Hard Corps: Women in power and the politics of… | Little White Lies

Long Read

Hard Corps: Women in pow­er and the pol­i­tics of tak­ing action

20 Sep 2017

Black and white illustration depicting a protest scene. Numerous people are holding signs with slogans related to women's rights and rebellion. The central figures include a woman holding a megaphone and a person wearing a cowgirl hat.
Black and white illustration depicting a protest scene. Numerous people are holding signs with slogans related to women's rights and rebellion. The central figures include a woman holding a megaphone and a person wearing a cowgirl hat.
More and more movies are fea­tur­ing female char­ac­ters with strength, agency and a dri­ve to take action. What took them so damn long?

Out­rage from a bur­geon­ing goon squad of men’s rights activists against major cin­e­ma releas­es that have dared to intro­duce strong, cen­tral women char­ac­ters into pre­vi­ous­ly dude-cen­tric cult fran­chis­es has become so ubiq­ui­tous that it’s now an assumed part of con­tem­po­rary film dis­course. Mad Max: Fury Road, Ghost­busters, Star Wars: The Force Awak­ens, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Sto­ry have all to vary­ing degrees sent shock­waves through these vocal com­mu­ni­ties, prompt­ing much bang­ing of sym­bol­ic saucepan lids from any num­ber of social media soapboxes.

This despair seems to clus­ter around the ques­tion, where have all the real men” gone?’ The pos­si­bil­i­ty that they may feel emas­cu­lat­ed by the very beloved genre films of their youth seems only to add salt to the wound, prompt­ing unam­bigu­ous­ly misog­y­nist tantrums that lean heav­i­ly upon the pre­cious­ness of their own sub­jec­tive nos­tal­gia. Exhib­it A is that ugly old chest­nut, the fem­i­nist war-cry that these reboots, sequels and re-imag­in­ings are rap­ing” their childhood.

This same tox­i­c­i­ty has recent­ly rid­dled sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy lit­er­a­ture as well. In 2015 and 2016, alt-right trolls took aim at the pres­ti­gious Hugo Awards and what they per­ceived as a left­ist bias. Women, of course, have long had a force­ful pres­ence in this lit­er­ary domain, par­tic­u­lar­ly those dri­ven by strong ide­o­log­i­cal moti­va­tions: Ursu­la Le Guin, Mar­garet Atwood and Octavia But­ler to name but a few. And in film, direc­tors includ­ing Kristi­na Buozyte, Kate Chap­lin, Kathryn Bigelow, Jen­nifer Phang and Lizzie Bor­den have each used sci­ence fic­tion codes and con­ven­tions in pro­found and often diverse ways.

But it is in front of the cam­era that the genre’s his­to­ry of strong, active women is the most vis­i­ble and diverse. Hero­ine Maria and her evil gynoid doppelgänger in Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, aggres­sive sex bomb Jane Fon­da as the title char­ac­ter in Roger Vadim’s Bar­barel­la, tur­bo-mum Sarah Con­nor from the Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise, resource­ful Kat­niss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and – of course – the icon­ic image of the no-shit-tak­ing woman, Sigour­ney Weaver’s Rip­ley from the Alien movies. For starters.

But if we’re going to lift the lid off of this par­tic­u­lar Pandora’s Box, it’s worth doing it prop­er­ly. Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of strong women in cin­e­ma bleed out­wards across eras, pro­duc­tion con­texts and the often blur­ry lines of film genre itself. Any pre­his­to­ry of women char­ac­ters in the recent Star Wars movies – Rey (Daisy Rid­ley) from The Force Awak­ens and Jyn Erso (Felic­i­ty Jones) from Rogue One – must nec­es­sar­i­ly look far beyond the ter­rain of sci-fi itself.

