Conclusion: The Future of Active Masculinity
As action cinema enters its second century—or third, if we rightly
include the one-shot 1890s films that showcased the wholesale spectacle
of physical motion—it has already begun to take on new forms and
to reconfigure its existing structures. Yet some contemporary films do not
seem to have registered these developments at all. An extended fire-engine
chase sequence in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) appears
pleasurably retrograded, with its innumerable car crashes and flying
storefront glass. Meanwhile, the Denzel Washington vehicle and boxoffice
success Man on Fire (2004) foregrounds south-of-the-border vigilante
justice that recalls self-consciously ugly post-Vietnam films such as
Rolling Thunder (1977) and many subsequent revenge dramas (though
the newer film employs a highly contemporary, frenetic visual style and
editing). Finally, the expensive comic-book adaptations League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and Fantastic Four (2005) resemble a
host of 1980s films in their relatively flat lighting design, their mostly
workmanlike cutting, and their rosters of unfamiliar faces (in the former,
in support of the durable Sean Connery).
Yet alongside these familiar narrative scenarios and formal patterns,
at least three distinct trends can be discerned. First, blockbuster action
films crafted for family audiences have emerged, with violence, language,
and sexuality softened to PG-13 levels, and with broad thematics surrounding
individual and national heroism. Second, sexy action heroines
have proliferated, in films marketed to young women as well as the genre’s
loyal base of adolescent and postadolescent males. Third, a number of
action films (including some in the above two categories) have explicitly
responded to the 9/11 attacks. We might add to these trends the continuing
globalization of the action cinema, both in the growth of international
audiences for U.S. film and the emergence of genre films in action modes
from many national cinemas.
With a few exceptions—including prominent vigilante films such Man
on Fire, The Punisher (2004), and the Kill Bill series—the R-rated action
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film is an increasingly rare commodity in U.S. multiplexes.1 Replacing it
are action blockbusters promoted for viewers across age ranges, not just
the traditionally lucrative 18–34 age demographic but also preteens, parents,
and avid filmgoers entering middle age. Nearly all of the successful
Stallone and Schwarzenegger films of the 1980s and 1990s carried R ratings
for their extensive violence, profanity, and occasional female nudity.
Contemporary films often deliver viewers the impression of an adult world
but scrupulously withhold the sights and sounds of that world. XXX, for
example, despite its adult-video title, pointedly strips its oversexed female
supporting characters down to their underwear but no further. Likewise,
its lawbreaking protagonist, Xander Cage—so extreme that his name
begins with an X—conveniently avoids censorable euphemisms. Similarly,
the steel-hard supercops of S.W.A.T. (2003) eschew the “fuck you” and
“suck my dick” litanies of other movie cops, and a brief scene of a woman
flashing her breasts is only half-gratuitous, filming her from behind (the
film substitutes a different offense, egregious product placement, with
characters reciting the names of the many soft drinks and fast-food chains
the film carefully photographs). In a manner recalling the heyday of the
Production Code, the adult world is made safe for all viewers’ eyes and
ears. Other films merge youthful and adult worlds. Spider-Man and SpiderMan
2 foreground family responsibilities and their protagonist’s romanceversus-work
conflict in ways that might appeal to children, teenagers, and
adults alike. The disaster film The Day after Tomorrow includes not only
the overacting-politician characters of mature thrillers but also a young
couple plucked from a teen romance, and uses a father–son narrative (and
lest we forget, a global disaster) to link the two plots.
With their frequent recourse to fantastic worlds and consequent
sidestepping of social questions, contemporary PG–13 action films model
gender in multiple ways. Many films show a proclivity for exclusively male,
mythologized, historical settings—the World War II milieu of U-571
(2000) and Pearl Harbor (2001), or the British Empire at sea in Master and
Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)—that depict archaic male
heroics with renewed vigor. Other films, such as the comic-book adaptation
X-Men and its sequel X2: X-Men United (2003), present cartoonish,
adolescent-friendly fantasies whose wildly improbable scenarios and
unstable models of gender identity to some extent thwart evaluation
against a particular social reality, even that of the contemporary viewer. (A
rainbow coalition of genetic mutants, the X-Men—who really are X-people
since their numbers include women and children—are racially, sexually,
and physically othered.) Such fantastic premises can facilitate progressive
ends by evading the burdens of realist representation. At the same time, the
X-Men series foregrounds identities so fantastic and multifaceted that
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representations of women and of diverse ethnicities lose clarity and power.
