When Stieg Larsson’s girl with
the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, encounters a man who regards her as
“legal” prey, we quickly realize exactly what sets this skinny hacker
apart from heroines of the past. Salander invites Advokat Bjurman into
the bedroom and leads him to the bed, “not the other way around.” Her
next move is to fire seventy-five thousand volts from a Taser into his
armpit and push him down with “all her strength.” In a stark reversal of
the nineteenth-century playwright Victorien Sardou’s famous formula for
successful theatrics—“Torture the woman!”—Salander ties up Bjurman and
tattoos a series of vivid epithets onto his torso. A sadistic sexual
predator is transformed in an instant into her victim.
We’ve come a long way from what Simone de Beauvoir once found in Anglo-European entertainments: “In song and story the young man is seen departing adventurously in search of a woman; he slays the dragons and giants; she is locked in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, she is chained to a rock, a captive, sound asleep: she waits.” Have we kissed Sleeping Beauty goodbye at last, as feminists advised us to do not so long ago? Her younger and more energetic rival in today’s cultural productions has been working hard to depose her, but archetypes die hard and can find their way back to us in unexpected ways.
We’ve come a long way from what Simone de Beauvoir once found in Anglo-European entertainments: “In song and story the young man is seen departing adventurously in search of a woman; he slays the dragons and giants; she is locked in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, she is chained to a rock, a captive, sound asleep: she waits.” Have we kissed Sleeping Beauty goodbye at last, as feminists advised us to do not so long ago? Her younger and more energetic rival in today’s cultural productions has been working hard to depose her, but archetypes die hard and can find their way back to us in unexpected ways.
Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games”
series have given us female tricksters, women who are quick-witted,
fleet-footed, and resolutely brave. Like their male
counterparts—Coyote, Anansi, Raven, Rabbit, Hermes, Loki, and all those
other mercurial survivors—these women are often famished (bulimic binges
are their update on the mythical figure’s ravenous appetite), but also
driven by mysterious cravings that make them appealingly enigmatic.
Surrounded by predators, they quickly develop survival skills; they
cross boundaries, challenge property rights, and outwit all who see them
as easy prey. But, unlike their male analogues, they are not just
cleverly resourceful and determined to survive. They’re also committed
to social causes and political change.
The female trickster has a long and distinguished lineage. For centuries, these heroines made use of veiled speech and disguise as they prowled around the margins of their worlds. There is Scheherazade, who rescues herself through storytelling, using the civilizing energy of narrative to end King Shahryar’s serial marriages and slayings. Then, there’s the younger and meeker Gretel, who sees her “moment in history,” as Anne Sexton tells it, and shoves the cannibalistic witch into the oven. In the end, she and Hansel are able to return home on the back of a duck, thanks to the poetry in her spells. Like the mythical Hermes, the two children become liars and thieves who traffic in enchantments.
Many of our female tricksters—often new inflections of the ones we know from legends and fairy tales—have complemented their arsenals of verbal weapons with guns and steel. Little Red Riding Hood has been revisited again and again in recent years. The girl in red, often positioned as a seductive innocent who courts the predator as much as she fears him, is no longer a willing victim. When Buffy, from the popular nineties TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” dresses up as Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween, she carries weapons in her basket. In David Slade’s “Hard Candy” (2005), a fourteen-year-old girl in a hooded red sweatshirt, brilliantly played by a sweet-faced Ellen Page, turns out to be not so innocent. She sets out to torture an online sexual predator, exceeding in ruthlessness Reese Witherspoon’s gritty Little Red Riding Hood in Matthew Bright’s “Freeway” (1996). Joe Wright, the director of “Hanna” (2011), reinvents the character as a genetically modified teen-age assassin who goes out for target practice dressed in pelts. In the cabin she shares with her father, she spends cold Norwegian winter evenings reading the Grimms’ fairy tales, deeply absorbed in images from “Little Red Riding Hood.”
