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Now that I am older, I see with different eyes. I adored action movies when I was young. I lived for them, for the sweeping scores and elaborate choreography, the sheer otherness that they represented. I was fascinated by the swordplay, battle sequences, and all the other things that I couldn’t adequately replicate in my own life. Action was an escape, and the threat of danger was thrilling. As an adult, I see this violence differently. I live not in that carefree bubble of childhood but in the real world, where misfortune comes to innocent people and villains rarely get what’s coming to them. What was once so appealing to my sense of childhood wonder now is irrevocably linked to social context: the tradition of violence in action cinema validates excessive male rage, overwhelmingly to the detriment of women.
Take, for example, Terminator. Sarah Connor is pursued by a cyborg that has been programmed to kill her; Kyle Reese, a soldier sent from the future, is her only hope. When she first meets her savior, however, he does not appear as the great protector that he is meant to be. He screams at her, waves a gun in her face, and forces her into a car with him. Contextually, this all makes perfect sense. It’s a tense situation, and he’s prepared for war. She is not, though, and I can’t help but take Sarah’s perspective on the situation. Her savior is just as threatening as the threat itself. She delivers a seemingly innocuous line during their first scene together: “Please, don’t hurt me.” It’s something I wouldn’t have thought twice about as a child, but my heart breaks for her now. To the unarmed victim, everyone with a gun looks the same. As viewers and consumers in this age of blockbuster action films, we are told over and over again that male rage and aggression are righteous factors in the pursuit of justice. Kyle Reese behaves as many other action heroes do. Protagonists are allowed their tempers because, at the end of the day, they are the heroes of the story. The ends will justify the means—this is what we are meant to believe. And in the next movie, Sarah herself inhabits this masculine rage. Cinematically, the solution to the problem is not to temper the violent persona that poses the threat in the first place; it is to make her embody it as well.
In this way, the tradition of male violence in film is not strictly limited to male characters. The women in action blockbusters, when featured at all, take up this mantle and bear it as if it was their own. The typical “strong female character” is one who is devoid of all personality except the weapon in her hands. This, we in the audience are told, is what strength looks like. This is the behavior worthy of our respect. Aggression and proclivity for violence become benchmarks by which badassery is measured. We are told to respect female characters who are modeled after the archetypal male action hero. Too often, these women abhor their own femininity, rejecting it in favor of a more masculine persona. The audience has been conditioned to equate competency with violence, and thus with masculinity.
The issue with any critique of an action movie, and of any branch of fiction in general is that the context of the plot is outrageous enough to justify nearly any behavior. Excessive rage is acceptable, one could say, given the extreme circumstances. There is no real-life equivalent to the Terminator, so characters need not mirror realistically acceptable behaviors. Their validation in fictional settings provides tacit approval for such behaviors in real life. Removed from cinematic context, violent or aggressive behavior occurs without the extreme justifications of narrative events. And yet it does occur. We have been socialized in a media environment that upholds aggressive hypermasculinity as the gold standard. When viewers see Kyle Reese treat the eventual object of his affection with violent disrespect, they are implicitly being told that they should treat the people they love in the same manner. “Do exactly as I say,” he yells at Sarah. Dominance is love, they hear. “Do you understand?” he fully screams at her when she does not respond. Aggression is love, they hear. The appropriateness of his behavior in the context of the film is a question for another time. In the context of everyday life, the context in which viewers will mimic his behavior, there is no question. This misconstruction of love as something harmful or forceful perpetuates a culture that forgives assault and abuse. When we are exposed to so much violent behavior in cinema, it becomes that much more normal, that much easier to defend that boys will be boys or but he’s such a good guy. We are so rarely exposed to the other side of it—blockbuster cinema rarely shows us the women on the receiving end of this violent behavior. But we know them, and we witness firsthand its effects. If the female perspective was given as much attention as the male—if we as viewers were taught to sympathize with the victims of male aggression rather than the perpetrators—our culture might look very different.
Action movies are escapist. I truly believed this as a child. So why are we eager to escape to a world so much darker than our own? We construct violent situations to justify even more violent actions, and then we call it strength. We continually overlook the effects of this violence in our culture. I don’t know if I can do that anymore. When Sarah Connor pleads for her life and safety, she is not in an action movie, and Kyle Reese is not a hero. She is just a woman in danger, and he is the threat posed to her. At that point, it isn’t escapist anymore. It’s just exhausting.
