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Gender and identity in the media
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Gender and identity in the media
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Looking like a hero: constructions of the female gun-fighter in Hollywood cinema.Christa van Raalte
Teesside University, UK
Abstract
This paper addresses the aesthetic and semiotic issues of dress, agency and desire as they are
articulated around the figure of the female gun-slinger in action-driven genres. It explores the problems
that this complex figure presents for feminist critics, in relation to the fetishisation of the female action
figure, the potential for readings of cooption or resistance embodied in the transvestite heroine, and the
celebration of cinematic violence. It also explores a number of strategies whereby film-makers and
narratives contrive to contain the transgressive potential of the female gun-slinger. With particular
reference to Salt (Phillip Noyce 2010), it highlights issues of transformation, performance and identity,
focusing on the operation of costume as an ‘alternative discourse’ within the text. It considers the
limitations and potential of the contemporary action heroine as an empowering female figure within
popular culture.
Keywords: representation, gender, performance, costume, action-adventure
Introduction
“A hero is one who looks like a hero” (Robert Warshow 1970:56)
Recently, in preparation for this paper, I re-watched Mr and Mrs Smith (Doug Liman 2005) with
my 17 year old daughter. In the middle of the first big shoot-out scene, as the heroine prowled through
her ruined house bristling with heavy-duty firearms and ammunition, my daughter spontaneously cried out
“I want to be her!. Seizing the opportunity for a little impromptu audience research I asked her to explain
why. “Because she’s so cool!’ was the reply. I lapsed momentarily from the role of academic to that of
parent and moral guardian to point out that Mrs Smith was in fact in the unenviable position of trying to kill
her husband, and simultaneously to avoid being killed by him – to which my daughter replied with
withering and unanswerable logic “But she’s Angelina Jolie!” Robert Warshow has explained the allure of
the Western hero in terms of his distinctive style – a style that is best expressed though violence,
although in fact it is the style, rather than the violence, that is the point. It struck me that, in essence, my
daughter’s tweet-length analysis offered a remarkably similar insight into the appeal of the modern action
heroine.
Image 1: Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs Smith
, In this paper, I will address the representation of the gun-fighter heroine in the contemporary
Hollywood action movie, with particular reference to Salt (Phillip Noyce 2010), in which Angelina Jolie
plays the eponymous lead. I will explore how issues of agency and desire are articulated around the
aesthetically powerful juxtaposition of ‘woman’ and ‘gun’, and how questions of empowerment, cooption,
essentialism and constructions of gender are worked out in the iconography of the text, asking: what
should the feminist critic make of these films? Carole Dole, in her essay “The Gun and the Badge”,
remarks that, despite the appeal of strong media images of women, “mainstream film viewers and
academic feminists alike have hesitated to celebrate cinematic women with guns” (2001:78-79). This
hesitation is understandable; violent women, and female gun-slingers in particular, present a number of
dilemmas from a feminist perspective. These largely fall into three interrelated areas which can be
characterised as the problem of women who commit violence, the problem of women who appear to ‘be’,
or to identify as men, and the problem of the fetishised phallic woman. For film- makers, too, the gun-
fighter heroine presents difficulties, as they strive they attempt to steer a course between these
representational issues and an unpredictable audience.
Having outlined some of the theoretical and critical problems pertaining to the representation of
the gun-fighter heroine, I will go on to discuss in more detail how they are articulated in relation to Salt, a
film which combines a violent heroine, a realist aesthetic and an explicit engagement with alternating
constructions of identity. While the marketing the tag-line: “Who is Salt?”, referred to the heroine’s role as
a double, or even triple agent , straddling the divide between East and West, from a critical perspective
the same question may be asked with reference to the manner in which Salt seems to straddle the
gender divide, and the potential for the feminist critic to read her representation in terms of resistance and
female empowerment on the one hand or cooption and reinforcement of patriarchal values on the other.
The problem of women who commit violence
Martha McCaughey neatly summarises the philosophical ‘quagmire’ which images of violent
women represent for the feminist critic, and the difficulty in deciding whether they “contribute to resistance
or replication”. On the one hand, feminism tends to oppose violence per se, characterising it as
“patriarchal and oppressive” and seeing female adoption of violent methods as reproducing male
domination. On the other hand images that associate women with pacifism can serve to normalise the
construction of women as victims, unable to fight back against (largely) male violence (2001:2).
McCaughey argues that images of violent women in films, while characterised as “tarnished prizes”
(2001:6), nevertheless have a useful role to play in raising questions around gender models, pleasure
and fantasy.
The issue of fantasy is key to any analysis of the gun-slinger heroine. Cinematic violence must be
understood in its dramatic and generic context. As Jason Jacobs has demonstrated, the gunfight in the
action film is largely bound up with fantasies of control and loss, so that “pleasure in gunfire sequences
simultaneously reflects our recognition of our vulnerability and our desire to fight back” (2000:14). The
iconic figure of the gunfighter hero, he suggests, represents a positive, even subversive, will “to gain
mastery over one’s life” (2000:13). While Jacobs speculates that this might be a specifically male
pleasure - although only because “in a patriarchal world men have more to lose”’ (2000:13) – its capacity
for appropriation by feminism cannot be ignored.
Judith Haberstram (2001) offers a useful concept of ‘imagined violence’, modelled on Benedict
Anderson’s characterisation of nation as imagined community (1983). She argues that images of women
with guns in popular culture have “the potential to intervene in popular imaginings of violence and
gender”, suggesting “not that we all pick up guns, but that we allow ourselves to imagine the possibility of
fighting violence with violence” (2001:251). Thus cinematic violence becomes a powerful rhetorical
device, challenging hegemonic mythologies and establishing resistance through a form of collective
fantasy.
The responses of actual female spectators to on-screen female gunslingers seem to bear out the
potential of cinematic violence as empowering fantasy. McCaughey’s own reaction as “a feminist activist
against violence” to watching Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 (James Cameron 1991) makes it clear that
the pleasures associated with the action hero are far from being exclusively male. She describes how she
drove home after the movie, flexing her arms and realised “that men must feel this way after seeing
movies – all the time..... I could understand the power of seeing ones’ own sex made heroic on-screen.”
(2001:21). The potential of such action heroines to inform a shared rhetoric of resistance is illustrated by
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