Written by Ann Yi Ngai
Illustrated by Sylvain Chan
On the final Sunday of the BFI London Film Festival in Southbank, crowds were sparse, and rain drizzled lazily. In the midst of this unfestival-like atmosphere, I attended three talks at the BFI Cinema on gendered representation on screen, intrigued by the focus on mothers, femme fatales/final girls, and older women.
The talks offered many insights into these female archetypes on film, as well as how they have been shaped by, and in turn, shaped our cultural understandings of women.
Mum’s the Word: Motherhood on Screen, hosted by Nadia Maria Olivia, demonstrated the dichotomous representation of mothers as either doting or deranged, holy or horrific. A point that stood out to me was that the act of “good” mothering is often a matter of (self-)sacrifice and saintly torment (such as in Two Women), whereas “bad” mothering involves ignorance or resistance to gendered norms, as well as an unwillingness to be invisible (as seen in Stella Dallas). Maternal instinct is not biological or natural, but rather socially constructed through these standards of motherhood. However, in recent years, there has been more space for “imperfect mothers” to appear on screen, as seen in the cases of Hereditary and Ladybird, where mothers are given depth instead of being demonised.
In another talk, Isaura Barbé-Brown contextualised the shifting portrayals of women within the evolving feminist movement in Femme Fatale to Final Girl: Evolving Archetypes in Genre Cinema.
Early femme fatales and final girls represent the Madonna-Whore dichotomy, in which the former, mostly portrayed as sexually deviant, manipulative, and irredeemable, are juxtaposed against the latter, who are portrayed as virgins, innocent, and thereby redeemable. However, modern portrayals of femme fatales and final girls allow more room for subversion and nuance, as demonstrated by Midsommar and Happy Death Day, where the female leads survive and thrive despite transgressing gendered expectations.
Finally, Coming of (Older) Age: The Older Woman, led by Billie Walker, focused on how monstrosity and disgust are embodied by ageing female characters on screen. The “hag” archetype, seen in several recent big-name movies like Weapons, The Substance, X, Barbarian, and The Front Room, exaggerates features of ageing to serve as visual and psychological terror. These limiting portrayals of older women on screen signify wider gendered dynamics of ageing and beauty, reducing these women to harbingers of grotesqueness, mortality, and decay.
These talks prompted some questions: What does the future of women’s representation look like? Are there ideal approaches to writing and portraying female characters on screen? When we talk about improving representation, what exactly do we mean?
Social media often grasps onto certain movies with female leads and/or seemingly pro-women tones and generates debates around the representation of these characters and archetypes. Is The Substance’s messaging on ageing women and gendered strife in Hollywood ultimately ineffective and counterintuitive, or is it a campy, gloriously surrealistic female-rage-fuelled horror classic? Is Nightbitch a compelling statement on motherhood and its difficulties, or feminist virtue signalling with a body-horror label? Is Poor Things a tale of sexual liberation and reclamation of agency, or is it just exploitative and sexist?
The topic of “good” and “bad” representation of women is also prevalent in these discourses. Participants operate on varying philosophies of representation: some emphasise the importance of “strong” female characters; some prioritise thoughtful and effective engagement with themes of womanhood and female-centric experiences; some advocate for the inclusion of underrepresented women on screen; while some bemoan the scrutiny of representation rooted in identity politics, arguing it has compromised the quality of films and TV.
Ultimately, the representation of women on screen needs to remain a complicated conversation. While parameters for “bad” representations should be in place, as caricatures of groups have damaging social consequences, it is also important to note that being overly corrective in upholding a standard for “good” representations of women limits artistic exploration and silences the contradictions and complexities that make a character true to life. It also places female characters on a pedestal that paradoxically demeans them. I believe making real progress in representation on screen means women can occupy a multitude of characters without being chastised or brutalised based on reductive notions of gender, whether it be a mother, a femme fatale, or an elderly woman.
