In 2016, the BBC aired the third series of their hit family gangster epic Peaky Blinders, an hour’s viewing featuring standout performances from the likes of British/Irish acting stars Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy and Helen McCrory. It is a programme filled with decadence, debauchery and dodgy dealings with crime bosses of all nationalities – but one thing it is not good at maintaining, it seems, is a well-written plot for one of its key female players. The character in question, Grace Burgess, is the wife of central soldier-turned-criminal Tommy Shelby, and has influenced the show in pivotal ways since the very first episode. Starting out as an undercover spy on the payroll of Ireland’s most repulsive inspector Campbell (played by Sam Neill), it appeared that Grace was much more multi-faceted than her beauty would allow the rest of the characters to believe.
However, in the second instalment of the show’s third series, it seems that today’s TV culture finally caught up with show creator Stephen Knight, as it appears he has bowed down to one significant factor that is prominent in almost every TV show of the modern age: manpain.
Manpain by definition describes the emotional suffering that, apparently, uniquely affects the show’s most important male character, and is most often at its peak when triggered by the demise of a female love interest (although other common tropes include a messy psychological backstory and family troubles). Most often, this arrives in the form of the physical abuse, kidnap, rape, and even death of their female counterpart, even more tragically as a consequence of the male’s schemes. What separates manpain from another character’s potential distress is the way the tragedy is dealt with by the showrunners: instead of focusing on the female who has been hurt, her pain is exploited to place focus on the reaction and resultant pain of the male. In its core form, this harks back to our society’s tendency to illustrate women as objects that impact on a man’s story.
Though legions of angry Twitter TV-watchers might claim to have coined this phrase, it actually dates back to a similar concept from comic book author Gail Simone: Women in Refrigerators. This term stems from a comic book plot line in which the male superhero returns home to find his female counterpart butchered in his fridge – of course, a prime example of abusing a female character in order to evoke a response in the man. This is a trend that has sadly followed through much of pop culture.
In the example of Peaky Blinders, manpain has often cropped up in subtle forms, yet the biggest blow was Grace’s death at the hands of a minor character just one episode after her happy wedding to Tommy. A character who started out in series one as a secretive and complicated spy was turned into a rather dizzy-headed housewife in the space of a few episodes by the show’s writers – and, in one quick camera shot, was gunned down at a charity ball, never to be featured again. On the other hand, the remainder of the show’s third series sees Tommy spiral into a vengeful state of grief, minimising Grace’s relevance to the motivation that provokes Tommy to become an even more twisted crime boss.
Is this the fate that awaits the majority of female TV characters, no matter how promisingly they start out? When used to heighten ‘manpain’, it seems their life cycle involves three stages only: 1. Potential Love Interest. 2. Love Interest. 3. Dead/Hurt Love Interest.
Unfortunately, Peaky Blinders is only one of many recent examples. Take Doctor Who: as one fan (username teenygozer) remarked, “[Manpain is] Donna Noble losing all of Time and Space and yet we all get to focus on the Doctor standing tragically in the rain…”. Or, on a broader scale, the relationship dynamic between Tom Hansen and Summer Finn in 500 Days of Summer, which contains manpain from start to finish. From the very beginning we witness Tom being comforted by friends and family, torn up over a girl whose point of view we never, ever experience. It may well be that Tom thinks Summer is flighty and infuriating – who wouldn’t just after a breakup? – but his manpain stems from the fact that we never see Summer’s side of the story, despite the story being all about her.
Why is it that mainstream media thinks we can only feasibly respond to a woman’s pain if it is told predominantly through the perspective of her man? What can we do to solve this? Of course, no one is suggesting that female characters can’t be killed off in TV shows simply because of their gender – that would be as bad as killing them for that very reason. But all we’re asking is for a few more to be able to have control of their own story without the threat of being harmed purely for a male’s character development.
Thankfully, increasingly more shows are moving away from this trope in favour of creating a story that revolves entirely around a female. Notably, those in the superhero genre, where manpain is extremely prevalent, include Netflix’s Jessica Jones (portrayed by Krysten Ritter) and CBS’s Supergirl, starring Melissa Benoist. These are unapologetic women who take centre stage with their emotional pain; Jessica suffers from PTSD thanks to the harrowing effects of one man’s psychological manipulation, whilst Kara Zor-El must work to fit in with a foreign world and hide her powers. There are few men to relieve the burden of stress here – and what’s more, viewers appreciate it. Supergirl currently holds a 97% ‘Fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, whilst Jessica Jones received widespread acclaim for its handling of dark subject matter through the story of Jones’s life.
Undoubtedly there is a long way to come before we stop seeing Grace Burgesses on every channel (or a close-up of Cillian Murphy’s agonised face, for that matter). But the more people are aware of the implications and setbacks of ‘manpain’ and its dominance of the TV landscape, the better – and the more we shout about it, perhaps the more shows like Jessica Jones we will start seeing on our screens.
Words by Megan Harding