Milla Jovovich – Bitch Flicks

This guest post by Laura Power appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

I love violent women. Maybe this is an odd thing to say; maybe it’s not. And I should qualify my statement by specifying that I love violent women in TV and film, not at my local grocery store. But oh, how I love a self-possessed Milla Jovovich stomping her thick-soled boot squarely into some thug’s gut, or a zinger-slinging Sarah Michelle Gellar tossing a spike straight through a vampire’s sternum.

But far too often it seems that filmmakers find violent women more acceptable when those women are either victims retaliating against violence (like in almost every horror movie ever made. ever.), psychopaths (Fatal Attraction; Basic Instinct; To Die For), or extorted to choose violence over death (Nikita). The spotlight rarely shines on women who are required to be violent during the course of their (lawful) day-to-day jobs, and who are not only competent, but who excel at those jobs. Yes, we have officers of the law Marge Gunderson (Fargo) and Clarice Starling (Silence of the Lambs); but Marge is part of a male-dominated ensemble, and Clarice is an agent-in-training who is used as a pawn and lied to by her male superior, and who relies on the help of a male criminal for clues and, in a way, mentorship.

Clarice can’t seem to shake Hannibal

But what happens when a woman is in a lawful profession, is competent, and is given the tools and information she needs to do her job? Well, this kind of woman hasn’t starred in many films, which is why the Paul Feig vehicle Spy starring Melissa McCarthy is such a…dare I say revolution?

As I considered Spy and the way McCarthy, playing CIA agent Susan Cooper, uses and responds to violence throughout the film, I asked myself if she truly was a new mold of a violent woman in film:

Is she being hunted? No.
Is she avenging a violence (physical, sexual) done against her? Nope.
Is she used for window dressing as men in the film kick ass? Not a chance.
Is she fully possessed of her faculties (i.e. no memory loss, mental illness)? She sure as hell is.

But I didn’t stop after I’d checked all of the boxes. I wanted to know what made Spy different from Feig’s other film featuring female law-enforcement agents, The Heat (2013). It isn’t just that Spy gives us a glamor—in McCarthy’s hair, makeup, and wardrobe (eventually), the decadent settings, and the European luxury. And it isn’t just that Spy takes its female lead very seriously—though it’s a comedy, Susan Cooper is self-aware and always in on the joke, never the joke itself. Spy is, however, different from The Heat—and from most other female-driven films—in how its main character uses violence in a competent, purposeful, and honest way.

Our first glimpse into Susan’s efficiency and…exuberance with violence is when the deputy director (Allison Janney) plays a decade-old video showing Cooper dive-rolling and shooting expertly through a training exercise. Cooper is fast and accurate, and although she seems embarrassed about the video, her supervisor is openly impressed.

Janney is another female actor I’d like to see kick some ass

Once Cooper’s mission starts, she takes step after step into more and more violence, and with each new challenge—a knife fight with a bomber in Paris; a quick-thinking trip-and-push in Rome; an in-flight spar with an armed flight attendant—she demonstrates both a willingness to be violent and a skillfulness to execute what needs to be done.

But Cooper’s best tricks start in Budapest, where she becomes more violent both physically as well as verbally. Cooper must lie to Rayna (Rose Byrne) to cover her identity, and, in the blink of an eye, she transforms into a filthy-mouthed bodyguard (“good gravy” replaced with “limp-dicked unicorn”). After this transition, Cooper’s quick-on-her-feet actions range from assaulting a man with her cell phone to making an impromptu decoy and smashing a fire extinguisher onto the heads of two bodyguards to escape capture.

