The Apple TV+ series is the latest to use a deceased family member or romantic partner as a plot device for its male protagonist. Ralph Jones wonders when this obnoxious trope will end.
Some things remain constant. When Ted Lasso creator Bill Lawrence’s new comedy drama Shrinking, starring Jason Segel, premiered on Apple TV+ in January, it was immediately clear that the show was guilty of one of the most quietly toxic tropes in entertainment: from the start, Segel’s therapist character Jimmy was defined by the loss of his wife, beautiful in death and only ever available in flashback form. Tia has no agency: we know her narrative purpose is to die, and her existence is only significant insofar as it affects our brave male protagonist.
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The temptation for countless writers, the vast majority of whom are male, to give male characters female relatives or love interests who are either already dead or dying as plot drivers appears to be irresistible. When you become aware of this phenomenon, you realise how widespread it is. While researching this feature, I saw the new Adam Driver film 65, in which Driver’s character crash-lands on Earth 65 million years ago. He’s in his spaceship in the first place because he has a terminally ill daughter who – spoiler alert – dies during the film. Why do male writers in television, film, and literature continue to use this trope? What can we learn from it about gender dynamics in fiction? Is there any hope that it will be consigned to the creative garbage can?
Izzie Austin is a film writer studying revenge in teen films for her PhD at Swinburne University in Australia. Before refining their subject, for a while they were looking into revenge films more generally and have therefore had to sit through a great many works that are guilty of indulging this sexist phenomenon, commonly known as “fridging”. “There are so many films where they just introduce a wife in one scene and then kill her immediately,” they say, citing the infamous Death Wish franchise as particularly egregious, in which Charles Bronson becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered. “It’s insulting to the female characters because their only function is to make other characters feel, and then it’s insulting to the male characters because their only function is to make other characters feel.”
The origins of “fridging”
Gail Simone, a comic-book writer, coined the term “Women in Refrigerators syndrome” in 1999 to refer to a trend she noticed in superhero stories of female characters being killed off to provide motivation for the male protagonists. The turn of phrase was inspired by a 1994 Green Lantern story, in which the Green Lantern discovers that his girlfriend has been killed and stuffed into a fridge and, as Austin puts it, “Dead wife make man sad; man process sad by doing violence”.
If this trope has only recently been given a name, it has been present throughout the history of storytelling. “These are long-standing narratives,” says Dr. Miriam Kent, a lecturer in film and media at the University of Leeds and the author of Women in Marvel Films. A Sleeping Beauty fairy tale from the 16th century involves a comatose princess who must be rescued by a prince. These ideas of female sublimation and male agency have always pervaded Western literature and, more recently, television and film. During the 1970s, According to Kent, literature professor Joseph Campbell’s seminal book The Hero’s Journey established the structure for a classic “quest narrative” that “generally involved a masculine hero and a princess,” and his storytelling theory influenced films like Star Wars. “The idea is that these are structures that are so deeply embedded in Western cultures and societies that they’re almost unconscious,” she says.
The trope annoys me to the brink of rage, firstly because it’s dreadfully boring, and secondly because it cannot be divorced from the greater context in which violence against women is endemic – Kristin Devine
They are so unconscious, in fact, that many Hollywood writers are unaware they are using them. After Deadpool 2 received backlash for murdering Deadpool’s girlfriend Vanessa at the start of the film – an example of “fridging” made worse by the fact that Deadpool’s appeal is that he is aware of the comic-book world in which he exists – one of the film’s writers, Rhett Reese, claimed he had no idea the term existed. Reese and his writing partner, Paul Wernick, declined to be interviewed for this piece. (Incidentally, fans were so outraged by Vanessa’s death during test screenings that an alternate ending was shot and added after the credits, in which Deadpool travels back in time and saves her.) 65’s writers and directors, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, were similarly unaware of the trope. “The attempt was to do a modern-day silent film with hardly any dialogue so we’re not reliant on exposition and back story,” Woods explains to BBC Culture, explaining their narrative choice with the protagonist’s daughter’s death. “The exercise was one of minimalism and attempting to tell a story in which you could hit the mute button and it would play the same in any part of the world and be digestible. So, with this film, we’re using broad strokes.”
The phrase “broad strokes” is correct. “I’m not sure if it’s necessarily lazy, but I do think there’s something to be said about the way screenwriters are trained,” Kent says. “A lot of the time, they’ll be trained by industry professionals who are also men working in that culture.” Kristin Devine is a writer and fertility coach who finds fridging so annoying that she wrote a short story in which a woman gains superpowers by being trapped in a fridge. Her rage at encountering the unreconstructed trope so frequently sparked the idea: “It irritates me to the point of rage at times, first because it’s dreadfully boring, and I despise being bored.” Second, it cannot be separated from the larger context of endemic violence against women. In a world already saturated with it, being fed a steady fictional diet of women-as-disposable-victim inures all of us to the reality of sex-based violence.”
What opponents of the practise fail to mention is that male characters should not be widowers. “The death of a loved one is a powerful motivator for people,” Devine says. “The death of Uncle Ben in Spiderman. Death of Obi Wan in Star Wars. But these characters weren’t made to die; they had important lessons to teach and tasks to complete before they died. They had to exist because they were essential to the plot, and their lives mattered far beyond their deaths.”
