The Female Protagonist in the 1970s Thriller Coma

Susan Wheeler arrived a year before Ripley and changed what a genre heroine could be

When Coma opened in February 1978, women in Hollywood thrillers were victims, love interests, or decorative bystanders. The 1970s paranoia cycle -- The Parallax View, The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, All the President's Men -- was almost exclusively male. Its protagonists were journalists, surveillance experts, CIA analysts, and newspaper reporters. They were played by Warren Beatty, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, and Dustin Hoffman. The genre had room for women only in supporting roles.

Coma broke the pattern. Susan Wheeler investigates a conspiracy not because she is a journalist or spy assigned to do so, but because she is a doctor whose professional competence tells her the data is wrong. Her authority comes from her training, not from physical dominance or romantic attachment to a male lead. Michael Crichton was explicit about this:

"When we started work in 1976, the recent women's movies had not yet appeared. Coma had that rarity — a strong heroine with an important job and hence a personality structure similar to a traditional male's." — Michael Crichton, MichaelCrichton.com (n.d.)

Michael Sragow at Film Comment placed Bujold's performance in a lineage that had barely begun:

"An intensely physical performance... a breakthrough female action star -- predating Sigourney Weaver's Alien by a year." — Michael Sragow, Film Comment (2019)

The film weaponizes institutional sexism as thriller fuel

The conspiracy in Coma would be easier to expose if Susan were a man. Every male authority figure she encounters -- Harris, Dr. George, Morelind, Mark, Bill Chandler -- dismisses her with language calibrated to exploit the assumption that a woman's concern is emotional rather than analytical. Harris calls her "Sue" and tells her to walk on the beach. The psychiatrist reports she is "under stress and a little paranoid." Mark tells her she is "just sensitized to it." Dr. George recites his credentials and refuses to show her the charts.

"She's continually derailed by her male colleagues who insist she's paranoid, hysterical and neurotic." — Kimberly Lindbergs, Cinebeats (2020)

Ken Anderson connected Coma to another film that used genre machinery to expose how systems control women:

"One of the strongest conspiracy theory thrillers because it ratchets up the tension by combining it with the combative feminist-era sexual politics of The Stepford Wives." — Ken Anderson, Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For (2012)

The Time Out review from 1978 identified the structural mechanism explicitly:

"The fact that nobody will believe Bujold, attributing her suspicions to female hysteria, only serves to point up the patriarchal nature of the medical profession." — Time Out, Time Out (1978)

Crichton fought the studio to keep the female lead

MGM wanted to recast the protagonist as male and pursue Paul Newman. Crichton refused. The fight is documented in the AFI Catalog production records and in a January 1978 Harvard Crimson interview where he stated: "I wanted to do a movie about a woman who wasn't a hooker or a housewife." In a Modern People interview the same month, he spoke about "the importance of telling stories about female accomplishments, which he thought were lacking in current cinema." (afi, thecrimson)

Bujold understood the significance. She had read the screenplay and immediately envisioned Paul Newman in the role -- confirming that the part was written in the register of a traditional male lead. She took it because no one was offering women that kind of part.

"I don't like to read scripts, and I would not be immediately tempted by anything called 'Coma.' It was Crichton. I met him and liked the way he talked about the movie. He was intelligent and clear. I trusted him, especially the medical background he would bring to the story." — Genevieve Bujold, The Washington Post (1978)

The pantyhose scene crystallized the change

The moment that audiences remembered was not a dialogue scene or a plot twist. It was Susan removing her pantyhose before climbing into the ventilation ducts above OR 8. The gesture is practical, unsentimental, and completely at odds with the genre's habit of making women suffer for their clothing choices. It became the film's feminist signature. See The Duct Crawl (Coma) for the full sequence analysis.

Andrew Sarris, reviewing the film in the Village Voice, registered the shift:

"Instead, she confronts all the menacing hirelings of a high-level medical conspiracy single-handedly... one senses that a new feminist spirit is rising upward in compensation." — Andrew Sarris, Village Voice (1978)