I wrote this paper for my Rhetorical Criticism class using a combination of the Narrative Criticism model as well as Feminist Criticism in order to come to a conclusion on The Flash‘s fifth episode of its fourth season. Not to brag (which means I’m about to brag humbly), but I received an A on this paper as well as in the course.
“We wanted to do something we’ve never done before. We started the concept of, wouldn’t it be funny if Barry goes for a bachelor party with the guys and Iris goes for a bachelorette party with the girls, and the girls wind up saving the city. That was where the episode started from, and that’s where it ended up.” –Andrew Kreisberg, Executive Producer of The Flash (Kile, 2017)
Over the last decade, the number of superhero movies and live-action comic book adaptations has increased exponentially. Each season of the year contains at least one adaptation of a Marvel or DC Comics adaptation in theaters, and that doesn’t even factor in the yearly television adaptations that grace the screens of different television networks each night of the week, with more being added each year. “They are the lifeblood of the movie industry” (Fenessey, 2017). Comic book adaptations present the unique opportunity to provide media representation on a large scale due to the sheer diversity found in the source material. “Recent developments in superhero comics have seen positive changes to the representation of characters and storylines” (Curtis & Cardo 2017). One adaptation that has been presented with this opportunity is The Flash, which began airing in 2013.
The Flash has never shied away from diversity. After all, the main cast includes a white main character, a black main love interest, two females, one Latino, and additional black man. Outside of the main cast, there is a wealth of diversity in the recurring supporting cast. Currently in its fourth season, the show has undergone many changes, but the core cast of diverse characters has remained more or less constant. In the fifth episode of the currently airing fourth season, the writers attempted to put emphasis on the female characters in the main and supporting cast with the overt intention of showcasing their progress in representing strong female characters that boldly promote the ideas of third wave feminism. I will use the Narrative Criticism model to perform an analysis and use Feminist Criticism to come to the conclusion of whether this episode reinforces, reverses, questions, or transcends patriarchy.
Normally, the episode structure of The Flash is as follows: a villain appears in Central City, the setting of the story, Barry Allen, the titular hero, will confront that villain and lose. From there, the main characters huddle up to examine why Barry lost that confrontation, and the “leader” of the team that aids The Flash fight crime who also doubles as Allen’s fiancée, Iris West, will give out instructions for the team to take the next step. Then, Barry’s “’regular” life as a crime scene investigator will produce additional drama to add to the tension of the episode. The villain will appear in the city again, the Flash will confront that villain, losing once more, but not before learning something that will help in the final conflict. At this point, whatever additional drama popped up in Allen’s regular life will be resolved which will help him face the villainous threat with a clear head and renewed focus. After the Flash defeats the villain of the week, loose plot threads are tidied up in the closing act of this episode.
The fifth episode of the fourth season, titled “Girls Night Out” sought to subvert this trend. This is the first episode of the entire show’s run in which Barry Allen does not don his crimson uniform to fight crime as the savior of Central City, the Flash. Instead, the focus of the story is on the bachelorette party of Iris West, Allen’s fiancée. West decides to hold a get together with her closest female friends within the superhero community while Barry and the men in the crime-fighting group head to a local strip club to celebrate themselves.
West takes her friends – Caitlin Snow, a metahuman with ice superpowers, Cecile, her father’s girlfriend, and Felicity Smoak, the girlfriend of another vigilante from another crime-fighting show within the same shared universe, Arrow – to a fancy restaurant for a quiet night of light celebration. While they’re enjoying their night out, a villainous figure with superpowers attacks the group of women unexpectedly, with Caitlyn Snow and her ice powers being the target of the attack. Caitlin uses her powers to fend off the attack, but the aftermath leads to conflict within the group. Caitlin did not tell the rest of the group that during a previous absence from the team, she had been involved with a crime lord who used her for her ice powers. Caitlin left while still “under contract,” so to speak, and the villainous figure came to bring Caitlin back. Caitlin planned to leave town immediately after the bachelorette party without telling anyone, and the group is greatly disappointed by this revelation.
