Women behaving badly take plum roles in screen dramas

MOVE over Tony Soprano, Don Draper and Walter White, the anti-heroines are the rising stars of screen drama.

Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in Homeland.

DURING the past 15 years, as television's golden age moved from first gear into overdrive, we've heard plenty about the rise of the male anti-hero. It started with Tony Soprano, the therapy-embracing mafia boss, who passed the baton to Mad Men's Don Draper, the womanising ad man with the fake identity, movie star looks and unequivocal streak of self-hatred.

The archetype found its keenest expression in Walter White, Breaking Bad's cancer-stricken chemistry teacher turned homicidal drug lord. Five corpse-strewn seasons after the hard-up teacher started cooking meth to pay his medical bills, White's journey into the criminal underworld recently came to a strangely apt end in a lab, the same kind of place his corrosive affair with the blue rock started. Fans around the world discussed the final episode of this often nihilistic series with the fervour of religious pilgrims.

We hear far less about the screen's expanding cast of anti-heroines, female characters who are deeply compromised, as noteworthy for their devastating flaws as for their strengths. Yet the early 21st century has spawned the biggest resurgence of anti-heroines since Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara tried to steal handsome Ashley Wilkes from under the nose of goody two-shoes Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind.

Of course, there have always been female characters with less-than-heroic qualities - O'Hara, Lady Macbeth and Helen Mirren's memorably brittle Detective Inspector Jane Tennison (from the Prime Suspect series) are among them. Those characters compelled us because their festering ambition (Lady Macbeth), naked self-interest (O'Hara) and emotional defects (Tennison) were once seen as rare and anomalous in women.

Yet today in film and television, a plethora of female characters, from drug-dealing housewives to a queen with a taste for incest, have little trouble locating their inner anti-heroines. Intriguingly, in spite of committing transgressions that could result in an extended jail sentence, these fictional women often attract our empathy.

Take Lisbeth Salander, crimefighter and computer hacker extraordinaire, and the beating, scarred heart of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books and films. Survivor of a traumatic childhood, Lisbeth is antisocial, bisexual and violent and vengeful towards those who hurt the vulnerable - she once carved the words "pig" and "rapist" on the abdomen of her sadistic guardian. Crime drama The Killing - Denmark's biggest cultural export since Lego - gives us another socially challenged female lead in homicide detective Sarah Lund, who turns rudeness and lack of emotional intelligence (unless she is interrogating a killer) into an art form.

Lund's social misdemeanours are mild, nonetheless, compared with those of Cersei Lannister in the hugely popular cable drama Game of Thrones. Cersei is a young, beautiful royal who schemes to install her son - the product of a consensual, incestuous relationship with her twin brother - on the throne occupied by her husband.

In the boutique cable drama Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker's character does a Walt White. Parker plays a suburban mum who, like White, breaks bad following a personal tragedy: she starts selling marijuana after her husband's death plunges her family into financial crisis.

Then there is the latest Woody Allen film, Blue Jasmine, in which Cate Blanchett offers a mesmerising, nervy turn as an unreconstructed martini-guzzling socialite who has also fallen on hard times, but is incapable of changing her high-living ways.

In the first season of the Showtime drama Nurse Jackie, middle-aged mother and ER nurse Jackie Peyton trades sex with a hospital pharmacist for prescription drugs. In 2009, the New York State Nurses Association formally objected to this, pointing out that Peyton, played by Edie Falco, gave nursing a bad name and had no qualms about violating the profession's code of ethics.

In spite of the complaint, the sixth season of this dark, comedy-drama hybrid is to air next year, while Falco has snared an Emmy for her marathon stint as the erratic, wilful nurse who cheats on her husband, has a secret drug addiction and ends up divorced and in rehab.

Finally, we come to the spectacularly compromised heroine of the moment, Carrie Mathison from Homeland, a blue-chip, free-to-air drama airing in its third season on the Ten network. Mathison is a bipolar CIA officer who is alternately brilliant at her job and a liability for the agency that employs her. As the new series opened, she was obfuscating like a politician with a dodgy expenses claim before an official hearing into the bombing of CIA headquarters that killed more than 200 people.

Off her medication and blaming herself for the bombing, Carrie is devastated when her mentor publicly betrays her. He reveals she had an affair with suspected terrorist and CIA bomber Nick Brody, and hid her mental illness from the agency for years. All of which, as Carrie fans will know, is true.

Yet like Lisbeth and Sarah Lund, Carrie is peerless at catching villains. She was the only agent to twig that Brody, a former marine, had been turned by the Islamic terrorists who captured him and held him in Iraq for years. And now, in a twist only Hollywood could have invented, Carrie is the sole agent to believe Brody didn't attack CIA headquarters, even though the bomb was in his car.

Carrie's personal life is a mess, but she is not simply a loser in love. Early in the series when she and Brody become dangerously intimate, you never quite know whether she is playing him (she suspects he is a terrorist even as she sleeps with him) or whether he is using her to stay one step ahead of the CIA. A runaway ratings hit in the US and Britain (but less so here), the drama owes much of its success to the complex characterisation of Carrie and the super-heated, Emmy-winning performances of Claire Danes.

