The Female Gaze — Rise of the Modern Hollywood Heroine
From Lara Croft to Lady Bird: how and why beloved female leads have evolved over time.
By Arya Desai
Original design by Arya Desai. Created in Canva.
The Heroine
Last summer, moviegoers returned to cinemas in record-level numbers since the pandemic. They had come to see Margot Robbie as the nostalgic childhood doll, “Barbie”. However, this rendition of the plastic heroine was breaking out of her shiny toy box and starting to speak.
The way society perceives itself has always been tied to the TV screen. Through the beloved characters on TV, watchers could be the best versions of themselves: action heroes, spies, stars, and more. The “hero” was someone to look up to, especially if one saw themselves represented in the character onscreen.
For girls, the heroine has the same effect. But the relationship with these female and female-presenting characters has been as tumultuous and complicated as society’s perception of women over the years.
“I think a lot about Beauty and the Beast, because when I was a little girl, I watched that and The Little Mermaid. [This] led us to thoughts that our only objective in life was to find our handsome prince or to be okay with the person who kidnaped us…,” says Maikiko James, who serves as Programs Director for the organization, Women in Film Los Angeles.
These classic ingenues that many young girls watched in childhood, grew up to be popular archetypes of the manic pixie dream girls, femme fatales, and lovers. On the whole, well-mannered and beautiful, despite challenges that happened to them over the course of their films.
“They collapse on the chaise lounge and cry so beautifully,” KC Stone, the Marketing and Communications Director for Women in Film, recalls of older heroines.
“When you watch old films, women are so composed, even if they’re losing themselves. Even if they are breaking down,” adds Stone.
“Lady Bird”, a famous representation of the modern heroine, embodies this transition from perfectly polished heroines of film past.
“I resonated so much because Lady bird is kind of grungy and gross…she has oily roots and grown out pink hair. She has acne, she doesn’t wear makeup, and she screams and she’s messy and she’s loud,” says Stone.
Today, the rise in popularity of strong-willed heroines like, Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” (Lady Bird) and “Barbie” (Barbie), Celine Song’s “Nora” (Past Lives), or Emerald Fennell’s “Cassie” (Promising Young Woman), has seemingly revealed a new type of female lead. Definitively one crafted through feminine eyes instead of masculine ones. In other words…the female gaze.
So how and why has the female gaze, or, “The ways in which women and girls look at other females, at males, and at things in the world” (OxfordReference.com), found its home in the heroines of modern cinema?
Saoirse Ronan as “Lady Bird” . Courtesy of Canva Images. Original Canva design by Arya Desai.
Mulvey’s Male Gaze
One way is by looking to the past and deconstructing what the heroine looked like under the eyes of the infamous male gaze.
This was something that film theorist, Laura Mulvey, was well acquainted with. Indeed, it was Mulvey who wrote her game changing essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which coined the term “male gaze”.
As she grew up and became a feminist filmmaker, she began to look at films from her fresh perspective.
“Instead of being a voyeuristic spectator, a male spectator as it were, I suddenly became a woman spectator who watched the film from a distance and critically, rather than with those absorbed eyes,” Mulvey explains in a recent interview.
Marilyn Monroe Courtesy of Canva Images. Original Canva design by Arya Desai.
There is no better example of this than “Lorelai Lee” (portrayed by Marilyn Monroe) in the 1953 film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Her iconic performance in the film as a promiscuous femme fatale on the hunt for rich men, shot Monroe to newer heights of stardom. However, despite her conviction to find wealth, Lorelai was characterized through her proximity to the men in her life.
“It’d be hard to say it passes the famous Bechdel Test (female characters are seen speaking to one another about something other than men), as each is obsessed with men, albeit in different ways,” notes Patrick Brown in his review for thecinnessential.com.
Between the 1970s and 2000s, the housewife had been replaced. In her place stood the action heroes, femme fatales, and manic pixie dream girls.
Unlike the starlette’s of the golden age, these female heroines were positioned to represent the “modern woman”. The only issue: they were still constructed mainly by men, and it showed.
A study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that, “in the top 400 movies from 1990-2006, females were more than five times as likely as males to be shown in sexually revealing clothing.”
For Doctor Stacy Smith, the president of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, this finding highlights an issue with many of Hollywood’s heroines.
“There are more males than females, but when females are shown, they are much more likely to be shown in a hypersexualized way,” says Smith.
