The stats:
Out of Total Film’s list of the 100 Greatest Female Characters in movies…
Only 79 have full names, and only 73 are listed by their full name.
6 are not human women, and 3 are not humanoid.
38 are a character in someone else’s story. 25 of those are primarily a love interest.
Approximately 1/5 do not survive their film.
Almost 1/2 are victimized or imperiled in their films, and 1/3 are victims of rape, sexual assault, family or intimate partner violence.
There are four women of color. Two of these women (the only adult women of color and the only black characters) are portrayed by the same actor, Pam Grier.
There are three four [correction based on help from commenters. Thanks, commenters!] characters identifiable as bisexual and one character identifiable as a lesbian.
More than half the characters are approximately 20–35 years of age.
22 appear in films at least co-written by women. Only 5* appear in films directed by women.
[*Correction: this statistic originally read as 4, because I relied on Wikipedia which still lists the directors of The Matrix as Andy and Larry Wachowski instead of Andy and Lana Wachowski. I regret the error and thank Bitch Flicks for alerting me to my mistake.]
Discussion (some film spoilers ahead)
Coding this list was harder than I thought it would be, mostly because I’ve only personally seen 73 of the films. For the films I haven’t seen or couldn’t completely remember, I turned to Wikipedia and IMDb plot summaries, but it is entirely possible I coded incorrectly.
For “full name” I relied on how the character is credited if I couldn’t remember the character’s name from the film, which probably produced errors.
“Is it her story?” is, admittedly, a somewhat subjective value judgment. One in particular I struggled with was Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I originally coded her as a “no,” but after seeing I did give a yes to Charlotte in Lost in Translation I changed my mind. While I think that Joel is the central character of Eternal Sunshine, Clementine is distinct from say, Summer in (500) Days of Summer, who might as well not breathe air if she doesn’t do it in front of Tom. So Clementine is one of 23 characters I coded as having her story told and being a love interest.
The numbers might be slightly off for the victimization figures, especially where the victimization didn’t make it into the Wikipedia plot summary. Straight-up victims include the villain characters who are killed in the film (e.g. Annie Wilkes from Misery), which is part of the reason I added the second column to find out how many of these characters were, in the Law & Order parlance, “special victims.”
20 characters undeniably die within their film, three more are characters in a series of films who die before the last installment. Three characters’ fates are ambiguous or vary depending on the cut of the film.
One question I wanted to explore, but ended up throwing out because I could not come up with a consistent standard, was “Is the character hyper-sexualized?” I basically wanted to see how many Jessica Rabbits there are on the list (note: at least one). But I found myself wanting to click “yes” for every character who is at all defined by the male gaze, and that risked obscuring female desire AND injecting more academia than I can handle.
The demographic coding was probably the hardest, because as interested as I was to see how representative this list is, I felt oogy imposing identities on people, even fictional people.
- So many of the characters are children or otherwise not expressed in a sexual enough way for me to have any guess as to their sexuality. Just to be clear: there are four characters who explicitly desire and/or have consensual sex with women. This doesn’t mean that 96 of the characters on the list are straight. Just one example of not knowing how to code here is Sugar Kane from Some Like It Hot, she ostensibly falls in love with Joe while believing he is a woman.
- In the 4 characters of color, I am including Chihiro from Spirited Away because her character is Japanese in nationality and was originally voiced by a Japanese actress, even though her animated appearance doesn’t clearly indicate her race and her English-dub voice actor is white. I am not including Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors even though her voice actor is a black man, because she’s not human or humanoid. Similarly, I didn’t code Lady or Dory as white, irrespective of their voice actors, because assigning a race to a dog and a fish gave me a headache.
- I drew somewhat arbitrary lines for the age groups: child is age 12 or younger, teen is 13-20, young is 20-35, middle is 35-60, and no character is older than that. I had to guess A LOT, sometimes relying on the actor’s age when they played the part.
- As such, I lack confidence about all of these statistics, and I welcome comments suggesting changes.
I wanted to explore the demographics on this list along other dimensions of the kyriarchy, but gave up.
- Determining the class of characters in movies I haven’t seen, especially those set in societies I am unfamiliar with, was too hard for me. I hope someone else takes that up.
- None of the characters are explicitly trans.
- None of the characters are physically disabled at the start of their films.
