By Danielle Hipkins, Professor of Italian Studies and Film, University of Exeter
Drawing connections with the AHRC-funded project A Girl’s Eye View 2021-2024, Prof. Danielle Hipkins reflects on audience responses to the genre of the ‘sick girl’ film.
The romantic film depends on the obstacle. Otherwise, what happens? Two people meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after. That is the outcome we want, but it’s not the story we want. It’s far too short, and likely boring.
Serious, terminal even, illness presents a narratively rich obstacle, and the canon of romantic films is strewn with lovers lost, slowly and painfully, or sometimes recovered through the sheer power of love alone. There are variations in outcome, and also in the distribution of illness: maybe he’s ill, maybe she’s ill, maybe they’re both ill. Sometimes they both survive, but usually it’s just one of them.
The boom in teen-oriented films has featured a number of romances blighted by illness, with both protagonists ill (The Fault in Our Stars, Boone, 2014; Five Feet Apart, Baldoni, 2019), or just one (Me Before You, Sharrock, 2016; Midnight Sun, Speer, 2018). Melodrama and its tears, as Steve Neale argued, gain their cathartic force from a sensation of missed opportunity.[1] But perhaps in this particular variant they also help younger viewers to process, and mourn, ‘endings’ without the guilt or indecision inherent in the messy process of the more mundane break-up.
In our recent study of Italian female teen audiences and their relationship with television and film,[2] the genre of the ‘sick girl’ film emerges as particularly popular in their viewing, from US examples mentioned above to more recent Italian films that have picked up on the trend like Sul più bello (Out of My League, Filippi, 2020) or Sulla stessa onda (Caught by a Wave, Camaiti, Netflix, 2021). In fact, when we asked our teen participants to select a film from a curated list, the majority chose to work on Out of My League. Whilst its distribution on Amazon Prime made it more familiar than many other films on our list, it also reflects the appeal of its plucky ‘ugly duckling’ protagonist, Marta. Suffering from cystic fibrosis, she sets her sights on a traditional ‘jock’ (or his Italian equivalent) and wins him over with her spirit and intelligence. Such was the popularity of this film, based on a series of teen books, that it spawned two sequel films. Marta doesn’t die, and for first-hand teen commentary on reasons for her popularity you can hear our own participants speak in some of the subtitled video essay entries that won our competition.
What all the video essays admire is the strength of Marta’s individualism – the heroine is one who overcomes (particularly in relation to illness), and takes action in pursuit of her love object, who is initially not interested in her. This chimes particularly with the ‘ordinary’ nature of the protagonist. In a culture that has defined itself in relation to ideas of female beauty, Marta in her own opening words remains an ‘ugly duckling’ (chiming with recent Netflix productions emphasising difference and non-conformity that our interviewees also mention, e.g. Tall Girl or Dumplin’). Marta is not successful because she is beautiful, but because she is strong and cheerful. In this respect through the ‘sick girl’ film anxiety about the body and its weaknesses (our prize-winning essay about the film identifies her physical appearance and her illness as her two vulnerable points) can be explored and overcome. This is particularly important, since it emerges elsewhere in our interviews that insecurities about the body dominate female adolescence and, as Rosalind Gill argues, in postfeminist culture, femininity itself is perceived to be a bodily property.[3]
Across these examples, though, we might ask why the terminally-ill girl? Rather than echoing a longstanding fetishisation of the sickly, non-threatening girl, a new version of this heroine overturns previous models. What emerges instead is a recent preoccupation with resilience,[4] which is narrated effectively through the physical enormity of the obstacles overcome. See, for example, the scene in Caught by a Wave, when the heroine insists on wilful risk-taking by participating in dinghy sailing contest with her leg in a metal brace. Such risk is rendered acceptably feminine because it is exercised in the name of love (her boyfriend is also her sailing partner). Thus the girl becomes the idealised resilient subject of Neoliberalism, and reinforces the notion that it is women who must carry out the real labour of holding families and relationships together. But there is something here too about seizing pleasure, and living in the moment. Caught by a Wave concludes with the death of the heroine, but takes satisfaction in her having enjoyed her love affair with Lorenzo, and the fond memories her best friend has of her.
In this respect the popularity of the ‘terminally-ill girl’ film also reflects Jia Tolentino’s reading of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, whose courage, she argues, ‘comes from her certainty that her future is a nightmare’.[5] What sense of (no) future haunts the recent surge in these films? A terror that the future will never arrive, so enjoy life now? Where is this terror more keenly felt than in the teenage years, when it seems like adulthood and its pleasures are always just out of reach? Which intensifying fears about global economic, political or climate catastrophe subtend these films’ obsession with premature death?
Most of our interviewees tell us how strong their mothers are. They need to be. In Italy women often still carry the double burden of housework and professional work. The shadow of ‘feminicide’ (murder at the hands of boyfriends and husbands) haunts everyday life. The future for girls looks pretty tough. Does the ‘sick girl’ film provide a fantasy training ground for that future?
[1] Steve Neale, ‘Melodrama and Tears’, Screen, 27.6 (1986), 6–23.
[2] A Girls’-Eye View research was funded by the AHRC, UK, 2021-2024, and Danielle Hipkins (PI, University of Exeter) and Romana Andò (CI, Sapienza University, Rome) were assisted in the collation and analysis of this data by Maria Elena Alampi (University of Exeter) and Leonardo Campagna (Sapienza University, Rome).
[3] Rosalind Gill, ‘Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10.2 (2007), 147-166.
[4] Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, ‘The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism’, Sociological Research Online, 23.2 (2018), 477-95.
[5] Jia Tolentino, ‘Pure Heroines’ in Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (4th Estate, 2019), p. 110.
Works Cited
Gill, Rosalind and Shani Orgad, ‘The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism’, Sociological Research Online, 23.2 (2018), 477-95
Gill, Rosalind, ‘Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10.2 (2007), 147-166
Neale, Steve, ‘Melodrama and Tears’, Screen, 27.6 (1986), 6–23
Tolentino, Jia, ‘Pure Heroines’ in Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (4th Estate, 2019)