Violent Women Theme Week

Violent Women: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Violent Women Theme Week here.

The Violent Vagina: The Real Horror Behind the Teeth by Belle Artiquez

It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.

Salt: A Refreshing Genderless Lens by Cameron Airen

Violent films with a female at their center tend to be viewed differently than violent films with a male lead. When a woman is in this role, it’s controversial. When a man is in the same type of role, it’s a part of who he is as a human being. We’ve become numb to the violence that men engage in onscreen. As a result, we don’t criticize it like we do when a woman is engaging in it.

Shieldmaidens: The Power and Pleasure of Women’s Violence on Vikings by Lisa Bolekaja

Emotional Violence, Kink, and The Duke of Burgundy by Rushaa Louise Hamid

In much of feminist literature from the past, kink is seen an act driven by patriarchy, with submissive women reproducing their oppressions in the bedroom and capitulating to gendered norms of women as silent and subservient. Even nowadays as the tide gradually changes, there is still a large amount of ire reserved for those who practice BDSM.

Violence and Morality in The 100 by Esther Nassaris

This act of mercy killing is the first of many moments when Clarke is forced to be violent for the good of others. It not only prompts an important change within herself – she loses her idealistic ways – but it prompts a change in the group dynamics. After this moment, Clarke begins to pull away from the co-leadership she and Bellamy had operated in and moves toward becoming the sole leader of the delinquents.

The Rising “Tough” Women in AMC’s The Walking Dead Season Five by Brooke Bennett

This season seems to present a large change in representational issues by including complex characters of color that we actually know something about and care for, presenting the couple of Aaron and Eric from the Alexandria community and self-pronounced lesbian Tara, and doing away with the innate equation of vagina equals do the laundry while the men go kill all the zombies.

Nine Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies by Sara Century

Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules.

The Real Mother Russia: Modernising Murder and Betrayal in The Americans by Dan Jordan

The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.

Monster: A Telling of the Real Life Consequences for Violent Women by Danika Kimball

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. Monster vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

Stoker–Family Secrets, Frozen Bodies, and Female Orgasms by Julie Mills

Her uncle’s imposing presence has awakened in her at the same time a lust for bloodshed and an intense sexual desire, and she promptly begins to experiment and seek out means with which to satisfy both.

Sons of Anarchy: Female Violence, Feminist Care by Leigh Kolb

At the end of season 6, Gemma violently clashes the spheres of power. She’s in the kitchen. She’s using an iron, and a carving fork. Using tools of the feminine sphere, she brutally murders Tara, because she fears that Tara is about to take control and dismantle the club—the life, the style of mothering and living—that she brought home with her so many years ago.

What’s in a Name: Anxiety About Violent Women in Monster, Teeth, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Colleen Clemens

The first college course I ever developed focuses on women and violence. Stemming from my interest in women who enact violence on and off the page, I wanted to ask students to think about our perceptions of women as “naturally” peaceful.

Hard Candy: The Razor Blade Hidden in an Apple-Cheeked Confection by Emma Kat Richardson

Hogtying and drugging Jeff is only the tip of Hayley’s sadistic iceberg: over the course of the next several hours, she subjects him to a series of tortures more at home in Guantanamo Bay than a sleepy suburban neighborhood, including spraying his screaming mouth with chemicals, temporarily suffocating him with cellophane, and attacking him with a taser in the shower.

High Tension: Rethinking Female Sexuality and Subjectivity Through Violence by Laura Minor

Rather than pander to the male gaze, Aja decides to reject these scopophilic pleasures in favour of championing female subjectivity, but he also chooses to reject heteronormativity by having the lesbian desires of Marie drive the plot of the film. Interestingly, it is these desires and subjective experiences that both initiate the use of violence and intensify the representation of violence throughout.

“It is not fitting for her to be so manly and terrifying”: Catharsis and Female Chaos in Pasolini’s Medea by Brigit McCone

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match.

Domestic Terrorism: Feminized Violence in Misery by Tessa Racked

Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Girlhood: Observed But Not Seen by Ren Jender

Girlhood starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls.

Patty Jenkins’ Monster: Shouldering the Double Burden of Masculinity and Femininity by Katherine Parker-Hay

In this narrative we see masculinity float free from any ties to the male body, femininity float free from any easy connection to frailness – we see them meet in the one body of this working class woman to excruciating effect.

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women by Melissa-Kelly Franklin

The acts of violence by the female protagonists are terrifying, swift, and socially subversive. They target misogynistic representatives of the patriarchal society that oppresses and silences women, taking them out one by one.

Slashing Gender Assumptions: The Female Killer, Unmasked by Kate Blair

To a certain extent, the reveal of woman as killer in both films comes across as a “gotcha” moment. After an hour or so of being scared out of your wits, it’s both surprising and puzzling to see a woman emerge as the killer. In the real world, most documented violent crimes are committed by men, but in a film, where anything can happen, there’s no reason to make this assumption.

“Did I Step on Your Moment?” The Seductive and Psychological Violence of Female Superheroes by Mary Iannone

This style of fighting codes our female superheroes as half menacing and half attractive – we are meant to be afraid of them, but also enticed by them. Their violence is inextricably linked to their sexuality.

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

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.

“She Called Them Anti-Seed”: How the Women of Mad Max: Fury Road Divorce Violence from Strength by Cate Young

In Mad Max: Fury Road the “strong female characters” are notable specifically for their aversion to violence. The film portrays its women as emotionally strong people who engage in violence only in self-defense, and only against the system that oppresses them.

Sugar, Spice, and Things Not Nice: Violent Girlhood in Violet & Daisy by Caroline Madden

The character of Daisy personifies the film’s juxtaposition of violence and girlhood. Daisy loves cute animals and doesn’t understand Violet’s dirty jokes. The twist is even that she has not really killed anyone, thus remaining innocent of all crimes. The opening scene displays the most daring oppositional iconography — the young girls dress as nuns, the ultimate image of pure goodness, while having a shoot ‘em up with a gang.

Children: The Great Qualifier of Female Violence by Katherine Fusciardi

True, the rape revenge trope has been put at bay, but there is still a gender issue behind the remaining motivation. It focuses around the assumption of maternity being the all-encompassing passion. Until female characters can be violent for reasons that have nothing to do with their womanhood, there still isn’t complete equality in media.

How Spring Breakers Ungenders the Erotic and Transformative Power of Violence by Emma Houxbois

Mad Max: Fury Road: Violence Helps Our Heroines Have a Lovely Day by Sophie Hall

Furiosa, stabbed and wounded yet still persistent, takes down the main villain Immortan Joe. “Remember me?” Furiosa growls just before ripping his breathing apparatus–and half of his face–clean off. That quip may seem like your average cool one-liner, but for me it is so much more than that. It’s Furiosa, our female protagonist, who takes out the bad guy. Not Max. Not Nux, or any other male character. Her.

Puberty and the Creation of a Monster: Ginger Snaps by Kelly Piercy

When Violence Is Excusable: Regina Mills and the Twisted Morality of Once Upon a Time by Emma Thomas

In the past, Regina’s path to control is lined with dark magic. Dark magic is fueled by her anger, and the two intersect endlessly until it is hard to tell whether Regina is controlling the anger, or the anger is controlling her. What is definitive is that the more her power grows the more violent she becomes. With the only person who offered her a loving future dead, there is no one to rein her in.

Timorous Killers: The Breach of Shyness in Polanski’s Repulsion by Johanna Mackin

The eye we see in the film’s opening credits belongs to Carol and encapsulates her relationship to the internal and external worlds. To outside observers, Carol’s large, doe-like eyes are a signifier of her feminine allure, but, as is made palpable to the viewer, they also house her intense fear and constitute a deceptive barrier against the malignant traumas that disturb her internal world.

Death of the (Male) Author: Feminist Violence in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar by Sarah Smyth

How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy, and authority.

TV and Classic Literature: Is The 100 like Lord of the Flies? by Rowan Ellis

On the contrary, Octavia moves away from the explicit sexuality of her role in the pilot, and although her initial training is linked to Lincoln, she gravitates toward a warrior’s life to gain the respect of Indra. Although some critics have seen this as a drastic change in her characterisation, looking back at her first scene in the pilot, where she is held back by Bellamy while trying to attack the others for repeating rumours about her, it feels more like a development.

The Killer in/and the Girl: Alexandre Aja’s High Tension by Rebecca Willoughby

In High Tension, we have le tueur—the Killer—in place of the Monster, who in Shelley’s novel can be read as Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger, that most famous of psychological devices used to illustrate the violence with which the repressed returns, doing all of the things the typical, well-socialized individual could never dream of doing. But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.

From Ginger Snaps to Jennifer’s Body: The Contamination of Violent Women by Julia Patt

Thematically, Jennifer’s Body mirrors Ginger Snaps in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.

What’s in a Name: Anxiety About Violent Women in ‘Monster,’ ‘Teeth,’ and ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’

This post by Colleen Clemens appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

When I tell people that I teach a course on women and violence, the conversation almost always goes like this:

Interested and well-meaning person: “What are you teaching this semester?”

Me: “One of the classes is the course I developed on women and violence in films and literature.”

Interested and well-meaning person: “Wow, there is so much to focus on. Domestic violence, rape, such a hard subject. Are you going to use The Accused?”

Me, trying not to sound like a jerky academic: “Actually the course focuses on women who perpetrate violence. I want to think about what it means when women enact violence as well.”

Long pause. Furrowed brow. Another beat.

Interested and well-meaning person: “Oh. I never really thought about that. Will you talk about Lorena Bobbitt?”

And that is why I developed the course. Because even the most thoughtful among us rarely take the time to consider women beyond the role of victim. When a woman enacts violence, we feel great anxiety because she is dismantling the binary of woman as natural caretaker (see Katha Pollitt’s “Marooned on Gilligan’s Island” for a great discussion of this concept. I start the course with this text). Only men are supposed to be violent. And the texts that portray women as violent actors anticipate this anxiety. When a woman is violent in a film or novel, she often has a reason–often sexual assault–that motivates her violence. The titles of several of these films demonstrate the anxiety we feel about a text displaying women actors of violence. And all of the films tell the story of a woman who was wronged–because that is the only way a woman would ever break out of the rigid mold of care-taking, peaceful earth mother.

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Monster

Based on the true story of Aileen Wuornos, this film follows Theron’s character through the development of her serial killing. When raped while working as a prostitute, Aileen kills her attacker. She comes to see that the world she lives in is dangerous and attempts to find a job off of the streets, but those positions won’t take her because they see her as unqualified. She wants to enter the world of “legitimate female work,” i.e., a secretary, only to be told that she doesn’t get to just jump into the world of law.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/sraDVyksYMs”]

The film shows us that she has no other choice but to return to the streets, and once there, she kills her johns because she is terrified of being raped again. Until the murders turn. Aileen spares one man only to kill another who offers her help. When is enacting fear of being raped, the audience feels some kind of pity for her. When she takes the life of an “innocent,” she loses the audience’s sympathy and becomes the eponymous “monster.”

