Through my research today on gender representation, I found that no movies exist that follow the sort of narrative I want with a female lead detective. Fun. Although, I did find a few movies within the mystery genre with aspects of thriller with a female lead, but not necessarily a detective as the main character. A good example of this is Kahaani, directed by Sujoy Ghosh. The main plot line of the movie follows a pregnant women attempting to find her husband while being pregnant at the same time. The movie portrays the main character, Vidya Bagchi, as a strong, courageous women who can conquer all of these obstacles to be able to finally find her husband. Although, this allows for Vidya to be shown as women typically are as emotional and weak/vulnerable. In multiple scenes throughout the movie, we see Vidya losing her composure and breaking down crying from the stress and hardships she encounters. This can be considered a good mix of representation for women in mystery movies as they can often be portrayed differently, as I will go into now.
Starting with the general idea of how gender is represented, according to a study conducted by the University of Southern California, women are either shown less, or given less meaningful lines in a film depending on the genre. (Ramakrishna, 1996) Looking into the “psycholinguistic normatives” (Ramakrishna, 1996) between the two genders, these representations come more easily into play.
For movies overall, the dialogue shared between females and males can be seen as unequal and more focused towards the male leads or male characters in those movies. The chart here describes it and shows that male characters have over two times more dialogue pieces than females in movies overall.
Women in Mysteries
In many mystery genre films, especially in the early 1900s when those movies were prominent, the women were portrayed as helpless, or even the victim in certain murder mysteries. In rare cases, such as Murder At the Gallop, it’ll show the women as the lead detective or helpful to the case. This stigma of women being helpless/the victim most likely stemmed from the first detective film adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, called Sherlock Holmes Baffled, in 1900-1903 directed by Arthur Marvin. This first showed the best detective as a male who was successful, so the idea of a female detective being good or the best would be compared to Sherlock, and not seen as good either.
In the 1930s, the Thin Man series came out with a woman, a “carefree wife” named Nora, was portrayed in the way earlier described. She was the wife to the detective, not even helpful to the detective himself. Throughout the series, we see Nora appear more carefree, and get less screen time than the main detective which is understandable. This could’ve set the stage for women’s appearances in mystery film for decades later until more progressive ideals could’ve come about.
In the 40s-50s, there were more cynical films, reflecting the tone and mood from the World War and the aftermaths of the Great Depression of the 30s. Detectives became more ruthless and leaned towards more crime and violent genres of mystery. Many movies were made starring all male leads. To list a few examples, Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia, Lloyd Nolan is Time To Kill, and Robert Montgomery in Lady In the Lake. In Lady In the Lake, the beginning of the movie starts with the wife of the main character taking advantage of him/divorcing him and marrying another man for his money. This portrays women in a negative light and simply materialistic. In Time to Kill, Heather Angel played as a “leading lady”. This meant that she simply acted as a love interest in the movie for the lead role of the detective.
Films with female detectives didn’t fair as well as others with the typical male detectives did. In 1991, V.I. Warshawski debuted in theaters and was meant to continue on as a series. The main character was Victoria Iphigenia, play by Kathleen Turner, as a private eye, solving the mystery of the murder of Boom-Boom Grafalk. It didn’t perform well at box offices, whether it was the fault of the casting or the time or the plot itself is up to interpretation.
In recent years, more TV shows have come out with female leads as detectives and show them as strong, individual women, such as Murder, She Wrote, Castle, and The Fall. Although, some of these TV shows can be considered more Standard Private Eye or even police procedural, more gender representation in a positive light for women being a lead detective and defying the odds is what we aim to achieve in our title sequence as well. By challenging the typical representation of women in mystery films, we are giving ourselves a challenge, but also painting women in a positive light.
Sources
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103184/?ref_=nv_sr_2
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025878/?ref_=nv_sr_1
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035443/?ref_=nv_sr_4
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057334/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Into The Truth 