Teen Protagonist – Bitch Flicks

Adolescence and Female Friendship in Gurinder Chadha’s ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging’

After chronicling the clashes among family, football, and adolescence in ‘Bend it Like Beckham,’ Gurinder Chadha delves into similar territory with the ebullient coming-of-age tale ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.’ An adaptation of the 1999 novel ‘Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging’ by the late Louise Rennison, the film tells the story of Georgia Nicolson, a teenager growing up in Eastbourne, England, whose entry into the world of romancing boys is as fraught and funny as you might expect.

This guest post written by Deborah Krieger appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

After chronicling the clashes among family, football, and adolescence in Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Gurinder Chadha delves into similar territory with the ebullient coming-of-age tale Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008). An adaptation of the 1999 novel Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by the late Louise Rennison, the film tells the story of Georgia Nicolson (Georgia Groome), a teenager growing up in Eastbourne, England, whose entry into the world of romancing boys is as fraught and funny as you might expect.

Georgia falls quickly for the “sex-god” Robbie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a new boy in town, and spends the course of the film trying to win him over. In the film’s opening scene, Georgia’s friend Jas (Eleanor Tomlinson) tells her regretfully, “Boys don’t like girls for funniness.” Taking this questionable advice to heart, Georgia attempts to make Robbie fall for her by hiding her own dramatic attitude and hapless sense of humor that separate her from the other girls in town. By the end, of course, she learns the all-too-important lesson that you don’t need supermodel looks to get a boyfriend, and that your significant other should like you for yourself and not who you pretend to be.

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging has a quite a bit in common with other movies and books in the “teen romantic comedy” genre. It is undoubtedly formulaic, and contains the expected happy ending and all-important positive message of self-confidence. Yet Georgia herself, and her attitude towards life, are what make the book and the film memorable, as Georgia is vividly crafted, full of recognizable flaws. She consistently makes the worst, most embarrassing social errors in nearly any given situation, including being caught spying on Robbie by him and his girlfriend; accidentally exposing her “knickers” to a crowd of partygoers (including Robbie) while fighting off another boy’s advances; or telling said boy that she’s a lesbian in order to avoid having to date him. For Georgia, her parents’ refusal to rent out a club for her fifteenth birthday constitutes the cruelest mistreatment, and she rather callously views her father’s job transfer to New Zealand as little more than an opportunity for her to have only one parent to supervise her misbehavior. (Of course, by the end of the film she realizes that she misses her dad and would rather have her family together.)

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is of opposing minds when it comes to showing how teens deal with their developing sexuality. On the one hand, many such encounters in the film are refreshingly realistic, for the most part eschewing picture-perfect kisses and idealized romantic encounters for true-to-life depictions of what being a teenager is actually like: full of awkwardness, weird mishaps, and lots of saliva. Seemingly over the course of minutes, teenage boys go from disgusting, unsanitary mysteries to objects of fledgling desire — from mere concept to attainable goal. In an early scene, Georgia’s friend Rosie (Georgia Henshaw) instructs their group of friends to sit on their hands to numb them, then to touch their chests over their clothes to simulate getting “felt up” by a boy.

On the other hand, the girls also treat sexuality in a rather cynical way: as a competition to be won, a skill to be taught and learned, and a game to be quantified and scored. Early in the film, Georgia and Jas introduce their “snogging scale,” or ten escalating forms of romantic and sexual kissing, with hand-holding while kissing at number one and “the full monty” at number ten. This scale is referenced consistently in conversations between Georgia and Jas, with them discussing their sexual experiences in terms of what number they earn on the scale. While preparing to make Robbie hers, Georgia visits the home of local boy named Peter Dyer (Liam Hess) to learn how to kiss. Peter is a local “ladies’ man” who apparently teaches snogging to all the local girls, and goes about his work with all the seriousness of a businessman. He sets a thirty-minute timer at the beginning of his lesson with Georgia, delivers questionably-sage advice, and insists that she be honest about her previous experience so that he can “evaluate” her accurately, prompting her to admit her only experience is with “the back of [her] hand.” Where other teen romances might feature the protagonist fantasizing about sharing her first-ever kiss with her crush, in the world of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging kissing — and what comes after — is treated in a much more transactional (and perhaps more practical) way.

