The director of Birds of Prey is a woman of color, and even she used this exact template for women’s grief, by having the heroine of the film (Harley) briefly engage in it, (before going out to buy a hyena and party like a madwoman).

My observation was that the only templates a lot of women have for their behavior is in films, and even female directors don’t have a language of their own, that speaks to women’s emotions. Most of the images we see were crafted and written by men.

It’s going to take some time for women in film to find their own voices for telling their stories onscreen. It may take forever for women of color to do so, since there’s no template for us at all. We were never even thought of in the making of such films, so have no idea what grief looks like for us, except from unfortunate personal experience.

I’m not sure which I find more objectionable, having a template for your emotions that isn’t anything like you, so that you have to mine yourself out of the images given to you, or having no template at all, so that you have to guess about whether or not you even have one.