The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Today there are a host of heroines on-screen—flip, fast-talking, gender fluid, brainy, sinewy, chain-smoking, and brash—and they are not about to go away. Appearing on a spectrum that takes us from crazed crusaders through single-minded avengers to strapping warrior women, they fight battles, first with words, but soon with weapons as well. Predictably, Hollywood also gives us a perversion of the heroine who has taken so long to emerge, with screen fantasies, scripted and directed mainly by men, that show women dressed to kill rather than crusading for a cause.

  Tricksters, Male and Female

  Hero worship comes easily to every culture, and today we continue to idolize heroes and heroines, neglecting their equally admirable partners in combating villains. These are the mythical figures known as tricksters—antiheroes, outsiders, misfits, interlopers, and, yes, losers—clever, self-serving, amoral, and determined to survive in a cutthroat culture (hello, Scheherazade) rather than to sacrifice themselves to a higher cause (goodbye, Jesus). Many have access to some kind of magical power: superhuman strength, shapeshifting, or spellcasting. Opportunistic and stealthy, they will lie, steal, and cheat, refusing to play by the rules or to become part of a corrupt system riddled with contradictions that do things like transform predatory hypercapitalists into kindhearted philanthropists. Undermining the system, overturning authority, and revitalizing their culture, these mischief makers paradoxically emerge as cultural heroes, champions of those who are marginalized and oppressed. They are the agents of renewal and change.

  “All the regularly discussed figures are male,” Lewis Hyde tells us in Trickster Makes This World, his magisterial study of the culture-building feats of tricksters, originally published in 1998. Who will fail to hear a distant echo of Joseph Campbell’s voice telling his readers that there are no models in the mythological universe for women’s quests? The stars in the trickster firmament range from the Greek Hermes and Nordic Loki to the Native American Coyote and African Hare. Tricky women exist, Hyde concedes, but when they make trouble, their subversive antics and disruptive tactics fall short of the “elaborated career of deceit” that marks the lives of those cultural heroes we know by the name of trickster.4

  There may be good reasons for the absence of female tricksters in what Hyde aptly describes as the patriarchal mythological imagination. The male trickster is never found at home, sitting by the hearth, brooding over impossible chores and dreaming of rescue. Driven by hunger and appetite, he is always on the road, mobile and mercurial in ways unimaginable for women in most cultures. As a boundary-crosser and traveler, trickster is adept at finding ways to gratify his multiple appetites—chiefly for food and sex, but for spiritual satisfactions as well. He is even capable of procreation, as the Winnebago trickster named Wakdjunkaga reveals when he changes into a woman to marry the son of a chief and bear three sons. But that trickster, like Hermes (who is sometimes depicted as a hermaphrodite), remains resolutely masculine and macho, with nothing more than the magical capacity to turn into a woman.5

  It may well be that tricksters are, by their very nature, male, heavy-duty patriarchal constructs, say, in the tradition of Anansi or Hermes, designed to define the addictions, appetites, and desires of manly men. (Hermes is, of course, less of an inveterate sex addict, since most of the womanizing in the Greek mythological universe was left to Zeus.) As the product of mythological systems constructed by male bards, poets, priests, and philosophers, trickster’s powers may simply have been reserved for male agents.6 But who is to say that the female trickster never carried out her own clandestine operations, functioning in furtive ways and covering her tracks to ensure that her powers remain undetected?

  Few in the past would have described Penelope, a symbol of hard-core fidelity, as a “trickster,” but Margaret Atwood construed her differently, as a knowing agent of power. Perhaps the female trickster has played her own survival game and endured simply by staying invisible and confounding the traditional approach we adopt when we try to make sense of our cultural stories. And now, in cultures that grant women forms of mobility and subversive agency unknown in earlier ages (yet still purposefully unavailable in many regions of the world today), she can join up with the more visible postmodern female counterparts brought to us courtesy of the Hollywood Dream Factory, where fantasies about power and playfulness can run wild. It is time to trace the covert operations of a set of female tricksters—girls gone wild in ways that challenge cultural stereotypes. They may not have “fully elaborated” careers but still they remind us that there is a female version of the mythical male trickster, one with its own set of defining features.

  But first an important caveat. What if some of these female tricksters are an invention of defensive fantasies, possibly mounted as resistance to the encroachments of women on male-dominated territories? Certainly, it is possible to make the case that a film like David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005), a recycling of “Little Red Riding Hood” starring a female predator stalking her pedophile male quarry, captures male anxieties about women exacting revenge for a history of rapacious behavior. Or that Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) reveals just how threatening women can be when they turn professional and are suddenly endowed with a higher intelligence, turning on men in vicious ways, not just slapping them or displacing them, but now killing them off. Do these directors, along with their teams of screenwriters, producers, casting directors, and so on, have their finger on the pulse of the culture, reflecting back to audiences their fantasies and fears, or are they struggling with their own personal demons, embodying them on-screen to haunt our imaginations? The answer varies, of course, with each film, and we can endlessly debate exactly where a movie will land on the spectrum that takes us from the culturally symptomatic to what is up close and personal.

