Complex Female Protagonist

Gibson’s Gonna Be OK: The Comfort of Hypercompetent Heroes

The lead character in BBC’s ‘The Fall’ is impervious to fear, but that’s OK. She’s doing the modern detective’s work of making us all feel safe in a world that’s anything but.

Written by Katherine Murray.

The lead character in BBC’s The Fall is impervious to fear, but that’s OK. She’s doing the modern detective’s work of making us all feel safe in a world that’s anything but.

The second season of The Fall just finished airing on the BBC and, while there’s been a slow decline in quality since the series premiere, it remains one of the only detectives shows – if not the only detective show – to acknowledge that violence against women is a built-in feature of patriarchal cultures rather than a random, strange coincidence. (Rebecca Solnit has a good essay about this in Men Explain Things to Me, if you want to get mad.)

The Fall is about serial killer named Paul Spector and Stella Gibson, the Gillian Anderson-looking detective who hunts him down. In his own mind, Paul is a dark, fascinating genius who’s playing a clever game of cat and mouse with the Irish police force. In almost everyone else’s mind, he’s a loser who hates women, and the police figure out who he is almost as soon as they start looking.

What makes The Fall an amazing piece of television is that it spits in the face of conventional serial killer narratives. Rather than being fascinated with Paul and how tortured and interesting he is, it’s focussed on how his hatred of women fits into a larger societal pattern, and how the lessons we learn about gender inform our beliefs and behaviours in life. It can be heavy-handed, but it’s also refreshing because it’s so different from the narrative we most often see.

The show spends roughly equal time on Spector and Gibson, but it’s Gibson we’re supposed to cheer for, and Gibson who’s built up as the ideal feminist woman. In the middle of a show full of terrifying, realistic, often heart-wrenching violence against women, Gibson’s there to make us feel safe. Not only because we know she’s going to catch Paul Spector and put him behind bars, but because she is completely and utterly awesome at everything. Perhaps unbelievably so.

The main source of tension in The Fall comes from fear and vulnerability. Watching the show, as a woman, you have the same chilling thought you have, as a woman, every time you’re walking alone at night, or hear a sound in your house while you’re sleeping: “What would I actually do if someone attacked me right now?” And the answer, if you’re honest, is that, even if you learned some krav maga one time, you would be just as terrified and just as dead as one of Spector’s victims.

The fear that men will attack us is something women carry around 24/7; it’s always simmering in the back of our minds, and The Fall forces us to look at it directly. In the middle of that horror, like a lifeline, or a warm blanket, Gibson the Terribly Competent stands impervious to fear. She can’t be intimidated by a bunch of tough guys on the street; she doesn’t freeze in an emergency; she can’t be made to feel ashamed for having sex; she breaks your nose if you don’t back off when she tells you to; she isn’t scared of some guy in a bar, or some guy in a limo, or even some guy who chokes other women to death. She looks at those guys with contempt and moves on with her life, without thinking the problem is her. No matter what, we know, she’s going to be OK.

It’s not actually unusual for the hero of a genre story to be hypercompetent. Like, we all understand that Jason Bourne is not realistic, right? And the guy from Mission Impossible? And that one detective from True Detective who said that time was round like a beer can? He was also improbably good at things.

What interests me about Gibson isn’t that it’s weird for the hero to be competent – it’s that, in this instance, her competence speaks to me and comforts me in way that Rust Cohle didn’t manage. She reminds me of another detective I like.

Appropriately, since Veronica Mars is set in high school, the tension in that story’s less about the fear of being killed and more about the fear of public humiliation. And Veronica, its hero, is impervious to all embarrassment.

In The Fall, it’s been implied that Gibson may have been assaulted at some time in the past, and that that’s what motivates her to work with female victims of violence. In Veronica Mars, it’s made explicit from the start that Veronica was the victim of the cruellest forms of high school bullying before she became the cynical, hypercompetent girl we know.

