Men and Female Action Heroes

Good looks and a good body do indeed seem to influence people, especially men, into watching movies featuring female action heroes. If we consider the American Film Institute's (AFI) top 50 movie heroes and villains that Jane Ganahl mentions in her article “”, the only eight female heroes that made it to the list were almost all pretty. However, there was no mention of the not so pretty and not at all feminine Sarah Connor that Linda Hamilton played in the movie “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” for example, and she was indeed a hero since she saved the world from a nuclear war. In addition to this, Ganahl wonders whether the fact that the members of the AFI chose more female villains than heroes, and most importantly almost half of them positioned in the top ten, means that Hollywood is misogynist. Perhaps this has a connection to the popular male habit or custom of calling a woman a witch or, their personal favorite, a bitch. Also, the customary tradition when showing a woman in action before was by putting them in the villain's role or character, which again shows the same point: women as bitches. We hear this last word in almost every movie, not to mention songs, especially rap or hip hop ones. Society has indeed influenced this panel and/or Hollywood itself.

Moreover, some men continue to try and bring down female action heroes. One of these men is Don Feder, who wrote in his article “Wimps Whiners Weenies: Men in Movies Today,” that in female action heroes' movies women are “fearless and indomitable” which means men show no contrast to them. As a result, male characters end up playing the fool and being helpless. Feder believes that this is not what the public wants, even when these movies feature famous directors or actors, and therefore they do not do well in the box office. Notwithstanding, if we take a look at the box office earnings of “Tomb Raider, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Charlie's Angels,” for example, we can see that they passed the mark of 100 million dollars. These numbers prove patently that Feder was wrong in his assertion.

Then we have the statement from Elliot Lederman, Universal's Senior Director of Licensing, in 1999; he affirmed that despite the popularity that the television show “Xena the Warrior Princess” was obtaining back then, we should not expect “a rash of female Rambos anytime soon”. What is more, he added that “there hasn't been a successful female action hero since Wonder Woman. Other studios have tried to create them, but Xena is the first successful one and it's going to be tough to follow the trend.” As we have been able to experience or witness, this statement is highly inaccurate, because we could very well say that after Xena there has been a rash of female Rambos indeed, and it was not so tough to follow the trend. Nowadays there are numerous, and many successful, female action heroes and they just keep coming. However, not all of them are accepted by the public, but it is only the minority that goes through that process or problem.

Christina Larson has a theory as to why some female action heroes underwent this lack of acceptance. She states in her article “Seven Mistakes Superheroines Make: Why The Latest Action-Babe Flicks Flopped” that she believes that Hollywood overreached when dealing with this type of women since studios did not stop to think or analyze why exactly audiences loved female action heroes. What they did instead was to come up with a formula that they thought was the one that had brought about success to previous female action hero's movies: they placed beautiful women with well-shaped bodies wearing tight costumes and then they made them fight in them. Apparently, they thought that that was all it took to make a female action hero movie successful. They based movies on the protagonist's good looks and sex appeal, but, actually, that formula was virtually wrong, which was a fact proven by the low box office income that movies like these obtained. What Hollywood should have realized, adds Larson, is that the movies that feature female action heroes that did well in the box office, did not only show a pretty woman with a nice body and revealing clothes, but they also showed them as strong, witty and successful. She makes an excellent comparison between a female action hero who was accepted by the public and one who was not:

Lara Croft may have originated as pure male fantasy - but on the big screen, she became erudite, well-traveled, a working photojournalist, and went home at night to a house worthy of Architectural Digest. On the other hand, Elektra [...] might turn heads in her tight-laced scarlet bustier. But her personal magnetism doesn't measure up: she's a gloomy assassin who suffers from nightmares, insomnia, and OCD. Plus she hates her job but can't - or won't - figure out what to do with her life.

As we can see from this quote, Lara (“Tomb Raider”) is a successful, happy woman who has got her life under control, while Elektra is a woman who is not happy and has definitely no control over her life, she does not even knows what she wants. Lara emanates a positive feeling whereas Elektra does the opposite, and no one likes negative feelings especially coming from an action hero, so it is no wonder the audience rejected the latter.