Imagine you're making a feature film. A great adventure film. A future blockbuster. You are aware of gender inequalities: there is no question of you presenting female characters as fragile little things placed under the protection of strong male characters.
No, you have created a role of a powerful, strong-willed woman, strong in character and of course endowed with proven skills if not superpowers. The film is being released. The critics were rave. But a few articles point out that, alas, you have fallen into the trap of the "Trinity syndrome".
Of what, of what? We explain everything about the Trinity syndrome and its transposition to "female leadership" in companies.
Like a Trinity in a Matrix
In 2014, film critic Tasha Robinson published an article entitled "We're losing all our strong female characters to Trinity Syndrome". She refers here to the film The Matrix to highlight that it is not enough to create strong female characters to give a real role to women.
To fully understand, let's remember the first installment of the Matrix saga . The first scene opens with the character of Trinity. She is presented as a woman of action. Formidable in martial arts and devoted to her cause, she fights a dozen agents of the matrix and brilliantly manages to escape unscathed.
In the scene that follows, it is the turn of Neo's character to be introduced. He is a somewhat lost man, suspecting the farce in which he lives without having the keys to confirm his suspicions. He leads an outsider life in a society that supposedly makes humans forget that they are actually crammed into farms and serve as a source of energy for the higher entities that have taken control of the earth. The plot of the plot is revealed: Neo is the "Chosen One", the man who will manage to save the human race from this disastrous reality.
Let's now look at the third scene, centered on the meeting between Trinity and Neo. While she is powerful, intelligent and competent, we quickly understand that she will have the "simple" role of accompanying the hero in his quest. It is strong, but secondary.
Trinity, we meet a lot of them...
Characters like Trinity, powerful and yet secondary, are legion in the films of the last twenty years. One thinks in particular of the Harry Potter saga in which Hermione Granger demonstrates unparalleled erudition. She is, on many occasions, presented as a great witch in the making, intelligent, powerful... However, the more the films in the saga follow one another, the more this witch, who has become a teenager and then a young adult, is confined to more secondary scenes, where her skills are invisible. Like Trinity, Hermione's main function is to accompany the "Chosen One" – Harry Potter – in his fight against the One whose name must not be pronounced.
In the blockbuster Edge of Tomorrow, where Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt "share" the bill, we find a strong female character, Rita Vrataski, presented as the war heroine who greatly contributed to the recapture of the lands occupied by the aliens. However, it is overshadowed by the character played by Tom Cruise, initially a coward, and even a deserter who finds himself unluckily on the front. He is trained in combat by Rita. But as the "real hero" develops his skills, Rita's disappears from the screen.
We can also mention the case of Gamorra in Guardians of the Galaxy, The Wasp in Ant-Man, or Astrid in the animated film Dragon and Tigress from the Kung-fu series Panda...
The role of "perfect second"
The Trinity syndrome is characterized by a double movement, of awakening for the male character, of erasure for the female character. As if, despite her skills, a woman was called upon to take the second role while the first should fall to a man, even if he would know less than she did at the beginning. As if this were the "meaning of history".
This observation resonates with the male gaze , defined in 1975 by the filmmaker Laura Mulvey as the male gaze that leads female film characters to be nothing more than foils (object to be seduced, conquered, a minor element in a secondary plot of love...). What changes with the Trinity syndrome is that the woman is less "object", she has more personality. But his function as a "second" remains.
In The Matrix, the closer Neo gets to the place of the Chosen One, the more Trinity is mobilized in the registers of support, of accompaniment (without being his mentor – this role being reserved for Morpheus, a man). Finally, through these films, we observe a subtle and progressive invisibilization of the "hard" skills of these women, soon limited to "soft" skills... And to subsidiarize these skills of interpersonal skills (support, accompaniment, etc.) to those of know-how, a bit as if the Trinities were occupying support functions in the literal and figurative sense.
Women's personal development, a benefit for men?
The Trinity syndrome therefore inevitably calls out to us on the side of the boom in personal development, which we know is mainly targeting women (for example, twice as many women as men read books in this category). Often criticized for its depoliticized dimension to the point of denying inequalities (or even promoting the swallowing of snakes in the name of positive thinking), could women's personal development be accused of producing new benefits for men?
The work of "knowing yourself better" is known to bring value beyond just the individual well-being of the person who leads it. By developing one's self-knowledge, congruence, balance, one simultaneously develops one's empathy, emotional intelligence, relational ecology... But it is not without additional mental load. Hard, hard, therefore, if this work rests mainly on the shoulders of women.
Especially since this work is not rewarded at its fair value, especially in professional life where what still makes the status, the remuneration and the promotion is to play the leading role, at the heart of the action. Not to excel in the second, even with the finest human qualities in the world!
Change the cast or change the script?
How can we get out of this imbroglio?
We observe that in cinema, as in the organization of companies, introducing female characters is not enough to make parity exist. Introducing strong female characters is also not a sufficient condition for these women to exist, to express themselves, to take their full place and why the first places. In other words, it is not (only) by diversifying the cast that you change the script. Or to put it in the language of business, it is not (only) by reaching one's "Rixain-quota" that one (automatically) produces gender equality.
It is still necessary to look at the dynamics at the heart of spaces of power. In particular, on the dynamics that establish a hierarchy of skills and establish orders of importance. Isn't the competitive logic up to the top of organizations doomed to reproduce the inequalities that run through society, starting with gender inequalities? Can we really hope that women will become "men like any other" in models of power that have "naturally" brought men to the highest responsibilities? Or is it not time to consider other scenarios, other organizational software in which it will no longer be important to play the leading role, or even to be a hero? A lot of work to be done on our imaginations, a whole exciting future to invent.
