The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Inspired by a newspaper account about Japanese girls luring businessmen to designated locations and then robbing them, Hard Candy initially takes us down the traditional path, setting up expectations that a young innocent stalked by an internet predator will also become his victim. But Hayley Stark, brilliantly played by Ellen Page, turns out to be less than innocent. Intent on avenging the murder of a friend, she sets out to torture Jeff in ways that are nearly unimaginable, leading him to believe that, after anesthetizing his groin area, she performed surgery, castrating him and disposing of his testicles in a plastic bag. Merciless, pitiless, and ruthless, Hayley responds coldly to Jeff’s pleas to stop with references to his failure to feel any kind of compassion for his victims. To the bitter end, she occupies the role of avenger with the unforgiving harshness of the predator himself.

  Like David Slade, the writers for the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer decided to reboot “Little Red Riding Hood” in ways that go beyond mere adaptation. In Season 4, episode 4, called “Fear, Itself,” Buffy dresses up on Halloween night as the girl in red. When she meets her friend Xander on the way to a festive gathering, he asks: “Hey, Red. What you got in the basket, little girl?” Buffy’s answer is telling: “Weapons. . . . Just in case.” When she finally encounters the monstrous Gachnar, a miniature beast who lacks the power to terrify, the camera pans to the sole of her foot as it is about to crush her antagonist. On a previous episode, Buffy had made the mistake of dressing in a princess costume, only to find herself falling victim to a spell that turned her into the character she was impersonating. Learning from past experience, she is now prepared—as a girl in red—for the beast in the woods.25

  Joe Wright, the director of Hanna (2011), put these killer girls on steroids when he reinvented Little Red Riding Hood as a genetically modified teenage assassin, dressed in pelts when we first see her. Raised by her father in the wilderness, where she hunts moose and befriends wolf puppies, Hanna is trained by him in languages, survival skills, and martial arts. But she remains in the dark about civilization. Roughing it in a cabin in northern Finland, she is closer to nature than to culture. “Once upon a time there was a very special girl who lived in the woods with her father,” the trailer to the film announces. Hanna may not dress in red, but she is immersed in fairy tales, caught repeatedly by the camera in the act of reading the volume of Grimms’ fairy tales that was in her hands when her mother died. And, of course, the illustration on one of the pages we see is from “Little Red Riding Hood.”

  Hanna’s mission is to shoot the CIA intelligence operative Marissa Wiegler (played by Cate Blanchett), who murdered her mother and is now intent on killing Hanna and her father. She visits not only Grandmother’s house but also a place known as Wilhelm Grimm’s house in Berlin, where a wolf dressed up as Grandmother lies in a bed.

  Joe Wright explained in an interview the importance of the fairy-tale setting in the woods and how his plot maps onto fairy-tale encounters with evil. “These stories were told every day,” he noted. “The Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel and Rapunzel were part of our lives, but they’re violent and dark and cautionary tales and they go some way to attempt to prepare children for the obstacles that they may face in the wider world,” he added.26 Wright draws on not only fairy tales but also fantasy literature, with Hanna as a dark double of Alice in Wonderland, entering the real world and experiencing its electronic wonders, along with everything else, for the first time as a teenager. But his warrior heroine probably has more in common with Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne than with Little Red Riding Hood.

  Hanna is a reminder that fairy tales have taken a dark turn, with heroines who can outrun, outsmart, but above all outshoot their adversaries in action segments that move with the lightning speed of video-game sequences. The film is framed by two scenes of shooting. In the first, Hanna uses a bow and arrow to kill a moose; she then shoots it in the heart to put it out of its misery. The film closes with Hanna pointing a gun at Marissa Wiegler, shooting her in the heart, and repeating the words, this time without pity, that opened the film: “I just missed your heart.” From where did Marissa, both wicked witch and cold-blooded wolf, emerge to meet Hanna? From the jaws of an amusement park wolf, of course. Both women run with the wolves in a film that mimics the action movie, that classic juggernaut of Hollywood cinema that features heroes on a journey. Are our new heroines nothing but a carbon copy of Campbell’s hero, fighting battles in dark places from which they emerge covered in blood but victorious? Are we installing a new model that mimics the old rather than creating an archetype that is in tune with the values we embrace today: empathy, care, and connection?