Another central aspect of the film’s narrative is the looming presence of beauty standards to which Georgia and her friends feel they must adhere if they have any hope of getting a boyfriend. After realizing that even to her own friends, her large nose diminishes her attractiveness, Georgia continually tries to change her looks in order to make herself more appealing to boys. While in pursuit of the kind of supermodel beauty that will undoubtedly make Robbie hers, Georgia also manages to lose some of her hair by trying to bleach it, accidentally shaves off one of her eyebrows, gives herself the appearance of having pink eye by putting Vaseline on her eyelashes, and turns her legs bright orange with self-tanner, which Robbie notices while the pair are swimming in a public pool. Yet despite Georgia’s perception of herself as unattractive and in need of beautifying, the film’s plot actually belies her claims, revealing her to be rather unreliable as a narrator. In addition to Robbie, whom Georgia wins over by the end of the film, naturally, she has to contend with two other boys who want to date her: the aforementioned Peter Dyer, he of the copious saliva, and Dave the Laugh, a boy she goes out with only to make Robbie jealous. Additionally, both Robbie and Georgia’s father comment disparagingly on her desire to keep changing herself, and that she is fine the way she is. Therefore, despite the early assertion in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging that boys don’t like funny girls, or weird girls, or girls who don’t have the CoverGirl look, Georgia’s own travails prove otherwise, and demonstrate that she really didn’t need to change much about herself at all to get the boy she wants.

However, the film falls into some unfortunate classic teen romance narrative traps as it tries to demonstrate Georgia’s own uniqueness and establish her as the ideal girl for Robbie. Right off the bat, the film immediately draws a contrast between the inexperienced Georgia and “Slaggy Lindsay,” Robbie’s girlfriend at the beginning of the movie, and thus Georgia’s rival. (“Slaggy” basically means “slutty,” for those not of us speaking the Queen’s English.) Lindsay (Kimberley Nixon) is immediately presented as the enemy even before Robbie is in the picture, and the narrative continually backs up this assertion. Lindsay is the conventionally attractive girl who stuffs her bra and wears a thong (the horror!), while Georgia doesn’t commit those apparently unforgivable acts. Lindsay’s behavior towards Georgia over the course of the movie is presented as needlessly petty and at times cruel, even though Georgia is, admittedly, aiming for her boyfriend. Despite the fact that boyfriends can’t be stolen, it’s still a pretty selfish move on Georgia’s part, and one that manages to avoid diegetic condemnation even as many of Georgia’s sneaky and dishonest maneuvers are properly called out.

While not as prominent in the movie as in the original book, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging also keenly traces the way that girls’ friendships change during adolescence when the specter of boys — and maturity — comes into the picture. Georgia’s “ace gang” of Georgia, Jas, Rosie, and Ellen (Manjeeven Grewal) are presented as the thickest of thieves, ready to go “boy-stalking” together, take beauty quizzes, and encourage one another’s romantic adventures. Yet the very first scene actually undermines the unity of the so-called “ace gang,” demonstrating the kind of social pressures that adolescent girls must contend with, and conquer, in order to maintain their friendships. The film opens with Georgia arriving at a Halloween party dressed as a stuffed cocktail olive, making more of a statement than she’d like in a room full of sexy angels, devils, and cowgirls. We then learn that the rest of the “ace gang” was supposed to go in matching costumes, yet the other three girls have decided to join their peers in wearing sexualized and attractive costumes without telling Georgia. It is both an establishing character moment for Georgia, an olive in a room of nymphets, as well as a recognizable betrayal of friendship on the part of her friends.

The greatest such rift in the film, though, comes from Jas, Georgia’s conventionally pretty “best mate,” who manages to snag Robbie’s brother Tom (Sean Bourke) early on in the film with little effort. She subsequently spends much of the film disappointing Georgia and frustrating her attempts to date Robbie, culminating in a recognizable yet tragic falling-out that lasts until the end of the movie. Jas correctly points out Georgia’s “scheming and pretending” as a cause of why Robbie won’t date her, while Georgia argues (also with some legitimacy) that Jas has been a rather poor friend when it comes to keeping her secrets. Georgia also manages to dig the hole between her and Jas deeper when she criticizes what she views as Tom’s lack of ambition, as Robbie wants to be a rockstar. Jas delivers the classic fatal blow to a teenage friendship when she announces that she will be attending Lindsay’s party instead of Georgia’s, because of course they are on the same day.

Of course, the party at the end — the club party Georgia so wanted at the beginning of the film — allows everything to be solved. Jas and Georgia reconcile (as Jas secretly helped Georgia’s mother plan the whole thing, conveniently fixing their friendship), Robbie and his band headline the party set, Robbie very publicly rejects Lindsay in front of seemingly everyone in town and declares his feelings for Georgia unequivocally, and her father doesn’t end up having to move to New Zealand. Indeed, the ending of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is the least realistic aspect of the movie — nothing in the real world resolves itself quite so easily and painlessly. Perhaps outright condemning (or at least questioning) Georgia’s perpetuation of the Taylor Swift-esque “she wears short skirts / I wear tee shirts” dynamic with Lindsay might have taken the film all the way from cliché to truly lifelike. Still, though, it’s hard not to be pleased for Georgia and her happy ending, if only because there is so much in her (mis)adventures that are very recognizable and true.