Whenever someone tries to insult, intimidate, or make fun of her, she has a snappy comeback to put them down. Whenever someone seems to get the upper hand against her, she manages to turn the tables somehow, making them look foolish in her place. In maybe the most blatant example, some popular boys she’s investigating put her name on the karaoke list in an attempt to embarrass her and make her back off. With only seconds to think it over, Veronica jumps up and sings the Blondie song “One Way or Another,” turning potential humiliation into a triumph as literally no real person could do.

Knowing that Veronica’s going to land on her feet whenever someone tries to bully her has the same warm blanket effect as knowing that Gibson can’t get scared. It’s not entirely realistic – for all of us, life involves at least some moments of fear and humiliation – but it gives us safe harbour in stories that are otherwise designed to make us anxious. In these particular contexts, Gibson and Veronica always know what to do, and the things they do always work. They allow us to confront the things that make us anxious with the safety net of knowing that it’s going to be OK.

And, if you’re going, “Katherine, that’s what all detectives do,” you’re sort of right.

Part of the point of detectives – at least modernist, soft-boiled detectives – is that they bring order to chaos and therefore restore our sense of safety. When Sherlock Holmes became popular, in Ye Olde Victorian England, it was in a context where urbanization, industrialization, and the expansion of the British empire had made people feel uncertain about what was happening. The world was changing really fast, there were a bunch of strangers around, and it felt like some random person could just murder you or steal your stuff and disappear into the crowd. (From a more racist point of view, it also seemed like a wizard from India could slip some potions in your tea, but that’s a different discussion from this.)

The calming figure of that era was a man with the superhuman ability to piece together tiny bits of information, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of literally everything that ever was, including scary foreign cultures. He was the safe harbour in the storm of modern living.

Flash forward about 100 years, and the same hero is reincarnated as House, a doctor who knows what’s wrong with you even when Web MD has no idea. Like Sherlock Holmes, House taps into our general fear that there is too much information for any one person to crunch. And, in a world where we are terrified that everything from our water bottles to our genes is trying to kill us in new, incomprehensible ways, the House version of Sherlock Holmes provides some safety, because House can see the pattern, House can understand what’s happening, and House can make some order out of chaos. Even if the MRI machine makes all your veins explode exactly in time for commercials, House will have the answer by the end.

The comfort of watching Gibson is both similar and different to the comfort of knowing that puzzles get solved. It’s the comfort of saying, “There’s someone who looks like me and, day to day, is not afraid to be alive. Someone who lives in the world I live in, that’s full of the terrors I face, and – realistically or not – is showing me what it could be like if I didn’t have to be scared.”

It’s a powerful counterpoint to the Man Kills Loads of Women – Is Special, Tortured Genius story that Spector thinks he’s starring in. This is Woman Is Not Afraid to Walk Down the Street; Woman is Not Afraid to Say No; Woman Isn’t Worried That She’ll Be a Total Drag if She Points Out What a Sexist Jerk You’re Being. It’s a different kind of fantasy than Knowing Lots or Solving Things – it’s Having a Right to Exist, opposite the story of a man who chokes women to death to feel strong. It’s the writers consciously and deliberately preventing this from being a story where you should have carried some mace to the bathroom, if you didn’t want to get killed in your house.

What’s different about Gibson isn’t that she’s extra specially good at stuff – it’s that the forces she’s facing off against are specifically aimed at women. The fear that she’s shielding us from is a fear that most men don’t carry around. The Fall, in its graphic and terrifying depictions of violence, would be unbearable to watch if Gibson wasn’t always at the centre, reminding us what life would be like if we didn’t have to feel afraid.

Different monsters require different kinds of heroes to defeat them. Gibson is the right kind of hero to face this kind of monster, and the strength of The Fall may be that it’s the first show to know which monster we’re trying to fight.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

‘The Good Wife’: Being Bad

The premise of ‘The Good Wife’ brilliantly sets up and challenges particular gender roles and expectations. Julianna Margulies plays the lead character, Alicia Florrick. Given Margulies’ age – she was 43 when the show began – and popular culture’s continual privileging of youth, particularly with reference to women, this is an achievement in itself. Alicia’s married to Peter Florrick (Chris Noth, who’s no stranger to playing “bad boy” partners after his role of Mr Big on ‘Sex and the City’), who has just been jailed following a string of political and sexual scandals. The pilot sees Alicia dutifully standing by her husband, remaining silent as he apologises for his indiscretions, before the show cuts to several months later as Alicia returns to work as a defence attorney following 13 years as a stay-at-home mom.

