Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: N/A
Subtitled, The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006, this is non-fiction, being a feminist – I guess, more post-feminist – analysis of action heroines over the time in question. It made for an interesting read, being considerably more dense than my typical reading material: Schubert seems to be aiming at an audience that already know what she means, with a good number of terms left unexplained in the text. Yet it was equally frustrating: for every section that had me nodding in agreement, there was one where I was at least raising an eyebrow, if not snorting derisively.Parts are incisive and smart. Others exemplify the worst excesses of ivory-tower academia.
The basic concept appears to be that action heroines fall into five archetypes: the dominatrix, the Amazon, the daughter, the mother, and the rape-avenger. Some may incorporate elements from more than one; Schubart makes the argument that The Bride from Kill Bill is all five, to some degree. To make her case, she looks at example of actresses who have made their careers in the genre, from Pam Grier through Michelle Yeoh to Milla Jovovich, and also specific entries such as Xena: Warrior Princess and the Alien franchise. There are some issues here: calling Pam Grier’s Coffy “action cinema’s first female hero,” is simply wrong. Even if you ignore silent heroines like Kathlyn Williams and Pearl White, who have admittedly fallen into obscurity, Cheng Pei-Pei is more deserving of the title for 1966’s Come Drink With Me. Schubart clearly knows of Hong Kong cinema, as her section on Yeoh indicates. So why no mention of Cheng?
Indeed, Grier is also called “the biggest, baddest and most beautiful of all female heroes in popular cinema.” While she undeniably deserves respect, I’d disagree with all three of those claims. There are some other gaffes as well, e.g. references to an Israeli fighting style called “krav manga“, which is presumably the art of hitting someone with Japanese comics. Or quoting Kill Bill as “Silly rabbit. Tricks are for kids,” and analyzing it on that basis. Perhaps Trix breakfast cereal doesn’t exist in Denmark? Or the assertion that Charlie’s Angels was guilty of “copying the martial arts wirework of The Matrix“. Um, wirework hardly started there, and in any case, that’s because they shared an action choroeographer in Yuen Wo-Ping? Other sections have not aged well, such as the blunt proclamation that “there is no historical evidence” as to the existence of genuine Amazons, and the analysis of Jovovich’s career as characters that “appear almost ugly with marked features, an androgynous appearance, and a hysterical behavior” does not stand up well from a current perspective.
On the other hand, Schubart is entirely willing to go against prevailing wisdom. For example, I can’t argue with her calling the much-derided Barb Wire “a shameless and witty remake of Casablanca” (though it gets scant coverage, considering its cover placement). She also defends Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, saying “My experience is that men who have enjoyed the ‘nauseating’ and ‘sickening’ pleasures of Ilsa have turned out to become quite normal social beings.” Guilty as charged. I must also agree – to the point that I’d like this on a T-shirt – when Schubart says, “A film is not better because it is politically correct, nor is it worse because it is politically incorrect.” In comparison to some academics, she seems utterly sane. She quotes one such scholar, the apparently borderline lunatic Richard Dyer, as saying “For the male viewer, action movies have a lot in common with being fellated.” Okay. Whatever, dude. Schubart, mercifully, largely avoids such excesses.
Largely, but unfortunately not completely, such as her claim that “Being a man is not an essence, but something which must constantly be tested and proved by, for example, raping women.” [Emphasis added] It is moments like that which do make it hard to buy into her analysis, since they appear to stem from a world-view incompatible with my own. Yet, Schubart would perhaps be fine with that, since one of the tenets of postfeminism she espouses, is a film can be read in different ways, depending on the reader’s experiences, and that all such readings have legitimacy. Seems reasonable to me: presumably the same applies to her book. That flexibility, and the five archetypes, are worthwhile elements here, which I’ll absorb going forward. “Men’s recognition of each other’s accomplishments rests on acts of violence”? Not so much.
Author: Rikke Schubart
Publisher: McFarland, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book