By Zoë and Marisa.

WARNING: Spoilers for Blade Runner 2049.

Blade Runner 2049, the long-awaited sequel to the cult classic Blade Runner (1982), has been praised by critics for its cinematography, special effects and bold philosophical concepts. However, during our viewing, its representation of women was cause for a large amount of eye-rolling. At risk of being feminist killjoys at the party of gushing praise for this film, we just couldn’t let this slide. 2049’s representation of women is tiresome, disappointing and unoriginal. The women of 2049 are solely defined in relation to men, written as tired stereotypes without any depth. This is evident not just through the limited character development of individual women, but also the broader representation of women in this film as objects for decoration and the male gaze.

Blade Runner 2049 (source)

Blade Runner 2049’s female characters are one-dimensional archetypes, and with a couple of exceptions (we’ll get to those later), 2049’s female characters perfectly express the limited thinking of the virgin-whore (or Madonna-whore) dichotomy. First coined by Sigmund Freud, the Madonna-whore dichotomy was a complex held by men who could not maintain sexual arousal in a loving relationship, although they could with mistresses. The problem, Freud determined, was that these men divided women into two categories: pure, virginal Madonnas and sexually voracious ‘whores’. Because the man views sex as something to do with devalued women, he can’t do it with a woman he loves. The virgin-whore dichotomy is still evident today in culture. And it is this way of thinking -- that women are either pure or slutty -- that permeates 2049. As Ruby Hamad writes, conceptualizing women this way negates “the idea of sex [as] simply something that a woman does, like eating a meal or wash her hair, rather it becomes the thing that defines her.” Crucially, it defines her in relation to men, and how her sexuality impacts them.

Let’s start with Mariette (Mackenzie Davis) the sex worker, a sort of dystopian Pretty Woman with shabby clothes, smudged eyeliner and flawless skin. She has sex with K (Ryan Gosling) after his girlfriend Joi recruits her, her blank face giving no hint of her desires as she undresses for him. The later reveal that she’s part of a replicant resistance movement had the potential to elevate her from a fetishized caricature to a truly interesting character. However, the film quickly moves on from this revelation in favor of giving more screen-time to Jared Leto’s scenery-chewing.

Mackenzie Davis and some of the women of Blade Runner 2049 (source)

On the flip side, we have Dr Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), pretty much the only woman in the film who doesn’t proposition, kiss, or engage sexually with K. She also has a complete lack of autonomy, having been trapped in a glass box since the age of eight because of an illness. Waif-like and dressed all in white, she cries silently, the very image of purity. She’s clearly brilliant and skilled, but the main focus is her connection to Deckard (Harrison Ford). Dr Ana, a woman who apparently managed to get a PhD while living inside a glass box, is reduced to what’s most important: her relation to a man.

Rachel (Sean Young), the lead female character from the original film, is a clear Madonna here: she conceives a baby miraculously, through the power of true love. (An eye-rolling cliché, and a surprise to many who watched Blade Runner. Sexual violence and lack of other options can turn into true love, girls!). Once she’s fulfilled her duty by giving birth, she’s no longer needed. The reappearance of Rachel in 2049 would have been thrilling. But why do that, when you could stuff her in a fridge off-screen to fuel Deckard’s emotional angst?

Finally, we have holographic Joi (Ana de Armas), the male-fantasy FitBit who serves (literally) as K’s girlfriend. Joi is sweet and demure, but she’s also sexy. But rather than being a three-dimensional character, she inhabits these traits at K’s whim: she’s literally his fantasy. She switches between forms of femininity depending on what he wants, inhabiting what feminist Robin Morgan calls “the unbeatable Madonna-whore combination”.^[1]  When she brings Mariette over for sex, she tells K she’s doing it because she feels bad that she can’t have sex with him. There’s no active sexual desire for him, just an expression of guilt. Whether she’s a 1950s-style housewife or dresses more revealingly, Joi remains passive.

Joi and K (source)

In fact, what all the above-mentioned characters have in common is their passivity. Not only are they constrained by social structures, glass boxes or software, they’re largely blank slates. We get no sense of what they want or feel. They want whatever K wants, whatever suits him. 2049 may sort its female characters into narrow categories based on their sexuality, but at least they all have something in common: whether virginal daughters, dead mothers or devoted girlfriends, their defining feature is how they relate to the men of the film.