Instead, the films’ narratives foreground the marginal status of an aggressive,
taciturn, white character, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). Paradoxically,
Wolverine’s aggression and taciturnity make him a figure of viewer identification
rather than aligning him with the tired, conservative tradition the
films and their cast of superpowered teens otherwise disrupt. Many other
cartoonish action narratives unabashedly embrace their lack of social context
and narrative depth. The Scorpion King (2002) showcases a supporting
character from the Mummy franchise, a character played by ex-wrestling
star The Rock, and is set in an imagined, ancient pseudo-Babylonia.
Released a few months later, XXX self-consciously tweaks the James Bond
spy mythology, offering instead action catering to early-adolescent extremesports
sensibilities (the film’s stunt sequences include motorcycling and
snowboarding, with hints of skateboarding, surfing, and parasailing as
well). Only Spider-Man, with its combination of dueling superpowers and
a contemporary teen-angst narrative, gestures toward social relevance, thematizing
sexual development, adolescent grief, and the minefields of
parent–child relationships (and on a different level, combining corporate
villainy and military technology in its antagonist character, the Green
Goblin). All these films, though, showcase physically powerful male heroes,
renegotiating but continuing patriarchal tradition.
Linked to the juvenilization of action cinema is the genre’s showcasing
of female action figures. Charlie’s Angels and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
(2001) feature women protagonists who combine martial-arts prowess,
facility with weapons, and conventional female sexual attractiveness. The
films successfully attracted young male and female viewers (enough to
produce sequels for both films), hinting at untapped narrative veins as well
as new audiences for action cinema. Notably, the makers of both films
found such veins in untraditional sources, the former film turning to a
long-defunct television series and the latter to a popular personalcomputer
adventure game with an active but voiceless protagonist. Television
and video games provide multiple sources and outlets for women heroes, a
consequence partly of the former medium’s longtime receptiveness to
women-centered programs and the latter’s abrogation of existing social
hierarchies, including those of gender. The two Resident Evil films, locating
Milla Jovovich amid action-horror perils, derive from the popular video
game. Meanwhile, television’s Alias (2001–) constructs Jennifer Garner as
a sexy, martial-arts proficient spy; the program’s relative popularity led
Garner to a supporting role in Daredevil (2003) and the lead in its sequel
Elektra (2005). Intertextual film references provide the basis for the
female-centered Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Kill Bill: Vol. 2, which grant their nameless
heroine substantial agency but also subject her to repeated 1970s-style
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beatings and add a decorative helping of motherhood to fix her within
existing categories of femininity (meanwhile, nearly all other female characters
in the films are mutilated, killed, or both). Outside U.S. cinema, the
Chinese/Hong Kong martial-arts fantasies Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
and Hero also locate women in primary active roles, resulting in international
successes that drew young viewers as well as older art-house crowds,
the latter usually not a substantial segment of the action cinema’s viewership.
Hollywood action films overall continue to show their flexibility
principally by locating women characters among otherwise all-male
groups. S.W.A.T. and the hugely successful Pirates of the Caribbean:
The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), among others, offer this marginal
concession to feminism, a concession already made in 1980s films such as
Aliens (1986).
A third notable development in action cinema is Hollywood responses
to the catastrophic 9/11 events. The terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington, and subsequent U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq,
threatened to alter significantly the landscape of media representation of
active, militant masculinity and femininity. Concerns about cultural
verisimilitude in fiction film led some film producers to predict the decline
of “frivolous, exploitative action films” that might recall actual terrorist
attacks.2 In addition, images of uniformed soldiers in combat, on patrol, or
merely situated in unfamiliar landscapes gained renewed primacy on
U.S. television, first in the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban and
al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq begun
in March 2003, an operation trailed by hundreds of news correspondents
and cameras.
Despite the U.S. military’s saturation of television images, fiction films
with military subjects have remained in short supply during the initial war
in Iraq, and amid the subsequent military occupation and counterinsurgent
warfare. Some films address other wars: Tears of the Sun situates
a combat narrative in a climate akin to the U.S. military’s 1993 Somalia
intervention, and The Hunted (2003) adorns a stock chase narrative with
a flashback of its antagonist’s violent experiences in the former Yugoslavia.
