The Hot Mess - Why we love a chaotic heroine | TROPES

in a rather iconic introductory scene Mindy Lahiri heroine of The Mindy Project gets a little too drunk at an ex's wedding delivers an unplanned speech in which she discusses their intimate past at length is called to the hospital to perform an emergency C-section tries to get there on a bicycle falls into a swimming pool has an imaginary confrontation with a Barbie and runs the rest of the way to work Barefoot through traffic this in a nutshell is the hot mess character type and she's been the queen of the female-led sitcom and sad com for two decades now I just figured if I'm going to be a mess that doesn't be a hot mess think Carrie Bradshaw Bridget Jones fleabag Mindy Lahiri Amy and train wreck man feel good Maggie and everything I know about love Issa and insecure Susie and I hate Susie Anya in this way up Arabella and I may destroy you and other beloved Millennial heroines what makes a hot mess she's a young woman in her 20s or 30s living in a big city there are 2 million single men in the city I have dated about a million of them she's outspoken impulsive and has big appetites whether it's for Booze food shoes or men I'm not obsessed with sex let's go stop thinking about it she has a desperate need for connection and a very chaotic love life I suddenly realized that unless something changed soon I was going to live a life where my major relationship was with a bottle of wine there's plenty that's radical about the hot mess from her slapstick comedy a rarity for pretty young heroines of earlier decades to the way her stories illuminate issues around sex trauma and mental health from a female perspective and even if we'd most likely not make the choices she makes the hot messes mixture of Charisma and self-deprecation makes her relatable plus the hot mess is often the narrator of Her Own Story making us see everything through her eyes I couldn't help but Wonder still while these iconic heroines will be in our hearts forever it may be time to move on from her as the main representation of youngish female protagonists on screen as Rachel aristi put it in the guardian chaotic female leads now seem to be the default one note expression of Womanhood not all stories of young adult women figuring themselves out have to involve erratic changes in mood public outbursts and dating a string of jerks so let's take a look at the hot mess who she is what's made her so appealing and who the new heroines might be for the young women in their 20s and 30s so high right now can we just please talk about this tomorrow let us introduce you to the hot mess she is physically awkward she falls and crashes into things with alarming frequency her lack of coordination is an outward manifestation of her inner qualities such as her impulsivity comedically the hot mess is a delight especially since just a few decades ago pretty female leads rarely got to engage to this extent in slapstick comedy what does this do she's outspoken the hot mess is outspoken and opinionated she blurts things out without thinking could have kept that one in my mind actually she's a big oversharer I've had these red itchy hives along my rib cage and I suspect it's a little analogy but tonight I'll find she is the queen of the terrible impromptu speech seemingly without any filter I'm sorry tell that I'm not such a natural after all the embarrassing public Outburst is a staple in hot mess narratives because it is a miniature snow globe representation of how she interacts with the World At Large the hot mess exists in the tension between knowing what she is supposed to be doing and being unable to stop herself from doing what she feels she needs to do and after four vodka sodas I realized I had something to say her vices are played for Laughs the hot mess has unhealthy habits and a tendency to overindulge I'll just eat the Pavlova and catch him myself Mindy lahiri's obsession is food fleabags is sex Bridget Jones smokes and drinks more than she'd like to Carrie Bradshaw also smokes and is a Shopaholic I spent forty thousand dollars on shoes and I have no place to live the vices speak to the way the hot mess is by definition out of her own control and they also point to things lacking in her life issues she needs to fix but much of the time her overindulgences aren't treated as seriously as they should be or are even glamorized in some way sure she might have an emotional breakdown after an especially rough night but with a few exceptions we rarely see her addictions have irreparable consequences it's impossible to imagine for example an episode of Sex in the City where Carrie is diagnosed with lung cancer her love life is chaotic hot messes date a lot and their taste in men almost all hot mess heroines are straight is terrible not continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following alcoholics Workaholics commitment phobics peeping Toms megalomaniacs emotional quits or perverts what we eventually realize about the hot mess is that at the root of her many failed relationships is her inability to figure out who she herself is and therefore who would be a good partner for her Bridget wants to change pretty much everything about herself in order to find a boyfriend resolution number one oh obviously we'll lose 20 pounds Mindy Lahiri wants a relationship just like in her favorite rom-coms Maggie of everything I know about love seems to be modeling herself and her relationship after rock and roll heroines of yore she is both charismatic and relatable the hot mess is fun her appearance and charm are aspirational while her down-to-earth attitude and small struggles make her relatable if a pretty and Charming woman embarrasses herself in public it makes us