Why ‘Good For Her’ Isn’t Good For Us
Shows like 'Wilderness' force me to admit we’re fine with “feminine rage” so long as it ends in an arrest.
Good for her? Shows like Wilderness and films like Promising Young Woman force me to admit we’re fine with “feminine rage” so long as it ends in an arrest.
In Amazon Prime’s Wilderness, Jenna Coleman is Liv Taylor, a woman who has given up her job, family, and life in London to move to New York for her spouse’s work. A loving wife to a rich hotel manager, her world is thrown into disarray when she discovers her husband, Will (Oliver Jackson Cohen) is a serial cheater. According to Liv, not wanting the shame or emotional burden of separating makes murder her only way out.
Wilderness is a shameless addition to the “good for her” cinematic universe, films that celebrate women’s revenge and rage. Indeed, much of what pushes Wilderness’ plot is the escalation of events from each of Liv’s failed attempts at murdering her truly detestable spouse. But what makes it compelling, like Gone Girl and Kill Bill, is the question of how justified Liv truly is in pursuing vengeance. Are the consequences worth it, even when she bites off far more than she ever planned on chewing?
— Spoilers for Amazon Prime’s Wilderness ahead —
The final scene sees Liv free of Will, having framed him for murder and jailed, and returned to the mountainous greenery that was the final destination of their doomed wilderness getaway. There, at the edge of a cliff, she delivers a defiant monologue to a casually misogynistic passer-by. Women, Liv concludes, can only be pushed so far by sexism before they “become the wolves”.
It’s a speech that seems destined to be reposted tenfold on “feminine rage” TikTok, or at least engineered with it in mind. Female, or feminine, rage in film and television is often celebrated across social media. There are countless furious fan-cams on TikTok and YouTube of screaming vengeful women from Korean dramas, old Hollywood movies, horror flicks, and beyond. Often these scenes and performances are savoured for how they subvert the expectations of femininity, i.e., the expectations placed on women to be amiable and palatable almost constantly.
But who can really achieve femininity to subvert it with rage in the first place? As far back as the ’80s and ’90s, people have critiqued how feminine rage in film and television is only subversive for white, straight, cis-gendered, and middle upper class women. Women with the privilege of being seen as amiable. When lesbians, queer and transwomen express outrage or even just discontent at their circumstances, they’re often dismissed as man-hating. When women of colour, especially Black women, express negative emotions, they’re stereotyped as angry or emotional, dehumanised, and invalidated – often by white women themselves.
None of this is to say that privileged white women do not face backlash for their rage in real life or film. There is no shortage of men throughout time who dismiss, diminish and punish even the most ideal white woman’s rage. Nevertheless, the misogynistic backlash to their rage is not compounded by racism, homophobia, or any other marginalisation. Rage from white women is less unacceptable than rage from women who deviate from white standards of respectability.
Therefore, the vengeful and raging woman figure in stories is rarely a woman who is not white, able-bodied, and otherwise someone who diligently meets the standards of beauty. The Bride in Kill Bill, Toni Collette’s turn as the mother in Hereditary, Harley Quinn, Carrie of Carrie fame, or the legendarily unhinged mother-daughter duo in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? – are all staples of the “female rage” canon. They also all fit the bill of idealised white femininity, an ideal they violently subvert with their rage and acts of revenge.
But more recent narratives have seen the violence and wrath of these women replaced with penal justice. More recent figures like Cassie in Promising Young Woman, and now Liv in Wilderness opt for more state-centred justice. While their wrath has violent and even murderous moments – the primary comeuppance they arrange for the horrible men in their lives involves these women manipulating the police and legal systems. It’s a trope I like to call law-washing.
Arguably, it was Gone Girl that popularised this trope. The 2014 film based on the best-selling novel centres on the disappearance of Amy Dunne, and the question of whether she has framed her husband for her murder. In Flynn’s novel, Amy is aware of how her whiteness makes her the perfect victim. She even maximises her victimhood by faking a pregnancy and intimate partner violence to manipulate the authorities into focusing on her husband as a suspect. Before Nick is arrested, however, Amy makes a miracle return, utilising the power of her victimhood to control him in their marriage for the rest of their lives. Notably, while Amy weaponises the law, she does not go through with penal revenge. But the legacy of Gone Girl is one in which the story’s successors go the extra executionary mile, fully law-washing the revenge.
2018’s Ocean’s Eleven all-women spin-off, Ocean’s Eight, saw the classic heist franchise rebooted with a star-studded female cast. Sandra Bullock portrayed Debbie Ocean, the never-mentioned-before sister to George Clooney’s Danny Ocean, who wanted revenge on a cheating ex. How does she get revenge? She gets a girl gang together to heist the Met, and frame her former lover for the crime. Despite being an ex-con herself, Debbie uses cunning criminality to manipulate a scenario in which her ex-boyfriend goes to prison for the crime she executed.
2019’s Promising Young Woman climaxes with law enforcement being manipulated to apprehend offending men in less of a law-wash than a law-flood. Protagonist Cassie, after allowing herself to be killed by the same group of men who got away with assaulting her best friend in college, arranges her murder so the police have enough evidence to arrest the men at a wedding. And now, the climax of 2023’s Wilderness also sees protagonist Liv manipulate the authorities so her husband is convicted of killing his mistress. A murder that she herself actually committed.
In both Promising Young Woman and Wilderness, Cassie and Liv essentially fashion themselves into proxies for the law. The conventional white woman protagonists weaponise the legal system and biases of the state to become judge and jury for the men they wish to punish. But the issue with these plots lies in how they don’t question the systemic bias that makes this manipulation possible. If these women were anything other than thin, white, beautiful and straight – would they have been given a story in which, despite their rage, the law favoured them entirely?
Not only do these “good for her” stories lack intersectionality, but their popularity can make it more difficult for even white women to be believed. During Amber Heard’s trial in 2022, her ex-husband Johnny Depp sued her for defamation after Heard wrote an article about surviving intimate partner violence. Despite the fact Depp had been the one to initiate the trial, his supporters spread the myth that Heard was pulling a “Gone Girl”, making content claiming similarities to discredit her accounts of abuse.
Similarly, when Megan Thee Stallion’s ex-boyfriend Tony Lanez was brought to criminal trial for shooting her in the foot, swarms of people disbelieved her. Despite witnesses, a police report, and later, a successful conviction – Megan Thee Stallion was and is accused of lying to ruin Lanez’s career. Rapper Drake even accused her of lying in a song. In both Heard’s and Megan Thee Stallion’s cases, Gone Girl was brought up by many in an effort to diminish their claims in the court of public opinion.
“Good for her” stories don’t cause women to be disbelieved. Women of all backgrounds have had their suffering under the patriarchy dismissed centuries before the TV was even invented. Equally, I don’t believe that all stories are obligated to be morally upstanding (wouldn’t that be dull?). But I grow wary of how many stories expect us to cheer when women weaponise an unjust system to enact harm for personal gain, and seeing those same stories invoked to dismiss the harm done to real women seeking justice within the system. Law-washed revenge stories like Wilderness, and Promising Young Woman may seem “good for her”, but what about everyone else?
Merryana Salem (they/them) is a proud Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian writer, critic, teacher and podcaster on most social media as @akajustmerry. If you want, check out their podcast, GayV Club where they yarn about LGBTIQ media. Either way, they hope you ate something nice today.