I’m pulling this out into its own post because…this is actually a big deal, and it’s not weird at all that it’s having a dramatic impact on people. I’ve heard other women say things about how they felt the movie changed how they thought about their own gender too.
I wrote about it a little at the end of this post, but having a female action character who doesn’t have to look pretty when she fights–who looks like she’s actually fighting, not performing a fight for the audience–is a big deal. It’s such a mind-bogglingly simple thing, and yet we hardly ever see it. Just think how much we’re used to seeing something like this:
(I feel like I should apologize to Black Widow at this point…I keep using her as a counterexample, and really, it’s not her fault.)
There’s friggin’ dust on every surface in this shot, there’s an explosion in the background, and she still looks like she just stepped out of the makeup trailer and is doing a destructoporn photo shoot.
At best, we get something like this:
This is what I call the “PG-13 fight” look, in which you can spend half an hour of screen time battling aliens and come out of it with a maximum of two artfully placed face scrapes/blood trickles.
To be fair, I don’t know if either of the above images are a still from the actual film or a promotional image. But promotional images are part of how the studio wants you to perceive the film (if anything, they’re more stage-managed than the actual shoot) so I think they’re fair game for analysis.
This is a promotional image from Fury Road:
Dirt! Neck tendons! Murder face! I mean, she’s got blood on her teeth in this picture. And while she looks slightly less dirty in the hyper-saturated color scheme of the finished film, this is just a very different image than we’re used to seeing when it comes to women in action movies.
And faces…boy does she get to have an amazing range of facial expressions while fighting! Here, I’ve been collecting them.
Actually…these faces are not amazing at all. They are totally the normal range of faces a person who’s fighting for their life might make. We just don’t normally get to watch a woman fight like a person.
It’s like…she has a complete range of emotions…or something.
It’s like…when actors don’t have to perform some set of expectations about femininity (or masculinity, for that matter)…they get to actually…act. What an idea!