- I didn’t have enough information to sort out how many characters have mental disabilities. Again, I’m very curious how this would play out.
Conclusion: Probably the most surprising thing I learned from this exercise is how many women screenwriters were active in the Golden Age of Hollywood. As for the lack of diversity in the list, the high number of characters who are merely lovers or helpers to male protagonists, and the high number of characters who are victims, I’m sadly unsurprised. While Total Film is not blameless (I could, and maybe will, do a separate post excerpting all the sexist language that appears in the write-ups for the characters), we shouldn’t forget that some (maybe a lot) of the blame falls on the movies themselves. Here’s hoping that the next 100 years of cinema produce so many full, rich women characters that no one needs to turn to killer plants to round out their list.
Showing my work: Master spreadsheet (Google Document) (Many film spoilers within)
Thanks so much for this. I was curious about the breakdown but unable to click through more than twenty or so before the combination of annoyance and boredom put me off. On the bright side, it did make me think about all the wonderful female characters that should go on a list like this. I doubt there’d be much intersect with Total Film’s list.
I’d love to see a list of female film characters compiled by feminists!
Came over from TBD. I’m grateful for the work you put into this, partly because since I’m not much of a movie buff, I haven’t seen many (maybe most) of the films on the list and thus had trouble making judgments about the strength of the characters/roles. Something I found worth noting: while most of these are American films, Whale Rider and Sen to Chihiro are not- so fully half the characters of color (the ones who aren’t Pam Grier) are imports, making Hollywood’s record even more dismal.
I’ve also been wondering how many of these are villain characters, and what that might imply- I’m NOT asking you to do more work, for the record; it’s just something that occurred to me while looking at the list. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large proportion of the ‘independent’ characters (those more than helpers or love interests) are coded as evil, because power/authority isn’t a *proper* woman’s place…
Excellent point about Chihiro and Pai being characters in films made outside the US!
Also, I actually did try to code for villainous characters, and you can see what I came up with on the spreadsheet, but I was REALLY winging it on that evaluation and not even remotely consistent in how I treated anti-heroes, femme fatales, etc. Because I couldn’t offer a meaningful standard for my choices, I didn’t discuss the results of that inquiry.
Unlike Robin, I’ve seen very few of these so I’m not good at adding to the spreadsheet without extensive googling first. But I am curious how many of theses films besides the ones you mentioned were made outside of the US.
To add to the disappointments already pointed out, the title of the list itself irks me. Why call it ’100 Best Female Characters’ rather than something that would be more accurate like ’100 Best Female Characters in the US Film Canon’ or something like that? I realize maybe it is impossible to include all films ever made in all countries in a Best-of list, I’m just saying there’s no reason for them to title their list as if they did.
Also, considering women in comedy issues, I was also wondering how many of those roles are comedic vs. dramatic.
Great analysis.
One thing I’d like to add to the “victimised, imperiled, victim of rape, sexual assault” etc. stat. Unlike most of the other stats, this is actually more or less representative of real life: in the UK where I am, 45% of women are victims of sexual abuse, stalking or domestic violence at some point in their life, 25% are victims of rape. Pretty much every woman has at some point been a victim of a “minor” incident like street harassment.
Violence against women in our society (Western society in general, more or less) is endemic, it’s hidden, the vast majority of the physical, financial and emotional cost born by women themselves. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have this reality represented in film.
Having said that, it’s obviously not acceptable for films to present violence against women and not at least make an effort to engage with it critically – and very few of those films do that.
That’s a really good point. And also a really sad point. Thanks.
Love this!
I don’t have much time to comment fully but one thing about Clarice Starling; I thought she was presented as being in a relationship with her female FBI colleague. It is ambiguous though.
Thanks! I haven’t seen Silence of the Lambs, so I based my evaluation of Clarice’s sexuality from Hannibal (or really, reviews of Hannibal discussing the differences from the book). I realize it is absurd to have seen Hannibal and not Silence of the Lambs.
that’s actually quite funny. Silence of the Lambs is a film that provides a conflicting experience for the feminist viewer though which makes it interesting. I haven’t seen Hannibal so can’t comment on how that might differ.
Thinking about it further it seems Clarice’s presented sexuality is quite complex and I noticed that you were looking for characters who can be identified clearly so; sorry.
Well, human sexuality is quite complex, so the movies might as well present it that way. But given how many explicitly straight characters there are in films, it would be nice if there could be some more gay characters outside of subtext and speculation.
