Gender Paradox: Representing Female Suicide in Modern European Cinema

by: Kierran Horner , March 25, 2026

Globally, more than one in every 100 deaths (1.3%) in 2019 were the result of suicide and close to one million people die by suicide every year (WHO 2014 & 2019). Europe has consistently high completed suicide rates, second to Africa amongst the six geographical regions designated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) (WHO 2021: 9, Fig. 8).[1] More men than women complete suicide, with an average ratio of male to female suicides of four to one (Värnik 2012: 760). Yet women engage more frequently in non-fatal suicide acts than men, and there are approximately twenty suicide attempts for every fatal suicide (Turecki and Brent 2016: 1229). Women are also more often diagnosed with depression, a condition underlying over half of completed suicides (Arsenault-Lapierre and Turecki 2014: 7). These anomalies are known together in suicidology as the ‘gender paradox’.

In fact, in Western societies, there is a possible under-reporting of female suicide because these acts are less culturally accepted in females than in males (Schrijvers et al 2012: 24). This speaks to an inherent ambiguity surrounding suicide statistics, where defining a suicide includes determining the component of intent, which makes it difficult to have unequivocal statistical data. However, as this article finds and as suicide research affirms, ‘interpretations of intent are often highly gendered’ (Fullagar and O’Brien 2015: 95). Then, these accounts of death are—because they are gendered—socially influenced, which in turn impacts future suicide acts. As Canetto and Sakinofsky (1998: 19) argue, cultural ‘expectations about gender and suicidal behavior function as scripts’. Although suicide data and international prevention programmes focus on reducing suicide completion, these enigmas relating to gender are often neglected, further disguising female engagement in the suicide process. As a result, women’s individual, gendered and embodied experiences of suicide and the personal and cultural adversity that can lead to attempts to end one’s life can be obscured.

In considering clinical and cinematic texts from a feminist stance, here I illuminate the experiences of vulnerable women, challenging mischaracterisations of how gender affects suicide acts. As Michele Aaron writes, ‘the relationship between cinema and suicide varies both quantitively and qualitatively according to formal and cultural parameters’. (2015: 40) How films depict female suicide can become gendered ‘scripts’ for suicide: at times sensationalising, romanticising and/or stigmatising and, less frequently, offering ‘authentic’ representations of these events and reflecting quotidian experiences of suicide. I compare these on-screen representations of suicide experiences encountered by women through eight films selected from over 121 in more extensive research, for the diversity of suicide acts they depict across cultural and temporal spectrums.

Representing a Gendered Death: Society, Suicide and Cinema

Underpinning the lived experiences of many women are the gendered roles accepted and sustained by their society, which commonly repress non-normative positions, identities or expressions. These (binary) gender characteristics are risk factors for the most common of mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, both of which can lead to suicidal acts (Möller-Leimkühler 2003: 2; Piccinelli and Wilkinson 2000: 486). Specifically relating to the impact of gendered power dynamics, the WHO report Gender and Mental Health concludes that:

The feeling of a lack of autonomy and control over one’s life is known to be associated with depression. Socially determined gender norms, roles and responsibilities place women, far more frequently than men, in situations where they have little control over important decisions concerning their lives. (2002: 2)

The continuing cultural dominance of binary, hierarchical, patriarchal paradigms based upon gendered norms in European countries and the strong link between suicidal behaviours and psychiatric disorders, then, can increase women’s vulnerability to suicidal acts.

As Jaworski argues, ‘[g]ender is made sense of in suicide through binary pairs: male-female and masculine-feminine, but also completed-attempted and active-passive’. (2014: 5) This binary thinking in considerations of gender in suicide also illuminates the heterogeneity in suicide statistics: ‘differences between socially constructed masculinities and femininities may impact on suicide-related behaviours and help explain gender differences in both behaviours and outcome’ (Payne et al 2008: 23). Undeniably, suicide acts are complex, with completed suicide being the concluding action of a multitude of influences and impacts—biological, cultural and everywhere between and beyond—yet, what Payne et al (2008) and Jaworski (2014) allude to specifically is the psychological impact of performances of femininity within the parameters of societal (phallocentric) expectations. As Unger and Crawford (1996: 558-559) write, ‘behaving like a woman increases a woman’s chance of developing depression, agoraphobia, or some form of eating disorder’. I will pursue these ideas further later through a prolonged analysis of Arden’s controversial, challenging and esoteric 1972 feature, The Other Side of the Underneath (UK), which specifically questions the psychological impacts of performing femininity and subsequent suicide behaviours.

Cinema is well-placed to capture these phenomenological experiences of suicide due to its expression of a cultural representation that is both popular and immediate. As Wilson (2012: 5) notes, ‘[c]inema in its matter and make-up is concerned more than any other media with the line … between the living and the dead’. However, in their ground-breaking study of sociological causes of suicide in North American films, Stack and Bowman (2011: 4) argue that film ‘represents a neglected source of knowledge on the causes of suicide’ and that ‘[k]nowledge about suicide in film is derived chiefly from the perspective of the humanities’. Suicidology has yet to fully understand the potential of film, from a Medical Humanities perspective, as a repository of aesthetic images of female suicide processes which are both influenced and impacted by the society they reflect.