like her because it reminds us that she isn't any better than us this idea has backfired though over time take the fascinating case of Jennifer Lawrence you're a person who doesn't mind seeming like they're they're not perfect no I don't have a choice in the 2010s when her star was Rising Lawrence cultivated a hot mess public Persona she was Brash and unfiltered made sure to let everyone know she was a big drinker I'm sorry I did a shot before I would constantly fangirl over other celebrities and even iconically tripped on the way to receive her Oscar an event that people still debate over whether it was real or fake at some point Lawrence's awkwardness began seeming performative and the relatability of her Persona crumbled even if you're feeling like a hot mess these days your meal planning doesn't have to be why not start off the new year right with Factor save time and give yourself the energy you need to take on all of those New Year New You tasks factors ready to eat meals are delivered straight to your door so you can skip the trip to the grocery store and The Chopping prep work and cleanup of cooking or if you're trying to kick that delivery addiction Factor can save you time and money by replacing takeout factors fresh never frozen meals are ready in just 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your first box hot mess heroines range from purely comedic and light-hearted to tragicomic comedic hot messes tend to have good jobs which is surprising considering how supposedly scatterbrained they are Mindy is an OB GYN Carrie is a stable hiring writer Bridget Jones Works in publishing and ends up becoming a bit of a reporting sensation Susie and I hate Susie is a successful actress this incongruous professional success is key to the secret meaning of the comedic hot mess her character is built to be the diametric opposite of the old-fashioned ladylike woman a lady is supposed to have a perfect boyfriend and a happy nuclear family a hot mess tends to date a lot of jerks at least before finding the right guy a lady is poised the hot mess is impressively uncoordinated a lady is polite and tactful the hot mess is tactless and loud to highlight this contrast the hot mess is often juxtaposed with women who have it together or who exemplify a traditional model of femininity Bridget's rival in love is Natasha an accomplished and Suave professional Mr Biggs wife weirdly another Natasha is polished and tasteful meanwhile Mindy's friend Gwen is the picture-perfect representation of Serenity and motherhood and so is Amy's Sister Kim in Trainwreck best sex that you've ever had guy is in jail but I've been thinking about maybe reaching out to him but the final differentiator is that unlike the archetypal ladylike lady the comedic hot mess has a cool and interesting job that makes up a significant part of her self-image or at the very least she has cool and interesting job aspirations the progressive message of the hot mess is that she is unafraid to take everything our post-second wave feminism world has to offer she will date everybody while she tries to figure out who is right for her she will chase and achieve a fulfilling and successful career and the qualities that allow her to do all this we are shown are her Gusto for life and irrepressible individuality none of which she would be able to have if she adhered to the stifling old-fashioned bottle of femininity or to The Impossible standards of the modern having it all woman I'm sorry he moved to Paris and fell in love with me I'm sorry he cheated on me with you still while her message is Progressive and affirming there's an illusory quality to the comedic hot mess first of all by bundling all these quote-unquote opposition of femininity traits into one rambunctious character it's almost as though the Trope keeps telling us that to be a progressive successful Charming woman you have to be all these particular things but there may well be plenty of non-traditional interesting women out there who aren't at all clumsy over indulgent and would never deliver an ill planned impromptu speech at a public event Lillian keep shining knowing you can always count on me secondly for all her manifest imperfections the hot mess's life is still too good to be true she is completely disorganized and yet professionally successful she has terrible taste in men and yet she ends up with someone great not always to everyone's taste but mostly she seems to be completely off her planned track yet she somehow gets everything she ever wanted in the end so even though she is in many ways billed as realistic she is still a fantasy Carrie you're the one one striking example of the comic hot mess who stands out in some ways from the others is Issa in Issa Ray's insecure Issa has the hot mess Hallmarks of being awkward and outspoken with a Chaotic Love life taking a non-traditional path and finding interesting creative success in a big city but this heroine story is built a little differently because it's not only about being female in the modern world but also about being black all the hot messes we've discussed so far apart from Mindy are white the white hot mess moves through the world in a kind of raucous and riotous way consuming people and experiences while oscillating wildly between self-doubt and megalomania but when your heroine is a woman and something else this adds another often constraining layer that may affect the way she relates to the world accordingly many of issa's outbursts happen only in Her Imagination or the privacy of a bathroom and her indulgences in drama aren't quite as over the top perhaps because she feels she can't be quite as performatively dramatically messy all the time what if I could introduce you to tie dollar