Contradictions in their characters make women the best action movie heroes
TAli Larter and Milla Jovovich in (2015); Kate Beckinsale in (2003).
o fully comprehend the mess our culture’s in right now, you have to wrap your head around Pam Grier’s tongue. Specifically, I mean its lifesaving exploits halfway through the 1974 film Foxy Brown, at the point our heroine wakes up lashed to a bedstead in a backwoods heroin lab, the prisoner of two sweltering hillbilly rapists.
Spotting a razor blade on the bed stand, Foxy cranes over, her mudstained blouse torn open to the navel. Then she pops out that tongue, which ticklingly coaxes the blade across the table — until it, and the prospect of escape, are clasped between her lips. Spiky female empowerment vignette or tantalising S&M peep show? Anywhere else, the two categories would be poles apart — but in the cinema, things aren’t so simple.
It’s certainly true that we’re living through a golden age of female action stars — perhaps foremost among them Charlize Theron, who stars in the latest Fast & Furious caper alongside Michelle Rodriguez and some men — and, later this summer, Atomic Blonde, from one of the directors of John Wick. Theron may not have set the movement rolling, but in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, she played its greatest character to date: the crop-haired, bulletbiting Imperator Furiosa, an instant screen icon to stand beside Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor and The Bride.
Star Wars, the biggest franchise going, has made female leads a habit, first with Daisy Ridley’s Rey in The Force Awakens, then Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso in Rogue One. This year has already yielded three woman-led action films — Underworld: Blood Wars, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter Ghost in the Shell — with Alien: Covenant and Star Wars: The Last Jedi also still to come. Oh, and Wonder Woman: the first solo female superhero film in 12 years.
You could look at this as a triumph for gender equality. Serious promotional muscle is often geared towards ensuring that we absolutely do. But 43 years on from Foxy’s tongue-based getaway, it’s still often unclear if these heroines really are ass-kicking mistresses of their own destiny — or just pneumatic fantasy objects, passed off as ‘strong women’ as a disingenuous sop.
Action heroines
It was Grier who minted the modern-day action heroine in all her contradictions — both in Foxy Brown and its 1973 spiritual forerunner Coffy, in which a nurse turned “baddest One-Chick HitSquad that ever hit town” (per the poster) takes down the drug pushers who made her sister an addict.
Twenty-four years old on Coffy’s Underworld release, Grier was a graduate of the women-in-prison film scene — lots of bad girls in communal showers. But her regal bearing and statuesque dimensions had marked her out as a heroine-in-waiting in the eyes of Jack Hill, her director on The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. So when he had to find a star for a revenge thriller centred on an African American woman, he knew who to call.
There had been female action stars long before Grier: swashbuckling serial queens like Pearl White and Helen Holmes, who’d thrilled crowds week after week in the 1910s. But the fall of the Motion Picture Production Code in the late 1960s had ushered in a new era where women on screen could be violent — and have violence, often graphic and/or sexual, enacted upon them.
As black women, Coffy and Foxy were underdogs twice over — which, in the age of James Bond and Dirty Harry, made their action exploits doubly exotic. In a 1997 interview for the release of Jackie Brown — Quentin Tarantino’s fond ode to her ResidentEvil:Afterlife goddess-under-pressure screen aura — Grier described those early roles as “heroines of the women’s movement,” who “showed women how to be assertive and self-sufficient, not passive victims.”
That’s incontestable. But they were also frequently shown in their underwear or less, and in contexts that were either sexually degrading, or made them look dominant and insatiable. This fell in line with the comic-book tradition of “good girl art” — and, from the 1990s on, the more explicitly threatening ‘bad girl art’ — in which semi-dressed heroines struck unabashed poses for a straight, male, sexually nervous readership.
Submission
Cast an eye over some recent superhero film posters and you’ ll see the trend was, until very recently, still prevalent enough for parody. In 2011 the American cartoonist Kevin Bolk drew a group portrait of Marvel’s male Avengers performing the kind of bottom-flaunting contortions regularly demanded of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. The picture, which went viral online, is very funny — but it also lays bare the strange and queasy paradox built into so much action heroine imagery: a show of female strength on screen, if it turns men on, is still ultimately an act of submission.
The critic Laura Mulvey identified this back in 1973, writing that a woman in a normal narrative film “tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation”. I’d kill to read her on Transformers.
Or Lara Croft, for that matter. Video-gamers had been staring at their heroines’ backsides for years, thanks largely to the Tomb Raider franchise, which in the 1990s pioneered the concept of a lead character players could ogle while they controlled. Hollywood cottoned on quick. First came an official Tomb Raider film (and later a sequel) offering Angelina Jolie from all angles — and then the Underworld and Resident Evil series, in which StarWars:TheForceAwakens Kate Beckinsale and Milla Jovovich’s lithe and lively forms are unambiguously offered up as part of the spectacle.
You’d imagine the forthcoming Tomb Raider reboot, starring Alicia Vikander, will be a little more sophisticated about it, though an action film that denied its audience the pleasure of watching the hero’s body in motion — female or male — wouldn’t be much of an action film at all.
Not that “phwoar” is the only possible target. Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot allowed its leads to deploy their full comic arsenal of fumbles and pratfalls, while dressing them in similar baggy boiler suits to the all-male 1980s squad. Ignore the charge of ruined childhoods: the film upset that male segment of the audience for whom Mulvey’s erotic contemplation felt like an entitlement.
Mad Max: Fury Road was even more radical — though it spoofed the cliché with an intentionally ludicrous scene in which the villain’s escaped harem spritz themselves,
It took a while for cinema to reconcile action violence with motherhood. There’s a flicker of maternal instinct in Foxy Brown, whose ultimate mission, beyond even revenge for her boyfriend’s murder, is to make her neighbourhood safe. But the female-led action TV series that followed, like Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels, preferred their women fluffily pristine. It took Ellen Ripley to shake things up.
The original heroine of the Alien films was, famously, originally written as male — until director Ridley Scott realised flipping the hero’s gender would upend his audience’s expectations with it. In the original Alien (1979), she risks her life to save her pet cat — a decision that would have had to be played for laughs if she were male. And in James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens, she becomes a surrogate mother to a young girl called Newt, and her maternal instinct, once kindled, spurs her on to ever-greater feats of heroism.
Following closely was the Terminator franchise’s Sarah Connor, another iconic James Cameron single mum. Played by Linda Hamilton in the original 1984 film and its 1991 sequel, she was transformed by motherhood from a hapless waitress into a warrior goddess in a black vest top.
Motherhood is also the motor for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill diptych, in which Uma Thurman’s assassin, known as The Bride, embarks on a revenge spree against the four former squad-mates she holds responsible for the death of her unborn daughter. Skirting spoilers, let’s just say the ending is an unexpectedly happy one — though not for the father, who as elsewhere is very much an optional part of the action heroine family unit.
See also The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), in which Geena Davis’s softhearted amnesiac mother realises she used to be a gorgeous and glamorous CIA assassin — a persona that surges back to the surface when she has to rescue her daughter from the girl’s biological father. In the realm of psychoanalysis, the male struggle to reconcile those two images of womanhood is called the Madonnawhore complex, and is a cause of sexual dysfunction. In the mind of Shane Black, it’s a great premise for a script.
Is it unfair that cinema’s action women have to negotiate this kind of psychological Krypton Factor while their male counterparts flounce lightly past with a machine gun tucked under one arm? Well, absolutely. But when it comes to great characters we’ll remember for a lifetime, don’t mistake a struggle for a disadvantage.