After the girls begin to feel like they’re in over their heads with the plot developments, they attempt to call Barry and the other men. Little do they know that the men went to a strip club where all cellphones are confiscated. Their “adventure” at the club becomes a site of emotional conflict as Joe West, Iris’ father and Cecile’s boyfriend, discovers that Cecile’s daughter is a stripper at that very club. Barry becomes intoxicated and gets dragged into a bar fight that lands the group of men in jail and unavailable to help Iris and her group.
Meanwhile, Caitlin breaks away from the group to confront the crime boss in person – a metahuman woman named Amunet who has the power to control shards of metal for offensive or defensive purposes. Upon visiting her at a club, she discovers that Amunet kidnapped and imprisoned another metahuman with the power to create a happiness drug from his tears. This motivates the girls to take action to free the imprisoned metahuman without the help of Central City’s biggest hero, the Flash.
Outside of Caitlin and her ice powers, none of the other girls possess any superhuman powers to combat Amunet and her security detail. The girls devise a plan that partially works, and they free the metahuman slave, “coincidentally” a man, who ungratefully runs off without a “thank you” despite just being freed from slavery and physical abuse designed to force him to cry to produce the drug. Amunet escapes to pester Caitlin later in the season to provide her with a compelling storyline to follow her character as time moves on.
The boys finally return from their overnight adventures, but neither side tells the other what really occurred that night out of what appears to be shame. Joe gets a moment to speak to Cecile’s daughter to confront her about her nightly occupation as an exotic dancer at one of the sleaziest clubs in town. She explains that its research about a book that she’s writing, but Joe implores her to self-examine why she felt it was necessary to hide this job from her mother. The episode concludes with teasing out another appearance of the season-long overarching villain as the plot moves toward an inevitable encounter between this villain, “The Thinker,” and the Flash.
To decide what effect this episode has on patriarchy, I will use the Narrative Criticism model. A narrative has four characteristics: the narrative must be comprised of at least two events, the events must be organized by time order, the events must include some kind of causal or contributing relationship among events in a story, and the events within the narrative must be about a unified subject (Foss 308). When using the Narrative Criticism model, one must examine features of the narrative, which includes the setting, characters, the narrator, events, causal relations, temporal relations, the theme, the audience, the type of narrative it is, and the objective of the narrative. When using the narrative model, one must also look at narrative coherence and narrative fidelity. Additionally, when engaging in Feminist Criticism, the objective is to determine if an artifact reinforces, reverses, questions or transcends patriarchy. It looks at how groups treat women and, in an intersectional way, minorities as well.
The setting of the Flash beyond just the literal location of Central City is important to the narrative. A supernatural phenomenon led to a boom in the number of super powered individuals that inhabit this fictional world. The existence and acceptance plays a role in each character’s view of their positionality within the world. Caitlin, for example, fears her superpowers because they come with an alternate persona that takes over whenever her powers are triggered. Another character in the main cast, Cisco Ramon, was hesitant to reveal his powers because of his fears as well. Since the death of her fiancé, the writers tie all plot points for Caitlin to her metahuman powers.
The main characters in this particular narrative are Iris West, Caitlin Snow, Felicity Smoak, and Cecile. The narrative on any given episode usually focuses on Barry Allen and his adventures in fighting crime with the support of the characters listed above as well as the male supporting cast. Iris, in particular, has received a new overarching plot this season as the “leader” of “Team Flash” because of her role in keeping the team together despite Barry’s absence earlier in the season. Leading up to her and Barry coming together as a couple, the show treated Iris as her own character who had her own career as a journalist who was trying to, at the time, uncover the mystery of the Flash before she discovered that Barry was the hero all along. Because of her lack of powers, she often serves as a damsel in distress; this creates drama for Barry to add to the conflict that he should be super powered enough to normally overcome.
Heading into the season, the writers attempted to add a new dynamic to Iris’ character as the leader of Team Flash (Ennis, 2017). At this point in the show’s run, this serves merely to distinguish her from Barry. The show initially established Iris as a strong, resourceful woman who was fearless after being raised by a father who works in the police force. By the fourth season, her primary role is “Barry’s fiancée,” so this change was made to add more to her character. In this episode, her development as leader is put into focus, as she has to make multiple decisions without the help of her super powered fiancé.
