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00:00Now I'm a severed head in a fridge. Sucks to be me, Jerry."
00:06Why do so many stories still stuff women inside refrigerators?
00:10The woman in a refrigerator trope is when a female character is killed or hurt in
00:15order to motivate a male character's story. The name was coined by writer Gail Simone,
00:20inspired by the 1994 comic Green Lantern No. 54, where the hero's girlfriend Alexandra
00:25DeWitt is, sure enough, murdered and stuffed inside his refrigerator.
00:30Looking at the many examples across film, TV, and comics,
00:33we can spot some recurring patterns in the fridged woman.
00:37She's often killed near the start of the story, and this harrowing event
00:40is the motivating incident for a male hero to go on a narrative journey.
00:45Husband to a murdered wife, and I will have my vengeance,
00:50in this life or the next.
00:52She can also arrive pre-fridged, dying before the story begins,
00:56and driving it without ever having to be physically present.
00:59My wife deserves vengeance.
01:01If she's not killed, the fridged woman might be the victim of severe violence,
01:05often including sexual assault. The fridging event might be presented
01:10as a direct result of the hero's failure to protect her,
01:13framed as a kind of failure of masculinity.
01:16Should I bring this on her?
01:17And in many cases, her death or suffering will be the price for unlocking our hero's
01:23god mode, enabling him to become a more powerful, complete version of himself.
01:28Frequently, we know little to nothing about the fridged woman as an individual.
01:31In her classic form, she's just there to be a symbol,
01:34often of lost innocence, purity, or everything good that's been taken
01:39from the male character.
01:40What was she like in real life?
01:42She was lovely.
01:44The fundamental problem with putting women in refrigerators is that it's a way
01:48of sidelining female characters, reducing them to one-dimensional objects
01:53in a story that's all about the men.
01:55The question of what exactly constitutes a fridging can get complicated.
02:00Does it still count if the woman is well drawn before she dies?
02:04If male characters get injured or killed, too?
02:06Or if there are other complex female characters in the story?
02:10These answers aren't always clear-cut.
02:12Ultimately, though, the fridged woman trope is most useful not as a way to condemn
02:17individual stories, but as a touchstone for opening up
02:20important discussions about how women are represented on screen.
02:24Whatever he does to you, don't scream.
02:27She'll scream, and you're gonna die knowing that it's all your fault.
02:31Here's our take on why this trope remains so common,
02:34and how we can bring this simplistic fridged woman out of the kitchen for good.
02:39What's the last thing that you do remember?
02:43My wife.
02:44That's sweet.
02:45Dying.
02:51If you're new here, be sure to subscribe and click the bell
02:55to get notified about all our new videos.
02:58This video is brought to you by Skillshare, an online learning community where millions of
03:03people come together to take classes that fuel their creative journey.
03:07If you're one of the first 1,000 people to click the link in the description below,
03:11you'll get two free months of Skillshare Premium.
03:14So become a member today and start exploring your creativity for less than $10 a month.
03:19Your women characters are awful.
03:26None of them have anything to say for themselves,
03:29and most of them get either shot or stabbed to death within five minutes.
03:33Green Lantern's girlfriend in the fridge may sound like an incredibly specific incident
03:38to make a whole trope out of, but Gail Simone was quick to point out that the general tendency
03:43to use the grisly death of female characters to motivate a hero is strangely ubiquitous in comics.
03:50Simone and her colleagues created a Women in Refrigerators website
03:54featuring an extensive list of these incidents to drive home the point that
03:58being a girl superhero meant inevitably being killed, maimed, or depowered.
04:03More than 20 years later, countless superhero stories on the big screen
04:07still feature spandex-clad men grieving the loss of a beloved female.
04:11There's only one person in this world that I care about, and she's gone.
04:14Long before the trope had a name, it was a common practice in all kinds of story genres.
04:19They killed my wife.
04:21Epics like Braveheart and Gladiator derive much of their emotional impact
04:25from launching the hero's story with a savagely killed wife.
04:29They killed her to get to me.
04:32The James Bond franchise not only contains a number of disposable Bond girls,
04:36it also uses the death of Bond's wife Tracy to justify his later
04:41womanizing.
04:42Many lady friends, but married only once.
04:45Wife killed and-
04:46All right, you've made your point.
04:47You're sensitive, Mr. Bond.
04:49About certain things, yes.
04:51Knowing about the loss in Bond's early story,
04:53the audience might excuse his sleeping with so many women
04:57without forming an emotional attachment as the behavior of a man
05:00who's still, at his core, heartbroken.
05:03What if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women,
05:06for all the dead ones you failed to protect?
