Trickster Help

Alastair and I were at lunch today–Steak N Shake, his reward for having survived another INS-mandated doctor's visit–talking about tricksters. If you've been listening to PopD for the past three weeks, we're all about the trickster hero*, what it takes to make a good one, how that kind of protagonist dictates his plot, etc. And somewhere toward the end of the fries we realized simultaneously that all the trickster protagonists we knew were male. You can have trickster female characters, but they're almost always antagonists and beyond that villains. The only female trickster protagonist I could think of in film was Julianne in My Best Friend's Wedding, and I had actively disliked her because she was selfish and ruthless, although, when I thought about it, I might have accepted a male hero who did what she did. Julianne made me actively uncomfortable because she was a female trickster. Even when I went to my own work, both of my trickster heroines, Sophie and Tilda, were trying to disavow that part of themselves, trying to be "good," which I must have subconsciously seen as necessary to make them likable or at least acceptable to me. My only trickster hero, Davy, was, on the other hand, mostly unrepentant. The shape-changing, boundary-crossing, unrepentant peace-breaking rogue is admirable in the male, not so much in the female.

At that point, we agreed that we needed to find some good trickster heroines (and I began to think about writing one, just because). Shortly after that, we drew a blank. So we're throwing the question out to you: Know any movies with a good trickster heroine?

* The trickster is an archetype that goes back centuries and yet is as modern as tomorrow. He's Mercury, he's Loki, he's Coyote and Raven, he's Brer Rabbit and Bugs Bunny, he's the Riddler and the Joker, he's Nathan Ford (from Leverage) and Danny Ocean, he's Bart Simpson and the Fool from the Tarot deck. That is, he's the guy who replaces your reality with his own using trickery and deceit, moving across boundaries, thumbing his nose at everything but his own code, upsetting the status quo; he's a shape-changer who transforms the world through his transgressions. One key aspect of the trickster is that although he is not necessarily a positive influence, usually (not always) he effects positive change. He screws things up because screwing things up is fun, but because he screws things up, the world is better for it. There's a lot of joy in the trickster stories because the trickster really likes being a trickster. That's why trickster stories are often funny; the trickster is a clown. But he's a smart, powerful clown which is why the laughter is often both spontaneous (I can't believe he did that) and respectful (it's so clever the way he did that).