Written by Sarah Smyth.

The Good Wife centralizes the conventionally marginalized wife figure — *The Good Wife* centralizes the conventionally marginalized wife figure

Warning: Contains MAJOR spoilers!

Like many other fans of the hugely popular political and legal drama, The Good Wife, a few months ago, I sat down to watch the latest episode, “Dramatics, Your Honor,” only to be rudely awakened from the state of pure escapism which the show pleasantly induces. Although often clever, complex, and compelling, the show is also a somewhat ridiculous yet highly entertaining romp, with a taste for outlandish storylines and theatrical, scheming characters. In other words, I do not watch the show to get a reflection of or even a reflection on Real Life. Real Life sucks, and The Good Wife allows me, and others I assume, to escape life’s often mundane, tedious, and sometimes downright brutal existence. However, in this episode, Will Gardener (Josh Charles), one of the main characters who also serves as the love interest to the leading character, Alicia Florrick, dies. Taking this extremely personally – how could the writers do this to me? – I took to Twitter to find answers. Here, I came across this letter written by the creators and executive producers of the show. In it, they wrote a rather jarring sentence: “The Good Wife, at its heart, is the ‘Education of Alicia Florrick.’” As I reflected on this statement, I began to wonder to what extent Alicia Florrick needed to learn something and, more worryingly, to what extent this need to learn is highly gendered.

The premise of The Good Wife brilliantly sets up and challenges particular gender roles and expectations. Julianna Margulies plays the lead character, Alicia Florrick. Given Margulies’ age – she was 43 when the show began – and popular culture’s continual privileging of youth, particularly with reference to women, this is an achievement in itself. Alicia’s married to Peter Florrick (Chris Noth, who’s no stranger to playing “bad boy” partners after his role of Mr Big on Sex and the City), who has just been jailed following a string of political and sexual scandals. The pilot sees Alicia dutifully standing by her husband, remaining silent as he apologises for his indiscretions, before the show cuts to several months later as Alicia returns to work as a defence attorney following 13 years as a stay-at-home mom. Through this premise, The Good Wife centralises the conventionally side-lined figure of the wife by giving her a voice and an identity beyond this primary label of “the good wife.” Alicia not only embodies a complex and multifaceted identity as a lawyer, but also as a mother, sister, daughter, friend, and lover. The show also complicates the label of “the good wife” itself. For every character who praises Alicia for standing by her husband, another lambasts her for sticking with him, claiming she fails both herself and women everywhere. The show makes apparent that a woman’s “choice” – for how much autonomy did Alicia really have in this situation? – is intensely scrutinised and criticised. The show then follows Alicia’s struggle with the complexities and obstacles of her identity as she attempts to navigate marriage, motherhood, and the workplace, as well as her increasing sexual attraction for Will, her boss and one of the named partners at the firm where she works.

Alicia navigates the many aspects of her identity including mother, wife and lawyer — Alicia navigates the many aspects of her identity including mother, wife, and lawyer

With a set-up that continually explores and challenges the traditional idea of what is meant for a woman to be “good,” I was puzzled by the idea that Alicia needs an education. As television enters a golden age with shows particularly examining the moral complexities of their lead characters, I wondered whether the need to educate rather than explore Alicia’s character is specifically gendered. As Bitch Flicks examined last year, women are critically neglected from this exploration in two ways. Firstly, women’s contribution is neglected from the critical consensus and canonisation of the television revolution. The title alone from Brett Martin’s book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, makes clear the absence of female-driven television shows within the consideration of this revolution. In The New Yorker, Emily Nassbaum criticises the degradation of “female” and “feminine” culture within the canonisation of television, and proclaims Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City as “the unacknowledged first female anti-hero on television.”

