Vijf ongeschreven film en TV regels die nu wel eens mogen worden afgeschaft

RDJ134 2 oktober 2014 om 16:55 uur

Als je eenmaal door hebt hoe films en TV series worden gemaakt, dan verliest het zijn magie en wordt het vaak stront vervelend. Want wie goed oplet met een TV show ziet dat er altijd een aantal locaties zijn als een school, club gebouw of een hok waar de karakters altijd terug komen. Net als het verplichte wekelijkse actie momentje in series als Sons of Anarchy. Dit soort gebeurtenissen zijn ongeschreven regels, dus vonden ze het bij Cracked.com tijd om vijf van deze regels aan te halen. Dingen zoals:

#5. The Shrewish, Nagging Wife Must Ruin Everything

She nags. She bitches. She's ruining everything. How horrible are these shrewish housewives who exist only to rain on our anti-hero's parade? Everyone hates Skyler White from Breaking Bad, so much so that Anna Gunn took to the New York Times to defend her character and herself against the insane people who have a hard time separating real life from make believe.

While the vitriol against both the character and Gunn was over-the-top and completely uncalled for, the character was still a prime example of why writers need to step up their game when it comes to creating compelling female leads.

From the get-go, so much about Skyler never makes sense, and it gets worse as the series progresses. She's a doting wife and mother so worried about her husband's cholesterol she insists on rubbery turkey bacon for breakfast, yet she doesn't seem to be concerned about the real stress in her husband's life. In the very first episode we learn he works full-time as a high school teacher in addition to juggling a second job at a car wash to keep the family afloat. What's Skyler's contribution to the family's financial crunch? The pipe dream of publishing her unreadable short stories someday.

What? We hate this person already, and we're not even 30 minutes in. As the purported moral compass of the show, Skyler is a complete failure. When she finds out about Walt's lung cancer she lacks the ability to empathize with what her husband is going through and instead makes it all about her. Even the thought that her secondhand smoke may have caused his lung cancer doesn't stop her from secretly smoking while pregnant with their child. She cheats on Walt with Ted and rubs it in his face. Her sole motivation appears to be, "What can I do today to make my husband's life worse?"

And Skyler's not alone. Rita on Dexter, Lori from The Walking Dead, Abby in Ray Donovan, all seem to be just standing in the wings somewhere, already glaring and ready to pop in and bring the whole damn room down at a moment's notice.

Their actions often don't even make sense, but since these characters are so poorly drawn from the beginning we're used to them acting only as irrational, bitchy foils to the male protagonist.

Why It Needs to Stop

Television writers seem to think that a strong female character equals self-centered and overbearing, and that's a bad thing. It doesn't have to be this way. Shows like The Americans and House of Cards feature much more nuanced writing for their female leads. That those characters exist for a purpose beyond riding their respective husbands' backs makes them and the shows they're on stand out among their peers, which is actually kind of sad, when you think about it.

As a married couple in The Americans, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) occasionally fight and disagree with one another, but these tensions are much more balanced since both characters are written on equal footing (they're both Russian spies).

Claire (Robin Wright) from House of Cards is such a strong, independent woman, not even Frank's annoying camera asides can faze her. While their relationship creates conflicts for her husband, her actions have some semblance of purpose beyond the "she's always bitching about something" trope lazy writers love to lean on these days.

Reageer