Nadine Franklin is the female protagonist of 2016 drama “The Edge Of Seventeen”. As I compared Nadine’s character with different traits from the Bem Sex Role categories, I found she was really hard to place as strictly masculine or feminine. While Nadine is portrayed as a very emotionally driven character, which is feminine, these emotions come out through masculine acts. She responds to problems by getting physical. At one point she throws a shoe across a restaurant while struggling to accept her best friend’s choice to date Darian Franklin, Nadine’s brother. She steals her mom’s car, runs off with a boy, and fights with her brother throughout the movie, each action serving as a response to emotions she is not willing or able to deal with.
It is made known from the opening of the movie that Nadine is not good at making friends. I wrongly associated this to her “shyness” – a feminine trait – but at the movie’s end I decided that wasn’t right. Nadine is very good at making friends when she feels wanted and included, as is made clear when Erwin introduces her to his film friends and she easily introduces herself. This scene juxtaposes the party Nadine attended at the start of the movie, where at she was excluded by her only friend, her brother, and everyone else at the party, causing her to feel overwhelmed by anxiety. Therefore, while her lack of friends and social anxiety may make Nadine come off as a shy (connotatively feminine) person, she possesses a strong personality and is an overall forceful presence once she really gets the opportunity to be herself.
Another aspect of Nadine’s personality that was difficult to pinpoint was her ability to be independent. Initially, I wrote her down as a self-reliant, individualistic person on account of her not having many friends. Looking back on the film now, I see she was a very dependent person. She relied on her dad’s encouragement when she was young. After he died, Nadine turned to her best friend Krista. When Krista and her fought, she relied on Mr. Bruner and Erwin. It isn’t until the end of the movie that Nadine is able to take care of herself, and even then she still leans heavily on these relationships with other people.
Overall, Nadine Franklin is a very middle line character on the spectrum of masculinity and femininity. She has a lot of the qualities that a stereotypically feminine character would have, but expresses them in masculine ways.
Shared by: Riley Schwahn
Image Credit: cinema-fanatic.com