sign [Music] where the title scientists come from Atlanta also explores this problem when the usually very together character van has a rare out of character Night Out smokes weed and finds herself subject to a random drug test at her teaching job the next morning so her pretty limited messiness is quickly punished in her world unfortunately you have admitted the use of an illegal substance to a superior Soul gotta fire you to cover my own ass as well as the schools the hot messes of tragic comedies or sad coms aren't as happy-go-lucky as their purely comedic counterparts their stories explore darker topics May and feel good is addicted to cocaine and processing childhood abuse Anya in this way up is coming out of a nervous breakdown Arabella and I may destroy you is processing a traumatic assault here again we see how the hot messes exterior is used to Signal what's going on inside her mind her erratic behavior is supposed to reflect her psychology and internal struggles where the comedic hot mess is funny seemingly without meaning to be funny the tragic comic hot mess actively uses humor as a defense mechanism great brilliant sleep bag's protagonist builds up a wall of jokes to protect herself from the world and from us presenting as the totally comedic type of hot mess before she gradually can't hide that she's in deep grief over the death of her best friend which was partially triggered by her own sex addiction these people are sad clowns laughing on the outside and crying on the inside May is literally a stand-up comedian while fleabag even dresses like a mime the tragicomic hot mess typically isn't as established professionally as the comedic one Carrie Bradshaw or Bridget Jones's good jobs are proof that they are really quite capable of staying afloat in life so it's fine for us to laugh at their personal failures and public embarrassments without feeling too worried about them the tragic Comic-Con messes tend to have lackluster jobs and vague not yet realized though creative Ambitions when we meet fleabag she's running a cafe with as little enthusiasm as humanly possible Maggie does well this but wants to be a writer Arabella has had some successes in writing but she's at risk of losing the bigger opportunities in front of her due to not getting herself together the tragic comic hot mess is actually in trouble life goals wise you know everyone feels like this is a little bit and they're just not talking about it or I am completely [ __ ] alone even still the tragic comic hot mess isn't totally realistic or relatable either because invariably these women while troubled and hanging by a thread are also the most interesting charismatic special people in any room they enter most of us don't get that consolation when we're dealing with pain the thing is that if you make every female protagonist on screen mentally ill sardonic and miserable but in a charismatic way this ends up glamorizing her particular set of qualities and holding up this one model as the only cool way to embody non-traditional femininity climate crisis Israel my hair is not and I love chicken over the two decades of her on-screen Reign the hot mess evolved Bridget Jones was wildly insecure and trying to be the woman she thought the world wanted her to be Carrie spent her time scrutinizing this same world and figuring out a balance between what she was and what the world wanted of her Mindy Lahiri barreled through the world doing mostly exactly what she wanted trying to fit into her own private rom-com and fleabag was completely disillusioned with her world and basically going through the motions until the drumroll hot priest if we take Bridget and fleabag maybe the two most iconic hot messes ever as bookends of the Trope then the hot mess starts out as an insecure Klutz who has absolutely zero control of her life and seemingly through the universe's benevolence ends up with a happily ever after I Now Pronounce You finally husband and wife [Music] she ends up a dark and sardonic young woman who builds a facade of complete control breaks down and eventually gets a subtle internal happy ending without it being tied to romantic fulfillment yet despite this maturation and increasing Nuance the hot mess is still at this point an exhausted Trope so what comes next we're seeing less individualistic less romance focused characters we're seeing messy younger characters like Rue and the other female leads of euphoria whose problems aren't played as aspirational or cute and aren't magically resolved in rom-com Happy Endings and we're seeing more heroines that represent intersecting identities that have yet to be properly explored on screen like euphoria's Jewels who is trans sex education's Florence who is asexual and Matilda from everything's gonna be okay who is queer and on the autism spectrum there's a lot more ground to cover in the topic of young adult women figuring out who they are for Gen Z creatives hopefully today's writers are up to the challenge let's get started with that and then it was clothes and then it was makeup this video was written by friend of the take Anya formosova if you liked the ideas here you can check out her channel q22 for more interesting cultural insights click the link in the description below [Music]

Channel: The Take

Views: 111,784

Keywords: fleabag, jennifer lawrence, maggie, everything i know about love, suzie, i hate suize, amy, trainwreck, mindy lahiri, the mindy project, aine, this way up, mae feel good, carrie bradshaw, sex and the city, bridget jones, diary, issa, insecure, hannah, girls, annie, bridesmaids, zoe kazan, clickbait, arabella, i may destroy you, hot mess, the take, tropes

Id: 1079sRzKkZI

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023