The Women in Refrigerators Trope, Explained

now i'm a severed head in the fridge sucks to be me jerry why do so many stories still stuff women inside refrigerators the woman in a refrigerator trope is when a female character is killed or hurt in order to motivate a male character's story the name was coined by writer gail simone inspired by the 1994 comic green lantern number 54 where the hero's girlfriend alexandra dewitt is sure enough murdered and stuffed inside his refrigerator looking at the many examples across film tv and comics we can spot some recurring patterns in the fridged woman she's often killed near the start of the story and this harrowing event is the motivating incident for a male hero to go on a narrative journey husband to a murdered wife and i will have my venues in this life for the next she can also arrive pre-fridged dying before the story begins and driving it without ever having to be physically present my wife deserves vengeance if she's not killed the fridged woman might be the victim of severe violence often including sexual assault the fridging event might be presented as a direct result of the hero's failure to protect her framed as a kind of failure of masculinity should i bring this on her and in many cases her death or suffering will be the price for unlocking our hero's god mode enabling him to become a more powerful complete version of himself frequently we know little to nothing about the fridged woman as an individual in her classic form she's just there to be a symbol often of lost innocence purity or everything good that's been taken from the male character what was she like in real life she was lovely the fundamental problem with putting women in refrigerators is that it's a way of sidelining female characters reducing them to one-dimensional objects in a story that's all about the men the question of what exactly constitutes a fridging can get complicated does it still count if the woman is well drawn before she dies if male characters get injured or killed too or if there are other complex female characters in the story these answers aren't always clear-cut ultimately though the fridged woman trope is most useful not as a way to condemn individual stories but as a touchstone for opening up important discussions about how women are represented on screen whatever he does don't scream she'll scream and you're gonna die knowing that it's all your fault here's our take on why this trope remains so common and how we can bring this simplistic fridge woman out of the kitchen for good what's the last thing that you do remember my wife that's sweet dying if you're new here be sure to subscribe and click the bell to get notified about all our new videos this video is brought to you by skillshare an online learning community where millions of people come together to take classes that fuel their creative journey if you are one of the first 1 000 people to click the link in the description below you'll get two free months of skillshare premium so become a member today and start exploring your creativity for less than ten dollars a month your women characters are awful none of them have anything to say for themselves most of them get either shot or stabbed to death within five minutes green lantern's girlfriend in the fridge may sound like an incredibly specific incident to make a whole trope out of but gail simone was quick to point out that the general tendency to use the grisly death of female characters to motivate a hero is strangely ubiquitous in comics simone and her colleagues created a women in refrigerators website featuring an extensive list of these incidents to drive home the point that being a girls superhero meant inevitably being killed maimed or depowered more than 20 years later countless superhero stories on the big screen still feature spandex-clad men grieving the loss of a beloved female there's only one person in this world that i care about and she's gone long before the trope had a name it was a common practice in all kinds of story genres they killed my wife epics like braveheart and gladiator derive much of their emotional impact from launching the hero's story with a savagely killed wife they killed her to get to me the james bond franchise not only contains a number of disposable bond girls it also uses the death of bond's wife tracy to justify his later womanizing many lady friends but married only once wife killed right you've made your point you're sensitive mr bond about certain things yes knowing about the loss in bond's early story the audience might excuse his sleeping with so many women without forming an emotional attachment as the behavior of a man who's still at his core heartbroken what if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect director christopher nolan's leading men range from billionaire vigilantes and dream burglars to old-timey magicians and amnesiac detectives but what ties many of them together is that behind this hero lies a very dead woman she might be dead from the start and represent the driving mystery at the center of the narrative you told me you were looking for the guy who killed your wife her tragic demise might be the story's inciting incident or the formative moment when the hero realizes who he is rachel believed in what you stood for what we stand for or her memory might still show up to haunt the hero's subconscious you're just a shade of my real wife i'm sorry you're just not good enough tv tropes termed this variation on the fridged woman who appears in the story either as a literal ghost or as a figurative one visiting the hero through visions or agonized flashbacks the lost lenore after the woman mourned in edgar allan poe's the raven i'm asking you to take a leap of fame it's easy to see why a filmmaker like nolan finds the fridging device to be such an efficient and effective emotional shorthand killing off a loved one is a quick way to advance the story add gravity to the events we're watching and present the hero as a tortured soul worthy of the audience's sympathy somehow i just i just know she's never gonna come back to bed as george lucas once said emotionally involving the audience is easy anybody can do it blindfolded get a little kitten and have some guy ring its neck the john wick series shows this quite literally by kickstarting its story through fridging an innocent animal albeit a puppy rather than a kitten the effectiveness of using his dog's death to motivate john wick's story