05:08Director Christopher Nolan's leading men range from billionaire vigilantes
05:12and dream burglars to old-timey magicians and amnesiac detectives.
05:17But what ties many of them together is that behind this hero lies
05:21a very dead woman.
05:23She might be dead from the start and represent the driving mystery
05:26at the center of the narrative.
05:27You told me you were looking for the guy who killed your wife?
05:30Her tragic demise might be the story's inciting incident,
05:34or the formative moment when the hero realizes who he is.
05:38Rachel believed in what you stood for.
05:41What we stand for.
05:43Or her memory might still show up to haunt the hero's subconscious.
05:47You're just a shade of my real wife.
05:50I'm sorry, you're just not good enough.
05:52TV tropes termed this variation on the Fridged Woman,
05:56who appears in the story either as a literal ghost or as a figurative one.
06:00Visiting the hero through visions or agonized flashbacks,
06:03the lost Lenore, after the woman mourned in Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven.
06:08I'm asking you to take a leap of faith.
06:10It's easy to see why a filmmaker like Nolan finds the fridging device
06:15to be such an efficient and effective emotional shorthand.
06:18Killing off a loved one is a quick way to advance the story,
06:21add gravity to the events we're watching,
06:23and present the hero as a tortured soul,
06:26worthy of the audience's sympathy.
06:28But somehow I just, I just know she's never going to come back to bed.
06:33As George Lucas once said,
06:35emotionally involving the audience is easy.
06:38Anybody can do it blindfolded.
06:39Get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.
06:42The John Wick series shows this quite literally
06:45by kickstarting its story through fridging an innocent animal,
06:48albeit a puppy rather than a kitten.
06:50The effectiveness of using his dog's death to motivate John Wick's story
06:54reveals a lot about how the fridging technique operates.
06:57When Helen died, I lost everything until that dog arrived on my doorstep.
07:02For a revenge narrative like this,
07:05the death acts as our buy-in moment.
07:07It sets up our desire for a biblical eye-for-an-eye style justice,
07:11the visceral satisfaction of seeing someone punished,
07:14probably violently, for their transgression.
07:17But it's worth noting that the death of a human character
07:22should function differently from that of an animal.
07:24As standout books Robert Wood writes,
07:26observing that Wick is also motivated by his car being taken,
07:31quote,
07:31When a role traditionally taken by a woman can be filled by a car or pet,
07:36that woman wasn't really being treated as a human.
07:39As Wood points out, much of the time,
07:45the Fridged Woman is used like a MacGuffin,
07:47an object that motivates the character,
07:49but whose specific nature doesn't matter.
07:52The Fridged Woman trope often seems to operate according to the logic that
07:56the less we know about her, the better.
07:58Thus, this person is reduced to an object.
08:01It can even feel like the fridging incident is,
08:04in Wood's words, damage done to his property.
08:07The John Wick series gives the dog's death extra significance
08:10by making the animal a gift from John's dead wife,
08:14and taking time to build a meaningful relationship
08:17between John and the animal.
08:18But the sad truth is that some Fridged women
08:21don't even get the same level of development as John Wick's puppy.
08:24So essentially, much of the time,
08:26the biggest problem with the Fridged Woman is bad writing.
08:30I can't believe Vanessa, my bride, was a fembot.
08:35In a sitcom spin on the trope,
08:37How I Met Your Mother used its mysterious titular mother
08:40as the motivation for Ted's long, rambling story
08:43of searching for love in the modern world.
08:46Kids, I'm gonna tell you an incredible story.
08:49The story of How I Met Your Mother.
08:52But after waiting until its very last season
08:54to introduce the mother as a real character,
08:56rather than an idealized specter,
08:59the show speedily killed her off with cancer in the finale.
09:02So all of Ted's ruminations on his dead wife ultimately proved
09:06just a narrative ploy to build his final grand gesture towards someone else.
09:11You made a sit down and listen to the story about how you met mom,
09:14yet mom's hardly in the story.
09:16And the vocal fan outcry over this choice highlighted how audiences
09:21frequently feel shortchanged by the cheap cliched trick of using a dead woman
09:26merely as a plot device.
09:28John Wick's audience not only found the death of the puppy
09:30to be an emotionally effective motivator,
09:33many also on some level seemed to appreciate simply that for once,
09:37it wasn't a woman being killed.
09:40Sure, fridging works,
09:42but if you avoid the cliched choice to objectify a woman in the process,
09:46it can actually work better.
09:48Naturally, the women in refrigerators debate was soon met with the response
09:57that it's not only female characters who come to nasty ends
10:00or endure brutal violence, especially in superhero comics
10:04and other action-packed stories that thrive on over-the-top conflict.