Both performed unimpressively in theatrical release, as did other post-
9/11 war films. In the months following 9/11, many major news organs
collected anecdotal evidence of U.S. studios’ interest in helping the war
effort by producing films that would depict the military in the most positive
light. In one interview, director Rod Lurie asserted: “I am certain right
now that the country and its citizens are very much in favor of watching
soldiers being portrayed in the most patriotic way possible.”3 (Notably,
Lurie himself has not directed a film showcasing soldiers in action.) Still, a
surge in production of ultrapatriotic films has not occurred. In 2004,
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Michael Moore’s antiwar documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 generated box-office
receipts greater than any of the previous years’ fiction films dealing with
war. Arguably, the great popularity of the vigilante films Man on Fire,
The Punisher, and Kill Bill 1 and 2 is the clearest symptom of U.S. viewers’
predispositions in the wake of 9/11.
Expectations that post-9/11 Hollywood films would aim for new relevancy
or would use avowed cinematic realism to attract viewers (on the
order of Saving Private Ryan’s graphic combat sequences, filmed with
handheld cameras) have not been fulfilled. Hollywood studios have
responded differently, or not at all, to the changing role of the United
States in global affairs. The most successful U.S. film appearing during the
winter of late 2002 and early 2003, when the threat of international war
loomed large, was the adolescent fantasy The Lord of the Rings: The
Fellowship of the Ring (2002), which featured abundant combat among
warring armies but no specific parallels to contemporary international
relations (notably, it was filmed well in advance of 9/11). Among recent
action-centered fiction films, figurations of gender that explicitly promote
the conservative traditions of soldiering remain marginal to Hollywood’s
overall output. Even those contemporary films using military personnel as
subjects locate their characters in highly ambivalent positions with regard
to popular morality and international law. Tears of the Sun asks viewers to
endorse an officer’s unauthorized aggression, which is undertaken for
humanitarian ends, and The Hunted suggests that elite soldiers may
become serial killers when the sanction of war no longer exists. Neither
approach is remarkably contemporary, and more significantly, neither
appears attuned to shifting public attitudes about war and the military.4 In
Hollywood cinema, a rhetoric of omission has prevailed.
U.S. studios’ relentless courtship of teen viewers, the industry’s least
discriminating patrons as well as those most likely to engage in the repeat
viewings that maximize blockbuster films’ grosses, appears to work against
putatively realist, serious military narratives. For every success such as
Saving Private Ryan or the widely seen if generally disdained Pearl Harbor,
a big-budget failure such as Windtalkers stalls a possible resurgence of war
films. Some action narratives do capitalize on the climate of renewed
awareness of the military and economic role of the United States in international
affairs. Marketing and publicity for the film version of Mark
Bowden’s nonfiction best-seller Black Hawk Down sought to exploit interest
in global military ventures, with director Ridley Scott and others asserting
the film’s realism, as if to position it as a text through which viewers
might gain valuable experience of the adversaries of the United States in
Africa or the Middle East. (The film premiered only a few weeks after the
U.S. army entered Afghanistan. With a heavy publicity campaign and a
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handful of Academy Award nominations, the film performed well, if not
spectacularly, at the U.S. box office.5
)
Audiences have not responded strongly to serious films foregrounding
military figures. Military men have instead featured prominently in thoroughly
fantastic, adolescent-oriented films. Near-parodic military figures
appear in many contemporary films, including X-Men and X2 (in the latter,
a rogue military scientist is the film’s chief non-superpowered villain), the
summer 2003 release The Hulk (in which the raging monster is the object of
military leaders’ special enmity and destroys an array of military hardware),
and Reign of Fire. In this last film, released in summer 2002, hordes of dragons
take control of the planet, and a ragtag band of Britishers mounts a marginal
resistance. Almost inexplicably, help arrives in the form of a team of
U.S. soldiers with tanks and helicopters. Given its postapocalyptic English
setting—along with generic iconography linking it to the science-fiction film
and the fantasy film—the film somewhat surprisingly fetishizes U.S. military
hardware, with both camera positions and the British characters’ reaction
shots signaling a reverent view of the vehicles and weapons. Overall, though,
the film visually and narratively disavows any close connections to the
U.S. military in historical reality. Matthew McConaughey plays the military
men’s leader, Van Zan, as a swaggering caricature, and the presence of firebreathing
dragons explicitly indicates the film’s antirealist tone. Van Zan
apparently sacrifices himself well before the film’s climax to kill a key dragon
(the film withholds the moment of his or the monster’s death), so although
the military presence is instrumental in rejuvenating the British group’s
morale, the U.S. characters are not responsible for the humans’ ultimate triumph
over their mythical adversaries.While the soldiers’ presence is remarkable
in a humans-versus-dragons film set in near-future England, Reign of
Fire finally shows no particular veneration of the U.S. military.