While not all of the female characters in Blade Runner 2049 fit into these narrow categories, and not all of them are passive, the female characters who actually exhibit some agency aren’t necessarily more complex or better-written characters. The female characters that don’t fit into ‘virgin’, ‘whore’ or ‘Madonna’ still exist clearly in relation to men. Let’s start with Luv (whose name we had to Google as when we were writing this article we realized the female characters’ names just weren’t memorable). Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) is a classically masculine ideal of what a ‘strong’ female character should be, but her passion and determination to succeed in her task are only present because her boss, Wallace (Jared Leto), has deemed this mission to be vital. Her sole purpose is to fulfill the orders of Wallace, and she meets her end carrying out this mission. Her badass aura and get the job done attitude portrays her as practical and logical, stereotypically masculine traits. However, we must still be reminded of her womanhood, demonstrated through the shot of her controlling highly powerful weapons whilst simultaneously getting a manicure. Luv’s active and disciplined characteristics mask her submission to Wallace.

Hoeks as Luv (source)

In hope for some redemption of this film’s poor female representation, let’s move on to the head of the LAPD, who had the potential to be a fully autonomous female character. Lieutenant Joshi’s (Robin Wright) power in her role cannot be denied. She is the head of a whole police task force, which apart from her, is very male dominated. It is great to see a strong female character in an important role. However, one night she visits K in his apartment, and talking about work leads to her attempting to seduce him. This unnecessary pass at K undermines Joshi’s professionalism. Rather than having a sexuality of her own, Joshi’s sexuality exists only in relation to K. It feeds into a male fantasy that assumes almost every female character is interested in K sexually. Competition between the women in this film is a recurring theme and reiterates that a large part of their characterization is reliant on men. Both Luv and Joshi show a level of agency and authority, but it is only exemplified through participating in stereotypically masculine acts of violence and domination. Luv’s violent persona, and Joshi’s casual attitude towards killing anyone the LAPD needs dead, demonstrate again a level of one-dimensional character development that reinforces a misconception that if a woman does anything a man does, she is empowered. To be a woman in 2049 is to be either passive and docile, or active and violent, neither of which encapsulates the true potential of female empowerment.

The way that individual female characters are represented in 2049 is completely reflective of the attitudes towards women as a gender, and the film portrays them as sex objects for male benefit. Objectification of the female body is nothing new in Hollywood, and in this film we see it so blatantly time and time again. In the birth scene, while Wallace delivers a monologue detailing his drive to find a way for reproduction in replicants, a naked female body is hanging from the ceiling in the background. The camera pans around the room, often following Wallace, with the hanging body decorating the frame. It could be argued that this nakedness is being used to symbolize the natural process of birth. However, Wallace’s behavior sexualizes her naked state by kissing the woman, before slicing her stomach open. The camera lingers on her blood-covered thighs, further eroticizing her murder. The whole scene demonstrates a female body being used for dramatic effect and then discarded.

In the scene where K arrives in the deserted vast landscape, the frame is full of large, broken sections of female statues. Fragmented body parts, high heeled shoes, and sexualized open mouth poses are some of the formations of the statues, with no context given; another use of the sexualized female body as decoration in the mise-en-scene. Later, the scene of K looking at the advertisement for Joi, an enormous naked female body accompanied by the slogan “anything you want to hear”, demonstrates that more than just her nakedness is commodified. A product to be bought, in the form of a woman, that is interchangeable, submissive, and of course, sexualized. Then there’s the scene establishing a brothel, where exaggerated sex sounds are heard. The camera pans across a number of women, reduced to silhouettes and shadows, hands against the wall, all the same, while simultaneously highlighting the invisibility of the men. Repetition alludes to their lack of individuality; fragmenting body parts evokes an image of broken and fractured women. Objectification reduces the human body to an object. Feminists have long argued that once objectified, it is easier for violence to be carried out on that body^[2] and objectification in itself is a violent and dehumanizing act.^[3] The representation of the female body collectively in 2049 demonstrates how this fictional dystopian culture views women as subordinate, reflecting our own contemporary society.

An easy rebuttal to this analysis might be, “but it’s a dystopia”. In an overpopulated, impoverished world full of suffering, is it ridiculous to expect truly empowered female characters? Surely in a dystopia it makes more sense for the women to be downtrodden and oppressed?