Film cultures can shape social attitudes towards psychological distress and suicide, and the effects of general mass media images of suicide on spectators have been established by suicidology scholars. For instance, Hawton and Williams (2005: 303) have stated that there is clear evidence that aesthetic portrayals of suicidal behaviour ‘can lead’ to its increase in society under certain circumstances: behaviours that are influenced more markedly ‘where methods of suicide are specified’. This question of imitation is, according to Schmidtke and Schaller (2002: 688), ‘dependent on a number of factors’. These include the characteristics of the filmic subject, such as gender, race and age and how far behaviour is reinforced or appears to be approved within the film. For this reason, as McInerney (2015: 92) suggests, as ‘an influential medium that simultaneously reflects and constructs social meanings around mortality, the dominant messages conveyed in film are worthy of exploration’. As a result, cinematic images of women’s suicides impact and influence their audience and the reiteration of clichéd methods of suicides motivated by gender norms can be detrimental.

The example of Belgian director Axelle Carolyn’s feature Soulmate (2013) epitomises the notion of influence alluded to in the suicide literature cited above and the representation of female suicide specifically. Before the film’s UK release, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) found the opening scene of the film depicting a female character’s suicide attempt met the definition of ‘Imitable Behaviour’ and requested edits for the film to attain a 15 certificate (BBFC 2013).[2] In the scene, which is available in full online as such edits were not required in other markets, recently widowed Audrey climbs into a full bath in an evening dress and, after a moment’s hesitation, reaches for an open razor where, from her perspective, the camera captures her slicing down the inside of her right forearm. A shot focusses on her face, projecting pain, then returns to her point-of-view as she slashes her left wrist and her agonised features are shown again (Fig. 1). Afterwards, Audrey submerges herself in the bath as the sequence shifts to a shot of the bathroom door which breaks open to allow the entry of another woman, who subsequently intervenes in Audrey’s suicide attempt.

 

 

After the request from the BBFC to edit this scene, Carolyn decided to remove it entirely, describing her rationale in a subsequent interview:

Basically, most shots that showed the knife or the wrists had to go … So, I made the decision to cut the scene completely—otherwise I’d have had some mangled, limp version that would’ve diminished the impact needed and made Audrey’s suicide attempt look painless and easy. (Bevan 2014, paras. 9-10)

Carolyn’s concern was to represent Audrey’s pain and confusion—a subjective, corporeal, female experience of suicide—to a wider audience. These were feelings the director did not believe could be conveyed with a diluted, edited version of the scene, which would instead, she maintains, have depicted a painless (i.e. romanticised) version of a woman’s suicide attempt.

The experiential impact of film, evident in both the BBFC’s editorial requests and Carolyn’s decision to excise the whole scene from the British version of Soulmate, indicates the importance of studying these images. Filmic depictions of suicide effect spectators and filmmakers as cognitive and embodied, as ethical and philosophical, as subjective and objective. The example of Soulmate speaks to an enforced absence within the body of the film where a suicide act is intimated but not documented (differing from directors such as Céline Sciamma and Deniz Gamze Ergüven who intentionally absent such actions from their films, as we shall see). There is at work in the required editing of Soulmate a silencing of a particular voice, that of one woman portraying another woman’s grief and anguish. The requested excisions in the opening scene of the film, the BBFC may argue, could have helped prevent real-life suicide attempts by expurgating the method of Aubrey’s own effort. However, for the film’s director, such edits would also obscure the agony and distress (both physical and psychological) behind a suicide attempt and compromise an authentic portrayal of the act.

In her film and her subsequent discussion about suggested edits to the opening scene, Carolyn speaks to gendered experiences of suicide acts and, therefore, suicide risk. Seemingly conscious of the ramifications of depicting female suicide acts, the director refuses to depict her heroine’s desperate act without also showing the requisite torment and pain. Imposed gender ‘traits’, expectations or definitions of what ‘female’ or ‘femininity’ are, including those reflected in the gender paradox in suicidology, can affect decisions around suicide and impact the representation and (therefore) perception of the suicide acts of women. As Fullagar and O’Brien (2015: 95) argue, women’s suicide is frequently misrepresented as ambivalent or merely narcissistic instead of with complexity and authenticity, the inherent emotional pain behind such acts left unconsidered or elided. I will turn now to further cinematic depictions of women’s suicide acts as they present fundamental aspects of the role of gender in these behaviours.

Gender Roles as Gender Paradox: Rejecting the Patriarchy on Film

The death by drowning of Thérèse in Agnès Varda’s 1965 feature, Le Bonheur, mirrors the challenges to accepted models of spousal domesticity and femininity in the society of the time.[3] Late in the film, as they lie in the verdant surroundings of suburban Paris, Thérèse’s husband, François, tells her of his affair with another woman, Émilie. He assures Thérèse, however, that he is merely increasing his happiness and has enough love for both women: ‘le bonheur s’additionne’. They then make love, and as he dozes post-coitally, she slips away.