To complement the survey of generic trends just outlined, I wish to
offer two brief case studies, looking at two quite different late-1990s films
that display the issues at play and at stake in the contemporary action
cinema. These films—the Hollywood production The Matrix and the
German film Run Lola Run (1998)—were released during the same period
in the United States but diverge widely in their representations of gendered
activity. The Matrix relies on the premise of the contemporary capitalist
world as an enervating simulation, and coupled with its foregrounding of
women and African American characters, the film carries progressive
pleasures. The film simultaneously appropriates liberal rhetoric and style
signifiers to produce emphatically conservative appeals (such as the many
gun battles that account for its R rating). In a different inflection of generic
discourses, Run Lola Run represents active, nonsexualized femininity
and critiques the violent strategies of conflict resolution conventionally
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undertaken by men. The two films vary greatly in their generic situation,
modes of address, formal properties, and reception. Nevertheless, each
illuminates gendered activity in compelling ways.
The action/sci-fi film The Matrix earned over $170 million in U.S.
receipts in 1999, making it the fifth-highest grossing film of the year.
The significance of the film lies not only in its popularity but also in its
savvy reconfiguration of highly conventional images of male violence.
Popular and critical discourse surrounding The Matrix focuses on vaguely
defined hipness and originality. These extratextual discourses partly efface
the film’s fidelity to venerable action-hero conventions—the presence of a
young, white male hero; a dearth of female roles; a vision of a singular,
world-saving intruder-redeemer figure; and a penchant for spectacular
gunplay. After the film received four Academy Awards, hyperbolic statements
of its cultural impact abounded. In his report on the March 2000
Oscar ceremony, The New York Times’s Rick Lyman dubbed the film “too
hip for the room,” despite its mass appeal and its corporate maker, the
Warner Brother studio. In the same article, the film’s producer, action-film
veteran Joel Silver, remarks: “I felt that The Matrix was just a very smart
action movie, if that’s not an oxymoron. [. . .] It was about more than
explosions and fistfights; it really raises the bar on these kind of movies.”6
These somewhat self-serving comments lend credence to an understanding
of the film as narratively original, philosophically sophisticated, and
ultimately countercultural. However, a close analysis of the film’s genderand
race-bound representations of violent action, along with its overall
figuration of heroic masculinity, reveals more conventional appeals as well.
The film repackages preexisting models of male activity, violence, and
control, locating these characteristics within a generic dystopian-future
scenario. Like many action films, The Matrix crafts a fantastic world
according to an adolescent worldview: here the adult, corporate world is a
nefarious simulation, while the “real” world features a motley crew of
revolutionaries with superhero-style names, a world-conquering race of
monster aliens, and the awe generated by introductory philosophy. Clearly
this conceit holds broad appeal for adults as well as adolescents.
The Matrix spawned a range of similar films—two sequels, The Matrix
Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, appeared in 2003, and other action
films such as Charlie’s Angels,The One, Equilibrium (2003), and Constantine
(2005) borrow from its visual and narrative style—and attracted an enormous
popular fan base. The film, particularly in its countercultural positioning
of conventional male violence, bears significance for the action
genre and the larger culture. It follows the exploits of a computer hacker,
Neo (Keanu Reeves, a part-Asian actor whitewashed in nearly all his film
roles), who learns that he is the only hope for humanity, nearly all of which
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has been unwittingly enslaved by a malevolent alien race. A small group of
rebels, led by the prophesizing Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), rescues
Neo from his enslavement and prepares him for his new role as savior,
a role he executes through numerous violent encounters in the film’s
virtual-reality realm, known as “the matrix.” Morpheus speaks in Zenlike
language and comports himself with almost narcotic calmness, and
the film swiftly transforms him from a powerful leader into a secondary
figure, Neo’s mentor and advocate. To perform his role, Neo learns both a
form of martial arts—borrowing explicitly the poses and fighting style of
Bruce Lee’s films—and a two-handed facility with firearms that recalls the
films of Hong Kong director John Woo and their many imitators. As Neo
hones his superlative abilities, the film adorns him with a full-length,
black-leather trenchcoat, signifying both luxury and rebellious or “alternative”
masculinity. The trenchcoat not only replicates the sartorial style of
blaxploitation heroes such as Richard Roundtree in Shaft (1971) but also
Clint Eastwood’s attire in 1960s Italian westerns and the costumes of 1990s
westerns such as Unforgiven and Tombstone (1993). The film’s portmanteau
style thus derives from Asian, African American, and even Italian
sources. This global admixture presages the similar corralling of diverse
action iconography in the Kill Bill films, which also finally showcase white
action figures.
