Warning: You might learn a thing or two about respecting women in the process of reading this article. Proceed at your own risk.
If you were to pick at the thread of cinematic history, you would end up with a neverending yarn of films focused on male characters practically flaunting their glaring flaws — whether it is their inability to be emotionally available, infidelity, being incredibly selfish, etc — which is *cough* the evidence of how human they are. And we are totally aboard that ship, no doubts there. What really ruffled our usually tame feathers is the rather expected disclaimer at the beginning of the recently released satirical film, Not Okay, warning viewers to be beware of its rather “unlikable female protagonist.”
Anyone who has seen Quinn Shephard’s directorial debut has already witnessed this oddity. As the film begins, a disclaimer flashes across the screen — that the film will contain “flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist.”
That is a joke, right? We should probably laugh it off? Well, sadly, no.
The Not Okay disclaimer is proof society is still stuck in archaic times when it comes to women
For those who haven’t a clue about what Not Okay is all about, here is a brief summary that will not spoil the film but will allow you to understand the heartfelt and obviously exasperated tirade that follows. So, the story depicts Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch), who represents the social media-obsessed attention-seeking youth of today that functions on how many followers they have. Disgruntled with her inability to achieve quick fame and wanting to impress her crush, the wannabe influencer pretends that she is on a trip to Paris and uses Photoshop to post fake images of herself enjoying the famous spots in the city.
But her seemingly innocent lie becomes much bigger when the French City faces a terrorist attack and Danni’s pictures place her near the exact locations. Instead of coming clean, she plays the victim, claiming that she is indeed a survivor, riling up a circus of fame and lies in the process, which only gets more and more complicated.
Coming back to that problematic disclaimer. Yes, technically, technically, it is a joke, but it is aimed at the ones who did have a problem that Shephard dared to present a female protagonist whose flaws are on such blatant display. As the Not Okay director recently revealed, when the film was shown to a select audience during its test screenings, people actually had trouble digesting that the film’s lead female character is unlikable with no redeemable quality in sight.
“The content warning was borne out of, to be honest, our test screenings. We un-ironically and consistently got responses from — I’m not going to say what demographic, but you might be able to guess — people who were quite literally like, ‘why would someone make a movie with an unlikable woman?’ It’s something I’ve repeatedly heard, and a lot of my other writer friends have as well. If you portray flawed women or women who reflect societal flaws, you get notes like, ‘I literally don’t understand why you tell a story about this character.’”
As stated above, every second film — no matter in what language it is — prefers to depict a flawed male character at its heart. Forget criticizing such obvious displays of a person’s negative aspects, most of these films have churned some rather big bucks at the box office. Some popular characters come to mind here — the easy-to-hate Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler, the rather prickly and rude Llewyn in Inside Llewyn Davis, the downright disgusting Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems, and so on.
The list is never-ending — with probably more additions on the way — and yet, none of these films ever faced such a reaction from viewers. In fact, these are treated as characters, allowed to stew in their personal avalanche of flaws that make them memorable, necessary for the script, etc, etc. So, why did no one question the problematic, often loathsome protagonists driving these stories?
The answer is simple…
Women, no matter fictional or real, are not allowed to show their flaws
The problem here is not that the character of Danni is selfish, self-centered, lacks empathy, and … feel free to add every other negative adjective that comes to mind. The issue here is that the character is a woman. Yes, and to put it simply — how could Shepard dare to try to burst the collective bubble of a society that loves to put women on a pedestal and practically abhors the idea that she is also simply a human being with her own set of flaws?
What probably contributed to raising the eyebrows further is that a flawed woman (oh, the horror!) got to drive the plot of the film. After all, a narrow-minded mentality, surviving on its expired stock of sexism, already has a hard time digesting that a woman is the central character in a film — how would stereotypes and misogynism stay alive at this rate? Add to that the fact that she is not striving to be the Merriam-Webster definition of perfection — for some, Earth would literally stop spinning if this forced mirage ceases to exist.
In a perfect world, the gender of Not Okay’s protagonist wouldn’t have mattered – after all, the focus of the film is to point a satirical finger at the desperation-for-fame-fueled influencer culture the world is stuck in. But since this is an issue and will sadly remain one for the foreseeable future, it is high time we learn to embrace dynamic female characters.
Compared to the decades we have spent rallying behind the most toxic male protagonists cinema has thrown at us, while internally arguing why we like them in the first place, we can assure you that it would be a lot easier to bring our minds and our dated opinions out of their claustrophobic closets.
Not Okay, starring Zoey Deutch and Dylan O’Brien, is currently streaming on Hulu.