So, #11 on the list, Eli, is actually a boy. A castrated boy. It is a major part of the book but they just hint at it in the movie, by showing a quick crotch shot with stitches, but I guess they decided that would have to do.
So, oops on Total Films part. And I suppose that just complicates your spreadsheet even further. Or maybe it makes the tranny list. Or something.
WELL done, otherwise.
Wow. Total Film should maybe be called Total Fail.
This is a great analysis.
Awesome job disecting all this data!
I think the list should be renamed “100 greatest female characters in films men watch”, though. The films the caracters are taken from are overhelmingly male gaze films: thrillers, sex dramas, horror flicks, action movies & every film ever made by Quentin Tarantino (srsly, what’s with that?).
It’s easy & tempting to make lists of “things that should have been on this list if it was a proper list”, but there are whole genres that are represented here by only one or two token genre-breaking hit: historical dramas, adaptations of woman-lead novels written by women, romantic comedies, golden age musicals… It’s like the list was compiled by the sort of demographic that’s been the narrow target audience for Hollywood since the 80′s – white, male and young. Which it probably was.
I posted my comment about renaming it before I saw yours, but I totally agree. Also, for real for real, buh to the Tarantino-love shown on the list.
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Isn’t Lisbeth Salander bi-sexual? She has sexual relationships with both Mikhail Blomkvist and Miriam Wu
Lisbeth Salander is definitely bi-sexual. She has multiple relationships with both men and women in the books (and American film, I can’t comment on the Swedish because I’ve never made it through the whole thing yet…)
But this is a great list!
Yes, Lisbeth has a relationship with a woman in the Swedish films. She isn’t presented as being straight in either the American or Swedish films but she’s listed as being straight on the list. Can this be changed?
I don’t see relevance on female characters being written or directed by female writers to make in the list, but it’s even more meaningless if we don’t account for how many female authors there are in the first place.
But what about the victimization? Is that something that automatically counts as “bad” for the character? A character, being female, is better having only a happy life and not having any sort of trouble in the story, and if it got to have some trouble, it better not be related with violence of any sort, much less sexual, because otherwise it would be some sort of “approval” of such violence?
This strikes me somewhat like some “subliminal message” arguments I’ve seen. There’s “101 dalmatians”, where the villain is named “Cruella De Vil”. See, the first name is derived from the “cruel” morpheme, “Vil” is the radical, the meaning “core” of the word “villain” and derivatives, and “De Vil” also somewhat of a pun with “devil”. “Thus” it’s all a “subliminal message” and it’s somehow hypnotizing devilishness into children’s minds. The most significant different I see is that those arguments on subliminal messages I saw had all an underlying background of how satanists and the like were trying to corrupt everyone’s souls and to destroy Christianity, but it could easily be coopted as hate towards women in this case, after all, the villain is a women. And she would kill puppies to make a coat, for god’s sake.
I hate being such a hardcore centrist in everything, exaggerations/extremisms in either side seem to make hard to point out valid points on either side. Like just by making this comment I could easily be called a women-hater and/or irremediably clueless due to male privilege that blinds me from having even the faintest idea of what could be a woman’s perspective, lumped with those mostly frustrated whiners defendants of “men’s rights”, whereas if I make some sort of feministic point about the same subject I’d be easily labeled as some sort of condescending and obedient feminist lapdog that will just parrot whatever any feminist say without ever having any critical thinking about it, as I consider myself unable to do so as I’m a male, and therefore inept to put myself on women’s shoes, even those without high heels.
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I just took a quick glance at the IMDb Top 250 of greatest movies. I haven’t seen all of them, but with most I know what they are about.
I noticed that all the movies at the top are stories about men, where woman hardly play a role, not even as love interests. I mean; who even remembers the love interests in THE GodFather, or in The Lord Of The Rings? I don’t.
The first movie on the list with a female lead character is Aliens4 on 59. (which is a very cool movie, with a very cool female hero, who is sexy but not oversexualized, and with a cool femnale villain as wel.).
All the movies on numbers 1-58 are completely male centered.
Hey!
Good article, I do believe Summer Finn is either bisexual or ambiguous because one of her past relationships was with “Charlie” played by Samantha Krutzfeldt.
Thanks for your thoughtful commentary!
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