Despite the film’s insistence on the spiritual, cerebral nature of “the
matrix,” most of its action sequences involve firearms, privileging a
conservative ideology of lethal masculinity. In one notable sequence, Neo’s
ability to control the virtual-reality environment allows him to produce an
apparently infinite array of (digitally generated) machine guns, an act he
punctuates with a conventional, monosyllabic, action-hero tagline: “We
need guns. Lots of guns.” This image of fantastic plenitude is specifically
tethered to white male agency, and to technologies of violence. In addition,
it constructs the acquisition of assault rifles as a utopian consumer activity
(which in many respects it is—people buy guys to satisfy desires for power,
personal autonomy, and often visceral pleasure). The scene’s empty, white
background specifically references the clean, bright environments of much
television advertising, and indeed, the infinite-guns scene in The Matrix
was borrowed not long after for an automobile broker’s television ads (just
as its rotating camera array was soon used in commercials for the Gap
clothing chain and other products). The hazy definition of the religious or
philosophical system of “the matrix,” which is often indistinguishable from
the Star Wars series’ Joseph Campbell-influenced notion of “the force,”
enables the film to distort thoroughly the tangible implications and social
consequences of violent weaponry (as well as the pacific tendencies of
Eastern religions). The film positions its computer-generated image of
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racks of guns racing past the protagonist as somehow alternative to conditions
of social reality, when in fact such an image suggests an exaggerated promotional
campaign for the National Rifle Association. Indeed, at least one
prominent member of the film’s special-effects team later worked on a U.S.
Army virtual-reality training simulation, suggesting the confraternity
between the film’s spectacular, fantasy violence and the ideology of realist
violence promulgated in military training.7
The construction of violence as redemptive, regenerative, or otherwise
oppositional to prevailing social ideologies has many precedents in mainstream
U.S. cinema, from Scarface (1932) to Death Wish to Pulp Fiction.
Violence takes on a different cast in the world of The Matrix, a world
defined as simulation. In more conventional action films such as True
Lies—in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character leads armed troops,
pilots a military fighter jet, and fires the plane’s air-to-air missiles—
viewers recognize the protagonist’s connection to an explicitly prosocial,
conservative ideology. Screen violence, when linked to conservative institutions
(e.g., the police and military) or to explicitly destructive, socially
antagonistic groups (criminals, terrorists) encourages viewers to contextualize
such violence within a social reality: violence is shown as the product
of groups or institutions with specific agendas of social discipline, political
protest, or material gain. However, when reconfigured in The Matrix as a
tool used unhesitatingly by a liberal-minded rebel hero, spectacular violence
paradoxically supports a conservative project of normalizing male
aggression and extending it into previously nonviolent arenas (e.g.,
Buddhist spirituality). Fight Club, released a few months after The Matrix,
offers a parallel worldview: in both, alienated, handsome, materially comfortable
men cast off the artificial trappings of their postmodern worlds,
and come to greater self-knowledge, through barely regulated physical
violence. Both films literally beat sense into their male subjects.
The Matrix defines its disembodied, virtual-reality environment as a
proving ground for traditional, white male mastery, thereby denying
agency to its few female characters. Ironically, the film’s production necessitated
the frequent stasis of its male lead. For repeated action sequences,
Reeves assumed static poses while a series of still cameras produced rotating
images of his body.8 Hence the film’s cameras produced the illusion of
movement for a static figure against a virtual backdrop. In some respects,
this positioning grants access to women as well—The Matrix and The
Matrix Reloaded both begin with women-in-action sequences—but ultimately
it is men around whom the film literally circles. The first film
locates women in two substantial supporting roles: the Oracle (Gloria
Foster), a stereotypical African American earth mother—almost a mammy
figure—with psychic abilities; and the active Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss).
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(A third female character, Switch [Belinda McCrory], is quickly dispatched.)
The film initially showcases Trinity’s fighting prowess: in the opening
sequence, she demonstrates her strength by rescuing Neo from his virtualreality
prison. Once Neo’s abilities are manifest, however, the film redefines
Trinity’s character as insufficiently skilled to overcome the film’s powerful
male villains and relegates her to a largely decorative and romantic role.
Like the black mentor Morpheus, Trinity cedes authority to the white male
protagonist, whom the film characterizes as the rightful, prophesied agent
of deliverance. The film thus offers a familiar narrative trajectory in which
women and blacks willingly relinquish their power so that young, white
men can act autonomously, to everyone’s benefit.
Like The Matrix, Run Lola Run foregrounds the spectacle of motion and
action, but with far different implications for its male and female characters.
