Just think of the 2006 to 2008 stretch, where three best supporting actor Oscars in a row were won for playing villains now often listed among the greatest ever: No Country for Old Men‘s Anton Chigurh, The Dark Knight’s Joker and Inglourious Basterds‘ Hans Landa. Meanwhile, the crafting of male villains seems to have reached new heights in the past few decades. If you do a Google search for lists of the best movie villains, those that feature women at all overwhelmingly cite characters that showed up onscreen 20-plus years ago - Nurse Ratched, the Wicked Witch of the West, Annie Wilkes. While there seems be a slowly growing number of diverse female protagonists, the same cannot be said for villains. I don’t have any statistics to cite on this one, just a lifetime of moviegoing experience. When it comes to villains, female representation is particularly underwhelming. With Hela, Ragnarok represents a step forward.

But that was then and this is now it’s time for us to keep moving forward. From her penchant for thigh-crushing and seducing targets to her fertility-centric Age of Ultron subplot, she is a walking collection of “Uniquely Woman Things.” When just having a female character join the boys’ club and do action stuff was considered a welcome change, it was easier to swallow that pill. In 2010’s Iron Man 2, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) became the first major female character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe who was not introduced as a love interest. Real-life women are not aliens from Venus or in possession of preternatural powers (“female intuition”), they are first and foremost people, just like men, and that’s the part that films quite frequently have trouble with - featuring a woman doesn’t mean you need to drown her character in feminine tropes. There are more outliers to this trend than there used to be, yes, and the stereotypes have evolved over time, but underneath it all, an irksome trend remains: the idea that women are “other.”Ĭommentators lamenting female representation are not saying there is a picture of womanhood that movies are missing or misrepresenting, but rather a lack of diversity, not just regarding race and age, but personality and narrative role. Women made up just 32 percent of speaking characters in 2016 on movie screens, according to a recent study, and when women do show up, they are often thrown into one of a handful of narrative roles. In certain ways, her character is even repetitive and unoriginal, but this is not a criticism - it is progress. Hela (Cate Blanchett) is primarily there to send Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and company on an outrageously entertaining intergalactic road trip and forcibly fix Thor’s hammer dependency. Thor: Ragnarok is not a villain-centric narrative.

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