of the unconscious like a slowly spreading moss. Cinema is more like a forest fire. If we write stories which offer an alternative to the dominator paradigm, we also offer an opportunity for rapt listeners to be consumed in a conflagration of new themes, new ways of thinking about the world, new solutions to contemporary problems. And all cunningly disguised as a Saturday night's entertainment.