Jess Zimmerman’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
Late last month, British actress Susan Sheridan died of cancer at the age of 68. Sheridan was an accomplished voice artist, but for me (and, it seems, for a lot of news writers), her defining work was in the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show. Sheridan played Tricia McMillan, known as Trillian (because, according to writer Douglas Adams, “it was a nickname that also sounded like an alien name”) – one of two surviving humans on the show, who is also an astrophysicist and the girlfriend of Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox. After Sheridan’s obituary was published, my friend Louise tweeted at me to ask if I’d written anything about Trillian. I hadn’t, I answered, but oh gosh did I have thoughts.
This turned out to be true, but incomplete. I did have thoughts about Trillian, a character who the Guardian notes was “not especially well written” but to whom Sheridan’s interpretation gave “an intelligence and likeability that removed any suggestion of her being a token space bimbo.” But I didn’t have a lot of feelings about her. I was sorry to hear about Sheridan’s passing because she was comparatively young and enormously talented, and because I am a human who’s capable of empathy, but not specifically because she was the voice of a character I loved. My feelings about Trillian were as they always have been: fairly indifferent. The one woman in my favorite sci-fi series of all time, and I just didn’t really care. What, I wondered, the hell?
*
Here is my feminist origin story: I sprang fully-formed as a twentysomething feminist from inside the head of a teenage boy. All through high school and college, my favorite books – my formative books – were the kind of works that might show up in Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky. I loved (and still love) Catcher in the Rye. I loved (and still love) A Clockwork Orange. I profoundly loved (and still love) all Vonnegut. And most everlastingly of all, I loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is perfect and hilarious and life-changing and extremely, extremely jam-packed with dudes.
I’m sympathetic to men’s defensiveness when they’re told their faves are problematic (I know, you wouldn’t think I’d be sympathetic to men, but I am!), because a lot of those are my faves too. Figuring out a way to love a piece of culture without letting it off the hook was a difficult task, and one that was ultimately crucial to my development as a feminist and as a thoughtful human. I had to recognize that, even as I’d made so much room for these books inside myself, in a very real sense they had no room for me. And so let it be said: The Hitchhiker’s Guide series is one of the best sci-fi properties on the planet, and also there is only one core* female character, and she is not good.
*
It’s not that Douglas Adams didn’t try with Trillian. He gave her two higher degrees, in math and astrophysics. He made her the nominal romantic partner of one of the characters, yes, but not the sympathetic Everyman hero; Arthur has designs on Tricia when they first meet, but he never “gets” or even pursues her, at least not while Adams was alive. Life, the Universe, and Everything contains a couple of extremely cutting scenes showing her as an underappreciated girlfriend, and in Mostly Harmless, there are two alternate-universe versions of Tricia McMillan; one is a neglectful mother and the other is career-driven, single, and full of regrets. Strong Female Character markers everywhere! And hey, at least Adams put a woman in at all, which almost didn’t happen. In the footnotes to the radio scripts, producer Geoffrey Perkins notes: “In earlier drafts the character was called Goophic, before that Smoodle, and before that she was a man!”
But this is still poor, benighted Earth, where people think digital watches and sexism are pretty neat ideas. Trillian doesn’t get a lot of laugh lines, or a lot of interior landscape; most of the time, she’s seen from the outside, filtered through a male observer. Until her alt-Earth version appears in book five, there’s really only one point where the omniscient narrator dips into her psyche and gives us a sense of Trillian as a subject – and it’s when she’s deciding to leave Zaphod. And it’s that lack of subjectivity – the fact that even attempts to make Trillian a more dimensional female character still stop short of making her a fully-realized person – that leaves her, and the series, vulnerable.
Trillian has never been able to escape being buffeted by conventions and expectations. When she’s good, she’s either a spoof on the “token girl” or a by-the-numbers Strong Female Character. When she’s bad, she’s a security hole – a way for lazy, shitty tropes about women to hitch a ride, Ford Prefect-style, on a series that otherwise bucks cliché.
