I just saw the movie Kick-Ass and I was highly entertained. It had everything I want in a movie. It had comic book based geekery, it had unnecessary violence and it had Nicolas Cage in what I would call his best performance since Adaptation – though I doubt he’ll be considered for any sort of academy award. That being said, it more than made up for his performance in the re-hashed Wicker Man that made the original Wicker Man look like “Wicca: The Broadway Musical”.
As much as I loved every second of this movie, it made me think about something that I’ve wondered before. In Kick-Ass, one of the main characters is an 11-year-old girl who has been trained since she was 5 years old to be a superhero. She is proficient in advanced weapon use and, it appears, several hand to hand combat styles. I thought she was fantastic and the girl playing her was quite good. My own personal adoration of comic book movies aside, I have noticed something in visual entertainment over the last few years and I am not sure what the long term social effect will be. This brings me to my question.
Do fictional women in media with superpowers or enhancements who engage in violent combat on screen empower women or encourage violence against them?
The conversation started when Battlestar Galactica was still running. I posed the question while watching an episode where Starbuck was kicking some guy’s ass. It happened a lot, as you may recall. I commented that I loved the way their universe didn’t segregate women and men in the military and considered their abilities equally. I wondered, though, if watching someone like Kara Thrace fight like a man on screen would encourage violence against women. We determined that Starbuck was not a good example for this because in any given situation you would have the exceptions. She is a highly trained military officer; she just might kick-ass by nature.
That led me, however, to the supernatural women on television; Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of course, or even Echo on Dollhouse. These are women who didn’t develop a normal toughness, they were enhanced by magic or technology. Watching a great but superfluous fight sceen between Echo and Paul Ballard, for example, doesn’t really show how events like that might go down in real life. Perhaps they wouldn’t happen at all since the premise of the show is very clearly fantastical.
My current favorite female character on sci-fi television is Agent Olivia Dunham on Fringe. At first, I loved the fact that her character appeared to be a highly trained federal agent who was killer with a gun, no pun intended. As the story line continued to play out, we find that she isn’t just a federal agent but that Olivia was part of scientific experiments with a drug called Cortexiphan that enhanced her natural abilities. Olivia is a super-agent created by the very fringe science she is now investigating.
Are these characters actually empowering or are they damaging to the social development landscape?
In my own opinion, I absolutely love them. These are fantasies – they are fiction stories with supernatural elements or science fiction technology. I am also not a tough girl, so watching Olivia Dunham or Buffy or even Starbuck do things that I can’t do is entertaining on one hand and a way empower my imagination on the other. But Kick-Ass brought up a whole new set of questions. Now the empowered woman isn’t supernatural or rebuilt with technology. She is just an 11 year old girl; an 11 year old girl who kills a lot of bad guys in a very bloody and violent way all in the costume of a superhero. Is this damaging or empowering? I’m not sure I know the answer, but Hit Girl made the movie for me.
The nature of many pagan traditions is female empowerment. But how do we empower each other as Pagans and women? Are these fantastical role models, in essence, Pagan archetypes? Is Hit Girl a maiden/warrior Goddess archetype? Is Starbuck an image of The Morrigan? Could Olivia Dunham be Persephone descending into the underworld of Fringe Science, back and forth between parallel universes? I think they could be very powerful symbols for pagan women, just as long as we understand the fictional nature of their stories.
I’m glad you’ve brought up this conversation because it’s one I’ve been having with myself recently. I loved hit girl, and in my opinion without her there is no movie or comic to speak of. What I love about her is hard to define but gender certainly plays a huge role in it. I know that I don’t feel the same about a boy superhero who’s violent, well trained, and foul mouthed and I’m not sure why that is.
I’ve been pondering why I like Hit Girl in spite of or because of being violent, well trained, and foul mouthed. I wonder if she has a will and drive of her own or if she’s a child and been raised to be a cog in the Big Daddy revenge scheme. Is she freedom from societal rules and glorying in a dark and dangerous side within every human or is she one more example of how a person can be shaped however outside forces choose even if it’s ‘contrary’ to their gender.
I waffle a lot on how to view the character or the messaging of the character. I know that either way I like her but sometimes I wonder if that’s a good thing. Meh, just stuff to think on I guess.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful post. I’ve clearly been struggling with this topic – I suppose if I weren’t, I wouldn’t have written this post. I have a hard time wrapping my brain around something I enjoy so much but might have negative social consequences.