Overthinking Christopher Nolan’s aversion to a female lead
It would be ridiculous to even try and deny that Christopher Nolan is one of the greatest filmmakers of the modern era, and if he carries on his current trajectory, then he’s guaranteed to be remembered in generations to come as one of the very best ever.
After graduating to blockbuster territory with Batman Begins, the subsequent billion-dollar success of The Dark Knight gave him the platform to craft ambitious, intelligent, and complex stories on a budgetary scale typically reserved for mindless CGI-infested showdowns between armies comprised entirely of pixels. It’s a sandbox not many get to play in, but Nolan’s career hasn’t been without a recurring criticism or two.
The most notable by far is the way prominent female characters are depicted within his films. Nolan has developed a reputation for either fridging his leading ladies by killing them off for the express purpose of giving a male protagonist a narrative arc, or sometimes they’re already dead by the time the story kicks off, and on the odd occasion, they’ve been reduced to damsels in distress in need of rescuing.
It’s telling that the strongest and most well-rounded female character to ever appear in a Nolan feature is Emily Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer, who was, of course, a real person and appeared in a biographical drama that was born from mountainous and voluminous research. When it comes to creating them from the ground up, though? Things are nowhere near as rosy.
The easiest way to zero in on Nolan’s curious aversion to female leads isn’t only found in the fact there hasn’t been a single one across his 12 feature-length movies to date but examining how many of them in general pass the Bechdel test. The answer, for anyone curious as to how many of his films feature two female characters conversing about anything other than men, is zero. Zilch. Nada. Not a single one.
Emily Blunt’s performance in Oppenheimer may have deservedly earned her an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, but the first woman to speak on-screen is Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock. This comes 20 minutes into the three-hour running time, and then she’s immediately featured in a sex scene. Historically accurate, perhaps, but progressive, it is not.
Memento? Dead wife. Inception? Dead wife. The Dark Knight? Murdered love interest. The Dark Knight Rises? Potential love interest, ends up dead. The Prestige? Two for the price of one, with Rebecca Hall and Piper Perabo playing the wives of Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman’s characters? Both of them dead long before the credits come up. Matthew McConaughey’s wife in Interstellar? Dead.
His feature-length debut Following? Ends with the main character being framed for the murder of a woman known only as ‘The Blonde’. Dunkirk technically gets a pass because it’s a war story centred on a single event, but still, none of the women who appear on-screen even get character names. In Batman Begins and Tenet, respectively, the main function of Katie Holmes and Elizabeth Debicki is to be rescued by the hero, while Hilary Swank is more of an exposition device and sidekick than a fleshed-out figure in her own right in Insomnia.
Nolan’s habit of dead wives, wives who are soon to be dead, and women who serve no independent function other than failing the Bechdel test is even more bizarre considering the number one creative collaborator to have been involved in every single one of the 12 features to date is his own wife, Emma Thomas. Not to suggest that maybe she should be having a word in his ear about it, but it’s undeniably strange that such a cinematic virtuoso has struggled so repeatedly with something as seemingly straightforward as crafting a female character on the page who lives long in the memory after the fact.
Will Nolan’s next original work, after the crowning glory of Oppenheimer winning ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ go completely against the grain and boast a female lead? It definitely can’t be ruled out, but history shows that it’s a million miles away from being a guarantee.