*
While Sheridan’s delivery gave the radio character some gravitas, she was eventually written out of the show with the explanation that she was “forcibly married to the President of the Algolian Chapter of the Galactic Rotary Club.” The Trillian of the 1981 TV show still has the degrees, but she also has a backless, plunge-necked red leotard, platinum Bangles hair, and actress Sandra Dickinson’s distinctive Audrey-from-Little-Shop baby voice. The best that can be said is that she eventually gets to put on a skirt. (Of course, astrophysicists – and others – can show thigh and cleavage if they want to! But when they do it on a television show, it’s usually for a reason other than personal autonomy.) And the less said about what’s done to Trillian in the 2005 movie, the better – she’s a quirky, free-spirited girl whose purpose is to teach empathy to Zaphod and spontaneousness to Arthur. A Manic Pixie Dream Astrophysicist.
As for the books – well, the first time I read the books, it was in fact because of Trillian, but if you’re expecting this to be a heartwarming “young girl is drawn into sci-fi because she feels represented” story, you’ll want to move along. What happened was, we were staying in the home of a family whose son had the Hitchhiker’s books, and the back cover copy referred to “sexy space cadet Trillian,” so I thought it might be racy. Book Trillian is far from being a sexy space cadet, to her and Adams’ credit. But the fact that she was described this way in the marketing copy says a lot about expectations of female sci-fi characters at the time, and who their audience was assumed to be.
*
Many elements of Hitchhiker’s Guide – the auto-translating Babel fish, for instance, which gets around the “why do all the aliens speak English” issue of most space dramas – are deliberate jabs at science fiction problems or themes. But the characters (with the possible exception of Marvin the robot) are all sui generis. Arthur isn’t a variation on the usual hapless nitwit in a bathrobe thrown into a galaxy too big to comprehend, because that’s not really a thing. Ford isn’t a spoof of the standard boring alcoholic goose-hating roving alien researcher. And so on.
But Trillian? I’m not so sure about Trillian. Even when nobody’s making a hash of her, even when a master like Susan Sheridan is giving her the best possible read, her role is kind of “the girl who’s there, but smart.” And that makes her vulnerable to predation by hackish tropes. Why not have her walking around the bridge of the Heart of Gold in a backless plunging leotard? Why not develop an offensively goofy romantic subplot where she helps Arthur learn to carpe the diem? Trillian wouldn’t do that, you say? How would you know?
When female characters are whole, real, singular people, they are to a certain degree inoculated against these banalities. When they’re skeletons, though, someone will be more than happy to flesh them out with whatever stereotype is currently preferred. Women characters are always under attack by hackneyed ideas; without an interior, they just collapse under the weight.
*
I don’t hold Trillian’s nonentity status against her, or against Adams. She’s a product of her times, whatever her times may be: eye candy when that’s the biggest pitfall for women in a pop-culture boy’s world, whimsical saver of men’s psyches in the Manic Pixie era. And I find her a lot more interesting now than I did as a Ford-obsessed preadolescent – because I’m interested in women characters generally now, including the ways they break down. Maybe figuring out Trillian’s failures can point the way to a new age of sci-fi women as distinctive and indelible as Ford Prefect or Zaphod Beeblebrox, women whose strength will lie not only in their smarts but in the way they stand guard against laziness and cliché.
In a lot of ways, that age is already here. I’m just sorry Susan Sheridan won’t get to give voice to it.
*
* I’m defining “core” here as “existing in all adaptations of the work” – radio show, book, television show, and movie.
Tags: books, feminism, jess zimmerman
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Somewhere in the void is the eighth grade language arts notebook in which I used to draw all the female main characters of the books I read. (Because boys were weird and hard to draw. Like hands.) A full page is devoted to Trillian. Trillian with cornrows and fancy alien earrings and space jumpsuits and mice.
I was supremely disappointed in ninth grade when I saw a photo from the TV series and found out she wasn’t actually black.
