Tag: Machete

Women of Color in Film and TV: The Conundrum of Butch-Hottie Michelle Rodriguez

Michelle Rodriguez, famous for her roles in “Girlfight”, “The Fast and the Furious” series, and TV series “Lost”, is a cinematic conundrum. Much like most Latina actresses, Rodriguez is typecast. Unlike those Latina actresses who are typecast as extremely feminine and sensual, Rodriguez is typecast as the smoldering, independent bad girl who doesn’t take shit from men. In her roles, Rodriguez embodies many traditionally coded masculine traits (she’s strong, aggressive, mechanically inclined, independent, physical, etc). Despite this perceived masculinity, she is not depicted as a lesbian, and her butch attributes are actually designed to accentuate her sexual appeal.

Michelle Rodriguez as Letty: mechanic, car racer, and thief in The Fast and the Furious series
Written by Amanda Rodriguez
Michelle Rodriguez, famous for her roles in Girlfight, The Fast and the Furious series, and TV series Lost, is a cinematic conundrum. Much like most Latina actresses, Rodriguez is typecast. Unlike those Latina actresses who are typecast as extremely feminine and sensual, Rodriguez is typecast as the smoldering, independent bad girl who doesn’t take shit from men. In her roles, Rodriguez embodies many traditionally coded masculine traits (she’s strong, aggressive, mechanically inclined, independent, physical, etc). Despite this perceived masculinity, she is not depicted as a lesbian, and her butch attributes are actually designed to accentuate her sexual appeal. Certainly, several actresses have played this same kind of role before (though, with them, there’s often skin-tight leather or vinyl in the mix), but Rodriguez consistently plays this same role over and over again. Is this role progressive, consistently allowing a woman some measure of toughness despite maintaining her overt sexuality? Or is this role simply a variation on a well-established theme that won’t truly lead to a multiplicity of female characterizations independent from female sexuality?
Rodriguez’s breakthrough performance was in the critically-acclaimed independent film Girlfight where she portrayed an abused, impoverished, angry young woman who finds her peace in the boxing ring. The climax of the film has Guzman facing off with her male lover and defeating him in the ring. She is afforded the rare opportunity to be stronger and better than men at a male dominated sport, and while she’s tough and muscular, Rodriguez never loses her vulnerability and sex appeal. This film set the tone for the rest of Rodriguez’s career.
Michelle Rodriguez as Diana Guzman in Girlfight
Among Michelle Rodriguez’s notable performances is the no-nonsense mechanic by day, car racing thief by night, Letty Ortiz, from The Fast and the Furious series. Though she is an impenetrably tough member of an almost exclusively male subculture, Letty embodies tenderness and self-sacrifice in her heterosexual relationship with Neck Muscles McGee (aka Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto). Rodriguez also plays the traumatized, gritty, untrusting cop with dubious morals, Ana Lucia Cortez, in Lost. Ana Lucia is the unyielding leader of the tail section of the plane, a significant contrast from the compassionate leadership of Jack Shepherd, who guides the remaining survivors on the other side of the island.
Michelle Rodriguez as Ana Lucia Cortez in Lost
Rodriguez also portrays Trudy Chacon, the jumpsuit-wearing pilot who defies orders to defend an exploited people in Avatar as well as the rigid Umbrella Corporation paramilitary officer, Rain Ocampo, in Resident Evil. Not to mention her role as Chris Sanchez in the floptastic flick S.W.A.T where Rodriguez is a single mother who doggedly makes her way into S.W.A.T ranks despite the institutional sexism inherent in the police force.
A pre-zombified Michelle Rodriguez as Rain Ocampo in Resident Evil
Of her acting career, Michelle Rodriguez has said, “Well, could you really imagine me playing the girlfriend that needs rescuing? Or the girlfriend?” She’s also said, “I don’t want people thinking of me sexually…I had a couple of offers to do some hot scenes in the shower with some guy and to make it real hot and sexy. The next thing you know, I’d be the next J.Lo or something. But that’s easy. I want [success] the hard way.” These quotes lead me to believe that she is consciously involved in the selection of her roles to the extent that she purposely eschews the quintessential eye-candy, sexualized parts typically offered to Latina women. Does that mean that the only thing left is shitty action movies that meld her fierceness to her sexuality in an almost paradoxically unique and formulaic way? Is her Otherness what allows her to fit into this strange niche, or does her Otherness essentially force her into this one-dimensionality? Do Rodriguez’s characters represent a link on an evolutionary chain, where she is still exploited for her sexuality but her strength and fortitude are the traits for which she’s truly valued? If so, will her characters eventually be given individuality in a non-exploitative way, or is this an evolutionary dead-end (much like her role as Shé in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete might suggest)?
Michelle Rodriguez’s sexuality is definitely at the forefront as Shé from Machete
I don’t have the answers. I do like to watch movies just because Michelle Rodriguez is in them (which is good for her because, yay ratings, but bad for me because, ew bad movies), but I’m hard-pressed to fancy her roles as outside the patriarchy’s ideals for womanhood. Sure, she may be gritty and badass, but she’s still beautiful and sexy as hell. It seems more likely that patriarchy, like all extremely powerful institutions, continues to adapt in order to contain potential threats to its hegemony. I’ll continue to hope, though, that through her personal choices, a lone Latina actress can help even just a little to change the face of gender inequality.
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Guest Writer Wednesday: Machete

Machete(2010)

This is a cross post from Heroine Content.

