by Helen Jacey
If the heroine has an intimate relationship, the partner has a powerful impact on her self-esteem, good or bad. In Julie and Julia the male partners of Julie and Julia are supportive and loving, helping to build their partners up and getting involved with the quests. In The Holiday, the heroines’ dodgy relationships at least propel them to work on their emotional baggage.
Bad relationships are jettisoned by the heroine as her emotional wounds are resolved.
The heroine’s story doesn’t necessarily end with a union of the lovers or definite closure. Endings can feel quite open.
Internal Union, a sense of fulfilment, is a powerful layer of union at the end of her story
COMEDY
As relationships are so central to so many heroines’ stories, what about the straight-up female-led comedy? Are there any that don’t focus on the heroine’s relationship, either because she needs one and gets one (romantic comedy) or has one or wants one while she gets on with other things (dramantic comedy). Sometimes the writer’s need to add a relationship is not the right decision, because what would make a perfectly good comedy in its own right tries at the same time to be a romantic comedy Baby Mama and Confessions of a Shopaholic were both weaker because they had to cram a potential relationship on top of the heroine solving her major problem. Neither film felt like it knew what it really wanted to be, a romantic comedy or a comedy. They didn’t work as dramantic comedies either, because the relationships with men weren’t central enough, and they stuck too closely to the romantic comedy pattern of union only at the end. There are more pure comedies with older heroines (Calendar Girls and Tea with Mussolini) or school girls (St. Trinian’s). TV shows like Weeds and Ugly Betty are good examples where the comedy stays comedy.
There’s definitely a gap in the market for comedy movies with heroines. We need more Calendar Girls, for instance. What is the female equivalent of the bromance — a feminine dramance version of Thelma and Louise without the cliff plunge? Why are we so reluctant to make comedies for heroines that are just funny situations? Maybe we don’t always need a man.
Heroine Character Conventions in Comedy
The heroine’s relationships, if she has any, are minor in comparison to her main problem.
A group of heroines might lead the story
Comedy is derived from the heroine’s blind spot, which generates a lot of internal and external complications.
The heroine’s main problem gets solved at the end of the story, but not necessarily in the way the heroine expected it.
Because she’s not relationship orientated, she might be on a quest or accidentally find herself in a predicament she has to get out of, and fast.
THRILLER
Just like comedies, we need more solid thrillers with heroines. It’s rare for a heroine to have the solitary and dark persona that male heroes can have, instead, an overwhelming desire for vengeance is more common in the thriller heroine. Watch the South Korean Lady Vengeance for a heroine consumed with the need for retaliation. Very frequently, a thriller with a heroine will have secondary story of a relationship or quasi-love relationship. This is normally with a man, and there is a good chance he will have an active role in helping her at the end. We see this very often. Even in The Brave One, the heroine needs to be saved from herself by an understanding man. It is rare for the heroine to be saved by another woman.
This is the opposite of the male hero in a thriller. If he has a secondary love or relationship story going on, he will either save her, or be unable to help her (Chinatown).
Heroine Character Conventions in a Thriller
The heroine can be a woman in jeopardy with a vulnerable child to protect.
Betrayal by a loved one can put her in jeopardy. Revenge or some kind of equalizing motivation often drives the heroine.
She has a complex and life-threatening mystery to solve.
The heroine often has some personal Internal Wound that is reflected by the external crime/problem/mystery (i.e., a very clear Metaphoric Wound).
The heroine might be motivated to save a more helpless woman or group of women or vulnerable people.
If she is saving a man she loves, he has put himself in jeopardy because he was helping her first.
SUPERNATURAL THRILLER
Heroines are often found in supernatural thrillers. They can be ghosts or summoned by ghosts. Gothika and What Lies Beneath both have female ghosts that seek the heroine out in order to protect her from her husband and expose his disloyalty and his crime. It is a metaphor for the abandoned mistress who was not able to break up the family unit because the man rejected her for his wife and continues to live a lie. More memorable is the matricidal heroine in The Others. Grace is a restless ghost, haunted by her own guilt for killing her children. TV shows include Medium and Ghost Whisperer, in which the heroine solves a case by using her supernatural powers.
Twilight is a supernatural romantic thriller. The vampire Edward is Bella’s soul mate. His love “possesses” her. Her quest is to be with him forever, but the antagonistic forces working against their union are numerous.
Heroine Character Conventions in a Supernatural Thriller
The heroine can be “summoned” as a supernatural force enters her life. Alternatively, she is the force. The force symbolizes a blind spot or a wound that must be healed in the heroine, like an alter ego who represents a victim role choice the heroine may have unwittingly made. For example, marrying a man who will prove to be really bad.
Betrayal is a powerful form of Significant Other Conflict in the story. If it doesn’t affect the heroine directly, it affects the ghosts whose problems she deals with.
Guilt is a powerful form of Internal Conflict.
The heroine’s sanity is often doubted. Even she begins to doubt her own internal logic and judgment.
The supernatural force triggers a quest of truth and survival for the heroine, usually instigated by a horrible event.
Deception of the heroine by her loved one is a frequent revelation as a result of the quest.
