Scot-free

When the onscreen adaptation of Gone Girl was released last October, I was genuinely excited to witness how David Fincher and Gillian Flynn were going to translate the thriller into the big screen. As a fan of the book, I relished the twists and turns Flynn’s third novel had in store for readers, particularly the vibrant characters that sometimes alternated between snarky and dark.

In retrospect, I was mesmerized by Amy Elliot Dunne, the titular Gone Girl. Not to give anything away, but her character was someone to root for from the start of her diary entries, due to her likeability and transformation, a delicious turn for the plot. Unfortunately, the film has suffered criticisms that have stemmed from the book itself: Amy is a “bitch,” she’s “manipulative,” and worst of all, Amy’s a “psycho.”  It seems that, for someone as free-spirited and smart like Amy Dunne, labels are the laurels she has to bear on her cross.

Nowadays, more female characters in media are being bombarded with insults and slurs. Take, for example, Skyler White, the once-doting wife of “badass” Walter White from Breaking Bad; Skyler’s actions may seem irritating to the audiences who have loved Walter’s actions and even empathized with his feelings. In a 2013 New York Times op-ed article written by Anna Gunn, the actress who plays Skyler, she admitted to seeing the hate posts and being a little frightened for her safety. With comments addressing Skyler as a “bitch wife,” it was clear that the Internet is going a little further, with one commenter going so far as to ask where Gunn was so they could kill her.

There’s this double standard bubbling in Hollywood now. While antiheroes like Walt and Dexter Morgan are sometimes “praised” for having conflicting morals and cool actions, female protagonists like Amy Dunne and Skyler White immediately get called as “bitch” and “harpy” because of how different they seem to respond to the norm of female characters. I recall, in the earlier parts of the novel, when it was revealed that Amy Dunne’s parents spun her persona into a bestselling character a la Curious George, calling her Amazing Amy.

Even with a label as noteworthy as “amazing,” the backstory of how it came to be is heart-breaking and it made more sense from the standpoint of the reader what Amy really truly is. Instead of being praised for the diversity of characters present in entertainment, there seems to be a blowback with how difficult it is for some people to see an anti-heroine, or the idea of it.

Known for her roles in The Help and Doubt, Viola Davis is seen in a new light in Shonda Rhimes’ new drama, How To Get Away With Murder. Initial impressions have proven that her character, Prof. Annalise Keating, is dark, calculating and hard to read, and that’s the best part about the character because it’s something new and refreshing in a TV landscape filled with submissive women or dominatrix-like characters. It’s hard to read Professor Keating, but NY Times Editor Alessandra Stanley, in her review, states that Shonda Rhimes is writing yet another “angry, black woman,” perpetuating yet another old label on a character that is fresh. Indeed, there is a problem.

Perhaps it’s difficult for audiences to distinguish anti-heroines with labels like “mother”, “daughter”, “mistress”, “best friend”, and the like. It surprised me when moviegoers in the cinema dismissed Amy in a negative light, or that some people I asked before didn’t like Skyler as much as they did with Walter. At this point in the game, it’s not even about the achievements of women in media because, in my belief, that’s going to belittle the efforts of women from the time of Lucille Ball and Joan Rivers – the counting of how many women broke through. Yes, television has given way to complex and dramatic women as well as funny and outspoken female comics, but it does not discount the female character problem.

Writer Maureen Dowd of the New York Times said it best when she stated art is about ideas, not what the right thing is. “The idea that every portrait of a woman should be an ideal woman, meant to stand for all womanhood, is an enemy of art,” Dowd exclaims. In a culture that is littered with quizzes or posts on a person’s favorite character on Orange Is The New Black or Scandal, shouldn’t it stand that a certain protagonist or antagonist’s morals and ideals be our mirror into ourselves and not the gender of the character?

If the antiheroes of today’s art forms get to leave the scene of the crime, both literally and figuratively, scot-free, why are the complex women of today’s entertainment caught up in the labels and restrictions of yesterday? As a culture, what’s holding us back to let these tick marks of an “ideal woman” go and disappear into thin air?