Here is where titles start to matter. I ask my students–and you–why isn’t the film titled Aileen? Because that would humanize her. And there is no humanity allowed for a woman that enacts violence. We cannot sit with such an idea that there is something human to her. She MUST be a monster for us to reconcile our ideas of femininity with the character we feel for during the majority of the film. Interestingly, the documentary about her life does use her first name.

If we look at a list of films about serial killers that are based on true stories, most of the titles allude to the name given to the male killer: Jack the Ripper, Doctor Death, Jeffrey Dahmer, Zodiac, the Green River Killer. Monster‘s title does no such thing. She is a monster. No human woman could ever do such a thing. Perhaps this is why so much was made of Theron’s transformation, as if we all needed to be reminded “It is OK. Remember, this is all fake. The most gorgeous woman in the world is under all of that makeup!”

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Teeth

Though I have written about this film before on a piece about the rape revenge genre (for a summary, head on over there for a recap), here I would like to focus on the title of the film.

We see a similar trope: girl gets raped; therefore, girl becomes violent. Dawn is literally a lily-white virgin, a “good” girl, until the horrors of patriarchy completely turn her. And her body protects her from further harm.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/IA5l86aluqQ”]

Again, the film creates a space for sympathy for Dawn. We can “understand” why she becomes violent through–and in spite of–her biology. Her vagina dentata takes over her thinking self. Then Dawn learns to use it for her own good. And then Dawn becomes a vigilante.

This movie poster is telling. Her vagina makes her squeamish. The power of it is too much to handle for her. Again, why isn’t this film called Dawn? Are her teeth more important than herself? Her toothed vagina is anxiety producing. She is monstrous. Her vagina is all she is, and she must simultaneously protect it and use it protect other women.

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Series

I find everything about the titling of this series fascinating. Stieg Larrson’s orginal title, Men Who Hate Women, has been completely lost on American audiences. Want to blow someone’s mind? Tell her this was the title. So now that we got that fact out of the way, let’s talk about the content and title. Again, we have an assaulted woman who uses violence to enact revenge on those who have wronged her and her family.

Lisbeth is certainly NOT a girl. She is a woman in this film. Infantilizing her and naming the film “the girl” and then pointing out something on her body is similar to naming Dawn’s film Teeth. The body becomes the girl. Because a “true” girl would never, ever do the things these women do–even if their bodies were violated. And why is Lisbeth behind Blomkvist when the trilogy is her story (don’t forget she’s still a “girl” when she kicks the hornet’s nest)? Making Lisbeth Salander a “girl” denies her womanhood because we don’t want to see her as a woman. A “natural woman” would never do what she does in the trilogy.

We shouldn’t forget that all of the characters are being failed by the patriarchal system. Aileen wants to get out of prostituting and is mocked for her attempt. Dawn is told that being a virgin is all that matters, and she is now dirty. Lisbeth is raped by the people in the system who are supposed to be protecting her welfare. Because all three revolt against the system of oppression, we have to “other” them and distance themselves from femininity. It is the only way society can sleep at night.

How ‘Spring Breakers’ Ungenders the Erotic and Transformative Power of Violence

This guest post by Emma Houxbois appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Ever since his screenwriting debut at age 19, penning the controversial script for director Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine has been best remembered in the public consciousness for navigating the razor’s edge between gritty realism and outright exploitation, with critics sharply divided on either side. In order for Clark to put himself in a position to meet the teenage Korine and solicit what would become the script for Kids, he taught himself how to skateboard at age 50 and hung around Washington Park Square as a means of earning the respect of his would be collaborators and in doing so, emerge with a film that captured the fidelity of their perspective rather than his alien construction of it.

Clark’s methodology of getting close to his subject, shooting using the techniques and visual language of documentary filmmaking, and relying on mostly untrained actors made an impression on Korine that has lasted, in one form or another, across his career to the present. When Korine began filming Spring Breakers in 2012, approaching the age of 40, his engagement with the youth culture he sought to evoke in the film had shifted almost completely into a position where he was stepping into the shoes that Clark wore when they collaborated on Kids.

The semiotics and technology of camera work had evolved remarkably in the 20 years since Kids was filmed, to the point where shooting handheld no longer immediately communicated that the film was either a documentary or aping one the way that Kids or his own follow-up Gummo had been received. Instead, it had evolved into a low cost alternative that fueled the explosive rise of independent filmmakers as diverse as Steven Soderbergh and Robert Rodriguez and stayed on as a stylistic flourish as many of those directors and DPs earned their way into studio budgets. The final nail in the coffin of handheld photography being immediately associated with documentary filmmaking or low budget productions was perhaps Steven Spielberg’s extensive use of it in the Omaha Beach invasion sequence in Saving Private Ryan.

Thus Korine was forced to rely on other means to convey the sense of spontaneity and unvarnished realism that defined his entry into filmmaking. This necessary shift came in the form of moving to a surrealistic approach that saw him hire famous well-known actors and rely on them to improvise and mingle with the same kind of untrained participants that he and Clark had both relied on in the past.

When the news emerged that Korine had cast former child stars Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson alongside his wife Rachel and James Franco through paparazzi photos of the young women handcuffed and leaning against police cars dressed in neon bikinis and sneakers, the immediate assumption was that Korine was mounting a kind of personal bacchanalia that would prey on the impressionable young actresses and exploit them for his own sexual appetites, a line of criticism similar to that which marred Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny and severely compromised the reception of Abdellatiff Kechiche’s work on Blue is the Warmest Color.

The film itself opens very conscious of these expectations and addresses them in the most confrontational way possible. It begins with Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” the dubstep anthem that bore the brunt of intergenerational musical warfare that painted it as being the clear sign that contemporary youth culture had no sense of taste or appreciation for art. The song is set and to a clearly constructed montage of the seeming worst excesses of Spring Break: young women dancing provocatively in bikinis, stripping, and simulating all kinds of sex acts for the lurid enjoyment of their male peers and the camera that frequently slid into slow motion to capture every jiggle and bounce, zooming in leeringly as they sucked on popsicles or laid back with their mouths open for the boys to pour beer and energy drinks held over their crotches into their mouths. The loudest, ugliest, most lurid speculation about Korine’s motives and the popular construction of Spring Break as a playground for the worst excesses of young male sexuality exploded across the screen.

It cuts abruptly to the norm of its protagonists’ lives, a generic and sedated tableau of aimless midwest life that pans through passively watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic while taking bong hits to Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson’s Brit and Candy bored in class among a sea of laptops flickering from one PowerPoint slide to the next in their professor’s lecture. Instead of laying the intended facts bare as he did in prior efforts, Korine takes on the role of trickster in Spring Breakers, first by baiting his critics by presenting the most lascivious and staged panorama of youthful excess imaginable, then by immediately following it by burying the true central thesis of the film in the droning voice of the professor:

The professor is speaking about what he refers to as the first and second reconstructions of the South, which he tells the class establishes a continuum, that the men of the South went to war, an experience which radicalized them upon their return home to revitalize their communities and effectively value their own lives and social cohesion more than in the antebellum and interwar years.

“When you go overseas to fight Hitler,” he tells the class as Brit and Candy doodle notes fantasizing about their upcoming Spring Break including miming oral sex on a cartoon penis, “you get shot at, you see your friends killed. You’re going to come home a different person. You’re going to come back a radicalized individual. You’re going to risk life and limb.” He further advances the theory that the Double V campaign, victory at home and abroad, meant to the generation who went to war that they were to defeat not only Hitler’s fascism and racism in Europe, but that they were to return and dismantle Jim Crow as well.

While the full text of the lecture isn’t available, this is likely speaking specifically about the Black soldiers who fought in those wars and not the generation as a whole, which again, has further connotations later in the film. The hard truth of it is that such a thesis completely ignores that these kinds of trauma frequently, and especially in current times, result in PTSD symptoms that would severely compromise or outright rob someone suffering from it from any desire for that kind of action, but the film is more concerned about society’s formal and informal liminal spaces and how they operate to encourage conforming rather than creating sustained radicalization that subverts norms.

This sequence then transitions into a middle-aged youth pastor who sloppily tries to construct his evangelical message with teen slang while wearing a tight Affliction style t-shirt emblazoned with Christian iconography and a crucifix tattoo down the length of his neck. His inauthenticity, the blatantness of the artifice he puts up in order to channel youthful energy and momentum toward his own end is a winking parody of Korine and Clark before him.

The girls, driven by desperation to escape their mundane lives to take part in Spring Break, scheme a robbery of the local chicken shack to raise the necessary funds to get there. To psyche themselves up for the crime, they exhort each other to pretend it’s a video game, to detach themselves and dehumanize their victims in a hurried pep talk to the same end as the grueling boot camp scenes sequences in Full Metal Jacket. However, instead of finding themselves repulsed or detached by their actions, they revel in the thrill, getting their first taste of a dark urge they chase through the film like an addiction.

Throughout this time, it becomes apparent that Korine’s camera has abandoned any sense of being an objective or passive viewpoint and instead takes on the same kind of probing, predatory nature it took on during the opening montage. As the girls engage in innocent play both at home and in their first forays into St. Petersburg, the camera constantly attempts to expose and eroticize their bodies but finds itself stymied by a change in pose or subtle movement juxtaposed against the tinny, childlike score. There’s a lurking menace, a predatory masculinity that haunts them through the lens and seems to foreshadow an undoing for them at the hands of the ravenous boys who await them in Florida. It’s all in service to the idea of building up the expectation of a didactic narrative that punishes women who transgress in the way of classic fairytales and Edward Gorey.

This construction reaches its zenith as Alien enters the film for the first time, arriving just as the girls find themselves out of money and stuck in county jail for being caught with cocaine. His initial appearance is full of leering and looming menace, with closeup shots of his grill lampshading the teeth of a fairytale wolf ready to devour the helpless girl as an agent of cosmic retribution. He interrogates them about their experience so far, probing it for fuel for his own fantasies, again hewing close to the initial framing that Spring Break is fundamentally a place where women exist for the pleasure of men, but as Alien reveals himself and his personal identity, he begins to emerge as a contemporary Jay Gatsby.

Like the F. Scott Fitzgerald character, Alien embodies a teenage boy’s conception of being rich and successful, but it’s informed by a culture that encouraged and abetted misappropriation of Blackness as the center of that construction who conceals his clear artifice by embedding himself in the legitimate Black community the way that James Franco, the trained actor playing Alien is shot in and among untrained actors from the local Black community. The Gatsby parallel reaches its apotheosis as he lists all of his proudest possessions, pointing to all the different colors of Calvin Klein briefs he owns in a nearly identical shot to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby throwing a stack of different colored silk shirts to Carey Mulligan’s Daisy in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby released the same year.

As Selena Gomez’s Faith breaks down and Alien hauls her off for a private chat, the construction of their experience as the radicalizing construction of warfare emerges in her dialogue as she says “This is isn’t what I signed up for,” mimicking common war movie vernacular as the expected breaking point where Alien erupts into violence draws nearer, intercut with a flash forward to Alien reaching up a bloody hand to grasp a gun. The tension dissipates as Faith returns home safely, however.

