Women in Get Carter

Glenda

In the film Get Carter the women are seen solely to be sexual objects and are only seen in relation to the male characters. their roles within the film are to serve as an erotic object for the male characters within the film and for the heterosexual males in the audience. 

This idea is reinforced in the scene in Kinnear's house with Glenda. In these scenes she is merely there to be a distraction for carter, and is there on the orders of Kinnear. In the begging on the scene she is made to serve the men drinks and is at risk of being berated if she performs the task wrong. While doing this she wears very little clothing. This is purely for the benefit of the males within the scene and for the pleasure of the heterosexual men in the audience. All of her actions are passive and everything she does is for the gains of the active male characters. This makes her seem to nothing more an an object to be gazed upon, and enforces the fact that Glenda is a completely passive character within the narrative. 

Despite the director portraying her in this way she could have potentially played an important role within the story and possibly have helped Carter - if he chose to listen to her. In the scene in Kinnear's house while Glenda is speaking to Carter, she reveals to him some him some very important information that could actually save his life, but because she is a woman she is completely dismissed by Carter. Instead of paying attention to what he is saying he  focusses on the meaningless conversation that Kinnear is having with the other men about a card game. The way this scene has been edited has been done so in such a way that the audience are also forced to dismiss Glenda as the sound of her voice is drowned out by the mens conversation. This I think is evidence to the fact that even the audience members don't feel what she has to say is important.

The way that she is shot connotes to the fact that Glenda is viewed as being an object. She is never seen in a full body shot unless she is in a sexual position, and is repeatedly viewed in segments using extreme close ups or from the side. Glenda never has a shot where she is without a man and also she is never seen in centre frame. This evokes that she is a very unimportant character within the narrative that cant be viewed at as being an actual person. It gives the impression that she literally could be anyone and Glenda herself is irrelevant - the only thing we are interested in is her body. The fact she is broken into pieces -particularly in the car/ sex scene- reinforces this and physically stop us from being able to view her as a whole person and we can passively view her as an object as we literally cannot see her. The fact that Glenda is only ever in scenes with males means that we can only ever see her character in relation to men. She is never on her own and we can only see her as the property of a man and again this enforces the fact Glenda cannot be viewed at as being a person in herself. We as an audience know nothing about her at all and its highly likely that Glenda isn't even her real name. 

In conclusion Glenda is a passive character that can viewed in relation to the active male characters. She is a clear archetype and has no development within the narrative.