The theme of this episode is clearly feminism. “’Girls Night Out’ does, occasionally, go overboard with its message of female empowerment. That #feminism bit in particular was pretty cringe-worthy” (Moran, 2017). The episode uses blatant and overt messaging to portray the empowerment of women and the lack of needing men to solve all of their problems. Several bits of dialogue push this theme, including the previously mentioned “#feminism” line accompanied with the hashtag hand sign performed by the actors. Additionally, as quoted in the outset, this was the objective of the narrative as explained by the Executive Producer, Andrew Kreisberg. It’s worth noting that Kreisberg has been suspended from producing CW shows amid sexual harassment allegations (Ryan, 2017).
The narrative, while tackling serious themes, was a comedy. Plenty of humor was used throughout the narrative, including the entire subplot of Barry and the boys at the strip club. Felicity, a character who usually provides comic relief on another show, attempted to provide much of that in her stints throughout this episode as well. “Felicity does practically nothing the whole episode except crack a couple of jokes. Aside from the desperate need to have another female character on screen, her presence in this episode serves little purpose” (Zyber, 2017).
The events clearly occurred over a well-defined timeline of one evening. The focus of the present narrative switched occasionally from the main plot of Iris’ adventures to Barry’s misadventures, but both plotlines occurred concurrently over the course of one night. The two sides of the narrative, the main plot and side plot, converge cleanly at the end of the episode when Barry and Iris reconvene. The speed of the narrative is a little choppy, for the audience is made to believe that all of these events happened so quickly over the 42-minute episode when it’s simply not possible. In the absence of Barry Allen, the fastest man alive, it was incredibly easy for the girls to track and locate Amunet and her base of operations. Additionally, they move from location to location, often across the entire city, with relative ease and without a sense of the action taking a long period of time.
There is a lack of narrative coherence as well. One of the male characters, Harry, has the same face of a man convicted for murder. However, Harry strolls into the middle of the same police precinct that arrested his doppelganger two years prior without any consequence. A “dead” man wanted for murder walked into the headquarters of the police and no one batted an eye. There was some narrative fidelity, for many people in the audience can relate to Barry’s side of the story. There have been many bachelor parties that occur in strip clubs that take a turn for the worst. Otherwise, there’s little narrative fidelity in a superpowered society.
After analyzing this model with the Narrative Criticism model, I found that this artifact reinforces patriarchy despite its noble intentions of doing the opposite. Early on within The Flash’s serialization, the female characters, Iris and Caitlin in particular, are established as unbelievably intelligent women who can hold their own in their own situations. They are written as strong, independent women within the first few episodes, and that gave the series a refreshing feeling. However, as the series progressed, they started to fall into the trap of being intrinsically tied to men in everything that they do.
With Iris, in particular, her character growth has been almost entirely based on what the plot needs her to be, not because of any natural progression. “Despite being an original member of the cast and Barry’s true love, Iris’s development has suffered under the steady bloat of the cast, as regularly introduced new (male) characters get entire narrative arcs of personal growth while Iris is shunted to the sidelines. In four seasons, Iris has transitioned from waitress to grad student, from city blogger to journalist, and finally to leader of Team Flash with little to no explanation of how her ambitions have evolved over time, or how she might even have acquired the skills she now uses” (Young, 2017). This disregard for an integral character’s progression in favor of the addition of men to the story shows that feminism isn’t usually the focus of the show.
Obviously, The Flash is the story of Barry Allen, the fastest man alive who fights crime along with his friends in Central City. The objective of the narrative is to appeal comic book lovers and the related demographics. With that being said, a narrative that centers on a male but includes women can include strongly written female characters. Due to the commercial and critical success of Wonder Woman, a film centered on the titular character with the same narrative objective as the “Girls Night Out” episode of The Flash, the issue clearly isn’t the message. The reason why that film was much better received than this episode was because of how the issue of feminism was tackled by the main cast. “While she conforms to traditional articulations of gender in the way she performs an attractive, female, white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper class woman, she also unsettles gendered boundaries through performing a determined, astute, formidable warrior at the same time” (Cocca, 2013). Clearly, a well-written female character gets the message across more than having poorly-written female characters spout messages of girl power and “#feminism.”
