What does the increasing trend of depicting revengeful women tell us about women's anger?
While doing some research for this piece, I remembered one of my favourite scenes in Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards: Shoshanna setting up her vengeance against the Nazi that killed all her family years before. Perfectly scored to Bowie’s Cat People, the scene draws its power from what we know about Shoshanna’s past. The Nazis murdering her family when she was a kid and the unpleasant and unwanted attention of the slimy Friederik.
But I only now finally understand what keeps pulling me to this scene: its smouldering depiction of female revenge. Shoshanna is not only a Jew orphaned by nazi hands, Shoshanna is a woman luring men with strong patriarchal values to their demise. What we see in this scene is the restoration of female power. Yet the source of that power flows from the system of her oppression. She is underestimated as a woman, so she can act without suspicion.
This is something I always think about when facing the arrogance of those men who - consciously or not - believe in women’s inferiority. When I see injustices against women I see a paradox; it’s exactly in that male arrogance that lies our last bit of hope, the narcissist feeling of invincibility. Without even realizing it, men are going to lose, because prejudice makes them blind.
These thoughts are obviously irrational, guided by rage, maybe my own revenge fantasy. For me, feminism is about gender equality and mutual understanding, not female supremacy. But why, then, do I find myself entertaining ideas of radical power? What is so invigorating about men being humbled by their own arrogance?
Lately, I found out that I am in good company.
This year the fourth season of The Handmaid’s Tale was released on Hulu. For those who don't know, the TV series is a dystopian fiction based on Margaret Atwood’s sci-fi thriller. The story is set in a fictional future America where a religious cult, with the mission of restoring fertility rates, seized power in parts of the country. This totalitarian regime, called Gilead, is based on a strict class system and one of the roles in this system is the Handmaid, who has the duty of serving the highest class, the Commanders’ families. The Handmaid is used as a tool to make children through ritualized rape.
The protagonist of the series is June (Elizabeth Moss), a handmaid who rebels fiercely against the dictatorship. While Gilead is a fictional society, the series describes to perfection the injustices of our patriarchal system and the powerful urge to subvert it.
After seeing June and the other characters going through every possible kind of abuse, the last season gave us something even darker; something that was, at least for me, hard to process: a great revenge.
Despite revelling in June’s righteous retribution, It was hard for me to understand how she could be so violent, so full of hate. Like I always do, I thought a lot about it, going on with my week, and waiting for the next episode.
From the Femme Fatale to the Radical Feminist
By chance, these days I’m reading the bible, that is Invisible Women - exposing data bias in a world designed for men by Caroline Criado Perez. Perez gathers in her book a martial mountains of research to prove how in a range of different fields, ‘gender affects the kind of question we ask’ and that if the data are missing or are not segregated then the product will end up discriminating half of the population, the female half.
If you ever read this book - and I hope you do - you will discover that every word of it is deeply enraging. It raised my awareness of how many injustices women still endure today. Perez made me realize that this world is so biased that we are not even conscious of most of these injustices. I started thinking: Why are women not furious? Why are we not in the street protesting every day for a world that doesn't see us, doesn't reward us what we deserve, and in some cases lets us die?’
It was in that moment of awakening that I understood June's reaction.
Lately, I realized that The Handmaid’s Tale resolution is part of a new theme that the film industry is now delivering us. The ancient archetype of the ‘femme fatale’ ready to kill for love infidelity has been replaced by a feminist icon that is fighting for something more than a man.
Movies like Promising Young Woman, deliver a withering critique of the “nice guy” and “frat culture.” Just as The Handmaid’s Tale exposes problems that are already present in our society and even more so in parts of the world where the condition of women is not so different from Gilead's. We can find the motive also in The Good Liar (2019) which tells the story of a perfectly constructed revenge for a rape experienced at a young age. And in August of 2019, Amazon Prime released its darkly comedic Why Women Kill, which inverts the theme of domestic violence and wraps it in a murder mystery.
While the Femme fatale trope was designed for a male audience and their fear of female sexuality, this new vengeful female detaches herself from the stereotype. Though she can still avail herself of feminine allure, often using sex as a form of power, the difference is in the stories which never depict her as a simple villain. On the contrary, this new generation of revenge flicks introduces complex female characters with complex choices and motivations allowing the viewer to empathize and understand their actions.
It feels like this new genre is bringing us back to the old stereotype of the “killjoy”, the man-hating aggressive feminist. Women have now found new rebellious ferocity but not knowing how to express it they drown their instincts in the cathartic pleasure of a vengeful fantasy. Therefore the risk is that instead of bursting the flame of rebellion, creating indignation and spreading awareness, these stories would simply become mere survival tools, to allow us to accept reality. To release and keep going.
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