The heroine survives the ordeal with the help of the supernatural power but only after her quest has led to the truth.
If she is supernatural or summoned, the heroine might live her life in one perpetual cycle with no resolution. The story doesn’t have closure and instead feels circular. If she is the lead in a TV series, she repeatedly attempts to solve supernatural dilemmas throughout the episodes.
BIOPIC
The biopic isn’t strictly a genre, as it doesn’t have recognizable conventions. It’s simply a way of categorizing films with real-life characters. A biopic story can actually be in any genre you like, but it is far more common that writers choose dramas, sometimes dramantic comedies (Julie and Julia), dramances (The Hours), and sometimes even thrillers (Elizabeth). By being imaginative with your choice of genre, you can really make your biopic screenplay stand out. Biopics can have fictional elements, such as contemporary characters whose lives are somehow changed by coming into contact with the historical character.
If a heroine is dark and complex, nine times out of ten she will be a real-life character (or if fictional, from Japanese, South Korean, or French cinema). In the United States and United Kingdom, a compulsive or deeply dangerous heroine is more likely to make it to the screen if she is a real life person, which says a lot about cultural differences. This makes biopics good to study for character complexity Examples of biopics with dark heroines are Monster, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, and La Vie en Rose.
Heroine Character Conventions for Biopics
These conventions are broad because ultimately character conventions will reflect those of the genre you choose to write the biopic in:
The heroine is a real-life character.
The heroine is known or unknown but will have some claim to fame.
If she is not known widely, the story will aim to highlight her achievement or the reason she should be known.
Once you have chosen your true-life char
acter, your biggest challenge will be using true-life facts to shape a dramatic story You might wish to use the principles, exercises, and questionnaires in this book in order to help you build your heroine’s character and select story information from her real life to make her memorable.
MUSICAL
The rise in popularity of musicals such as Eight Women, Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Mamma Mia!, and Nine has put this genre firmly on the entertainment map for heroines’ stories. Music, singing, and dancing bring a deeply joyous important element to these films. They bring a whole new layer of harmony to the viewing experience, and judging by their success, this is what audiences want. Unless lyrics are your strong point, team up with a good song writer to write a good musical!
Heroine Character Convention in a Musical
Two-dimensional characterization and stereotypes aren’t such a scourge to the writer of the musical.
Heroines find love, are competitive with others, pitch themselves against a dominant patriarch figure who seeks to control them, and have mother/daughter relationships.
The most important thing is that heroines express their emotional journeys and experiences by singing and dancing through most of them!
The heroine or heroines tend to end up victorious or fulfilled.
SCIENCE FICTION
sci-fi stories allow great scope for the development of hugely diverse female characters from worlds with very different values, traditions, and roles. This kind of imaginative freedom might really appeal to you if you are jaded with life on planet Earth.
Gender difference is frequently a nonissue in the sci-fi film unless it is concerned with the reproduction of the human race, when women characters and the right to their bodies tend to be under threat, such The Handmaid’s Tale, which gave a nightmarish vision of scientific interference with reproduction. Or they work for the bad guys as scientists who are responsible for new evolutions in the human form. Terminator Salvation and Avatar both have women characters in powerful scientific roles.
Heroine Character Conventions in Science Fiction
The heroine’s femininity isn’t an issue, unless there are reproductive elements to the story. The heroine’s skills and brains count more. She has to be capable of functioning in outer space, using high-tech equipment, dealing with aliens, and being a brilliant scientist.
UNPOPULAR GENRES FOR HEROINES
By this I mean those main genres in which heroines don’t tend to be featured very often or they are featured in very stereotypical ways. These are:
Horror
Action-adventure and Action Thrillers
In horror films, female characters are traditionally either heroines (young, blonde, and attractive), victims (unlikeable traits), or female forces of evil (possessed or born evil). Masculine-orientated stereotypes (good-girl victims and seductresses) can rule the day, making the horror a difficult genre to crack if your heroine is too complex. In horror, morality in characterization has no shades of grey. In the past, this has been because a large percentage of your audience is likely to be male and/or under thirty. Layers of union are virtually nonexistent in horror films, as they are designed to create extremely tense and suspenseful viewing experiences.
The Descent pushed the boundaries of horror by having a group of female friends enter a cave filled with cannibalistic hybrid humans. The dynamics between the female friends are reflected in themes of love, female bonding, and motherhood against a backdrop of survival. Sarah, the heroine, is an incomplete heroine mourning the loss of her child and husband, only to end up having to fight for her own survival as her friends are killed off one by one. Whether further evolutions of female characterization in the horror genre will widen the audience is a big question.
Heroines in action-adventure and action thrillers have also been evolving. Although they are frequently still young and beautiful, their characterization is getting more complex. They usually have their own agendas, backstory wounds, and desire to fulfill their own missions. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Quantum of Solace, and The Incredibles all have women characters who defy the stereotypical female of the action-adventure by being more complex. It would be nice to see an older action-adventure heroine, as unlikely as that may seem.