Do I still sometimes want to name my hypothetical future daughter after her? …possibly…
Oh ugh I didn’t even get into this here but yeah she’s supposed to at LEAST be dark-complected — it’s quite clear in the book!
I firmly believe she was black, though. Adams describes her as: “…slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little knob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes. With her red head scarf knotted in that particular way and her long flowing silky brown dress, she looked vaguely Arabic.”
Does. Not. Sound. White.
It wasn’t just my brain then. I feel so validated now.
Oh my God, YES!! I remember when the movie was coming out when I was in high school. I’d read the books a bit earlier and I was disappointed Trillian was white instead of dark skinned. Then I had a long argument with a white girl over lunch when she said just because it said “darkish” didn’t mean Trillian couldn’t be white. SCREW YOU, LEE! There were exactly zero non-white girls in science fiction back then, why couldn’t you just let me have my own interpretation?
Anyway, I actually liked the movie. *shrugs* It was silly and I liked Mos Def and Deep Thought and the Perspective Bazooka thing and Trillian’s line “It won’t work on me, I’m already a woman.”
Mos Def looked suspiciously like my high school crush in that movie. I can’t not like it.
Mos Def has cheekbones that still haunt me with their beauty to this day.
It’s so odd that Adams would include an explicitly non-white female character (in a series where, IIRC, pretty much every other humanoid character is described in a way that can easily make them white-by-default) and then just….not do much with her.
I’d love to pick his brain about Trillian. I too felt like her characterization was all over the map both within and between adaptations and part of me wants to ask him “why did you bother? What were you trying to do?”
Yeah, she never really coalesced into a cohesive character. I wish she had more consistent agency — like she has flashes of “I’m pulling the story forward” but she’s just…. along for the ride a lot of the time? It’s so frustrating, because she’s within spitting distance of a really awesome character and it just never comes together 🙁
The things I remember about Trillian, amongst the sea of blandness, are the times where she is clearly, clearly, on her own journey. One that uses the men in the story to get places and do things, not because she’s ‘a girl’ but because, ya know, she just doesn’t happen to have her own spaceship so when someone WITH a spaceship comes along, she uses him to get somewhere cool. It feels like she has more agency than all of the men combined, except… we don’t get to actually SEE it, and so it’s meaningless. I remember all the times she’s exasperated at having to deal with the men, not, it seemed to me, because ‘oh, men!’ but because she has BETTER THINGS TO DO. Why are we messing around with this stupid bureaucracy when we could be off with Slartibartfarst, seeing fjords being made! Etc.
Which is why I loved the radio adaption and found the tv series weird. None of that is going on in the tv series. The movie had some (I also love the perspective gun)
I don’t know how much of this is because those things are there. I suspect a lot of it was my brain trying to find a way to make the echoing space where her character is say something back, because I needed it to. It’s not that there’s nothing there, as such. It’s that the thing that’s there, where her character is in the story, is somehow impossible to access. As if she was imported wholesale from a completely different story, and the bits we get in the Guide barely warrant a mention in her own story, because there are so many cooler things than ‘that time I hitched a ride with a couple of losers’.
How badly I want to read that story.
This is how I read it too- and it’s just frustrating because I feel like that story is there (must be there?) around the edges, but it never becomes part of the narrative.
I loved this woman. She’s just so smart, and she’s studying the universe, and then she just takes off with this stranger because he happens to have a space ship and she wants nothing more than to go see the universe for herself. Just the sort mind and brashness to (in one evening) discover that yes, aliens are a thing, and yes, she can go to outerspace, and then doing it. I love that. That’s a great story. Then we just get nothing. Ugh.
I would love to see that… all I’ve seen in interviews is him admitting that it’s a weak part and that Susan Sheridan did a fantastic job with basically nothing to work with..
Oh, so it wasn’t just me! I always envisioned her as a Muslimah, and that line right there must be why.
I named my first car Fenchurch, so.
