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The Feminism of Anti-heroism in ‘I Care A Lot’
An existentialist? A bad feminist? Marla Grayson may not be the traditional anti-heroine you think…
It was a gut-wrenching experience. On the one hand, I wanted to tear myself — no, tear her — apart and rummage through her brains to destroy the evil within. On the other hand, it’s Rosamund Pike with her idiosyncratic fucked-upness, and one has to love her for it. Is it wrong to wish her character would die? She couldn’t possibly take all the blame, right? But wait, is there any good person in this story? Am I perhaps being too harsh on her?
Heated online debates suggest I’m not the only one caught by ambivalence towards the lead character of I Care A Lot (2020). A neo noir dramedy thriller with bouncy music and pastel colours, I Care A Lot tells the story of Marla Grayson (Pike), a professional guardian who exploits rich and vulnerable elderly people to achieve her American Dream of extreme wealth. Reception to the film was mixed. As fans chanted for the absurdly entertaining amorality of the film, critics despise it for its unconvincing plot, vicious characters, and confused politics — particularly about whether or not it’s a feminist piece.
This article attempts to play devil’s advocate, move beyond Pike’s character’s cathartic qualities, her challenge to the neoliberal #girlboss prototype or as a “hollow feminist vitriol” and suggest a more structural understanding of the character through examining Marla Grayson’s expansion of the female antihero archetype.
I Care A Lot invites a feminist discourse through its framing of a fierce female misogyny-fighting protagonist.
A glib businesswoman and legal guardian owning an elderly care firm on paper, but a con-artist at her core, Marla Grayson isn’t a woman to be messed with. She has a wall of photos of wards she’s been appointed to care for by the court, and from whom she reaps personal financial gains by checking them into care facilities and selling off their properties behind their backs. She also takes away their phones and forbids their families from ever visiting. The more isolated they are, the better it is for her and her fraud. She moves between different places with an all-time triumphant air, the bouncy music-video like aesthetics and emphatic slow emotion accentuating her sneering artificiality.
That the internet’s so divided over this character intrigues me to how this reaction compares to that of other cinematic antiheroes. Broadly speaking, the antihero’s a character in a story typified by rejection of conventional heroic traits or disregard for the norms of social morality. A figure with a long literary tradition, the antihero found some of its early cinematic representations in sci-fi and horror films such as Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933). Popular theories of the role of antiheroes in literature suggest a kind of realism in the figure, who mirrors aspects of the reality, the struggles, or the unrealised fantasies of the audience. As Sara A. Amato observes in her thesis examining contemporary female antiheroes, the antihero’s often developed and become more popular after “wars, widespread distress, and other remorseful, taxing pressures of life” — such as Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver (1976), who is a Vietnam war veteran who arguably strives in vanity to fashion an authentic life; and the organized crime family in The Godfather trilogy, who, according to P.J. O’Rourke, reflects the corruption of the post-Soviet world. These later antiheroes have started to veer away from the fantastical settings to be framed in more real-life or mundane settings.
It wasn’t until more recently that female antiheroes started to take the lead, and a more subversive reconfiguration of the trope happened. Female antiheroes have long existed through archetypes such as “the tomboy”, “the witch”, or the “femme fatale”, but they often existed as the trivial, devious, or insignificant supporting roles to advance the storyline of the male protagonists.
One of my all-time favourite antiheroines from the oldies is the stunning Christine Vole (Marlene Dietrich) in Witness for the Prosecution (1957), whose beauty, danger, love, and intelligence fuse in a mysterious and enchanting way to keep audiences on edge until the end. She seduces you, confounds you, teases you, and surprises you. Like most other female characters, antagonists, and antiheroines of her time, her character is dependent upon the male protagonist’s journey, at times servicing his goals while thwarting his efforts at others as a seductive creature to be loathed and eliminated.
These tropes have been increasingly challenged in the 21st-century, arguably called by some critics as the peak of antiheroes. Most progress has been made in television while cinema have slowly caught up, giving rise to intriguing and well-rounded female antiheroes such as Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill (2003–04), Lisabeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and Amy Dunne in Gone Girl (2014). These “bad” women came armed with desires, skills, intelligence, and histories. They don’t play by the rules, make controversial choices, put themselves and others in precarious situations, and are deeply troubled, intimidating, and sometimes despicable and outright devious. There’s a pleasure in watching them because we identify with their flaws and struggles as the imperfect or “evil” versions of ourselves, and we live vicariously through their questionable choices we’d never made in our real lives. “Every character is delivered with at least a bit of humanity,” Jordyn Kreshover writes of the reason we identify with the “bad guys.”
Marla Grayson fails as a satisfying antihero in this regard. Her struggle against Peter Dinklage’s Russian mafia boss barely makes her sympathetic because of unrealistic and artificial plot twists and her blatantly and thoroughly deceptive, selfish, cruel, and twisted personality. The only time in the film when Marla talks about her family is when she speaks of her mother as a sociopath in a quick one-liner, and she clearly doesn’t care about her mother or wants anything to do with her or her family — if she really has any.
It’s also dubious that her relationship with her romantic partner and scammer accomplice, Fran (Eiza González), isn’t untainted by their collective lust for wealth. After the couple lose everything following an attack on their home, Fran appears irritated with Marla, challenging her on her proposal to move away and start their life anew, assumedly with nothing but each other. They’ve lost everything but each other, which is clearly not enough, and it’s not until Marla proposes a potential plan to regain what they’ve lost that Fran softens and a grin returns to Marla’s face. Our sympathy for (or would it be more accurate to say interest in?) Marla thus results not from how much we know or identify with her, but from the formidability of the enemy and the fear and apprehension of facing and attempting to overcome the seemingly impossible.
