I Am Begging You, Please Stop Breaking Your Female Characters
Women are not dainty lil pieces of pottery!
Troubled female protagonists are having a rough time. They have personal issues, relationship problems, and most significantly, people keep turning them into cracked porcelain.
Cracked Porcelain Woman is mentally unstable, sometimes due to mental illness but also usually due to the fact that she has experienced some form of trauma. She often stars in horrors, psychological thrillers, or other hard dramas. She is usually thin, white, and cisgender. While her surface may seem perfect and nice, the cracks in her facade indicate that there is darkness underneath the surface. Maybe the pressure to keep everything together is too much for her to handle, and she can no longer keep up appearances. Perhaps the world she inhabits is too cruel for her to bear, thus fracturing her from the outside in.
The point is, the most notable part of Cracked Porcelain Woman is that she is flawed. So how do we grapple with her imagery?
This is, on a very surface level interpretation, objectification. Women are literally being made into objects. If “regular” women are dolls, then these troubled women are broken dolls. But grouping women into “broken” and “unbroken” still places them within the non-human world. The dichotomy isn’t between a mentally stable woman and a mentally unstable woman, it is between an object that is doing a good job of being decorative and another that is doing a bad job of being decorative. Either way, women are presented as things.
There is also the idea that the woman is broken (or starting to break) due to her trauma. Where shows like “I May Destroy You” or '“Unbelievable” delve into how we process trauma (and hopefully, move forward from it), Cracked Porcelain Woman indicates that trauma is something permanent and unfixable. Because inanimate objects have no mechanisms for healing, these posters suggest that these women don’t have them either. Once broken, always broken. It’s not that I don’t believe trauma has a lasting impact, it does. But experiencing it doesn’t justify stripping women of their humanity and portraying them as damaged goods.
Cracked Porcelain Woman is also, importantly, a woman. There is no shortage of male characters who are mentally unstable or have gone through hardships. Ray Monroe has issues. The Narrator/Tyler Durden both (singularly) have issues. Edward "Teddy" Daniels (aka Andrew Laeddis) has issues. Yet these men aren’t positioned as broken pieces of fine china, they are positioned as anti-heroes, anti-villains, or often just normal people whose full story we uncover later. They aren’t broken by the world around them (at least, not in the beginning) in fact, the instability of that world often makes them more solid in their own delusions.
I am not trying to romanticize their mental states or condone their actions, especially because they are often violent. I don’t expect Nina Sayers to set explosives à la Project Mayhem. I just question why inner turmoil makes men powerful and women fragile. The posters for these films portray characters who are seemingly in complete control, even if the space around them is unnatural (bent, glowing blue, etc). Where Cracked Porcelain Woman suggests there is something wrong with her, the male-centric posters suggest there is something wrong with the outside world. At the very least, these men are portrayed as humans and not things.
A poster and trailer are usually the first glimpses we have into the world of a film or television show. If we go in already assuming that a woman is unstable, imperfect, broken in some way, how does that color how we watch the piece? Do we question her reality, or her thoughts, more because we think something is wrong with her already? Part of the fun of a psychological thriller is not knowing what is real and what is imagined, so how does that change when we’re presented with a confident male lead versus a brittle female one?
The point is, as Mad Max: Fury Road teaches us, women are not things.
Brilliant and serviceable: CPW is an important contribution to the lexicon of "reading" popular culture imagery.
Ron Gross