10:08Comics critic Heidi MacDonald stated,
10:10if you composed a list of male superheroes who had been killed,
10:14maimed, or otherwise dispossessed, it would be just as long.
10:17So simple, even a blind man could see it.
10:20But in response to the criticism that quote,
10:23damn it, men suffer too,
10:25editor John Bartol and the Women in Refrigerators team
10:28created a second list for a counter-trope they called
10:32Dead Men Defrosting.
10:33Bartol argued that while it's true that male heroes
10:36are frequently attacked, injured, or maimed,
10:39the effects are rarely permanent or irrevocably disempowering.
10:43Superman dies, but is resurrected.
10:46He's back.
10:47Thor loses an eye, Luke Skywalker loses a hand,
10:50and Tony Stark gets a chest full of shrapnel,
10:52but each of them comes back at least as powerful as they were before.
10:56And crucially, their pain isn't designed to motivate anyone else,
11:00but to provide the sort of adversity which the hero himself
11:04must overcome to be worthy of his goal.
11:06Why do we fall so that we can learn to pick ourselves up?
11:11In the rare instance when a male hero is actually killed,
11:15his agency tends to remain fully intact,
11:18as he gets to make his death count and achieve a final victory for his beliefs.
11:22The Batman universe offers a clear example of how these differences play out.
11:36Both Bruce Wayne and Barbara Gordon suffer spinal damage
11:40in The Dark Knight Rises and The Killing Joke, respectively.
11:43However, while Batman is able to make a full recovery
11:46thanks to a little makeshift chiropractor treatment,
11:49Batgirl is left permanently paralyzed.
11:51It really is a shame you'll miss your father's debut, Miss Gordon.
11:55Our venue wasn't built with the disabled in mind.
11:59Most importantly, Batman's injury occurs so that he can overcome it
12:03to rise up and save the day.
12:05You don't owe these people anymore.
12:08You've given them everything.
12:10Not everything. Not yet.
12:14But Batgirl's suffering is inflicted by the Joker
12:16in an attempt to drive her father insane.
12:19I spoke with Commissioner Gordon before I came in here.
12:23He told me he wanted this done by the book.
12:25Despite all your sick, cruel, vicious little games,
12:28he's as sane as he ever was.
12:30There's also a fundamental difference in the nature of violence
12:34inflicted on female characters.
12:36And your wife moan like a whore when they ravaged her again and again.
12:47As comics editor Joan Hilty pointed out,
12:49it's not just how often it's done, it's how it's done,
12:53and to whom certain things are done.
12:56The sexually violent visual language of how these women get killed
13:00is remarkably consistent.
13:01By using sexual violence against women or the threat of it
13:05to motivate male characters, stories reinforce the regressive idea
13:10that a woman's value is tied to sexual purity,
13:13while a man's is comprised of his capacity
13:15to violently protect that purity.
13:18There is my daughter.
13:20You still keep your sins.
13:21You sell them.
13:23You sell my daughter.
13:24Undoubtedly, the sight of harm coming to someone innocent
13:28provokes a strong feeling in a viewer.
13:30Yet as John Wick proves, using an animal for this purpose
13:34actually makes much more sense.
13:36You can't let the animals die in a movie, just the women.
13:40Lumping women in with animals and children in this way
13:43implicitly harks back to a view of females as simple, virtuous,
13:47helpless creatures.
13:48But hadn't we better get the women and children into the boat, sir?
13:52In fact, the woman in the refrigerator can be seen
13:54as evolving out of the damsel in distress,
13:57a woman who's stripped of her agency and put in danger
14:00as a prize for the hero to rescue through his bravery and skill.
14:05The Taken series demonstrates how intertwined these two tropes are,
14:09by using them relatively interchangeably.
14:11The first film sees Brian Mills chasing after a damsel in distress
14:15when his daughter is kidnapped.
14:16After the series basically rehashes this premise in the follow-up,
14:20the third entry kills off his ex-wife,
14:23while on some level implying that she ends up dead
14:25for making the mistake of being with another man
14:28instead of with the hero.
14:30But whether they're dead or Taken,
14:31the female characters function as little more than a pretext
14:35for Brian to begin his latest rampage.
14:37But what I do have are a very particular set of skills.
14:42The problems with the fridged woman also apply to similar tropes
14:46like black dude dies first and bury your gays,
14:49which treat people of color or LGBTQ characters as expendable
14:53in stories starring straight, white protagonists.
14:56I've seen this movie, the black dude dies first.
14:58And arguably, some of the most hated fridging moments
15:01in recent years do center on race or sexuality
15:05as much or more than gender.