One of the most infamous of these characters is “Lara Croft”. In 2001, Simon West directed the original “Tomb Raider” film, starring Angelina Jolie as Lara.
Angelina Jolie as “Lara Croft”. Courtesy of Getty Images. Original Canva design by Arya Desai.
“When you look back at the original adaptations of these characters there was something beautiful and clean and honest about these women. Her braid is still perfect. She has dirt splattered on her butt, perfect little bang pieces, and a perfectly well-done French braid down her back…it’s like a dirty, but dirty so that men can think she’s hot,” says Stone on Jolie’s “Lara Croft”.
Equally as guilty are the manic pixie dream girls. These leading ladies embodied the saying, “young, wild, and free”, with their colored hair and mismatched socks to prove it. Of course, underneath the carefree exterior comes a healthy dose of trauma and emotional instability.
“Manic pixie dream girl” was first coined by movie critic, Nathan Rabin, to describe Kirsten Dunst’s character of “Claire Colburn” in Elizabethtown: “That bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
The Modern Heroine
Greta Lee as “Nora”. Courtesy of Canva images. Original Canva design by Arya Desai.
Today’s heroine is certainly far from perfect, but progress is on the way.
“Nora”, the lead of Celine Song’s film, Past Lives, is regarded as a step in the right direction.
“Nora, the protagonist in Song’s Past Lives, is just trying to maintain her life as it is and how she loves it, which is feminism in its own way, because she’s choosing herself consistently through the film now,” Stone argues.
Unlike the heroines of the past, Nora’s story involves two potential male love interests, but she makes her ultimate decision based on her desired lifestyle and job.
“I think we’re seeing a shift of femininity being more self-possessed as opposed to, like oppressed,” Stone adds.
Films and TV like Lady Bird and Fleabag, cast a much-needed spotlight on the actual “messy” woman in a way that encapsulates the female perspective, versus the manic pixie dream girl perception.
“I watched that when I had moved to pursue the rest of my degree and I resonated so much because Ladybird is kind of grungy and gross…she has oily roots and grown out pink hair. She has acne, she doesn’t wear makeup, and she screams and she’s messy and she’s loud,” says Stone.
Which takes us back to the plastic lined streets of Barbie land.
“Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ recognizes identity and gender are complex and messy,” writes Jennifer Stokes, a senior lecturer in Digital and Information Literacy at the University of South Australia (Variety.com).
“Robbie’s Barbie works to escape the role of object, both literally and through the cinematography. She is beautiful, but not sexualized. She controls her narrative,” Stokes adds.
Margot Robbie’s journey as “Barbie” is in many ways symbolic of the heroine’s breakout. She is, in fact, not a perfect plastic doll anymore, and neither is this new kind of heroine. But, a closer look into cinema’s hall of fame will reveal that characters indicative of this modern female lead have come before, but, instead, not given the same welcome.
Thelma and Louise (1991), now a cult classic, generated a fair amount of criticism during its initial release. The reason being its female leads: two middle-aged female characters who escape polite society and turn vigilantes.
This is something Eva Neuwirth, a graduate of American Film Institute and a Los Angeles director, took note of, when comparing the film with another box office hit from its year, Silence of the Lambs. “People felt very, very comfortable with the idea of Jodie Foster struggling to hold a gun in this way…it played within a sort of patriarchy and not to say that it’s not a feminist film…but it wasn’t threatening in the same way that Thelma and Louise pissed off men.”
At the time of its release in the early 1990s, the film was one of the first of its kind. The cowboy outlaw had become the cowgirl outlaw, and some critics weren’t happy.
“There were those, including journalist John Leo of the ‘toxic feminism’ take in Time magazine, who took exception to Thelma & Louise: those who saw the film as gratuitously violent (despite the fact that the film’s body count stands at just one), and the men as unrealistic caricatures,” notes Pamela Hutchinson, an arts writer for The Independent.
For every Lady Bird, Barbie, Fleabag or more, many women of color heroines are simply overlooked. And it is clearly still a problem.
The welcome that many women of color leads have and still receive as “modern heroines” has yet to be equal, according to Stacey Smith.
“Opportunities are still curtailed for women and people of color. Even when the identity of the director might correspond to the identity of the lead character, we still find that women and people of color face limits that their white male peers do not,” Smith says in a 2023 industry report.