This, then, leads me onto my second point. The privilege of exploring a morally ambiguous character is primarily afforded to white, cis-gender, heterosexual, able-bodied men. Female characters, as well as other oppressed groups, in contrast, are refused this privilege. Not only are there fewer critically acclaimed female-driven shows than male-driven shows, and even fewer with Black or queer-identifying leading women. But when there are shows which attempt to explore complex female characters, they face a much harsher moral and critical assessment. For example, whereas the greed, selfishness and pure pigheadedness of Tony Soprano from The Soprano’s and Walter White in Breaking Bad are continually held up as an exploration of character, earning them a cult status within popular culture, Hannah Horvath from Girls is positively reviled (see here, here and here). Although Hannah’s characteristics are less extreme that Tony and Walter’s, she also shares a tendency to be narcissistic, self-absorbed and, at times, unlikeable. Whereas male characters are entitled to be bad, female characters, it seem, must always be good.

Male television characters can be bad... — Male television characters can be bad…

...whereas a female character must always be good — …whereas a female character must always be good

Ensuring women remain “good” ensures they also remain passive, docile, and unthreatening. As Carol Dyhouse demonstrates in her book, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women, the lives of young women in comparison to the lives of young men has been plagued with social anxiety and moral panic from the nineteenth century. However, the more I thought about Alicia’s education in The Good Wife, the more I realised that her education is not about being good; it’s about being bad.

Near the end of season one, Alicia makes her first difficult and morally ambiguous decision. As the recession hits, the partners at her law firm, Lockhart & Gardener, must decide which first year associate to lay off, Alicia or Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry). In order to save her job, Alicia pulls in a favour with her husband’s campaign manager, Eli Gold (Alan Cumming), asking him to switch legal representation to her firm, enabling her to bring in top lucrative clients. Not only does Alicia unfairly exploit her advantages, advantages to which Cary simply cannot live up, in order to ensure she secures her positions at the firm. She also uses Peter for her own career prospects, much in the same way that he uses her – Eli continually makes it apparent that Peter’s resurrected career as the States Attorney and, later, as the Governor of Illinois depends on Alicia’s support. Her education in complicating, if not rejecting, her “good” label comes to a head at the end of season four when she accepts Cary’s invitation to start their own firm, pinching Lockhart & Gardner’s top clients along the way.

After Will discovers Alicia’s plans at the beginning of season five, he tells her, “You’re awful, and you don’t even know how awful you are.” As Alicia’s complicated love interest in the show – although at times they engage in brief sexual encounters, Alicia is not “bad” enough to involve herself in a full-blown illicit affair, even if her relationship with Peter is strained at best – Will’s words are highly charged. Nevertheless, there’s some truth to them. Alicia’s come a long way from the relatively meek and unsure character of the pilot. As Joshua Rothman claims, “Everyone, including Alicia, thinks that she’s a victim—but, in fact, she’s a predator, all the more dangerous for being stealthy.” With season six currently airing, the show remains committed to this education. As Alicia considers running for States Attorney, the definition of “good” and “bad” become redefined. The latest episode, “Oppo Research” demonstrates the way in which, within the landscape of politics, what’s defined as “good” and “bad” becomes, simultaneously, much more black and white, and much more tenuous – it all depends on outward appearance and surface. As (politically defined) unpleasant aspects of Alicia’s life are made apparent – although, interestingly, they relate to Alicia’s family members rather than Alicia herself – the show reveals that even good girls have skeletons in their closets.

Cary Agos begins as From colleague to rival to partner, Cary Agos motivates Alicia to be bad — Cary Agos goes from colleague to rival to partner, Cary Agos motivates Alicia to be bad

Without wanting to be prescriptive or wishing the integrity of Alicia’s character away, a significant part of me wants Alicia to fuck up. And I mean, really fuck up. I think this is why I became so invested in the relationship between Will and Alicia, and why I was so saddened by the death of Will. I wanted Alicia to ditch her “Saint Alicia” label and embrace being bad. But the success of female-led shows is not in swapping one side of a dichotomy for another. It’s about embracing a nuanced portrayal of women in television and wider popular culture. The Good Wife succeeds in presenting a character who, despite her best efforts, remains flawed. In this way, Alicia Florrick can finally shed “the good” label for good.

Sarah Smyth is a staff writer at Bitch Flicks who recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.