Feig, as a director of female violence, and McCarthy, as the subject acting out this violence, shine in their respective roles, but they shine brightest during the beautifully choreographed fight between Cooper and a French female baddie in a green jumpsuit. The fight takes place in the kitchen of a nightclub, and Cooper uses dinner rolls, a baguette, frying pans, and finally a kitchen knife to attack and defend. As she dodges swings and blows, her reactions are sharp and athletic. Cooper grabs her opponent by the waist and brings her to ground like she is just a sack of rice; she plunges a knife into her opponent’s palm. And on the other side of the camera, Feig gives McCarthy the same treatment he gave Jude Law at the start of the movie when Law (playing CIA agent Bradley Fine), perfectly coifed and tuxedoed, does slow motion roundhouse kicks at plate-faced bodyguards. As McCarthy tousles with her own nemesis in the kitchen fight, Feig uses slow motion to let us savor the violence and bird’s eye shots to let us see the controlled swings of Cooper’s arms and legs as she fights. The violence is not slapstick. The violence is not played for laughs. The violence is just flat-out cinematically terrific.

One could make an argument that Susan Cooper must adopt a persona in order to explore this violence, and that it does not represent the “true” woman—the woman who bakes, has trouble getting the bartender’s attention, and might wear a “lumpy, pumpkin sack-dress” out to dinner. But I don’t agree with that argument. Cooper’s violence is not just a persona she wears in the field. The “real” Susan Cooper is the woman who follows the jumpsuit-wearing assassin into the kitchen, seeking out the conflict rather than hiding from it. The “real” Susan Cooper is the woman who head-butts Bradley Fine when she’s tied up in a dungeon. The “real” Susan Cooper is the woman who gets a field promotion because she has, in essence, saved the goddamned day.

Too long have men had the privilege of having so much fun (and looking so good) with violence in film. Let’s hope that more female directors pick up this mantle, and that more women are given the opportunity to shine as the centers of films where they can punch, kick, and shoot without the added context of victimhood or psychopathy. Give us more opportunities to be violent. Because, filmmakers, let’s be honest: it’s about time.

Laura Power teaches English composition and creative writing at a two-year college in Illinois. You can read more of her work at Cinefilles and Lake Projects and follow her on Twitter.

Resident Evil DVD Cover

Feminist film discussion so often turns to the Bechdel Test—for the uninitiated, it asks if 1) a movie has more than one female character 2) if two female characters have a conversation 3) if that conversation is about something other than a man—that it is easy to forget the test is not meant to be a benchmark of quality. Passing the Bechdel Test does not make a movie good. It does not even make a movie particularly feminist. It’s a bare minimum requirement for movies at all interested in portraying women as part of its story.

I’d love it if more movies passed the Bechdel test, but don’t count on The Rule as the savior of cinema. Movies can easily pass the Bechdel test and be beyond terrible. Which is abundantly illustrated by the Resident Evil franchise; which releases its fifth installment, Resident Evil: Retribution, today. The first four Resident Evil films pass the Bechdel Test. They even pass the Sarkeesian Corollary—that women characters speak to each other about something other than a man for at least 60 seconds—which is fairly remarkable for action-heavy movies without much dialogue at all. The first four Resident Evil films also pass Alaya Dawn Johnson’s adaptation of the Bechdel test to evaluate the representation of people of color in movies.

[By the way, it’s very easy to pass the third prong of these tests when there’s a gender-neutral ZOMG ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE! to dominate conversation.]

Zombies: something to talk about

Additionally, the Resident Evil films pass what I would call The Ripley Test, in that many of the female characters’ gender is not essential to their character or to the plot, and a male character could have filled that “slot” just as easily. The series protagonist, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, was not a character in the video game series but was invented for the films.

The second film, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, starts bringing over characters from the game series, and notably chooses Jill Valentine, the female of the pair of main characters from the original game, over Chris Redfield, who doesn’t appear until the fourth movie (one film after his sister Claire appears as the leader of a band of surviving humans.) [Author’s note: I’ve never played the Resident Evil games and relied heavily on the Resident Evil Wiki to write this piece.]