  Hanna, 2011 Courtesy of Photofest

  Warrior Women

  Fans swooned over Arya Stark’s triumphant sleight-of-hand before slaying the Night King in the godswood with a Valyrian steel dagger in the finale to HBO’s popular series Game of Thrones. Maisie Williams, the actress who portrayed Arya, was worried that fans would hate how the Battle of Winterfell was resolved and would believe that Arya did not really deserve to be the savior in the long-running series. But the show prepared viewers for the finale by presenting Arya first as the “distressed female” of classic horror, next turning her into a clever master of masquerade, and finally allowing her to morph into the winning survivor who looks death in the face and finds the strength to slay the monster. Even as she is terrorized and tortured, Arya, the Final Girl in Game of Thrones, rises to the challenges of the Evil that no one else was able to face down.

  Television shows of the past decades have given us many pumped-up, tough-talking women: Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers, Eartha Kitt as Catwoman in Batman, Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman, Lindsay Wagner in The Bionic Woman, and Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. But Game of Thrones modeled an entirely new set of possibilities, not just with Arya but also with Lady Brienne of Tarth, a stoic, fierce swordfighter in armor. Then there is Sansa Stark, who evolves from disagreeable teen to capable leader of her people, and Queen Cersei (a clever homonym for Circe), traumatized, entitled, vindictive, and conniving. And who can forget that “beautiful evil” known as Daenerys Targaryen, survivor, liberator, and destroyer?

  More than any other branch of the film industry, the Disney Company has mastered the fine art of picking up disturbances in the cultural airwaves and adapting the stories it tells on-screen to adjust to new social circumstances. Once upon a time in the world of Disney animation, men fought the battles and defeated the villains. Eric, the Prince Charming of The Little Mermaid (1989), rows out to sea at the end of the film to confront the flamboyant, power-hungry, sassy octopus-witch Ursula, who has usurped King Triton’s crown and now has his authority (“The sea and all its spoils bow to my power”). Ursula, incidentally, was inspired in looks and behavior by drag legend Divine. “You monster,” Ariel screams at her, and Ursula, who knows that Ariel can resort to little more than name-calling, answers back by calling her a little brat. While the Little Mermaid is helplessly caught in the vortex of a whirlpool, Eric mans a ship, commands it to move full speed ahead, and impales Ursula on its bow. Bolts of lightning course through her body as she deflates and sinks into the sea, clearing the way for Ariel and Eric to live happily ever after.

  Beauty and the Beast (1991) gives us a final battle that pits the faux Prince Charming, Gaston, against Beast, who leaps from one parapet to the next to escape his rival’s bullets and blows. Beast has all but eluded and defeated Gaston, but he makes the near-fatal mistake of sparing his rival’s life. Beast is not a beast, after all, though his animal instincts and vigor give him an advantage in the film’s final standoff. He may vanquish Gaston, but salvation comes from Beauty, who restores Beast’s health and lifts the curse cast on him.

  Recent animated Disney films tell a different story. Ever since Always-brand feminine products made a video advertisement, “Always #LikeAGirl,” in 2014, girls have begun to run like the wind in our media productions. Always did a takedown of the phrase “like a
girl,” revealing that the phrase was designed to humiliate or insult rather than to show approval or give praise. Running like a girl meant that you were not really running at all, just engaging in ungainly giraffe-like motion forward. After the video went viral, #LikeAGirl power runs became the fashion in Hollywood, with Elsa in Frozen and Frozen II, along with Moana in the 2016 animated film of that title, leading the pack.

  Frozen and its sequel, Frozen II, mark a recalibration of the norms in the Disney Princess franchise. Here are films that earn the highest possible marks on the famous Bechdel test, with two named female leads who talk about many things besides men.27 Anna and Elsa may still have royal blood (they also have the spaghetti-thin figures of Barbie dolls along with the spooky eyes of Bratz dolls), but even with their pinched waists, alabaster plastic skin, and ski-jump noses they are strong enough to scale mountains, race through snowdrifts, survive tidal waves, and, on another level, face up to the truth that their elders were driven by greed.