Deborah Krieger is a senior at Swarthmore College, studying art history, film and media studies, and German. She has written for Hyperallergic, Hooligan Magazine, the Northwestern Art Review, The Stake, and Title Magazine. She also runs her own art blog, I On the Arts, and curates her life in pictures @Debonthearts on Twitter and Instagram.

Teen Girls Coming of Age in ‘Clueless’ and ‘The Edge of Seventeen’

These two women directors, Amy Heckerling (‘Clueless’) and Kelly Fremon Craig (‘The Edge of Seventeen’), use their films to give a focused examination on the insecurity and self-doubt teen girls face. Cher and Nadine’s personal struggles, as well as their relationships with older mentors, reveal how patriarchal expectations shape their lives as they come of age.

This guest post written by Emma Casley appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The Edge of Seventeen’s protagonist Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) says, “There are two types of people in the world: The people who naturally excel in life and the people who hope all those people die in a big explosion,” placing herself firmly in the second camp. Though Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) is the star of an entirely different film released 21 years before, there’s little doubt that Nadine would categorize the Clueless character in the first group. Despite differences in tone and the personalities of their leads, both films share a similarity in subject matter: teenage girls growing up. And both films are written and directed by women – a rarity in mainstream movies.

These two women directors, Amy Heckerling (Clueless) and Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), use their films to give a focused examination on the insecurity and self-doubt teen girls face. Cher and Nadine’s personal struggles, as well as their relationships with older mentors, reveal how patriarchal expectations shape their lives as they come of age. Though the two films both focus on a very particular demographic of white, well-off teenagers, they do point to the ways in which even these girls of relative privilege suffer under the boundaries of gender roles. The films do what they aim to do well: give depth and nuance to a demographic that is often written off as being frivolous and shallow. However there are obvious limits in what these films can portray. Though casting a critical look at male privilege, both films leave issues like racial and economic inequality untouched. The success of Heckerling and Craig’s films demonstrates the need for even more diversity of voices in film rather than being the end goal of more inclusive filmmaking.

The similarities between Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen can be most clearly seen in the parallels between their lead characters. Their actions reveal how they both struggle with the immense pressure that society places on young women. Cher sees herself as an expert and mentor for her family, fellow students, and teachers; Nadine frets over her social awkwardness and isolation. Cher spends her weekend choosing non-school books to read and workout regimens; Nadine’s nights off involve crying while throwing up into a toilet while her one friend (Haley Lu Richardson) holds her hair back. Cher uses strategically delivered flowers and chocolates to woo the object of her affection; Nadine sends a painfully awkward and explicit Facebook message to her crush about “doing it in the Petland stockroom.”

Cher might present herself as more put together through reading Fit or Fat and working out to buns of steel, but this urge to constantly “improve” herself and others demonstrates how she sees herself as something that needs to be improved upon. She complains about “feeling like such a heifer” after spending the day eating candy and snacks, and after her friend declines her suggestions for sex, she worries that she wasn’t presenting herself as attractive enough: “Did my hair get flat? Did I stumble into some bad lighting? What’s wrong with me?” While it’s a line played for laughs in the film, Cher clearly isn’t so different from Nadine as she despairs that she “feels so grotesque” and outcast from her cooler peers. They just have different ways of expressing this insecurity.

It doesn’t help that the few female role models Cher and Nadine have don’t provide much reassurance that things will get any better once they reach adulthood. Nadine’s mother (Kyra Sedgwick) seems to be constantly on the edge of breaking down – struggling between her job and taking care of her children and dealing with the emotional aftermath of her husband’s death. Cher’s mother has passed away, but her teacher Miss Geist (Twink Caplan) serves as an example of what the future might have in store for her. Similar to Nadine’s mom, Miss Geist is overworked and lonely. Though Miss Geist has a happier ending in Clueless, she still demonstrates the difficulties of living up to social expectations, even as an adult. Nadine and Cher are young women struggling with insecurity and feeling like they’re failing to perform femininity in the right way and they watch as their older female mentors struggle with the exact same performance. Nadine’s mother even tells her that she comforts herself thinking that everyone is as miserable and dead inside as she is – not exactly an “it gets better” message for the teenager.

