It was that day last week ‘Bad Girls’, ‘Bad Girls’ in the Spanish versionand Paramount decided to share the movie on TikTok Divides 97 minutes into 24 clips. TikTok has a strange and powerful ability to fall in love with cultural products of other times (this happened with Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’ and Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’) and regurgitate them in the form of dances, montages, jokes. and comments made by fans are almost always much younger.
The strategy is part of the promotion of a new musical set to premiere in early 2024, as is the script for ‘Mean Girls’ written by Tina Fey. The film that catapulted the careers of Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried 20 years ago A cult film, a minor classic about the evil of high school queens. TikTok has the hashtag #meangirls 12.8 billion viewsThis is proof that bad girls never go out of style, even in sorority times.
This is not an isolated case. The recently awarded Lumen Novel Prize for ‘Vladimir’ has one of the arguments that can be summed up in a sentence like advertising pitch: “She looks like Lolita but in reverse”. The story reached its author, Argentinian Leticia Martín, firsthand through the testimony of a boy who, when very young, had sexual intercourse with a much older woman.
Like Nabokov, Martin confronted evil during the writing process and came to different conclusions. one is that society “became more forgiving and justifying male abuse” for a thousand years.” Another is that evil is definitely not a masculine trait. “Neither evil nor any other classification,” the author notes. “Gender matters less and less for many things. “Maybe in the future we will not be able to know the gender of the other person.”
“I like fiction that represents women who are not saints, who are not self-sacrificing,” the Argentinian admits.flawed mothers, women who sin, fall, choose the path of error. “I like it because sometimes I think that true women’s liberation will be achieved the day we act with the self-confidence that is avoided when women are ideally constructed,” she reflects. “We are not muses or just inspiration from others. We are the ones who hold the clay, the canvas, the paper. Those of us who run away to new lives, those of us who say no to what is expected of usthe ones we create to do something better than to hate or passively accept. Because we can, and we choose to do so.
The importance of being angry
The protagonist of Sheena Patel’s brutal literary debut, ‘I’m a Fan’ (Alpha Decay), isn’t exactly a paragon of virtue either. is jealous, quick-tempered, capricious and cruel; She cheats on her boyfriend and ‘stalks’ her crush’s other lovers to questionable levels of morality (and legality), while a famous artist subjects her to textbook psychological abuse. The novel is a portrait toxic relationships In a world poisoned by narcissism and social networks. It is also an angry critique of prestigious literary and artistic circles that tend to fly the flag of progress, rebellion and inclusion while maintaining their usual white and wealthy structures.
Patel, who critics have already associated with Ottesa Moshfeg, admits that his goal is to explore “how our entire society is organized around fandom and fandom.” almost thoughtless praise”. “I was disappointed with the way the characters were drawn. brownThe author, whose father is a Kenyan Indian and whose mother is a Mauritanian writer, explains: “We are often represented by nostalgia or nostalgia. as a sacrificeand I wanted to challenge all of that. And he adds: “It’s important to be angry; This is a feeling that is often denied in our lives. I wanted to be my hero naughty, irreverent and fun. I finally wanted exceeding the limits of what is acceptable”, has something in common with the protagonist of Sara Mesa’s ‘Un amor’, which Isabel Coixet recently adapted for film. Sleep with someone who will fix your roof, why not?
Crazy, psychotic and off the rails
Also knows a lot about ‘Bad women’ Is he a journalist? Anna BogutskayaA Madrid woman with a Russian father living in London recently posted: ‘Unlikeable Female Characters’It analyzes nine different tropes of the ‘disgusting’ woman: the whore, the bad one, the angry one, the bitch, the crazy one, the psychotic one, the derailed one, the clueless and weird one in prostitution. “I decided to write my book not only because I found the characters fascinating, but also because I found the public and industry reaction to them. “I’m interested in the complex dance that exists between expectations and reactions to female characters who don’t conform to a manufactured ideal,” she explains.
Of all the movies starring baddies, Todd Field’s ‘Tár’ starring the gorgeous Cate Blanchett has been one of the most talked about movies this past year for its portrayal of baddies. A successful conductor who abuses his power. There were also those who criticized how difficult it was to rise to the top in a masculinized world such as classical music, where the number of female conductors was small, and the portrait of the person who made it was just right. a monster.
“I was fascinated by ‘Tár’ because it follows the same patterns of movies about cursed and troubled geniuses, all men, of course, but Just the fact that Lydia Tár is a woman raises all these questions about how power works. and what kind of permissions we give to people we call ‘genius’,” says Bogutskaya. “In ‘Tár’ we see not only the story of an abuser, but also the myth that he created and that is perpetuated by the industry around him. I think it is a great film and performance. thornyexplores the industrial narcissism of the artist.
In her article, Bogutskaya explains how we are used to being fascinated by real psychopath male characters like Tony Soprano, but falling in love with them is not the same thing. “These series that we love so much, like Mad Men or The Sopranos, They also had very complex female characters like Carmela Soprano, Betty Draper or Peggy Olsen.…but at the end of the day, they are secondary to male heroes, ‘complex’ heroes. And the public reacts very differently to their failures,” says Bogutskaya.
From ‘Hacks’ to ‘Fleabag’ to ‘Girls,’ television fiction in recent years has produced a handful of heroes freed from the tyranny of being tidy, pleasant and well-mannered. “The most important thing we gained is good characters and good stories. Not ‘good’ in the moral sense, but fun, complicated, is full of paradoxes that we love to discuss. There is nothing more boring than stereotypes of perfect, bland characters about how perfect and moral they are.”