THE NEW TAKE ON THE FEMALE EXPERIENCE

What does the female experience mean? What trademarks a woman to be a “woman”? Rage, performance, the expectation that they are in the room to provide something for you. The list goes on. There's an expectation of softness, sweetness, sugar, and spice, and everything nice, all bundled into one woman that you expect to meet your exaggerated presumption of what a woman should be. Media over the past few years has grown to attempt to tell stories of women in less patriarchal spaces, but, as we'll soon discuss, its representation has a much bigger impact than solely telling women's stories. 

A lot of the women-led movies I was exposed to focused heavily on the premise of love. Fulfilling that one thing we know is expected of all of us, but history has taught us has special significance in the life of a woman. And these films teach the idea that women, alone, are defenseless, helpless, scared creatures, but when the husband steps in she begins to become more rounded; more human. Disney and Hallmark's films are the best examples of this trope. The woman, either fantasizing solely about getting married and living happily ever after, or solely everything else, gets their whole life turned around when the man they never thought they'd be lucky enough to meet exposes them to everything they've ever lacked; a hallow, empty woman in desperate need of a man for their real life to begin. 

After that were the sleepover demographic films. Movies about mermaids, and sisterhood, highlighting the beautiful ways two women unify in friendship, in a way that feels almost entirely exclusive to them. This is the first step towards more feminine-headed stories being told, rather than just stories with women in them, however much of them still revolve around patriarchal ideals. Mermaids need mermen, boys separate friendships. Even in well-rounded family movies with more than enough opportunity to represent a more diverse family lifestyle, still almost always tends to have some weird, hedonistic relationship between the father and daughter, almost always involving a scene in which the dad has to protect the daughter against some boy that Freud would say the dad is jealous of. Thus even in narratives that portray women to be actually functioning human beings with both a left and right side of their brain, they still get caught in the same male-dominated power dynamic. In the newer generation, we have women written with the idea of feminism, of standing up for themselves or following their true heart's desire, but because so many of them continue to be aimed at teenagers more often than not, they tend to keep up the charade of what society wants women to do; think they have free will but fall into the same societal pitfalls as the last. So what's the new approach?

As people in the modern world, how do we tell stories about women that are true to a real woman's experience, and not what men think a women's experience is, or what the world thinks happens in the day-to-day life of the average woman? In recent years, the media seems to be tapping into an untapped market of a woman's experience that continues to make men increasingly more uncomfortable; rage. 

Over the years the premise of women taking their long-pent-up anger out on any who dare step in her way has changed part of the landscape of cinema, and I believe for the better. There have been many films with this center narrative over the past few decades beyond the ones I'm going to mention, but none take the theme of revenge more seriously than Gone Girl. 

What makes this film so unique, and even more so in the book, is the shifting perspective and narrative that takes place throughout. Switching between Amy Dunne and her husband Nick Dunne, the narrative does not shy away from portraying Amy as a villain in her own right. But what this story does so expertly is divide the viewers based on their own, pre-existing feelings. Published in 2014, Mohammed Al Fuadi in Formalist Criticism states that every single individual viewer of a piece of media reacts and interprets it based on their own lived experience, therefore putting the viewer in somewhat of the writer's chair, able to form and shift entire texts based on the knowledge they already had. This is what made Gone Girl so encapsulating. It's not just a story about an angry woman, one the media would have no issue skewing to make her seem irrational, as is the way most times a woman expresses herself, its a story about a woman doing something not a single person in her position wouldn't have an intrusive thought about, allowing for the "rage" she enacts to be much more complex and compelling than any film about a man enacting revenge. More recently films like Ti West’s “X” and “Pearl” explore themes of rage and vengeance through the growing unhinged perspective of rising porn star Maxine, and endlessly horny Pearl. 

These types of narratives create a clear distinction between themselves and other overly masculinized sexploitation pieces. While these films, both X and Pearl alike rely heavily on themes of sex and sexuality, it manages to have much more serious undertones tying in with performance pieces like “I, Tonya”. All three feature discussions of mental health, sexuality, abuse, and the crushing weight of attempting to meet the high standards of yourself and those around you. However “X” and “Pearl” apart from “I, Tonya” tend to lean more into their depictions of female rage in a much more cinematic way, emphasizing drama rather than realistic storytelling (nothing wrong with that).

The one true story that dies to be told is the pressure of performing and how the films created about it tend to circulate very similar premises. “X”, “Pearl”, “I, Tonya”, “Black Swan”, “Suspiria”, and novels like “Gone Girl” and “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” all have the same center focus; we expect too much. These stories are films and books that use mediums like dancing, ballet, acting, sports, and the ability to succeed in them as a kind of blanket to tell an overarching story that all women, and more, relate to in a very specific way. The constant pressure to be your best self, especially for women, is soul-crushing. Be pretty, skinny, pale but not ghastly, tan but not dark, full lips and long lashes but no makeup, make a mark on your field but don't overshadow anyone society deems more important. And what some of these pieces have that others lack; mothers pushing you through it all. And every single one of them, Kat in Euphoria, Maxine and Pearl in the X franchise, Jennifer in Jennifers Body, Dani in Midsommar, and the Mother in Susperia, all feature brutal, soul-crushing moments in which these female leads shift their entire personality, and persona, body and mind to better serve their current arch. 

These films depict women at their breaking point, broken and battered by the constant battle to stand up against an entire world that, no matter how much progress we make, seems to be scared of making too much. That’s what female rage feels like to me (a man). A person at their wit's end, finally doing what they have to in order to adapt to a world that refuses to adapt for them. And this is an important distinction to make as these stories become bigger and more discussed because I believe everyone is at a point at which we are tired of explaining ourselves. Tired of telling people that us saying we deserve rights isn't saying you don’t. Tired of emotions being mistranslated as rage. Female rage is not crying while doing your makeup in the mirror, that's called sadness, and that's not new. Women have been portrayed as the sad, quiet trope, crying by themselves, for too long. That’s realistic, but that’s not rage, that’s the max amount of rage we allow before men begin to call "bitches crazy". Female rage is rageful, it’s raw and it’s dark, but it's also conniving, it’s sleek and quick. The version of female rage that social media obsesses over is the female counterpart of male rage, loud and erratic, quiet and slow. It's the patriarchies' imprint on spaces we think aren't theirs. Female rage becomes so romanticized because, unlike an angry man, an angry woman is thoughtful with it. Her rage is pointed and vengeful rather than violent and evil, and that is why female rage is so often presented in such an artistic manner. It's something more than the rage we all know, widespread and irrational, it’s its own entity, living and breathing as one mass of the collective's grief and sorrow for the world we were cast into. It means something beyond anger; it means something.