This is a great intro-level text about gendered representation in film for people new to media criticism. A younger version of me would have benefitted from this, but anyone who's done any degree of media analysis won't find anything new or noteworthy here. For me, the most glaring flaw of this text was that it does no Marxist, historical, or poststructuralist analysis—which, okay, is a hugely pretentious thing to say, but bear with me for a second: I mean it does no analysis of material conditions or of the basis for gendered stereotypes and, most glaringly, it does not interrogate why likability, particularly among women, is constructed to be important.

In a certain light, this book does what it says on the tin. It does very much identify which women in movies have been cast as unlikeable. Due to a fundamental lack of curiosity about what likability functionally is or does—or, for that matter, what unlikeability is or does—its commentary does not delve much deeper than that. It correctly identifies that there are gender roles in society, and that women are expected to adhere to them. It does not question the actual social function of those roles or transgression from them in the real world, except insofar as likability is constrictive, and unlikability is more representative of human diversity.

Why is the likability role normative for women? The book is less interested in this. It talks about how women are supposed to behave, but not why patriarchal power structures want women to behave that way. The repeated question of the text is: Why shouldn't she be a trainwreck? Why can't women be The Psycho? (Boy, more on that in a second.) We are talking about a fictional context here, where characters are frequently reduced to parables. This matters. The author is interrogating the message of those parables, and the work those parables do in constructing normativity within society. I think this book is great for those who would like to read up on this, on these terms: how media establishes and reinforces messages about what is normative, specifically on how A Good Woman as a category is shaped by film.

When I say the book is less interested in the origins of this normative role, I mean it doesn't care about the social factors that go into why "likability" is valued. This is cultural criticism as though the cultural artefact exists independently of the society that made it. Normatively, in Western society, (white) women do the social work and the nurturing work involved in maintaining the (white) nuclear family structure. It's in the interest of maintaining these role responsibilities that women are paid less, discouraged from working and ambition, discouraged from the sciences, etc. It's also in the interest of maintaining these role responsibilities that likability is valued. It is hard to nurture well and to form social connections when you are not expressing the traits associated with likability: friendliness, predictability, humility, kindness.

This book is about women who don't express these traits, but, again, it's not interested in why or how unfriendliness, unpredictability, arrogance, and cruelty can be... socially good to avoid? I don't think women have an obligation to express any likeable trait; I agree that it is narrow-minded, restrictive, and prescriptive to expect this. I am myself not terribly friendly. But likability certainly has social benefits, and people watching unlikeable women on the screen are going to respond negatively at least in part because unfriendliness, unpredictability, arrogance, and cruelty can be unpleasant to witness.

The gendered aspect does matter; it is dehumanizing to expect perfect performance from women; I think flawed female characters are great—but social analysis is the only thing that really makes sense of the commentaries in this book, and social analysis is almost non-existent. This is most glaringly demonstrated in the chapter on The Psycho which, first of all, inexplicably accepts "The Psychopath" as a salient category at face value. The point of the book, of course, is that constructed categories are spurious; but the whole chapter is about how women should be allowed to do murder on-screen without anyone getting upset about it, which doesn't make sense in a book whose thesis is about letting women be unlikeable. Some of the discussion about Amy Dunne was interesting; the critics who called Gone Girl a step backward for feminism are guilty of the same kind of shallow analysis I am accusing this book of. But I'm not sure what the book was saying by the simultaneous identification that Amy Dunne's murdering is upsetting and that critics were, understandably, upset by it. When the book's repeated thesis is that women should be allowed to be unlikeable but you include a chapter about how women serial killers should be as accepted/celebrated as male serial killers in media, how do you not extend the "let women be unlikeable" thesis to murder, or to the lack of empathy that media constructions of psychopathy—itself problematic and worthy of deconstruction—entails? Should the audience not respond with disgusted/appellation by a graphic murder? What is the point of this chapter in this book, without the historical/social analysis to help us understand why people respond to the idea of women murdering with such proscription?

In sum, the central complaint I have about this book is that it lacks focus: theoretical focus, analytical focus, but also focus in messaging—even focus on what sort of "media criticism" it is doing. The author is explicitly focusing on film because that's her analytical background; but, tellingly, several of the films she discusses are adaptations of books. Then is this still mainly an analysis of film? This is a great gift for the young adult in your life who's newly into film and/or gender studies, but won't offer anything new if you, like me, have the misfortune of being overeducated in this area.