Why I Love Marge Gunderson
I don’t have any news about Jim Carrey’s weight gain, although I will keep an eye out for you, many Google searchers. But I did get a hot tip in the comments last week, and I wanted to share it: Jadet Cadet’s post on Gender and Size in the Action Genre.
She’s responding to a list of the Top 10 Action Babes from AskMen.com, a site which says of the “babes” in question, “We’re not sure if we want them to protect us or ravage us.” And Jadet does a great job of discussing the implications of this list as well as the sexualization of female action heroes in general.
I’ve noticed that female machismo has become more and more rigidly confined to women who fit a stereotypical mold of female attractiveness, especially in regards to slenderness. Women who are extremely muscular or heavier set are represented less in the horror/action/sci-fi entertainment circuit than the waif thin, and women who are both heavy and muscular are nonexistent. This provides a very narrow image of what female strength looks like in real life, and sends a conflicting message than can reinforce unrealistic standards.
The heroine’s physical power is often explained by an external cause, a force she has usually has no control over. Six of the heroines on this list have portrayed characters with supernatural abilities on more than one occasion, and five have used supernatural or technological means to explain their unusual physical strength. This allows them to believably play the part while remaining thin and lightly muscular, the beauty ideal in modern day entertainment.
I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer as much as the next girl, but of course, this is exactly what I was complaining about in reference to Joss’s casting choices, so I completely take Jadet’s point.
She also talks about Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, which reminds me of my favorite female action hero of all time: Marge Gunderson in Fargo, played by Frances McDormand. Marge is seven months pregnant throughout the film, reinforcing her femaleness. However, in her police chief’s uniform, she’s certainly not hyper-sexualized. She’s just brave and tough and smart, and she gets the bad guys in the end. She is, as Jadet puts it, “a rare type of female heroine that doesn’t exist simply for the male audience to drool over.” I love her.
But I wonder: do you think we’ll ever get another action hero who is a woman, who is big and tough and not in a leather catsuit or a cheerleading costume? Will we ever get a hero that qualifies as buff, if not outright fat? Is it too much to ask for?
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Celebrities, Feminism, Meta, Movies, Question, TV
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This reminds me of a small movie my friends and I just watched. It is the sequel to “The Gamers”. In it is a pretty amusing story following a group of people playing D&D and in it the female player is filling the role of “fighter”. Her ex, made a character sheet up for her and she was outraged when she read that the character was wearing “Bikini mail” for armor…you know…the typical fantasy armor for women.
Anyway, in it she plays her own warrior. One that focused on other attributes, her intelligence being one of them. She also kicks some major ass and is not waif thin. Yeah it is a small movie and the special effects are campy but I love it.
I would love for more women to toss the “Bikini mail” out and to play more realistic heroines.
Queen of Nuffink, I think when women write their own characters you do end up with women with much more varied body types. I’ve been playing D&D for over a decade, and have played everything from a vaguely homicidal “sexy” elf (when I started), to a fat human sorceress, to a 6’2 muscular half devil ranger with facial tattoos.
Linda Hamilton was always my favorite. I was pretty young when T2 came out and I hadn’t seen any woman built like that before. Women don’t really gain mass when they work out though so a thin heroine is believable, but not just plain skinny like Summer Glau. Gina Carano is the strongest girl I can think of and she’s not vein popping huge.
It’s off the topic of action stars but on Entourage this season there’s a girl who clearly has an eating disorder (I know the word “clearly” is presumptuous but something is visibly wrong), and when they are talking about her they call her “the young looking one”. She doesn’t look “young”, she looks like she’s dying. Does anyone else still watch that show?
What about Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from “Aliens?”
Sure, she’s slim. Very.
But she’s pretty zipped up. No fembot makeup. She does have a tussle with a British doctor in the third film. I always wondered if they softened her by giving her the young girl, newt, as a charge. But then I also saw Newt as being a metaphor for Ripley’s vulnerability.
Punchy, I know EXACTLY who you’re referring to, and she is SCARY!
I also love Ripley. (And, BTW, the role was originally written for a man, but Sigourney was cast and they didn’t change the character much.)
Marge Gunderson is one of the best onscreen characters ever, in one of my favorite movies.
I also wonder if we’ll see more Marges. In the recent “G.I Joe” movie, all the men had full body armor, while the women were wearing skintight leather and push-up bras. Which, as everyone knows, is VERY practical combat wear! Luckily the movie tanked. And I think continued failure of these kinds of movies will be the only thing that will put an end to this ridiculousness.