While it’s true that the dystopian setting justifies the oppressed position of women, this doesn’t rationalize 2049’s lazy treatment of female characters. Perhaps you’ve heard of a show called The Handmaid’s Tale? Like 2049, it depicts a world steeped in misogyny, where women are valued only for how they can serve men. Unlike 2049, it shows us the women’s perspectives, allowing the audience to learn their motivations and desires. Even women who aren’t protagonists in The Handmaid’s Tale are given rich characterizations. The script presents them as more than mere objects, even though that’s how the show’s universe sees them. 2049 could have done the same, rather than the script reinforcing the women’s subordinate position. By showcasing trapped and constrained women, but not affording them motivations or wants that aren’t catering to men, the film reinforces sexism rather than condemning it. A scene of giant pornographic statues in the desert isn’t a condemnation of the objectification of women: when it’s presented without irony or commentary, it’s just objectification.

Blade Runner 2049 ultimately both reflects and reinforces sexist views of women. By presenting female characters who only exist in relation to men and playing into the tired stereotypes of virgin/whore/Madonna, the film shows no interest in the personhood of women. Furthermore, by showing women as only passive and vulnerable, or dominant and violent, the film suggests they can only become empowered by exerting control over others. In conjunction with the endless objectification of the female body, this portrayal of women is tiresome and disappointing. While it aims to show us what the future could look like, this film, through its script and mise-en-scene, inadvertently emphasizes the misogyny of our present.

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^[1] Carina Chocano, You Play The Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Princesses, Trainwrecks and Other Man-Made Men, (United States: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 9.

^[2] Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: discourses on life and law (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), 138.

^[3] Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, (London: Women’s Press, 1981), 109

This post appears on Bitch Flicks. It is cross-posted with permission. 


By Zoë

When I saw the trailer for Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016), my first thought was, “Why do I feel so afraid?” I was unsurprised then, to discover that the woman behind the music was Mica Levi, who composed the score to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). After seeing Jackie, it occurred to me the two films that Levi has composed music for have more in common than it initially appears. Under the Skin is a sci-fi angle on the femme fatale, where Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who seduces and kills men in Scotland. Jackie is the Oscar-ready biopic of Jackie Kennedy, centred on a masterfully emotive performance by Natalie Portman. Yet both films feature women who are lost, distanced from others and profoundly alone. Those around them cannot understand them, and so they are alienated. It is the haunted feeling of such alienation that Levi’s scores illuminate.

Johansson’s alien in Under the Skin is of course the more literal embodiment of alienation. She blankly visits human settings such as shopping centres and nightclubs, never sure of how to arrange her face to fit in with those around her. She lacks human empathy, illustrated starkly in a scene where she leaves a baby on a beach with a tide coming in. When she experiences sex with a human man, she is so overwhelmed that she flees. Levi’s score is fittingly otherworldly, pulsing with unidentifiable noises, the viola screeching like a wounded animal. It’s utterly unlike other film scores, giving the audience no easy emotional cues. The nails-on-chalkboard discomfort it conjures makes audible the colossal distance between the alien and humanity. One cannot relax when listening to the score, instead feeling a constant sense of dread at what this unknowable creature might do next.

Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin

This constant dread, this grim unease, are present also in Levi’s score for Jackie. Jackie, in contrast to the alien, is utterly, familiarly human. Her grief and trauma over her husband’s death is the bedrock of the narrative. The audience knows how she feels, due to Portman’s highly expressive face. Jackie is also privileged, famous and powerful. But as the narrative demonstrates how quickly Jackie loses her power, Levi’s score highlights the instability of Jackie’s world in the aftermath of her husband’s death. The score is more lush and regal than the score for Under the Skin, in part because there’s an orchestra and in part to reflect the high-class American world that Jackie inhabits. But the discomfort that Levi brought to Under the Skin is present in Jackie, too. Many times when the score begins, it sounds light, almost cheerful, before being undercut by low, ominous strings that lurk obtrusively in the background. The result is a feeling of disturbance, that something familiar and romantic has been polluted by a grim terror.

Natalie Portman in Jackie

Just as Under the Skin showed how Scotland was a completely foreign world to the alien, Jackie displays how the First Lady losing her title and home throws her into a world that’s entirely unfamiliar. Visually, this is represented through particular, subtle moments: the look of shock on Jackie’s face when Lyndon B. Johnson is greeted as “Mr President” hours after JFK’s death; the camera lingering on Lady Bird Johnson picking out new White House curtains while Jackie watches, unseen. Jackie is constantly filmed on her own, without even the presence of bodyguards or servants to lessen the impression of her alienation. Her friendship with her assistant, Nancy, is shown to be of great value to her, but the film’s repeated shots of a solitary Jackie make clear that she feels cut off from everyone around her. In the film’s final minutes, a happy sequence of her playing on the beach with her children is concluded with a close-up of her grief-stricken face, and her children out of the frame. Then, she sits alone on the couch while the Life interviewer talks on the phone. Then, at the burial of JFK, she stands starkly apart from everyone else. The final shot is of her dancing at a party in JFK’s arms, placing her feelings of joy and belonging firmly in the past.

