On the importance of unlikable female protagonists.
"My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women."
—Marguerite Duras, The Lover
In my high school yearbook there is a note from a girl who wrote, "I like you even though you are very mean." I do not remember the girl who wrote this note. I do not remember being mean to her, or anyone for that matter. I do remember I was feral in high school, socially awkward, emotionally closed off, completely lost.
Or maybe I don't want to remember being mean because I've changed in the 20 years between now and then. Around my junior year, I went from being quiet and withdrawn to being mean where mean was saying exactly what I thought and making sarcastic comments, relentlessly. Sincerity was dead to me.
I had so few friends it didn't really matter how I behaved. I had nothing to lose. I had no idea what it meant to be likable though I was surrounded by generally likable people, or I suppose, I was surrounded by people who were very invested in projecting a likable façade, people who were willing to play by the rules. I had likable parents and brothers. I was the anomaly as a social outcast, but even from a young age, I understood that when a girl is unlikable, a girl is a problem. I also understood that I wasn't being intentionally mean. I was being honest (admittedly, without tact), and I was being human. It is either a blessing or a curse that those are rarely likable qualities in a woman.
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Inevitably on every reality-television program, someone will boldly declare, "I'm not here to make friends." They do so to establish that they are on a given program to win the nebulous prize or the bachelor's heart or get the exposure they need to begin their unsteady rise to a modicum of fame. These people make this declaration by way of explaining their unlikability or the inevitably unkind edit they're going to receive from the show's producers. It isn't that they are terrible, you see. It's simply that they are not participating in the show to make friends. They are freeing themselves from the burden of likability or they are, perhaps, freeing us from the burden of guilt for the dislike and eventual contempt we might hold for them.
In the movie Young Adult, Charlize Theron stars as Mavis Gary. Nearly every review of the movie raises her character's unlikability, painting her with a bright scarlet U. Based on this character's critical reception, an unlikable woman embodies any number of unpleasing but entirely human characteristics. Mavis is beautiful, cold, calculating, self-absorbed, full of odd tics, insensitive, and largely dysfunctional in nearly every aspect of her life. These are, apparently, unacceptable traits for a woman, particularly given the sheer number working in concert. Some reviews go so far as to suggest that Mavis is mentally ill because there's nothing more reliable than armchair diagnosis by disapproving critics. In his review, Roger Ebert lauds Young Adult screenwriter Diablo Cody for making Mavis an alcoholic because, "without such a context, Mavis would simply be insane." Ebert, and many others, require an explanation for Mavis' behavior. They require a diagnosis for her unlikability in order to tolerate her. The simplest explanation, of Mavis as human, will not suffice.
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In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don't follow this code become unlikable. Critics who fault a character's unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.
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