As I was looking for inspiration one day I came across this video. These types of videos are not a new way of editing or portraying female rage/ female experiences. These „Fan edits“ are video clips that are edited together in a video with an underlying message. In this case: the portrayal of what it means to a woman. These Fan often consist of recognisable dialogues from movies, as well as music that deals with the topic in its lyrics. If you scroll through tiktok and searhc female rage, you will stumble upon many videos that consist of these features. Dialogues from „Barbie“, „Black swan“, „Hidden Figures“ are often used to portray these feelings. There even is a whole genre that fits into these categories. Songs like „Labour“ by Paris Paloma or „Abbey“ by Mitski are often used for these edits.
Scolling through the comments under this video showed once more that this is not a individual phenomenon. Girls are raised in the patriarchy to become a woman. The idea of a woman in the patriarchy is an idea that no one can live up to. Therefore women often do not feel good enough.
Anya Taylor Joy is one of the many actors who spoke up about female age on set and film. She recons a scene in „The menu“ where she slaps her partner. This was not in the script – The script said that she sits silently while a tear is running down her face, even though her partner betrayed her and that would mean that she dies. More actors open up about their real feelings on set and let that also fit into their character on screen. Expressing emotions how they would feel is a way to change these norms and the scene.
THE CRAZY BITCH
One of the many trends on Tiktok as I said alfready id the rise of female rage. One of the starting points for this trend was a scene in the movie “Pearl” where the character played by Mia Goth gets rejected at an audition. Instead of claiming the rejection and leaving the stage she screams “Please! I’m a star!!!!!”. The edits of women in film in distress are flooding social media, espacially tiktok. They’re a series of clips compiled into a video where female characters are screaming venom through their tears. As the name suggests, they’re full of rage.
Often these emotional outbursts are a response to male characters or injustice.
These edits are followed by music like Lana Del Rey’s Pretty When I Cry, Mitski’s Liquid Smooth, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Music is one of the key element in these edits that enhances the extreme emotions and blood-curdling screams. The most common films that appear in these edits are Pearl, X, Gone Girl, Jennifer’s Body, Don’t Worry Darling, and Thirteen – just to name a handful.
The edits feature lines from these films that evoke strong emotions, such as: “It’s my life, you don’t get to take that from me,” “I work like a dog, day and night,” “Why are you leaving me if I didn’t do anything wrong? I don’t understand, I thought you liked me,” “What is wrong with me? What the fuck is going wrong inside my head,” “Where do you think I learned all this shit from?”
Extreme phrases like this would have once been shameful to relate to, yet now the comment sections are full of phrases like: “female rage is so powerful,” “she’s so me,” “I love women,” and “real.”