All hail the complicated woman: the 2015 Golden Globes
January 14, 2015 3:39 PM   Subscribe

"As Maggie Gyllenhaal put it in accepting an award for her performance in 'The Honorable Woman': 'What I see, actually, are women who are sometimes powerful and sometimes not, sometimes sexy, sometimes not, sometimes honorable, sometimes not. And what I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film.'" The 'strong female character' is dead. All hail the complicated woman., by Alyssa Rosenberg for The Washington Post.

See also Sarah Larson's article, Tina and Amy's Last Golden Globes (The New Yorker). Snippet: "The big winners were 'Boyhood,' Showtime's 'The Affair,' 'The Grand Budapest Hotel,' 'Transparent,' feminism, empathy, and good parenting."

Bonus link: Small Batch: The Golden Globes, a shorter version of NPR's "Pop Culture Happy Hour" hosted by MetaFilter's own Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson.

Related: FanFare – Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (13 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
loved these complicated women you go girls
posted by Sheila Nagig at 4:08 PM on January 14, 2015


Snaps for posting the Small Batch link.
posted by Aizkolari at 4:37 PM on January 14, 2015


Speaking of Linda Holmes, she pretty much hits it out of the ballpark with this review of a trailer for "The Boy Next Door".

Even better is her response to a reader accusing her of selling out for mere clickbait:

Thank you for clicking! (Seriously: Once in a while, we laugh at things. Laughing at things has a long and glorious history. There is not a bright line between humor and merit. Two weeks ago, I was writing about Huck Finn. We all contain multitudes. We all will continue to contain multitudes. And by the way, BuzzFeed contains some pretty solid writing, which I know is disorienting for a lot of people who read about it more than they read it, but this is part of seeing the world as it actually is. NPR writes silly things. BuzzFeed writes serious things. The world is amazing!)

As to the Golden Globes, I can't recall a more feminist-oriented show, which makes me happy.
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:46 PM on January 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


loved these complicated women you go girls
posted by Sheila Nagig at 19:08 on January 14 [+] [!]


eponyfantastic.

Excellent post, jcifa.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 5:58 PM on January 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Their Cosby bit was awesome. Even Ricky Gervais could not have done that.
posted by Renoroc at 6:09 PM on January 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


I really want to love all of this but I'm not seeing it. The Globes show was mostly boring and uncomfortable; Tiny and Amy were mostly absent and their bits fell flat for me; the winners were stuff I had never heard of which is strange because I literally do nothing but consume popular media all day long.

I am all for complicated female characters because I am one, but I don't trust our culture enough to not go too far in the other direction (all asshole women all the time). That's why we should be quiet and hope it doesn't become a thing. Let female characters be as 3D as male characters and let it be business as usual. That's the only way to not fuck it up.
posted by bleep at 6:20 PM on January 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Permit me to meander a bit...

From a Splitsider interview with Parks and Recreation co-creator Mike Schur about the show's final season, linked in this FanFare post:
...we just wanted to present a character, a female character, who was not just like…the word is always "strong," which I think is a kind of lame word to describe good female characters on TV, so it wasn't just a strong character but an interesting, nuanced woman who was smart and was very career-driven and goal-driven, but who also had normal human flaws. Sometimes the way that people try to counter a negative representation of a certain person or kind of people is just by making them kind of superheroes, but we didn't think that was realistic. No one's a superhero. We just wanted to present a person who had a lot of different kinds of characteristics and who was nuanced and multi-dimensional in the kind of ways that, much more typically, male characters get represented on TV. So that was one thing, and 95% of that goal was accomplished when Amy Poehler agreed to be in the show because that's what kind of person she is in real life, and we knew that if she did the show we'd just have to put her onscreen every week and a lot of that work would be done for us.
(emphasis mine)

Good points on their own, especially considering this recent post about The Mindy Project. Also, compare the bolded part to this post about actors with disabilities who are being passed over for actors who crip it up.

I guess in both cases the ideal is getting to a point where people know and enjoy you so much that they give you a chance to do something that represents a lived experience. But most actors with disabilities don't get even the lowest level of a chance, so how can they move up that scale? Until that happens, the representations of PWDs (like, for example, the representations of Native Americans played by white/Latino/Asian people) will remain less based in reality.
posted by Madamina at 6:30 PM on January 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


My favorite Amy/Tina bit was in their opening act, when they recited all the great humanitarian accomplishments of Amal Ramzi Alamuddin (George Clooney's wife) and then said "Of course, tonight we will be awarding her husband a lifetime achievement award."
posted by Thorzdad at 7:42 AM on January 15, 2015 [4 favorites]


I am all for complicated female characters because I am one, but I don't trust our culture enough to not go too far in the other direction (all asshole women all the time). That's why we should be quiet and hope it doesn't become a thing.

What?
posted by psoas at 8:22 AM on January 15, 2015 [2 favorites]


Not everybody was thrilled with the Cosby stuff.
posted by kmz at 1:31 PM on January 15, 2015 [2 favorites]


Alls I'm saying is that trumpeting something and making it a fad is the best way to ruin something.

That was a good article about the Cosby joke; I found it creepy and unfunny.
posted by bleep at 1:41 PM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


I did feel a little weird. It was, after all, a pure rape joke. I'm not sure the fact that it was women making it should be a determining factor in appropriateness.
posted by Justinian at 3:11 PM on January 15, 2015


On reflection I do think there is a difference between targeting a specific person (particularly a famous person) to draw attention to the fact that they are likely a rapist and a more generic "rape joke" where humor is the purpose. They were making a joke, yes, but not because they were trying to be funny but because they were trying to shiv Cosby.
posted by Justinian at 3:33 PM on January 15, 2015 [4 favorites]


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