I liked Ripley, but Vasquez from Aliens was the real action heroine of that series IMO. Sure, she wasn’t the main character but my sister and I utterly worshipped her when we were teens. Tough mentally and physically. Not only could she beat you up, she’d tear you apart verbally before and after the fight. She had muscles with no apologies. Not skinny muscles to avoid scaring the boys, she had MUSCLE muscles!
Damn. Now I want to watch my Aliens DVD!
LOVE Vasquez! I watch her parts on the dvd more than anything else.
“Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?”
“No, have you?”
That’s one kick ass female!
Punchy,
I feel a weird need to defend Summer Glau. She was a professional ballet dancer for most of her life, so I bet she’s really strong even if she’s skinny. I do agree that her physical fragility is really played up in Serenity and Firefly (though it is consistent with her character).
Kat-
Even if Summer was a robot on the inside, I think I could beat her up. That’s what makes her unbelievable to me as an action hero. And I think it was the article that said these girls have to be strong through some magic process, wasn’t Summer’s character on Firefly some government experiment?
Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton could beat me up so they were great as kick ass female leads. (I forgot about Vasquez!)
Also, Brigitte Nielsen anyone?
I guess I never thought about it that way, but let’s be honest. How many other unrealistic things can we point out about these movies?
It’s all about living in the fantasy. And the majority of the movies credited where Sci-fi/Action/Fantasy films. In real life of course Carrie-Ann Moss could not beat up a room full of Agent Smiths (even with her martial arts training and kickass biceps). But neither could she hover in mid-air for 5 seconds…
The majority (okay making a generalization)… rather a good deal of action movies these days are based off of comics. And there’s hardly varied representation of women in comics. They were usually slim (though muscular) with wider hips, a tiny waist, and huge boobs.
I guess it’s one of those “it’s not right, but it’s okay” type of deals. It’s not really fair to criticize a movie that is clearly 100% fantasy, but at the same time a little variance with the heroine sizes couldn’t hurt.
I’ve always thought that “Women don’t really gain mass when they work out” thing was a myth, or doesn’t apply to everyone. Of course we gain mass – if we have the genetic potential and if we EAT. The thing is, many women who work out restrict their eating at the same time, because to them, it’s more about being lean than about being strong.
Obviously, women are not shaped the same way as men. We tend to have less upper body strength, and we tend to maintain a higher fat percentage, so our muscles are less visibly defined. But, last time I checked, I had 130 pounds of lean mass at 5′-4″ (I weighed 190 at the time) – and I wasn’t even working out seriously.
Women with strong, sturdy builds are fairly common in the real world but are almost completely absent from the mass media. And, yes, it would be nice to see some larger, stronger women portrayed as action heroines. My guess? Most men don’t want to see women who look like they could really, actually, beat them up. It scares them.
Geena Davis made some terrifically cheesy and entertaining popcorn action flicks back in the mid-1990s. Check out the not-half-bad pirate yarn “Cutthroat Island” (how many movies have been made about female pirates) and the wildly entertaining “Long Kiss Goodnight” (her dialogue with Samuel L. Jackson in that film is worth the price of admission alone). Yes, she’s an ex-model, and yes, she’s still pretty trim in those films. But being an athletic, six-foot-tall woman, neither film uses any explanation on how she can kick all these male characters’ asses other than the fact that her characters are total badasses.
PS: no Arnold Schwarzenegger pithy one-liner will ever top Geena Davis’ line to a bad guy in LKG: “Die screaming, motherfucker.”
I just posted a comment there, and wanted to add one here as well. (Love the site, BTW, my GF pointed me here and I think the entire thing is great)
I’m not sure how popular a truly muscled heroine would be, because the largest audience for action films are men, and most men aren’t interested in a masculine-looking woman. It’s not a matter of fear (as suggested above), it’s just a matter of what is naturally appealing, and I don’t think women with large muscles (not muscle tone, but actual muscle bulk) fit that bill for a majority of men.
That said, I think there’s room for a woman who looks more like an actual woman, and not an overly-stylized, model-esque version of a woman. But for the stereotype to be broken, it demands someone unique and vibrant, to break out of the pack and exhibit a whole new model for people to follow.
The question is, where is the Hank Aaron of new female action stars?