Fenchurch forever! She could fly and she figured out what had been going wrong all this time and how the world could be made a good and happy place. Life goals.
And then she just…..vaporized in the next book. Colossal copout, Adams.
That was when I gave up on the series! I was pretty much like, “Okay, that’s where that reference comes from, okay, that’s kind of funny, okay, this is moderately interesting” until that happened and I went NOPE NOPE NOPE out of there.
The more I think about it, the more this incident tips me over the edge from “books that failed to change my life” to “books that reinforced for me, once again, that female characters are essentially disposable,” and I’m angry now.
I get that Mostly Harmless was Adams’ way of getting himself out of another sequel, but I spent the entire book worrying about Fenchurch, to the point where I didn’t really care what was happening to any of the other main characters except Random.
I literally cried out loud on the bus when I read that part. I love Fenchurch.
not The Alleged Car?
Had I been thinking clearly, this is exactly what I would have called my first car. In fact, given the circumstances of its unmourned departure, this is how I will refer to it from now on.
My first iPod was Marvin (and then it was Marvin II and Marvin III) and my computer was Eddie. I always took great pleasure in hooking them up and seeing that Eddie DIDN’T shut down…
my computers have always been named fortytwo…until I had three in the same house. then the shitty one was fortyone, the passable one fortytwo and the worthy one fortythree.
My (ex now) husband wouldn’t let me. So my daughter is Tegan. (But spelled Taidhgin)
One of the best Trillian moments actually happened in the movie, where she gets hold of the Point of View gun and reminds everyone that for God’s sake, Arthur wasn’t the only one who lost Earth. I remember that moment of pathos every bit as much as “with a degree in math and another in astrophysics what else was there to do? It was either that or the dole queue again on Monday.” (and if I’ve misquoted, forgive me; the book is miles away and I’m only partly caffeinated. 😉
Also, yes, people like to rag on the film, but it had some great moments, and I went to a screening that literally had teenage girls in bathrobes dancing in the aisles with pure geeky glee to “So Long and Thanks For All the Fish,” which was beautiful, so _haters to the left._
“It won’t work on me; I’m already a woman.”
I love that part.
And she *nails* the resignedness of that line, too.
Yeah, it’s not braggy. She’s clearly pissed at the whole situation.
I feel you. I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, but it came out when I was thirteen. I was obsessed with HHG at that point, and dragged all my friends to the film, which was unpopular where I live, and that convinced plenty of them to give the books a shot. I remember one of my closest friends in sixth grade, I was always trying to lend her books so we could talk about them, and after she read and enjoyed HHG I felt so encouraged that I gave her my treasured copy of LeGuin’s “The Dispossessed,” which predictably resulted in a phone call from her mother to mine. I wasn’t allowed to recommend her books after that.
Aww, that is a lovely image 🙂
I also really enjoy the movie adaptation, and think that the POV gun bit in Deep Thought’s basement was one of the film’s best moments. It’s not the world’s greatest film, but it’s fun and goofy and touching and Mos Def somehow managed to steal the show from Sam freaking Rockwell, who chews so much scenery it’s his primary source of carbohydrates (and I say that affectionately, because Sam Rockwell is delightfully good at chewing scenery). People grouse about how it’s not like the books, but my only response to that is basically “are you at all familiar with H2G2 as a thing?” Like, consistency between mediums is not exactly the franchise’s calling card.
And anyway, I would spend my life listening to Stephen Fry read Guide entries if I could. When the film came out they published a few bonus ones online, and him talking about Blogging is like the greatest most hilarious thing ever.
I was so excited when they announced Stephen as the Book I think I may have shrieked. Sure the movie has its failings but that is a prime piece of casting right there.
Also worth noting that DNA was kicking the POV Gun idea around for well over a decade before the movie came out. Pretty much all of the new bits in the movie, including Humma Kavula and Vogsphere, and the slapsticks used to evolve the Vogons, were from Douglas’s own movie drafts.
