This article by a certain Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was reprinted in the Florida Times-Union this morning. Never mind that it's two weeks old as of this writing, there's bigger stuff going on here. For example, the title it was printed with in the FL T-U syndication: "Women are bringing the action in today's thriller movies: tough breed of female action heroes take over roles that used to be male." Which sort of implied that this article was going to make a point, right?
Hahaha no.
What Mr. Williams does instead is list female characters, drawing vague connections between them without ever really touching on what makes these roles iconic, culturally significant, or important, all the while infusing his article with a weird brand of faux-feminism that is actually, frankly misogynist in places. The implication that all of these characters come from the same basic stock (Ellen Ripley, of Alien and its many sequels) is interesting, but it oversimplifies the roles these characters play entirely, as well as any sort of historical precedence prior to Alien (1979) for a woman to be (gasp) competent - for example, both Anna and Giulia in The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970), who both manipulate the protagonist by weaponizing the femininity, and especially Anna, who sees right through Marcello's efforts at subterfuge. (And, due to Marcello's ambiguous sexuality crisis, may present an even more masculine archetype than the protagonist himself)
Yes, Noomi Rapace's character in Prometheus is a deliberate reference to Ripley's role in the earlier series, but you could also say that Dr. Grace Augustine from Avatar has more in common with Ripley than just sharing an actress (Sigourney Weaver). Thesis papers have been written about themes of motherhood and creation in the Alien series. Prometheus plays with some of those same themes, though makes it more about parenting in general - the ability (or lack thereof) to create, and then responsibility towards those creations, whether you will see them come to fruition or whether they will destroy you. Williams seems more obsessed with violence in this article than concerned with the motivations behind these characters, and while he alludes to Ripley's connection to Newt, and the alien's role as a mother, he never really seems to get the parallels between the characters and instead gets bogged down in a moment of faux-feminism over the line "Get away from her, you bitch!"
....Which is actually a perfectly acceptable use of the descriptor "bitch." As is Molly Weasley's similar line in her showdown with Bellatrix Lestrange, "Not my daughter, you bitch!" The problem with the word "bitch" is when it is misapplied to mean "a woman in a position of power who makes men feel threatened on account of her competence and influence and the fact that she does not conform to traditional ideas about gender roles." For example, Hilary Clinton. Or Tina Fey. In fact, this fictional sort of application of the word bitch is probably the only appropriate application - excepting the possibility that you actually know someone as emotionally abusive and manipulative as Tangled's Mother Gothel in real life.
Moving on, we encounter a weird and problematic section where he glances over the fact that Aeon Flux was a horrible flop and Karyn Kusama also directed Jennifer's Body, (which is incredible in theory and horrible in execution and I've already written a term paper about and isn't really the point of this post, so I'm not going to go into it in detail and needless to say it has embraced and subverted thriller and horror tropes all over the place, and I love it for what it wants to be and hate it for what it is), and moves into some bizarre statement about how The Hunger Games "turned archery into a hip sport in which women can compete with men."
Because this isn't about how women can compete with men. This is about how we need to stop comparing female characters to male ones and judge them on their own merits and recognize that writing female characters presents its own tragedies and triumphs and the issues that are important to a male character are not the same as the issues that are important to a female character, and the whole reason the arc of Alien works so well is because Ripley is a woman, and having a male character do battle against an angry mother extraterrestrial from beyond the stars would be a completely different film with a completely different emotional center. And I could spend a really long time talking about menstruation and reproduction and why these are abject topics for men vs for women and where the horror derives in each, but that's not the point. Let's just leave it as "Prometheus and Alien are scary for women because they are about losing control of your reproductive ability, whereas they are scary for men because vaginas and uteruses are scary in general for men." (Which would bring us back around into a conversation about the concept of the abject and the uncanny, and menstruation and pregnancy in the horror genre, but again - not the point.)
Moving on to Mr. Williams's misguided statements about Kill Bill and female assassins, he again seems to miss the entire point of the duology, or of Quentin Tarrantino's body of work in general. Yes, The Bride goes on a bloody rampage in which she takes down a bunch of other ladies, all of whom are still employed by or willingly aided her former employer, Bill, in the brutal slaughter of her fiance and unborn child (this turns out not to be exactly the case, but I will refrain from spoilers). Somehow, Mr. Williams seems to ignore the series's title - Kill Bill, as well as the fact that there are some really repulsive male characters in the films (for example, "Chuck who is here to fuck"), and the fact that these various female characters have been complicit or accomplice in the various crimes committed against the protagonist makes them just as guilty, and all of the men get what they had coming as well? Somehow, the fact that the series is a feminist revenge fantasy completely escapes Mr. Williams's grasp.
