When watching The Princess Bride as a child, my main take-aways were that I loved Princess Buttercup’s orange dress, I wanted for long, flowy hair like hers, you can survive drinking poison if you train yourself, and that while rolling down any type of hill, you must yell “as you wish”. Watching it as I get older, I have become much more critical of the film, mostly of Princess Buttercup’s helplessness throughout the movie, her many opportunities to be empowered that she refuses to take advantage of, and the obvious sexualization present in the film.
According to bell hooks, it is important to develop an oppositional gaze when analyzing films. Developing this ability to critique the film by being aware of the absence of correct representation is important in giving the option “not to identify with the film’s imaginary subject because such identification [is] disenabling” (hooks, 254). In this analysis of The Princess Bride, I am going to use an oppositional gaze to analyze the female role that is represented by Princess Buttercup’s character. Buttercup is depicted as completely powerless, tossed between two men, and sexualized throughout the movie.
This movie was intended to be a fairy tale love story. It is not a surprise that many people love this film, because it has striking similarities to Disney princess movies, or any fairy tale story you’ve ever read. But there are still many flaws in this film regarding how Princess Buttercup’s role as a woman is represented. This type of movie follows a specific plot. In Greg Smith’s article, “It’s Just a Movie”, he challenges the readers to think about how many aspects in a movie are just automatically known by the audience, because we “read into” the movie with past experience (Smith, 131). Our past experiences of romantic films allow these negative stereotypes of how women are represented to be presented because they follow our expectations of how these fantasy movies should be.
It is no surprise that a film intended to be a princess, fairy tale movie depicts the main character as helpless and just a pawn in a man’s romantic journey, but this film also fails to create any type of character development for the main character, Buttercup. Buttercup’s character stays pretty static throughout the movie.
In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey writes about Budd Boetticher’s critique of female representation in film. Budd writes that “what counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself, the woman has not the slightest importance” (Mulvey, 33). This is evident throughout The Princess Bride.
Princess Buttercup character appears to be important solely in order to provide a reason for the two men who are fighting over her, Westley and Prince Humperdinck, to show off their manliness through sword fights, scaling cliffs, and drinking poison. Buttercup’s character seems to provide nothing by itself, but its purpose in the film is to create an interesting plot for the male characters to be able to develop. She is shown as an object, being moved between men with little regard for her feelings.
Buttercup is seen as a helpless woman throughout the film. One of the obvious examples is after when Westley is attacked by a Rodent of Unusual Size and Buttercup refuses to do anything but play the victim, providing another opportunity for Westley to become the hero. Through this scene, it gives more value on Westley’s character, making him appear selfless, strong, and heroic, while just reiterating the fact that Buttercup’s character would not be able to fend for herself and needs a man to save her. This is also an example of an opportunity where she could have presented herself as a strong and independent woman. She had just figured out that the love of her life is still alive, and when he is attacked, she does absolutely nothing to try to kill or fight the creature.
Another way this movie was flawed was in its inability to pass the Bechdel test. The Bechdel test is a measure of a women’s representation in a film. This is measured by three criteria:
- Two women are in the film
- The two women need to talk to each other
- The two women need to talk to each other about something other than a man (“Bechdel Test”, 2018)
These criteria are pretty wide, and it seems like it should be very easy to find movies which fit all three criteria. But, unfortunately, this is not the case, or else there would have been no need to create the Bechdel test to analyze women’s representation in film. The Princess Bride fails to meet these criteria. Buttercup is one of three women in the movie who have any type of dialogue, and the other two women play insignificant roles. One of these women is the woman who boos Buttercup in her nightmare, so it isn’t even a true part of the plot. After hearing the woman boo, Buttercup says “Why do you do this?”, but then the subject quickly switches to talking about why the woman was booing in the first place: Westley, a man, therefore not allowing The Princess Bride to pass the Bechdel test.
Sexualization of Buttercup is evident throughout the movie. This again brings us back to Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, where Mulvey introduces the idea of “looked-at-ness”. Women are often portrayed in films as to be the source of the male gaze. They are objectified through men being the “bearer of the look” (Mulvey, 33). This creates the idea that women are not to have importance in a film, but just to be an object of the male gaze
Buttercup’s main sources of attention come from the fact that she is beautiful. Even towards the end of the film, when she is planning to take her own life, she kisses Humperdinck’s father, but then tells him that she is planning on killing herself “once [she] reaches the honeymoon suite”. Although this information is quite morbid, the only thing the King apparently got out of the interaction was the fact that Buttercup had kissed him.
Then, as Westley finds Buttercup in the honeymoon suite, with a knife pressed to her chest, he says “There’s a shortage of perfect breasts in this world, it would be a pity to damage yours”. This comment completely ignores the fact that she was incredibly unhappy to the point of actually attempting to take her own life and places her life value as less important than her boobs through objectifying her.
Although this movie is a favorite for many hopeless romantics, it’s important to understand the flaws in female representation in the film. Women are constantly being portrayed as helpless, unable to live on their own, and sexualized and objectified in mainstream media. It’s important to be critical of these films because through critiquing these films, we are developing an oppositional gaze and choose to not identify with the misrepresentation of our identities in mainstream films.
Sources:
“Bechdel Test.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Oct. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test.
Hooks, Bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Movies and Mass Culture, 1996, pp. 254.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, 1990, pp. 33.
Smith, Greg M. “‘It’s Just a Movie’: A Teaching Essay for Introductory Media Classes.” Cinema Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 2001, pp. 131
Feminist Film Studies Fall 2018 