deconstructing the good woman/bad woman dichotomy in the tdk trilogy

ah, dichotomies, the bane of every person who isn't a... well, actually dichotomies hurt everyone, but i'm not here to talk about real life ones (atm anyway). i here to talk about the one i mentioned in my last post: the good/bad dichotomy in chris nolan's female characters. (i'm only focusing on the tdk trilogy because i haven't seen any of his movies outside of it except inception.)

like i said, this thing is really, really false. even without factoring characters and characterization, i can tell that the thing was something inadvertently made up by the fans. it probably started as them pointing out a flaw and now they're trying to stick all the girls in there. "but frankie, but frankie, why is it so easy to put them in there at a first glance though?" that's answered easily: it's because nolan doesn't write enough women. when you make a series of three movies with a big cast of characters you should have more than six females among them. that even number makes it more than easy enough to separate them into dumb groups without a second glance. for two, this dichotomy in general ignores nolan's work deconstructing yet another dichotomy: the one between good and evil. also, misogyny, because you sure don't see anyone trying to force the male characters into these limited moral spaces!

but yeah, to the girls. i mentioned the four main female characters in my other post - rachel, anna, selina, and talia - and how they 'fit' into the dichotomy. of course, it doesn't work that easily. for one, three of these four girls slide around the grey area more than batman does, really. rachel is the only girl that can be called good, but that's because she dies before she can be forced to do things that would put her into the grey area as well. the good/bad thing really flattens the characters into two-dimensional caricatures of the things nolan actually wrote.

i wanna talk about talia next because she's the only one who might fit into the 'bad' category, but even then it's only because she doesn't care about what her father really stood for - if she did she would be an antivillian like her dad and bane. her revenge makes her a bit more shallow in terms of morality compared to selina and anna.

i like anna because she's one of the characters that sits right in the grey; she's a cop on the mob's payroll but it's only because she wants to help her mom. she has a hand in rachel's death but it was unknowingly. she refuses to sit firmly in the 'good' or 'bad' area - she's the epitome of what nolan was trying do, really.

selina is a fun one as well, because she's also firmly in the grey; she's a jewel thief, but only because she can't get any higher in life because of her record. she has no qualms with killing, but the only people she kills are people who are endangering her (of course, us having spent so much time with batman skews our perspective on this). she even has a sort of code when it comes to her stealing. she's a darker shade of grey, but still grey nonetheless.

and this isn't even counting the fact that to put the dichotomy in effect you have to erase the three neutral female characters from the story: barbara gordon, judge surillo, and talia's mother. all three put into the plot of one of the movies in some way but aren't there enough (or are too dead) to reallly have an established moral compass.

like i mentioned above, the real problem here is the fact that there are only seven of these guys amongst a sea of complex male characters. let's not make it worse by trying to erase pieces of their characterization, please?

subverting tropes with c. nolan

okay guys.

so yesterday there was a post on my tumblr dashboard about how the marvel movies do better than the dark knight trilogy at portraying women. i'm not really here to talk about that rn, because i made a lot of posts about it on my blog already (here, if you wanna see them idk), but i'll just tell you that i agree with the sentiment but literally every argument, while they do apply to the portrayal of women in media, doesn't apply to the tdk trilogy. but, like i said, that's not what i'm here to talk about. while i was talking about that i mentioned that the only time nolan really did something interesting with his female chars was in inception. i mentioned how in his movies if there are two female chars one is usually good and one is bad and that's annoying, we all know that. in inception he subverts that with both of the girls.

there are a lot of ways to interpret inception, but the two most popular are the theories the one where mal was right (cobb is in some super deep dream state), and the one where she's wrong (she's really dead). there are others, and even within those two there are separate subtheories, but i'm gonna focus on these two supertheories for this.

in the movie, mal is presented as a sort of villain: not only does she get in the way of jobs, she has no problems with killing them in the one occasion where death has some kind of weight in a dream. she's dangerous, and it's only because cobb confronts her that the team can complete the job. ariadne, on the other hand, is the team's architect, and is one of the most important members of the team even before she makes cobb take her into the dream with them. she builds the mazes, and is the one who sees through cobb and actually takes initiative to do something so that the team won't be compromised by mal in the field. from what i've said above, you can deduce that they fall neatly into the categories most female characters do in a nolan story: ariadne is the good one, and mal is the bad one, right?

but it's not that easy.

to say that mal is the 'villain' and that ariadne is some kind of 'hero' is grossly simplifying both women.

in the case of ariadne, it's a bit simpler: if you've seen inception more than once while simultaneously having an internet connection, you know that the team aren't heroes. you don't have to look far to see it; miles straight up calls cobb wanting ariadne to work with them corruption. she's not neutral, but ari isn't exempt because she's new either. she's not the good one, she's just another person helping the protagonist.

now onto mal. there are two things that need to be put out there right now: 1, mal is still the antagonist. antagonists don't have to be evil, nor do they have to be villains, they just have to be against the protagonist, and she is. 2, mal does qualify as an anti-villain: on the sliding scale of anti-villains, she's a solid type four. 

however, like i said, to say that she's a villain at all is still simplifying the character a lot, and when you really look at it she doesn't really fit into the list of 'bad' women in nolan's films.* first off, her MO is super important. her whole motivation in the movie is getting cobb to realize that the world he's living in isn't real, and that he needs to come back home. whether you agree with her or not, that's not really that villainous or evil or even that bad. her means are more than a bit dodgy, let's be honest here, but in the end she doesn't want to ruin their job, she's just willing to do it if it'll get her husband to wake up. 

secondly, you have to take into account that mal isn't real. (this is where subtheories can make things mucky, but let's work under assumption that in both theories she's a projection.**) sure, she gets in the way of the crew at times when they're trying to work, but she's a projection, and an extension of cobb. take away all the layers, and the thing that's really getting in the way of the team is cobb's subconscious. ariadne says as much when cobb stops her from asking him about the layout. so, really, if you're really pressed about inception not having a villain, it does have one: it's cobb.

"but frankie, but frankie, cob can't be the villain! he's the protagonist!"

i said it above, but i'll say it again: the antagonist isn't always a villain, and the villain isn't always the antagonist. the protagonist can be evil just as easily as your antagonist can be good; heck, sometimes they're both evil, and sometimes they're both alright folks! protagonist is just term that means 'person/people we're following'. that's it. it doesn't mean 'hero' or 'good guy' or anything else, just that. mal is an antagonist because she's opposing cobb, but cobb is the villain because he's really the one getting in the way - also, not to mention the little stunt he pulled with not telling everyone about limbo. if you want to take it even further, you could say that cobb is the antagonist as well, since mal is an extension of him. 

so, in reality, the nolan dichotomy doesn't work here, as the 'good' woman isn't really good, just on our side, and the 'bad' woman isn't even real.

* my real problem with the good/bad dichotomy is that it's actually false (they all are, lbr). going off of the four nolan films that i've seen, it seems like it works - rachel is the good one and anna ramirez is the bad one, selina is the good one and talia is the bad one - but that completely ignores a) the nuances of the last three (rachel is a bit too saintly, but that's for another day), and b) the other three women who have some kind of presence in the dark knight and the dark knight rises. this is something i ought to discuss in a separate post though.

** there's a subtheory within the 'mal was right' camp that says that she was the real thing, and that she was really there and all that jazz. i'm not really here to argue that that was wrong, because i needed to make a point, but i will say that if that was the real mal why was she acting that way???