Sunday, January 27, 2008 | A+E, Movies, Reviews
From buff to 'Buffy'

Girls with guns and goofy geeks are teaming up to redefine the action hero

That diverse landscape isn’t just home to twentysomething underachievers who work at big-box retailers and have fantastic adventures. It’s also home to the kinds of women those characters are apt to fantasize about: tough-as-nails heroines who can hold their own in a firefight, best their male counterparts in hand-to-hand combat and save the day while looking hot in tight pants and curve-hugging tops.

“Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” debuted on Fox on Jan. 13—a mere five days, for what it’s worth, after Sen. Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary. The series follows in the combat-boot footsteps of 1991’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” with Lena Headey filling in for Linda Hamilton as the butt-kicking mother of John Connor (Thomas Dekker), the future revolutionary leader constantly targeted by homicidal androids from the future. Headey made her tough-gal bones as Queen Gorgo of last year’s hit movie “300,” and she blazes through this “Terminator” with all the precision and emotion of a Spartan warrior facing the Persian hordes.

And she’s not the only fatal femme on the show: Summer Glau (“Firefly”) costars as a terminator named Cameron (a nod to the director James Cameron—more on him later), who serves as John Connor’s bodyguard (and the object of a few lingering glances). The two-part pilot established a geek’s ultimate scenario—two attractive women (OK, one woman and one cyborg) fighting on behalf a young social outcast.

“Terminator” follows on the heels of last fall’s “Bionic Woman,” based on the ’70s “Six Million Dollar Man” spin-off, starring voluptuous British actress Michelle Ryan as twentysomething hottie Jaime Sommers, who becomes a kind of terminator herself when a quasi-governmental agency gives her cybernetic enhancements after a horrible car crash. While Sommers isn’t nearly as steely as Headey’s Connor, she’s just as capable as Cameron of crashing through walls and high-kicking her opponents into submission.

These new (albeit recycled) heroines are the latest in a recent line of tough female pop-cultural icons that includes Kara “Starbuck” Thrace from “Battlestar Galactica” (Katee Sackhoff, who also has a role on “Bionic Woman”); Sydney Bristow (“Alias”); the now-canceled “Veronica Mars” (played by “Heroes” actress Kristen Bell, the current queen of geek pin-ups); Milla Jovovich in the “Resident Evil” flicks; and the toughest, sexiest and unlikeliest take-no-prisoners heroine of all: Buffy Summers of the cult hit series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

“Female heroines like Buffy don’t have perhaps the same element of unreality that male superheroes do,” says Andrea Wood, a post-doctoral fellow at Georgia Tech who specializes in modern media and gender/sexual issues. “They retain a very strong hold on their humanity and have vulnerabilities. They sometimes crack under the pressure they’re dealing with, but still manage to save the day, as it were. What’s important to me as a scholar of popular culture is the fact that these characters do uphold sort of feminist principles—empowered women in charge of their lives, in charge of their sexual agency.”

DOUBLE STANDARD

If it’s easy enough to trace the rise of the geek in modern culture, pinpointing the birth of this action-heroine renaissance is a little more complicated. We know that the two newest additions to the party come from franchises stretching back to the ’80s and ’70s. But where did the demand for these buff babes come from?

“I think there’s a very real possibility that some women are dissatisfied with current male leadership,” says Wood, pointing to the role of women voters in Clinton’s New Hampshire win, “and maybe looking toward both realistic and fantastic representations of female leaders.”

There is, no doubt, some validity to that theory. But given the sex appeal of these rock-hard heroines, it’s safe to wonder if there aren’t other factors at work.  

 “It’s relevant to consider how female heroines do still tend to prescribe to ideals of femininity,” says Wood. “They’re generally white, thin, beautiful and heterosexual, for the most part, while male heroes don’t have to be attractive. There’s still a double standard at work.”

That double standard is as old as female action heroes themselves. From ’70s Blaxploitation flicks like “Foxy Brown” and “Cleopatra Jones” to “Halloween” and other horror movies, heroic female exploits have gone hand in hand with heroic female exploitation. And the original 1992 “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” movie was more a vehicle for nubile Kristy Swanson to dress up in a cheerleader outfit than a feminist manifesto.