Relating the audience to the antihero through an external factor rather than their own humanity isn’t a new technique. In Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature noir A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), a young and beautiful vampire clad in black chador — ‘The Girl’ (Sheila Vand) — roams around the almost empty streets at night and targets suspicious men who mistreat women. The Girl has a total of two brief lines in the film, and we know very little about who she is, where she comes from, and what she wants. We know that she is a bloodthirsty vampire, however a righteous one resembling a mysterious urban vigilante. One of the best scenes of the movie is when The Girl flinches from feeding on a human boy she takes home and develops romantic feelings for. Without a word, the scene is filled with tension and tenderness: the elegant movement of her hands, the slenderness of her exposed neck and chador-less figure, the steadiness of her gaze until approached by the boy she has reserved feelings. It’s all there in the movements.
The viability of an antihero without a backstory can be further seen through a literary classic, Albert Camus’ Nobel-winning novel The Stranger, in which the apathetic protagonist Meursault is portrayed with plain language in account of his life mundanities ranging from his work, his love, his mother’s death, and a murder. The novel is simultaneously “a colonial allegory, an existential prayer book, an indictment of conventional morality, a study in alienation, or ‘a Hemingway rewrite of Kafka’”, observes Alice Kaplan in her book Looking for ‘The Stranger’. This “critical commotion”, as well as feverish popular debates about the book, is not unrelated to Camus’ strategic blanking of his antihero’s past and a future as an absurd man abandoned by God in the everlasting present.
Meursault isn’t malicious — just abhorrent, at worst. Compared to Marla, who actively perpetuates crimes and intentionally exploits innocent people, Meursault’s indifference appears angelic. Marla abandons her belief in the compatibility of justice and quality life and chooses the latter, while manipulating rhetoric of the former to advance her other goals. Thus the irony of her being a professional carer, when she clearly doesn’t care about the welfare of the elderly, and the feminist rage against her as a fake whose existence and representation throws mud on the movement.
What is a feminist character anyways? In her 2014 essay “Bad Feminist,” Roxane Gay examined the tension of “a right way to be a woman, a right way to be the most essential woman,” which “suggests anger, humorlessness, militancy, unwavering principles, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman, or at least a proper white, heterosexual feminist woman.” According to Gay, the right feminist works to be beautiful, is professionally successful, despises men, decries sexist assumptions and misogyny, and earns a living independently with financial stability. Marla Grayson checks all those boxes. She’s a #girlboss; a perfect embodiment of Gay’s essential feminist.
What irks us is her pernicious impact on other oppressed communities, which Blakeson poignantly and comically points out both narratively and stylistically. Blakeson’s attitude towards Marla seems confused, vacillating between celebration and condemnation throughout the film. Whenever Marla gets a win, expect her to be punished in the next scene, only to rise up again, get beat down, then rinse-and-repeat. It’s essentially a story between two villains, and it’s hard to identify with any of the characters. Blakeson’s taking for granted of Marla’s ambition for wealth and lack of explanation of other factors contributing to this, such as the briefly mentioned childhood in poverty, results in a gap between Marla and the audience. An alienation not unlike that in films such as Fight Club (1999), in which Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is similarly brutal, cynical, resourceful, and discloses little personal history and has few redeeming qualities. Marla Grayson represents the closest female equivalent to this masculine “bad boy” icon. Despite flaws in the screenplay and potentials for fuller characterisation of supporting characters for their own sake, as well as service for Marla’s character, I Care A Lot is a daring and empowering film that normalises its antiheroine’s vanity and greed as a natural human tendency.
Her appearance of wanting it all and having it all makes her don the feminist clothing but, as Gay says, it’s never feminism that creates this “notion of being able to have it all… when really, it’s human nature to want it all.” It’s thus possible that Marla may not even view herself as a feminist. Recognising the myth and seeing the convenience and benefits in exploiting it, she may just have thought “why not?”
So the question at the beginning expands: how do we view a character who chooses “the wrong side of history”? Is it wrong of her to ride on the capitalist wave of profit and oppression and not want the revolution? How justifiable is her choice and if we despise her so thoroughly, what makes us different?
In existentialist views, absolute morality is dissolved, and a choice is a good one if made with authenticity. There’s no right choice to begin with but one works to make a choice right. Therefore, it’s not about Marla’s feminism or service to justice — personal or collective — but that if she really cares about feminism or justice, and that if her wily deployment of feminism or justice aligns with her true goals and ambitions. It’s only on the ground of authenticity that one can judge another morally.
Maybe trying to figure out if Marla Grayson is feminist or not, or has the right morals or not, isn’t unlike the debates about Meursault’s apathy, Tyler Durden’s profligacy, or Alex’s amorality. And maybe should’s and should-not’s aren’t the most productive measures of our actions. If Roxane Gay is cautioning through her essays against the essentialist type feminism, Blakeson may be using Marla to caution against an exclusive, repulsive neoliberal type of feminism, corporatism, or whatever ism’s that are nominally justified, progressive or benign yet the abstractions of which overlook specificities of individual realities.
Appreciating Marla Grayson is the latest in a long chain of efforts to deal with difficult cultural texts, and probably the first of a burgeoning list of corrupt heroines who defy conventional imagination. She may be far from likable, but her existence — with her self-aware weaponisation of a myth, her completely men-independent and self-serving ambition, her owning her beliefs and the unassuming need for explanation, and good riddance of a weepy backstory — may just suggest cinema’s progress to feature life of all types and varieties in all their possibilities.
