Rise of the Action Heroine

I love action movies. I can talk about Fellini and Godard, I can admire French new wave, and I certainly do love the auteur golden age of cinema – but whether steered by a gangster, superhero or cop, I’m always drawn to a good action movie vehicle. I discovered the silly, fantastic trinity of Die Hard, Speed, and The Matrix when I was making daily trips to the neighborhood blockbuster at the age of 10, and quickly fell in love with the concise sweep of the well-executed action movie. “What’s a good action movie?” I would ask my parents as I trolled the action aisle at our (dearly departed) neighborhood Blockbuster, and they suggested in turn James Bond, Indiana Jones, Miller’s Crossing, The Untouchables, The Usual Suspects, and The Bourne Identity. My sister and I would get sugary snacks and watch and rewatch the X-men series, while I would drag my friends to see the new Spiderman movie the day it was released.

And I haven’t grown out of it. The new Star Trek movie was fantastic (though the sequel was slightly disappointing), I followed the Bourne trilogy to its end, and though I’m getting fatigued of superheroes I still watched every Batman, and have kept up to date on the (increasingly tiresome, but still mostly fun) Marvel hegemon. My sister moons over the Grand Budapest Hotel release, but I’m already excited for the new Guardians of the Galaxy in August.

But in order to love action movies, I’ve had to accept that I’m never going to see myself represented in them. I don’t expect to see compelling, non-idiotic female leads – and I do expect to see women treated as rewards, as plot devices and romantic pawns, and generally created as undeveloped, flat characters. With the entire Hollywood movie industry generally characterized as men making films for men – with women only holding 18% of behind the camera roles, and many films failing to feature enough women to pass the simple Bechdel test – it might seem unsurprising that the most testosterone-fueled of the movie genres is short on female leads. It could be argued that we should focus our attention on incorporating women as complex characters in more dramas and comedies, and surrender the action movie to male domination – but I disagree. We need more female action heroes.

The action genre may be generally simple, but it’s a kind of simplicity that can be indicative of broad social and cultural norms. The form of the archetypal  ‘bad guy’ has always told us a lot about the western mindset, as he evolved from a Russian-accented evil mastermind during the Cold War to a modern ideologically motivated and often vaguely middle-eastern terrorist (or, reflecting our modern fears, even a natural disaster or post-apocalyptic baddie). And while the action movie villain reflects what we’re currently afraid of, the hero reflects what we aspire to be, and what we trust to conquer our fears. When these heroes are all men, it damages our perception of what’s possible. I certainly don’t look to action movies to tell me what I can and can’t do – if I did I’d have pretty warped perceptions of physics and gun safety – but I can’t help but look at blockbuster movies as major cultural signals, as indicators that the cultural monolith affirms or denies my ability to be a ‘hero.’ Lupita Nyong’o’s recently spoke about this kind of cultural affirmation in her moving ‘Black Women In Hollywood’ acceptance speech, explaining how the international success of dark-skinned model Alex Wek helped her to embrace her own dark complexion as beautiful. The fashion world’s embrace of Wek was an important signal to Nyong’o, a cultural affirmation of non-white beauty. In action movies, we need signals affirming non-male strength and power, not only because female leads will affirm our own strength and give us female role models, but because movies will be better for it. Even the most fantastic scenario or the most ridiculously costumed hero must in some way be analogous to the consumer’s life, and when more than half of movie-consumers are female, it pays – both artistically and literally – to make these analogies align to the lives of women.

And these roles are out there. La Femme Nikita, Luc Besson’s post Professional movie about a female spy, was the first action movie with a female lead that I remember watching. Though Nikita might be a druggy psychopath at the beginning of the movie, I loved the development of her secret agent skills, her sexual authority, and especially the idea that a woman being dragged off to die would scream her own name. Kill Bill, True Grit and Alien all come to mind as past examples, but it may be the enormous success of the Jennifer Lawrence driven Hunger Games series that ultimately marks a turning point in Hollywood’s relationship with female action leads. With The Hunger Games proving that women and men will turn out, in droves, to see a female kick ass, the movie industry would be foolish not to capitalize on this broken ground and make more non-chick-flick roles for women.

I still love a lot of movies that ignore women. It’s hard not to, since some of the best movies do. But I also recognize how I’m culturally minimized by the industry. So while the otherwise-excellent True Detective series may have been meta-criticizing its leads’ relationships with women, making some kind of easily ignored point that ignoring women leads to death and destruction, at this point I’m so exhausted with shows that use similar scenery – the fetishized, ritualized murder of women – without engaging female perspectives that I’m not really listening anymore. It’s the same fatigued, misogynistic landscape that women have been bored by for centuries. If you want to get our attention, make roles that recognize us – as paying consumers, and as capable humans.