Without her it seems as if Alien has built a fantasy of his own with Brit, Candy, and Rachel Korine’s Cottie making up his own personal harem. He invites them into his fantasy, transferring his vicarious experience of Blackness by taking them to a strip club run by Alien’s former mentor, played by Gucci Mane, which instigates the biggest clash of authenticity and artifice in the film as trained actor James Franco playing the role of Alien putting up a false performance of Blackness comes into conflict with Gucci Mane, untrained actor and real life murderer (acquitted for self defense). It’s the first major crack in the character’s facade and the assumption that he represents a reckoning for the girls.

That reckoning seems to occur as Alien begins playing dangerously with guns in front of Brit and Candy in bed, but when the turn happens, it’s Brit and Candy who frighten Alien by picking up a pair of loaded pistols equipped with silencers and force him down on his knees in an eroticized reenactment of their robbery of the chicken shack. As the oral sex imagery in the film’s opening montage is reversed and takes on a dangerous shift from popsicles and streams of beer to a loaded weapon, it’s Alien and his performance of masculinity that is called into account as Brit and Candy experience the erotic thrill for themselves. Instead of resisting, Alien embraces the shift in power by aggressively sucking on the silencer, embracing his new role as the subject to their object.

What emerges from this sequence is the realization that there was never going to be a didactic element to this film, that it was presented as a ruse to facilitate the idea of Brit and Candy reveling in the erotic thrill of violence and domination that is usually reserved for men. Alien isn’t their reckoning, he’s theirs to exploit for their own gratification as they use him to recapture the thrill of the chicken shack robbery by committing a string of violent robberies wearing pink ski masks emblazoned with unicorns to thoroughly code their violence and the erotic thrill they derive from it as being inherently girlish rather than simply a pantomime of masculine violence.

The reckoning, when it does occur, is in the form of Archie, who again imposes the harsh light of authenticity on their delicate artifice by having them sprayed with gunfire, resulting in a bullet would for Cottie, which again, recalls the professor’s commentary that being shot at and witnessing a friend being shot is an inherently radicalizing experience. Cottie then retreats, leaving Brit and Candy thus transformed. As Cottie explains her rationale for leaving, that everyone is returning to their normal lives -intercut with shots of the montage of the normative Spring Break- it serves as a reminder that the socially acceptable and encouraged version of that liminal space is constructed with the purpose of letting participants break social norms around sex and drinking with the understanding that they will re-adopt those norms when it ends. Brit and Candy, by remaining, have crossed fully over from a legitimized liminal space into a simulation of warfare as they have sex with Alien one last time before they launch an attack on Archie.

In the final moments before they attack, Brit and Candy leave messages for their mothers, telling them that they’ve been changed by Spring Break, that it’s refocused their priorities in life, that they want to return to their lives, that they’re going to apply themselves to school and appreciate their mothers more when they return, completing their transformation along the lines of their professor’s lecture.

When the attack finally occurs, it’s Alien who dies in the opening hail of gunfire, giving way to voiceovers of their full voicemail memories to their mothers as they shoot their way through Archie’s compound with his people placed around the sprawling yard like enemies in a video game, killing everyone they encounter until they reach Archie himself and shoot him in his bathtub.

The film ends with the camera rotating over Alien’s dead body as they return, bending down to kiss him while the frame continues to pivot until it is completely upside down and they run away into the distance, visually completing the inversion.

What Spring Breakers ultimately accomplishes, despite never fully exploring the fraught and exploitative relationship Brit and Candy have with Blackness, is to produce a narrative where women discover and pursue an erotic thrill discovered in violence without being killed or consumed by madness and guilt the way most every other violent female protagonist in film is.

Thelma and Louise take their lives, understanding that they cannot be allowed to remain in the world after having tasted the thrill of their transgression. Beatrix Kiddo, the protagonist of the Kill Bill films must curl up on the floor and atone for the enjoyment she got from her revenge by sobbing while her daughter sits outside blithely watching television. The examples are endless. What Spring Breakers postulates, in its own dark way, is that the experience of surviving non-sexualized violent trauma and being transformed by it in a meaningful and potentially positive way is not a gendered experience, nor is the seductive allure of dominance and violence as a means of asserting it.

“Pleading for the Female Gaze Through its Absence in Blue is the Warmest Color”

“Conspicuous Consumption and The Great Gatsby: Missing the Point in Style”

Emma Houxbois is a fiercely queer trans woman whose natural habitat is the Pacific Northwest. She is currently the Comics Editor for The Rainbow Hub and co-host of Fantheon, a weekly comics podcast.

Death of the (Male) Author: Feminist Violence in Lynne Ramsay’s ‘Morvern Callar’

The poster for Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 film, Morvern Callar

This post by Sarah Smyth appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

What would you do if you found your boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor after committing suicide? Panic? Cry? Call the authorities? This is not the case in British director Lynne Ramsay’s delicious 2002 film, Morvern Callar. The film opens with the titular character, Morvern (Samantha Morton) lying on the floor by her dead boyfriend as the lights on the Christmas tree flash in the background. The scene is silent and utterly absurd. Morvern sits quietly, perhaps contemplating what has happened, although the film never quite reveals what she’s thinking. She then touches and caresses the body in a way which is both sensual and erotic. The scene is visceral and private; it’s almost tender. Yet, underneath it’s silent and passive exterior, there’s a subtle kind of violence, a violence in not doing anything through Morvern’s refusal to act in a “moral,” “normal,” and “citizenly” way. This violence quietly yet insidiously perforates the scene. Morvern eventually gets up and looks at the computer where, on the screen, bears the instructions “read me.” This is her boyfriend’s last command but one to which Morvern gainfully obeys. From here on out, Morvern resolutely and, I argue, violently stakes out her place and takes control over her own trajectory by, ironically, reinterpreting the very instructions which her boyfriend left on the computer.

The violence in the opening scene is of Morvern not acting following her boyfriend’s death

Morvern Callar is based on Alan Warner’s 1995 novel of the same name. It centres on Morvern, a young supermarket assistant, who lives in a cold and bleak Scotland. Her boyfriend commits suicide on Christmas day, leaving behind presents for Morvern including a cassette player, mix tape, and a manuscript of his novel with instructions for Morvern to get it published. The instructions read, “I wrote this for you. I love you,” and Morvern takes this quite literally. She deletes his name from the title page and inserts hers instead. After sending the manuscript to a publisher, she then escapes on a hedonistic holiday to Spain with her best friend and colleague, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott), where they spend their time clubbing, taking drugs and having sex. When she’s there, a couple of publishers seek Morvern out and offer her a lucrative book deal, which Morvern gladly accepts. When she returns to Scotland, she plans to use the advance from her deal to leave home and, perhaps, start a better life. She extends this offer to Lanna who declines, and the film ends on an ambiguous but hopeful note as Morvern sits at the station waiting to begin her new life.

Morvern Callar is not obviously nor overtly a violent film. The opening scene – quiet, muted, subtle – informs the tone and even the theme of the rest of the film. Yet, Morvern’s act of deleting her boyfriend’s name – James Gillespie in the film, unnamed in the book – from his manuscript is a violently feminist act. Since the beginning of literature itself, male authors have continually appropriated the voice, narratives and identities of women Perhaps with the flexibility creative licence, this in itself shouldn’t be problematic. After all, women have also appropriated the voice, narratives and identities of men in their work. Rather, the problem arises with the profusion by which this occurs, the privileging of the male-authored narrative within the canon, and the consideration of these narratives as universal rather than explicitly gendered. Morvern’s act, then, is a protest against this and reclamation, perhaps even reparation, for the years of oppression enacted on female voices within literature.

The realisation of this reparation is significant. Morvern gets paid an extraordinarily large sum, £100,000 (about $270,000 today) to be exact, from the publishers for her book deal. Given her background and socio-economic status, this sum is doubly significant. In fact, its life changing, enabling her to reclaim an authority and autonomy over her life not (literally) afforded to her before. When Morvern asks Lanna to go with her on this new adventure, she tells her not to worry about money; Morvern can take care of it. This offer positions Morvern in a traditional heteronormative male role as she proposes a promise of financial security to the woman. Of course, this involves a level of female dependence of male power, here economic, inducing a loss of female independence and freedom so crucial to the subject of modern feminism. Lanna declines, perhaps for this reason or perhaps because she’s too tied to home. But ultimately, this is journey for Morvern to take, for Morvern to reclaim, and the film leaves us hopeful that it will be successful.

Lanna chooses not to leave with Morvern despite the tempting financial offer…

In order for Morvern to follow through effectively on this violent act, however, this violence must be literalized on her boyfriend’s body. If she informed the authorities of his death, Morvern would also risk sacrificing his financial and intellectual property. She, therefore, leaves his body on the kitchen floor for a while before eventually cutting it up in the bath and burying it in the forest. The film makes no attempt to suggest any moral quandary on that part of Morvern. As Williams says, “Morvern never reports the death, and deals with the body herself. She mourns Him but shows no remorse, no guilt for -as it were- dancing on His grave. If she gets away with it, it’s partly because she doesn’t lie: Morvern is guileless as well as guiltless.” The scene in which Morvern cuts up the body is, in fact, blackly comic as the blood splatters on Morvern’s body accompanied by the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Sticking with You.” Although we get no point-of-view shot – the body is, in fact, never seen – we are privy to Morvern’s subjectivity and interiority through the music which Morvern is listening to on her cassette player. Our sympathies, then, are directed towards Morvern, not her boyfriend. This violence, then, is both an extension and a literalization of the violence enacted on the (male) authorial authority, and, crucially, I argue, an explicit feminist statement.

Morvern’s authorial violence is literalized on the boyfriend’s body in a darkly comical way

The violence enacted on the authorial authority within the film is also mirrored outside of the film. The novel is written by a man but is narrated by a woman. The film is adapted and directed by a woman, reclaiming the female narrative voice through this female vision. As Shelley Cobb argues in Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, Ramsay inverts the gendered appropriation by excluding Warner’s narrative voice, reflecting Morvern’s usurpation of the ideal figure of the male author. If as Linda Ruth Williams claims, Morvern “purloin[s] a man’s cultural capital,” Ramsay also purloins the symbolic, cultural and economic capital of (male) authorship. This purloining of capital and the subsequent signature of Ramsay’s (female) authorial authority within the film is most obviously found in the changes Ramsay makes when adapting the novel for the screen. How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy and authority.

In this way, then, I disagree with Lucy Bolton who argues that Morvern’s journey is about establishing the lasting communion with her dead lover. In Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women, Bolton claims that Morvern lodges the memory of her boyfriend in her mind, using her body as a cradle to preserve the memory of touching him. This reading crucially neglects the violence Morvern enacts on her boyfriend both on his body and his authorial identity. Morvern deletes his name and buries his body; it’s a separation rather than a preservation. Morvern Callar, then, is about violence, a reclamation and reparation through violence, which enables women to radically remove themselves from oppressive male structures, and, instead, construct their own narratives, their own voices and their own journeys through this very destruction.

