The Violent Woman

Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema

Hilary Neroni

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791463840, 9780791463833
• eBook ISBN: 9780791483640
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

In The Violent Woman, Hilary Neroni brings psychoanalytically informed film theory to bear on issues of femininity, violence, and narrative in contemporary American cinema. Examining such films as Thelma and Louise, Fargo, Natural Born Killers, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, Neroni explores why American audiences are so fascinated—even excited—by cinematic representations of violent women, and what these representations reveal about violence in our society and our cinema. Neroni argues that violent women characters disrupt cinematic narrative and challenge cultural ideals, suggesting how difficult it is for Hollywood—the greatest of ideology machines—to integrate the violent woman into its typical narrative structure.

PART ONE
The Development and Background of the Filmic Violent Woman

CHAPTER 1
Complementarity and Its Discontents An Overview of Violent Women in American Film

Since the late 1980s, the violent woman has become a staple in contemporary American cinema. In looking at films from Thelma and Louise (1991) to Strange Days (1995) to Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) to Girlfight (2000), we quickly see that action and violence are no longer the exclusive province of men. Rather than waiting for men to protect them, female characters have begun to protect themselves. When we first look at the emergence of the violent woman in the films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, we cannot but be startled by the dramatic change that her emergence seems to indicate in cinematic representations. She seems, in short, to have sprung into existence as if shot out of a cannon, taking the cinema-going public completely by surprise (as the very public debate about Thelma and Louise seemed to suggest). Even though the current phenomenon is unprecedented in the number of films that contain a violent woman, this figure itself is not unique to contemporary cinema. The violent woman has antecedents throughout the history of film and an investigation into the significance of the violent woman’s emergence in the films of today must therefore begin with a brief look at the history of the violent woman in American cinema. I aim in this chapter not to provide a comprehensive history of the violent woman but instead a survey of her various historical manifestations in the cinema in order to highlight better the theoretical, cultural, and aesthetic foundations of her origins.

An overview of the violent woman in cinema allows us to see more clearly the various ways in which the violent woman has been not only present throughout the history of cinema, but also connected to the historical situations of women from all backgrounds within American society. The earliest filmic manifestations of violent women are the heroines of the Serial Queen Melodramas, films that Hollywood produced in large numbers (nearly eight hundred series) between 1912 and 1925, as Ben Singer has detailed in his pathbreaking article “Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama.” Each series consisted of anywhere from six to twelve episodes that were shown each week as viewers anticipated the twists of their extended plots. In these series—the soap operas of their day—the action inevitably revolved around a heroine in danger who went to unusual lengths to save herself or someone she loved. The films were filled with action—adventure, car chases, melodramatic villains, and close calls—and were aimed primarily at women (who made the serials a viable cinematic product for seventeen years). Moreover, the heroines in these films participated in many activities usually reserved for male characters. They used guns, took part in car chases, and held jobs (such as a detective or a novelist, occupations that few women of that time had an opportunity to pursue).

In films starring violent women, the mise-en-scène that surrounds the violent woman is almost as important as the actual violence itself in shaping our ideas about the woman and subsequently about her violence. In the Serial Queen Melodramas, the woman interacts with the mise-en-scène by setting out in each episode to investigate and conquer her surroundings. More often than not this means that the films depict her at first in the domestic sphere and then depict her adventure in various rural or urban environments, as she follows her free spirit and investigates mysteries. The typical serial heroine is able to master both domestic spaces and rural or urban spaces, for she fears very little of what she encounters. In this way, the Serial Queen Melodramas are more like the Western, in which the adventure lays somewhere “out there,” and any perils are expected and even eagerly anticipated. In the end, the mise-en-scène of the serial queen melodrama serves as a kind of playground for the heroine, which is an unusual scenario for a female character in Hollywood. Traditionally in Hollywood, women characters are more often trapped by their mise-en-scène, either emotionally or physically.

One of the best known and most popular early serials, The Perils of Pauline (1914) depicts a young woman who wants to pursue her own adventures before she settles down and marries.¹ Though Pauline (Pearl White) herself is not actually violent, she is certainly a precursor for the violent woman. Even though she is a single young woman with a guardian, she is also extremely rebellious. For example, in “Deadly Turning,” Pauline signs up for a car race against the will of her male guardian. In the end, her guardian agrees to her demands, on the condition that he drive the car during the race, and she sit in the passenger seat. Although this seems to indicate a taming of her original desire, her rebellion nonetheless continues to exist and have an effect on others: by desiring nonfeminine adventures she calls into question feminine norms. In the years before and after World War I, women faithfully attended serials depicting such freedom and adventure. In “Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama,” Ben Singer argues, “The clearest and most interesting indication of the genre’s address to a female audience lies in its sustained fantasy of female power. Every serial-queen melodrama, without exception, places an overt polemic about female independence and mastery at the center of its thematic design.”² In this way, early films did at times cater to female fantasies of empowerment.³