On the internet, Danes has become known for her "epic cry face" - in one contortion she can simultaneously conjure horror, disgust, distress and rage. It's the rawness of her character's vulnerability - whether she's falling for someone she shouldn't or being locked up in a psych ward - that draws you in.

Far less emotive is The Killing's Sarah Lund. Played to stony perfection by Sofie Grabol, Lund is ill-mannered, often emotionally unreachable and neglectful of her son. Like her close fictional cousins Carrie and Lisbeth, she is at once a genius investigator and a maverick. Although she always gets her man (the killers are usually male) she once made a mistake that cost another detective his life. Indeed, she is so impetuous her superiors often remove her from big cases - being up against the bad guys and the people you work for is a well-known convention of crime and espionage stories.

So too, is the male sleuth whose love life is a disaster zone. It's as if those who mix it professionally with low-lifes can never have normal private lives and, in the age of the unorthodox heroine, more and more female protagonists share this lonesome territory. In the final episode of The Killing, screened recently on SBS, there were signs Lund was heading for emotional redemption: a long-lost love interest was keen to make things work second time around, and relations with her estranged adult son were beginning to thaw.

Then, in one rash moment, Lund chucked it all away. She exacted her own form of justice on a criminal in a way that ensured there would be no damp-eyed reunion with her son and grandchild; no autumnal romance.

Instead, she would be forever on the run as a fugitive cop, keeping herself to herself. It's an austere, anti-romantic finale that wouldn't be tolerated in Hollywood, yet it was absolutely in keeping with the emotional trajectory of this monosyllabic character with the gift for self-sabotage.

So what underlies the rise of the 21st century anti-heroine? The public's seemingly insatiable appetite for noirish crime dramas with unconventional protagonists is one factor, and cable TV's drama revolution is another. It's significant that TV's golden age took root in America's subscription television sector, away from free-to-air's ratings pressures and need to appease advertisers. This emancipation, in turn, nourished a dazzling line-up of nuanced, almost novelistic characters, whom the viewer gets to know over several series.

While cable's male anti-heroes have tended to hog the limelight, many supporting female characters could give the bad boys a run for their (laundered) money. In The Sopranos, Tony Soprano's wife, Carmela (also played by Falco), is a committed Catholic and family woman who turns a blind eye to her husband's lucrative career as a gangster. And in one of Mad Men's most shocking episodes, the classy office manager Joan sleeps with an older, sleazy client in return for a promotion into management ranks. We see, in excruciating detail, how much this act of professional prostitution costs Joan. And we witness how some of her male colleagues will never forgive her for making the demeaning compromise they demanded of her, in order to win the client's business. Such double standards were common in the 1950s and 60s, when this subtle yet often confronting series is set.

The rise of the transgressive heroine has not completely dissolved such prejudice. Anna Gunn, the actress who plays Skyler White, Walter White's wife in Breaking Bad, wrote recently in The New York Times about how her character became a target of hate on Facebook and other online forums; "a flash point for many people's feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women".

A "F . . k Skyler White" page and an "I hate Skyler White" page on Facebook have attracted thousands of likes and, at one point, a death threat was made against Gunn.

Skyler was initially the moral centre of the series, the character who opposed Walt's descent into the drug world, but she eventually became his accomplice, helping him to launder his ill-gotten gains.

Gunn understandably was shocked a death threat was made against her. Still, she concluded: "I finally realised that most people's hatred of Skyler had little to do with me ... Because Skyler didn't conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender."

Well, maybe, maybe not. While the vicious, often misogynous criticisms of Skyler and Gunn are indefensible, it could be that the extraordinary hostility that rained down on this character reflected how she was badly conceived - even before she started laundering Walt's drug money, she failed to win us over.

In the first season of Breaking Bad, I found Skyler unconvincing and annoying; while she wafted around writing unpublished short stories and selling stuff on eBay, Walt wore himself out teaching high school students and working a second job at a car wash. And when Walt was diagnosed with lung cancer, it was Skyler - who did so little to contribute to the family income - who insisted he seek out the most expensive treatment going. (I should add that I found Walt's plunge into the ethical abyss equally alienating.)

While anti-heroines are more common on TV than film, Allen's latest creation, the socialite played by Blanchett, fits the bill. Jasmine loses everything after her rich husband is jailed for financial misdeeds, yet she refuses to accept her new circumstances. Her pretensions and condescension towards her working-class sister recall Blanche DuBois, as many critics have noted.

Jasmine flies first class when broke, and is undone by her own duplicity when an eligible suitor - handsome and (need we ask?) rich - arrives on the scene. To the last frame, she resists the reality of the straitened lifestyle caused by her husband's downfall which, we eventually learn, she helped bring about.

As you watch this film, you badly want Jasmine to adapt to life among the 99 per cent. But she can't and won't, and this makes her a true anti-heroine in an era when, it seems, it's almost good to be bad.

Rosemary Neill is a senior writer on The Australian.