  In Frozen II, the dam built by Anna and Elsa’s grandfather on the land of Indigenous peoples turns out to be part of a colonial scheme rather than a vaunted act of altruism. In this brave new world of Disney heroines, Anna manages to engineer the destruction of a dam that would have spelled the doom of the Enchanted Forest, and Elsa makes a solo power run into tsunami-like waves to tame the rebellious Nokk (a supernatural water horse) that will carry her to the rivers of ice. “Kissing won’t save the forest,” Elsa tells us, gesturing to earlier films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Beauty and the Beast and reminding us that times have changed. “Can you see how determined she is!” my five-year-old granddaughter blurted out with glee when we were watching Elsa dive into tidal waves and smash ice floes.

  Who could have imagined that Disney would halt the juggernaut of fairy tale–themed animated films to make a movie that turns to Polynesian creation myths as its foundational narrative? Were they listening to complaints about White Saviors and Eurocentric mythical imaginations? Moana (2016) opens with a scene of an Indigenous people’s storytelling: a grandmother telling young children the story of Te Fiti’s transformation. Te Fiti, once the god of creation, has turned into Te Ka¯, a demon of destruction, after the demigod Maui extracted her heart with his magical fishhook. It will be Moana’s mission to return Te Fiti’s heart and thereby save her island from ecological devastation and restore its natural beauty. Suddenly Disney princesses can embark on heroic quests and travel down paths different from the one that takes them to the happily-ever-after of matrimony.

  “You’re no one’s hero,” Moana, who gives as good as she gets, defiantly tells Maui, who has been boasting about being “a hero to all.” “You stole Te Fiti’s heart,” she tells him. “You cursed the world!” she shouts at the muscle-bound demigod who sports animated tattoos on his chest. Although Moana eventually gets some help from Maui in her rescue mission, she single-handedly doubles down in her efforts to defeat Te Ka¯ and “save the world.” Disney’s effort to create a new type of heroine has met with as much controversy as praise. How dare a corporation claim Indigenous mythology as its property and masquerade its monetization of Polynesian traditions as cultural preservation? Disney colonized not only the mythology of the Pacific Islanders, but also its fabrics and its rituals, reducing the multivocal mythical universe of Pacific Islanders to a single, homogenized story branded as its own. The two codirectors of the film are even woven into the film on the fabric of a tapa, or barkcloth, that bears their images, as if to insert and solidify their ownership of the story with a visual signature and prop. Protests that accused Disney of “brownface” cultural appropriation in a range of costumes and pajamas were taken seriously and led to recalls of merchandise.28

  Moana’s quest resembles in some ways the journeys of Campbell’s heroes, but with a crucial difference. Unlike Maui, who uses a magical fishhook that doubles as weapon and instrument of transformation (he is also a trickster), Moana is committed to matters of the heart that lead to healing, beauty, and ecological balance. Driven by compassion for her people and for the natural world, she is also propelled by natural curiosity (not greed and conquest) about the world beyond her reef and its wonders. Maui may once have been the hero to all—after all, he is the demigod credited with bringing fire to humans and pulling up the island with his fishhook—but his vanity, egotism, and lack of care have turned him into something of an oaf, charming but unattractively arrogant. Moana may still be a Disney princess—“If you wear a dress and have an animal sidekick, you’re a princess,” Maui jeers—but she has taken cues from the folkloric and mythical heroines who came before her as well as the heroes from times past. She power-swims like Elsa and learns to sail, yet preserves a sense of obligation to her people and an adventurous desire to escape the constraints of the domestic world.

  Princesses may be fast disappearing from the Disney repertoire, but the resurgence of fairy tales in films oriented to young adult audiences has given us a new type of heroine, a warrior woman who has modeled herself on the hero archetype. Gone are the sleeping beauties, nice and narcotized, passively awaiting liberation and the arrival of a prince. Instead we may have a new archetypal heroine, shooting ’em up, bobbing and weaving, or, like Rey in The Force Awakens, wielding a light saber. But with a twist. These warrior women are also caring and compassionate, in touch with the natural world as well as with those who inhabit it.

