Katherine Irving: “Strong female characters are not the only kind of feminist character”
MFA assistant film programmer Katherine Irving talks Disney, writing programming copy, and the impact of on-screen narratives.
Katherine Irving is the Manager and Assistant Programer of Film and Video at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). She cares a lot about female narratives in film, particularly about the subliminal messages that they send to women and young girls. Through her work, she tries to promote complex female stories and challenge films that present women as helpless or vengeful.
In addition to her work at the MFA, Irving teaches film studies at Boston College and has served as a programming consultant for the Boston Women’s Film Festival. In the following interview, Irving discusses the portrayal of women in film and how these images can affect them.
Daysia Tolentino: You work a lot on creating film exhibitions that showcase strong, independent, and powerful female narratives on screen. What do you think is the predominant narrative about young girls in film?
Katherine Irving: I think that young girl characters actually tend to get better narratives than grown women, especially if you look at Pixar movies lately, Disney movies. A lot of the heroes of those films are really strong, very much themselves, and very self-possessed. Whereas when women get older, they tend to star in films where they’re portrayed as victims, and they tend to overcome that victimhood through revenge. It’s rare to see a strong female character who is strong from the beginning of a film.
DT: Do you think that the industry is taking sincere steps to change these narratives, especially with the rise of the #MeToo movement and the increased desire for more diverse stories?
KI: I think that there are more films with strong female protagonists, and with female protagonists in general. I think that’s actually an important distinction to make, is strong female characters are not necessarily the only kind of feminist character because any character that portrays women as complicated and human, rather than a sort of two-dimensional object, shows the world that women are real people. I think we need more of that. Films like “The Favourite” and “Madeline’s Madeline” are a great example. These people are not necessarily strong, they have a lot of neuroses and a lot of problems but they are still, in my mind, feminist characters because they are so complex and so flawed.
DT: Whether it be a strong female lead or a female character who is flawed, how important is it to show young girls these types of narratives?
KI: I mean I can speak from experience on this. When I was young, I was raised watching a lot of Disney movies. We were a very Disney family, and so I saw a lot of really idealized depictions of women— these animated princesses. As I got older, I started to watch more romantic comedies and teen comedies which are no better. So I think I really internalized those narratives and thought that a woman should aspire to be desirable above all else. A lot of those narratives end with a marriage, as if that is the epitome of joy and happiness that every woman should aspire to.
I think for a long time, instead of really wanting a career, I was interested in being beautiful and nurturing and whimsical and all the things that a woman is supposed to be to land a man. It wasn’t until much later, when I actually started to study more challenging films and study film theory, that I began to see the ideological messages that films sort of smuggle within them, see those for what they are, and understand that they had actually shaped my identity without my even knowing it. When you figure that out, it’s really empowering because then you can take control of your own identity.
DT: Through the work that you do at the MFA, do you strive to help other women and girls to realize these messages they’re taking in?
KI: I try. I write a lot of the copy for the website, so there’s always going to be a description or a synopsis for every film. That’s limited space, but I try within that space to have a critical eye and help other people to parse some of the messages in the film. But that kind of thing, I get to experiment with a lot more in my teaching; I also teach at Boston College. It’s fun to teach my students to pick apart the ideologies in the films they’re watching.
DT: This last question is more of a fun one: are there any recent female coming-of-age films that you particularly like?
KI: I think the one that stands out to me in this moment is “Eighth Grade.” The character in the film played by Elsie Fisher, I think in the beginning, is really struggling to be liked through engaging with social media and presenting herself a certain way. Over the course of the film, [she] learns that it’s cool to be weird and be different. That really resonated with me. I also think it’s so cool that it was directed by a 27-year-old man who could have made a nostalgic film about his own experience of being in middle school in the early 2000s. But instead he chose to explore what it’s like to be a preteen today, and specifically for girls, which I think is sort of an exercise in radical empathy.
Note: Interview has been edited for clarity.