François awakes to find Thérèse absent and searches the surrounding country park for her. Aware of a commotion, he arrives at a crowd gathered around Thérèse’s corpse and bends over her lifeless form, hugging her to him. There is a stuttering, arrhythmical repetition of this gesture, his raising of her inert body to his chest, which speaks to his guilt, loss, confusion, the conflict within his emotions: he has lost the mother of his children because he also loved another. This sequence is a stuttering intervention in the linear passage of the film and an indication of François’s brief recognition of his complicity in Thérèse’s death. He has led her to this event through his arrogance and disregard for her sovereign self; he is guilty of his wife’s death, whether it was suicide or an accident. Depicted only in two brief, transitory long shots of her floundering in the lake as she grasps for a branch, the intent behind Thérèse’s death may be considered enigmatic. They are spliced into the last iteration of François hugging her body to his, the images could imply Thérèse’s fear of death, her realisation of a mistake or, conceivably, that this is not a suicide attempt at all, but an accident, that she wants to hold onto life (Fig. 2). Indeed, Varda herself refers to the uncertainty behind Thérèse’s demise, ‘une femme meurt au cours d’un pique-nique. Elle est allée cueillir des fleurs ; elle a glissé dans le lac. Ou peut-être s’est-elle suicidée?’ (1994: 70).[4]

 

 

Thérèse’s death is seemingly left to hang enigmatically between mistake and intended death, echoing many real-world deaths by drowning, which are particularly difficult to define as acts of suicide. As Rockett et al write (2011: 52): ‘drowning can be highly problematic for medicolegal authorities in assigning a manner of death in the absence of witnesses, suicide notes, and other compelling corroborative evidence’ (2011: 52).

Drowning, then, is an ambiguous suicide method and, because of the passivity read into such deaths as we have seen, it is also gendered. Methods of suicide are categorised in the gendered male/female-active/passive binary that Jaworski (2014) writes of, where cultural assumptions suggest that women choose less active means by which to make attempts on their lives, which further obscures the experiences of women in the suicidal process. These gendered interpretations of suicide acts further obscure the experiences of women, silencing them and, when posthumous, erasing the distress—and its causes—that led to such tragic acts. Both those vulnerable to suicide behaviours and, when fatal, those entrusted with deciphering them as accidental or intentional are influenced by accepted, gendered narratives. Even within the intimate, personal instances of suicide, traditional expectations of the ways in which women (should) act dictate definitions of their experiences. Yet the inserts of Thérèse’s drowning occur as her husband grasps her body to himself, and within the context of the previous narrative of the film. The preceding scenes are Thérèse’s suicide note, the compelling corroborative evidence. They document the previous months of her life, her assumed happiness in domesticity and motherhood, unaware that her husband is continuing an affair and falling in love with another woman and, immediately before her death, his ‘confession’ to her that he is in love with them both, that his new love is equal to theirs. Throughout Le Bonheur, Varda challenges traditional gender roles maintained by and within patriarchal superstructures. This feminist stance questions how women’s mental anguish is impacted by such performances of gender, how they find release from these stringent definitions of femininity and respond to the realisation that these are fallacies, constructs that they have abided by in vain: Thérèse is a committed mother and wife, and yet is still betrayed by her husband.

Vera Chytilová’s contemporaneous feature film, Sedmikrásky/Daisies (1966), opens with a scene in which the two female protagonists discuss the falsity of ‘feminine’ roles. The plot, if indeed it has one, follows these characters, Marie One and Marie Two, as they rebel against traditional definitions of women’s position(s) in society. Their insurgency encompasses Marie Two’s apparent attempted suicide in response to such societal restrictions. At the start of this sequence, the camera tilts upwards from Marie Two’s head, her eyes closed, to a bed covered with fake turf, the whisper of a hiss on the soundtrack. Marie One walks into the room in their shared flat as the hissing continues, and she glares angrily, a close-up on the dials of a gas meter ticking down to 0-0-0-0 signals its source. Marie One hovers over Marie Two, asking, ‘And who’s going to pay for this?’, which cuts to a close shot of Marie Two’s face, eyes still closed, before she opens her left eye and says, ‘Dead men tell no tales!’, giggling. Marie One then moves to the window, opening the blind and saying, ‘Only you forgot to close the window!’, mocking her friend for her thwarted or simulated suicide attempt (Fig. 3). Marie Two then asks ‘Can’t you smell it?’, and a spectator may think of the gas that has gathered in the room, but when Marie One asks ‘What?’, Marie Two replies, ‘How volatile life is!’, over a tracking shot of various bottles on a table and eggs and potatoes in an ashtray.

 

 

Like Le bonheur, this scene could be suggesting simply the contingency of existence, the accident that conveys life and death. Yet, in Chytilová’s film, certainly, the two Maries take this notion of contingency as a reason to anarchically kick against the pricks of patriarchal (and other authoritarian) convention. In the sequences that precede the ‘suicide’ scene, Chytilová has the Maries mock patriarchal notions of women’s roles and how they should behave. For instance, they trick an older man into buying not one, but both Maries a lavish dinner by insinuating that Marie One will accompany the man home after the meal and both go to a nightclub where they ‘misbehave’—dancing on tables, stealing wine from other patrons—until the maître d’ and male waiters eject them. The suicide attempt is then played as a joke in which Marie Two had no intention of taking her life, or at least had left her death to chance, with the open window and the expiring gas working at a minimum as subconscious indications of this. Instead, this scene parodies conventions of the society in which the two Maries exist and especially the notion that women attempt suicide because of the loss of a man. The Maries defiantly refuse the traditional roles and boundaries created for them.

