You know the archetype – a woman is sat on the floor, knees pulled into her chest, crying into her cashmere, her expensive highlighted hair sticking to her tears while her husband leaves loudly with a final door slam that sends a shudder through the wall. And what awful thing did she do to get herself into this mess? Well, she worked too hard, earned too much money and became far too successful at work to be any use in a romantic relationship. And he, the other archetype, is the emasculated man who must leave before he punches a hole in the plasterboard, driven by his inferiority complex.
The woman probably deserves it though, right? You know what those career women are like – power hungry, emotionally starved, as uptight as their pencil skirt, incapable of a loving relationship, probably messaging her colleagues on Slack while he’s going down on her. No wonder he left her!
At least this is the narrative Hollywood keeps feeding us: For women to be successful at work they must be single, or put simply – their career success will lead to difficulties in their relationships. It’s the narrative we apply to the likes of Jennifer Aniston, whether she’s on screen (The Morning Show) or not.
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We saw it in Fleishman is in Trouble, which told the story of the failed relationship between Dr Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg) and his wife, Rachel (Claire Danes). For 10 episodes we watched Rachel’s success as a talent agent be blamed for their separation. Her career undermined and overshadowed Toby’s own achievements, which as a Manhattan Doctor himself, were not inconsiderable. And so, the inevitable relationship breakdown ensued.
Then there was the unnecessary relationship plot line in The Devil Wears Prada. The moment Andrea (Anna Hathaway), a lowly magazine assistant, finally ascended the ranks at work to be noticed by editor-in-chief (Meryl Streep) was the moment she lost the respect of her boyfriend. And remember in the first series of The White Lotus when we met Tech CFO Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton) on holiday with her family and saw her and her husband work through troubles after he had cheated on her because, God forbid, we meet a successful woman in a thriving relationship.
I could go on with the examples – How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Proposal, No Strings Attached, A Marriage Portrait - but you get the gist. If we happen upon an ambitious woman in a film, then we know that at some point she’s going to have to choose between delivering a career-defining key-note or fluffing the ego of some guy. It’s the career / relationship seesaw – if one is up the other must be down.
And now on our screens we see ourselves watching the loud break-up sex between two hedge fund managers in Netflix’s newly-released thriller, Fair Play. What begins as a playful office romance becomes toxic and fraught after Emily (Pheobe Dynevor) receives a promotion ahead of her fiancé Luke (Alden Elrenreich). His discomfort and anger at his seemingly reduced status in their relationship and at work is the pillar of the film, around which she frets about how to downplay her position and title.
How in 2023 are we still peddling the myth that no woman can have it all or, at the very least, what she has worked hard for without damning consequences? Perhaps it’s the context these shows are made in. Despite gains by younger women in several states, women in California, where these shows are largely generated, will not see equal pay until at least 2043. Even what we seen on the screen is art imitating life, imagine what might happen if Hollywood wrote not only strong female characters, but stronger male ones too. Because while the pervasive narrative is that she can’t have it all, if you analyse the storylines in the aforementioned films and TV shows, the other story is that it he can’t handle it all. She might be the one crying on the floor, but he's the one running away because he can’t hack it. ‘It’ being a female breadwinner. The problem isn’t just 2D female characters with little complexity, rather the prevailing ‘threatened male’ trope that’s letting us down. As Luke says at the end of Fair Play: ‘I’m nothing.’
It's interesting that as we’ve spent the last decade discussing how to level up and diversify the types of women portrayed on screen (it turns out not every woman can be categorised as either a manic pixie dream girl or a psycho workaholic), what we’ve negated is the need for better representation of different men too.
Like anything that gives one person more power than another, wealth disparity between two people in a relationship is something to be navigated and accepted as a natural dynamic. To do this without falling on tired stereotypes, to exit the sludge of repetitive storylines, requires work, whether in the writing room or at home. It’s about time Hollywood rids itself of the equation that a woman's promotion and skyrocketing career must equal the death of a romantic relationship, in much the same way it needs to create a narrative that doesn't automatically present a man feeling inferior to a woman's success. As Carl (Harris Dickinson) says to his girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean Kriek) in Triangle of Sadness: ‘I don’t want to be the man while you be the woman, I want us to be best friends.’