  Take Rupert Sanders’s Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), in which the title figure, played by Kristen Stewart, is nothing like the charmingly goofy princess of Disney’s live-action Enchanted or the spunky yet vulnerable Snow White in ABC’s series Once upon a Time. This Snow White becomes a “pure and innocent” warrior princess, an angelic savior who channels Joan of Arc and Tolkien’s Aragorn, as well as the four Pevensie siblings from C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, to save the kingdom of her late father (stabbed to death by the queen on their wedding night). When we first see her (as a child), she has rescued an injured bird and plans to help it heal. And when we last see her, she conquers a massive monster with pity.

  In Snow White and the Huntsman, everyone is armed, and swords, scimitars, axes, snares, and shields feature as prominently in this film as they do in the Middle Earth of The Hobbit. Romance is edged out by the racing energy of horses speeding through dramatic landscapes and by expertly choreographed combat scenes. This is a Snow White designed to appeal to those who crave action in their entertainments.

  Do we risk installing a disturbing new archetype of female heroism, one that emulates the muscle and agility of classic male heroes? When we look at Hollywood’s refashioning of fairy-tale heroines in films ranging from Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) to Maleficent (2014), the slide from one extreme to another becomes evident. Suddenly the comatose beauty turns into a glamorous mutineer with an impressive arsenal of weapons at her disposal.

  Snow White and the Huntsman takes us into a wilderness of environmental depredations and dynastic conflict. Charlize Theron’s fair-haired wicked queen presides over subjects with ravaged faces in landscapes that resemble toxic oil spills; in her shape-shifting magic, she reconstitutes herself at one point from what looks like a flock of crows caught in an oil slick. Her rule has no doubt created the viscous black horrors that Snow White encounters in the denuded woods to which she flees. The film’s raven-haired heroine, by contrast to the queen, soothes savage beasts with her compassionate face and, as a digitally miniaturized Bob Hoskins, playing one of the seven dwarfs, proclaims: “She will heal the land.” Snow White is no passive, guiltless damsel. Her exquisite beauty, combined with charismatic leadership, enables her to defeat the evil queen and redeem the desolate landscape of the kingdom and its ailing inhabitants.

  Savvy Saviors: Hunger Games and Golden Compasses

  Hollywood demands much of its new heroines (and the actresses who play them), requiring heavy lifting in the form of contoured features, sculpted bodies, and a disposition that displays courage without showin
g it off. If any heroine has it all, it is Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games films, a set of movies based on Suzanne Collins’s bestselling trilogy of tales about a postindustrial, postapocalyptic wasteland that requires its inhabitants to revert to hunter-gatherer practices in order to survive. Collins, who began her career writing children’s television shows, was bold enough to invent a new heroine, one that was never meant to exist. Living in the country of Panem, which, despite its name alluding to the Latin word for bread, is anything but bountiful, Katniss is another emaciated trickster, little more than “skin and bones.”29 To survive, she uses her bow and arrows, hunting game to support her family in ways that suggest some kind of kinship with Artemis, goddess of archery and the hunt.

  Katniss not only possesses contraband weapons but, in true trickster fashion, is also a trespasser and poacher. In order to reach hunting territory with sufficient game, she must become a boundary-crosser, traversing a “high chain-link fence topped with barbed-wire loop,” which is electrified for a good part of the day as a deterrent to poachers. The so-called Peacekeepers (or security forces) cannot outwit Katniss, whose sharp ears detect exactly when the electricity is turned off and who can find a loose stretch in the fence and surreptitiously slide under it. While training with Peeta, the other Tribute from Panem chosen by lottery to play in deadly games with only one survivor, Katniss learns how to build snares that will leave human competitors dangling and to camouflage herself with mud, clay, vines, and leaves. A master of ruses and stratagems, she wins the Hunger Games by outwitting not only her twenty-two opponents but also the Ministry itself.