As Marie Two’s facetious, feigned suicide questions the reasons behind these acts, literature around suicide endeavours to explain how women make attempts on their own lives. What is absent here is an explanation of ‘why’ women choose such different (and often less terminal) means. This scene in Chytilová’s film, wittingly or not, echoes with the assumption that women choose less active suicide methods or mechanisms because they have no intent to complete suicide. Underlying this notion are several insidious and openly sexist theories—that women choose suicide methods such as poison and gas that will preserve their beauty and will avoid the destruction of their external selves. This idea has proliferated through thanatological, sociological and psychological literature. For instance, as Barbagli argues:

In Europe, over the past one and a half centuries, some changes have taken place in the methods individuals use to take their own lives. Yet there continues to be a difference between male and female populations, with the former still choosing less lethal means of poisoning and, in the past, drowning, rather than firearms, knives or hanging, the preferred male choices. This is because women are less accustomed to the use of violence and also more concerned that their body and in particular that their features should not be disfigured. (2012: 162-165)

Barbagli believes that women’s vanity is so great that the wish to preserve their looks dominates them even in moments of the greatest psychological agony.[5] Further, apart from a disregard for the essential factor of access to such means of suicide as gas or poison (both readily available in the home which in patriarchal hierarchies is the frequently-private, domestic domain of women) and that neither poisoning or, especially, drowning guarantee pristine remains, Barbagli’s conclusion maintains a misogynistic tradition of the beautification of the female corpse, including those bequeathed through completed suicides. Not only in life, but also in death, women are expected to maintain an unattainable level of beauty.[6] As Bronfen (1992: xi) explains, ‘because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of alterity, culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women’. Through art which represents the death of women, cultures disseminate the dual constructs of both the feminine/female and death as othered mysteries.

There is a long history of these notions in Western art and, for Brown, ‘[i]mages of female suicide are part of a male cultural obsession with dead women’ (2001: 154). Two recent films directed by men that I now briefly discuss exemplify such a convention by unambiguously representing women choosing a less fatal means of suicide, drowning, reiterating the notion that female vanity is behind such decisions. Each film also draws in a further cliché about the causes behind women’s suicide acts, the oft-repeated convention that women’s suicides were motivated by the thwarted love of a man (note Ophelia). Throughout the narrative of Rainer Sarnet’s 2017 film, Rehepapp/November, the semi-heroine Liina attempts to win the love of Hans, and when her prospective beau dies, she walks into a nearby lake to drown herself (Fig. 4).

 

 

The suicide act is stimulated by the loss of love or the failure to meet society’s assumption that a woman needs the dubious protections of a man. A further representation of this notion of women’s suicide promoted by frustrated love occurs in François Ozon’s Frantz (2016). Nearing the conclusion of the film, Adrien confesses to Anna that, rather than being a pre-war friend of her late fiancé (the eponymous Frantz) as he has been feigning, he is actually the soldier who killed him. Anna, confused by her feelings as she has begun to fall in love with Adrien —in some ways as a substitute for Franz —walks, as Liina did, into a local lake, intending to drown (Fig. 5).

 

 

Where Thérèse’s drowning in Varda’s film is depicted in two fleeting shots of her in the water, conveying the ambiguity and the potential contingency of the act in that instant, the scenes of Liina and Anna entering the lakes in Sarnet’s and Ozon’s films are prolonged, each filmed with a contrasting chiaroscuro, a monochrome yet painterly mise-en-scène that reverberate with one another. Considering these fictionalised accounts of women’s suicide acts represented by male creators against suicide data, we see that just two per cent of female completed suicides in Estonia and twelve per cent in France were by drowning (Värnik et al 2008: 547; Ajdacic-Gross et al 2008: Table 1), indicating the romanticisation of these fictional women’s deaths. The motive for Liina’s and Anna’s suicide acts is equally specious, a further patriarchal trope. As Canetto writes:

In Western countries, relationship losses are traditionally assumed to be more significant in women’s than in men’s suicidal behavior. Suicidal behavior in response to abandonment is conceived as the consequence of women’s presumed weak self and relationship-centered identity. Consistent with this presumed connection between women’s suicidality and rejection is the belief that women’s suicidal behavior is driven by interpersonal motives (such as the wish to reengage and influence) rather than by a wish to die. (2008: 261)

Women, too weak to subsist alone in the world, turn to suicide as the only alternative to rejection by or failure to attain a relationship with a man. The depictions of female suicide acts in these two films—the methods represented, the reason(s) behind the acts and the serene, arcadian compositions—speak to a particular romanticisation of women’s suicide. This idolisation of these deaths mirrors what Aaron refers to as a necromanticisation of femininity:

By necromanticisation I mean not only how woman is figured beguilingly and prophetically ethereal … but, more simply, and neo-logistically, how she embodies a romance with death. … the to-be-dead-woman as beloved spectacle, muse and, or rather as, inevitable projection of male desire and despair. (2015: 52)

Aaron refers to Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film, The Virgin Suicides, which, as a North American film, sits outside the scope of this article, but this idea has an important bearing on our considerations here. Women’s bodies are fetishised and in death they are further objectified, reclaimed and remodelled, manipulated into definitions of ‘femininity’ by and of a patriarchal order which they can no longer even begin to refuse.