These two women are impor­tant sym­bols, how­ev­er, find­ing them­selves on the precipice between the his­to­ry lead­ing up to their posi­tion­ing at the cen­tre of their sto­ries, and the futures (both fic­tion­al and, in terms of real world impact, ide­o­log­i­cal) that lies ahead. These char­ac­ters con­tin­ue a tra­di­tion of some of the most mem­o­rable and impor­tant women-of-action in the cin­e­ma as their jour­neys take them on a kind of sub­jec­tive, indi­vid­u­alised process of mil­i­tari­sa­tion. These are women who con­scious­ly imple­ment an often sys­tem­at­ic approach to Tak­ing Action, rather than mere­ly per­form­ing acts.

In the case of Star Wars, it would be dif­fi­cult not to trace the franchise’s inter­est in strong women back to Princess Leia and Padmé (Leia’s ide­o­log­i­cal­ly klutzy slave-biki­ni phase aside), but it is obvi­ous­ly with The Force Awak­ens’ Rey that women moved to the front­lines of the action-and-empa­thy stakes. Yet Leia’s tra­jec­to­ry itself is telling: she does not evolve from a Princess to a Queen as regal log­ic would com­mon­ly dic­tate, but from a Princess to a Gen­er­al. Real princess­es don’t sit back on thrones, sym­bol­ic or lit­er­al. They lock, they load, they mobilise the troops.

Acts of fem­i­nist mobil­i­sa­tion – be they for­mal or infor­mal – are vital to women like Leia, Rey and Rogue One’s Jyn. Accu­sa­tions of Rey’s Mary Sueism – a female char­ac­ter type whose strength is deemed too ide­alised, too unre­al­is­tic – fall at in the face of what was clear­ly years of self-train­ing and dis­ci­plined prepa­ra­tion off-cam­era before the action of The Force Awak­ens played out. Her mark­ing off days, scratched into the wall of her aban­doned Walk­er-home, show a woman strate­gi­cal­ly prepar­ing in wait, her ded­i­ca­tion to up-skilling final­ly pay­ing off when snow­man droid-child BB8 arrives, kick­ing off her inter­galac­tic adventures.

In Rogue One, Jyn is a defi­ant out­sider who, by join­ing the Rebel Alliance, under­scores the sym­bol­ic pow­er of their very name: a mobilised space where non-con­formist dis­si­dents must find a way to work togeth­er. But like The Force Awak­ens, the chal­lenge for Rogue One is to find a way to con­tin­ue con­sol­i­dat­ing its mythol­o­gy. Jug­gling the franchise’s over­ar­ch­ing nar­ra­tive with its broad­er, icon­ic pop cul­tur­al poten­cy, the trick is to keep old­er fans hap­py with­out becom­ing stag­nant, either ide­o­log­i­cal­ly or nar­ra­tive­ly. Char­ac­ters like Jyn and Rey might offer new per­spec­tives to new audi­ences, but they also recall old­er ways of women in film ral­ly­ing to action.

Three figures with distinct visual styles and poses holding futuristic weapons, black and white illustration with strong contrasts.

Even the very descrip­tion of Star Wars his­tor­i­cal­ly as a space west­ern’ offers a potent start­ing place to look for the ances­tors of cinema’s mobilised women-of-action. They are, on the sur­face at least, not dif­fi­cult to find: con­tem­po­rary exam­ples might lead us to Sharon Stone’s Ellen in Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead or Michelle Williams in Kel­ly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cut­off, but the reign­ing queen of tough west­ern women is still Joan Crawford’s Vien­na in John­ny Guitar.

Although a tough-as-nails saloon­keep­er clad in mas­cu­line-styled attire, with Crawford’s sig­na­ture curves and ambi­ent sex­u­al­i­ty, Vien­na is any­thing but tomboy­ish. Sur­round­ed by chal­lenges on all fronts, Crawford’s steady gaze (and stead­ier gun) cre­ate in Vien­na one of the most resilient and deter­mined women the genre has ever offered. Yet for Vien­na and so many of her west­ern women allies, chal­lenges result not only from the strug­gles inher­ent to life on the Fron­tier, but – more often than not – com­pli­ca­tions aris­ing from gen­der dif­fer­ence, often direct­ed at them from lovers, would-be-para­mours, hus­bands or bas­tard exes.