Shieldmaidens: The Power and Pleasure of Women’s Violence on ‘Vikings’

In ‘Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies,’ Neal King and Martha McCaughey assert that “cultural standards still equate womanhood with kindness and nonviolence, manhood with strength and aggression.” Under the Victorian cult of true womanhood, womanly virtue was supposed to encompass piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Thank goodness writer/producer Michael Hirst ignored those virtues by creating two dynamic women warriors with his historical drama ‘Vikings.’

This post by Lisa Bolekaja appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

It is rare to find films or television shows where women characters are actively violent without some cause. Conventional storylines that portray women resorting to violence are typically ones in which women are attacked, raped, or protecting loved ones, most likely children. Women are pushed to extreme acts of violence because of patriarchal dominance, or some form of outside threat that usually targets them because they are female and perceived as weak. Female passivity is the expected norm. Men “do” things, women have things “done” to them. The 80’s and early 90’s ushered in a bumper crop of American films portraying kickass women (mostly White—Pam Grier held it down for Black women in the 70s); however, given closer inspection, most of these violent women were reacting to something and not necessarily acting out.

In Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies, Neal King and Martha McCaughey assert that “cultural standards still equate womanhood with kindness and nonviolence, manhood with strength and aggression.” Under the Victorian cult of true womanhood, womanly virtue was supposed to encompass piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Thank goodness writer/producer Michael Hirst ignored those virtues by creating two dynamic women warriors with his historical drama Vikings. Writer Giselle Defares does a great job giving an overview of the show here, however my focus is on two particular women, both warriors (known as shieldmaidens on the show), who represent a new type of bad-assery that some feminists may argue replicate male domination and aggression. The women, Lagertha (Katheryn Winnick) and Porunn (Gaia Weiss) are two women warriors who derive pleasure and wield power by going to battle alongside their men. Real talk: sometimes a woman wants to knock the stuffing out of people and wreck shop just like the guys.

Watching these two women maneuver the world of the violent dark ages is fascinating because they are not constructed as emasculating or overly masculine women who need to be put in their place by their men (although it does occur on occasion). They are presented as Viking women who are part of the fabric of the violent society they live in who also further the goals of their aggressive Northen European/Scandinavian culture. They are providers of home and hearth, defenders of home and hearth, and will go raid some other country’s home and hearth to take what they want too. This egalitarian treatment of women as warriors is the best part of watching Vikings. Unlike the English or Parisian women who stay posted up on the show waiting for their men to defend them, Viking women are straight up in the mix, leading charges, and beating their enemies.

Lagertha: Baddest Chick in the Game

Lagertha Lothbrok is depicted in the first episode of the show as a typical farm wife caring for her two young children inside their humble abode in a place called Kattegat while her husband Ragnar is away on some manly quest. Two men, strangers, enter their home under the pretext of seeking food and warmth. It soon becomes clear that they are there to sexually harass and rape her. In any other historical drama, the woman may put up a valiant fight, only to be brutalized once she is overpowered. A husband/lover/shining knight may arrive to save the day at the last minute, or be spurned into action by man pain after their woman has been violated or murdered. Not so Lagertha. She sends her children outside, pretends to be compliant to the two men, and proceeds to fuck them up with kitchen utensils. In this moment we learn that:

Lagertha does not need a male savior.
Men may have to be saved from her fighting prowess.
She likes to fight.

Lagertha physically fights with her husband Ragnar when he wants her to stay behind and care for their children when she would rather go on the raiding party into the new land of England. We’re talking real knock down, dragged out fisticuffs in the house. And she bruises Ragnar up pretty good as well, taking full hits from him like a boss. Even in the midst of their physical altercation, viewers can tell they really love each other. This aggression toward each other isn’t new, and they will most likely fight again about other raids Lagertha wants to participate in. She isn’t afraid to become violent to get what she wants. And Ragnar doesn’t expect her to back down ever.

Viewers want this couple to win in life and love (and oddly enough their domestic battles too), but when Ragnar becomes an Earl and later impregnates a woman from another clan, he tries to convince Lagertha to let him have two wives; Aslaug his new pregnant sidepiece, and herself in an egalitarian polyamorous household. Ragnar loves both women (but Aslaug mainly because she can have the sons that Lagertha’s body can no longer carry to term), however, Lagertha is too proud and full of self-respect. Once again, in any other movie or television show, Ragnar would most likely force Lagertha to obey him with threats of violence or death, or he would abandon her. Instead, Lagertha chooses to divorce him. Their young son, Bjorn, chooses to go with her. She literally leaves Ragnar standing in the dust crying over her and his beloved son as she rides off into a new land and life without him.

Lagertha’s warrior ways don’t leave her as she re-marries and eventually defies her new husband, the Earl of Hedeby, by bringing a phalanx of warriors to help her ex-husband Ragnar defeat a mutual enemy four years later. Once Lagertha gets word that Kattegat has been overrun and Ragnar (with his new wife and children) has fled to the hills, she comes to his rescue with their now grown son Bjorn doing what she does best: kicking ass and taking names. When her new husband tries to humiliate and sexually harass her in front of their court, Lagertha stabs him in the eye and snatches up his title and power, becoming the new Earl of Hedeby.

In her new position of authority over an entire people, Lagertha stands with the newly crowned King Ragnar by fighting with him overseas and sitting next to him at the seat of power with other Earls and Kings making strategic decisions on their planned raids. She helps Ragnar force an English King to negotiate monetary rewards and a new alliance. She leads a small contingent of fierce shieldmaidens on a secret night attack against the city of Paris that galvanizes the male Viking warriors after devastating setbacks in their battles against the French.

Lagertha claims her right to be a woman, mother, warrior, pagan, and political leader without gender constraints. Granted, her people do participate in patriarchal terrorism towards other countries and the women go along with it, but in the context of that culture, it is the norm, and shieldmaidens will kill women from other countries without hesitation. Nationhood supplants sisterhood on the battlefield. And as anti-feminist as that sounds, there is something to be said about bold women with agency, even if they are anti-heroes in someone else’s narrative. Many fans of the show (myself included) believe Ragnar was stupid for letting Lagertha go, a woman who was truly his equal, unlike his new Queen Aslaug whose only power as a woman comes from being alluring, birthing sons, and supporting Ragnar as his trophy wife. Aslaug’s gift of “second sight” seems banal and useless at best, and in the third season Ragnar is no longer enamored by her. He looks bored. And if it sounds like shade is being thrown, it’s because I’m #TeamLagertha.

PORUNN: On the Come Up

Porunn is introduced in a later season of Vikings as a young slave woman who works for King Ragnar and Queen Aslaug. Bjorn, Lagertha and Ragnar’s son, becomes smitten with her, and has eyes to make her his woman. Although a lowly slave in the household, Porunn does not allow herself to become a common bed wench without letting Bjorn know the uneven power dynamics of their relationship. She knows that he is the firstborn of the King and that he can have anything he wants, even women. But Bjorn has really fallen hard for her and they soon become lovers even though Porunn still has to work for the Queen and King. Queen Aslaug notices this budding relationship and how happy Porunn makes Bjorn, so she grants Porunn her freedom and gives her new clothing suitable for a young free woman of Kattegat.

Does Porunn run after Bjorn to access the status and resources she now has as a newly freed woman who is partnered with the King’s son? Nope. Porunn, immediately goes to train as a shieldmaiden, to become a warrior like her hero Lagertha, not a future Princess sitting on a throne and birthing babies for her man.

Porunn does become “with child” in a matter of time, and yet she still insists on sailing with Ragnar, Lagertha, and the other warriors into England to pillage and kill while pregnant. This fact enrages Ragnar and upsets Lagertha when they find out Porunn is fighting while carrying their grandchild. They blame Bjorn for being stupid and weak for not stopping his lover, instead of recognizing the fierce warrior status Porunn wants to uphold.

Porunn becomes severely injured and disfigured with a vicious sword cut to her face during a savage battle against the English. Back in Kattegat she falls into a depression thinking Bjorn doesn’t want to marry her now because she is ugly and not worthy of his love or that of their unborn child. She is wrong of course, but her looming pregnancy depresses her even more and she tells the other women that she doesn’t want to have the baby now.

Months after the birth of her daughter, (and while Bjorn, Lagertha and Ragnar are away), Porunn abandons her child by leaving her with Aslaug. She takes off into the hills in search of her destiny as a shieldmaiden, perhaps regaining the confidence she lost after her disfigurement. The audience is left to wonder if she will return to her child and Bjorn. Sometimes women aren’t maternal and don’t want children. A squalling baby hanging off her breasts is not for Porunn the moment she leaves. Maybe the spilling of more enemy blood and high adventure is. She, along with Lagertha, subverts the trappings of conventional femininity and the cult of true womanhood by engaging in so-called masculine pursuits such as war and territorial expansion.

Lagertha and Porunn drink, fuck, celebrate their Norse Gods and wish a muthafucka would start some shit because they will finish it. They undermine assumptions about gender, female violence, and the pleasures they obtain from bloodshed. About to enter its fourth season, Michael Hirst has set the bar high for his women warriors on Vikings. Time will tell if Lagertha and Porunn can survive the violent world they help create and shape.

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja is the co-host of the increasingly popular Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room podcast. She’s a member of the Horror Writers Association, a former Film Independent Fellow, and a writer of speculative fiction. Her latest short story “Ninja Fishing” can be found in the new Awkward Robots Orange Volume available now. She divides her time between Twitter, Italy, Southern Cali and various Sci Fi conventions. You can find her @LisaBolekaja

‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: Violence Helps Our Heroines Have a Lovely Day

This guest post by Sophie Hall appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

This article contains spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Jurassic World.

Is Mad Max: Fury Road the greatest feminist blockbuster of the year? Or is it simply, in the words of Immortan Joe, mediocre? This has been endlessly debated over the past few months since the film’s release in May and though opinions may vary, I feel that this is one of the more successful attempts at female representation in a blockbuster and my favourite of the year so far. This is largely due to how violence and female characters in Fury Road intertwine, like how the characters both embrace violence and reject it.

Furiosa ready for battle

Let’s start with the most obvious character to analyse: Furiosa. What struck me most about violence and her character was how it kept her in the limelight. By that, I mean she didn’t have to teach Max or Nux to fight so that they could save the day. In an article at Black Girl Nerds titled “Strong Characters are Barely Strong and Rarely Characters” (about female characters in general), writer Bijhan Valibeigi states that

“In the first act we meet her and she seems rude and dismissive, saying ‘whatever’ and rolling her eyes. In the second act we are shown that she secretly has a feminine and caring side – almost universally in the process of learning that she secretly cares for the male protagonist, and is too insecure to admit it. In the third act she learns to reconcile her feelings for the protagonist with her tough-as-nails identity and uses some typically ‘for boys’ skills – usually combat, but also often hacking or deductive science – to save the male protagonist… so that he can save the day.”

