How Shrinking perpetuates Hollywood's most sexist cliché

Some things never change. When Shrinking, Ted Lasso creator Bill Lawrence's new comedy drama starring Jason Segel, launched on Apple TV+ in January, it was immediately apparent that the show was guilty of one of the most quietly toxic tropes in entertainment: from the off, Segel's therapist character Jimmy was defined by the loss of his wife, beautiful in death and only ever available in flashback form. Tia is deprived of any agency: we know that her narrative purpose is solely to die, and her existence is only important insofar as it affects our brave male protagonist.

The temptation to give male characters female relatives or love interests who are either already dead or dying as a plot driver is seemingly irresistible for countless writers, the vast majority of whom are male. Once you are aware of this phenomenon, you realise how pervasive it is. I am currently reading a novel narrated by a man grieving over a woman we never meet before her death; while researching this feature, I saw the new Adam Driver film 65, in which Driver's character crash-lands on Earth 65 million years ago. The reason he is in his spaceship in the first place is, lo and behold, because he has a terminally ill daughter who – spoiler alert – dies during the film.

Why do male writers in TV, film and literature continue to engage in this trope? What does it tell us about the gender dynamics in fiction? And is there any hope on the horizon that it may be consigned to the creative dustbin?

Izzie Austin is a film writer doing a PhD that examines revenge in teen movies at Swinburne University, Australia. Before refining their subject, for a while they were looking into  revenge films more generally and have therefore had to sit through a great many works that are guilty of indulging this sexist phenomenon, commonly known as "fridging". "There are so many films where they just introduce a wife in one scene and then kill her immediately," they say, citing the infamous Death Wish franchise, in which Charles Bronson becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered, as particularly egregious. "It's insulting to the female characters because their only function is how they make other characters feel and then it's insulting to the male characters because they don't actually get to feel anything new."

The origins of "fridging"

It was in 1999 that comic-book writer Gail Simone first gave a name to the trope, coining the term "Women in Refrigerators syndrome" to refer to a trend she noticed in superhero stories for female characters being killed off to provide motivation for the male protagonists. The turn of phrase was inspired by a 1994 Green Lantern story, in which the Green Lantern discovers that his girlfriend has been killed and stuffed into a fridge and, as Austin puts it, "Dead wife make man sad; man process sad by doing violence".

If this trope has only been given a name in the last few decades, it has been conspicuous through the whole history of storytelling. "These are narratives that extend way way back," says Dr Miriam Kent, lecturer in film and media at the University of Leeds and author of Women in Marvel Films. A fairy tale like Sleeping Beauty, which dates back to the 16th Century, involves a comatose princess who must be rescued by a prince. These notions of female sublimation and male agency have always pervaded Western literature, and, in recent centuries, TV and film. In the 1970s, literature professor Joseph Campbell's seminal book The Hero's Journey set out the structure for a classic "quest narrative" which "generally involved a masculine hero and a princess", says Kent, and his storytelling theory went on to inform films like Star Wars. "The idea is that these are structures that are so ingrained within Western cultures and Western societies that they're almost unconscious," she says.

The trope annoys me to the brink of rage, firstly because it's dreadfully boring, and secondly because it cannot be divorced from the greater context in which violence against women is endemic – Kristin Devine

So unconscious are they, in fact, that many Hollywood writers are unaware of deploying them. After 2018's Deadpool 2 attracted criticism for having Deadpool's girlfriend Vanessa murdered at the beginning of the film – an example of "fridging" made worse by the fact that Deadpool's appeal is that he is aware of the comic-book world in which he exists – one of the writers, Rhett Reese, said that he didn't know the word existed. Reese and writing partner Paul Wernick declined the invitation to be interviewed for this piece. (Fans were so incensed by Vanessa's death during test screenings, incidentally, that an alternate ending was shot, and added post-credits, in which Deadpool travels back in time and saves her.)

