(Image
1)
James Cameron’s Aliens has hit a stride with popular
culture and has influenced not only the future of the action genre, but also
how an audience views a film. The
character of Ripley, how she is filmed and Sigourney Weaver as the casting
decision plays a large role in the success of the film and Cameron’s new age
portrayal of female “bad-assery.” While
Aliens also retains a postmodern quality to it, it also challenges the audience’s
preconceived notions of women’s roles in action films.
James Cameron has
been a main proponent in propelling women’s roles in action films from being
the helpless damsel to a tough leading woman role, as seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Aliens.
In Aliens Sigourney Weaver’s
character, Ripley, is the protagonist of the film and in doing so changes the
course of the film and allows for the director to exploit the audience’s ideas
of film gender role. Unlike Ripley, most
female film characters are weak and in need of help where they are forced to
call on a man’s expertise, no matter what the genre may be. This damsel in distress archetype is
challenged and effectively broken in this film as Ripley fends for herself
against an alien that nobody else has seemed to conquer. In conquering the alien, Ripley seems to
morph sexually from the archetypal “weak-woman” to brutish man. In her
book Gender Trouble (1990), Judith
Butler conceives that "Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a
set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the
appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” Ripley certainly is a sure-fire example of
this as she gets in the iconic yellow robot in order to fight the remaining
female alien (Image 2)
(Image 2)
Ripley is effectively represented as a woman in a man’s role, as this is
represented in the robot suit as having a strong upper-body build. This change is not only shown to the audience
as an evolution of the character through story but also as Ridley literally
embodies the masculine-beholding robot. In
a decade that pays homage to other films in tradition to post-modernism, many
films proceeding Aliens do the same as the roles of women in film have
undoubtedly been changed.
In contemporary film,
the main protagonist in action films of the last decade has seen more than a
few female action heroes. In films such
as Kill Bill, The Hunger Games series, The Underworld series, and various other
women have been deemed action heroes.
One postmodern relation I immediately made when I saw Kill Bill was The Bride’s jumpsuit
(Image 3). This was not only in
reference to Bruce Lee’s suit in Game of
Death but also it stuck out to me because of Ripley’s suit in Aliens. In my opinion Bruce Lee’s character in Game of Death and also Sigourney Weaver’s
in Aliens were combined in order to
provide the female action hero, thus proving the lasting effect and female
revolution in female film characters and the impact from Aliens Ripley.
(Image 3)
Aliens and mainly the character of Ripley
helped change the landscape and break down barriers concerning contemporary
gender roles in film. Paving the way for
a new generation of female action heroes to enter in to the throes of danger
and action.
I loved how you brought up some modern counterparts to the whole bad ass women in an action role. Another similarity to Kill Bill and Aliens was the maternal aspect to it. I mean in Kill Bill she really did not know her daughter survived until the very end but once she found out she was motivated by the her daughter. So even today some of these female action roles are motivated by a maternal instinct Katniss protecting her sister Prim is another example.
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting to read Brown's essay from 1996 when roles like Maggie in _Point of No Return_ were still of the radical variety as it provided a nice sampling of that history. But, as you illustrate with your references to action heroines like The Bride from _Kill Bill_ and Katniss from _The Hunger Games_, we are well accustomed to our contemporary action film females being cut from the same cloth as Maggie. They often carry a certain mystique that provides a sexy surface appearance but hides some sort of deadly proficiency or some repressed experience. Look at Scarlett Johannsonn's Blade Widow from Cap. America 2 and The Avengers. She is the model of the contemporary heroine made explicit: sexually savvy, skilled at arms, comes from a dark KGB past. In fact, I think that the radical hero today would be a return to the muscular eighties heroines like Ripley and Sarah Conner. I think that in the long time that we've spent with heroines who operate through subterfuge, we've become accustomed to ambiguous motives, and thus a sense of disillusionment. Maybe a return to berserker heroines who wear their cause on their sleeve (which probably isn't there because it'll most likely be a tank top) would be a welcome return -- a little less subterfuge in such an accessibly informational era.
ReplyDeleteThere are a couple of peripheral comments you make here that I'd have liked to see developed: the relation of Ripley's gender-morphing to postmodernism (instead of discussing the two as if they're somehow parallel or unrelated), and Ripley's becoming-masculine, (gaining upper-body strength) by essentially becoming robot. The idea that gender is something one puts on and takes off like an outfit, or in Butler's terms "performs," _is_ postmodern, as is the idea of extension of the human body into that of an alien or machine. It's like you almost see this, but then get sidetracked into less interesting focus on changing gender roles.
ReplyDelete