According to
journalists, bloggers and whoever else decides this sort of thing, 2012 is the
Year of the Movie Geek – or, as Entertainment Weekly suggested, to some
predictable grumbling, the Year of the Dude Movie. You could go through the
usual arguments about how movies aren’t gender-exclusive and how women enjoy
watching superheroes and shit blowing up just as much as men, but it’s hard to
deny that this year seems to be stuffed with even more traditionally male-oriented fare than usual, with offerings like The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers and The Bourne Legacy dominating the year’s cinematic slate and nary a
romantic comedy or female-centric film to be seen. Yet, amidst all this
testosterone, a ray of hope has quietly emerged: despite being theoretically
geared toward men, many of these action, sci-fi and comic book flicks have
actually served as showcases for women.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at some of the “dude movies” released thus
far. January 20th kicked the year off with Underworld: Awakening, the fourth installment in that shockingly
prolific vampires-meet-werewolves franchise, and Steven Soderbergh’s spy movie Haywire, both headlined by women. Fast-forward
two months, and we’ve got The Hunger
Games, 2012’s first real blockbuster; like the Suzanne Collins young adult
novel it was based on, the movie derived much of its appeal from the character
of Katniss Everdeen, who has become one of the most iconic heroines in recent
memory thanks to her fiery personality and skill with a bow and arrow. The Avengers may have been a
sausage-fest in terms of sheer numbers, yet it was Scarlett Johansson’s Black
Widow who not only served as the superhero juggernaut’s emotional center, but
also seemed to generate the most conversation among filmgoers, even if some
people refused to recognize her awesomeness. Snow White and the Huntsman and Prometheus?
More leading ladies. Even Pixar got in on the act, featuring a female character
as their central protagonist for the first time ever in Brave.
Of course, these are hardly the first movies to put a woman in the center
of all the action. In 1979, Ridley Scott introduced the world to Ellen Ripley, Sigourney
Weaver’s smart, competent and tough corporate grunt-turned-alien fighter who is
largely recognized as cinema’s first real action heroine. With the sequel, Aliens, in 1986, Ripley was firmly
cemented as a character as edgy and classic as James Bond or Indiana Jones.
Just sooo badass.
However, despite the fact that Alien ultimately grossed an impressive
$80.9 million (or about $189 million, if adjusted for
inflation), Ripley didn’t prompt a sudden influx of cinematic action
heroines. Instead of perking up and realizing that maybe audiences just love a
good, fun, ass-kicking blockbuster, even if said ass-kicker has a vagina,
studio heads seemed to write off Alien
as a fluke and proceeded to churn out even more macho-man flicks than
before. The ‘80s not only gave birth to
the modern popcorn movie, thanks to – among other things – Top Gun, the Star Wars
franchise and a guy named Steven Spielberg, but also saw the rise of such stars
as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Tom Cruise. Nine of the top ten
highest-grossing movies of that decade can be characterized as action
films, E.T. being the exception, and
not a single one features a female lead (though, granted, there are a fair
number of sequels on that list). Aside from Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, actresses appeared to be largely
confined to romantic comedies and weepie melodramas like An Officer and a Gentleman, When
Harry Met Sally and Terms of
Endearment; when they did appear in more male-oriented movies, it was
nearly always as the obligatory love interest.
The ‘90s saw a slight uptick in
the number of female leads in movies that would traditionally belong to men
(which, let’s be honest, refers to pretty much everything besides your standard
rom-com and tearjerker) with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise, Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs and Linda
Hamilton as a hardened, buffed-up Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Technically, Hamilton was supporting to
Edward Furlong and Schwarzenegger, but I’m counting her here because she had no
romantic attachment to either of them, and she’s still considered one of the
top action heroines.
Ho hum. Just another day of kicking Terminator ass and
saving the world.
Still, such improvements were
marginal. Only in the past decade has it become somewhat commonplace – or, at
least not utterly out-of-the-ordinary – to see a woman carrying an
effects-heavy tentpole movie. So far, the 21st century has given us
The Bride in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill
Bill movies, Lisbeth Salander in two
cinematic adaptations of The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo, Michelle Yeoh
in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Saoirse
Ronan in Hanna, Chloe Grace Moretz’s
scene-stealing Hit Girl in Kick-Ass;
and the list could go on. Angelina Jolie has made a bit of a career out of
action films with entries like Lara
Croft: Tomb Raider, Wanted and Salt on her resume, and even actresses
like Sandra Bullock, Jessica Alba and, apparently,
Kate Hudson have tried to get in on the fun.
Hey, I didn’t say they were all good.
In fact, way back in that
oh-so-distant year of 2010, EW movie
critic Owen Glieberman suggested that, with the releases of Salt and the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, female
action stars were becoming “the new normal”. This most recent spate of on-screen
action heroines is encouraging not just in terms of quantity, but in terms of
quality as well.
While it might seem unfair to
force female characters to undergo harsh scrutiny and navigate tricky gender
politics when none of their male equivalents ever have or ever will be burdened
by such critical analysis, the truth is that action heroines tend to fall under
a limited set of archetypes. There’s the eye-candy vixen, who often wears tight
and/or revealing clothing and serves largely to motivate – i.e., as a love
interest for – the male hero (Trinity in The
Matrix, Fox in Wanted, arguably
both of Zoe Saldana’s characters in Avatar
and the Star Trek reboot, most
noir femme fatales); the victim-turned-avenger, who usually rages against men
(Jodie Foster’s character in The Brave
One, The Bride, the girls in Sucker
Punch, Lisbeth Salander); and, lastly, there’s the cold, dehumanized
assassin, who is usually trained or motivated by a man, often a father figure
stand-in (Saoirse Ronan’s Hanna, Hit Girl, Jolie’s Evelyn Salt). This isn’t to
say that none of these heroines are well-developed or interesting characters,
simply that, while female action stars have become much more prolific as late,
they are still lacking in variety as far as characterization goes.
Looking at the heroines that
have emerged in 2012, however, things seem rather promising. Though they still
exhibit certain clichés (Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus is, in large part, driven by the death of her father;
Black Widow is a trained assassin, though her backstory is mostly obscured in
the movie so a father figure can’t really be pinpointed), many of these
characters – perhaps with the exception of Gina Carano in Haywire, who as far as I can tell, fits the “victim-turned-avenger”
and “assassin” archetypes to a T – are complex enough that it is difficult to
force them into preset categories. Doing sufficient justice to her franchise
predecessor’s legacy, Elizabeth Shaw was like a brainier, more philosophical
Ripley, her survival instincts surpassed only by her desire for knowledge, and Jennifer
Lawrence portrayed Katniss Everdeen as fiery, independent and resourceful,
someone willing to do whatever it takes to protect herself and those she loves.
Despite what certain people may say, Black Widow was much more than just a sex
symbol for teen boys to ogle, proving to be as vital to the plot and character
arcs in The Avengers as any of her
male counterparts. If anyone was a bit superfluous, it was Hawkeye. Sorry,
Jeremy Renner.
You still look pretty damn awesome.
It’s hard to say whether or not
this sudden influx of compelling onscreen heroines is the prelude to a longer,
more meaningful trend, though the upcoming slate of movies for the year doesn’t
look quite as promising, at least as far as blockbusters go, and studios as a
whole still seem to have that
infuriating habit of not taking women as an audience seriously. After all,
it’s not like Avatar and Inception actually prompted Hollywood to
take more risks on original scripts, instead giving us nothing more than
endless 3D conversions and foghorn sounds in trailers. Still, even if it is
merely a temporary blip in the cultural radar, this blip is definitely heading
in the right direction.
Photo Links:
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