But in Fury Road, this is more the case for Max than Furiosa; she uses violence for herself and herself alone. Max and Nux’s characters are not blessed with Furiosa’s pearls of violent wisdom so that they can excel and save the day. There’s even a scene in the film that were it given to your everyday Hollywood writer, it would have panned out differently (and disappointingly). When their rig is stuck in the bog, Max’s character is trying and failing to shoot an approaching enemy. This would have been the perfect opportunity for Furiosa to guide Max and let him save the day. She could have given him your typical supportive BS like, “relax,” “just breath,” “we believe in you,” “take your time,” “use the force,” etc. Instead, Furiosa uses Max’s shoulder as an armrest as she hits the target with a single shot.

Furiosa telling Max to sit down

For Furiosa to not let another male character steal the scene with heroic violence but instead to rely on her own self-confidence and do it herself is a breath of fresh air for the audience members, particularly female ones. Furiosa doesn’t have to tell how violent she is; she shows us.

Max’s character is actually a complement to the violent women of the film. He never once treats Furiosa’s violence with disdain over the fact that she’s a woman. He always treats her as his equal. He treats her with hostility when they first meet not because he underestimates her, but because he understands that she’s his physical equal and a threat. There is no condescension. As he is the co-leading protagonist of the film, the way that he perceives Furiosa is vital as it is how the audience will be guided to see her through his gaze.

Furiosa having control and using her own violence is again highlighted in the final showdown of Fury Road. Furiosa, stabbed and wounded yet still persistent, takes down the main villain Immortan Joe. “Remember me?” Furiosa growls just before ripping his breathing apparatus–and half of his face–clean off. That quip may seem like your average cool one-liner, but for me it is so much more than that. It’s Furiosa, our female protagonist, who takes out the bad guy. Not Max. Not Nux, or any other male character. Her. It’s as if she’s saying it directly to the audience as well as at Immortan Joe. Even though the scene is extremely brutal, the violence of it can again be seen as to empower women. Our representation defeats the bad guy!

This gives our female audience members a pleasure that we so far haven’t really experienced this year (granted, Star Wars and Mockingjay Part 2 are still yet to be released). We almost had it in Age of Ultron when Scarlet Witch rips out Ultron’s heart, apart from the fact that his doom was moments away anyway and that Vision’s character was the one to destroy Ultron’s final form. We kind of had it in Jurassic World when Claire’s character releases the T-Rex on the Indominous Rex, but the moment is dampened when she tells her male colleague to “be a man for once in his life” and help her beforehand. Furiosa doesn’t have to discredit her violence in order to use violence to save the day, whereas Claire had to.

Even though Furiosa’s link to violence can be seen as empowering to her gender in Fury Road, one of the more interesting things I found writer/director George Miller doing was having The Wives not be inherently violent. When Furiosa tried to kill Nux in self-defense, The Wives intervene and remind Furiosa that they had agreed to “no unnecessary killing!” Now, Miller could have easily made The Wives bloodthirsty characters with no substance like this years Sand Snakes on Game of Thrones, but Miller did the opposite, giving them more depth and intelligence.

The Wives’ reasoning for sparing Nux was the he’s “kamakrazee,” which means he’s one of Immortan Joe’s war boys. This implies that The Wives know that Nux is just brainwashed by Immortan’s regime and is a victim of his rule. I found this one of the more profound moments of Fury Road, as The Wives have more reason than any to want to inflict violence on others as so much of it has been inflicted on them, yet they do not.

Miller even has a scene where one of The Wives, The Dag, discusses the reasons for violence- with another female character! Yay for no mansplaining! “I thought you girls were above all that,” The Dag says to one of the Many Mothers as she described how she shoots her enemies. Even the topic of violence helps to develop the pairs characters, as the Many Mother entrust The Dag her seeds she’d been keeping to plant one day as she’s dying.

The Dag saying goodbye to one of the Many Mothers

Better still, Miller doesn’t directly state that Furiosa and the Many Mothers’ use of violence are wrong and The Wives’ lack of violence is right. He hints more at that they need to co-exist with one another. For example, as a result of The Wives having Nux spared leads to their survival, as Nux later sacrifices himself to protect them and Furiosa needed to be violent in order to save the day and defeat the bad guy.

The mix of these two stances the women have on violence leads to them creating a peaceful matriarchal society at the end of Fury Road. Which brings me to what I most love about how violence was portrayed in this film: both the traditionally feminine characters against violence and the traditionally masculine characters who use violence are all meant to be treated with respect by the audience–one isn’t right, one isn’t wrong. The violence in Fury Road doesn’t make the women at odds with each other, but helps bind them together.

Sophie Hall is from London and has graduated from university with a degree in Creative Writing. She is currently writing a sci-fi comic book series called White Leopard for the website http://www.wpcomicsltd.com.

Puberty and the Creation of a Monster: ‘Ginger Snaps’

This guest post by Kelly Piercy appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Turn on any TV at primetime and you’ll likely see a sex worker dead in a dumpster. Or you’ll see a sex worker telling a cop all about that other sex worker who ended up dead in a dumpster. Because being aware and/or in control of your sexual identity can often be the most dangerous thing a woman in pop culture can be. Slasher films are overpopulated with hot young ripe things just ready to be plucked by a cartoonish serial killer. There will be jeering. There will be mutilation. Of this we can be sure. These things are sold to us on a regular basis.

What we can’t be so sure of however, is what fresh hell each teenage girl experiences with their hormones on an individual basis. Or what really happens when you get bitten by a werewolf. There will be blood in both instances, yes. But there will be a whole host of weird surprises. In Ginger Snaps, those two things just so happen to combine in one film, and you’ll soon become endlessly irritated that you didn’t think of it yourself. It is one of body horror’s great allegories. And there is so much room for snark. With Ginger Snaps, we have one of the most interesting examinations of violence in this bleak world that is representation in film. Certainly the only one where the teenage girl does the mutilating. And truth be told, it’s hard not to feel completely exhilarated by it. Even when you’re heaving.

Describing Ginger Snaps in a sentence might sound something like “an excellent example of subversion of genre norms coupled with language that belongs in the pop culture hall of fame.” Something that would also work is “two teenage girls being fucking awesome.” Because in Ginger Snaps, teenage girls are smarmy and moody – of course they are – but also passionate and resourceful. The dialogue is funny and brimming with wicked imagery as opposed to sleeping through clunky exposition and gender conformity. Horror films have a history of violent transformation or destructive host and the repercussions of these changes in public spaces, but not many examine the female body specifically and it’s place in society, the specific “monstrous feminine.” The genre path of teenage sexual behaviour leading to monstrosity strangely never stopped to think about periods. Ginger Snaps takes a long hard look at “the curse” and plays with both its stereotypes and its biological facts incredibly honestly.

Ginger, despite morphing into a werewolf, becomes our protagonist killer in a very human way, and the complexity of her journey is a cinematic rarity. A large part of its appeal is the addictive excitement-and-relief cocktail that comes with seeing your experiences reflected on screen–to see menstruation from a menstruating perspective. Who wouldn’t see want to see the violence of their PMS daydreams being played out? Ginger Snaps gives its characters a small town and a big world, and the result for its viewers reflects as both deeply personal and pure escapism. Also known as the ingredients for the perfect horror. Get ready to fall in love with the Fitzgerald sisters.

How early does the violence start in Ginger Snaps? A more appropriate question might be “How many films can you recall opening with the massacred corpse of a family dog?” Marley and Me, this isn’t. There’s a wild animal killing the canine population of the sleepy town of Bailey Downs, and nobody really seems too concerned. But we don’t have time to dwell because soon we’re met with the sight of 15-year-old Brigitte, both slouchy and creepy, emerging from her garage, hooked up with tools. Like Dick Van Dyke with all his instruments in Mary Poppins, but a teenage girl with wires and shit. I’m not going to get into Emily Perkins’ physicality in this film because the level of scowl perfection alone is truly inspiring, and it deserves an article in its own right. Suffice to say, this is when I knew I was with Ginger Snaps for the long haul.

As well as Brigitte, we also get the privilege of Ginger, who is the older, edgier, decidedly more daring sibling partner in crime. Ginger and Brigitte muse on suburban mundanity in their shared basement bedroom, while Ginger traces her arm with a knife: “Wrists are for girls, I’m slitting my throat,” she scoffs. We move to Ginger impaled on their garden fence, ruptured at the abdomen, limbs splayed, blood everywhere. Then Brigitte leans in and takes a photograph. Yes. These little shits are staging various death poses for a school project! It is so glorious I smile immediately, wickedly even. I feel pure joy radiate out. This is my comfort zone. And so our titles roll and with them comes dozens of DIY photos of Brigitte and Ginger, meeting variously creative gruesome ends. They’re showing this as a slideshow to their classmates, for a school project. It drips with bad taste. Their teacher can’t believe it. I told you you’d love the Fitzgerald sisters.

It’s not long before the fake blood is replaced with real blood. Sixteen-year-old Ginger’s first period and her transition into a werewolf happen simultaneously. What a day, huh? Society punishes women for being women, this is another one of those things we can be sure of. In this particular instance, Ginger is punished for becoming a woman by being violently savaged by a wild beast, which doesn’t sound too different from the online comments section. In a lot of ways Ginger Snaps seems even more relatable in today’s climate than in 2000, the year of its release.

Ginger’s own metamorphosis masquerades as regular, as mundane. Adult women assure her of her normality. But one transformation is obscuring the other, as highlighted by the excellent scene with the school nurse that hits every parallel beat with precision. Menstruation is the birth of Ginger as a threat. Hurtling toward womanhood, she is now decidedly different than a male, she is now the monster that lies within the feminine, and more accurately the feminine that intimidates the masculine. The unattainable, confusing and unfathomable, the unknown onto which the fear is projected. Oh, and she’s also physically becoming a gnarling brute that really wants to rip human flesh to shreds. So there’s that.

But at first Ginger doesn’t recognise her yearning for splattered organs, she just thinks she needs to get laid. Pre-menstrual, Ginger is vaguely disinterested in boys at best. When the schools resident Bro Boy first makes a move she is almost puzzled, and a simple “Er, no…” will suffice as she continues walking, a fly swatted. Later, when he tells her about his sisters and insists that when it comes to cramps “nothing takes the edge off like a toke,” she replies simply again, “Maybe I like my edge, thanks.” The way that Katherine Alexander’s delivery complements the dialogue is unmistakeable in many of Ginger’s best lines. Her attitude could be reactionary, bratty, and dramatic, but instead it is deliciously restrained. This brings with it an awareness of the shouty, quick tempered, usually improv-based insult scenes prevalent in films currently–the “say the grossest thing you can as loud as you can” approach. Getting increasingly shouty in a very short space of time seems to be the default in a lot of comedies (looking at you, America) and Ginger Snaps felt like a reminder. Shouty is funny when it’s the rarity. And a lot of comedies could benefit from Ginger Snaps’ example of less is more. They could also benefit from Mimi Rogers’ more is more, perfectly cast as the girls’ excessively perky mother. The implication being that Ginger Snaps is not only a superior horror film, but a superior comedy as well.