Both portraits of female suicide in November and Frantz conspire in reiterating normative notions of femininity, a phallocentric codification. The images of women’s deaths are appropriated in their ultimate vulnerability. This commodification, or comortification, of the female body by men is challenged by Bronfen, amongst other feminist scholars, in her attempt to re-subjectivise the female body and, especially, the female corpse. Of this idea and its formation in suicide, Bronfen argues:

Suicide, in turn, is both the literal attainment of alterity through death and the performance of an autobiographical desire. For suicide implies an authorship with one’s own life, a form of writing the self and writing death that is ambivalently poised between self-construction and self-destruction; a confirmation that is also the annihilation of the self, and as such another kind of attempt to know the self as radically different and other from the consciously known self during life. (1992: 142)

The appropriation of images of female deaths is a denial of selfhood, of subjectivity in death, and instead, there is an objectification of the female body.

A film such as Céline Sciamma’s 2019 feature, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire, critiques the patriarchal, heteronormative corralling of ‘the feminine’, quite expectedly, given that it deconstructs the male gaze and its definitions and objectification of femininity. One of the film’s three leads, Marianne, is employed to paint a portrait of Héloïse for the latter’s husband-to-be, whom the sitter has never met. Héloïse, Marianne learns, was recalled home because her older sister died by suicide, throwing herself from the bluff that the two women sit at the base of as they talk. Héloïse later divulges that before her death, her sister wrote to her to apologise, and Marianne asks: ‘What could she be apologising for?’ Héloïse replies: ‘For leaving me her fate’ (Fig. 6).

 

 

Through suicide, the sister has rejected her role, her fate to marry a situated and unknown suitor, and Héloïse has now to take her place. This suicide act is ambiguous, what Fiona Handyside calls a ‘token of her defiance’, a disobedience to the wishes of the sisters’ mother, ‘which also functions as a kind of sororicide—by killing herself she offers up her younger sister as her replacement sacrifice’ (2023: 68). Additionally, and this may be Sciamma’s intention, in jumping from a cliff, the sister chooses a method of suicide that according to suicidology data is one more often employed by men (Mergl et al 2015: 2). Héloïse’s older sister felt her situation was dire enough that she chose a method of suicide with higher lethality, greater destruction of the corporeal self, one that would not ‘preserve her looks’ as Barbagli would have it. The anonymous sister deconstructs the imposed notions of aesthetic femininity and the obligation towards male companionship. Significantly, Sciamma chooses not to portray this death, denying the scopophilia of a violent fate. Female suicide is presented in Sciamma’s, Varda’s and Chytilová’s films as a desperate escape from imposed gender roles; the realisation that these are constructs that bind them, suppress them; the exploitation of women’s vulnerability within these constructed models; and as a nihilistic, anarchic denial of them.

In Mustang (2015), the director Deniz Gamze Ergüven intensifies the negation of these norms. The film is set in contemporary Turkey, where five sisters are imprisoned in their aunt and uncle’s home after they are seen ‘acting obscenely with boys’ (read: ingenuously playing, clothed, in the sea with friends). Their captivity reflects the idea that the sexual purity of women and girls is, as Mehmet Eskin writes, ‘seen as the honor of the family within the Turkish culture’ (2012: m119). When the middle sister Ece shoots herself off-screen, again withholding the salacious gaze on the ‘Poetic’ image of female death, rather than being forced into an arranged marriage, the impact of her rejection of gender expectations is devastating (Fig 7).

 

 

Ece’s death is consistent with research into suicides in Turkey, where, as Eskin (2012: 114-115) argues, ‘[t]he largest proportion of suicidal deaths in Turkey fell in the age group of 15-24’ and ‘[s]atisfaction and communication with family/family members and care from mother [sic] were all found to be the predictors of low suicide risk in adolescents and adults’. The girls of Mustang are repeatedly denied communication; except amongst themselves, their voices are unheard within the family unit. Additionally, Ece’s suicide by gunshot is, as with Héloïse’s sister’s method of suicide, one more often chosen by men. Jaworski (2014, 43) argues that, seen as ‘ … decisive, violent, aggressive and [therefore] masculine, guns communicate serious intent’. Again, a female director and female screenwriters choose a method of suicide for their protagonist, which transgresses gender stereotypes, and the binary of ‘active/passive’ at the core of thinking around gender and suicide, in order to accentuate that character’s rejection of an arranged marriage. They also represent the desperation these young women feel about their plight, the intent of self-destruction that feels like the only option.