15:12Ultimately, the point of calling out women in refrigerators
15:15isn't about taking offense to particular stories
15:18in which bad things happen to women,
15:20but about drawing attention to the sheer number of stories
15:23in which women exist only for bad things to happen to them.
15:26Much like the Bechdel Test, which asks if a story includes
15:30at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man,
15:33the fridged woman trope wasn't designed to be an all-encompassing measure
15:37of a story's feminist credentials.
15:39It's there to spark conversation about how female characters tend to be written.
15:44After Deadpool 2 got negative reactions for arguably fridging
15:48Deadpool's girlfriend Vanessa,
15:50Gail Simone herself weighed in that in her view it wasn't a fridging,
15:54because Vanessa was a well-rounded character in the first film,
15:57and continues to appear in Deadpool 2 as a lost Lenore figure.
16:01It's okay. There's a time for us. It's just not now.
16:05Others counter it's a textbook fridging example,
16:08reducing the woman to a sidelined symbol of lost goodness to motivate Deadpool,
16:12while the fact that she's magically resurrected in a mid-credits scene after the movie has ended
16:17only makes it worse that she's left out of the whole story for no real purpose.
16:22Yet the debate around this example illuminates that there are many more
16:26instances where the question of what's really fridging gets very murky.
16:30For example, what if there are also plenty of men dying as motivation
16:34so that the hero can rise up as a deeper, more complete version of themselves?
16:38I'm a hero, Uncle Ben.
16:40In Game of Thrones, the death of a woman, Ygritte,
16:42does motivate male character Jon Snow,
16:45but the death of male character, Khal Drogo,
16:47is used exactly the same way to motivate a female, Daenerys.
16:51Or what if a woman is killed off in a story where there's a female hero,
16:54or plenty of other well-drawn female characters in the mix?
16:58Jen Garner in Alias, her fiancé got fridged.
17:02To me, what that says isn't,
17:05why are you killing the loved one of that main character?
17:09It's, there's not enough female protagonists in storytelling.
17:13That's what it's about.
17:14What if the killed woman has agency?
17:17In Avengers Endgame, Black Widow does die to save a man,
17:20but she chooses to sacrifice herself.
17:22You tell my family I love them.
17:27You tell them yourself.
17:28So is her death fundamentally different from Tony Stark's heroic self-sacrifice?
17:33Moreover, is a female death that motivates a man really still a fridging
17:37if she's given ample pre-fridge screen time and characterization?
17:41In Seven, Gwyneth Paltrow's Tracy is killed explicitly in order to test Brad Pitt's David.
17:46I took a souvenir.
17:50Her pretty head.
17:52Yet this is the climax, near the end of the movie,
17:55when we have very little time left with any of the characters.
17:58When Avengers Infinity War's Gamora is killed by her adoptive father Thanos.
18:03This doesn't sit right with many viewers,
18:05because it's clearly sacrificing her to serve his story.
18:09I ignored my destiny once.
18:12I cannot do that again.
18:15Even for you.
18:18But of course, her character's been fleshed out over multiple movies,
18:22and due to the magic of time travel and alternate timelines,
18:25she'll eventually come back in another form.
18:27On Breaking Bad, both Jane and Andrea die in terrible ways,
18:31to shape Jesse and Walt's character arcs.
18:34But especially with Jane, the fact that we've gotten to know her well,
18:38and see her special relationship with Jesse,
18:40is precisely what makes her death gut-wrenching.
18:44Have you been to the George O'Keefe Museum?
18:46Is that the, uh, one with the A-bombs?
18:48So counter to the fridged woman cliche that the less we know is better,
18:52examples like these illustrate how killing a three-dimensional character
18:56resonates far more,
18:58because we have the sense of a fully formed person we care about
19:01having been destroyed.
19:03It's striking that when films or shows go out of their way to subvert
19:06or complicate the fridging trope,
19:08You thought I loved Rebecca?
19:11You thought that?
19:12I hated her.
19:13the result is usually better drama and greater emotional impact.
19:16The Lannisters send their regards.
19:20We might never move away from using character deaths
19:23to gut-punch the audience and drive stories.
19:26It's just too effective.
19:27But we can hope to leave behind lazy, derivative versions of this,
19:31which assume women or other marginalized groups
19:33are only there as accessories to a white male story.
19:36What really keeps us watching is a new twist on the same old story,
19:41something we haven't seen before.
19:43Can you tell a story, Bob?
19:45Can you make us laugh?
19:45Can you make us cry?
19:46Can you make us want to break out?
19:48Enjoy a song.
19:49Hi, everyone. I'm Susanna.
19:52I'm Debra.
19:52And we're the creators of The Take.
19:54Please subscribe and tell us what you want our take on next.
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