Angelica Jade Bastién writes that Jackie uses horror movie techniques to illustrate Jackie’s grief. Levi’s score is an integral part of this, the relentless, ominous strings suggesting that life has changed for Jackie in a most terrifying way. When she finally returns to the White House from Dallas, the score is fundamentally eerie, sadness undercut with grim foreboding. It’s a score suited to a dangerous expedition into unknown territory, rather than a return home. Levi’s score communicates what doesn’t need to be said through dialogue; the White House isn’t home anymore, and Jackie’s power has disappeared with her First Lady title. The terror of being cut off from a familiar world, and the subsequent alienation, are made salient in Levi’s grim, uncomfortable music.

The alien in Under the Skin has no possessions apart from her classic predator’s white van, and the outfit she chooses to resemble the common woman. Although dressed in the finest of outfits, Jackie finds herself similarly dispossessed, telling the Life reporter that the White House and her current house never belonged to her. “Nothing’s mine, not for keeps anyway,” she tells him. Separated from the home planet or the White House, both women are anchorless, adrift. Even when surrounded by revellers in metropolitan Glasgow, or watched by thousands at her husband’s funeral, the alien and Jackie remain fundamentally alone. Haunted by their inability to connect with others, to slot in to this world, they stand lost and detached. Jackie’s deeply emotional outbursts may stand in stark contrast to the alien’s lack of empathy, but both women share a troubling alienation from the people around them. Levi’s scores make this alienation audible, the grim discomfort of her music allowing the audience to feel, even for 90 minutes, the terror of such a solitude. 

By Zoë

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Carol was beautiful. While watching it in the cinema, I wanted to throw myself through the screen and into Carol and Therese’s world. Cate Blanchett as Carol was intoxicating, and it wasn’t hard to understand how Rooney Mara’s Therese could fall in love with her. It felt like a revelation to see a film about lesbians that was both exquisitely made and featured a happy ending.

On Monday, during the Oscars ceremony, Chris Rock referred to Carol as the “third best” “girl-on-girl movie” he’d seen this year.

When I heard that, I cringed. Because here was a movie I had loved not just as a cinemagoer, but as a bisexual woman. Carol, for me, captured the beauty and terror of being a woman attracted to a woman, something I’ve experienced. I saw myself reflected in Therese. So when Chris Rock referred to the film as “girl-on-girl”, linking it to lesbian pornography, I too felt denigrated.

It was shame that I felt, a feeling well known to same-sex attracted women. In fact, you can see this shame depicted in Carol. In the scene where Therese first meets Carol at the department store, her attraction to the older woman is instant. But immediately after her wide-eyed, starstruck attraction, Mara depicts Therese’s confusion, her anxiety over what she has just felt. Did I just feel that? Surely not. But she’s a woman. I can’t feel that way about a woman. In Therese’s flushed cheeks and nervous gestures is not just the delightful shock of being attracted to someone, but the panicked confusion of attraction that is taboo. How could I feel that? What’s wrong with me?

 Cate Blanchett (left) as Carol and Rooney Mara (right) as Therese in Carol

Both the film’s director, Todd Haynes, and writer, Phyllis Nagy, are openly gay. Together they capture same-sex attraction with all of its complicated emotions: wonder, joy, confusion, fear, shame. With Carol, I saw for a film that represented lesbian love as being as valid as any other romance, while also acknowledging its separate challenges. I saw represented on screen the feelings I too have known, the shame I too have felt.

Carol is of course set in a different world to our own. Lesbians and bi women obviously face significantly less oppression now than they did then. But the shame still persists because the prejudice against us does. Every time I mention being bisexual, no matter how liberal the company, it is prefaced by at least thirty seconds of anxiety. Because for every ten situations where it is accepted without question, there is one that goes badly: The date who immediately asked me if I’d ever had a threesome, the friend’s father who called me a “dyke”, the middle-aged man who propositioned 17-year-old me and asked if I could “turn straight” for him. These instances are rare, and without doubt, others have it much worse. I am lucky. But these rare instances are the ones that haunt me, that make the words catch in my throat the next time around.