Such desperation to escape the confines, the constraints of matrimonial gender roles, is presented in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022), through the protagonist, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, nicknamed Sissi, who completes suicide to avoid these imposed expectations. As Marion Hallet writes, ‘la Sissi des années 2020 est une femme rebelle, incomprise, indépendante, enfermée dans une prison dorée’ (2022: para. 3).[7] Hallet evokes the notion that this rendering of the empress is a modernisation. This is evident, foremost, in Sissi’s death: the real-life Empress did not complete suicide in October 1878 by throwing herself overboard from a ship, but was murdered by stabbing in September 1898. Kreutzer rewrites the death of her principal to release her prematurely from her golden prison. Frustrated by the restrictions of her rigid, patriarchal existence, Sissi makes several suicide attempts in the film, including jumping from a window, which she survives with only minor injuries. The film also depicts what could be considered a ‘slow suicide attempt’, as the Empress takes heroin, starves herself, then only eats unhealthy foods, primarily cream cakes. Slow suicide is defined by Rockett et al as a suicide ‘whose duration extends over several months or even years and seems rarely likely to be registered as suicides’ (2011: 52). They explain that:

a suicidal decision by some individuals may lead to a protracted, tortuous, and lethal trail of excessive use of alcohol and/or other psychoactive substances, malnutrition or undernutrition, or some combination of intentional destructive behaviors. (2011: 52)

Slow suicide can take the form of various (frequently combined) instances of self-destruction over a prolonged period, meaning that they are often unnoticed. Yet, Sissi’s self-destruction may be read as a rejection of the slow death that is her ‘golden prison’. At first, Kreutzer indicates Sissi’s malaise, her discord with her opulent surroundings, as she argues with her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph, takes lovers, and indulges in over- and under-indulgence. The director portrays these behaviours as progressing towards Sissi’s ultimate demise, in which she offers her protagonist the agency of her own death, the refusal of the narrative propelled onto her, as the vast expanse of sea represents a freedom from the restrictions of her royal life and the gendered hierarchies it promotes and maintains (Fig 8). Along with Héloïse’s sister, Ece, Thérèse, and Marie Two, Sissi refuses definitions of femininity imposed by the patriarchy. However, at least three of these women choose to die instead of accepting the impositions of constructed gender roles. Each of the films in this section depicts the repressive force of the normative patriarchal hierarchy, from which only one of these women survives.

 

 

Rejecting Psychiatry on Film: The Case of The Other Side of the Underneath

Suicidology research has shown that compelled models of ‘the feminine’, or what it is to be female, continue to impact the decisions women make when contemplating suicide. Consequently, understanding the gender paradox could lead to the advancement of suicide literacy and the development of more appropriate tools to assess suicide risk for all, but especially women. There are varying approaches in the analysis of data that show women experience more depressive episodes and that there are fewer completed female suicides. Multiple mental health studies confirm that even when women present with identical symptoms to men, they are more likely to be diagnosed as depressed (Afifi 2007: 386; Conway et al 2004: 70). This is another interpretation of the suicide gender paradox that likewise speaks to inherent sexism.

The debut feature of Jane Arden (who herself died by suicide in 1982), The Other Side of the Underneath, enters into dialogue with this trope. The film was drawn from the play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches, and other dramatic writings, performed by the radical feminist Holocaust theatre troupe (co-founded by Arden and the feminist artist Penny Slinger, amongst others), and, controversially, deconstructs psychiatry, traditional gender roles and sexualised representations of women. Or, as J. J. Charlesworth writes, Arden’s film seeks ‘out women’s oppression in the subconscious traces of social conditioning’ (2019: 52). Not only challenging definitions of mental health, after R. D. Laing’s anti-psychiatry, Arden and her collaborators provocatively question the roles and spaces into which women are compelled by psychiatry and other patriarchal structures. The film opens with images of the attempted suicide by drowning of a (presently anonymous) woman (Fig. 9). Mirroring suicidological research, this woman (Susanka Fraey) survives and, still limp, is placed into the back of an ambulance and taken to a psychiatric hospital in the Welsh countryside where she is diagnosed ‘schizophrenic’ (a disorder frequently underlying suicidal behaviour [Hegerl et al 2009]).

 

 

In following Fraey’s character’s narrative through the process of ‘healing’ in the clinic, Arden’s film deliberately blurs the boundaries between non-actors and actors, patients and therapists in order to collapse the divisions in such binaries of experience and knowledge. Chelsea Phillips-Carr argues that the film’s ‘playing with doctor-patient relations, the causes and effects of mental distress, and the concept of healing … redefines what it means to be “sick”’ (2019: para. 1). Arden and her colleagues are reclaiming definitions of mental illness from the patriarchy. This reappropriation occurs specifically around delineations of gender roles. Several scenes—oscillating between surrealist performance of traditional, violent gendered stereotypes and the satirising of rote messaging—allude to the confused messaging society employs to direct girls and women into their assigned positions. For example: the sequence in which Fraey’s character is haunted by the apparition or hallucination of another woman (Sheila Allen), her head covered with a bald mask and a phallic prosthetic proboscis (à la Pulcinella/Mr Punch), screeching ‘Not right, little girl’; when another woman (Sally Minford) violently bows a cello whilst repeating ‘multiply’ more and more aggressively as an L-edit transfers the soundtrack onto shots of Fraey’s character dragged from the lake; and in conversations throughout the film in which various patient-actors discuss whether they are attractive or not. The film challenges patriarchal definitions of women, their objectification as alternately (and simultaneously) eroticised, nurturing, silenced, and prettified. In the interstice, the intersection between the scenes of Minford’s playing and Fraey’s flaccid body hauled from the lake after her suicide attempt, Arden implies the likely cause of this suicide act: an unwanted pregnancy or the rejection of that reproductive role. In each of the above scenes, Arden and company imply that these women’s efforts to fulfil these characteristics—which amount to the sexualisation and domestication of women—have led them to the hospital, where they learn to process the repudiation of gendered societal norms. At the heart of this critique is, as always, the question of power, of men over women (such as that of the psychiatrist over his patients), which has made Fraey’s character so desperate as to attempt suicide.