While gen­der often does not rank high­ly on the list of con­cerns for women in west­erns, men in these films often feel quite dif­fer­ent. Sur­vival there­fore fre­quent­ly demands they tack­le how their own fem­i­nin­i­ty (or lack there­of) is received by the men (and some­times oth­er, more ortho­dox women) whose sto­ries inter­sect with their own. When women like these mobilise, pick up a gun, and take action, the per­ils of fron­tier liv­ing often becomes a metaphor for patri­archy itself, in all its myr­i­ad guis­es. Although such claims would be dif­fi­cult to make for all west­erns, this ten­den­cy in some is com­pli­cat­ed fur­ther in the case of the girl-gang sub­genre. Often used as a way to add some brute force sexy piz­zazz to a genre whose codes are tra­di­tion­al­ly heav­i­ly masculinised.

Jonathan Kaplan’s 1994 film Bad Girls is a case in point: what had the poten­tial to be a pow­er­ful film about fem­i­nist uni­ty col­lapsed into what crit­ic Janet Maslin mem­o­rably described at the time as a film with, all the legit­i­ma­cy of Cow­poke Bar­bie with a lot less enter­tain­ment val­ue”. At the same time, the ral­ly­ing of women in these con­texts to band togeth­er and to fight back, to stake a claim in a cul­tur­al and social space of their own offers fur­ther evi­dence of the broad ways women have found to mobilise pow­er through tak­ing action across genre.

This becomes thornier in the case of the noto­ri­ous rape-revenge film cat­e­go­ry: if there was one instance of the explic­it trans­for­ma­tion of women’s emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal ener­gy into direct polit­i­cal action, this would sure­ly be it. It is there­fore no sur­prise that rape-revenge and the west­ern have such a long affil­i­a­tion, despite the lat­ter (erro­neous­ly) being so close­ly aligned with hor­ror tra­di­tions. From The Brava­dos and Last Train from Gun Hill to women-dri­ven nar­ra­tives like Han­nie Caul­der, sex­u­al vio­lence and a thirst for vengeance marks many westerns.

In terms of pure action, few women are as iconic as Pam Grier, who not only embodied the tough, mobilised, strategic woman of action, but also framed her refusal to back down as one inextricably linked to race as much as gender.

In rape-revenge films with women pro­tag­o­nists more gen­er­al­ly, gen­der dif­fer­ence and links to vio­lence and pow­er are key, from Meir Zarchi’s broad­ly despised 1978 exploita­tion film I Spit on Your Grave to Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-win­ning Jodie Fos­ter vehi­cle from 1988, The Accused. What is of inter­est here is how sex­u­al vio­lence mobilis­es a par­tic­u­lar kind of fem­i­nist action in the rape-aveng­ing woman pro­tag­o­nist, like some kind of ide­o­log­i­cal alche­my: rape turns’ women into fem­i­nists’.

Girl-gang cen­tred rape-revenge films com­pli­cate this: while more famous instances of female-avenger rape-revenge films find their pro­tag­o­nists iso­lat­ed by their desire for vengeance, there are a num­ber of straight-to-video, for­got­ten grind­house films and TV movies exam­ples that show women com­ing togeth­er, active­ly build­ing fem­i­nist net­works. Both these mod­els, how­ev­er, are based on women turn­ing to mobilised, strate­gic action. What marks them as dif­fer­ent from some­one like Rey in par­tic­u­lar, how­ev­er, is the empha­sis on their gen­der difference.