I’m really intrigued to read Toast readers’ opinions of the POV Gun. I’m a guy who was very tangentially involved in the movie, and briefly worked with Douglas on web/game stuff, and that scene has always flummoxed me. Thank you so much for sharing them.
I was so worried about Rockwell but let’s be honest, Zaphod is a pretty epic scenery chewer so it seems pretty appropriate.
Also can we talk about ALAN RICKMAN as MARVIN? Amazing.
I like the movie quite a lot, as long as I pretend the last ten minutes didn’t happen. Part of this, I think, is that Hitchikers is less ‘a book series’ as ‘a loose conglomerate of media’. I have segments of the radioshow memorised, I read the books over and over, I know how the story shifted and morphed. So the movie is just another version, which means that I have basically taken the bits I like from all of the versions, and morphed them together in my mind.
Can we talk about Warwick Davis as the physical Marvin? Like, 1) getting a little person for the part, and 2) his flawless physical action. I love Warwick Davis and he rocked it.
Even though she was 1000% less bad in this than anything else I’ve seen her in, I am still pissed they cast Zooey Deschanel as Trillian (instead of, you know, any of a jillion WOC who would have done a great job). Other than that, the casting was A+++
I HATED Zoe Deschanel as Trillian – she reminded me of some of the more vacant Dr Who girls from the Tom Baker era. (Although, to be fair, that’s kind of how the part was written, but she was cooler in my head).
This is wonderful and outstanding and a far better articulation of my frustration with HHGTTG than I could’ve written.
I think I might project more personality onto Trillian than Adams actually wrote. her status as Only Sane Man in a galaxy that operates on nonsense is appealing to me (even as the term itself is ironic in this context). although even as I say it “the one sensible woman surrounded by bungling men” is a pretty condescending archetype, too. in a way, I wonder if she’s not even partly metafictional–she coasts atop the absurdity of the galaxy, but none of the irreality that defines the series manages to stick to her. she’s a tourist in a bizarre universe.
I’ve always visualized her as the model they used in the gigantic photoillustrated edition, where she’s more of a bedraggledly fashionable Londoner and certainly not slit-thigh fodder (that edition also features a black Zaphod who’s incomparable). and let us never speak of what they did to her in the movie. that travesty is the reason I can’t watch that thing again.
She’s like the Peanuts Franklin of The Guide. Too good to be real. Maybe Adams had the same reserves with making her more complex that Schultz had, not being able to make a minority character more neurotic without that reflecting on the whole group, as a stereotype. Which is DEPRESSING AS HECK
Here is my feminist origin story: I sprang fully-formed as a twentysomething feminist from inside the head of a teenage boy.
have you been reading my diary again? i sprang out around 16, but seriously, my formative years were full of pulpy sci-fi and MAD magazine and humorous books by Groucho Marx.
and then a light clicked one day.
i recently salvaged all my old copies of MAD from the parental garage, it is ASTOUNDING the degree to which women/girls/ladyflavored people are other/absent.
reading thru again as an adult, I realized that ALL of the POV characters in my copies were boys. in gender non-dependent situations, like delivering smartass lines or witnessing ridiculous adults at the mall. but nope. boys were your POV, boys were in on the joke, and I, girl who was in on the joke, didn’t officially exist. …i was surprised how little this registered to 13 year old me.
I’m sorry to say that, when I was a (pre)teenage boy, first hearing the original radio series when it played on my local public radio station in the early ’80s, I entirely missed the fact that the only real female character was barely even a character, and was, um, disposed of with a single trite line about being married off to some . . . guy.
It was only when I played the radio series for my pre-teenage daughters on a long car trip that light dawned.
The radio series and the books are still very funny, and I can’t undo the fact that they shaped parts of my intellectual and personal development in ways that can only be described as out of all proportion – I’ll never be able to take consumer electronics seriously, and don’t even get me started on shoe shops! – but oh, how I wish it wasn’t all so clearly written by boys about boys and for boys!