Especially in comparison to many of the male characters in both films, the women in Clueless and Edge of Seventeen are unhappy and flawed, unable to provide support for the young female protagonists. While one reading might interpret this as plain old sexism in the writing, another way to look at it is that these films showcase the wear and tear that these women experience under a patriarchal society. While Nadine and Cher feel the pressure to twist and conform to impossible standards, their male counterparts (both teenagers and adults) are allowed to just simply be. This translates into many of the male characters being mentors or supportive figures for the female characters: Nadine has her teacher Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson); her mother has her son Darian (Blake Jenner); Cher has her father (Dan Hedaya) and Josh (Paul Rudd). Darian might express frustration with being the only “stable” one in the family, but The Edge of Seventeen never shows him struggle to live up to gendered social expectations as his mother and sister experience. Both films portray many of the male characters in a very positive way: they act as a sympathetic ear to Nadine and Cher’s problems without having much personal stake in the matter.

However, both films also demonstrate how a lack of awareness of societal pressures on women manifests a much less positive, and much more dangerous, way in other male characters. The Edge of Seventeen and Clueless contain very similar scenes that take place between the protagonists and a male classmate while they drive together in a car. In both cases, the girls reject the boys’ sexual advances and subsequently are stranded after leaving the car to escape the situation. In these scenes, from the boy’s perspectives, they were responding to “obvious” signs that the girls were interested in a romantic and/or sexual relationship with them. But the films suggest that actually the boys simply felt their own desires and assumed that the girls would accommodate them.

In this way, the male characters in both films, whether they are understanding mentors or aggressive sexual assaulters, are ignorant of their own power. Characters like Mr. Bruner and Cher’s father can be so “good” because they’re not dealing with the same kinds of social pressures as characters like Nadine’s mother and Miss Geist are, and can instead be pillars of stability in the main characters’ lives. But their pillar-like quality can be seen in a different way: as the men stay static, then women must constantly bend and be flexible to accommodate their positions. Cher’s father and Mr. Bruner remain ignorant to this dynamic, even when offering support to the two girls. This lack of awareness shows its darker side in the two car scenes. The two boys assume that they “know best” in these situations and expect the girls to acquiesce to their advances. Neither film gives credence to this assumption. They instead give a sympathetic view to Cher and Nadine’s hurt and betrayal, pointing the finger at the dangerous presumption of male privilege. Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen show empathy for the deeply flawed female characters and the societal oppression they face. They also demonstrate how men, as kind advisers or dangerous predators, have a tendency to assume the impartiality of their views — of course they can give good advice to their students and daughters, of course they know that when a girl gets in a car with them it’s an invitation for sex. One of the main functions of male privilege is men not even knowing that they have it.

Of course other kinds of structural oppression exist in conjunction with male privilege, and both Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen center on the lives of well-off, white, suburban girls. The two films focus on giving detailed portraits of a single character so it does make sense within the context of their stories for them both to have such a focus on a particular demographic and lifestyle. However, neither film deviates from the larger film canon’s intense fixation on the stories of the rich and the white and the otherwise privileged at the expensive of other narratives. Both directors have discussed their process in writing and directing their films; Heckerling details how she fought for Clueless to focus on the girls rather than the boys, and Craig used her own experiences with self loathing and insecurity to inform Nadine’s struggles. So while it might not have been essential that these films give nuance to female coming-of-age stories, in both cases, their role as writers and directors shaped the films into stories that echoed their own life experiences. What would other women, of different backgrounds, bring to their stories if they were given more opportunities to get behind the camera?

For both Heckerling and Craig, their efforts have translated into films that bring depth to the stories of teenage girls, but Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen shouldn’t be seen as the end goal of gender inclusivity in film direction. They represent two good examples of what can be accomplished when women directors are given more control over the stories they tell, but there are still a vast array of voices that have remained unheard.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Clueless: Way Existential

Emma Casley is a Brooklyn-based film writer. Last year she participated in the New York Film Festival’s Critics Academy. She can be found wandering the streets for good coffee and also on Twitter @EmmaLCasley.

‘The Transfiguration’ Offers Insights into Vampirism and How Our Experiences Shape Us

The point of the story is that, like so many vampires, he’s been transformed against his will into a creature he can’t quite make peace with. It’s an insight into vampires – backed by what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of how they have been portrayed in film – but just as interestingly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s an insight into how our experiences shape us; how early the die can be cast on the type of people we grow up to be.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I have a confession to make: I am so taken with the idea of being a literal vampire that it completely escaped my notice that Michael O’Shea’s film, The Transfiguration, may not be about literal vampires.

