In her series, The Single Woman in Hollywood, Hayley examines the ways that single women are portrayed onscreen, plotting them on a highly scientific matrix of Horny/Sexless and Messy/Organized.
“It all began on New Years Day, in my 32nd year of being single.”
For 20 years, Bridget Jones has been the official mascot for the Horny and Messy woman. She has further complicated both her personal and professional lives by sleeping with her boss, and “sleeping with your boss” is definitely on the Horny/Messy bingo card.
There are a lot of quickly identifiable things on that bingo card: She’s hungover. Her eye makeup is smudged. She can be a lot of fun, but she’s also flaky. She is charming when she wants something, and when she doesn’t get it, she’s a destructive nightmare. She has a plan to get her shit together, but maybe she’ll start that after her next one-night stand or her third whiskey. She clearly has issues — intimacy, work, family — and at the top of that list is not willing to acknowledge that she has issues. She is the cinematic shorthand for “Oof.”
She is Horny and Messy.
About twenty minutes into watching Bridget Jones’ Diary, you’ll be calling out, “BINGO!” She falls into a place where many Horny/Messy women find themselves: a hypervigilant awareness of her own supposed “faults”, and her journey is to slowly correct each and every one of them until she is “perfect”, and therefore ready to be in love. Or, as this genre would put it, she’s ready to be loved. There is this sense that Horny/Messy women are incomplete creatures. Like they’ve missed a software update or something essential to operating in the world. The things Bridget believes are crucial to being loved are 1. Losing weight 2. Dressing sexy and 3. Being confident, because you’ve lost weight and dressed sexy, I guess.
In 2015, we got something very special in the Horny and Messy department: Rebecca Bunch. The titular character in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca Bunch decides to quit her job and move across the country because she randomly bumped into her ex-boyfriend. In the pilot, we are treated to a song called, “The Sexy Getting Ready Song.” This song sends up the very thing that Bridget Jones spends an entire evening doing before an important event. And it is so refreshing to see some of the ridiculousness in such an upfront way.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a revelation. It keeps all the familiar twisting, secrets-and-lies tropes that we’re familiar with, and takes us in a new direction. It explores complex versions of what it means to be a woman, a mom, a friend, a boss, a partner — you name it, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has something to say about it. Rebecca Bunch is a Horny and Messy character that truly plumbs the depths of what each of those words mean, and she is frequently annoying, unlikeable, and mean. You know — like all of us.
Rebecca Bunch spends four seasons learning that it is hard to pull yourself out of the idea that you are going to get your happily ever after in a big, sweeping cinematic way. To snap out of the single woman dreamland, where as you drag eyeliner across your lash line, you imagine kissing someone later. And falling in love with them, getting married, and finally becoming everything you ever wanted. Or at least, everything that the media you’ve consumed has told you that you wanted.
How do we untangle ourselves from this alternate, implausible reality that Hollywood has created for us? You’re a “Bad girl” who is pushing people away because you are afraid of being vulnerable. You’re a “Good girl” who is doing what other people want instead of what you want. Where are all the Medium girls — the Bad-ish girls, the Good enough girls — the ones who are sometimes shitty and sometimes great? The ones who have mixed success in relationships, the ones who sometimes have a good job and sometimes don’t. The ones who like being single, the ones who want partnership. The ones who aren’t defined by whether or not men want to kiss them. I don’t see them on screen, but I see them every day in real life.
These four kinds of single women — Sexless/Messy, Horny/Organized, Sexless/Organized, Horny/Messy — have become crystallized over time. They have started to dictate the kinds of characters that women can play on screen. The more we break out of these quadrants, the better. Every time I have a hard time pinning down a Single Woman in Hollywood into one of these four quadrants, I consider it a success.