The film, released in Germany in 1998 as Lola rennt and in the United
States in 1999, locates a female protagonist at the center of its action narrative
and in doing so investigates the consequences of male action and
inaction. A huge hit in Germany, where it spawned a popular women’s
hairstyle (the dyed, fire-engine red style of the film’s heroine), Run Lola
Run achieved substantial recognition and profits in the United States as
well.9 Like The Matrix, Run Lola Run calls attention to the constructedness
of the cinematic world, presenting three similar but distinct versions of the
same storyline and including intermittent sequences of cartoon animation.
The German film, however, uses its different “realities” not as a template
for male mastery but as a space for working through the problems of
female representation and agency in the action genre. Run Lola Run tracks
its heroine’s movements through urban Berlin, following her actual movement
through physical space (though fragmenting them repeatedly
through rapid edits, jump cuts, and violations of the 180 axis of action;
and occasionally filming her in slow motion). Eschewing spectacular violence
and the sexual threats to women characters that constitute part of the
action film’s familiar syntax, Run Lola Run demonstrates the malleability
of action-based narratives, reworking models for female and male representation.
Like so many Hollywood action films, Run Lola Run is emphatically
a film of masculinity in crisis, but the film demonstrates that the
reassertion of a traditional, inflexible masculinity does not resolve this
crisis. Instead, women must intervene into the spheres once managed, or
mismanaged, by men.
Visually and narratively, the film applies techniques not groundbreaking
in themselves, but uncharacteristic of the largely linear, illusionistic
action cinema. The film tracks the frantic attempts of Lola (Franka
Potente) to muster a large sum of money (100,000 deutsche marks, or
about $55,000) in a twenty-minute span to prevent the likely death of her
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hapless boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), following a mishandled
payoff in a car-smuggling operation. The film repeats its central events
three times, with slight variations leading to drastically different conclusions:
at the end of the first version, Lola is killed by the police; in the second,
Manni is run over by an ambulance; and in the final version, the lovers
survive and make a tidy profit. After each of the first two versions, an
intimate, red-tinted interlude appears, and the story returns to the
beginning of Lola’s “run” (her moped stolen, she spends much of the film
dashing along city streets). In addition to this temporal disjunction, the
film periodically displays series of still-photo flash-forward sequences illustrating
the lives of minor characters—a woman Lola passes on the street,
for instance, is shown kidnapping a child in one version, and becoming a
religious zealot who distributes leaflets on the street in another. Each
episode also begins with a short, animated sequence of Lola running out of
her apartment building. Further violating principles of visual continuity, Run
Lola Run alternates between film and digital-video images, with scenes not
featuring Lola and Manni shot on video and the rest shot with 35 mm
film.10 Such discontinuities and departures from visual realism attest both
to the film’s gamelike, music-video–influenced nature and to its willingness
to experiment with action-genre conventions to test their utility for
representation of women protagonists.
The film’s unconventional style provides a vehicle for its focus on
women’s experience. The narrative pointedly finds its heroine first in her
bedroom in the family apartment, a bedroom that includes a row of naked
Barbie-like dolls. Following the phone conversation with Manni in which
she learns of his plight, the standing Lola deliberates nervously as the camera
circles her. Here female stasis in domestic space accompanies thought,
which precipitates action. Once she chooses a course of action, she leaves
domestic space behind; the film returns there only for the beginning of the
next two stories. In each case, the narrative proper begins at the moment
Lola casts off domesticity, a decision emphasized by the camera’s subsequent
circling of Lola’s immobile, benumbed mother as Lola departs
(though it does so in binary fashion, the film at least acknowledges other
femininities that Lola denies). In each scenario, Lola seeks the aid of her
wealthy bank-executive father, without success: he rejects her appeals in
the first two versions, and in the third, she fails to meet with him. The film
thus demonstrates the unreliability of patriarchal and paternal authority,
and Lola’s ultimate refusal of it. Lola’s apparently sensible choice to turn
first to her father for help in resolving her personal dilemma proves fruitless,
as his self-interest overcomes any notion of family responsibility.
Finally, Lola must act autonomously, and she succeeds by visiting a casino
and winning against astronomical odds. In this setting—in which male
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patrons wear tuxedos and the few women wear gowns, in contrast to Lola’s
punk-inflected tank top, checkered pants, and military-style boots—Lola
asserts her presence by emitting a deafening scream, signaling her unwillingness
to abide the decorum of her father’s straitlaced, moneyed world.