The film, which premiered at Cannes last year and opens in limited release this month, follows Milo (Eric Ruffin), a teenager who’s even more obsessed with vampires than I am. Milo, who we learn early on has been seeing a counselor about his violent impulses, gets beat up by local gang members during the day and stalks the streets at night, cutting his victims with a knife and drinking their blood. He keeps detailed journals explaining the “rules” of vampirism as he’s learned to understand them and he never socializes with anyone except his older brother and, as the film progresses, a neighbor girl named Sophie (Chloe Levine). Sophie has a much more casual, romantic interest in vampires, preferring popular works like Twilight and True Blood over Milo’s darker, more refined tastes – Let the Right One In, a Swedish film that shares more than a couple of plot points with The Transfiguration, is his favorite.

As Milo starts to care for Sophie, he also starts to see himself through her eyes and to question some of the choices he’s made, as well as some of the rules he’s learned about vampires. He also starts to reflect on how he became a vampire in the first place, an origin story that has less to do with being bitten by a stranger and more to do with witnessing his mother’s suicide. Eventually, like the sun setting over the course of a month, a heavy existential question settles over the film: if this is what Milo’s experiences have already made him, what comes next?

The Transfiguration is a slow-moving but confident film that uses the idea of vampires in a way I haven’t seen before – which is saying something, considering how omnipresent vampires were just a few years ago. As many other critics have pointed out (to me), it’s never entirely clear whether Milo has literally become a vampire, or if he’s just a messed-up kid who kills people and drinks their blood – and it doesn’t need to be clear. The point of the story is that, like so many vampires, he’s been transformed against his will into a creature he can’t quite make peace with. It’s an insight into vampires – backed by what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of how they have been portrayed in film – but just as interestingly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s an insight into how our experiences shape us; how early the die can be cast on the type of people we grow up to be.

Shot “guerrilla-style” by a first-time filmmaker, it’s impressive that The Transfiguration even exists, and that O’Shea and his director of photography, Sung Rae Cho, were able to create an unconventional horror film that can stand side by side with indie and art house offerings at festivals around the world. The understated performance from the two young leads, Eric Ruffin and Chloe Levine, also helps to maintain the difficult balancing act between the real and the supernatural. That said, The Transfiguration is better at asking existential questions than it is at answering them and the film’s final act is a bit of a downer.

In that respect, it reminds me of another weird movie with a problematic ending: Sony’s 2012 sci-fi film, Looper. Although I liked Looper a lot, the movie’s resolution, and its message [spoiler] that its main character should kill himself so that he doesn’t ruin someone else’s life, rubbed me the wrong way. Like The Transfiguration, Looper is a complicated story about destiny, the role of formative experiences, and the question of whether someone who has internalized a very deep trauma and lashes out in violent ways has any possible path toward redemption. That question is not academic to some people; it’s something they struggle with in real life, and I hope they will not conclude that the answer is “Once a monster, always a monster.”

The Transfiguration is less glib about this question than Looper is, but it definitely seems to take the position that, after life has placed you on a particular path, you walk it until you die.

For me, the most interesting character in The Transfiguration is actually Milo’s taciturn brother, Lewis (Aaron Moten). What we know of him, we only know from a single scene late in the film, but he was, apparently, a part of the neighborhood gang before withdrawing for unspecified reasons. He served in the military for some period of time and saw people get blown to pieces overseas. And, in the single scene where he talks for more than five seconds, he soberly and surely tells Milo that, no matter how bad he feels for whatever he’s been doing, there are people all over the world doing something a million times worse. This is a moral philosophy that’s both true and incomplete, but it’s fascinating because it’s about how you go on living – and that’s something we only do when we haven’t given up on ourselves as being a lost cause.

By contrast, the least interesting characters are the undifferentiated clump of gang members who apparently have nothing better to do than to terrorize middle school kids. Nothing about them feels particularly real to me, and it seems like they exist only to fulfill a plot purpose and to serve as a vague reminder that young men with histories like Milo’s can grow up to be killers even without getting weird and vampiric about it.

The Transfiguration is an uneven film with an uncomfortably pessimistic ending, but it’s rescued by its insight into Vampire as monster and the way it leverages that insight to examine the human condition.

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

When Women Are the Bad Guys in YA Dystopian Films

This is a guest post by Jessamyn Neuhaus.

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains big spoilers if you have not seen the films Divergent, The Maze Runner, and The Giver. If you have not read the Hunger Games novels, it contains a major spoiler for Mockingjay Part 2.