reveals a lot about how the fridging technique operates when helen died i lost everything until that dog arrived on my doorstep for a revenge narrative like this the death acts as our buy-in moment it sets up our desire for a biblical eye for an eye-style justice the visceral satisfaction of seeing someone punished probably violently for their transgression but it's worth noting that the death of a human character should function differently from that of an animal as standout books robert wood writes observing that wick is also motivated by his car being taken quote when a role traditionally taken by a woman can be filled by a car or pet that woman wasn't really being treated as a human being as wood points out much of the time the fridged woman is used like a mcguffin an object that motivates the character but whose specific nature doesn't matter the fridged woman trope often seems to operate according to the logic that the less we know about her the better thus this person is reduced to an object it can even feel like the fridging incident is in woods words damage done to his property the john wick series gives the dog's death extra significance by making the animal a gift from jon's dead wife and taking time to build a meaningful relationship between jon and the animal but the sad truth is that some frigged women don't even get the same level of development as john wick's puppy so essentially much of the time the biggest problem with the fridged woman is bad writing i can't believe vanessa my bride was a fembot in a sitcom spin on the trope how i met your mother used its mysterious titular mother as the motivation for ted's long rambling story of searching for love in the modern world kids i'm going to tell you an incredible story the story of how i met your mother but after waiting until its very last season to introduce the mother as a real character rather than an idealized spectre the show speedily killed her off with cancer in the finale so all of ted's ruminations on his dead wife ultimately proved just a narrative ploy to build his final grand gesture towards someone else you need to sit down and listen to the story about how you met mom yet mom's hardly in the story and the vocal fan outcry over this choice highlighted how audiences frequently feel shortchanged by the cheap cliched trick of using a dead woman merely as a plot device john wick's audience not only found the death of the puppy to be an emotionally effective motivator many also on some level seemed to appreciate simply that for once it wasn't a woman being killed sure fridging works but if you avoid the cliched choice to objectify a woman in the process it can actually work better naturally the women in refrigerators debate was soon met with the response that it's not only female characters who come to nasty ends or endure brutal violence especially in superhero comics and other action-packed stories that thrive on over-the-top conflict comics critic heidi mcdonald stated if you composed a list of male superheroes who had been killed maimed or otherwise dispossessed it would be just as long so simple even a blind man could see it but in response to the criticism that quote dammit men suffer too editor john bartol and the women in refrigerators team created a second list for a counter they called dead men defrosting bartol argued that while it's true that male heroes are frequently attacked injured or maimed the effects are rarely permanent or irrevocably disempowering superman dies but is resurrected he's back thor loses an eye luke skywalker loses a hand and tony stark gets a chest full of shrapnel but each of them comes back at least as powerful as they were before and crucially their pain isn't designed to motivate anyone else but to provide the sort of adversity which the hero himself must overcome to be worthy of his goal why do we false so that we can learn to pick ourselves up in the rare instance when a male hero is actually killed his agency tends to remain fully intact as he gets to make his death count and achieve a final victory for his [Music] beliefs iron man the batman universe offers a clear example of how these differences play out both bruce wayne and barbara gordon suffer spinal damage in the dark knight rises and the killing joke respectively however while batman is able to make a full recovery thanks to a little makeshift chiropractor treatment batgirl is left permanently paralyzed it really is a shame you'll miss your father's debut miss gordon our venue wasn't built with the disabled in mind most importantly batman's injury occurs so that he can overcome it to rise up and save the day you don't owe these people anymore you've given them everything not everything not yet but batgirl suffering is inflicted by the joker in an attempt to drive her father insane i spoke with commissioner gordon before i came in here he told me he wanted this done by the book despite all your sick cruel vicious little games he's as sane as he ever was there's also a fundamental difference in the nature of violence inflicted on female characters and your wife moan like a [ __ ] when they ravaged her again and again as comics editor joan hilty pointed out it's not just how often it's done it's how it's done and to whom certain things are done the sexually violent visual language of how these women get killed is remarkably consistent by using sexual violence against women or the threat of it to motivate male characters stories reinforce the regressive idea that a woman's value is tied to sexual purity while a man's is comprised of his capacity to violently protect that purity where is my daughter still keep yourself you sell them you sold my daughter undoubtedly the site of harm coming to someone innocent provokes a strong feeling in a viewer yet as john wick proves using an animal for this purpose actually makes much more sense because he can't let the animals die in the movie just the women lumping women in with animals and children in this way implicitly harks back to a view of females as simple virtuous helpless creatures and children in fact the woman in the refrigerator can be seen as evolving out of the damsel in distress a woman who's stripped of her agency and put in danger as a prize for the hero to rescue through his bravery and skill the taken series demonstrates how intertwined these two tropes are by using them relatively interchangeably the first film sees brian mills chasing after a damsel in distress when his daughter is