Her vocal outburst, which repudiates prevailing, Western notions of
female propriety, punctuates (or causes) her gambling victory: she ceases
screaming when the roulette ball falls into a desired slot. Additionally, her
scream shatters glass in the room (as does a scream she unleashes earlier, in
her father’s office), granting her destructive power through aggressive but
nonviolent means. (With regard to violence, in the film’s first episode, Lola
does acquire a gun, which she uses to help Manni rob a supermarket, and
in the second episode, she robs her father’s bank at gunpoint, but in neither
case do her actions lead to a successful resolution.) In contrast to
U.S. action films in which women characters enter the phallic, masculine
world of firearms—films such as Blue Steel (1990), Point of No Return
(1993), and The Long Kiss Goodnight—Run Lola Run presents its heroine’s
activity and agency through her vocal power, her visual centrality, and her
displays of athletic exertion.
Run Lola Run indicates the action genre’s largely untapped potential for
depiction of physically active, psychologically strong women characters.
U.S. films that feature women protagonists routinely subject these figures
to sexual violence. Female action heroes periodically engage in violent
action after being stripped to their undergarments, and they almost always
must fend off a group of sexual predators or a single, rapine villain. (Charlie’s
Angels and other PG-13 female action films rein in these impulses somewhat,
relying on implicit rather than explicit rape threats and creating
characters who seem to prefer spending time in their underwear; Charlie’s
Angels combines the worlds of action, comedy, and girls’ sleepover party.)
Run Lola Run proves that neither treatment is requisite within the generic
framework of the action film. In another striking departure from
U.S. action films, the film does not eroticize Lola’s character: the frequent
running sequences foreground her body’s physical exertion, not its sexual
characteristics; and even in the bedroom interludes that connect the three
episodes, Lola is not objectified by the camera but framed from the shoulders
up, visually equivalent to Manni.
The film also works through tensions surrounding male/female power
relations. Lola’s activity initially requires Manni’s stasis—she instructs him
to wait by a phone booth (in which the film photographs him, with the
booth’s intersecting bars visually entrapping him) rather than perform a
foolhardy robbery. In the story’s first version, Manni becomes impatient
and proceeds to rob the store, setting in motion the events that lead to
Lola’s death. The film thus shows male unwillingness to accept an inactive
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role, and the fatal consequences to women of this obstinacy (notably, Lola
is shot by a nervous, young policeman, hinting at men’s capacity for
mismanagement of the weapons they conventionally master). In its final
episode, Manni himself becomes active as well, chasing and catching the
homeless man who has taken the money Manni had lost earlier. The film
thus accommodates active roles for both partners, rejecting the frequent
dictate in action narratives that one character’s activity demands a male or
female partner’s relative passivity. Ultimately, Manni uneasily relinquishes
his gun to the homeless man, who the film suggests (from the wily look in
his eyes when he receives the weapon) might use it to redress his own economic
inequality. The film acknowledges the potential violence of this
exchange (i.e., the possibility that the homeless man might shoot Manni
upon receiving the weapon) through Manni’s caution in handing over the
gun. Viewers already subjected to characters’ untimely deaths may fear for
the male hero’s safety, but the film rewards him for his willingness to abandon
this tool of violent masculinity, as he finally reunites with Lola in the
next, concluding scene.
Although Run Lola Run demonstrates a new range of agency for women
protagonists, the film’s challenge to cultural assumptions surrounding
men’s and women’s access to spheres of physical activity is partly limited by
its generic situation and its structural emphasis on heterosexual romance.
Transcending its narrated familial crises and the deaths of its protagonists,
the film ends in a utopian space, far removed from social reality (with Lola
and Manni free from conflict, their relationship secure, and flush with
spending money). Lola’s gambling success occurs wholly within the realm
of cinematic fantasy, as does a brief sequence in which she angelically saves
the life of a heart-attack victim by holding his hand. One might view such
utopian elements as essential to the transmission of a progressive ideology,
given the long-standing disenfranchisement of women, people of color,
and the working class within realist discourses such as journalism, social
science, the law, and even literary schools such as realism and naturalism.
In terms of social reality, for example, the couple’s criminal status (as
smugglers or armed robbers) might raise moral objections among some
viewers. According to the terms of the action genre, such transgressions
often position characters positively at the margins of social behavior. Even
in this marginal position, the film does not grant its heroine complete
autonomy, as Lola’s activity is predicated on her allegiance to her
boyfriend. Taking account of its fantasy, lawlessness, and heteronormativity,
though, the film creates a space for visually arresting female activity, an
antidote to the U.S. action genre’s conventional, largely conservative
images of male aggression. It is perhaps fitting that the action genre—
historically and generically a key site of exaggerated, conflicted, and shifting
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representations of manhood—should so successfully interrogate active
masculinity in a film featuring a female hero and a largely static male protagonist,
and that this text should come from outside the U.S. film industry.
