Exploring the role of the female warrior in film
Action Babe Cinema!
But let’s leave our babes behind bars, or really our captives of the Colosseum, for the moment and consider another, more contemporary category of violent women who don’t seem to need much motivation at all to kick the crap out of someone. In my intro I alluded to Angelina Jolie and others’ roles as capable heroines who basically fight for a living or who have to resort to violence all the time as part of their jobs or hobbies (you know, tomb raiding, international espionage, that sort of thing). Beautiful action heroines with amazing combat skills have long been a staple of Hong Kong martial arts and sword-fighting movies,1 but the recent raft of heroines have been different in a couple of ways. Unlike their sisters in women-in-prison movies, these "action babes" are much more along the model of the male action hero: they work alone, using their special skills to achieve a goal which often restores order to the world of the film. They aren’t part of a group of ordinary women forced into action by systematic oppression; they are experts in violence who live in more or less fantastic worlds who choose to act aggressively. When you add to their unusual lifestyles the ever more common blending of computer graphics and live action, you really have a phenomenon completely unlike anything in the women-in-prison genre: stylized vs. gritty, alluring sensuality vs. raw sexiness, calculated killing vs. fighting for survival. Both kinds of films do give us the thrill of beautiful, physically strong heroines, and they do raise some of the same questions, but the essential differences make them hard to compare. So it’s back to prison again for us.
As I mentioned before, the nature of heroism in the women-in-prison movies is characterized by a collective effort aimed at resisting structural oppression rather than individuals fighting alone. These are not femme fatales or individualistic figures who mimic the stories of the lone gunfighter,2 these are the disenfranchised banding together temporarily to battle the system. This makes a great deal of sense when you consider the typical understanding of women as cooperative rather than competitive. We’ll fight for our freedom, but we’ll do it as a team! I can’t decide whether this is sexist or not. Is it asserting that women are so powerless that they can only achieve a goal when they work en masse or is it giving a more realistic picture of how resistance typically works: there are polarizing individuals, but it is a group effort? Anyway, the scenes of rebellion found in The Arena and elsewhere allow for the possibility of a feminist message that is based on the newly formed female community.1 Marc O’Day "Beauty in Motion: Gender, Spectacle and Action Babe Cinema," p. 202.
2 Suzanna Danuta Walters, "Caged Heat: The (R)evolution of Women-in-Prison Films." In Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies, p. 122.