But back to Ginger. Her sexual ambivalence is marked by a classic slow motion strut-slash-glide through the school hallway. She is now Sexually Awakened™ and interested in Bro Boy. After getting rough with him in the back of his car, Brigitte finds her in their bathroom. “I get this ache,” Ginger says, head in the toilet, hair silver and covered in blood, “I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces.” She just lost her virginity, and it could have essentially been soundtracked by Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like The Wolf.” So she killed a dog after.

Ginger’s acts of violence are now accelerating, with her temper becoming increasingly explosive. Both the hockey field and the neighbour’s garden offer chances for instant relief, but it’s not enough. Ginger’s hunger is all-consuming. Hormones multiplied by a taste for blood equals death and infection. Brigitte’s got a real problem on her hands trying to fix this. As she panics, racing to find a cure to save her sister, Ginger remains devilishly nonchalant. She justifies her actions simply: “No one ever thinks chicks do shit like this. A girl can only be a slut, a bitch, a tease, or the virgin next door. We’ll just coast on how the world works.” You can’t fault her insight. But Brigitte is in a dangerous situation now, facing off with GingerWolf, so it sounds like it’s about time for a knight in shining armour to draw a sword and fight the Big Bad, doesn’t it? Nope, Ginger Snaps still doesn’t let you down, because when Brigitte’s drug dealer sidekick Sam (think Canadian Jason Dean) suggests taking the cure and fleeing the monster, Brigitte shouts “HOW ABOUT NO!” in his face. The sisters have a pact, “out by 16 or dead on the scene, but together forever.” In the end, we know that Brigitte has to figure this out alone.

Throughout their lives, the Fitzgerald sisters operated exclusively as a unit. Ginger can be bolder, domineering and baiting, and Brigitte grounds her, more prone to analysing and logistics. There is a repetition of the mantra “this is so us” coursing through – if Ginger leaves the dinner table, Brigitte follows, if Ginger offers up a judgement, Brigitte extends it. They have matching bone pens. They are functioning as one, in spite of an obviously unbalanced power dynamic and personality difference, and they are both aware of this, becoming increasingly vocal about it as the film progresses. When Ginger’s acts of violence become more heinous, the distinctions between the two of them mobilise and the separation gains speed. As Ginger becomes a killer, Brigitte becomes an individual. Brigitte forces her own journey to Werewolfdom by actively sharing blood with Ginger, and she proceeds with complete self-awareness, in control of her body and the changes she knows are coming. She goes into the fight equipped not only with the experience of witnessing Ginger’s destruction, but with the necessities to survive womanhood: a strong sense of self, the courage to call out bullshit, and a fierce possessiveness of your own body.

Despite always wanting to be a screenwriter, I have never wanted to write horror. Now I do. This is representation in action, folks! I am living proof of it! Power to the Ontario Gothic. This is how it’s done.

Kelly Piercy is a Lit grad and comedy writer based in London. She mostly enjoys Leslie Knope, Sleater Kinney, and Cher’s twitter feed.

When Violence Is Excusable: Regina Mills and the Twisted Morality of ‘Once Upon a Time’

This guest post by Emma Thomas appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

When Once Upon a Time, ABC’s fairytale drama, premiered in 2011, the focus was on Ginnifer Goodwin, fresh off her success on Big Love, and Jennifer Morrison, of House M.D. fame. Yet, fairly quickly, Lana Parrilla became the breakout star.

Morrison plays Emma Swan, arguably the series’ hero, while Goodwin plays her mother, Snow White (it’s complicated). Parrilla plays the show’s antagonist, Regina Mills, otherwise known as The Evil Queen.

Parrilla’s character is like no other on television.

Once Upon a Time flashes back and forth between the characters’ fairytale background in the Enchanted Forest and their modern existence in Storybrooke, Maine.

In Storybrooke, Regina Mills is powerful and complex. With her short hair, power suit, and subdued make-up, she looks every part a business woman. It is not only her clothing that illustrates her control, but also her attitude. She is cold and collected and judgmental from the very moment the show begins.

Back in the Enchanted Forest, Regina Mills is certainly not an in-control business woman, instead she is a violent, sadistic queen, with costuming to match. We see her command mass murders, and even rip out hearts. Regina Mills earns her Evil Queen moniker.

In the present, particularly during the show’s first two seasons, Regina Mills could not be qualified as a “good person” (a title the show adores). She is still manipulative, and still seeking a way to gain control. However, it is important to note, that unlike her sometimes nemesis, sometimes mentor, Rumplestiltskin, it is not power she seeks but control. It is always about control.

This makes sense when one considers Regina’s past. Abused as a child, forced to watch her mother murder her lover, and ordered into a marriage with a king who she physically could not escape, Regina’s tendency toward violence seems almost excusable.

Yet, interestingly enough, the show rarely addresses the connection between Regina’s past and her tendency toward violence. Her background is introduced slowly, and the audience is left to form their own conclusions.

The one person she has a connection with is her father, a kind man who did nothing to stop her mother’s abuse, but ultimately Regina’s increasingly violent nature wins out — and she murders her father in an attempt to gain more control.

In the present, Regina Mills finally finds inspiration to curb her violent nature. Her adoptive son Henry begs her to become ‘a good person’, and she tries her hardest to make him proud.

At face value Once Upon a Time is a very black and white show, and characters are either “good” or “bad.” Is it possible to change sides? Ultimately, yes, if we believe Captain Hook’s rapid ascension into the good guy club. But, Regina’s journey has not been so easy. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that Regina herself would state that she is unequivocally bad.

Normally, the bad characters are hated, or at least seriously disliked, by viewers. Just look at William Lewis on Law and Order: SVU or Walder Frey on Game of Thrones. Generally, viewers love to hate evil characters.

Yet, on Once Upon a Time, most viewers love to love Regina Mills. Her violent past is excused by many as just that, the past. Interestingly enough, her violent present certainly exists. In the first season alone she murders a man, she kidnaps a woman, and she (accidentally but still) poisons her own son. Her behavior gradually change as the show progresses, although her acts do not become less violent. Instead, Regina begins to focus less on what she wants internally, and more on what is she, and most notably the good guys, deem is best for the greater good — but even when she’s being good she continues to fight, manipulate, and scheme. Somehow, this behavior is now acceptable, because she is helping the heroes and not the villains.

Why do we, as viewers, accept Regina Mills when her violence is partnered with good characters, but deem her evil when we are told, by the series’ writers, that she is bad? Of course, there are some differences. She hasn’t ordered a mass murder since she became “good.” But, could that be due more to a difference of time period? When the army of flying monkeys was attacking (yes, this show is often weird), the good characters considered it perfectly acceptable for Regina to murder them — and yes, it was murder, because we’d learned that the flying monkeys were human beings placed under a spell. So, mass murder is acceptable when it is in support of good.

Although Once Upon a Time itself does not directly address the complex questions of morality, it does raise them. Why is it acceptable for Regina Mills to kill at all? What is the true differentiation between good and bad? What makes someone evil? Regina was subjected to years of abuse, does that mean her attempt to murder her mother is justified?

And, when years later, Snow forces her to murder her mother, is that OK?

Presumably when she was forced into a marriage with Snow’s father, King Leopold, she was truly forced, likely sexually (this is one of many intense arguments within the fandom). Does that mean it was acceptable to orchestrate his murder?

Why is that worse than attempting to fight, presumably to the death, her own sister. Does the fact that she was was trying to harm Henry and Snow’s baby son make it acceptable?

In many ways, Regina Mills’ path of violence is an unanswered question.

Emma Thomas is a freelance writer, media development associate, and independent producer. Her musings can be found on Twitter (@EmmaGThomas), while her newest film projects can be found at Two Minnow Films.

Timorous Killers: The Breach of Shyness in Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’

This guest post by Johanna Mackin appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

When Carol, the demure and unassuming young beautician at the heart of Roman Polanski’s surrealistic thriller Repulsion begins to lose her grip on reality, she externalises a deep fear of men into acts of fatal violence. Some of cinema’s most symbolically layered female characters are seen to present patterns of shy and socially anxious behaviour that belie murderous impulses, but who are these timorous killers, and what archaic chains of fear are made manifest in the violent outbursts they are given to?

Carol (played by Catherine Deneuve), is irretrievable from her shyness. She looks down as she walks, her manner is subdued and often sullen, and she frequently appears lost in a world of her own. Her speaking voice is soft and she speaks little, her movement slowed by the burden of fear, and she passes across things so lightly and interacts with the world so delicately that she can barely be seen to leave a trace upon it. Her fragility and reservedness (which as we will see provide a crucial, if unsustainable, defence against threats to the self), are only breached when outside influences encroach more than the barely tolerable amount she has come to live with, and these cracks in her armoury, which give way to hallucinations of violent sexual abuse, culminate in a double androcide.

Pioneering object-relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein expands Freudian notions of death instinct, identifying that “anxiety has its origin in the fear of death,” which she sees as an impervious truth for every human. For the infant, the ambiguity of the object world represents a deathly threat to the self that destruction is projected onto, turning it into an external representation of the death instinct, which is introjected as internalised self danger and then projected back out into the external world. Constantly mediating a fear of the outside and a fear from within, external dangers are thus intensified due to internal fear, but the introjection of this harmful danger also intensifies “the perpetual inner-danger situation.”

The threat posed to Carol’s ego by the men she comes into contact with therefore greatly exacerbates her internalised danger, and thus the fear of death, or death of the self, given that selfhood is the only conduit through which we live in the world. Of course, real and imaginary threats can demonstrate a similar impact upon the individual, and in Carol’s case she is presented with significant instances of both, from the direct misogyny of men encountered, to imagined cracks in the walls of her apartment worsening outside of her control.

Terror management theorists developed the idea that “we humans feel fully secure only if we consider ourselves valuable contributors to that world we live in,” the world of meaning we have created to defend against the anxieties of death. A sense of our value within the world (or “self esteem”) is established in our interactions with others, and the extent to which we are able to be successfully incorporated into the dominant worldview. Studies following this position have shown that it is through elevated self esteem that we can most easily evade the fear of death. Carol’s self esteem, already negligible at the start of the film, is systematically shattered throughout the course of its events as she is leered at, coerced into romantic situations against her will, and scolded for her demeanour by a succession of people. A fundamental paradox at Carol’s centre is that her aesthetic presentation makes her appear acceptable to society, while her turbulent sense of self is greatly at odds with one which can be enjoyed as a fear-abating continuation of the dominant ideology.

In an edifying essay about the impeachment of the commercial skin industry on the way we view our own bodies, authors Kenway and Bullen highlight a crucial link between the perfect body image, and the sociological pedagogy of a myth that anything which threatens it possesses an abject quality. Naturally, these prescribed notions of attractiveness impinge greatly upon a whole society. Failure to properly conform can be taboo or prey to a litany of prejudices; compliance, as noted in Carol’s case, can elicit unwanted attention and expectations. This is epitomised in her sister’s lover’s view of her, as both “the beautiful younger sister” and someone who “needs to see a doctor,” when her failure to meet his expectations of polite social interaction threatens the stability of his own tentatively compiled defences against death anxiety.

