A Thin Red Line: Gender, Violence and Contemporary Cinema

Abstract

Molly Haskell, assessing the place of women in Hollywood in the mid- 1970s, concluded her study From Reverence to Rape in the pessimistic tone set by the book’s title:

Whether in the European or the American film, whether seen as sociological artefact or artistic creation, women, by the logistics of film production and the laws of Western society, generally emerge as the projections of male values. Whether as the product of one auteur or of the system … women are the vehicle of men’s fantasies, the ‘anima’ of the collective male unconscious, and the scapegoat of men’s fears.¹

Although this is not the place for a full survey of the shifting position of women – as actors and representations – in Hollywood film, some stocktaking is necessary, and the different ways in which critics (especially feminist critics) have recorded that history is crucial. In the same way, the discussion of early modern drama in this study concentrates almost exclusively on the tragic genre, so the parallel analysis of cinema will be largely restricted to violent film, a wide-ranging categorisation that has to incorporate the diverse genres of action, adventure and horror. Since the subject matter of this section will include a number of films where fear, fantasy and gender intersect (mirroring the preoccupations of the early modern tragedies discussed above), the work of Mulvey, Haskell and Kuhn is particularly relevant to the discussion that follows.