This article on women characters in movies – skip to the end – is very funny. I think her Ethereal Weirdo is my favorite, although I will admit to having women like her. They’re usually stoners. I’ve always thought of her as the Cortazar Hopscotch fantasy woman, because I dated a guy who actually admitted, out loud, that he fell in love with the woman in that novel when he read it.
This girl can’t be pinned down and may or may not show up when you make concrete plans with her. She wears gauzy blouses and braids. She likes to dance in the rain and she weeps uncontrollably if she sees a sign for a missing dog or cat. She might spin a globe, place her finger on a random spot, and decide to move there. The Ethereal Weirdo appears a lot in movies, but nowhere else. If she were from real life, people would think she was a homeless woman and would cross the street to avoid her. But she is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and perk up his dreary life by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.
But no post about women in film is complete without Bechdel’s Test for Women in Movies:
Some days it’s hard to come up with any that do pass the test. Help me out, readers?