Andrea Dworkin calls fairy tales, “the first scenarios of women and men which mold our psyches”, teaching fundamental cultural lessons about gender and relationships.¹ “We have taken the fairy tales of childhood with us into maturity,” she writes, “chewed but still lying in the stomach, as real identity.” In Animals (2019), the latest feature from Australian director Sophie Hyde, based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emma Jane Unsworth, hard-partying best friends Laura (Holliday Grainger) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat) are finding the transition into their thirties increasingly difficult. “The fairy tale is the failure,” Tyler tells Laura after a pregnancy announcement from Laura’s sister over a family dinner – an announcement to which Laura initially responds, “Oh, shit.” Tyler’s statement reflects the film’s interrogation of the choices women are expected to make as part of the narrative of ‘growing-up’, the kind that are typically – and often unproblematically – celebrated by the rom-com. Animals may sample tropes from this genre – the arrival of an attractive male saviour type, obligatory wedding dress shopping, ribald female behaviour giving way to something like maturity – but it does so only in order to ask “Why this, still? Why not something else?”
Laura and Tyler share an apartment in a creaky Georgian house in Dublin, a city we see primarily through the fuggy half-light of streetlamps at dusk and an omnipresent sheen of rain. They both work as baristas and have been going to the same dingy pub for years. Laura has been trying to write a novel for the last decade. The frustration she feels at her lack of progress is growing but she doesn’t know how to push ahead. Tyler, meanwhile, clings to the idea of an endless hedonism to distract herself from the sadness of her complicated homelife back in the U.S. and the sense that Laura is drifting away from her.
Animals neither condemns nor valorises Laura and Tyler’s intense but messy friendship. In doing so, it refuses to cast their relationship as a fun if misguided ‘phase’ which must be relinquished in order to achieve happiness through marriage, babies and the rest. Rather, the scrutiny of Laura and Tyler’s intemperance by others functions as a commentary on the ways in which female excess and impropriety are judged through an explicitly gendered lens. “You won’t get away with it much longer,” Laura’s brother-in-law warns Tyler about her smoking after she mentions her upcoming thirtieth birthday. When they turn up drunk to meet Laura’s sister’s new baby, she tells them that “Sooner or later the party has to end.” A card on her mantlepiece reads ‘Welcome to the club’.
The party doesn’t quite end when Laura meets Jim (Fra Fee), a pianist, but it is dealt a body blow. Kind, talented, hardworking and handsome, Jim is most definitely – at least on the surface – not a mess. He has managed to turn his passion for music into a successful career, and his home is straight out of an Ikea catalogue. Although conventional, what he offers Laura is legitimately appealing: time and space to write, a passport to acceptable adulthood in the form of an engagement and marriage and, perhaps above all, his belief in her dreams. “The trying is the thing,” he tells her when she questions her ability to finish her novel. Following this, she is able to implement the self-discipline she has thus far been unable to muster. Yet in choosing Jim Laura skirts dangerously close to the postfeminist new traditionalism Angela McRobbie describes in The Aftermath of Feminism (2008), where dubious, less-than-satisfactory aspects of unreformed femininity are glossed over by virtue of being freely chosen.²
Ageing, as Laura and Tyler find as they tip into their thirties, raises the stakes significantly. Their choices no longer seem as ephemeral or limitless; instead, they are something to be accounted for, to others and to themselves. In one scene, Laura and her sister give each other magazines: a bridal one for Laura, a pregnancy one for her sister. This is a nod to the primary choices which still characterise women’s lives: although alternatives to heterosexual normativity undoubtedly exist, they are not granted the kind of cultural visibility conveyed by mass market glossies. In this context, Jim is both safe and convenient, saving Laura from having to take a path less well trodden and far more likely to provoke questions of accountability than quell them. This would perhaps be the more truthful option, but it is also the more intimidating.
Typically ending at the beginning, the rom-com offers a dreamscape of resolution, fulfilment and stability through the reassertion of normative gender roles. As Janice Radway found in her famous study of romance readers, the appeal of these idealised narratives stems in no small part from the demands and disappointments of real-world relationships.³ It is precisely because the reality is often underwhelming that the fantasy feels so satisfying and cohesive. For Laura, Jim is clearly not enough. Tyler wonders, half-joking, why it is that Laura cannot simply sleep with him but come home to her, and in doing so conjures up a relationship model without a name, showing how the failure of conventional language to capture the emotional complexities of female relationships and a lack of alternatives to romantic norms continue to delimit the choices on offer.
Jim’s arrival inevitably alters the dynamics of their friendship. “She made me feel like I was being unfaithful to her,” Laura tells him as she increasingly leaves Tyler to party alone. Drinking free champagne in a bridal shop as Laura tries on white dresses, Tyler argues that weddings can never be progressive. Brides, she insists, are still passed about “like human batons” and women are conditioned to want this treatment. Defensive, Laura shoots back that her feminism is about, “blazing a trail through tradition.” Neither perspective manages to be fully convincing. Instead, Laura and Tyler play out tired, predetermined scripts surrounded by fairy tale white dresses that look both romantic and ridiculous. These scripts position them against one another, conveniently eliding the broader question of why marriage continues to be portrayed as a kind of reckoning for women in a way that it rarely is for men.
Like animals, Laura and Tyler are savage and unapologetic in their appetites, delighting in indulging their desire for wine, drugs, dance floors, men, each other. For this, they are hunted, reminded at every juncture of the ‘right’ thing they are not doing by choosing something else. In this context, the film’s recurrent image of a lone urban fox moving deftly through the streets at twilight takes on a particular symbolism, reflecting choices which stray down unlit paths and into uncharted shadowlands. ‘Vixen’, after all, refers not only to a female fox but to a particular type of quarrelsome, sexually confident woman. Aloof, independent and striking, the fox reflects women’s experiences and choices which do not conform to any script, those that exist on and within the margins, unsettling, unnatural. If Animals does not answer the question it asks – why do the choices available to women remain so prescriptive? – its willingness to question and re-imagine what a happy ending looks like is in itself satisfying. Hyde reminds us that it is not only the ability to choose that counts but the quality, diversity and liberating potential of the choices available, something which, even today, continues to leave so much to be desired.
1. Andrea Dworkin, Women Hating, (Plume, 1987), 26, 32-33 2. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, (SAGE, 2008) 3. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 1991)
Mary McGill is a writer and a researcher at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her doctoral work explores postfeminist femininities in digital visual culture. She is a writer with a particular interest in contemporary culture and female representation.