  A look at data from the film industry is a reminder to keep asking “Who is telling the story and why?” A 2016 study sponsored by the Annenberg Foundation found that roughly two-thirds of speaking or named characters in films made between 2007 and 2015 were male and only one-third female. Only 32 percent featured a female lead or co-lead. Of the one hundred top-grossing films of 2019, 92.5 percent of the directors were men, 7.5 percent women. Women fared better as writers (12 percent) and as producers (22 percent) but worse as composers (less than 1 percent).7 In 2019, of the one hundred top-grossing films, 10.7 percent were directed by women. Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to ever win the Academy Award for Best Director (was it coincidence that the film, The Hurt Locker, was a war thriller with a nearly all-male cast?).8 The Annenberg study gives us all the more reason to look closely at new archetypes that have emerged and at who is constructing them. In many ways, we are in an exploratory phase, for no one has yet written a rule book along the lines of The Hero with a Thousand Faces for the heroine’s journey and quest or considered how the trickster factors into the cultural logic of new media. How do these new cinematic tricksters represent a deviation from earlier norms and how do they move the needle in ways obvious but also imperceptible in our understanding of female heroism?

  It is not hard to rattle off female stereotypes in movies from the past century. There is the femme fatale (Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon), the prostitute with a heart of gold (Irma la Douce and Pretty Woman), the sassy Black woman (Monster-in-Law and Waiting to Exhale), the terrified Final Girl of Horror (Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and so on. Monstrous and power hungry or marginalized and powerless, these characters are masters of seduction and also of suffering. Recall Hitchcock’s declaration during the filming of The Birds, when its star, Tippi Hedren, was subjected to vicious daily assaults from birds that were in turn protected by the ASPCA: “I always believe in following the advice of the playwright Sardou. He said ‘Torture the women.’” The only real problem, he added, was that we don’t torture women enough. (The French dramatist Victorien Sardou had put that theory into practice in his five-act play La Tosca, later adapted for Puccini’s 1900 opera of that name, which gives Tosca more to endure tha
n is imaginable.) From The Perils of Pauline through Gaslight to Rosemary’s Baby, glammed-up women have screamed, shrieked, and cowered in terror while men plot to torment them.

  Are we flying blind in the twenty-first century? Are there no models for the woman’s quest, as Campbell asserted near the end of his life, when he pointed out that women were only now moving into arenas of action that had formerly been reserved for men alone? “We are the ‘ancestors’ of an age to come,” Campbell reminded us. That’s what makes us the inventors of new mythical models that will guide generations to come. And he advocated creating those new models with compassion rather than passion, in ways that would promote growth and strength rather than power. To his credit, what he wanted was not just new wine in old wineskins, but a new, headier wine in fresh wineskins.9 The film industry, now decentralized, dispersed, and operating in multiple production sites ranging from Hollywood to Bollywood and beyond, has constructed many of those new models (with help from blockbuster novels), and it has reversed course in astonishing ways, creating a new pantheon of female heroines.

  Crazed Crusaders

  When Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, encounters a man who regards her as “legal” prey, we quickly realize exactly what sets this skinny hacker apart from heroines of the past. And it is not just her tattoos, spiked quills of black hair, and Doc Marten boots. Salander invites Advokat Bjurman into the lair of her 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 on the bed with “all her strength.” In a stark reversal of Sardou’s imperative to torture the women, Salander ties up Bjurman and tattoos a series of colorful epithets onto his torso. A sadistic sexual predator is transformed in an instant into her abject victim. This is the woman who will solve the brutal murders (all of young women) committed by a serial killer in a corrupt culture of shady industrialists, Nazi sympathizers, and sexually perverse civil servants.10

  Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy gave us one of the first in a parade of twenty-first-century female tricksters, women who are quick-witted, fleet-footed, and resolutely brave. “Tiny as a sparrow,” “fierce as an eagle,” “a bruised animal”—it is not by chance that reviewers of Hollywood’s version of the first installment to the trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, used animal metaphors to capture Lisbeth’s nature. She has exactly the same ravenous appetite, along with the predatory instincts, of animal tricksters (Coyote, Anansi, Raven, Rabbit). Female tricksters are always famished (bulimic binges are their update on the mythical figure’s insatiable appetite), and also driven by mysterious cravings that make them appealingly enigmatic. Surrounded by predators, they quickly develop survival skills, crossing boundaries, challenging property rights, and outsmarting all those who see them as easy prey. But, unlike their male analogues, they are not just self-serving, cleverly resourceful, and determined to survive. They’re also committed to social causes and political change, though not without running into the uncomfortable paradox of finding that a social crusade against violence can beget more violence.

  Lisbeth, as fans of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy will recognize, is a woman on a mission. Unlike Scheherazade, she does not use the civilizing power of story to change her culture (although one could argue that Larsson tries to do just that by beginning his novel with statistics about the number of women in Sweden who have been threatened by a man). Instead Lisbeth aims to exact revenge for injuries done to her and to a sisterhood of female victims. It is worth noting that Larsson’s trilogy was a long, belated apology for a dark secret of his own. At the age of fifteen, he witnessed the gang rape of a woman named Lisbeth and failed to intervene, an experience that haunted him and inspired a story that ended with symbolic retribution, vicarious and cathartic, at least for its author.