Wrapping Up…
Genres continuously evolve, and there are numerous subgenres always emerging. Different cultures also have very different genres, and it can open your eyes to watch a great deal of recent films from other countries to see their conventions.
EXERCISE: GENRE CONVENTIONS
Go to the theater or rent out three or four movies in a certain genre that you normally avoid. It doesn’t matter if they have heroes or heroines, but try to get a selection with both. Try to identify all the conventions in the genre that make it recognizable. Look at the character conventions, using my approach above.
Even if you have worked out the genre for your story, think about how you could change it to the genre you have been studying. Does it make it more interesting? The purpose of this exercise isn’t to make you necessarily change your genre, but it’s good to get out of habits. It could even encourage you to think about another genre.
UNSUNG HEROINES
Chapter 9
By now I hope you are well on the way to knowing who your heroine is, the story she’s leading, and all the factors that will make her compelling, unique, and completely unforgettable. If you haven’t got a project on the go, maybe your imagination will have been fired by some of these ideas.
There are still some grossly underrepresented women in film and TV, such as lesbians, disabled women, women of different ethnic groups, and older women. As Whoopi Goldberg once joked, Tiana, the animated African American princess in The Princess and the Frog is black, but she spends 70% of the film as a frog so that’s okay.
Then there’s the lack of certain kinds of heroines leading certain kind of genres, such as thriller and action-adventure. It is all too easy to narrow the scope of your story ideas and concepts when you have a heroine in mind. It’s as if we still want to give our heroes and heroines very different territory to roam in the worlds of our stories. We are still risk averse in what we allow heroines to do and be. If a female character takes wild risks and chooses career over love and family, then in movies she’s still more likely to be the heroine of a biopic, a fantasy, or sci-fi (Monsters vs Aliens). On TV, she’s still likely to be in a procedural or investigative series.
Let’s take a film with a hero, written and produced by a male team, The Departed. It was hailed for its brilliant characterization and complex morality. Now do the mental exercise of swapping Jack Nicolson’s character Frank with a woman. Let’s call her Francesca, and imagine Meryl Streep or Judi Dench playing her as the nasty gang leader who rules by extortion and torture but has a soft spot for her surrogate daughter. Imagine Leonardo di Caprio’s character played by Cameron Diaz. She has no kids, no family, and a high IQ, and life has shaped her into being a good chameleon. Written well, with Scorsese directing, without resorting to stereotypes that either sexualize or demonize the women, this mythical female-led rendition of The Departed could be a compelling film, exploring the rarely shown scenes of female power, violence, and paranoia. Oh yes, you’d have to make the shrink (who to my mind was the weakest character in the film) a passive and easily manipulated young man who looks good with his clothes off. This film wouldn’t be untrue or unlikely. There are plenty of ruthless and manipulative women in the real world who wouldn’t think twice about killing. You might be ahead of your time if you wrote it. I bet audiences would love it.
FORGETTABLE HEROINES
Remember the M-Factor? Lots of heroines simply don’t have it. Their stories might, but nine times out of ten they have suffered the greatest threat known to female characterization: Heroine Softening.
The requirement of making female characters softer was explored in-depth by Lizzie Francke in Script Girls (1994), in which she interviewed many women screenwriters and directors in Hollywood about their work. Man
y of her interviewees were pressured by producers and executives to tone down strength and complexity in their female characters. She highlighted the conservatism women felt affected their projects and the fear some producers have for female characters that are too dark or complex. Heroine Softening is a syndrome that you should be aware of because it can still happen.
HEROINE SOFTENING
In the best-case scenario, your heroine will be close to your vision as the writer, the happy outcome of a rewarding creative journey with others you may be working with. If you feel under pressure to make her softer, warmer, or nicer, you can use her M-Factor like an ace up your sleeve. It also might help you to know some of the reasons why complex traits can still be less acceptable for women.
The roots of this double standard, I believe, are to be found in our earliest life experiences and the fact that women do most of the mothering. You may not agree with the explanation I’m going to give, but you might see some grain of truth in it. The mother, in a child’s psyche, is the soft and gentle caregiver, as well as the all-powerful being we depend on. As we grow up, culture reinforces attitudes and expectations of what women are supposed to be, reflecting or even contradicting our unconscious feelings about our earliest role models, both male and female. A fear of female domination and anger, and a craving for gentleness and kindness in women can equate to deeply uncomfortable feelings about the scary or unsympathetic female. She should be soft and loving! This discomfort, or “dread” as some theorists have called it, results in the fantasy females of men’s stories and the deeply Conflicted heroines of women’s stories. Very simplistically, the Hero seeks a vulnerable female (the opposite of their mothers) who needs saving, and for whom the man can prove himself as worthy. And the Heroine? She experiences an identity crisis! She wants to be saved and completed by her soul mate Hero (e.g., Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Elizabeth Bennett, and Bridget Jones), at the same time, she only has her mother as her deepest role model. In the close relationship or when the heroine becomes a mother, family patterns re-emerge. The Heroine feels let down or empty, and the Hero’s getting restless. He didn’t sign up for a gorgon or a needy child. He thought he’d found the maiden! As for her, she’s thinking where has my Prince Charming gone?