Trigger warning here for a joke from the movie concerning sexual assault, which is mentioned briefly at the end of this post.)
 
Ah, Machete. What I remember best about Machete, unfortunately, is the phone call I got as the credits started to roll. It was my mother in law, telling me my three year old had fallen off a love seat onto a tile floor, landing on his head, and now he was saying his head was buzzing and his tongue felt funny. Everything turned out okay, but now Danny Trejo will likely always be linked for me with my son’s possible concussion and the Dell Children’s emergency room. It’s a shame, because I really like him. If I could re-link that memory to Jessica Alba, I would, but after Fantastic Four that there just isn’t room for more Jessica Alba pain associations in my neural pathways.
Before all of that excitement, though, I’m pretty sure I saw a film that included two things.
First, I saw multiple people of color, including women, as the forces of good in an action film about the concerns of hardworking, decent people who just happen to be one of the most villanized groups in my home state of Texas – Mexicans and Mexican-Americans! In this film, these people are the real heroes, and for a lovely change of pace in media, the U.S. is portrayed with just as much corruption as Mexico, if not moreso because of all the hypocrisy.
I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the film, especially when Team Good got to kick major ass.
(This is where some drive-by commenter is going to come along and be all “are you really anti-racist or are you just against white people?” just like happened on my review of Batman Returns. I’m not sure why people do the drive-bys. Do they think I’m going to be struck by the insightfulness of their observations and get therapy to resolve my virulent anti-white-people agenda?)
Unfortunately, in addition to the righteous ass-kicking by people of color for great justice, the second thing I saw while watching Machete was a film that ruthlessly exploited women for the glorification of a male action hero and the satisfaction of the male gaze, and it was really fucking disappointing.
To get this across better, let’s take a look at the nurses:

The nurses
Electra Avellan and Elise Avellan play the nurses, and I love them. They work in a hospital for The Network, an underground resistance movement that assists Mexicans who immigrate into Texas. I’m not sure they have any medical skills, as their main responsibility in caring for the wounded Machete seems to be comforting him with eye candy, but they are on the side of good and they wear fantastic platform heels and shoot things and I have absolutely no problem with any of that. If sexy nurses with machine guns can’t be part of your revolution, then I don’t want any. 
(That’s not what you thought I was going to say, was it?)
In a feminist utopia I think the nurses could still exist in a movie, because I think there are a lot of women who would find that a lot of fun, and for good reasons. When Grace reviewed Grindhouse, which included Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, she said this:
…the whole package pays homage to/makes fun of the “grindhouse,” which is a beaten-down movie theater that plays double-bills of B movies. […] Now that we’re clear that these are supposed to be B movies, that they are hearkening back to and a parody of a specific kind of film, then we can skip all of the ways in which they are typically sexist. Yes, there are copious bare breasts and ass shots, women are called bitch all over the place, sexual violence is threatened (though, and I thought this was telling, never actually enacted) […] If there is any chance of you enjoying Grindhouse, or finding anything about it to be subversive or interesting, you are going to have to consider these things part of the kitsch that Rodriguez and Tarantino are playing with and move on.

To me, the nurses are part of that kitsch. They’re a lighthearted genre trapping. What I DO have a problem with is that almost every other woman with a speaking part in this movie is basically the exact same character as the nurses, just in different clothes. They exist to fawn over the hero, look hot for the audience, and kick ass, without any distracting personal goals or motivations.
From the naked woman who betrays Machete and stabs him in the leg with his own knife to win a drug lord’s favor, to Jessica Alba’s ambitious INS agent whose career ambitions are quickly sacrificed to furthering his quest, to Cheryl Chin’s turn as the Dragon Lady enforcer for the drug lord, to Lindsay Lohan’s drugged out, often naked internet porn star (who gets used sexually by Machete to humiliate her father, in a plotline I thought was beyond atrocious), there there is barely a hint of any female activity that does not revolve around men. Michelle Rodriguez’s Luz comes close, but even she is ready to turn over leadership to Machete as quickly as possible, anointing him leader of her desired revolution. (For all Rodriguez’s talk in the media lately about how she wants to be typecast as the bad-ass instead of the boring girlfriend, I was expecting a little more.) Alba and Rodriguez even get new costumes late in the movie to make them fit better into the nurse paradigm, and the results are not awesome.
Lately I’ve been reading some of the Criminal comic book series by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and it’s gotten me thinking about women in genre fiction. Criminal is specifically noir crime fiction, and when you read that kind of fiction, you know from the get-go that the dame is going to be trouble. I would argue that action movies are almost as bad for prescribing the roles female characters must play, and B movies doubly so. So if you’re going to create in a genre like that, how do you work with your female characters in a way that’s not horribly sexist? How do you give them agency? How do you give them personalities and missions in their lives beyond their usefulness as plot points for the hero?
Let me tell you, the people who made Machete haven’t asked themselves any of those questions. Or if they have, they’re doing it wrong. “All your babes are belong to our sexy stereotype” is not creating strong female characters, regardless of how many guns you give them. Turning all women into genrelicious Barbie is not staying within the genre, it’s turning them into objects. You could argue that the men in this film are also stereotypes, but damn, at least they get to have clothes on!
I desperately want to give this film some stars. The way the film treats women, though, is appalling. The rape joke made by Machete’s brother when Machete brings two drugged, naked women to his church was also not okay.
No stars.
Skye Kilaen blogs about women kicking ass in action films at Heroine Content, where the unofficial slogan is “Helping feminists with their Netflix queues since 2006.”