Tough Gynes

Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men

Stan Goff

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532644085, 9781532644092
• eBook ISBN: 9781532644108
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

In Borderline, Stan Goff unpacked the association of masculinity with war. In Tough Gynes, using an incisive and often darkly humorous study of nine films featuring violent female leads, he untangles the confusion about "masculinity constructed as violence" when our popular stories feature women as violent protagonists. Whether read individually or with a group, Tough Gynes raises compelling questions about gender and violence, with a few provisional answers. Plus, you get to watch movies as you read it.

1

Perky Princesses and Lovable Rogues: Princess Leia

In 1977, George Lucas’s film Star Wars became the highest-grossing film in history, a position it held for five years. War films, almost without exception, are exciting, and this one had “Wars” in the title. We went to see it expecting that adrenaline buzz. Based vaguely on Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress,20 the film was about heroes using redemptive violence against villains.

Displaced from premodern Japan into an intergalactic mélange of tribal confederations—governed apart from the bad Empire by a Senate comprised of aristocrats—that are curiously technologically advanced enough for light-speed space travel and yet organized according to archaic social standards, Lucas substituted Jedi warriors for Samurai and light sabers for sword and staff.

Anything that makes that much money just has to be reproduced, and the Star Wars franchise has given birth to twelve puppies, as of this writing—so, thirteen films in total. Princess Leia, played by the late Carrie Fisher, appeared in six of them.

Let’s start with, she was a princess. A princess. I have granddaughters, and when every one of them turns on a television or gets roped into a new kid movie by sales campaigns aimed at little girls, they are given princesses as role models. They can be “spunky princesses”—like Princess Leia—but they are also hyper-fem in appearance. Because a princess is pretty. And a princess, at least as far as I know my history, is part of a hereditary aristocracy. We like hereditary aristocracies, even though we celebrate their undoing in grammar-school history classes where we break away from the wicked King George. We like hereditary aristocracies in Star Wars. We like them in Lord of the Rings. We like them in Game of Thrones. We miss that sense of Platonic order.

Where do we meet Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan? Being captured as a rebel spy by the dastardly Darth Vader. A few (spunky) retorts to Vader, and she disappears. She reappears in a holographic message to our humble hero-to-be, Luke Skywalker (who, it will be revealed, is possessed of Jedi superpowers and specially chosen because he is, unknowingly, part of the hereditary aristocracy and Leia’s sibling). Leia is the Damsel in Distress, a pretty woman whose required rescue will give the male protagonist an opportunity to prove his mettle in a lethal-force rescue op.

That’s the set-up. So far so good.

Leia does a few things that break patterns. She stands up (spunky princess style) to her degenerately brilliant captor, Darth Vader, instead of squealing helplessly and getting the vapors. She smart-mouths Governor Tarkin, her captor’s boss. Luke and his new friends, Hans Solo and his primate companion Chewbacca, stage the lethal-force rescue op, mowing down imperial troopers by the dozens between bug-eyed panting and humorous quips. Leia does not swoon into the rescuers arms or have to be led out by the hand, raining tears and breaking the china with high-pitched screams. She gets a gun (a blaster) and “gets some,” taking out her fair share of robotically-Nazified storm troopers who all need serious remedial marksmanship training, because they can’t hit a barn door.

Apart from Leia, in the first film there are no female characters, unless you count some alien hookers in the bar and a throwaway aunt in Luke’s desert home with six short lines. In fact, in the Star Wars Trilogy, if you subtract Leia, the total time other women spend speaking on screen is sixty-three seconds. In three movies.

Katha Pollitt named this trope “the Smurfette Principle.”

Contemporary shows are either essentially all-male, like “Garfield,” or are organized on what I call the Smurfette principle: a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined . . . The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys.21

So while Leia doesn’t fit perfectly into this principle, because she is the still-pretty honorary male, she is uncomfortably close to being Smurfette in the larger scheme of the Star Wars franchise. And as we can see in this film series, written and directed by rich white men, this is a boy story from beginning to end. When women show up, these writer-director-dudes interpret a feminist sensibility as representing one woman as honorary male, sufficiently attractive to Average Adolescent Boy.

