Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture

By Jeffrey A. Brown

Beyond Bombshells analyzes the cultural importance of strong women in a variety of current media forms. Action heroines are now more popular in movies, comic books, television, and literature than they have ever been. Their spectacular presence represents shifting ideas about female agency, power, and sexuality. Beyond Bombshells explores how action heroines reveal and reconfigure perceptions about how and why women are capable of physically dominating roles in modern fiction, indicating the various strategies used to contain and/or exploit female violence.

Focusing on a range of successful and controversial recent heroines in the mass media, including Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games books and movies, Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels and films, and Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies and comic books, Jeffrey A. Brown argues that the role of action heroine reveals evolving beliefs about femininity. While women in action roles are still heavily sexualized and objectified, they also challenge preconceived myths about normal or culturally appropriate gender behavior. The ascribed sexuality of modern heroines remains Brown's consistent theme, particularly how objectification intersects with issues of racial stereotyping, romantic fantasies, images of violent adolescent and preadolescent girls, and neoliberal feminist revolutionary parables.

Individual chapters study the gendered dynamics of torture in action films, the role of women in partnerships with male colleagues, young women as well as revolutionary leaders in dystopic societies, adolescent sexuality and romance in action narratives, the historical import of nonwhite heroines, and how modern African American, Asian, and Latina heroines both challenge and are restricted by longstanding racial stereotypes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781496803207

Jeffrey A. Brown

Jeffrey A. Brown is assistant professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University. He is author of Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture; Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture; and Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans, all published by University Press of Mississippi. He has been published in Screen, Cinema Journal, African American Review, Journal of Popular Culture, Discourse, and Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Book preview

1

TORTURE, RAPE, ACTION HEROINES, AND THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT MOTIFS FOR MALE CHARACTERS IN ACTION films is the convention of torture, and the hero’s ability to withstand it. Torture is also a key component for action heroines but the often brutal on-screen torture of female characters foregrounds issues of sexualized violence, rape, power, and gender in a manner very different than with male characters. Heroes can triumphantly turn the tables on their torturers and thus prove their superior manliness. But when heroines are victimized in torture scenes, often to the point of actual rape, the films risk eroticizing images of violence against women, even if the women do eventually triumph over their torturers. The pivotal rape scene in Stieg Larsson’s controversial, but incredibly popular, novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) was cause for a great deal of debate among critics and many of the books’ readers. Was the graphic and prolonged description of the heroine Lisbeth Salander’s horrific anal rape misogynistic? Or was it necessary to reveal the brutality and inhumanity of the act, and to justify her violent revenge? The debates were renewed when both the Swedish version of the film (2009) and the subsequent Hollywood version (2012) each depicted the rape in graphic detail. When considered within the larger context of torture in recent Hollywood film and television action genres, the torture and rape of Salander in all three versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reveals a complex understanding of victimization and redemption that cuts across traditional gender boundaries. Unlike earlier action movies or rape-revenge films, contemporary depictions of torture and rape lay bare the tenuous links assumed in our patriarchal culture between notions of power and powerlessness, masculinity and femininity.

The torturous rape of Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sparked a heated public debate about whether the story should be heralded as a groundbreaking feminist tale of empowerment or as yet another example of the lurid sexualization of male violence against women. A review in the Independent described Salander as a vision of female empowerment . . . a kind of goth-geek Pippi Longstocking (Gibbs 2008, para. 7). The Boston Globe praised Salander as a remarkable character: Her life is full of abuse violence, and familial woe, but her resilience and her peculiar moral stance give the book most of its thrill (Morris 2010, para. 2). On the more critical side, when Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story about the incredible popularity of the book trilogy, they included a sidebar by Missy Schwartz entitled Did Larsson Have a Problem With Women? She emphasizes the brutality of the attacks against female characters, and condemns Larsson for exploiting it [savage misogyny] in graphic detail for titillating storytelling purposes (Schwartz 2010, 42). Similarly, a Bitch magazine article, The Girl Who Doubted Stieg Larsson’s Feminism, argued that Larsson’s vivid scenes of sexual violence against women, particularly Salander, occur so frequently that it’s hard not to question whether they’re there as much for titillation as for social commentary (Taraneh 2010, 9). A book review in the Guardian entitled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Feminist, or Not? summarized the debate: The book divided critics. Some saw Lisbeth Salander (the tattooed private investigator of the title) as a feminist avenging angel. Others criticized Larsson’s graphic descriptions of the abuse and mutilation of women, judging the whole effort ‘misogynist’ (Groskop 2010, para. 2). Yet, regardless of the visceral reactions that critics and readers/viewers had to the violent events in the story, specifically Salander’s rape and her subsequent revenge against individual rapists and systemic misogyny, this scene and the controversy it inspired crystallizes the sexual and the gendered nature of torture.