“You’re a badass, take-no-prisoners woman,” a defeated husband tells his wife in Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” last year’s best-selling novel that takes the idea of the avenger heroine to the point of near-parody. Many of these new tough girls are not at all inclined to temper justice with mercy (think Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill”), especially when they are on political missions. “Zero Dark Thirty” has Maya, a C.I.A. officer obsessed with hunting down Osama bin Laden, who operates in a theatre of global combat that offers entirely new terrain for female heroics. Maya may cringe while witnessing violent interrogations and torture, but her determination to find and punish terrorists never falters. “Homeland”’s Carrie Mathison is more complicated, but she, too, obsessed with a terrorist named Abu Nazir, shows a form of unforgiving single-mindedness that shades into pathology. Both Maya and Carrie continue the tradition of wielding language as a weapon. Maya turns an office window into a slate for reprimands. Carrie creates a visual map of her manic thinking, papered with evidence and clues that eventually lead to Abu Nazir’s capture.
If male tricksters have traditionally been fixated on satisfying colossal appetites of all kinds, our new female tricksters—orphans, loners, and outsiders—are beleaguered and needy. At work, they become Cassandras, confident and shrewdly prescient women whose intuition and brashness cut through thickets of bureaucratic procedure. Yet, once work stops, they seem utterly lost. There is clearly something compensatory in the psychological fragility of these women warriors: their gains in intellect and muscle are diminished by moments of complete emotional collapse. Vulnerability continues to attract. Hence the intransigent presence of the sleeping princess, who remains central to many films and novels, despite the rising numbers of female avengers and investigators.
One of the riskiest and most controversial recent enterprises, Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” features a “Sleeping Beauty” plot. The film recounts Django’s search for his wife, Hildy, or Broomhilda, named by German-American slaveholders after Wotan’s daughter Brünnhilde. When she finally appears on-screen, she emerges from a claustrophobic underground cage, naked, dehydrated, immobilized, and painfully vulnerable. Like her namesake, who was narcotized with a “sleep-thorn” and sealed off from the world, Hildy can do little more than suffer and endure, not just in the tomblike vault in which she was imprisoned but everywhere else. Even after her liberation from slavery, Hildy is winsome, grateful, and defenseless (the gun she flourishes in the finale seems purely decorative). It’s a low point in a movie that otherwise boldly cuts against the stereotype of slaves as people without will, hopelessly resigned to their bondage.
Sleeping Beauty and Briar Rose, magnetically beautiful and mute, invite riskless voyeurism in both their cinematic and their fictional incarnations. Perhaps this is why the trope of the sleeping woman persists, despite efforts to shut it out; its most recent appearances include Pedro Almodóvar’s “Talk to Her,” Julia Leigh’s “Sleeping Beauty,” and Anne Rice’s “The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty,” among many other works. The upright, brainy female, physically commanding and a bit unhinged, is less of a crowd-pleaser.
These days, the trickiest of them all may be Lady Gaga, who last year migrated with ease from a performance-art piece called “Sleeping with Gaga” (used to sell her perfume, Fame) into the oven to play the witch for Annie Leibovitz’s “Hansel and Gretel” photo shoot for Vogue.
A shape-shifter par excellence, she was able to play the innocent
Sleeping Beauty, yet she also staged herself as a mobile predator
seeking revenge on the children who violate her property rights. Like
every female trickster since Scheherazade, she, too, draws on lyrical
inventiveness to carry out her mission. The message she broadcasts,
that she was “born this way” and wants to take us into a “kinder and
braver world,” prompts us to square the provocations of her art with the
undemanding mantra of her social mission. Lady Gaga draws us out of our
comfort zones, crosses boundaries, gets snared in her own devices.
Shamelessly exploitative and exploratory, she reminds us that every
culture requires a space for the disruptive energy of antisocial
characters. She may have the creative energy of a trickster, but she is
also Sleeping Beauty and menacing monster, all rolled into one.
Maria Tatar chairs the program for folklore and mythology at Harvard University. She is the editor of “The Annotated Brothers Grimm.” Read her pieces on Philip Pullman’s fairy tales, the evolution of Snow White, little blond innocents in films, and newly unearthed fairy tales.
Illustration by Hannah K. Lee.
The female trickster has a long and distinguished lineage. For centuries, these heroines made use of veiled speech and disguise as they prowled around the margins of their worlds. There is Scheherazade, who rescues herself through storytelling, using the civilizing energy of narrative to end King Shahryar’s serial marriages and slayings. Then, there’s the younger and meeker Gretel, who sees her “moment in history,” as Anne Sexton tells it, and shoves the cannibalistic witch into the oven. In the end, she and Hansel are able to return home on the back of a duck, thanks to the poetry in her spells. Like the mythical Hermes, the two children become liars and thieves who traffic in enchantments.