If The Flash wanted to truly reverse or transcend patriarchy, they wouldn’t even have an episode dedicated to feminism. In fact, the entire show would consistently show strong and capable women who make wise and well-founded decisions on a regular basis. There wouldn’t be a need to explain that their actions as female characters empower women. Their actions would speak for themselves. “Have faith in the personas you’ve created. More importantly, have a little respect for the audience’s intellect. Show us a fierce woman and we’ll connect the dots from there” (Frith, 2017). Instead, we have a feminism-centric episode that actually does the opposite of what it intended to do. In fact, the episode plays up several stereotypes of women that are harmful to the message of empowerment.
For example, Caitlin’s alter ego that comes out whenever she uses her ice powers, Killer Frost, is shockingly a killer. Iris attempts to overcome this barrier by using the “power of friendship” to explain why Killer Frost doesn’t have to kill (Young, 2017). Typically, when they play, boys are taught to be rough and to play sports and to be independent and cool. Girls are taught to rely on each other, to rely on the power of friendship, and to love each other and to get along. This episode does nothing to buck this trend. It allows men the power to continue to exhort power on others while women are forced to be submissive and friendly because that’s just the way things are.
Overall, “Girls Night Out” missed the intended mark to show that women can be empowered to do whatever they put their minds while being free of the power of men. It’s understandable to see where the writers were coming from; they wanted a conflict that the girls could solve without the men’s help to show that they are free from the restraints of patriarchy. If they truly wanted to accomplish this, the work would have had to start (and continued) from the first episode of the first season with a focus on well-written characters, not a poorly written plot that tries to elevate weakly written females. “Girls Night Out” tries to transcend patriarchy, but in the end, it reinforces the very thing that it tries so desperately to fight.
Works Cited
Cocca, Carolyn. “Negotiating the Third Wave of Feminism in Wonder Woman.” PS: Political Science & Politics, vol. 47, no. 01, 2013, pp. 98–103., doi:10.1017/s1049096513001662.
Curtis, Neal, and Valentina Cardo. “Superheroes and third-Wave feminism.” Feminist Media Studies, 2017, pp. 1–16., doi:10.1080/14680777.2017.1351387.
Ennis, Tricia. “The Flash finally remembered it has female characters, but will that continue?” Syfy, SYFY WIRE, 10 Oct. 2017, www.syfy.com/syfywire/flash-finally-remembered-it-has-female-characters.
Fennessey, Sean. “The Superhero Movie Generation.” The Ringer, The Ringer, 13 Nov. 2017, www.theringer.com/movies/2017/11/13/16643172/superhero-movies-2017-box-office-future.
Foss, Sonja. Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice, 5th ed. Prospect heights, IL: Waveland, 2009
Frith, Vanessa. “’Girls Night Out’ on ‘The Flash’ Had One Glaring Flaw.” BuddyTV – TV News, Spoilers, Photos, TV Personality Quizzes, Trivia, 8 Nov. 2017, www.buddytv.com/articles/the-flash/girls-night-out-on-the-flash-h-66711.aspx.
Kile, Meredith B. “’The Flash’ EP Dishes on Iris’ Bachelorette-Gone-Wrong in ‘Girls Night Out’ — Plus, New Crossover Scoop!” Entertainment Tonight, ETOnline, 7 Nov. 2017, www.etonline.com/flash-ep-dishes-iris-bachelorette-gone-wrong-girls-night-out-plus-new-crossover-scoop-90607.
Moran, Sarah. “The Flash Goes Wild in ‘Girls Night Out’.” Screen Rant, 8 Nov. 2017, screenrant.com/flash-girls-night-out-reviews-spoilers/.
Ryan, Maureen. “’Supergirl,’ ‘Arrow’ Producer Suspended Amid Sexual Harassment Allegations by Warner Bros.” Variety, 11 Nov. 2017, variety.com/2017/tv/news/warner-bros-sexual-harassment-andrew-kreisberg-1202612522/.
Young, Cate. “’The Flash’ Still Doesn’t Know How to Handle Its Female Characters.” Cosmopolitan, Cosmopolitan, 22 Nov. 2017, www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a13857721/the-flash-girls-night-out-review/.
Zyber, Josh. “‘The Flash’ 4.05 Recap: “That’s Not How Feminism Works”.” HighDef Digest, The Bonus View, 9 Nov. 2017, www.highdefdigest.com/blog/flash-405-recap/.
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