Even the mother of all superheroines, Wonder Woman, wasn’t immune. Decades before Lynda Carter battled evildoers in skimpy Amazonian garb in the ’70s TV show, the comic-book heroine was subjected to mistreatment on a regular basis. Her creator, psychologist William Moulton Marston, was notorious for including scenes of female bondage in almost every issue.

“What are the consequences of these kinds of images?” Friedman asks. “Are you producing titillating images and these strong women are just an excuse?”

It may not be that simple. While most creators doubtless feel a responsibility to present positive examples of feminine power and accomplishment, Friedman believes they’re torn between that impulse “and what always exists in this culture: the tendency to sexualize women and reduce them to their sexuality.”

The solution to that tension, he says, is simple: “to have strong, assertive female characters but to milk the [idea] of exploiting sexuality and titillating male viewers.”

For proof, he points to examples as diverse as the “Charlie’s Angels” movies and Jennifer Garner in “Alias.” “The women are allowed to kick serious ass,” he says, “but clearly what makes it go down easy for American audiences is that they’re wearing these skimpy outfits.

“Ideally, there’s a way to come up with images of strong, powerful women that incorporate images of their sexuality that are sexy but not exploitative,” he says. “‘Buffy’ is the absolute best of all these examples,” he says, “in the way it was savvily able to play it both ways. She was a pretty explicit feminist but also had sex appeal.”

Wood agrees, noting that some of Buffy’s antecedents erred on the side of not being sexy enough, at least for some audiences.

“When you talk about Linda Hamilton in the ‘Terminator’ films, there’s an interesting contrast between the first and second movies,” she says. “In the first one, she’s vulnerable, fairly inept, relies on the male character. In the second one, she’s almost asexual, if you will, not an object of desire nor a desiring object. There was a lot of talk at the time the film came out that wasn’t actually ideal in the cultural consciousness to have a woman like that be so physically buff … Whereas if we look at characters like Buffy and some of the other current female lead characters, they tend to embody a more noticeable femininity both in their appearance and their clothing aesthetic.”

BLAME JAMES CAMERON

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that both “Terminator 2” and “Aliens”—which more than its predecessor established Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley as a new kind of action heroine—were directed by James Cameron, who also first introduced the mass public to Jessica Alba with the series “Dark Angel.”

“I think James Cameron was a director who really demonstrated the extra edge and interest that having a female action hero rather than a male action hero can have,” Friedman says. “We’re so used to the clichés of a strong male action hero that Cameron found a way to do something what that character type that was explicitly feminist and also presented a different approach, like Sigourney Weaver being a surrogate mother in ‘Aliens.’”

But with 1998’s hit “Titanic,” Cameron also bears some of the blame for the current shift in our perception of leading men: what Friedman describes as “the rise of sensitive, if not androgynous, then at least metrosexual action heroes like Leonardo DiCaprio.” As Leo and other nontraditional action stars like Tobey Maguire came to prominence, he says, “you saw the beginnings of a new icon of masculinity that was less about brute strength and hyper-masculine fantasy.”

It’s that new definition of masculinity that unites such seemingly polar opposites as Headey’s no-nonsense Sarah Connor and geeks like—well, like her son John. Both the butt-kicking babes and the charming geeks are asserting themselves in the cultural landscape by embracing those parts of their personas that don’t conform to the macho-man stereotype, while at the same time retaining enough ingenuity and physical aptitude to avoid charges of wimpiness—and, in the ladies’ case, rocking a sweat-soaked tank top.

“Both male and female viewers are looking for stories and characters that challenge traditional gender assumptions and challenge our traditional notions of what a hero is,” Friedman says. “As contemporary gender roles have changed—and I put this all in the context of changes wrought by feminism: women entering the workplace, having more and more parity, earning more than men—you have a sort of redrawing of the lines of power in a way I think is ultimately healthy for both women and men.” SP