A Little Help From Manohla Dargis on What Women Want

"Like many women, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to move through the world. How to walk with confidence but not too much swing. How to stand with my shoulders back without sticking out my chest. How to smile, like a nice girl. How to cross my legs, like a lady. How to speak up, within reason. How to take up space but not too much. Yet I love watching women who take up space, who swagger and sometimes wildly crash."

That quote is the first paragraph of a recent article by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis and it is interesting in the context of writing fiction. How should women be depicted (much, of course, depends upon the era in which a story is set) and what do they want?

In a nutshell, Dargis wants to see women in action and the more extreme, the better. She's an advocate of what one might call "the alpha-female." As is the case with respect to the proverbial alpha-male -- a stock character of popular fiction -- the alpha-female is a person who exerts control over other people and her environment. She makes things happen and if people get in her way, they better have more physical clout than she has.

Among others, Dargis points to actress Charlize Theron who she praises for kicking butt "again and again" in "Atomic Blonde," an action thriller released in 2017, and who now stars in "The Old Guard," described by Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday as "a violent, fantastical action thriller about a group of supernatural mercenaries."

"The Old Guard" has recently received a lot of critical attention because it is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and as such, is said to be the first graphic, or comic book-based, film directed by a black woman.

The secret power of the supernatural mercenaries is that they are impossible to kill -- sort of like kick-boxing cockroaches, one suspects.

One of things Dargis said she liked to watch on YouTube were stunt videos from action films centered on women.

"Only recently did I grasp that the behind-the-scenes videos I was looking at were showing women kicking and punching their way to different kinds of female representation," she said.

This is in sharp contrast to women of the relatively recent past.

"In the films I saw growing up in the 1970s, including those from the classical era, women didn’t register as especially physical unless they were swimming, riding a horse or dancing, like Eleanor Powell and Ginger Rogers, whose athleticism was bound up with the feminine ideals of their era. Women in movies — the stars, at any rate, the desirable and desiring ones — were elegant, small, tidy and contained, even at their curviest," Dargis said.

"And then," she continued, "there was Shelley Winters, whose heroic swim in the 1972 disaster flick 'The Poseidon Adventure' destroyed me. Her matronly Belle, a former competitive swimmer, takes the plunge to save the leading man. She succeeds but dies."

We're all familiar with the objectification of women -- the male gaze. But it seems women can objectify women as well.

Here's Dargis again:

"There’s a potent feminist critique that women have long been made to be looked at for male pleasure in movies and elsewhere. But women also look, and the female gaze always complicates that dynamic. Winters’s big, powerful, fish-pale thighs complicated it for me."

There's more on that theme (the female gaze) in the article by Dargis plus and a lot more on how violence -- as brutal as possible -- becomes women. Who needs men at all, one begins to wonder, except perhaps as a punching bag when women aren't slugging it out with each other?

But back to "The Old Guard" and it's director.

In the above-referenced Washington Post article by Ann Hornaday, Prince Bythewood is quoted as that her identity as an African-American woman informed every decision she made, some of which involved making sure fight scenes were depicted from a different angle than the usual "white male gaze."

One scene in particular -- a fight between two women on a cargo plane -- was said to be particularly sensitive for the director.

"I didn't want anyone to look at that and say, 'That's a sexy cat fight' [as white, but not males of other races, apparently would]," Prince-Bythewood was quoted as saying. "No, I want you to see two badass women going toe-to-toe, but also see their vulnerability within that. Because for me that's what badass is: that swagger, that strength, but also empathy and vulnerability."

Anyway -- all of the above is offered by way of providing a few clues to help those interested in coming  up with a contemporary answer to the age-old question: "what do woman want?"