Two successive scenes of The Other Side, both involving Penny Slinger, speak to this fundamental conflict. In the first, two women (Slinger and Fraey) sit opposite one another on a bed, a sheet draped over their crossed legs to form a platform on which several shards of mirror are placed. Fraey is in a nightdress, Slinger topless but wearing a trilby. The women hold shards of mirror up to one another and to themselves, and after one edit, Fraey wears the trilby, and Slinger is entirely nude. The latter pulls a switchblade and threatens Fraey’s character, but then the two begin to kiss and caress one another, and as they separate, Fraey now has the knife (a phallus along with the trilby, the man’s hat as populist psychoanalytical signifier of male genitals). The transference of power represented by the phallic knife and hat is conspicuous in the scene, as are the gendered interactions within each subject as they transition between genders and those with the Other (Fig. 10). Indeed, Slinger herself says in interview that the sequence (devised by her and Fraey) ‘was about ‘Self/Other’ reflections, exploring who has the power and the transference of power, love and hate’ (Satchell-Baeza 2019: 159). The scene openly challenges phallocentric, psychoanalytical dream symbolism and power relations between genders.

 

 

In the sequence occurring directly after the one above, Arden and Slinger critique another (erstwhile) sacrosanct institution, the (Catholic) church and present one of the most fatal mental health conditions, particularly common in women and associated with a higher prevalence of attempted suicide, eating disorders (WHO 2002², 2: Cliff et al 2020: 1). The camera cuts to a woman (Slinger), behind an iron gate, with a crucifix, candles and a small table surrounding her, rubbing her legs and torso, repeating ‘dirty girl’ and ‘dirty’ as an organ plays on the soundtrack (Fig. 11). She becomes more agitated, rubbing her breasts and the shot cuts to within the room, revealing a silver bowl full of (holy) water in which she begins to wash, clearly distressed. But her anguish turns to laughter, and she slowly begins to calm, mumbling, ‘Daddy’s girl. Little pearl. Little treasure. Stroke her thighs. Little prize, prize, prize, prize…’, as she caresses her breasts again, then breaks down, sobbing and biting at her nails. There is a shot from within the room as a head-scarved woman (Arden) hands Slinger a silver goblet and bread (surely representing The Eucharist), which she hungrily gobbles up and slurps, before Arden pulls off Slinger’s wig and the latter regurgitates the food and drink into the silver bowl.

 

 

In Richard Kovitch’s documentary film about the artist, Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows (2019), Slinger discusses the timing of this scene, noting that it was a period when she herself was on the cusp of an eating disorder. The sequence was then a very personal one as well as a commentary on the societal pressures that lead to women being diagnosed with mental health disorders. The rejection of food in the scene in The Other Side, also representing the Holy Communion, evokes Unger and Crawford’s argument that performing femininity increases a woman’s chances of developing depression, agoraphobia, or an eating disorder, discussed earlier (1995: 559). Again, it is societal expectations—here that women must look a certain way to be attractive—that direct women into being defined and treated as mentally ill and concurrently cause mental and physical anguish.

It is against such repression of the female self that The Other Side rails, attempting to decommission male ascendency over women. Arden, Slinger and the rest of the Holocaust troupe enact scenarios in the film that confront their internalised ideas of femininity in order to deconstruct them as phallocentric, patriarchal impositions. The film speaks to the enigma at the heart of many female experiences of mental health, that when women perform the roles expected of them and when they do not, they risk their responses being pathologised. They are both erroneously diagnosed with mental ill health and compelled towards some of the most perilous mental illnesses, such as depression and eating disorders, which ‘carry a high risk of suicide’ (Hawton 2000: 484). Further, as Ussher (2011: 47) argues in her comprehensive feminist history of mental health, diagnoses of depression (and other mental illnesses) can be considered as led by ‘expert definition’, ‘fictions framed as facts, used to regulate and control those deemed deficient, dangerous, or merely different from the norm’. I argue that The Other Side challenges these same definitions, these diagnoses and the pathologisation of women’s responses to the quotidian violence experienced by them (repression, impuissance, objectification, sexualisation, assault, etc.) by patriarchally-dominated cultures, re-writing the script of women’s mental health and suicide acts.

