At this very moment, I’m traveling towards Copenhagen airport to fly back home after being an exchange student in Sweden for 5 months. I’m excited to go back home but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to post something on my blog today – responsibilities people, responsibilities. So, as some of you might remember, I posted part 1 of “Downfall of comedies” on Wednesday and promised to talk more about the overall process of mistreating the characters and especially focusing on women. As I already mentioned in my post about romantic comedies, I’m not happy how female characters are nowadays being portrayed.
With all those humiliating situation described, such as bodily liquids, cursing and god-knows-what, I feel as if it is even more offensive when that kind of behavior is put upon a female character. As if making them desperate for love and incapable of being successful and happy at the same time isn’t enough, now in top of it all, they are stupid as fuck! Yes, I said “fuck”, which is a word I try to avoid in my blog but I can’t describe this situation without using this specific multifunctional curse word. It’s just so annoying, it is actually unbelievable how many stupid things women do in movies nowadays, and not just the stupid characters like the Playboy blondie from House Bunny, but also the smart ones like Kirsten Dunst’s character in Bachelorette. Obviously, she isn’t the best example of being smart but she was among her group the closest to a person of intelligence and yet, things she did were complete disasters.
Another factor that comes to mind when thinking about women in comedies is now the “cat-fight” or the constitutional need to add girlfriend dramas into the mix of comedies. Everybody, let’s think back to some of the latest comedies revolving around girls doing outrageous things over something specific – the number one premises of the latest comedies I can recall from the top of my head is a wedding! The Hangover started it, Bride Wars, Bridesmaids and Bachelorette followed – while the first focused on making men look like cavemen, the following movies made female relationships look like a pile of horror. Honestly, the fact that all the bridesmaids in Bachelorette hated Rebel Wilson’s character, or at least were focused on only portraying a dislike towards her, raised an important matter.
One thing is showing women incapable of coping with their own lives, something romantic comedies have been doing ever since I can remember, but the other is showing them off as evil beings who mistreat other women. Of course, it is an essential factor in real life but those comedies I mentioned deal all with friendships between these women! Therefore, these women should love one another not try to ruin their wedding day or destroy a party of your best friend – I would never treat my friends like that, so why should movie characters do those things? Before you tell me that all that screaming and yelling and slapping is funny, I would say that it’s funny to a point where it becomes humiliating and that pretty much happens almost right away, for me at least.
My criticism might be based on subjective feelings towards the portrayal of female characters in comedies but not all those feelings are negative. One of the best examples of a strong female character, who in her very core is not mistreated by any means, is Olivie from Easy A. She shows that making mistakes is okay, she also proves that telling the truth isn’t that bad and though she and her friend have a fight, they don’t start purposely ruining their lives or crash their parties to throw things. And let’s be honest, that comedy is funny and no mistreated female characters were needed to make that movie happen. Though the role Amanda Bynes might have taken things too overboard but that in some ways also comes down to acting.
Ending this post will be hard, because I could go on and on about things that bother me with female characters, not just in comedies, but also in many other films including TV. As I have tried to start watching Girls, I can’t get over the horror I witnessed in the first episode. There is something about that leading character that I can’t grasp and it feels as if the writer herself mistreats the “underdog” character to a point where she feels uncomfortable. But who am I to say what Girls is all about, I haven’t even been able to get past its first episode! Anyway, to rally up these thoughts, I would like to hear your opinions on female characters, especially from ladies and maybe even from men, because while women are mistreated as characters, men always seem to like them in the movies. As if being stupid as fuck but meanwhile hot, makes you so irresistible to the opposite sex.
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