I don't really understand Mr. Williams's decision to group Black Widow (The Avengers) and Catwoman (The Dark Knight Rises), when Black Widow would be more at home in the company of La Femme Nikita, Wanted, and Salt's heroines (or that Mr. Williams seems to omit Hanna or The Professional/Leon from this discussion entirely, despite their heroines most certainly being part of this trend). Perhaps it is because both characters wear black, leather catsuits? However, this is an oversimplification - Catwoman is a thief and historical love-interest of Batman. Black Widow is a former Soviet assassin who earns her keep at SHIELD by infiltrating Fortune 500 companies and tracking down fugitive scientists. As The Dark Knight Rises hasn't been released yet, I can hardly draw conclusions about Catwoman's motivations, but his description of Black Widow as "Although she's a bare-knuckle ninja, her super power emanates from her pout and posture" sort of makes me wonder if we were watching the same movie.
Yes, okay, Black Widow is pretty. However, she's also got the clearest motivations of pretty much any character in the Avengers - she has debts to repay. While the boys club behind her spends the first half of the movie bickering, angsting, trying to defend the actions of the villain, or being otherwise incapacitated, she is the only character to obtain useful intel from Loki, pilots a jet, brings Bruce Banner in from India, beats up some Russian mobsters (while tied to a chair), and turns Hawkeye from Brainwashed and Crazy into a useful member of the team once more. The femininity that Black Widow possesses is weaponized. She recognizes what people expect of her and uses it to advance her own goals.
In concluding his discussion of Catwoman (who he demeans by calling "kittenish" - pun or not, this adjective does not empower a character) and Black Widow, Mr. Williams states "A counter-balance to the sexy superheroine is the feminist ideal of self-sufficiency." What is problematic about this statement is that it implies a character cannot be both beautiful and self-sufficient. Catwoman is a world-class thief who I anticipate will seduce Bruce Wayne for some nefarious purpose and not because she needs a man in her life. Black Widow is a super-spy and master assassin, and she's nobody's love interest. I think that these characters are both demonstrably self-sufficient.
But it is perhaps in bringing the article around to arguably more "real world" heroines that Mr. Williams makes his most subversive point. No, Thelma and Louise does not have a happy ending. That doesn't make it any less of an iconic film - if anything, it should have been involved in the discussion of Kill Bill and not shuffled all the way to the end like some kind of sloppy segue. What are we supposed to take from the penultimate example in this list being two women who hit a "literal dead end" ? That female characters shouldn't take risks? Whether or not a story is a tragedy or a comedy in the Shakespearean sense doesn't determine whether or not it has merit as a story. If it were, Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well would be the Bard's greatest masterpieces while Hamlet and King Lear would be regarded as slop.
Are Thelma and Louise good role models? No, probably not, but the fact that their revenge adventure ends badly doesn't mean that little girls should be discouraged from looking up to characters who aren't afraid to kick ass and take names. Suggesting that we should settle for Norma Rae, who comes from a film in an entirely different genre, ultimately subverts the entire exercise of listing these characters. There wasn't a point to your article, Mr. Williams, except to vaguely imply that while the presence of female characters in action movies is an interesting trend, women should stick to tamer, more realistic fare.
The important thing to take away from most of these women (maybe not Laura Croft, who is basically Indiana Jones with tits and ass) is that although they take center stage (or something close to it) in a genre with traditionally male protagonists, they're still women. The idea that for a female character to be strong and powerful, she basically has to be a dude is erroneous and ultimately, movies that adhere to this notion wind up feeling patently false. These are characters whose strength comes from, in part, their femininity and the issues therein, whether it is the host of uniquely female reproductive fears, the responsibility of being a caretaker, or the ability to take society's expectations of you and defy them - or weaponize them. They are role models, and they are a fascinating trend in cinema, but to simply list them and draw superficial comparisons between them and pass these pedestrian observations off as genuine feminism distracts from their actual significance. You can't just take a script and change James into Janine and find-and-replace all the pronouns and have a good female protagonist - the best female characters embrace their inherent femininity and exist in story worlds that are built to showcase why these traits are strengths, and that's what these characters have in common, not superficial details like black catsuits or bows and arrows or revenge plots.
No comments:
Post a Comment