Intro

Reflections are a large part of how we live our everyday lives, not only in the physical sense of seeing our appearance, but also from a rhetorical perspective in checking how we are reflecting outside influences back through our own ideas and personality traits. In a way, people are like mirror-balls; constructed of hundreds of tiny mirrors that reflect every little nuance of your personal experience. This can be a parent figure, a physical object, or even characters we relate to in entertainment and the media. A particularly relevant part of this conversation is how women specifically are represented and reflected in entertainment and the media and how that representation can affect them mentally and emotionally. Even with a big push in the last few years for better and more accurate representation in movies and television, women still struggle to find a spotlight in large franchises that don’t portray them as emotionless protagonists or damsels in distress. For example, even though the Star Wars movies have created female characters that do not technically fit into one of these two categories, almost all of the women characters manage to sit right between them. Most would argue that this is not a bad place to be as a female character: a fighter yet still empathetic. However, this still limits the emotional and intellectual range of a female character, thus doing the same for real life women. So even though Star Wars does make an effort to stray from typical female character arcs, they still fall short when it comes to accurate female representation because most of the female characters within the film franchise still fit in the same slot of emotional vulnerability. Ultimately this will result in the young female viewers adopting/reflecting the emotional range of these characters and effecting how women and men see women’s vulnerability. 

Overview

Female characters in entertainment, specifically in movies, have been evolving for decades. We have gone from damsel in distress to ultimate hero in a span of about a hundred years, but it has been no easy task. These changes mostly come from brave women speaking out on behalf of either the character they or someone else is playing and demanding a more accurate representation of a female. In my speech, I  will be looking at how this misrepresentation has mentally affected women, specifically from the standpoint of female protagonists. How does Leia Organa’s slave costume affect the minds of young girls watching that film? Do they feel disgusted by the lack of fabric covering her body? Or, because they so desperately want to be the female hero, do they start to believe that her costume is just a part of that life? Along those lines, how have female characters evolved since the 1980’s when Return of the Jedi was released? Scarlet Johannson has spoken out numerous times about her uncomfortable and unrealistic costumes as the Black Widow, and only recently could be seen wearing an outfit that was more practical for her role. Brie Larson received a lot of backlash for how she portrayed Captain Marvel in the last three Marvel films, but some may say that she was simply playing the role of a witty, sarcastic, female protagonist. In fact, a lot of her tendencies can be compared to Han Solo’s in Star Wars, yet Harrison Ford received awards and claps on the back for his performance. So how can we encourage little girls and growing teens to be themselves, bold, brave, smart and sassy, when female characters receive so much hate for doing that very thing?