Are Rodriguez and Tarantino feminists?
IT's a bit late in the evening for philosophical meditations, but I really couldn't resist.
My roommate and I have Netflix, and her most recent rentals have included both discs of Grindhouse, the Quentin Tarantino/ Robert Rodriguez double feature that came out earlier this year consisting of the movies Death Proof and Planet Terror. We watched Planet Terror first, and I just finished watching Death Proof right now. What struck me about both films were the incredibly strong female characters present in both.
Planet Terror is basically the origin story of Cherry Darling, a go-go dancer turned warrior turned savior of humanity. Death Proof follows the exploits of a stuntman serial killer who stalks and kills women with his car- but in the final act, picks the wrong women to mess with. The women in both movies remind me strongly of Tarantino's character The Bride from his Kill Bill films. All are unmistakably female and feminine, yet all are strong, intelligent, capable, and deadly.
I find the women of Grindhouse particularly fascinating, because while there are your standard horror movie women in both films who stand around and look sexy and get slaughtered, the principle heroines all basically hijack the women-in-horror-films convention and beat their attackers to death with it. Cherry Darling, as you know if you have seen the previews or the action figures, gets one of her legs replaced with a gun and literally becomes a killing machine.
The women of Death Proof, Zoe, Abbey, and Kim, are attacked by a maniac, and after escaping with their lives, don't even hesitate before arming themselves and taking after him to exact their revenge. They hunt Suntman Mike down, do to him what he did to his other victims, and then end it all by beating the shit out of him in a vicious three way. While I found myself queasy from the violence at the end, and the way the women passed him around like a piece of meat, kicking and punching him until dead, I was struck by their utter lack of hesitation. In any other film or tv show that I've seen, women are always shown to hesitate- to have a fierce internal debate with themselves over the morality and necessity of taking a life. Even if they're supposed to be hardened warriors, you never see women just go directly after someone and kill them without a hint of drama or soul searching. Even Rodriguez's Cherry Darling had to be forced into the role of sexy gun wearing chick by her superhuman badass boyfriend, El Wray. But Tarantino's women? No way. It's... amazing, and humbling to realize that for all my love of women warrior characters in fiction, that I'd never seen anything like it.
And they're not unfeminine. The premise is that all the women are working on a movie together- two are actresses, one is a hair and makeup artist, and one is a stunt woman. Hell, at the beginning of the movie, they're discussing fashion magazines and boyfriends. Most portrayls of violent women seem to feel compelled to strip their subjects of all vestiges of humanity, making them inhuman asexual creatures of the other (Ultra Violet) or overcompensatingly masculine (GI Jane). But the women of Death Proof and The Bride? No way. Hell, in The Bride's final face off with Bill, she's wearing a skirt and a shawl.
The more I think about it, the more I am blown away by Tarantino's treatment of women- as warriors, as killers, and as people. While I do not believe that any artists who chooses to present such women is necessarily a feminist, such a consistent treatment by Tarantino does make me wonder.
At this point, I realize that I'm incoherent from sleep deprivation, and probably not doing a good job at getting my point across. So, go out and rent the movies. Look beyond the sex and blood and gore and compare the female characters in them to the other strong fictional women who have gone before. There's no moral angst like you had with Xena and Buffy. There's no need to prove oneself as a man, like GI Jane. There's no need to strip oneself of the feminine, or channel it through the narrow focus of fetishized fanboy oversexualization. It's... breathtaking. And inspiring.
My roommate and I have Netflix, and her most recent rentals have included both discs of Grindhouse, the Quentin Tarantino/ Robert Rodriguez double feature that came out earlier this year consisting of the movies Death Proof and Planet Terror. We watched Planet Terror first, and I just finished watching Death Proof right now. What struck me about both films were the incredibly strong female characters present in both.
Planet Terror is basically the origin story of Cherry Darling, a go-go dancer turned warrior turned savior of humanity. Death Proof follows the exploits of a stuntman serial killer who stalks and kills women with his car- but in the final act, picks the wrong women to mess with. The women in both movies remind me strongly of Tarantino's character The Bride from his Kill Bill films. All are unmistakably female and feminine, yet all are strong, intelligent, capable, and deadly.
I find the women of Grindhouse particularly fascinating, because while there are your standard horror movie women in both films who stand around and look sexy and get slaughtered, the principle heroines all basically hijack the women-in-horror-films convention and beat their attackers to death with it. Cherry Darling, as you know if you have seen the previews or the action figures, gets one of her legs replaced with a gun and literally becomes a killing machine.
The women of Death Proof, Zoe, Abbey, and Kim, are attacked by a maniac, and after escaping with their lives, don't even hesitate before arming themselves and taking after him to exact their revenge. They hunt Suntman Mike down, do to him what he did to his other victims, and then end it all by beating the shit out of him in a vicious three way. While I found myself queasy from the violence at the end, and the way the women passed him around like a piece of meat, kicking and punching him until dead, I was struck by their utter lack of hesitation. In any other film or tv show that I've seen, women are always shown to hesitate- to have a fierce internal debate with themselves over the morality and necessity of taking a life. Even if they're supposed to be hardened warriors, you never see women just go directly after someone and kill them without a hint of drama or soul searching. Even Rodriguez's Cherry Darling had to be forced into the role of sexy gun wearing chick by her superhuman badass boyfriend, El Wray. But Tarantino's women? No way. It's... amazing, and humbling to realize that for all my love of women warrior characters in fiction, that I'd never seen anything like it.
And they're not unfeminine. The premise is that all the women are working on a movie together- two are actresses, one is a hair and makeup artist, and one is a stunt woman. Hell, at the beginning of the movie, they're discussing fashion magazines and boyfriends. Most portrayls of violent women seem to feel compelled to strip their subjects of all vestiges of humanity, making them inhuman asexual creatures of the other (Ultra Violet) or overcompensatingly masculine (GI Jane). But the women of Death Proof and The Bride? No way. Hell, in The Bride's final face off with Bill, she's wearing a skirt and a shawl.
The more I think about it, the more I am blown away by Tarantino's treatment of women- as warriors, as killers, and as people. While I do not believe that any artists who chooses to present such women is necessarily a feminist, such a consistent treatment by Tarantino does make me wonder.
At this point, I realize that I'm incoherent from sleep deprivation, and probably not doing a good job at getting my point across. So, go out and rent the movies. Look beyond the sex and blood and gore and compare the female characters in them to the other strong fictional women who have gone before. There's no moral angst like you had with Xena and Buffy. There's no need to prove oneself as a man, like GI Jane. There's no need to strip oneself of the feminine, or channel it through the narrow focus of fetishized fanboy oversexualization. It's... breathtaking. And inspiring.