  Lisbeth’s humorlessness, her almost pathological lack of affect, makes her an unlikely candidate for the role of trickster. But like classic male tricksters, Lisbeth has a bottomless appetite—for food, as well as for sexual partners, both male and female. In the film directed by David Fincher, she stuffs herself with french fries while hunched over her Mac laptop and chain-smokes her way through the investigation. Her “high metabolism,” she claims, keeps her looking skinny. Although she is described as an “anorexic spook” by one of the novel’s villains, she is endlessly gorging herself with something like “three big open rye-bread sandwiches with cheese, caviar, and a hard-boiled egg” or “half a dozen thick sandwiches on rye bread with cheese and liver sausage and dill pickles.” Constantly brewing coffee, she shovels down Billys Pan Pizza as if eating her last meal. Consuming “every kind of junk food,” she may not have body dysmorphia but she clearly has some kind of eating disorder.

  Gluttony is writ large in the Millennium trilogy, and sexual appetite as well, with Salander presented as what one critic describes as a “popular culture fantasy—adolescent-looking yet sexually experienced.” In fact, the depictions of Salander as both victim of rape and partner in consensual sadomasochistic erotic practices are so explicit as to arouse the suspicion of creating a spectacle designed to play into the voyeuristic desires of readers. “Misogynist violence is appalling,” one critic notes archly; “now here’s some more.”11 The same could be said for the graphic display of women’s mutilated corpses in crime-scene photos that are regularly inserted into scenes of investigative work to add cinematic dash to the otherwise dull images of open laptops, scattered files, and ashtrays full of cigarette butts.

  That Lisbeth’s physical strength, as well as her technological savvy and varied appetites, is modeled on male figures becomes evident when we learn about her superhuman strength. She is nimble and muscular enough to defeat school bullies as a child and later, as an adult, she beats up thugs twice her size in physical combat. In the second novel of the trilogy, we discover that Lisbeth was trained as a boxer and was once a serious competitor in contests with men. Whether roaming bars, lighting up, or roaring off on a motorcycle, she mimics male behavior throughout the film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo rather than shaping a unique female identity. Her appeal derives in large part from the ability to serve as an ironic double of the classic male trickster, masquerading, performing, and imitating in ways that offer both serious reenactment and gender-bending parody.

  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2011 Courtesy of Photofest

  “She’s different,” Lisbeth’s boss, Dragan Armansky, tells a client in the Fincher film, who responds by asking, “In what way?” The answer: “Every way.” “Out of place” is an understatement to describe Lisbeth’s first appearance in the film, as she marches, with robotic purposiveness, into what looks like a soulless conference room for corporate headquarters, with two men in suits awaiting her arrival. “I find it’s much better if she works from home,” Armansky declares dryly before she enters the room. Lisbeth looks oddly waiflike even with her black mohawk, multiple piercings, and motorcycle getup. “Different” captures precisely the reaction of critics and viewers, who were unprepared for a punked-out, feral hacker who rights wrongs using a form of hard-wired intelligence never seen before in a female lead. When Lisbeth embarks on her revenge saga, she is relentlessly focused on uncovering the identity of a serial killer who has left a trail of corpses—all young Jewish women, with their shared biblical names as the only clue.

  Lisbeth possesses what her author described as “sheer magic.” As noted, when we first see her in the book, it is through the eyes of her employer, Dragan Armansky, and he describes her as one of those “flat-chested girls who might be mistaken for skinny boys at a distance” and as a “foreign creature.” Like Hermes before her, she wears a cloak (his is described as one of shamelessness). Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare has declared her to be “introverted, socially inhibited, lacking empathy, ego-fixated,” as well as exhibiting “psychopathic and asocial behavior.” She has difficulty �
��cooperating” and is “incapable of assimilating learning.” She may exhibit the classic traits of Asperger’s syndrome, but she is also cunning and moves about the world with the nimbleness of a spider on its web. Her athletic prowess is given visual expression in the film as she navigates her way through a world filled with electronic trip wires. Her gymnastic agility aligns her once again with the impudent Hermes and his folkloric kin, whose clever antics disturb boundaries and challenge property rights. A master of the World Wide Web, Lisbeth has, like Anansi before her, her own network to administer, this time by cracking codes and hacking into systems.12

  Hackers feed off the lightning speed of the internet, violating regulatory measures and legislative rulings. Detached from the world, socially backward, misanthropic with a serious bad attitude, and often living alone in dark, claustrophobic spaces, Lisbeth fits right in when it comes to uber-nerds.13 Her seeming lack of emotional involvement masks a deep commitment to avenging rapists, murderers, and other women-hating men—and to do good. As compensation for agreeing to keep quiet about the discovery that the now-dead Martin Vanger carried on the family tradition of murdering young women, she demands donations to the National Organization for Women’s Crisis Centers and Girls’ Crisis Centers in Sweden, a bargain of convenience that could be turned against her as a crusader for social justice.