Almost 100 years after first-wave feminists secured American women the right to vote, there is still a massive gender gap when it comes to political power in the United States. Consider our new 2015 Congress: a whopping 80 percent of our elected leaders in D.C. are men (oh, and 80 percent white and 92 percent Christian). That paltry 20 percent is ginormous compared to female American CEOs and top executives—5 percent at last count. Then there’s my personal favorite, the enduring tendency among college students to automatically give their male professors better evaluations than female professors. When it comes to wielding real political, economic, and cultural authority over other people, many Americans still seem to assume that the person in charge should also wield a penis.

Popular culture reinforces, and challenges, the notion that if a woman achieves a leadership position, there must be something suspect, something unfeminine, about her. TV and movies remain chockablock with depressingly conventional depictions of women in power: bitchy and/or oversexed bosses, ball-busting iron maidens, and professionally-successful-but-personally-a-mess singletons. However, at the same time, women are also far more equally represented alongside men in cinematic offices of power than in real life. Catch any random Law and Order episode and you will see successful and influential female attorneys, detectives, police officers, judges, politicians, doctors, and business professionals in action. Heck, on TV women are not only Secretary of State, but also Vice President and even POTUS. I, for one, would immigrate immediately to any nation where Alfre Woodard is giving the executive orders.

Of all the genres that could envisage a world of more complete gender equality, science fiction seems like our best bet. After all, life has got to be better a few hundred years from now, right? Not according to American entertainment, where the future is always dystopian, not utopian. In our movies, TV, and fiction, the world to come is inevitably a hellish urban wilderness or a post-apocalyptic badland plagued by vampires, viruses, aliens, malevolent robots, or ecological disasters.

YA dystopian fiction in particular is having its moment right now. Last year saw the release of at least four dystopian films based on young adult fiction containing some pretty dire visions of future societies. All four featured an almost identical female leader character. She’s coldly calculating, middle aged, icily beautiful, and a villainess—or, at the very least, a highly misguided leader whose blind devotion to a rigidly depersonalized or somehow “perfected” world forms the basis of the conflict with the main characters. In Divergent, Kate Winslet plays Jeanine Matthews, Erudite faction leader; Ava Paige is the head scientist of W.I.C.K.E.D. and played by Patricia Clarkson in The Maze Runner; Meryl Streep plays the Chief Elder in The Giver; and President Alma Coin is played by Julian Moore in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and Part 2 (coming in 2015).

Now, on the one hand, you gotta admire a movie employing any one of these talented actors. Even though they are all A-listers, because they are over 34 years old these four women will earn less and be offered fewer parts in Hollywood than their male counterparts. Also, there’s something to be said for simply seeing a powerful female character in a leadership role. As Amanda Rodriguez writes in a Bitch Flicks post about Julian Moore’s character in Mockingjay Part 1, “this embodiment of a nontraditional representation of matriarchy in Coin is refreshing. She is decisive, smart, calm when under attack, and always thinking about the greater good of the people.”

President Coin, rocking an awesome hairdo that celebrates the gray.

But on the other hand, there’s a troubling trend here, because four movies in one year definitely counts as a trend. All of these future worlds are shaped and influenced by beautiful but heartless middle aged women who rule over a dehumanized dystopia with an immaculate but totally iron fist. In Mockingjay Part 1, Julian Moore’s President Coin is leading the rebellion and although she’s ruthless, she’s one of the good guys. But WARNING! BIG SPOILER HERE in the final chapters of the novel Mockingjay we learn that in her own grab for unlimited power, Coin callously facilitated the death of Prim, Katniss’s beloved sister, and blamed it on the Capitol. Presumably, Part 2 will include this big reveal, and Coin will then join the ranks of dystopian female fanatical leaders depicted in The Giver, The Maze Runner, and Divergent.

Meryl Streep’s Chief Elder character in The Giver is not as overtly evil, but her insistence on the rigid eradication of human individuality and free will to maintain peace and order in “the community” is definitely creepy and makes her the very bad guy in charge. In one pivotal scene, we learn that the policies Chief Elder enforces are so mercilessly conformist that even a young infant who fails to live up to certain standards of behavior will be dispassionately dispatched down a bad baby chute to oblivion.

The Chief Elder will eliminate pesky human individuality and free will.

Patricia Clarkson’s Ava Paige in Maze Runner is a hazy figure in the main characters’ flashbacks, until LAST WARNING, I MEAN IT, SPOILER AHEAD a scrappy band of teenagers escapes the maze and discovers that Paige is the head scientist/leader of the sinister scientific organization that imprisoned them in the maze in the first place. Paige claims that she did it in order to test a possible cure-all for the disease/ecological apocalypse threatening human existence. For a minute it seems that Paige is the ruthless but brilliant scientist who stops at nothing to save the world, even shooting herself at the end of her video message in the ultimate sacrifice to the cause. But no. She appears in one last scene, calmly wiping the fake blood off her face and announcing the commencement of…Phase Two. Bwahahahaha!