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote and directed 65, were similarly oblivious to the trope. "The attempt was to do a modern-day silent film with hardly any dialogue so we're not reliant on exposition and back story," Woods tells BBC Culture, by way of explaining their narrative choice with the death of the protagonist's daughter. "The exercise was one of minimalism and attempting to tell a story where you could push the mute button and it plays the same in any part of the world and it can be digestible. So we're painting in pretty broad strokes with this film."

"Broad strokes" is right. "I’m not sure if it's lazy necessarily but I do think there is something to be said about the way in which screenwriters are trained," says Kent. "A lot of the time they will be trained by industry professionals, who will also be men working within that particular culture." Kristin Devine is a writer and fertility coach who finds fridging so frustrating that she wrote a short story subverting it, in which a woman actually gains superpowers from being stuck in a fridge. The idea derived from her anger at encountering the unreconstructed trope so often: "It annoys me at times to the brink of rage, firstly because it's dreadfully boring and I hate being bored, and secondly because it cannot be divorced from the greater context in which violence against women is endemic. Being fed a steady fictional diet of women-as-disposable-victim, in a world already full of it, inures all of us to the reality of sex-based violence."

What critics of the practice are not saying is that male characters shouldn't be widowers. "The death of a loved one is a strong motivating factor for people," says Devine. "Uncle Ben's death in Spiderman. Obi Wan's death in Star Wars. But these characters weren't created only to die – they had important lessons to impart and tasks to fulfil before they did. They needed to exist as fundamental to the story, and their lives mattered far beyond their demise."

Subverting the cliché  

She and Austin both cite the original John Wick film as an example of how featuring a deceased female partner or family member may be done in a way that doesn't feel exploitative. Though the 2014 Keanu Reeves action vehicle falls into the trap of soft-focus beach flashbacks, John Wick's late wife Helen is a more richly drawn character than most equivalents; and while it may be a revenge thriller, the inciting incident in the film is that Wick's dog, a gift from Helen before her death from a terminal illness, is killed, "So you don’t meet the wife [in the present tense]," says Austin, "but you feel her character through her understanding that her husband is going to need somewhere to put his energy." Similarly, we never meet the dead wife of Robin Williams's psychologist Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting but her and Maguire's relationship comes alive on-screen through Maguire's words. "[That film offers] a much more honest acknowledgment of: people have partners; their partners were special to them and now they're gone; how do you continue after this point?" says Austin.

Shrinking's success proves that audiences can overlook "fridging". But at the same time the groundswell of opinion against it is rising

Austin also cites the 2015 video game Fallout 4 as an example of a work undercutting the trope: the game allows the player to choose to be either a female or a male character whose spouse is killed and whose son is kidnapped. The gameplay isn't perfect – Austin points out that the creators may not have realised that a woman and a man might not respond to the situation in the same way – but it signals that creators might be getting savvy to avoiding this misogynistic cliché.

Other rays of hope have appeared in the gradually shifting gender dynamics of superhero adaptations – a form so commercially enormous that it may be capable of changing the narrative. Vast corporations like Marvel and Disney "know that there are female audiences watching their content," says Kent, and are beginning to change their behaviour, whether cynically or otherwise, by creating more female heroes, like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, and less female victims. In the 2022 Disney+ series She-Hulk, the main character addresses the viewer and wonders whether the twist in the episode is that she might be fridged – though of course, she isn't. And, thinking of another blockbuster franchise, in the last Bond film No Time to Die, we see the death of 007, but not his love interest Madeleine Swann. "I think there's definitely been a shift in terms of popular discussions of these issues," says Kent.

No one is pretending that fridging is a thing of the past. "The fact that it's still happening in a fairly straightforward way suggests that there's not been much movement," says Kent. Shrinking's success proves that audiences can easily overlook it. But at the same time the groundswell of opinion against it is rising: as Devine says, "fiction should inspire us to higher things," she says, "or help us explore realities that are uncomfortable. Fridging accomplishes neither purpose."

-bbc