In Praise of "Messy Women"

Why should male characters get all the nuance?

Author

The Clubhouse
October 28, 2024

Welcome back to The Clubhouse! We hope you were able to find comfort or inspiration in your favorite pop culture offerings this weekend!

This week, we sing the praises of “messy women” — women characters in TV, film, books, and games who get to be just as unapologetically scattered and flawed as their dude counterparts — and have rounded up some of our favorite messy ladies in film/TV, books, games, and comics to celebrate them with you!

And as always, we wanna hear from you! Tell us all about your favorite messy women in media, ideas for future issues of The Clubhouse, or anything else that’s on your mind in the pop culture/media space by replying to this email, or writing to us at [email protected]!

TV’s OG messy women: Ethel (Vivian Vance) and Lucy (Lucille Ball) on ‘I Love Lucy’ (CBS)

IN PRAISE OF “MESSY WOMEN”

by Teresa Jusino

Messy male protagonists abound. From the earliest days of film and television, and even earlier than that in books or theater, men have gotten to be selfish, bumbling, and impulsive and still get to be the heroes of their stories. When male characters act rashly, or chase their dreams to the detriment of other areas of their lives, readers and viewers tend to understand it. Even expect it. And these characters get to sit at the center of dramatic, “serious” stories.

Meanwhile, it’s rare that the women in these stories aren’t relegated to being the nagging voice in men’s ears, reminding them of their responsibilities or of what their priorities should be. Selfish, bumbling, and impulsive female characters are often viewed as especially damaged. Messy women tend to exist in fiction to be entertaining or high-concept (because could you imagine a woman like this in real life?), but rarely to be simply understood unless through the prism of speculative fiction.

When nuanced female characters are allowed to be protagonists, those stories tend to be comedy or sci-fi/fantasy, as though it’s unimaginable that they could exist in real life or “real stories.” Take TV comedy classic I Love Lucy, for example. Lucy Ricardo is constantly chasing her show business dreams through her husband, Ricky, while also precariously balancing her roles as wife and mother. And her journey is funny.

Going further back, the most coveted, nuanced roles for men in Shakespeare are dramatic roles like Hamlet or King Lear. For women, it’s Rosalind in As You Like It, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, or Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew. Comedies where, as fully fleshed-out as these women are, they still only exist to complete a romantic relationship, and are only allowed to be entirely themselves, because the audience is there to laugh. Hell, Katherine is reduced to “the Shrew” in the title of her own play for having the audacity to be snarky.

People have a harder time justifying certain behavior from fictional women, because of what they expect from women in real life. Girls are taught to be responsible, nurturing, and concerned about communal welfare while boys are encouraged as individuals and taught that their desires for their lives matter. Women and girls are rarely given the same grace men and boys are given when they make mistakes, act inappropriately, or shirk responsibilities in favor of pursuing personal goals or growth.

If we believe in feminism — in the idea that people are equal and deserve equal respect, access, and freedom to design the lives they want for themselves — then we need to allow women the same freedom to fail or fall short that we allow men so easily.

With that in mind, here are some female characters who are compelling precisely because they’re navigating through their mess, and we’re rooting for them to get to the other side:

TELEVISION

The women of Shrinking

Christa Miller as Liz and Jessica Williams as Gaby in ‘Shrinking’ (Apple TV+)

It makes sense that a comedy about therapists would be filled with messy characters. But on Apple TV+’s Shrinking, the messiest people are the therapists themselves.

One of them is Gaby (Jessica Williams), a woman who can’t help but get involved in other people’s business (maybe that’s why she became a therapist?), can’t decide if she wants to be her friend’s teen daughter’s role model or bestie, and is navigating life after her recent divorce by sleeping with her dead best friend’s husband.

But the top prize for getting involved in other people’s business goes to Liz (Christa Miller), who is a compulsive busybody. She isn’t just nosy. She’ll actively insert herself into your life to handle/fix your problems whether you want her to or not. Yet, for all that helpfulness, she’s not particularly nurturing or even that concerned with other people’s feelings or desires. When she steps in to help, it’s so that she can be the person who “fixed it.” Solving other people’s problems is how she feels good about herself.