kidnapped after the series basically rehashes this premise in the follow-up the third entry kills off his ex-wife while on some level implying that she ends up dead for making the mistake of being with another man instead of with the hero but whether they're dead or taken the female characters function as little more than a pretext for brian to begin his latest rampage but what i do have are a very particular set of skills the problems with the fridged woman also apply to similar tropes like black dude dies first and bury your gaze which treat people of color or lgbtq characters as expendable in stories starring straight white protagonists i seen this movie the black dude dies first and arguably some of the most hated fridging moments in recent years do center on race or sexuality as much or more than gender ultimately the point of calling out women in refrigerators isn't about taking offense to particular stories in which bad things happen to women but about drawing attention to the sheer number of stories in which women exist only for bad things to happen to them much like the bechdel test which asks if a story includes at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man the fridged woman trope wasn't designed to be an all-encompassing measure of a story's feminist credentials it's there to spark conversation about how female characters tend to be written after deadpool 2 got negative reactions for arguably fridging deadpool's girlfriend vanessa gayle simone herself weighed in that in her view it wasn't a fridging because vanessa was a well-rounded character in the first film and continues to appear in deadpool 2 as a lost lenore figure it's okay there's a time for us it's just not now others counter it's a textbook fridging example reducing the woman to a sidelined symbol of lost goodness to motivate deadpool while the fact that she's magically resurrected in a mid-credits scene after the movie has ended only makes it worse that she's left out of the whole story for no real purpose yet the debate around this example illuminates that there are many more instances where the question of what's really fridging gets very murky for example what if there are also plenty of men dying as motivation so that the hero can rise up as a deeper more complete version of themselves over here uncle ben in game of thrones the death of a woman egret does motivate male character jon snow but the death of male character called drogo is used exactly the same way to motivate a female daenerys or what if a woman is killed off in a story where there's a female hero or plenty of other well-drawn female characters in the mix jen garner and alias her fiance got fridged to me what that says isn't um why are you killing the loved one of that main character it's there's not enough female protagonists in storytelling that's what it's about what if the killed woman has agency in avengers end game black widow does die to save a man but she chooses to sacrifice herself tell my family i love him so is her death fundamentally different from tony stark's heroic self-sacrifice moreover is a female death that motivates a man really still a fridging if she's given ample pre-fridge screen time and characterization in seven gwyneth paltrow's tracy is killed explicitly in order to test brad pitt's david i took a souvenir her pretty head yet this is the climax near the end of the movie when we have very little time left with any of the characters when avengers infinity wars gamora is killed by her adoptive father thanos this doesn't sit right with many viewers because it's clearly sacrificing her to serve his story i ignored my destiny once i cannot do that again even for you but of course her character's been fleshed out over multiple movies and due to the magic of time travel and alternate timelines she'll eventually come back in another form on breaking bad both jane and andrea die in terrible ways to shape jessie and walt's character arcs but especially with jane the fact that we've gotten to know her well and see her special relationship with jessie is precisely what makes her death gut wrenching have you been to the georgio cave museum is it the uh one of the a bombs so counter to the fridged woman cliche that the less we know is better examples like these illustrate how killing a three-dimensional character resonates far more because we have the sense of a fully formed person we care about having been destroyed it's striking that when films or shows go out of their way to subvert or complicate the fridging trope you thought i loved rebecca you thought that i hated her the result is usually better drama and greater emotional impact the lannisters and their regards [Music] we might never move away from using character deaths to gut punch the audience and drive stories it's just too effective but we can hope to leave behind lazy derivative versions of this which assume women or other marginalized groups are only there as accessories to a white male story what really keeps us watching is a new twist on the same old story something we haven't seen before can you tell a story bob can you make us laugh can you make us cry can you make us want to break out enjoy a song hi everyone i'm susanna i'm deborah and we're the creators of the take please subscribe and tell us what you want our take on next this video is brought to you by skillshare an online learning community that offers affordable classes designed to fit your schedule and skill level when you join skillshare you'll get access to thousands of workshops taught by amazing professionals and you'll receive feedback and encouragement from your fellow creatives one skillshare original you can check out right now is robert generate iii class on how to create your own coloring book the award-winning illustrator will walk you through a step-by-step guide on 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Channel: The Take

Views: 383,740

Keywords: deadpool, deadpool 2, taken, taken 2, batman, women in refrigerators, how i met your mother, fast and furious, seven, american assassin, the amazing spider-man, the amazing spider-man 2, spider-man, the umbrella academy, the 100, the 100 lexa, the avengers: infinity war, the avengers: endgame, memento, the prestige, inception, shutter island, chistopher nolan, james bond, the spy who loved me, keanu, john wick, gladiator, braveheart, ironman, the boys, the green lantern

Id: 0d3Pv4wk1QU

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020