I was watching The Avengers a couple weeks ago, after finding some free passes in the bottom of my mother`s purse, and it wasn’t until after Scarlett Johannson had rendered her 27th victim unconscious with an assortment of acrobatic kicks that I realized we are in the halcyon days of ass kicking females. I can’t decide whether this trend is a good or bad thing.
When done wrong, like in Barb Wire, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider(and it’s equally ridiculous sequel) and Resident Evil, I can’t think of another genre that annoys me as much. Seeing an emaciated heroine fell MMA fighters with one poorly thrown punch or handle and M60 without collapsing from the recoil doesn’t just take me out of a movie, it turns me downright surly. It`s just a movie and I should lighten up. I know. And it`s a fair point. Especially in a mindless action romp like The Avengers. I just wish I knew how to do it.
It takes a special kind of asshole to nitpick a character in a movie whose premise includes super humans, a Tesseract and an exiled Norse god, but I’ve managed to anyway. If you’re asking me to buy the premise that the world is being invaded by monsters from another planet, a threat so dire, the Norse god, a billionaire in a bionic suit, an unstoppable irradiated monster and a genetically enhanced super soldier can barely contain it, I find it ridiculous that Johansson is in the thick of the action with the kind of tiny pistol my grandma carries in her purse.
I guess I understand it. After all, a movie with an all-male crime fighting squad will stick out like a lighthouse in a fog to feminists and bored Liberal types. It’s business, and doesn’t hurt on the PR front.
The problem is, if you`re going to try and cover your bases on that front, you have to go all the way. It defeats your women`s empowerment objective when these one-dimensional, smoky voiced babes show up to rumble in some awfully tight, impractical outfits. When the high school girls trade blows over some ex-con Lothario in the field behind my house, they show up in sweat pants and Varsity hoodies not catsuits and stilettos.
But, there`s another side to this decade of femdom that I rather like. The closest I’ve ever come to heaven – except that time I saw a bright light while pounding back absinthe shots in an unlicensed Puerto Vallartan bar – was seeing Scarlett Johansson in a latex catsuit on an IMAX screen. Although, I was left fumbling at my armrest for a pause button every time she walked across the screen (and the resulting tense conversations with my girlfriend as to what exactly was going on in my pants) I couldn’t help feeling manipulated.
I know she was cast, and the character woven into the script, expressly for undersexed men in long-term relationships like me, the basement dwelling set and the vultures itching to spring a lawsuit on what they see as a misogynistic entertainment industry. I loved looking at her, but couldn’t shake the feeling she would not have made it a block in the Watts riots let alone an intergalactic war smack dab in SoHo.
Maybe I’m alone, but when I think of strong female characters I think of Ellen Ripley, Jackie Brown, Sarah Connor and you could probably talk me into Buffy Summers – though I didn’t pay much attention to the show when Charisma Carpenter was off-screen. These were tough, determined, resourceful women who handled their business without squeezing into a leather catsuit.
If they had dressed Sarah Michelle Gellar in a catsuit each episode, and I was being truthful, I`d probably have a stack of VHS tapes underneath my bed with the slow motion button worn to a nub. But don’t think for a second, after each episode, I wouldn’t found someone to complain to anyway.
Tony Dhansak says
The term commonly used by 3rd wave feminists for this role is the “Fighting Fuck Toy”; next time, you’d do a good job to do a bit of basic research before churning out a load of guff like this.
Rose says
I just had to say that I agree with most of what you said. It’s unfortunate that there are no really strong female superheroes or characters on the screen anymore (not that there were that may before), not to mention that most of them tend to be waify or stick figures with boobs, yet as a woman I’m supposed to sit through a movie and believe that she can beat up dudes that look like brick walls on steroids when I know that if I were to poke her with my pinky finger she’d snap like a twig.