Ussher (2011: 187) argues that one of the most insidious effects of this ‘medicalisation of women’s misery is the pathologisation of reasonable responses to everyday life (or to everyday violence and abuse)’. It is reasonable to develop coping mechanisms to exist in a society that represses, others, exploits and intimidates particular genders within a hierarchy of power. These issues are frequently raised in Arden’s film and in Slinger’s dialogue, ‘Daddy’s girl. Little pearl. Little treasure. Stroke her thighs. Little prize, prize, prize, prize…’, for instance, there is a palpable reference to incestuous sexual abuse. As Angel argues:

The threat of violence, its ever-hovering possibility, offers grounds for men’s protection of women, but also for access to them. Conjuring the threat is then also a warning, a way of making a woman’s every action and move a more or less responsible management of the naturalised risk of violence. (2021: 94)

For women and girls, the menace of violence, according to Angel, haunts their quotidian existence, reiterating the conventional narrative that women are vulnerable and need men’s protection. There is, according to the WHO, to continue with just one of the various forms of abuse addressed in The Other Side (and alluded to in Sciamma’s, Kreutzer’s and Ergüven’s films through the tradition of arranged marriage), a high prevalence of sexual violence against girls and women and ‘the presence of multiple mental health problems later in life’ (WHO 2002: 2). It is also accepted by suicide researchers (and more widely) that there are strong links between sexual abuse (at any stage of life) and suicide attempts in women (Schrijvers et al 2012: 21; Freeman and Freeman 2013: 122). The threat of sexual(ised) violence, which is frequently thought to be ‘an inherent risk of being a woman’ (Sanyal 2019: 24), is one of the many phantoms that stalk women’s consciousness, revising and limiting their desires, impacting their mental health and frequently leading to suicidal acts. Women and girls are taught through experience that these and other abuses are inevitable, that their gender automatically makes them vulnerable and that it is their responsibility to maintain performances that decrease their susceptibility to this violence. Once again, we return to contrived and damaging gender stereotypes and women’s resistance to these repressive roles or a rejection of these imposed identities through tragic self-destruction.

Conclusion

This feminist, intersectional analysis of gender and suicide has shown that depictions of women’s suicide acts in modern European film reflect but also frequently challenge assumptions surrounding women’s experiences of suicide in comparable suicidological literature. Some of these films rewrite the scripts behind gendered suicidal acts: depicting the pain behind a suicide act (Soulmate); painting in the causes behind assumed ambiguous acts (Le Bonheur); laugh at established ideas that women need men’s protection (Daisies); hide images of female bodies from the male gaze and pierce the false gender binary between methods of suicide (Portrait, Mustang); reappropriate the historical narrative (Corsage); and deconstruct diagnoses of the most fatal mental illnesses most commonly experienced by women (The Other Side). These films challenge the gender role of ‘female’ and patriarchal definitions of femininity, addressing themes such as hyper-sexualisation, domestication, reverence, matrimonial subservience, objectification, obsequiousness and sexual violation. In so doing, they speak to the gender paradox in suicide, positing that women are driven to suicide acts because of anguish, pain, distress and confusion caused by and rejection of the gendered norms imposed by a society in which they are repressed, abused, objectified, sexualised, silenced and betrayed.

This article begins an analysis of filmic portraits of women’s suicide acts, showing how patriarchal definitions of gender impact (and obscure) the decisions, methods, intentions, conclusions and other experiences in the female suicide process. As suicide is culturally determined—as far as the very definition of a death as suicide relies on a multitude of specific factors, what Canetto (2008: 259) calls ‘the limitations of comparing epidemiological patterns across cultures’—some of these texts/films challenge such assumptions. While the breadth of this article does not allow for in-depth national, social analysis, my future research will. I hope that further research will uncover other intersectional voices (beyond the confluence of gender and disability), such as those of Global Majority women, trans women, lesbian women, and non-binary and genderqueer identities, which are often lacking in the filmic examples available so far. This is despite the fact that more LGBTQIA+ people attempt suicide and self-harm and that there is an equivalent race paradox to the gender paradox discussed at the outset of this article (King et al 2008: 1; Haas et al 2010: 12; Payne et al 2008: 29).

Notes

[1] African region, 11.2 completed suicides per 100,000 population, European region 10.5 per 100,000 and South-East Asian 10.2 per 100,000: WHO, 2021, p. 9, Fig. 8.

[2] A film with the BBFC’s 15 rating may show scenes of suicide and self-harm, but they should not be frequent or endorsed. Glamorisation of suicide or self-harm may result in a higher rating. Graphic depictions or detailed references are unlikely to be permitted’, https://www.bbfc.co.uk/rating/15 (last accessed 10 January 2023).

[3] Le Bonheur was released in the same year that married French women first obtained the right to work without their husband’s consent and before French sociologist Christine Delphy’s influential late-sixties research documenting domestic, familial and patriarchal ideologies in France, later collected and published in Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression.

[4] ‘[A] woman dies during a picnic. She went to pick flowers and slipped into the lake. Or perhaps she completed suicide?’

[5] It should be remembered that Simone de Beauvoir similarly wrote that the reason for women’s failed suicide attempts was ‘likely to be satisfied with play-acting: they pretend self-destruction more often than really want it’, Beauvoir, Simone de (1988 [1949]), The Second Sex, trans. and ed. by H. M. Parshley, London: Picador Classics, p. 621.

[6] See, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s infamous quote that ‘… the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world’, Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition (Rise of Douai, 2015), p. 15.

[7] ‘[T]he Sissi of the 2020s is a rebellious, misunderstood, independent woman, locked in a golden prison’.