Inspired by Brit Marling’s The New York Times op-ed, “I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead”.
…hard to pin down. She fights crime and looks good while doing it. She’s so beautiful, the man never suspects that underneath her silky, crimson gown, she’s got a knife holstered to her thigh. (It’s there in case her plan of leading him up to her hotel room to slip arsenic in his drink goes awry.)
The strong female lead has traveled around the world. She’s lived in Germany, Korea, Hungary, and Russia. The audience knows that she can speak to mobsters as though their language is her native one, but what we don’t know is that she had to learn how to say “no” in all four countries (nein, 아니, nem, нет). She never explains to us that she had to say those words so many times they began to taste like sour milk, and soon, they became unrecognizable to her—as foreign on her tongue as they had felt when she first said them. Was it niem? Neti? She couldn’t remember. The audience doesn’t see that, after a while, she had to replace these words with a guttural yelp, a defeated “uh-uh”, a lackluster shake of the head.
The strong female lead has plotted bank heists, parachuted out of airplanes, and stabbed more men than one in the jugular with a stiletto. But when the audience isn’t looking, when their eyes are on the bad guys, she’s crying into a stiff drink because the person she loves doesn’t love her back. She’s ignoring her father’s calls, regretting ignoring those calls, waking up day after day alone and in bed wondering, “Where did all my time go?”
