Studying women presidents and prime ministers on screen, from Meryl Streep in Don't Look Up to Dimple Kapadia in A Thursday

In 2016, when I heard Hillary Clinton had lost the US Presidential race to Donald Trump, I took it as a confirmation that this is how much the US hated its women. And I felt temporarily gratified to live in a country which elected a woman as its third prime minister.

This was before I remembered Indira Gandhi was the only woman prime minister we have had, and she was an outlier. Her strong and uncompromising leadership style skews meaningful analysis of gender representation in governance. Anyway, for all the breaking of paths and glass ceilings, trailblazers like Gandhi and Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher commonly belong to conservative or traditional parties.

Left to the simultaneously imaginative and mimetic art of comedy, the first woman US president looks like Meryl Streep’s Janine Orlean in Don’t Look Up and Julia Louis Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer in the HBO show Veep. They are both are anti-feminists and women of power. Yet they could not be more different in how they reflect the realities of their gender. To be an anti-feminist is to also suffer the consequences of conforming to the patriarchy. 

When Don’t Look Up premiered, some critics noted that the movie was rendered toothless by its general cynicism. Even though it all but shouts climate change is real, the movie is not saying anything new and shocking enough to be a wake up call nor does it demand specific political action. Instead, it was panned for reeking of depressed-voter abstraction. We are not told which party President Orlean belongs to. It is enough to show that her actions are remarkably like Trump and leave it there, as if to shrug and say that all politicians are the same, the women too. And though she may not be a loose cannon or unintelligent like Trump, when a woman is given the seat at the desk in the Oval Office, her actions will be no different from a man. Really! Here, my suspension of disbelief burst, and Don’t Look Up changed from satire to fantasy. 

Who is President Orlean? It is like her character arc materialises from and dissipates into the ether. Orlean is corrupt and self-absorbed. She is more interested in the optics of a climate apocalypse than the science. She is given no motive to run off with the tech billionaire and abandon her son, and the earth, in the compulsions of an intra-elite competition. In the end credits scene of the movie, with no thinking beyond an aesthetic allusion to the garden of Eden, President Orlean exchanges her power suit for a birthday suit. For no purpose other than a callback, she is eaten alive by an alien creature of a new ‘primitive’ planet. There are no career-woman tropes or subplots of systemic backlash in a movie that revels in it otherwise. The premise of her role works even if she were a man.    

The notion of a female Trump is silly and problematic. Women who run for high office are punished by their less-egalitarian cultures whether they like it or not. Just look at Selena Meyer. Convinced to pedal an anti-female-genital-mutilation speech by her Qatari lover, she is eventually dumped because the line “Women’s rights are human rights” also proves too radical for him. If that is not enough, her ex-husband’s philandering and her daughter’s unlikability also reflect on her approval ratings.

Not even Mrs America, Phyllis Schlafly, who Dahvi Waller, the creator of the show, deemed the foot soldier of the Raegan revolution, could make it to the White house. Waller was also interested in showing a true female antihero, and not a female antihero who is basically a man. “If Phyllis Schlafly were a man, I believe he would have been rewarded. Not only was Phyllis not given an appointment in the White House, but the reason why she was not given an appointment in the [Raegan] administration is because she is considered too polarizing,” she said. 

The video essay, ‘The Girlboss Villain is Everywhere – it’s Enough Now,’ suggests that since the 2000s, there has been a simultaneous rise in She.E.Os as well as the girlboss villains in popular culture. Whether it is Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada, headmistress Hope Haddon in Sex Education or even Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, the girlboss villain is established as not a real woman, and her villainy, masculine. Her lack of empathy is so absolute that she is bereft of any humanity.

She tries to succeed like a man in the cut-throat corporate environment for personal capital gains instead of trying to make a difference like she promised. In this, she seems worse than bad guy bosses because she was expected to be better.

Sure, one’s gender or ethnicity does not preclude us from becoming oppressors, particularly because we have to function in the same capitalistic systems, but the number of times the girlboss villain trope keeps coming up is misogynistic. It encourages the association that women cannot become successful without being evil. A Wall Street Journal report stated that 80 percent of the time, the media cited the CEO as the source of blame when the company’s leader was a woman, compared to 31 percent of cases when it was a man in charge. With male-led companies, it is usually the company as a whole that is implicated.       

On the other hand, the onscreen Indian woman leader has to be a version of Mother India. In A Thursday, Dimple Kapadia’s character Prime Minister Maya Rajguru shuts her personal assistant down when he tries to warn her that she is thinking emotionally about a hostage situation because she is a woman, mother, and grandmother. She replies, if you cannot be emotional about your own country, then there is no meaning in supporting me as a candidate. “Emotions can be an asset. You’ll learn with age.”

However, like a video of any Parliamentary session indicates, both male and female leaders have a penchant for emotional outbursts in this country, and cinematic fantasies come easily when there is no risk involved. Nobody I know is telling Smriti Irani, Mahua Moitra or even Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take it down a notch. A Thursday makes the case that a head of State is more empathetic just because she is a woman, just like a woman police officer can be more trigger-happy than her male counterparts, and a woman terrorist can be actually be a rape victim trying to seek justice. The womanhood of it all, like in Don’t Look Up, is nothing but a marketing gimmick. Rajguru and Orlean are one-dimensional in different but significant ways.

I do not think all women characters necessarily need a work-life imbalance backstory or a hero’s journey [not even an antihero’s journey], especially in a comedy, but a president? We look to the silver screen for representation of a female president not only because it teaches us what is possible, and what must be acceptable but to tell us that when we do not manage to have it all, it is almost never our fault. If Hillary Clinton, with her political connections, experience, and standing against a half-serious opponent could not win, who will? Farida Jalazi, an expert on women in political leadership said that electing a woman president for the US is not 'inevitable,' and not 'just a matter of time.'

Eisha Nair is an independent writer-illustrator based in Mumbai. She has written on history, art, culture, education, and film for various publications. When not pursuing call to cultural critique, she is busy drawing comics.

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by Eisha Nair