The Divergent villainess played by Kate Winslet is similarly cavalier with human lives, orchestrating a takeover by the relentlessly logical Erudite faction that begins with a planned mass extermination of all men, women, and children in the peace-loving Abnegation faction. Because, um, nothing’s more bloodcurdling than an intimidating perimenopausal woman in a chic suit who values brains more than abnegation? So it seems. Rodriguez writes in her Bitch Flicks post reviewing Divergent: “I’m frankly so tired of the cold, fanatic female villain trope.” (She also points out that this trope is not unique to YA-based dystopias, citing Jodie Foster’s 2013 turn as Delacourt in Elysium.) Rodriguez rightly asks of Divergent: “Is it claiming that cold, intelligent women are the problem? Are they the purveyors of this dysfunctional culture? If so, for which real world social ill is the post-apocalyptic world of Divergent a stand-in? What problematic mechanism of power does this sci-fi series seek to illuminate?”

Unfortunately, I don’t think these four “cold, intelligent women” are illuminating “problematic mechanisms of power” at all. Rather, they are expressions of the persistent distrust of female authority in our current culture. These characters serve as a type of sexist shorthand for a society gone terribly, terribly wrong. Though not necessarily the sole “purveyors of this dysfunctional culture,” their pitiless rule symbolizes just how bad it’s gotten, because when women hold the kind of power and authority that renders them coldblooded killers, there’s something awfully amiss. But it’s essential to note that we’re talking here only about the power and authority of older, non-motherly, women. In these films, it’s perfectly all right, nay, imminently laudable, for women to kick ass and flex their muscles and be all empowered—as long as they are teenagers. If your boobs are still high and firm and your skin youthful and dewy, why, there’s nothing more attractive than leading the rebellion or fighting your way to freedom.

Snark aside, two of the youthful female protagonists in these films are pretty great. Calling attention to some of the problematic aspects of these films certainly doesn’t erase the positive features. Katniss is one of the most interesting female pop culture characters in recent years and is played by an extremely talented young woman who has chosen a range of nuanced roles—all hail Jennifer Lawrence! Shailene Woodley’s protagonist in Divergent is not bad either, casting off her namby-pamby Abnegation name “Beatrice” for gender-bending “Tris”; doggedly training at bare knuckle fighting; and eventually bringing a mad conspiracy to its knees (kinda with the strength of her devoted love for the young hero, but it’s YA, so they get a pass there). Even the tiresome helpmeet-to-the-hunky-hero female teenage characters in The Giver and Maze Runner are relatively strong and capable and not particularly cringe-inducing (though in her Bitch Flicks post Megan Kearns accurately points out that The Maze Runner exemplifies the Smurfette Principle).

So what’s with those other female characters, the Ice Queens of the future? If the teenage women can be heroes, why do the militant extremists running these four YA dystopias have to be older women? The novelists who created these characters and the filmmakers who brought them to the screen are demonstrating that despite the many gains we’ve made toward gender equality, we’re still stuck with rigidly defined ideals of femininity for women over 40—and those ideals do not include attaining professional positions of power. That old favorite, the Madonna/whore dichotomy, takes a contemporary dystopian twist here. The older female characters embody a mom/megalomaniacal dictator dichotomy, in which the acceptable roles for middle aged women appear to be limited to either the mother of the protagonist or deranged antagonist, drunk with power and out for world domination.

In my book Housework and Housewives in American Advertising I discuss how the “new momism” (identified by Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels in The Mommy Myth) shapes contemporary gender norms and advertising, and I wrote about it in another Bitch Flicks post. Although Americans have long idealized motherhood, the new momism of our era is the basis for a freshly insidious ideology that subtly but persistently demarcates parenting as women’s (unpaid) work—in fact, women’s best and only really valuable work. The villains of these four dystopias are the antithesis of good mothers. They are a direct and active threat to the teenage protagonists. And, it’s very clearly implied, what could possibly be more disconcerting? More dystopian? These disturbing versions of future dehumanized societies suggest that a middle aged female head of state is particularly chilling.

