Self-Aware, A Disaster, And Constantly Failing: Our Favourite On-Screen Women

In a scene in the first episode of season 5 of Bojack Horseman, one of the hardest and strongest scenes for me in the show, Diane sports a new haircut and clothes, and attends her ex-husband Mr Peanutbutter’s party. On the way home, she howls at a traffic stop as people in the cars next to her avoid looking at her, failing to stop themselves from gawking at this woman who is coming undone. I think that was the moment Diane actually stepped into the potential of what she could be, what her life could look like. In the first four seasons of the show, I found myself somewhat relating to Diane and yet being constantly annoyed by her. Mostly because of how much I saw myself in her. A woman, so strong in her beliefs of what the world should look like, and yet so at odds with her own life and identity. She is the best example of not following her own advice (ahem, hello me). Even while she fights against Hank Hippopopolis for his sexual misconduct, she continues to befreind Bojack, who has treated and continues to treat the women in his life horribly. She fights the big corporations who prey on the little guy and yet surrounds herself with celebrities and the glamorous lives they lead. She purports the ideas of feminism, but judges her coworkers at Girlcroosh and is, frankly, a bad friend to Princess Carolyn (who in her own way also fits this trope) and the other women in her life, fixating on her own problems and struggles, but choosing, for the most part, to not do anything about them.

While she writes Bojack’s life story or even ghost tweets for celebrities, she goes to great lengths to not engage with her own trauma, her own story. Like most of us, even while her life surrounds her identity, she refuses to actually dig deeper, in denial about her mental issues. She rejects the good men for the bad or the average, because that might mean having to actually work on herself. She stops taking medication because she feels it makes her a lesser writer—believing that her sadness is the only thing worth writing about. She revels in her victimhood while wholly rejecting that women are victims in their own stories. She’s struggling. She’s failing. It’s hard to watch, because it can sometimes feel like looking in the mirror, but isn’t that what feminism should look like? I show you my failings, you show me yours, and we’ll both help each other with it.

Nothing I say about this show will ever be enough, so much so that I struggled writing this section more than any other in the piece. The name Waller-Bridge gives her character says it all, right? The inner life of her character, of all the women on the show, is messy, it’s painful, plagued by trauma, garbed in humour that never makes you go ha ha, but makes you recoil uncomfortably in the familiarity of it. Using sex as a defence mechanism, never really knowing how to speak to her father, never really knowing how to tell her sister, who is so different from who she is, that she loves her, falling in love with a priest, a man she knows will never love her back and still hoping, burying her grief, and being acutely and painfully aware of everything she’s doing.

A lot has been said about this show, and how women must come out of this dissociation, of numbing ourselves to our self-awareness while also constantly smirking at it in acknowledgement. Was Fleabag in denial? Or was she hyper-aware? Was the constant breaking of the fourth wall a need to confide in an entity that will never speak back to her? I, honestly, do not have the answers to any of these questions. I will not sit here and claim to know Fleabag. Do I see myself reflected in her character? Yes. Does that trouble me? Deeply. I do not know how to be articulate about this show. But I think that is the point. You do not analyse a show like Fleabag, you just revel in its messiness. You allow it do to you whatever it needs to. I don’t want it to add to the conversation, I just want it to exist. That’s enough.

I have always loved Marvel, from the comics to the movies and now the shows—it’s my ‘I ‘don’t want to think’ entertainment, I want to sit there for two hours and believe that a hero will fall from the sky and save everything; that global warming isn’t our real problem, Thanos is. Which is why, WandaVision, was refreshing, yes, but so uncomfortable. It had all the elements of a superhero show, but it towed the line between the fantastic and the real so well that it made me sit up and actually use my brain.

‘But what is grief, if not love persevering?’ Imagine something like that coming out of a superhero show. But it wasn’t really that, was it? It was a show where a woman worries about making dinner on time, her twins, impressing her husband’s boss, her brother, fitting in with the other women in the neighbourhood. Seems like a run-of-the-mill sitcom. Only, at the centre of it is a woman, with immense abilities, with a power stronger than most, if not all superheroes in her universe. A woman who potentially has immense responsibilities, but right now, all she wants to do is bake the perfect cake and kiss her kids goodnight. A life she could have potentially had, if only her husband hadn’t died fighting to save the world, if only there wasn’t a world she needed to save.