The events that precipitate Carol’s unravelling stem from her sister’s involvement with a married man and subsequent holiday. Carol is reliant upon the protective forces exerted by her sister’s presence, and when the barrier of their private apartment is punctured by an unwanted male (she throws his belongings away after hearing her sister having sex with him), her abject defences necessarily harden, so that what little self is left may not be stolen from her. When she is left alone in the house, she meditates upon a family photo, which is returned to for clarity of motive at the end of the film. It features Carol as a young girl, lingering defensively in the background and casting a hateful stare at a nameless patriarch on the right. The implication, reinforced when the photo appears again as the final shot of the film, is that Carol was sexually abused as a child, and this is what has prompted her intense mistrust of men and series of harrowing rape hallucinations.

This internally harmful repulsion felt toward men, which was engendered in Carol at such a young age, has been unable to heal owing to constraints of society and the continual reinforcement of negative patriarchal behaviours. Colin exerts his entitlement over her (despite voicing his recognition at one point that “it’s all so sordid”), eventually breaking down the door of her apartment through sexually agitated aggression. Her landlord attempts to repeat the abuse she suffered as a child, repelled only by a fatal outburst. Even less overt threats such as cat-calling in the street and sexualised derision from other men in conversation (“Cinderella,” “Little Miss Muffet”) belie a menacing claim to women’s bodies, which asserts that Carol’s fear is not at all unfounded.

Whilst, as Klein suggests, externalisations of fear are often our most powerful therapeutic defense against it (via artistic expression, for example), Carol’s freedom to communicate is so muted by those around her, who will not weather her extremes of anxiety, that it is impossible for her to manage this fear in a healthy way, and so it spills over (like the filled bathtub into which her first victim is decanted) as an even more abject threat to be internalised once more, intensifying her removal from reality. People project onto her a social conformity that her life experiences render her incapable of meeting. Her trance-like episodes are condemned by customers and colleagues at work; her desperately relied-upon sister curtly dismisses her deep paranoia; she is told to not “look so mis’” by a well-meaning friend. This projected impediment of ill-fitting normalcy onto Carol sends her deeper into herself, manifesting as a timidity which in turn fosters more hostility from the external world which, rather than providing a patient and therapeutic space for Carol to talk into, imposes desired behaviours onto her. Her main pursuer, Colin, purposefully ignores her silence and negative body language as he repeatedly makes unwanted advances upon her.

Speaking on the development of schizoid states and schizophrenia in children, object-relations therapist D W Winnicott offers that failure of good-enough active environmental adaptation, produces a psychotic distortion of the environment-individual set-up. Relationships produce loss of the sense of self, and the latter is only regained by return to isolation. Being isolated, however […involves…] more and more defensive organization in repudiation of environmental impingement

For Carol, who can be seen to present with an obviously schizophrenic symptomatology, the healthy development of understanding illusion in the external world is distorted, or interrupted by childhood abuse. An incorporation of illusion into the life of a healthy child is challenged as they grow up (think of the tooth fairy, for example), but in the case of Carol the distinction between objective and subjective reality was denied a healthy conclusion by forcing a defensive retreat into a secret, “truly incommunicable” inner world, far removed from external reality. Here her use of illusion takes on more psychotic properties, especially when under duress such as that of her sister’s departure.

Compounding Carol’s fear throughout the film is a plethora of memento mori, which bind events to a sense of impending death. The devouring cracks in the wall; the sounds of clocks ticking and bells tolling at moment of heightened trauma; and finally, the rabbit, a symbol for Carol’s own self death (this is alluded to in talk of her being “strung up” and “all shaking like a little frightened animal”). The rabbit rots away throughout the film, eventually thrown out by the landlord who is then killed after he abuses Carol, thus severing her final defence against the unburdenable traumas of the past and from which she is unable to recover.

Winnicott speaks of the individual as then being able to inhabit a “false self that seems satisfactory to the unwary observer” (however unconvincing, Carol’s prosaic job and her hesitant engagements in conversation with Colin support this). This false self defends fiercely against the core self, “although the schizophrenia is latent and will claim attention in the end.” He describes a loosely organised self in defence against paranoid anxieties as “defensive pathological introversion.” Continuously expelling and incorporating the impeachments upon her secret, incommunicado core, Carol sinks further into a world which is entirely abject and encroaches upon the borders of her existence. This catastrophic entropy and its fatal consequences result in Carol’s defences eventually shutting down altogether as she slips into a kind of catatonic state at the end of the film. Her subjectivity is silenced by society, being deemed unacceptable, and so she has no reasonable outlet but to kill. Others must die so that she does not suffer total self death.

Repulsion is just one representation of the explosive anxieties of women in film. Carrie is perhaps the most famous example of a “timorous killer,” but other notable examples of introverted women being pushed to murderous extremes include Sleepaway Camp, Ms 45, Sightseers, Antichrist, and A Question of Silence, to name a few that are well worth exploring.

What these characters also have in common is an ability to explode and subvert the damaging environments that contain them. Sometimes their murderous transgressions from shyness and anxiety provide them with a kind of psychotic catharsis, and sometimes the consequences present a more abysmal loss of self, but what is consistently gratifying is the symbolic employment of such characters to illuminate the negative effect of a dominant cultural ideology on individuals. In a world ridden with stringent and judgmental expectations, the symbol of the timorous killer should be celebrated as a resistance against cultural order.

Johanna Mackin has recently completed an MA in Contemporary Literature in Culture and currently spends her time coding and writing poetry (the boundaries of which are often blurred). You can find some of her poetry on Instagram, or follow her on Twitter @johannamackin

The Killer in/and the Girl: Alexandre Aja’s ‘High Tension’

But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), ‘High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Tensions are high between Alex and Marie, the two college-age women at the center of Alexandre Aja’s 2003 film, High Tension.

Violent women in films are seen mostly in two ways: the crazy villainess, characterized as an uncontrollable and unreasonable bitch who wreaks heaps of havoc on unsuspecting (if not always undeserving) folks in her path, and the strong, take-no-prisoners heroine who populates some action and science-fiction genre films, and who—as in the classic case of the Alien franchise’s leading lady, Ellen Ripley—reclaims the roles of motherhood and femininity, showing that it is completely possible for those qualities to exist in the same person.

High Tension is a confusing film when contextualized in these terms. Marie, with whom the viewer spends the most time, seems heroic and smart. Her friend Alex, on the other hand, is more traditional and mostly submissive: she retreats to the bosom of her family in rural France to study for exams with Marie, adores her younger brother and seems at ease with the unexciting pace of country living. Later, she appears to capitulate completely to the psycho-killer who invades her family’s home, while resourceful Marie searches for misplaced cordless telephones and succeeds in eluding the killer completely. Viewers see Marie as the Ripley-esque heroine as she endeavors throughout this brisk 90-minute film to save her friend from the clutches of a sadistic sexual predator, one who is shown early in the film to enjoy getting “head” from women’s decapitated heads. Nice pun, writers.

At least, that’s what you think until you get to the end. In the final few minutes, viewers learn that Marie is, in fact, the killer, who has butchered Alex’s family and abducted her due to a frighteningly intense girl crush. Alas. Marie’s close-cropped hair, healthy attitude toward masturbation, and ingenious strategies are now corrupted, since it’s clear that the filmmakers intended for her to be the villain. Not just a violent woman, but a woman who so deeply represses her desires that they literally manifest themselves as an ugly, dirty, stocky man in mechanic’s overalls, who is capable of brutally murdering an entire family to eliminate any signifiers of the world in which she feels…well, not herself.

This story has been told before. Aja and co-writer Gregory Levasseur riff heavily on another case of repression leading to violence: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In High Tension, we have le tueur—the Killer—in place of the Monster, who in Shelley’s novel can be read as Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger, that most famous of psychological devices used to illustrate the violence with which the repressed returns, doing all of the things the typical, well-socialized individual could never dream of doing. But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.

The film’s tagline, “Hearts will bleed,” is a clear nod to this idea. This horror film is, at its core, a love story. Marie is somewhat of a party girl, encouraging her academically talented friend Alex to have a good time, but who also seems consistently left in the dust in favor of Alex’s male sexual conquests. Furthermore, Alex chastises Marie for “acting that way every time a guy tries to talk to you,” and suggesting that Marie will “end up alone” if she does not conform to stereotypical sexual and gender norms. The surroundings in which Alex hurls these ideas at Marie are also stridently traditional: the house in the country, where viewers see Mom hanging up laundry and Dad toiling in an at-home office opposite a glimmering computer screen. The farmhouse is pastoral Southern France in a microcosm—“like a doll’s house,” Marie asserts. Overtly perfect and totally unreal, at least in Marie’s experience.

The terribly hyperbolic rape van that le tueur pilots, and into which Alex is stashed after Marie/Le tueur murders Alex’s family is equally unrealistic, however. It’s laughable that Marie describes it only as “an old rusty truck” when she notifies the police about le tueur’s actions—before she and le tueur are explicitly linked—because it’s so much more. It’s clearly a murder-house on wheels, a Gothicized antique of a vehicle, a faded logo peeling off the side, and an ironic “head” trailer hitch blatantly displayed for all to see. Inside, le tueur has seemingly stashed many a female victim, whose pictures are pasted to the rearview mirror and whose blood cakes the walls and ceiling of the van’s rear compartment. “But those girls were alone,” Marie says as she tries to convince Alex they can escape the van. “There are two of us.” Indeed.

Though at the time of the film’s release, viewers might have been able to see some redeeming aspect in the pure fact of Marie’s true sexuality being represented (at least in the end) on screen, it’s impossible to see this film as progressive. While there’s no explicit representation of heteronormative desire on screen, Alex’s parents, her discussion of her own male partners, and her ultimate rejection of Marie serve this purpose. As such, the family’s dispatch at Marie’s hands illustrates the film’s destructive take on non-normative sexual preference. They literally can’t exist in the same space, even at the rural margins of society. Marie is in the end found to be monstrous, confined to an institution in handcuffs.

And yet. In those last moments, can viewers experience some sympathy for Marie? Imprisoned in an asylum and whispering “I won’t let anyone come between us anymore” over and over, Marie senses Alex on the other side of a two-way mirror and reaches for her. But rather than being tender, this movement is treated as the final, frightening jump-scare of the movie. Marie and her monstrous desire: condemned. Is this a cautionary tale, then? A warning, detailing just how deeply wrong it is for society to impose and police strict ideals of sexuality?

And those Frankensteinian scars on Marie’s face in those final shots, from her “rough with love” ordeal? Coincidence? I think not.

Rebecca L. Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodramas, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania.

From ‘Ginger Snaps’ to ‘Jennifer’s Body’: The Contamination of Violent Women

Thematically, ‘Jennifer’s Body’ mirrors ‘Ginger Snaps’ in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.

This guest post by Julia Patt appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

“Hell is a teenage girl.” So Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried) informs us in the opening voiceover monologue of Jennifer’s Body.

