Book review: Women walking a new line on screen

This smart and thoughtful debut traces the evolution of female characters in media, from the earliest television shows, movies, and music to the present day examining the nuances of what it means to be a woman, on and off screen.

At its core, it challenges “the flawed formula that is rooted in bias” that deems those who are allowed both in art and in life “to be perceived as difficult, unruly, or unlikeable and get away with it”.

By celebrating the ascendancy of difficult female characters who are deemed by society to act improperly, it grapples with the interesting question of why there is often pressure on women, whether fictitious or real-life, to be likeable.

As the author muses, “Likeability is too silly a rulebook. It limits the characters and limits our imaginations”.

Anna Bogutskaya painstakingly documents the increased number of female characters in pop culture who are imperfect with “wants desires and flaws” like Fleabag in the eponymous television series, Villanelle in Killing Eve, Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Skyler White in Breaking Bad, and Shiv Roy in Succession.

This, she posits, smashes stereotypes and forces a much-needed conversation on the confines of being female.

She argues however that although there’s much talk about a new representation of women, and how suddenly being unlikeable as a female character has become a selling point, we still haven’t reached the point where ‘fictional women’ are given agency to be as “messy, flawed, or downright evil as fictional men without making it into a headline or a joke”. Greedy bastards, she writes, in movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, become poster boys for masculine enterprise.

“Ambitious women though are usually pitted against each other or shown to be unhappy in some aspect of their life.”

While being sold the notion of having it all — career, romance, health, family — the movies also tell us to settle down.

The lessons delivered in this book are important ones for young women. It is only through trying to understand ‘unlikeable’ female characters, who act in ways that are uncomfortable to watch, or go against the grain, that we can, in turn, understand ourselves, as women with all our fragilities and the bad choices we sometimes make.

Do we ever find male heroes ‘unlikeable’? The strong suspicion is that many young women are hungry for unlikeable female characters who make the wrong choices, who can be selfish, or careless, who demand attention on their terms, and unapologetically so and who go beyond the reductive expectations of what it means to be female.

This book would make a fabulous present (Christmas is just around the corner) for your Gen-Z female relative.

Bogutskaya rounds off her exploration by giving a long list of movies, from the 1930s to now, providing a jumping-off point for any reader wanting to do a deep dive into challenging, raw, complex, ‘unlikeable’ female characters.

She ends the book with a great quote from the actress Glenn Close, who throughout her career has played many villainous women, from Cruella de Ville to Alex in Fatal Attraction (a deeply misogynistic movie which spawned the phrase ‘bunny-boiler’): “The women I have played — other than Cruella — who have consistently been called ‘villains’ or ‘bitchy’ all have reasons for their behaviour. I’m not saying that their behaviour is always acceptable, but they exist in the grey areas of life where we all live.”

As her last word, Bogutskaya adds: “There’s no room for likeability in the grey areas of life, and there shouldn’t be any on our screens.” Quite so.