In terms of pure action, of course, few women are as icon­ic as Pam Gri­er, a fig­ure who not only embod­ied the tough, mobilised, strate­gic woman of action, but also framed her refusal to back down as one inex­tri­ca­bly linked to race as much as gen­der. Less well known is Cyn­thia Rothrock, an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly gift­ed mar­tial artist who took her abil­i­ties in a range of mar­tial dis­ci­plines to the screen, becom­ing a cult actor in almost 50 movies. Post­fem­i­nist kick ass’ girl movies were soon to become the norm – from the fea­ture length reboot of Charlie’s Angels to Quentin Tarantino’s revival of the trope in Kill Bill and Death Proof in par­tic­u­lar. Taran­ti­no reg­u­lar stunt­woman-turned-actor Zoe Bell would con­tin­ue to define the mobilised woman-of-action in films like 2013’s Raze, and this fig­ure is close­ly linked in the broad­er cul­tur­al imag­i­na­tion to videogame adap­ta­tions like Angeli­na Jolie in the Tomb Raider films and Mil­la Jovovich in the Res­i­dent Evil franchise.

Yet these pre­cur­sors to Rey and Jyn are sig­nif­i­cant as much for where they devi­ate as merge. While the com­plex­i­ty of the Bechdel Test is hard­ly demand­ing, as an ide­o­log­i­cal par­lour game it cer­tain­ly rais­es aware­ness of how women’s sto­ries have tra­di­tion­al­ly been framed, their sto­ries aligned far too often by those of the men around them. Images of the mobilised woman-of-action are diverse, and movies that address how women fit into explic­it mil­i­tary con­texts sug­gest that progress is not to be made by sim­ply putting a woman in uni­form and giv­ing her a gun. The over­wrought butch­ness of Demi Moore’s GI Jane or Goldie Hawn’s bum­bling-princess-makes-good might be strong women, but are hard­ly the first that leap to mind.

Rather than an explic­it­ly mil­i­tarised imag­i­na­tion, then, Rey and Jyn sug­gest a turn to a type of fem­i­nist corps’ motif, typ­i­fied by that great for­got­ten icon of 90s fem­i­nism, Tank Girl, who was played to joy­ful pre­ci­sion by Lori Pet­ty in Rachel Talalay’s 1995 film. Kate McKinnon’s Jil­lian Holtz­mann in the recent Ghost­busters reboot prompt­ed a revis­it to the pre­cise kind of pow­er Tank Girl rep­re­sent­ed, a kind of punk, post-fem­i­nist spir­it of anar­chy and deter­mi­na­tion. Like Rey and Jyn, these are not Action Women in the strict­ly gener­ic sense, but rather some­thing more impor­tant: they are Women Who Take Action.

This dis­tinc­tion lies at the core of The Force Awak­ens, and like it, Rogue One must find a way to main­tain a sense of loy­al­ty to the broad­er Star Wars mythol­o­gy with­out col­laps­ing into regres­sive, nostalgia-for-nostalgia’s sake images of women who sit around wait­ing to be res­cued. Rey did this by stak­ing a claim in her right to her own sto­ry, her own skills and her abil­i­ty to strate­gise and exe­cute her actions. That Rey is a scav­enger who repur­posed the visu­al style of the ear­li­er films is no small coin­ci­dence: like Tank Girl on Ambi­en, her very habi­tat, her very appear­ance was gov­erned by a ret­ro­spec­tive punk fem­i­nist DIY aesthetic.

Look­ing back at Women Who Take Action through­out film his­to­ry and for­ward to the role they play in the unfold­ing Star Wars series, women like Rey and Jyn demand we ask impor­tant ques­tions: What can we sal­vage? What can we take back? What can we keep and repur­pose as we move for­ward, and what don’t we need any­more? It seems, from this per­spec­tive, only inevitable that some con­ser­v­a­tive feath­ers will get ruf­fled. But we will keep look­ing – as Han Solo told Finn in The Force Awak­ens, women always fig­ure out the truth.”

You might like