Jill Valentine in Resident Evil video game and film

One could cynically dismiss the choice to create the character Alice and select Jill Valentine as one of the first crossover characters as the result of Hot Action Chicks putting butts in movie seats. They do both make incredibly impractical clothing decisions (or in the case of Alice in Resident Evil, have incredibly impractical clothing decisions made for them). But the first film also has Michelle Rodriguez as badass S.T.A.R.S (think S.W.A.T, but working for an evil corporation) officer Rain Ocampo, who could just have easily been another tough dude to leave Alice our Smurfette.

Michelle Rodriguez as Rain in Resident Evil

Resident Evil: Extinction finds Alice, Claire Redfield, and secondary female characters Betty and K-Mart (seriously) dressing and acting much more like people whose primary concern is avoiding grisly death by zombie attack, give or take a little eyeliner.

Spencer Locke as K-Mart and Ali Larter as Claire in Extinction

So the Resident Evil franchise does not have an inclusiveness problem. Unfortunately, it has a problem with pretty much everything else that makes a movie enjoyable: storytelling, logic, consistent mythology, characterization, visual finesse. Zombie genre inventor George A. Romero was fired from the first Resident Evil movie over “creative differences.” Firing Romero from your zombie movie is like firing Zeus from your thunderstorm. His absence is profoundly felt in the Resident Evil films’ total inability to make up their mind about their internal Rules of Zombification (Resident Evil‘s zombie apocalypse is caused by the spread of a biological weapon called the T-virus, which sometimes seems airborne and other times not so much, which when exposed to living tissue either causes superpowers or horrific mutations depending on the will of the plot, and sometimes causes your traditional death and subsequent reanimation as a zombie, or maybe a gigantic Super Zombie if we’ve reached the end of ~~a level~~ an act).

The Resident Evil movies would also have benefited from Romero’s transparency when it comes to social commentary: it’s one thing to have the primary antagonist be the gigantic and sinister Umbrella Corporation, but that lack of subtlety offers no help in understanding the actual meat of your message when Umbrella Corporation’s apparent corporate mission is to be as moustache-twirlingly eeeeevil as possible, rather than, you know, normal corporate goals like making money.

Warning: this teaser trailer is infinitely better than the actual movies.

But the main problem with the Resident Evil series unfortunately is one that severely undercuts is Bechdel-busting assets, and that is that series protagonist Alice is a total cipher. In every film she is re-set, like a video game character reverting to the start of the level. In the beginning of Resident Evil, she awakes (naked in the shower) with no memories. In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, she begins and ends the film waking up in Umbrella Corporation lab with new sets of superpowers as the subject of unknown experimentation.

Alice wakes up in an Umbrella Corporation lab. Get used to it, Alice.

In Resident Evil: Extinction, she’s revealed to be one of hundreds of Alice clones. In Resident Evil: Afterlife, all the clones are quickly killed off in a massive explosion, and the surviving Alice is somehow stripped over her superpowers, only to act more or less exactly as tough as she was when she still had them.

Before the consequences of any of these changes to the nature of Alice’s character can be explored, the series hits the reset button yet again. Meanwhile, Alice’s personality can bizarrely and dramatically shift at any time, and we’re supposed to dismiss it because she’s always just had her memories erased or been genetically modified or remotely activated by satellite or cloned or de-powered or something wackadoo and scifi like that.

While the Resident Evil movies make it abundantly clear that passing the Bechdel Test is not enough to make a movie any good, ultimately I must say I like this series more than I would if it were another male-dominated action franchise. It’s not like video game adaptations are generally known for nuanced characterization anyway. I know I’m going to keep watching these terrible flicks because I like zombie movies and action movies, and if I’m going to keep punishing myself with crap movies, it’s at least nice to see some what-passes-for-“characters” of my own gender represented some of the time. Representing women doesn’t necessarily make a movie any good, but it at least makes it a little different.

Tag: Milla Jovovich

Nobody Puts Susan Cooper in the Basement: Melissa McCarthy and Skillful, Competent Violence in Film

The Resident Evil Series Proves The Bechdel Test Does Not Measure Quality