Watching these two characters build a friendship is interesting, because they see themselves in each other, for better or worse. They each get the chance to feel the consequences of their worst behavior when dished out by the other while also getting to practice being their best selves with each other. If there’s anything better than a messy female character, it’s two messy female characters learning how to clean up their messes together.

FILM

Gemma in M3GAN

Allison Williams in a scene from ‘M3GAN’ (Universal Pictures)

Gemma in M3GAN loves her career as a roboticist and was never planning to be a parent when she suddenly becomes the legal guardian for her niece after her sister and brother-in-law die in a car accident.

And she’s pretty terrible at it. Not only does she not have any parenting instincts, but she also can’t seem to deal well with other human beings in general. (This might be why she went into robotics.) And her solution to better connection with her niece? Rather than trying to get to know her niece better, or working harder to deepen her own emotional literacy so that she can better connect, she creates a humanoid, robot doll powered by AI and has it connect with her niece instead. Murders ensue.

The entire rest of the movie is Gemma cleaning up that mess, and it’s an entertaining ride.

BOOKS

Celaena Sardothien in the Throne of Glass series

illustration of Celaena Sardothien by Charlie Bowater

TMS staffer Madison Lair chimed in when she heard I was doing this list to sing the praises of a teenage assassin in Sarah J. Maas’ Throne of Glass series.

Lair said, “The world's greatest assassin, Celaena Sardothien is a messy 18-year-old girl who loves to read books, eat sweets, and dance to music (sometimes by herself). From eating two pounds of candy in bed to showing up to court in insanely outdated clothing, Celaena has absolutely no shame. She's deadly, mischievous, and chaotic and we love her for it.”

Being a slave and forced to live and work as an assassin would do a number on anyone, let alone a teenager, and the series allows Celaena to navigate the murky waters of injustice, morality, and love in a nuanced, fully-developed way. It acknowledges that she is a mess without judging her messiness.

VIDEO GAMES

Edie Finch in What Remains of Edith Finch

Screenshot from ‘What Remains of Edith Finch’ depicting a photo of Dawn, Edie, and Edith Finch. (Giant Sparrow/Annapurna Interactive)

What Remains of Edith Finch is a single-player exploration game where you play as 17-year-old Edith Finch, the last surviving member of her family. She’s returned to her childhood home after the death of her mother to capture the full story of her family’s tragic history.

The Finch family is full of messy women, but the messiest of all is its matriarch, Edith’s great-grandmother who went by “Edie.” After the death of her mother, Edie emigrated to the United States from Norway with her father, husband, and newborn daughter in the hopes of escaping the Finch family curse: theirs is a long, sad history of untimely deaths.

Those deaths continued even after the move abroad, and as children kept being born (and dying) and the family got bigger (then smaller), Edie became obsessed with the family deaths and memorializing the deceased with portraits and by crafting their bedrooms into shrines. The Finch house is a cobbled-together hodgepodge of rooms and secret passageways, each leading to a new shrine to a family member. It’s a disjointed monument to Edie’s preoccupation with the dead.

Edie’s devotion to the “family curse” causes a rift between her and her only surviving daughter, Dawn (Edith’s mother), causing Dawn to leave her mother alone at 93 to remove her young daughter from the house.

Edie’s story is a fascinating one, and she never gets “un-messy,” but weirdly enough, her life and subsequent passing provide her great-granddaughter with a template for how to appreciate life.

ICYMI

Theo Rossi and Cristin Milioti in a scene from ‘The Penguin’ (HBO)

Here are some recent posts over at TMS that you shouldn’t miss:

INTERVIEW SPOTLIGHT

Have you seen these interviews? Make sure you’re caught up with the convos TMS is having with the folks behind our favorite stories!

TMS’s Rachel Leishman catches up with Allison Williams at NYCC to talk about dances, costumes, and M3GAN 2.0.

And here are some other chats that aren’t to be missed:

Thoughts? Ideas? Reply here, or write to us at [email protected] to tell us how we’re doing and what you’d like to see!