What is even more significant for the history of violent women on film, however, is that eventually such independent behavior did lead to violence. A good example is the serial The Woman in Grey (1921). A mystery surrounds the serial’s main character Ruth Hope (Arlene Pretty), who happens herself to write mystery novels. The mystery involves a fortune buried in an old house, numerous relatives, love interests, and hidden identities, all of which have Ruth constantly probing and investigating. Haviland Hunter (Fred Jones), the main villain, tries to thwart Ruth’s investigation and even attacks her throughout the series. And although a friend (who becomes Ruth’s lover at the end of the film), Tom Thurston (Henry G. Sell), is always there to save her at the last minute, Ruth does quite a bit of violent fighting with Hunter. She also jumps from a fast moving car, is thrown from a bridge, and is almost killed with a dagger (in “The Deadly Dagger” episode, of course). Firing a gun, and defending herself during fights with Hunter, Ruth appears far more daring and independent than Pauline was just eight years earlier. This heightened quality of independence is indicated in some ways by her ability to be violent. Although not discussing violence per se, Ben Singer echoes this thought when he points out that “the depiction of female power self-consciously dissolves, sometimes even completely reverses, traditional gender positions as the heroine appropriates a variety of ‘masculine’ qualities, competencies, and privileges.”⁴ One of those qualities is obviously the ability to handle oneself in a fight, to be violent. Nevertheless, all these serials had men who saved the heroines in the end, ostensibly because they couldn’t save themselves. Likewise, even though these women were capable of being violent, rebellious, independent, and adventuresome, the serials invariably depicted their heroines as completely virtuous and entirely bereft of any tendency toward promiscuity. Clearly, having chastity and a male protector were two commodities that allowed these women some latitude in the direction of adventure and freedom—and even violence. These commodities blunt the disruptive power of her adventurousness and violence.

Since the period of the Serial Queen Melodramas, the violent woman has continued to crop up in isolated instances in the history of American cinema. She is never entirely absent from the American cinematic landscape, but it is when depictions of the violent woman appear in large numbers and in similar roles that they tell us about the functioning of ideology. That is to say, insofar as she appears in a historically related group of films, the violent woman is most clearly related to social problems and contradictions—and to the ideological response to these contradictions. The violent woman appears at moments of ideological crisis, when the antagonisms present within the social order—antagonisms that ideology attempts to elide—become manifest. Though antagonisms always exist within the social order, they emerge most forcefully at moments of ideological crisis.

Such an ideological crisis occurs when strictly defined gender roles—roles that give a logic and a sense to sexual difference—break down. Ideology works to produce clear gender distinctions in order to provide stable symbolic identities for both male and female subjects. Without this kind of coherence, identity loses its guarantees: male and female subjects begin to question, rather than invest themselves in, symbolic identities. This process destabilizes the social order, and popular culture often responds by producing cultural images that work through, contain, or expose, this destablization. One powerful example—one that almost always acts as a nexus for concerns about gender identity—is the violent woman in film. If there is one characteristic that defines masculinity in the cultural imagination, it is violence. The depiction of a violent woman upsets this association of violence with masculinity. Yet, at each moment when the violent woman emerges on a wide scale in film history, the films in which she appears go to great lengths to frame her violence within the very symbolic system that her violence threatens to undo. In this way, these films are an effort to ameliorate the social antagonism at the same time as they are explorations of it.

After their appearance in the Serial Queen Melodramas, the next filmic trend in which the violent woman emerged en masse was in film noir (from the late 1930s through the 1940s); she reappeared in horror and blaxploitation films in the 1970s and early 1980s; and she has most recently appeared in full flower in a wide range of films from the late 1980s through to the present. In these current films, the violent woman has undergone a fundamental transformation from her earlier incarnations: when she appeared in Serial Queen Melodramas, film noir, blaxploitation films, or horror films, the violent woman was strictly a generic figure, limited to a particular kind of film. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, depictions of the violent woman began to cross generic boundaries. She has appeared in action films, neo-noirs, comedies, and dramas. This widening of the violent woman’s berth suggests that the antagonism—the ideological disruption that the appearance of the violent woman marks—has become more dramatically exposed than in the earlier eras. Because the violent woman in contemporary films has escaped the confines of isolated (and often marginalized) types of film, her violence indicates that the antagonism of the sexual relationship has become imagined to be increasingly precarious. But each of these contemporary manifestations of the violent woman owes a debt to the femme fatale and film noir.⁵

Masculinity and violence were intimately linked in Hollywood during the time of the classic film noir. Westerns, gangster films, and war films concentrated on masculinity, and they all connected violence with masculinity.⁶ Westerns depicted men using violence to bring law and civilization to the lawless while conquering untamed parts of the country. Gangster films showed how honor and masculinity stem from proving oneself violently. Similarly—although not as prolific or widespread as the other genres—war films during this time clearly connected honor and respectability with professionally administering the kind of violence that would crush the enemy and save American lives. With all these images of masculinity and violence covering the American screens, what provoked the image of the femme fatale?

