In the past year or so, you’ve probably seen captions like “Good for her” or “She did nothing wrong” to an image or video of a morally-questionable female character— usually in the middle of a scream, mental breakdown or a murder—from a subgenre of films colloquially dubbed “female rage” movies. Common examples of “female rage” movies include Gone Girl (2014) and Pearl (2022), but movies like the The Virgin Suicides (1999) gets thrown into the mix for reasons we will discuss later. For the most part, “female rage” movies include a female protagonist that lashes out, sometimes violently, because of grievances with gender, society and the female experience.
Take Gone Girl: In the turning point of the film, Amy (Rosamund Pike) opens the second act with the iconic “cool girl” monologue where she expresses her frustrations with how women are expected to maintain an effortless and easy-going persona catered to their boyfriends. “Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man,” she narrates. After discovering Nick’s (Ben Affleck) infidelity, alongside other marital and financial issues, Amy executes her revenge plan to multiple extremes, like fabricating diary entries, faking a pregnancy test, murdering an obsessed ex-boyfriend. The audience knows she’s crazy, and yet, her motives are familiar, and even sound— why should men get away with neglect or infidelity while women are expected to entertain male fantasies and remain committed?
But not all “female rage” movies are necessarily revenge films: Pearl stars a farm girl (Mia Goth) with psychopathic tendencies and big dreams. Pearl has aspirations to become a chorus girl or movie star, but to her resentment, is stuck to farmlife by a strict mother and an ill father. Pearl is obviously unstable— from the beginning, she kills farm animals, messes with her paralyzed father, and masturbates with a scarecrow before lashing out at it (“I’m married!” she screams). By the end, when her delusions aren’t realized, she has killed most of the supporting cast.
Pearl isn’t exactly a revenge movie, but the depiction of a girl lashing out and acting crazy is enough to win over audiences. We recognize Pearl’s instability, yet still sympathize with suffocating upbringing and her lack of agency. Modern life for a girl can feel similar— apart from the monotony of school and work, girls are expected to behave within standards of feminity that exclude the reality of daily life and render—usually male-coded— emotions like anger and frustration as taboo. From friends and family to mass media, these expectations seem set in stone. The gender binary is enforced early on, with expectations of how boys and girls should act enforced, however consciously, through our parents, teachers and relatives.
Media behaves similarly; it’s not difficult to discern what is acceptable for women when certain archetypes are rewarded while women that fall outside of what is acceptable or expected get punished. Slasher films embody this quite obviously; when you see two female characters—one of which is a virgin, the other not— in a horror movie, it’s not difficult to guess who dies in a brutal, gruesome manner and who lives as the final girl. Even the “final girl” trope is sexist in itself— setting up the “weakest” (aka female) member of the cast against whatever evil they are up against for the maximum amount of tension. The madonna-whore complex exudes in slashers; it shows that while men are allowed to simultaneously enjoy and condemn promiscuous women (usually in the sex scene before her inevitable death) and celebrate chasity through the unlikely virgin-heroine.
With such a suffocating set of expectations, it’s not surprising that girls and women online are drawn to extreme and visceral expressions of anger and frustration. However, it’s important to consider what the circulation of out-of-context pictures of beautiful, thin, white movie stars in vague distress communicate, and who these images are for. Even in violent outbursts, covered in blood or mid-scream, the women still look beautiful and palatable— they are never ugly. How might the responses to these images change if the women’s appearances reflect grotesque nature of their actions? It brings into question how liberating “female rage” movies are when the actresses are still expected to maintain and upkeep both their face and body.
The equation complicates when you consider race; Black and Hispanic women are subjected to a different set of prejudices regarding anger and their actions are scrutinized in a way that their white counterparts are not. The female-rage craze hints at a double standard that renders white-woman rage as palatable and appealing, but with racialized women, their rage is far less marketable.
This becomes more apparent when we examine what movies are included in “female rage” lists. Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides doesn’t portray any kind of female revenge or rage, nor does it explore any interiority into the female characters’ psyches. Told from the collective voice of a group of male classmates, The Virgin Suicides narrates the events leading up to the Lisbon sisters’ mysterious suicide. The sisters are mystified by these boys: the boys share anecdotes, collect memorabilia, and fantasize about the girls. These boys assign higher, deeper meanings to the suicide and even condemn the girls for their selfishness, but never once in the movie does anyone make an effort to reach out or get to know these girls. The Lisbons are mysterious not because of difficult personalities or any extenuating circumstances but because no one bothered to ask. The film lingers on surfaces and anecdotes without revealing the girls’ interiority, the audience leaves knowing little.
Even without explicit revenge or retaliation, The Virgin Suicides remains popular among girls. While that can be attributed to Coppola’s eye for aesthetics and materiality, The Virgin Suicides’ ambiguity also leaves room for projection. The Lisbon girls have no one to consult, and, with strict parents and delusional male classmates, remain unknown and misunderstood, both of which are universal feelings. The Virgin Suicides’ portrayal of the suffocating male gaze that render women as objects to inspect, analyze, and fantasize about is taken to the extreme, and presents the root of why women crave the nuance they get from violent revenge films.
Still, it’s perplexing that The Virgin Suicides is included alongside movies like Gone Girl and Jennifer’s Body. However, when you disregard the plot of these films and the interiority of their respective protagonists, you are left with aesthetically-pleasing, color-graded screenshots of Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) laying forlornly in a grassy field, who fits right in with other beautiful, white actresses in vague distress.
All this isn’t to disregard the female-rage genre— revenge thrillers are satisfying, and the demand for women-centered stories is a step in the right direction. But like any other craze, one should proceed with caution, especially in the era of quickly-commodified “girl”-centric crazes. It’s important to take a step back and ask ourselves why we revere certain things, who is included or excluded, and question the extents of their subversion.
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