This post sums up The Trillian Problem perfectly.
WRT Arthur: The “hapless everyman who has no discernible skills but nevertheless ends up having big adventures” is an existing archetype, though.
Hey now, let’s be fair. Arthur makes a mean sandwich.
I do kind of enjoy Arthur as a sort of un-hero character. He has moments, but for the most part, he’s unredeemed. He really does just want to sit in a bath all day and never get dressed. He fucks up far more than he saves anyone – he breaks a starship by asking for tea, and his happy retirements are either squatting in a ditch in the past, squatting in a ditch on a damp planet where he makes sandwiches, or the sweet embrace of death.
He’s unpleasant and unlikeable without being an antihero jerkass. He’s just a wet loaf of bread as a human being, and never rises above it. He’s not really an everyman hero, he’s just an everyman.
Then without Trillian in the latter radio series up pops Lintilla, who is a bit hard to tell from Trillian, and also vanishes abruptly.
DUE TO MARRIAGE. I could probably write a whole other piece about Lintilla.
Marriage as annihilation!
What did you make of the Trillian(s) of Mostly Harmless?
Honestly, I think the whole problem of Trillian is what Robert Webb called (not) “letting women be idiots too.” Female characters in comic fiction can’t just have whatever trick a male character has that makes them funny to read about/watch (hapless bad luck; boundless egotism; unceasing depression; dynamism and a towel; etc.) — they are FIRST written as women, THEN… whatever else. It’s a great observation that changed how I look at female characters in comedy.
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/12/rober…
Honestly, I think the whole problem of Trillian is what Robert Webb called (not) "letting women be idiots too." Female characters in comic fiction can't just have whatever trick a male character has that makes them funny to read about/watch (hapless bad luck; boundless egotism; unceasing depression; dynamism and a towel; etc.) — they are FIRST written as women, THEN… whatever else. It's a great observation that changed how I look at female characters in comedy.
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/12/rober…
Aw, I always loved that when Arthur Dent was trying to guilt-trip her about not noticing him and running off with Zaphod Beeblebrox, her answer wasn’t “Oh, god, I’m so sorry, I should’ve appreciated you, gentle nobody” or a swoony “It’s OK because I’m in LOVE!” but instead just a kind of “*shrug* Eh, that party was boring and he seemed interesting. And I was right.”
This is really amazing.
I HATED Zoe Deschanel as Trillian – she reminded me of some of the more vacant Dr Who girls from the Tom Baker era. (Although, to be fair, that's kind of how the part was written, but she was cooler in my head).
Take a look around. Things haven’t changed for women much. Movies are mostly male. Look at the posters for them. Even if it’s a chick flick, the male star is usually named first, and bigger. Most ‘big’ writers’ are mostly men. Late night television hosts, all male. NPR, for crissake, so very male. Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, has at most, 2 women on at a time, out of the five. I could go on and on and on, but, you know.
I too, am sorry that Trillian was an afterthought, and that Susan Sheridan is gone. Recently, I’ve been listening to older radio shows, like ‘Suspense’ and ‘The Whistler’ and ‘The Black Museum.’ Also sexist. Mostly male voices, women in distress or easily ‘bumped off.’
I so miss Douglas Adam’s brain, as well. H2G2 changed my world view. I realized that that view is as valid as that of the Bible. And easier to understand. lol
Did you know that Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Douglas Adams, and the members of Monty Python were all friends? What isn’t known more generally is that they knew and hung out with wildly creative women, too, including Emma Thompson, who actually introduced Fry to Laurie. At least, she made it to fame and fortune, too. I wonder how many others did not make it because of their lack of a penis and deep voice.
OH that SUCKS. I would have loved to have had someone to talk about HHTG to. What a betrayal with The Dispossessed, which is *still* one of my most treasured books, 30 years after reading it for the first time.
i was rather certain Fenchurch was female, and existed in the series.
Nice post admin thanks for sharing.