Outbreaks of violent women in film—such as the femme fatale in film noir—occur at moments in history when a clear difference between genders ceases to be operative. There are, of course, many different characteristics that we associate with maleness and many that we associate with femaleness, but, as I have said, one of the most significant is the identification of violence with masculinity. The very idea of masculinity implies, to some extent at least, the propensity to be violent, to protect oneself and one’s family. In Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, James Gilligan, a psychoanalyst who spent much of his career working within the Massachusetts prison system, points out that “Violence is primarily men’s work; it is carried out more frequently by men; and it is about the maintenance of ‘manhood.’”⁷ Violence—or at least the ability to be violent—is one of the main ways that men differentiate themselves from women. If gender difference becomes elided, then there is seemingly nothing to stop a woman from taking up violence as well, from being as violent as a man. In a sense, the appearance of the filmic violent woman, then, is a cautionary tale about the elision of difference. It is as if films with violent women are saying: “If we continue to disregard the proper difference between the genders, look at what kind of chaos will erupt.” These films are also dealing with the problem of their own existence—that is, they offer violence as a cautionary tale on the level of narrative, but also as an attraction on the level of spectacle. This contradiction, between narrative and spectacle, underscores the conflict between the violent women as cautionary tale and the violent woman as role model. In the last instance, films with violent women remain ambiguous insofar as they struggle with the ultimate possibilities of the elision of gender difference and the ideological crisis that it signals.

The years of classical film noir—the late 1930s through to the end of the 1940s—were years of rapidly changing gender roles. These revolutions/transformations were, of course, not new: women had been making active moves to change their lives and to enter the public world for decades. During World War II large numbers of women, however, were called upon to work for the factories left vacant by men who had gone off to war but were subsequently fired once the soldiers returned.⁸ At the conclusion of the war, the United States government called upon women to willingly take up the feminine position once again. But the demand did not immediately create the reality. Women could not take up their previous position so easily, and men and women both were left with a growing understanding that the female “role” in life was no longer well defined.⁹ Women had now—simply because of the exigencies of the war—shown that they could work and support themselves without men, and the job of provider no longer seemed uniquely male.

The new violent woman of the 1940s cinema, the femme fatale in film noir, became a site for the exploration of the angst and fantasies that surrounded this elision of gender difference. The influence of the femme fatale on the history of violent women in film is far reaching. From Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) to Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), there are many films today whose leading female characters either are influenced by, are in direct conversation with, or are recapitulations of the femme fatales of film noir. Film noir has become a much disputed category among film scholars because unlike genres (such as the Western or the gangster film), noir does not have as fixed a set of patterns or criteria. In fact, noir’s styles and themes often run across genres. Certainly the long scholarly debate on whether or not noir deserves its own generic category indicates the uncertainty of its status. Indeed, film noir was not even a category (unlike Westerns, gangster films, etc.) that the studios themselves used.¹⁰ It was, of course, French theorists who coined the term and created the category.¹¹ In “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea,” James Naremore suggests the amorphous quality of this category. He claims:

If we want to understand it or to make sense of genres or art-historical categories in general we need to recognize that film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema; it has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse—a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings, helping to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies.¹²

One of the main elements found in noir—whether it is a genre or just a style—is the femme fatale. Just like the category of film noir itself, the category of the “femme fatale” does not involve rigid definitions. She is an ambiguous character who varies dramatically from film to film. She has also been the nexus for much theoretical work concerning sexual difference. For instance, Elizabeth Cowie claims that “femme ‘fatale’ is simply a catchphrase for the danger of sexual difference and the demands and risks desire poses for the man.”¹³ What continues to feed this theoretical work on the femme fatale is her ambiguous status: she seems to be both society’s fantasy screen and, on the other hand, she seems to be a hard rock of the real that threatens the stability of patriarchy. She is both a manifestation of society’s fantasy of the underside of femininity (and thus in the service of ideology) and also something more elusive (and thus undeniably threatening to society). But there are characteristics that remain constant: a self-centered nature, an overt sexuality, and an ability to seduce and control almost any man who crosses her path mark the femme fatale of the late 1930s and 1940s. She is almost always glamorously beautiful an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: The Development and Background of the Filmic Violent Woman
• Part Two: The Violent Woman on the Contemporary Screen
• Notes
• Index