Carrie Fisher was ordered onto a “fat farm” by producers to lose ten pounds before the boys club would allow her on screen. Before Episode VII, Fisher was ordered back to the “fat farm,” whereupon she self-deprecatingly quipped, “They only want to hire three-quarters of me.”22

Hot Chick with a Gun trope. A gunslinging woman is not women’s emancipation. Sorry. Just no. This trope has gone much further than Leia, as we can now see the “calendar girl” posed in lingerie with porn makeup on a Harley cradling her AR-15. It happens. The Hot Chick with a Gun trope is just the exoticization of women into a “sexy beast,” the eventual conquest of which is super-extra-probative of some steroidal gym-bodied, bigger-gun-wielding stud. The point here, though, is that Leia is only allowed on the show because she is “attractive,” and only allowed to do man-stuff like kill folks while making smart-assed remarks if she retains the capacity to make boys snicker and say, “I’d do her.” This is how she retains her femininity—which has been sexualized as she “invades” common spaces with men. How do girls internalize this? “You can kick ass and still be hot, still feminine.” Nothing to see here, move along.

Who is Leia going to be attractive for? Next trope please. The Loveable Rogue. Hans Solo. Because boys who are courteous, gentle, and considerate are just boring as hell and they don’t get a girl’s juices flowing like a macho bad-boy. If someone can find me a more hackneyed trope in film and television than the Loveable Rogue, email me. Now, in a PG-rated film like Star Wars that gets half its market share from boys of acne-fighting age, the Loveable Rogue is a selfish prick, who occasionally shows signs of redeemability by doing something nice for someone helpless, and he never kills innocents (because his marksmanship is always perfect, unlike those wall-eyed Imperial Storm Troopers), and he’s loyal as hell to his real friends, or friend—in this case, an Ape-Man who always makes the exact same noise, like a vacuum cleaner that just sucked up a shoelace, which our hero can instantly interpret into a paragraph of detailed technical information. Leia’s job is to confront the Loveable Rogue Hans (spunkily) until they are suddenly drawn into pheromone range, whereupon the Loveable Rogue molecules penetrate her blood-brain barrier and overwhelm her with the urge to mate.23

Leia’s desirability is chaste, for the most part. This is PG-land. She is cute, virginal, not yet despoiled in the fantasies of that boy in the audience, who will someday be her Hans and wipe her hard drive with his loveable bad-boy mojo. In case we fail to realize how desirable she is, though, once George Lucas prevailed upon Fisher to sufficiently slim down, he made sure that in The Empire Strikes Back, in a scene reminiscent of Orientalist tales like Desert Song, Leia is held captive among other sex slaves—though she is not yet despoiled—by Jabba the Hut, the bloated urchin with a profanely phallic tongue, and she is displayed for the audience in a provocative semi-reclined position wearing a golden bikini.

This is “male gaze” country, folks. The director has it; and he is passing it along to you. This is the seizure of the objectified female body by the male eye-beam. Jabba the craven oriental despot with Leia the sex slave is a white fantasy, too, that turns on the transgression of the virgin and transformation into whore, eroticizing female humiliation. The Damsel is again in Distress—yeah, we know that one—and the boys get to see Leia undressed. The girls learn . . . that boys like to see them undressed.

She can be an honorary male—gun-toting and smart-mouthing—but she has to be hot and susceptible to Hans’s masculine bad-boy sex mojo. Gender . . . sexualized. Men . . . interpreting feminism to the greatest male advantage. Equality . . . when women become more like men.

The Star Wars franchise did, after thirty years, discover non-white people and a few more women. By the time Rey shows up in The Force Awakens, they’d learned enough not to be as heavy-handed with the tough-girl-as-feminist (developed by a man), though the obligatory “hotness” remained. Rogue One pissed off the so-called alt-right (a neologism for modern American fascists), which means the movie can’t be all bad, based on the fact that members of the alt-right want women to return to the status the blood-and-soil boys fantasize they had around 200 years ago.

Let’s talk about the Lovable Rogue trope in a bit more depth. One of the attractions of the Lovable Rogue trope is the idea that, while our rogue has some ethical issues, he retains enough of a moral core to hint at his future redemption. One of the problems with this is that this redemption—when the Lovable Rogue is cast as a romantic interest—is only provoked by protectiveness of his own heterosexual love interest. It is a hugely successful trope, unlikely to die out...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Perky Princesses and Lovable Rogues: Princess Leia
• Chapter 2: “Here, Kitty, Kitty” and the Toothy Vagina: Ellen Ripley
• Chapter 3: Clarice Has Three Daddies: Clarice Starling
• Chapter 4: Earning a Penis to Kill Arabs: Jordan O’Neil
• Chapter 5: Recapturing Normal from the Zombie Apocalypse: Selena
• Chapter 6: Monstrous Women and the Idol of Success: Karen Crowder
• Chapter 7: Bad Rape, Good Rape: Lisbeth Salander
• Chapter 8: Reluctant War and the Practice of Virtue: Katniss Everdeen
• Chapter 9: Conquest of the Frontier: Jane Hammond
• Chapter 10: The F-word
• Bibliography