Alyssa, since you're bringing up Jane Tennison, I was wondering if feel that "complex" characters, female and otherwise, are really kind of reductive vehicles that are driven by pop-psychology traumas, manifested in boozing and sleeping around, and if so, if there's a misogynistic element to such female characters? Or is this just a deficit in creative imagination?See my dilemma? I think there are a couple of categories of "complex" female characters who drink or have a lot of sex.
There is, undoubtedly, a classic collection of bad girl performances, where writers, directors, and actresses treat damage, or even simple female anger (an emotion the movies seem terrified of, and thus intrigued by) as if it's inherently interesting. Teen movies tend to be particularly big sinners on this score. I think it's deeply uncreative when directors use alcohol abuse as a way to signal that a character is a bad person, as they do with the evil art-class girls (a badly abused Clea Duvall) in She's All That, or as a sign of privileged discontent, as in Crazy/Beautiful. I've always found Pretty Woman deeply annoying both for its wholly inadequate explorations of the factors that get women into prostitution and its quick-fix approach to getting them out. And it's extremely frustrating that a career-enhancing move for women is frequently to ship them off to play either a hooker, like Maggie Gyllenhaal in Sherrybaby, or a drunk, like Sandra Bullock in 28 Days. I also think it's incredibly annoying when women's alcoholism or promiscuity is used for cheap laughs: the parade of drunk sluts in The 40-Year-Old Virgin is an incredibly weak note in an otherwise sensitively drawn, if raunchy, comedy, and I particularly found the treatment of Elizabeth Banks' character as a sexually terrifying freak who must have something wrong with her offensive. In other words, I think portrayals of complicated women who abuse alcohol, or engage in prostitution, or who have a lot of sex the movies say they'll surely regret later are sexist and uncreative when "acting out" is the simplest way the filmmakers can find to convey inner turmoil, or as lazy humor in the place of actual jokes, when real problems become mere devices.
On the other hand, there are women who drink, who use drugs, who have sex without emotional attachment, and excluding portrayals of those things from the movies would further dehydrate an already arid selection of roles for accomplished female actresses.
Jane Tennison is a great character because primary to the facts that she drinks too much, is not always respectful of her sexual partners' and boyfriends' emotions, and has an abortion, is that she is navigating a minefield of workplace sexism, racism in London, and the conflicts between emotion and rationality that are the hallmark of good police procedurals. Even simple things like what she'll be called by the cops she's overseeing is something the writers of Prime Suspect handle in a deft and pointed way. "My voice suddenly got lower, has it?" Tennison snaps at a cop (later to become an ally), who persists in calling her "sir" or "ma'am" against her wishes. "Maybe my knickers are too tight. Listen, I like to be called Governor or The Boss. I don't like Ma'am - I'm not the bloody Queen. So take your pick." Her alcoholism and her sex life are part of this tapestry, and the show deals with them that way: Jane Tennison is a talented and emotional detective who happens to drink too much, and who has an abortion at one point, not an exploration of abortion or alcoholism with police work as the Lifetime Movie Device of the Week. And that's the way life usually is: the hard stuff is part of life, not the sum total of it.
And then, sometimes it is. I have an incredibly hard time watching the Battlestar Galactica episode "Scar," because I find the image of Starbuck falling apart and becoming not just a pilot who drinks too much, but a simple drunk almost unbearable. But I think it's a brilliant episode because it illustrates the factors that have contributed to her downward spiral, without wrapping them up in a neat redemption narrative. Not everyone gets effectively rehabbed, or, um, gets to have a destiny involving the salvation of humanity and reincarnation, and it's useful to demonstrate consequences, even if they come in the form of surrendering a flight ace title rather than passing out in an alley. And alcoholism, drug abuse, and sex can be interesting and redemptive even if they're not a manifestation of a larger trauma, or part of a larger character sketch. I haven't watched The People v. Larry Flynt for years, but I remember how gorgeous Courtney Love's portrayal of Althea Flynt was, as a picture of someone just kind of slipping away (incidentally that, and Lindsay Lohan's performance in Mean Girls rank as the two roles I most wish the actresses who took them learned life lessons from.).
I guess in art as in life, I'm not much interested in people who are acting out. I am interested in talented policewomen, dedicated fighter pilots, stubborn businesswomen. I'm interested in who they sleep with, what substances they ingest, and in what amount, because that is part of who they are. I'm not a particularly prissy girl, and I'm not particularly interested in sitting in a movie theater watching get good girls get all the wonderful things they theoretically deserve. Enough with Rachel McAdams being virtuous. I'd rather see a gorgeous, single, determined middle-aged woman, who also happens to be a drunk, surmount racism against African immigrants in London to solve a vicious murder. If Sandra Bullock has to go to rehab a couple of times to get Helen Mirren on screen as Jane Tennison, I can live with that.