What if sometimes women just want a so-called ‘small’ life? No hustle, no big dream, no weight of the world on them, just a little house, some love, some laughter, and cake to go with it all. Is that failure? Is that less-than? And why must our grief be small? Wanda’s feelings were as big as her powers, and even though I do not have the power to hypnotise a whole town, I, too, have hurt the people in my life and innocent bystanders because of my pain. I have not been put-together, I have not been pleasant, I have not been nice. Does that mean I failed? Does struggling mean failing? Does wanting someone’s else life mean failing?

Say what you will about Big Little Lies, it definitely gave us characters that kept me up at night. After I saw the show, I went back and read the book. I wanted more time with the characters, their flaws, their disastrous personalities, the sea of difference in their lives, even though it all looked fundamentally the same. And while in some way or the other, all of them were failing, it was Mackanzie that caught my eye. She’s the perfect soccer mom. Always immaculately dressed, her high heels clacking on the gravel; always perfectly behaved (in public, at least); always kind, a crusader for every worthy cause in town. But she has one of those things that plagues most women after the age of 15—a brain that never shuts off. Behind the surety of those click-clacking heels is a woman who is deeply insecure about herself. A woman who believes she never lived up to her own potential. Constantly at odds with what her true self is and the image she portrays and wants to fiercely protect, so much so that she projects these issues on to her daughter. In her own feelings of inadequacy, she refuses to leave room for her daughter to make mistakes. She’s critical of and unkind to her ex-husband’s wife because in Bonnie, she sees the rejection of her as a wife. In her restlessness, there is self-destruction (for example, cheating on her husband), a need to blow up this perfectly stitched together life so maybe she might have a chance to rebuild. In Madeline, I see the constant pressure of being perfect that we put upon ourselves—you can fall apart, but do it quietly, do it hidden away, preferably, don’t do it all. I kept waiting for her to scream, to rage, to shout, to be the madwoman, the anti-hero she is, but openly. I have to be honest, I am not a fan of Madeline Mackenzie, but if there’s someone I’d want as a friend, it would be her, only because I’m a little scared of her.

I will watch anything with Shefali Shah in it. And yes, Dil Dhadakne Do is a Zoya Akhtar over all feel-good fest about rich people and their rich-people problems. But the women in this women have been written with nuance I have come to not expect from Bollywood a lot, where the women are written in extremes, never straddling the extremes like most women in real life do. On the surface, Neelam seems like your typical South Delhi aunty, she has fancy kitty parties, fights for her son to keep his plane and plans fancy vacations. But she reminded me a little of Madeline Mackanzie. She was scary, but in a very different way. In the conversations I’ve had about motherhood with my own mom, the one thing she’s always told me is that guilt is the reigning emotion of being a mother, especially if you have a daughter. You never think you’ve done enough so you feel guilty, you think your children are ungrateful so you feel guilty, you think you’ve set the wrong example, so you feel guilty, you can’t prevent them from being hurt, making mistakes, getting their heart broken, so you feel guilty. And I saw so much of that in Neelam.

At a certain point in your life, you stop seeing your mother as solely your mother and start seeing her as a woman, as an individual. When I rewatched Dil Dhadakne Do after reaching that point, I finally saw Neelam. Here is a woman, deeply unhappy with her own life. She has never made a decision without her husband weighing in on them, she trapped in a life of comfort, the sole provider of which has been her husband. She feels inadequate, old, undesired, unwanted and dispensable. Her husband’s wandering eye, which never lands on her; her children’s disregard for her because they’re grown up and think they don’t need her anymore, has made her bitter. In the advice she gives to her daughter to keep going with her unhappy marriage doesn’t come from a place of ignorance or awkwardness—it comes from a place of denial. To allow her daughter to examine her marriage would mean accepting that her own needs to be examined, to accept that there is lack in her own life.

That scene, where she stuff her face with a whole slice of cake gave me goosebumps, because it reminded me of the days where I cried silently in my room so no one else could hear, and then wondered as an adult how many times my mother had done the same thing. I don’t feel pity for Neelam, I feel empathy. I see a woman who wants more, but is burdened by the belief that she doesn’t deserve more because her life has taught her that. I see you, Neelam. I see you.

In discussions around this piece with our team of wonderful women, we all came to the same conclusion, that being a feminist now, to us, looks very different from what it was when we were younger. And we all agreed that was was exactly the point of the movement, it was never meant to be static, it’s supposed to be an ever-changing entity, evolving entity. And maybe that’s why, you can never be a ‘failing’ feminist, because there is no failing, only changing. Maybe just doing the best you can and being okay with it is the best gift we can give to ourselves and each other.