At first glance, it’s kind of a throwaway tagline sort of quote reminiscent of Mean Girls or Heathers. Teenage girls are the worst—they might even be evil, but just “high school evil,” to borrow another line from Diablo Cody’s highly quotable script for Jennifer’s Body. But we should note that the line isn’t, “The devil is a teenage girl” or “Teenage girls are demons.” Rather: “Hell is a teenage girl.” Which suggests not only evil, but also suffering. Teenage girls may make other people suffer but, more than that, they suffer profoundly themselves. And although Needy’s flashback indicates she’s thinking about her friend, Jennifer Check (Megan Fox), when she makes this observation, her present tense delivery and its placement in the script at least suggest the possibility that she’s also thinking about herself.

Megan Fox as Jennifer Check

Jennifer’s Body comes from a long, proud tradition of possession movies about women, particularly young women, from The Exorcist to Paranormal Activity. But given the conspicuous absence of old priests and young priests—indeed any mention of exorcism at all—the film’s closest analogue is, I’d argue, its pre-9/11 sister movie and cult werewolf flick, Ginger Snaps. Thematically, Jennifer’s Body mirrors Ginger Snaps in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.

Look familiar?

Ginger Snaps takes place in a Canadian suburb called Bailey Downs, where a mysterious creature, the Beast of Bailey Downs, has been picking off house pets, mainly dogs. The movie begins with the discovery of another such canine victim, but the attacks happen with enough frequency that, aside from the hysterical owner, no one bats an eye at this newest fatality. Other than the beast, the community is distressingly normal to the film’s two protagonists, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) Fitzgerald, who as children vowed to be “out by 16 or dead in this scene, but together forever.” Ginger at least appears to have opted for the latter option, as the sisters’ first scene together is a lengthy discussion and staging of various forms of suicide, which they put together as a photo slideshow for class. Although Ginger hails suicide as the “ultimate fuck you,” Brigitte is markedly less certain, worrying aloud that people will just laugh at her in her casket, her death having changed nothing.

Excellent show-and-tell project

There is of course much about the Fitzgerald sisters’ plan that conforms to the status quo. Suicide is an undeniably violent act, but it’s a self-directed violence, physically harming only the sisters and expected of women whom society views as predominantly nonviolent towards others. Given the abandonment of “out by 16,” it seems evident, too, that the sisters have succumbed to what they believe to be an inalterable, futile situation. They have no power to truly challenge the structures that make them so miserable. That is, until the Beast of Bailey Downs, a werewolf, attacks Ginger and she begins to change.

That the change happens simultaneously with puberty—her first menstrual cycle literally begins on the night she’s bitten—only heightens the sense of power Ginger now feels. Although still a weird Fitzgerald sister, her sexual appeal only increases throughout the movie until she fully transforms. This on its own is insufficient to manifest as a disruption. Ginger’s male classmates are only too happy to view her as a sexual object, albeit a slightly unsettling one. Even her confidence is unthreatening as long as it is confined to the context of their own desires. No, the difficulty is that Ginger remains unsatisfied and is no longer content to be so.

Unfortunately, nothing in this aisle for lycanthropy

In Jennifer’s Body, Needy and Jennifer play somewhat different roles in an otherwise familiar setting. Rural Devil’s Kettle, named for an unusual waterfall, may differ geographically from Bailey Downs but the sense of limitation and confinement remains. At the beginning of the film, Jennifer urges Needy to come to a concert with her because the band, Low Shoulder, is from the city. Her desire to leave Devil’s Kettle is evident in her enthusiasm, a fact Needy appears to wistfully recognize as they watch Low Shoulder perform at the local drinking hole. But Jennifer is no social outcast in the vein of the Fitzgerald sisters. She is, as Needy unnecessarily informs us, “a babe.” And though she characterizes herself as a dork in comparison, Needy herself hardly qualifies as a weirdo. “We were our yearbook photos,” she explains in her voiceover. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

Hard to make Amanda Seyfried look “dorky” but they tried

Jennifer and Needy’s desires similarly do not disturb societal structures. Even Jennifer, extremely cognizant of her sexual powers, is ultimately unthreatening. She is not much of a party girl either, saying longingly at the bar: “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to get trashed.” In other words, she plays by the rules. And despite her assertive attitude, willingness to manipulate men, and apparent confidence, the right sort of masculinity is enough to overcome her. This is painfully evident in her interactions with Nikolai, the lead singer of Low Shoulder, who continues to fascinate her, even after he insults Jennifer and the town.

Satanists with awesome haircuts

In fact, Nikolai brutally uses Jennifer’s desire for and idealization of the outside world against her. After a fire breaks out in the bar, killing several people, she and Needy flee through the bathroom window. Outside, Nikolai finds them and leads Jennifer away to the band’s van—the last time Needy will see her alive, as the members of Low Shoulder intend to sacrifice her in exchange for their commercial success. (It’s a hard world for an indie band. They’re just all so pretty.) When Jennifer appears again, covered in blood, she is possessed by a demon—and as with Ginger, her desires can no longer be sated by ordinary means. As Devil’s Kettle becomes a place of tragedy, Jennifer transforms into an agent of gleeful destruction, lusting not for attention or boys or society dictates for a teenage girl, but rather for power, violence, and fear.

The new Jennifer doesn’t care about gender roles

Ginger comes to a similar conclusion about her longing. “I get this ache,” she confesses to Brigitte. “I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces.” This conflation between sex and violence is hardly unique to Ginger Snaps or Jennifer’s Body, but the emphasis on female sexuality and female power subvert our expectations in the violent scenes. Nor are these neat, orderly killings—both Ginger and Jennifer tear open and partially consume their victims. These films are bloody and that blood belongs almost exclusively to men. Of the two, Ginger is much more erratic in her selection of victims, striking out mostly at male authority figures as they threaten her. This is fitting for her affliction and the gradual nature of her change, which, in an unusual twist on the werewolf trope, happens over the course of the month until the full moon instead of all in one night.

Jennifer, conversely, makes a full transition to her new undead, possessed state of being although her feeding patterns notably also occur on a monthly schedule as the life forces of her victims wane. As a hungry demon, as Needy points out, Jennifer appears remarkably like a woman in the throws of PMS: “She gets weak and cranky and ugly.” Being full, Jennifer explains, is an incredible high—and she’s basically indestructible. It’s no wonder that each month she seduces and consumes another boy after the juice from the last runs out. Externally, this does not manifest as a large behavioral shift. Jennifer is flirty, appealing, and deliberately submissive as she lures in her next meal. The difference is she no longer figuratively attains her sense of self-worth from her conquests—they are literally making her more beautiful and powerful.

Confidence is terrifying

We can understand why Ginger and Jennifer become so insatiable and simultaneously why their hunger appears so monstrous in the context of patriarchal society. Their love of killing makes them a serious threat. It’s the full realization of their powers and the traditional means by which they might be subdued—control over their self-image, social standing or physical wellbeing—no longer work. For the first time in their lives, both are completely uninhibited. They are free to want. There is something almost laudable about their transformations, too; they’ve gone from almost certain victims to powerful killers. And it’s all the more telling that we can characterize both films as macabre comedies as well as horror flicks; they are often as funny as they are frightening and their delight in the upending of social convention is palpable.

But it is the way of horror that normalcy often reasserts itself and the monster is destroyed. In the case of both Ginger Snaps and Jennifer’s Body, the agent of that destruction is not a man but another teenage girl—and not just any girl, but a literal or metaphorical sister.

Inseparable…until one of us gets bitten by a werewolf

Ginger’s relationship with her sister remains the only reliable element in her life, although her encroaching transformation certainly strains it, as she abandons, threatens, and ignores her at various turns. It’s clear from the outset that their relationship has always been one of distinct inequality with Ginger as the leader and Brigitte the follower. Brigitte, who grows more assertive as the story progresses, is determined to find a cure for her sister’s condition and teams up with local drug dealer and apparent lycanthrope enthusiast Sam. However, this new alliance irritates Ginger, who as they go to consult with him drolly remarks, “Romeo, Romeo, where for art thou, Romeo?” In fact, although there is real affection at the heart of their relationship, Ginger is undeniably possessive and jealous regarding Brigitte, accusing even the school’s elderly janitor of checking out her sister and then killing him in a fit of werewolf-induced rage. Neither is it accidental that Sam becomes her intended target, as she first attempts to seduce him and then attacks him when that fails. However, she does not target Brigitte until the very end of the film, at which point Brigitte resigns herself to killing Ginger in self-defense.

There are striking similarities in the relationship between Needy and Jennifer. Jennifer is often possessive and controlling of the weaker-willed and aptly named Needy. But they genuinely care for one another, as Needy observes, because, “Sandbox love never dies.” Despite her altered state, Jennifer avoids harming her friend, even when the demon inside her would clearly be glad to rip her to pieces, too. Instead, Jennifer settles for consuming the boys around Needy, including her goth friend, Colin, and her boyfriend, Chip. This last murder drives Needy to finally take action against Jennifer and the two exchange barbed insults in two confrontations that eventually result in Jennifer’s death. Needy flatly exposes Jennifer’s insecurities, revealing a dynamic that has subtly developed over the course of the film: Needy is the stronger and more capable of the two.

Jennifer confides in Needy

It is tempting to read these two endings as a reassertion of patriarchal values in the vein of conservative horror: the well-behaved, sensible girl saves the day and survives to tell the tale while the sex-crazed, uninhibited female monster is destroyed. This is accurate but for two facts: the tragedy of our two heroines and the contagion of violence. Brigitte and Needy are devastated by what they have to do, both visibly mourning the women they loved. For them, these moments are personal, not political. It’s worth asking if they would have intervened at all had Ginger and Jennifer ranged farther afield. Both look for other solutions; both permit at least one person to die despite what they know; both keep the confidences given to them. At the end of Ginger Snaps, Brigitte leans over the body of her transformed sister and sobs; having killed Jennifer, Needy is broken, bitter, and changed, spending her days in a mental health institution for criminals. Neither looks much like a heroine of the patriarchy; neither returns to the strictures of society.

Not so Needy anymore

And both are marked in more significant ways. Brigitte deliberately infects herself to gain Ginger’s cooperation. Jennifer scratches Needy as they struggle, thus communicating some of her demonic powers to her friend, a fact Needy reveals at the end of the film as she levitates out of solitary confinement and escapes. Although Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed show us more of Brigitte’s fate—which also involves institutionalization—it’s unclear at the end of the first movie what the outcome of her infection will be. Jennifer’s Body gives us rather more, because Needy has one thing on her mind: revenge. The closing credits of the film reveal the gruesome deaths of Low Shoulder, and security footage shows Needy strolling towards their hotel room, her intent unmistakable.

Brigitte and Needy’s reactions remind us what we might forget over the course of these films: both Ginger and Jennifer are victims. They did not intentionally become what they are. But their survival makes them strong, even as it changes them in other more horrific ways. Those changes and that power are, the films seem to suggest, communicable. And despite their destruction, something of what they’ve gained persists in the women who love them and survive. Although the immediate threat may have passed, the possibility for further violence lingers.

Julia Patt is a writer from Maryland. She also edits 7×20, a journal of twitter literature, and is a regular contributor to VProud.tv and tatestreet.org. Follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/chidorme

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

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.