Before Past Lives, came films with strong Asian female leads who navigated their identities similar to “Nora”. The Joy Luck Club was one of these, but received no industry awards at the time of its release in 1993.
“I was recently talking about the Joy Luck Club, which, you know, before Crazy Rich Asians was the first movie that had an all Asian-American cast. And I saw myself represented. And then it took another 25 years to make a film starring an Asian.”
When Margot Robbie failed to receive a nomination for her role as titular “Stereotypical Barbie”, the media was in outrage. Her Latina co-star, America Ferreira’s nomination for her role as “Gloria”, was seemingly swept under the rug.
“It is interesting that there’s such an outrage, understandably, over Margo, who is a white woman versus America, who also delivered a great performance but is a woman of color,” says Stone.
The Formula
The “formula” for producing a successful modern heroine isn’t one size fits all. But many experts agree that it starts with representation behind the camera.
“There is a clear relationship between who works behind the camera and who we see on screen,” writes Smith in a 2023 industry report.
This is backed by numbers, in a report, Smith finds that, “For films with male direction only, the percentage of female speaking characters on screen was 32.5%. When a female was attached to direct, that number jumped to 47.6% of all speaking characters – a 15.1 percentage point difference.”
“I think something that’s really critical that we’ve seen happen is that now more people are seeing themselves represented…because not only does that make them feel seen in the world, but gives them that thought, if that person made that story, I too can make stories and be my own owner of my narrative…,” James comments.
Looking at the past few years of female heroines, the rules apply. Barbie and Lady Bird were directed by Greta Gerwig. Past Lives was directed by Celine Song. Promising Young Woman was directed by Emerald Fennell. Nomadland, which featured a middle-aged female lead, was directed by Chloé Zhao.
But reaching this level of opportunity is still guarded by a system that works against female directors and in turn, female stories.
Urvashi Pathania, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and graduate of AFI has experienced this, despite success with several grant programs and fellowships, “Leaping out of that fellowship tier is hard, once you start talking about Hollywood it isn’t as easy as those programs make you feel…the path to actually getting your film funded is much more circuitous than you would think.”
Eva Neuwirth on the set of film, “Suck Hard”. Photo courtesy of Eva Neuwirth.
“[AFI] told us that the only thing harder than getting people to fund your first feature, is getting people to fund your second feature,” Neuwirth says.
Looking to the future, James and the Women in Film team, “…think it’s a trajectory. I think it’s a path we have to be helping people get to where people like Greta Gerwig or Chloé Zhao have gotten.”
“Giving people more of the opportunity to have power over their narrative is really how we advance culture and society,” James adds.
After all, it wasn’t until the 2023 Oscars that three of the best picture films were directed by women, setting a new record (Variety.com).
The Future of the Leading Lady
Lady watching heroine onscreen. Image created by Canva AI.
So what will the female hero look like in five years? Ten years? Twenty years? Will all of this seeming progress stick?
Despite strides for female lead characters, Hollywood’s tumultuous nature has always come and gone in waves, chasing trends instead of creating them.
In 2023, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s Industry Report found that the number of female leads in films was equal to the number over a decade ago, in 2010.
“In the last 14 years, we have charted progress in the industry, so to see this reversal is both startling and in direct contrast to all of the talk of 2023 as the ‘year of the woman,’” Smith says.
Recent female-led and female-directed superhero movies were panned by critics and moviegoers.
“We saw what someone might call a failure. We felt like this with Madame Web…you could easily say it’s a woman superhero movie…then this new one coming out with Captain Marvel and The Marvels. It came out and was barely seen,” says James.
But James believes much of this may be attributed to the makeup of these female superheroes,
“I actually think there’s a lot to unpack if you just map women’s stories on historically male stories, it also doesn’t work. …but we can’t just shoehorn stories into ones that exist and expect people to like them.”
Though the future of the heroine is uncertain, what is certain is that there is a market. Barbie grossed $1.4 billion globally at box offices during its theatrical release, according to TheLosAngelesTimes.
Eventually, many hope that this will make room for leads that are more controversial, human, and imperfect than “Barbie”.
“I am thinking about our own lives, where we make mistakes and then find redemption. Maybe …it’s not just the hero’s journey anymore, but it is all of our journeys collectively, the messiness, the complication of being human and then being able to take the risk and say it,” James expresses.
Pathania hopes for the same. “I want all the women to be even more unlikable. More unlikeable female protagonists because guess what, that’s just a real woman.”