Changes in the action genre’s global situation, and its models of gender
identity, continue to occur at a rapid rate, often through the influence of
films produced outside Hollywood. Just as the Hong Kong model constructed
by Jackie Chan provides a progressive alternative to U.S. cinema’s
conventions of male activity, Run Lola Run’s departure from action-film
conventions originates far from Hollywood. Run Lola Run, like Chan’s
films, participates in a generic and cross-cultural dialogue with U.S. action
films. This dialogue is partly a consequence of the dominance of U.S. films
in the global film industry. U.S. films, particularly action films, command
a disproportionate share of global film audiences, even in countries such as
Hong Kong that have substantial domestic film industries. Many cultural
commentators, both in the United States and abroad, view such economic
and cultural influences as troubling signs of the homogenization—or
more precisely, the Americanization—of national and regional cultures,
industries, and art forms. However, the action film’s generic framework,
which U.S. films have been most instrumental in shaping, also provides a
narrative and formal structure that films from other national cinemas can
mobilize in culturally specific, often progressive ways. International films
rearticulate paradigms of heroic, adversarial, or even revolutionary masculinity
(and periodically, femininity as well) and critique prevailing cultural
mythologies surrounding gender and violence in particular.
Moreover, the global legibility of action cinema crucially improves nonU.S.
film’s chances of international distribution. Widely distributed films
in the action genre or applying its codes include Jamaica’s Third World Cop
(1998); Brazil’s City of God (2002); India’s Bandit Queen (1994); Thailand’s
Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003); South Korea’s Shiri and Nowhere to
Hide (both 1999); and from Japan, the ultraviolent Battle Royale (2000)
and Battle Royale 2 (2003), the 1980s and 1990s yakuza dramas from actordirector
Takeshi Kitano (including Fireworks [aka Hana-bi, 1997] and
Sonatine [1993]), and director Takashi Miike’s streamlined, frenetic
action-exploitation films (including City of Lost Souls [2000] and the Dead
or Alive trilogy [1999–2002]). While the domestic film industries of many
countries undoubtedly have suffered commercially because of inroads
made by U.S. films, filmmakers outside the United States have nevertheless
proved themselves adept at modifying local production practices and
narrative styles to cope with Hollywood’s challenges, often resulting in
genre-invigorating fare such as Run Lola Run.
Media outside the United States have also appropriated the signifiers
of active masculinity in thoroughly unpredictable ways, merging social
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reality and mass-produced artifice for explicitly political ends. Many
commentators have noted the disturbing but politically expedient use of
media technologies by radical Islamic groups, who use videotapes (training
videos, footage of suicide bombings, and other forms) to recruit new
members, to communicate instructions among terrorist cells, to broadcast
propaganda messages through regional and international news media, and
as evidence of kidnappings and brutal killings. Yet amid this overwhelmingly
grim use of videotape, television, and digital media, one event has
occurred that weds global media, the U.S. military, and consumable icons
of active masculinity in a surreally comic way. In late January 2005, a website
known for posting statements from Arab militants featured a communiqué
from the al Mujahedeen Brigade, a group that had claimed
responsibility in 2004 for a pair of civilian kidnappings. In the 2005 statement,
the group claimed it had captured a U.S. soldier, John Adam, and
posted a photo of a bound soldier with a machine gun pointed at his head.
As Western news outlets soon reported, the captured soldier was in reality
a foot-high action figure,“Special Ops Cody,” produced for sale at U.S. military
bases in Kuwait. “The figure appeared stiff and expressionless,”
reported The Associated Press.11 Moreover, the group was threatening the
toy soldier with his own tiny, plastic gun. Some headlines surrounding the
incident showed sober, journalistic restraint: the New York Times headlined
its account “U.S. Military Says No Soldier Missing in Iraq,” while MSNBC’s
website carried the story as “Doubts Cast on Claim U.S. Soldier
Kidnapped.”12 This figure—mute, emotionless, rigid, in a tight spot—was
of course virtually indistinguishable from the archetypal protagonist of
American action cinema. Only CNN’s website could state the plain facts:
“So-Called U.S. Hostage Appears to Be Toy.”13 Yet again, the images of
active masculinity, and the apparent threats to that masculinity, continue
to inspire media spectacle, careful analysis, and sometimes, relieving
comedy
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