Chris Rock’s remark is yet another comment that brings that shame to the fore. It’s a reminder that female same-sex attraction is mocked and fetishized, still, in 2016. Even when it occurs within an elegant, romantic, critically-acclaimed film, lesbian sexuality is discussed as something hyper-sexual, seedy, pornified. The description “girl-on-girl” suggests that our very identity is a porn category. Apparently, we still cannot find other women attractive without lecherous men assuming it is for their benefit.

Mara and Blanchett in Carol

When Therese reacted with shame over her attraction towards Carol, I first felt amazed: here was my experience reflected up on the big screen, in a mainstream movie, by an A-list actress. Here was the rapid heartbeat and sweating palms, the confusion, the incredulousness that you could be attracted to her. I am so thankful to Haynes and Nagy for representing this, for allowing all the lesbians and bi girls still wracked by insecurity to feel a little less alone. But at the same time, I’m immensely sad that we still feel this shame felt sixty years ago. We are still made to feel ashamed, and we should not.

Our sexuality still cannot exist on its own terms. It is bound on all sides: by politics, by societal prejudice, by the leers of men who think they’re far cleverer than they are. When Chris Rock called Carol “girl-on-girl”, I felt that shame, that feeling that there is something inherently weird and exotic about our sexuality. That it is something to be gawked at and sexualised by spectators. Society has evolved greatly since the time period of Carol. Things are definitely much better than they are. But while comments like Rock’s persist, shame, the legacy of our deviant existence, lives on. 

By Zoë

Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. It’s hard to dispute that the two films were both critical and commercial successes. Furthermore, they both achieved this while featuring well-written, complex female leads.

Both films could be considered ‘feminist’ in that they starred female characters who were not sexual objects, were multi-dimensional, and whose narrative arcs didn’t revolve solely around men. However, Fury Road and The Force Awakens had completely different approaches to the representation of gender and sex, and I want to explore this further.

In The ForceAwakens, gender does not matter. By which I mean, you could swap any of the male characters to female, or vice versa, and they would remain largely the same. The plucky desert orphan with a knack for piloting could have been a man. The runaway Storm Trooper could have been a woman. The characters’ defining traits were their skills, their personalities and whether they were on the side of good or evil. This is excellent, in my opinion, because it sends the message that it’s not your gender that is important, but what you do. Considering the number of children who watched this film, it’s a wonderful message for them to absorb.

This ‘gender-blind’ approach is often utilised in science-fiction, a genre which, owing to its fantastical nature, can disregard the prejudices of our own society. Jane Espenson, a writer on shows including Firefly, summed it up thusly: “If we can’t write diversity into sci-fi, then what’s the point? You don’t create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.”

Fury Road, however, takes a completely different approach. In Fury Road, gender – or rather, sex – does matter. It matters entirely, because the oppressions faced by the women in Fury Road occur explicitly because they are women.

Sure, Furiosa is never treated differently because she’s a woman. There’s no holding back from Max when they fight each other, and Immortan Joe’s men respect her command until they realise she’s gone rogue. But let us be clear – Immortan Joe’s kingdom is a patriarchy. It is ruled by men, and women suffer from their abuse. The abuse of the women that Furiosa rescues cannot be separated from their status as women. They are raped and forced to bear children, kept in sexualised outfits and essentially treated as chattel. Their inferior status is inscribed upon their female bodies. You could not swap the characters from male to female and retain George Miller’s highly political message about the abuse of women.

While The Force Awakens eschews gender politics, Fury Road confronts them head-on. The heroes of The Force Awakens fight the Dark Side, the heroes of Fury Road fight the patriarchy. They escape male oppression and search for a female-only utopia. Furiosa is a member of the “Vulvalini”, honestly.

I enjoyed both films immensely, as a film-lover and as a feminist. The difference was, The Force Awakens made me forget about sexism for two hours. (What a glorious two hours that was.) Fury Road demanded that I think about it. When it comes to gender equality, The Force Awakens shows us a world we’d like to live in. Fury Road, by contrast, shows us a representation of the world we live in now and just how devastating it is.

The oppression of women is an issue that we all need to be paying attention to. So thank-you, Fury Road, for making it the focus of a big, popular film. But sometimes, thinking about it all is unbearable. So thank-you, too, The Force Awakens, for giving us a fantasy to escape into. When it comes to female-centric films, we need both kinds. 

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Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is now showing in cinema.
Mad Max: Fury Road is nominated for Best Motion Picture at the 2016 Academy Awards. 

Cause a Cine do not take any credit for the images used in this post.