Many of our female tricksters—often new inflections of the ones we know from legends and fairy tales—have complemented their arsenals of verbal weapons with guns and steel. Little Red Riding Hood has been revisited again and again in recent years. The girl in red, often positioned as a seductive innocent who courts the predator as much as she fears him, is no longer a willing victim. When Buffy, from the popular nineties TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” dresses up as Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween, she carries weapons in her basket. In David Slade’s “Hard Candy” (2005), a fourteen-year-old girl in a hooded red sweatshirt, brilliantly played by a sweet-faced Ellen Page, turns out to be not so innocent. She sets out to torture an online sexual predator, exceeding in ruthlessness Reese Witherspoon’s gritty Little Red Riding Hood in Matthew Bright’s “Freeway” (1996). Joe Wright, the director of “Hanna” (2011), reinvents the character as a genetically modified teen-age assassin who goes out for target practice dressed in pelts. In the cabin she shares with her father, she spends cold Norwegian winter evenings reading the Grimms’ fairy tales, deeply absorbed in images from “Little Red Riding Hood.”
“You’re a badass, take-no-prisoners woman,” a defeated husband tells his wife in Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” last year’s best-selling novel that takes the idea of the avenger heroine to the point of near-parody. Many of these new tough girls are not at all inclined to temper justice with mercy (think Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill”), especially when they are on political missions. “Zero Dark Thirty” has Maya, a C.I.A. officer obsessed with hunting down Osama bin Laden, who operates in a theatre of global combat that offers entirely new terrain for female heroics. Maya may cringe while witnessing violent interrogations and torture, but her determination to find and punish terrorists never falters. “Homeland”’s Carrie Mathison is more complicated, but she, too, obsessed with a terrorist named Abu Nazir, shows a form of unforgiving single-mindedness that shades into pathology. Both Maya and Carrie continue the tradition of wielding language as a weapon. Maya turns an office window into a slate for reprimands. Carrie creates a visual map of her manic thinking, papered with evidence and clues that eventually lead to Abu Nazir’s capture.
If male tricksters have traditionally been fixated on satisfying colossal appetites of all kinds, our new female tricksters—orphans, loners, and outsiders—are beleaguered and needy. At work, they become Cassandras, confident and shrewdly prescient women whose intuition and brashness cut through thickets of bureaucratic procedure. Yet, once work stops, they seem utterly lost. There is clearly something compensatory in the psychological fragility of these women warriors: their gains in intellect and muscle are diminished by moments of complete emotional collapse. Vulnerability continues to attract. Hence the intransigent presence of the sleeping princess, who remains central to many films and novels, despite the rising numbers of female avengers and investigators.
One of the riskiest and most controversial recent enterprises, Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” features a “Sleeping Beauty” plot. The film recounts Django’s search for his wife, Hildy, or Broomhilda, named by German-American slaveholders after Wotan’s daughter Brünnhilde. When she finally appears on-screen, she emerges from a claustrophobic underground cage, naked, dehydrated, immobilized, and painfully vulnerable. Like her namesake, who was narcotized with a “sleep-thorn” and sealed off from the world, Hildy can do little more than suffer and endure, not just in the tomblike vault in which she was imprisoned but everywhere else. Even after her liberation from slavery, Hildy is winsome, grateful, and defenseless (the gun she flourishes in the finale seems purely decorative). It’s a low point in a movie that otherwise boldly cuts against the stereotype of slaves as people without will, hopelessly resigned to their bondage.
Sleeping Beauty and Briar Rose, magnetically beautiful and mute, invite riskless voyeurism in both their cinematic and their fictional incarnations. Perhaps this is why the trope of the sleeping woman persists, despite efforts to shut it out; its most recent appearances include Pedro Almodóvar’s “Talk to Her,” Julia Leigh’s “Sleeping Beauty,” and Anne Rice’s “The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty,” among many other works. The upright, brainy female, physically commanding and a bit unhinged, is less of a crowd-pleaser.
Maria Tatar chairs the program for folklore and mythology at Harvard University. She is the editor of “The Annotated Brothers Grimm.” Read her pieces on Philip Pullman’s fairy tales, the evolution of Snow White, little blond innocents in films, and newly unearthed fairy tales.
Illustration by Hannah K. Lee.
No comments:
Post a Comment