There is a particular line from “Working Girl” which I quote all the time, here on Substack, on X and in my personal and professional life, because I think it’s one of the most subversive and transgressive lines of dialogue in Hollywood history. It’s a line from the scene where Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) meets Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) for the first time. Sitting next to Tess at a bar, Trainer gives her the old once over and declares that Tess is like no other woman he’s met before in his long storied career in corporate high finance. He says “you’re the first woman I’ve seen at one of these damn things that dresses like a woman, and not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman.”
You should take a moment to listen to it in context because a great line of dialogue, when delivered by an iconic movie star, can become something like a magical incantation.
There is more at work here though, than just one great line of dialogue. It’s hard to write flirtatious dialogue this good, perhaps even harder to find two actors with the talent and chemistry to pull it off. But Mike Nichols, as good a director of relationship movies as anyone who has ever done it, is doing something else here that is even more clever than a couple lines of well-delivered dialogue. By the time Tess arrives in that bar, we already know she is smart and tough, but we don’t yet know anything about Jack. Nichols has alerted us in advance how vulnerable Tess is in this scene, she has taken a strong antihistamine and the edges of her tough take-no-shit attitude have been well and truly sanded off. And Jack, while being charmingly playful and flirtatious on the one hand, is also trying very hard to get her in the sack.
And so this scene is packed with tension, and not just of the romantic kind. The entire scene feels a little dangerous. What kind of man is Jack? Is he the kind of aggressive Wall Street pay-for-play asshole Tess has been running up against throughout the movie? A man who will gleefully take advantage of Tess once the tequila and pills conspire to push her beyond the capacity for consent? Or is he something different… maybe even someone special?
Who knows… and that’s the fun of it. What we don’t know yet is that the very next scene will reveal the answer in a fun and unexpected way, and set us on the rocky road of a romantic journey whose outcome will remain in doubt until literally the final scene.
These are the things… story, character, emotional journeys, which are possible when Hollywood creates women who behave like women and not like feminist activists think men would behave if they were women.
By now everyone knows that “Supergirl” is going to wind up being one of the biggest bombs of 2026, and in a year where the U.S. box office is on fire in a way it hasn’t been for a decade, this is quite an accomplishment.
That the movie would bomb was evident even before the Thursday night previews began… over the previous week the opening weekend estimates had been sliding steadily downward day-after-day like a distressed real estate listing 30 days from a foreclosure. And by the weekend, the battle for control of the narrative had already begun.
The New York Times was one of the first to the battlements with this sub-headline:
Female-led superhero movies have been rejected almost uniformly over the past five years or so, perhaps reflecting a resurgent misogyny among the core fan base, which is largely male
Other outlets like Variety and Entertainment Weekly were quick to pile on, but the narrative having been duly set by The Gray Lady, where you can find all the news that’s fit to print, the permission structure was officially in place. Individual Hollywood power players quickly joined the fray as well, with one of the most cringe-inducing offerings appearing on X via Joe Russo, of The Russo Brothers, a writer-director team whom have created some of Marvel’s best offerings.
Russo tweeted this:
On behalf of all men, I’d like to apologize to Milly Alcock for my gender being the absolute worst to her. Sounds like you’re super in this movie, girl. Can't wait.
What you need to understand about Hollywood is that we are all suffering from some version of the same personality defect…. we have enormous egos combined with crushing insecurity. To simply pick up one’s life and move to Hollywood with the goal of breaking into the movie business requires a certain kind of insanity, which we might call “ego”… you must believe in your bones that you can do it as well as, or better than, the best who have ever done it or you’re probably not going to make it.
But alongside that outsized ego lurks a dark side, a secret fear given a name once upon a time by legendary screenwriter William Goldman… that no one knows anything… worse, that we are all of us, never more than one creative decision away from being exposed as frauds.
When a highly-anticipated blockbuster bombs, impostor syndrome becomes heightened in a way that can become debilitating, and the instinct then is to cast about for excuses… preferably exigent circumstances which could not be anticipated or controlled. If the movie was just bad in a conventional sense, then the danger is that the word goes out… you don’t know what you’re doing… jobs begin to dry up… and before you know it you’re back in Gary, Indiana or Bisbee, Arizona with your tail between your legs… anonymous again, like the rest of us.
But what if success was never on the table in the first place? What if it’s not the case that your movie was ill conceived, poorly developed and badly produced but rather that it was unfairly targeted by a large and unruly group of toxic misogynist fans who conspired to ratio the movie into oblivion before audiences could discover its brilliance for themselves. In that case not only are you not a failure, you’re actually a kind of hero…bravely releasing your truth into a dark and Trumpian world which does not, will not and cannot appreciate your genius.