TORTURE AND THE MALE ACTION HERO

Torture scenes have long been a staple of action-oriented films featuring male heroes, from the early swashbuckling films of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn to hard-boiled detectives played by the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell to the iconic action heroes of the 1980s personified by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson. Over the years, the intensity of torture scenes has increased dramatically. For example, the torture of James Bond in Goldfinger (1964), where he is bound spread-eagle with a laser slowly burning its way towards his crotch, seems incredibly tame compared to the prolonged beating Bond experiences in Casino Royale (2006), as the villain brutally assaults his genitals with a knotted rope. While the intensity of the tortures endured by male heroes has changed, the symbolic and the narrative reasons for the convention have not. Torture is a concise and effective means to establish both the heroism and the unassailable masculinity of the characters. The primary function of male torture at the narrative level is to demonstrate the exceptional strength, nobility, and endurance of the protagonist. Real heroes never crack: they never give more than their name, rank, and serial number to the torturers. Gary Cooper as Lieutenant Alan McGregor in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) will never give up the details about a British ammunitions delivery no matter how many hot bamboo shoots are inserted under his fingernails. Likewise, fifty years later, Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo in Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985) refuses to tell the Viet Cong and the Russians about American military operations, despite repeated electrocutions and scarring by a hot knife. As viewers, we know that heroes like these will remain stalwart and endure whatever pain they must in order to safeguard their comrades. We also know that, as real heroes, they will eventually triumph over their interrogators. When Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is chained from the ceiling and electrocuted in Lethal Weapon (1987), he still manages to break his torturer’s neck with his legs and then bursts in guns-a-blazing to save his partner Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) just as the villain claims: There are no more heroes. But as Riggs proves, and as we in the audience know, there still are heroes. At least in the world of action movies, there still are men who can withstand any torture and rescue themselves and others.

Yet, as critics like Steve Neale (1983), Kaja Silverman (1992), Susan Jeffords (1994), and David Savran (1992) have argued, the incessant and spectacular depiction of male torture in action movies functions to both eroticize the male body and to deny that very eroticism. Ever since Laura Mulvey (1975) first identified the dichotomous ways that gender is represented in cinema with the dominant gaze coded as masculine and the object of that fetishizing gaze being feminine, it has been commonplace to understand prolonged looking at male bodies as a potentially feminizing erotic act. In visual forms of media, men are coded as voyeurs and women as exhibitionists, thus any time the male gaze of the camera dwells on a male body there is a symbolic risk of emasculation. Even a character as undeniably masculine as James Bond can run the risk of being feminized by the camera gaze if a display of flesh seems unmotivated by anything other than erotic contemplation. When Daniel Craig’s Bond emerges from the surf halfway through Casino Royale clad only in tiny European swimming briefs, the camera lingers appreciatively on his taut and muscular body. So atypical was this unmotivated male erotic display that critics and fans were quick to point out that this scene turned the tables and treated Bond as a Bond girl, most notably Ursula Andress’s Honey Rider, whose bikini clad body was a focal point of the first Bond feature film Dr. No (1962). Casino Royale ultimately returned Bond to a more typical realm of male display through the controversial torture scene, which we will return to in detail below, torture being the most common of conventions which have developed to compensate for the fetishization of male bodies in the media. Visual media forms use a variety of techniques to justify looking at the male body without implying emasculation. For example, Richard Dyer (1982) has detailed the techniques employed in photographs of male pinups, such as the male subject looking away from the camera in disinterest or staring back at the viewer challengingly, and creating a ridiculously hypermasculine miseen-scene via exercise, muscles, weapons, or tools. Similarly, Neale argues that male heroes can at times be marked as the object of an erotic gaze, thus it is not surprising that ‘male’ genres and films constantly involve sado-masochistic themes, scenes, and phantasies (1983, 13). Building on these theories in her analysis of 1980s action movies, Susan Jeffords argues that the chief mechanism in mainstream cinema for deferring eroticism in the heterosexual male body is through establishing that body as an object of violence, so that erotic desire can be displaced as sadomasochism (1994, 51). The torture of male action heroes, more than any other compensation technique or sadomasochistic phantasy, allows the camera to appreciate the shirtless and bound bodies of male ideals as they valiantly writhe in pain without any feminizing or homoerotic implications because the narrative makes it clear that these male bodies are only being displayed under duress. The tortured male body is not a passive and inviting spectacle; it is a body that demonstrates strength and resilience even when it is at its most vulnerable point.

The tortured male body in film is a way to display and to deny feminization of the body. Its resistance to torture demonstrates not just the heroism of the character and his strength but also that the body is not passive or penetrable. On the occasions when the body is penetrated, it is usually still able to repair itself. For example, when Rambo is wounded by shrapnel in Rambo III (1988), he is resilient enough to force the piece of wood straight through his body and then cauterizes the wound by igniting it with gunpowder. The male body may not be completely impervious (though in the case of Superman it is) but rarely is it irreparably scarred. Even when the torture of male heroes ends in death, their valiant endurance can still win the day, as when Mel Gibson’s William Wallace is tortured and disemboweled in Braveheart (1995) but his suffering unites Scotland to fight their oppressors. To be penetrable and passive is to be coded as feminine, and the suffering of male heroes carefully denies feminization. So common is the depiction of male heroes being tortured and subjected to prolonged suffering that it seems willfully masochistic. In fact, the extensive suffering that seems to be embraced by heroes like Rambo, Bond, and any character played by Mel Gibson (for more on Gibson being tortured, see Brown 2002) can be understood as a form of reflexive masochism. Others may be the actual agents of the hero’s physical torment, but the persistent spectacle of heroic suffering that is common in action films suggests that it is ultimately a willful form of self-punishment undertaken to solidify a masculine position and eradicate any hint of passivity or feminization. According to Kaja Silverman, because reflexive masochism does not demand the renunciation of activity, it is ideally suited for negotiating the contradictions inherent in masculinity. The male subject can indulge his appetite for pain without at the same time calling into question . . . his virility (1992, 326). No matter how spectacular the display of the male body is in torture, it refuses feminization. For example, in his analysis of the Rambo films, David Savran argues that these ordeals [Rambo’s exaggerated sufferings] must be seen as self-willed, as being the product of his need to prove his masculinity the only way he can, by allowing his sadistic, masculinized half to kick his masochistic, feminized flesh ‘to shit’ (1992, 201). Any hint of feminization is symbolically eradicated through a momentary embrace of masochism and the hero’s ability to overcome whatever tortures are heaped upon