Interestingly, the mothers of the main characters do appear in The Giver and Divergent and throughout the Hunger Games. In The Giver, Katie Holmes plays the mother character, who’s an emotionless adherent to the dehumanizing rules that govern “the community.” Paula Malcomson as Katniss’ mother in The Hunger Games is not such a stooge of the regime, and joins the rebellion in the capacity of a healer, but when the trilogy begins, she’s willing to comply with the requirements of the Hunger Games and offer her daughter for possible sacrifice. She has virtually no impact on Katniss’ life by the end of Mockingjay—she’s just a minor character.

Ashley Judd’s mother character, Natalie, plays a bigger role in the plot of Divergent. The piously humble Abnegation paragon Natalie reveals at a crucial point that she is divergent like her daughter and possesses all the fighting ability and fearlessness of the Dauntless faction. But Natalie exercises this power in a completely mom-appropriate way. Natalie only reveals her abilities in order to save daughter Tris from certain death at the hands of the Erudites. Then Natalie sacrifices her own life in a gun battle to keep Tris safe. She’s the total and complete opposite of Jeanine Matthews. The casting and wardrobe is instructive as well, with baby-faced Judd as the mom in sackcloth serving as a dramatic contrast to chilly blonde razor-edged power suited Winslet as the anti-mom.

This is what a good mom looks like. — This is what a *good* mom looks like.

It’s no coincidence that the laws of these four dystopias, which are led by four really scary bitches, trash the most sacred of familial bonds. Quite literally, in the case of the baby chute in The Giver. These worlds feature dehumanizing regulations, brutal power regimes that keep the masses broken and victimized, and/or rigid emotionless policies that heartlessly separate mother and child. They conform to the most exaggerated stereotypes of what will happen when women who don’t know that their real place is in the home caring for their children start prowling the halls of power. What happens when women take charge? What happens when moms can’t be moms? Or, worse yet, choose not to be? Just the end of the world, that’s all.

Obviously, the scenario of mom-aged women not being good moms holds particular significance for a YA audience. I’m no Freudian but as a college teacher, the mother of a fourteen year old son, and a former teenager myself, I can attest to the fact that many adolescents and young adults experience a mostly unconscious fear of/highly conscious burning desire to be on their own and to do it without parental interference. It’s a pretty standard stage of emotional development, and the source of a great deal of conflict between parents and their teenagers. Not that I’ve been reading any parenting advice books about this or anything.

To some extent, this may help explain the almost identical villainesses in Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Giver, and Mockingjay. In the YA dystopian landscape, the cruel mom-aged woman in charge adds to the terror and thrill of fighting your way to freedom. In Divergent, the teen protagonist Tris defeats Kate Winslet’s Matthews in hand to hand combat, finally defeating Matthews with—oh irony!—the same mind-control drug Matthews used to enslave the Dauntless faction to do her evil bidding. In Katniss’s case, the betrayal of Julianne Moore’s President Coin is the final push Katniss needs to instigate the climax of the Hunger Games series. To truly free her people, Katniss must defeat this cold surrogate of a mother figure. Meryl Streep’s Chief Elder in The Giver, a softer villain, is moved to tears by the new knowledge she gains of human connection. Her crying clearly shows her evolution toward a more appropriately female emotional responses. Meanwhile, we have to wait and see what’s to become of Patricia Clarkson’s Wicked Witch of W.I.C.K.E.D. until the next installment in The Maze Runner franchise.

But although the defeat of the powerful anti-mother may appeal in some developmental, metaphorical way to many teenage consumers, it is also clearly infused with broader social and cultural fears about women in power. These characters markedly reinforce our wider unconscious and consciously accepted assumptions about who should be in charge in politics, in business, in the college classroom, and just about everywhere else. To solely see these dystopian villainesses as archetypes in the psychosomatic journey to adulthood doesn’t take into account the specific time and place and culture that produced them and the very real ways gender bias shapes actual power distribution in today’s United States. A fictional world depicting a powerful female leader as an unfeminine antifamily power-hungry bitch looks way too much like our real world, where powerful female leaders are often depicted as…you know.

I’m not saying the bad guys in dystopian fictions should always be, well, guys. Nor am I arguing that all evil female fictional characters should be subject to rigorous feminist deconstruction. Sometimes a villainess is just a villainess. But I do want to suggest that we have a problem when the bad guys in four widely read and viewed YA dystopias are, across the board and uniformly, supposed to be especially frightening because they so blatantly contradict what women of a certain age should be. They reiterate and reinforce the notion that nothing could be more dystopian than a mother-aged woman who doesn’t act motherly. Fear of the future? No, the same old fear that still shapes how Americans vote and learn and hire and live: fear of a woman in charge and in power.

Jessamyn Neuhaus is a professor U.S. history and popular culture at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the author of Housework and Housewives in American Advertising: Married to the Mop (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).