And so here we are post-Supergirl, and "misogyny” is the uncontrollable variable Hollywood has settled on to explain away this particular failure… yet again.
Superhero fatigue is real, but I also happen to think that after audiences walked away from “Superman” disappointed, and what was meant to be a billion dollar blockbuster fizzled at a mere $600 million, those same audiences decided to skip “Supergirl” assuming it would be a lackluster sequel to a movie they didn’t much care for. But let’s go ahead and debate the misogyny excuse proffered by the mainstream Press and our Hollywood elites on the merits, anyway.
Is it true that modern male audiences don’t like or can’t handle a strong female lead in a blockbuster movie?
The obvious answer is to point to the myriad contradictory examples which disprove the theory… beloved movie characters who have stood the test of time like Princess Leia, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor and Gal Gadot’s version of Wonder Woman.
This last is a particularly poignant example. For one thing, “Wonder Woman” was released in 2017, recently enough that it puts paid to the ridiculous progressive argument that men are somehow more misogynist now than we ever were. And for another, because the movie is going to wind up making more money ($822 million worldwide) than both “Superman” and “Supergirl” combined, it suggests that the problem might have been Gunn’s approach to the story and the characters rather than some mythological army of 4Chan Chuds.
But to effectively argue the case against misogyny it’s not enough to simply point out that there are plenty of strong badass female characters much beloved by male audiences throughout Hollywood history, we must also take a minute to talk about why those characters are so popular.
And to do that we have to go back to the Jack Trainer Principle.
We love Ripley, Sarah Connor, Leia, Diana Prince and others because they behave like the real women we all know and love… and not like women think men would behave if they were women.
in “Alien,” the more dire the situation aboard the Nostromo becomes, the more Ripley’s emotions begin to break through the surface of her practiced calm exterior. She loses none of her competence or her bravery, but when she learns the truth about their mission, that she and her crew are expendable, she bursts into tears. Her raw emotionality (“will you listen to me Parker… SHUT UP!”) is endearing. It makes her relatable, and in the end it has no bearing on her ability to outmaneuver the alien and to “blast it the fuck out into space.”
When “The Terminator” begins, Sarah Connor is a terrified waitress who possesses none of the skillsets she will eventually need to survive the apocalypse and train her son to lead humanity out of the darkness. Like any of us, man or woman, she must be trained. That it is a man who trains her is perhaps the worst of “The Terminator’s” many modern sins, but it is critical for the love story which drives the narrative, and it works like a charm.
Sarah is an awkward solider at first, bad at it really… a serious liability for Kyle Reese who must drag her from encounter to encounter like a sack of rocks. But eventually we see her swell with pride when Reese tells her she’s made a petty good field dressing (her first). And then later, in a hotel room, she takes to bomb making like a pro. The culmination of her character arc comes at the end of the film when Reese, tired and badly hurt, collapses and seems ready to give up. Desperate and with the Terminator hot on their heels, Sarah grabs Reese by the lapels and screams “ON YOUR FEET SOLDIER!” into his face.
If Sarah had begun the movie as an ex-special forces Mary Sue with all the skills she would ever need, then that singular moment would be meaningless and none of us would remember it. But in the end, it is the special nature of what she brings to the fight as a woman which makes the drama work in a way Jack Trainer would have recognized instantly. She is never simply a female Kyle Reese, she is Sarah Connor, a woman for whom being a badass does not come naturally… until it does.
This is why when Sarah Connor finally says “you’re terminated, fucker” the audience leaps to its feet, because the line has been so well earned.
And then there’s Wonder Woman, who was wisely portrayed by writer Allan Heinberg and director Patty Jenkins as a woman first and a “wonder” second. The senseless violence and suffering of World War I brings Diana to tears. Unexpected love brings her joy, but also great sorrow. When she does fight, her powers finally unleashed, it is to put an end to violence and suffering, not to escalate it.
And it never once occurred to me that any of these things made her weak.
You can say that “Supergirl” as imagined in this new iteration checks all the same boxes as those checked by Ripley, Connor and Diana, I’ve heard many people argue that very thing. And you can say that Milly Alcock does an admirable job with the material she was given. You can even say that Alcock’s sins, to the extent she has them, were committed after the fact in the intemperate and alienating quotes she gave to the press…
What you cannot say is that it was misogyny which killed “Supergirl.”
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