With a headline like Gosh, Sweetie, That’s a Big Gun, how could Rico not read it?

There's an article in The New York Times about some current movies:

The summer season brings the usual cavalcade of testosterone-fueled action heroes, including Thor, Green Lantern, Captain America, and Conan the Barbarian. But action-movie derring-do is not always an exclusively male preserve, and in the last year some women and girls— Evelyn Salt, Lisbeth Salander, and the lingerie-clad avengers of Sucker Punch, among others— have been shooting and not just clawing their way into macho territory. Is this empowerment or exploitation? Feminism or fetishism? The chief film critics of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, discuss the new pow, crash, and splat:

Dargis: It’s no longer enough to be a mean girl, to destroy the enemy with sneers and gossip: you now have to be a murderous one. That, at any rate, seems to be what movies like Hanna, Sucker Punch, Super, Let Me In, Kick-Ass and those flicks with that inked Swedish psycho-chick seem to be saying. I like a few of these in energetic bits and pieces, but I’m leery of how they fetishize hyper-violent women. Part of me thinks the uptick in bloody-mama and kinder-killer movies is about as progressive as that old advertising pitch for Virginia Slims cigarettes, meaning not very. You’ve come a long way, baby, only now you’re packing a gun and there’s blood on your hands (or teeth).
It’s obvious why some of these violent femme films exist: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is an international sensation, so it’s inevitable that the books would have been blown up to fit the screen, with David Fincher’s adaptation of the first book coming soon. The question is why are so many violent girls and women running through movies now, especially given that the American big screen hasn’t been very interested in women’s stories, violent or not, in recent decades, an occasional Thelma, Louise, and Jodie Foster character notwithstanding. There are other exceptions, of course, usually romantic comedies that are so insipid and insulting I want to kill everyone on screen. Wait a minute: is it female rage fueling this trend? (Ha. Ha.)

Scott: Female rage is definitely on display in a lot of these movies, some of which depict women taking revenge against abusive men. The Salander trilogy sketches a grim tableau of a society defined by brutal masculine authority, the pathology of which infects the family, the economy, and the state. And the brutal, efficient, and ingenious manner in which Lisbeth brings various baddies to justice is calibrated for almost universal appeal, since we all like to see a scrappy underdog bringing pain to the bullies.
But it seems to me that what fuels these fantasies is also a deep anxiety— an unstable compound of confusion, fascination, panic, and denial— about female sexuality, especially the sexual power and vulnerability of girls and young women. In Hanna the teenage heroine, raised in arctic isolation by her father, experiences her first kiss, and then executes a swift, complex series of martial arts moves on her unsuspecting beau, who winds up flat on his back, gasping for breath. Hanna’s finely tuned, self-protective reflexes, drilled into her over the years by her CIA-renegade daddy, have overridden her amorous impulses. Is that a byproduct of the training, or part of a patriarchal program to keep her chaste as well as safe?
It is interesting how frequently the violence of these girls is overseen or inculcated by a father figure who is not always a literal dad: Nicolas Cage in Kick-Ass, training his killer pixie to use sharp blades, big-caliber guns and foul language; Scott Glenn in Sucker Punch, urging his girl warriors into battle; and Eric Bana in Hanna, sending his darling out to fight the wicked witch, played by Cate Blanchett. Are these paternal figures reassuring or creepy? How do you think the always-fraught relationship between sex and violence plays out in these movies?

Dargis: Male anxiety about female sexual power can be depended on to make trouble, and not just in real life, as evident from The Birth of a Nation on, probably before. One difference is the tender age of these recent combatants. The bad seed isn’t new, but what seems different is that young women and girls can kill today without being necessarily and fatally pathologized. One of the first of these tiny terrors was played by the twelve-year-old Natalie Portman in Luc Besson’s neo-exploitation flick The Professional (1994). Her character, a cigarette-smoking, wife-beater-wearing Lolita, schooled by a hit man, was a pint-size version of the waif turned assassin in Mr. Besson’s La Femme Nikita (1990), which spawned various imitators.Mr. Besson likes little ladies with big weapons. As does Quentin Tarantino and more than a few Japanese directors, including Kinji Fukasaku, whose 2000 freakout, Battle Royale, provided the giggling schoolgirl who fights Uma Thurman’s warrior in Kill Bill Vol. 1. Mr. Tarantino and his celebrated love of the ladies of exploitation has something to do with what’s happening on screens. Yet something else is going on. The bottom line is, it used to be easier to make movies with women. You could put them on a pedestal and either keep them there (as revered wives or virginal girls) or knock them down, as with femmes fatales. If that’s trickier to pull off today, it’s partly because of, to quote the great Kim Gordon, a “fear of a female planet.”
I don’t see a shoot ’em up like Hanna challenging those fears, but at least it has female characters who do more than smile at the superhero or the guys having a swell bromance. It’s better than nothing. The truth is that many American filmmakers, including favorites of mine like David Fincher, Michael Mann, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Wes Anderson largely or completely avoid stories about women. Mr. Fincher made Panic Room, and now he’s doing The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a different kind of female empowerment trip. His “Tattoo” movie will be better than the Swedish version because he’s the superior director, but I also hope he will more forcefully engage the theme that was blatant in Larsson’s book, as evident in its blunt original title: Men Who Hate Women.

Scott: Mr. Fincher has made one women-fight-back movie: Panic Room, starring Ms. Foster— who has had an interesting and somewhat-unsung action-heroine career— and the future Mrs. Edward Cullen, Kristen Stewart, who has made a career of passivity. But most of Mr. Fincher’s films are about male bonding and male rivalry and explore some interesting homoerotic undercurrents related to that theme. A lot was made of Mark Zuckerberg’s trouble relating to women in The Social Network, but perhaps not enough was made of the network of love, jealousy, sadism, and competition that linked him to Sean Parker, Eduardo Saverin, and the super-hunky Winklevoss twins.
But back to the women. I think the first Salander movie ran into a serious problem when it tried to translate Larsson’s anger about pervasive sexual violence into cinematic terms. It is in the nature of the moving image to give pleasure, and in the nature of film audiences— consciously or not, admittedly or not— to find pleasure in what they see. So in depicting Salander’s rape by her guardian in the graphic way he did, the director, Niels Arden Oplev, ran the risk of aestheticizing, glamorizing and eroticizing it, just as Gaspar Noé did with Monica Bellucci’s assault in Irreversible.
The risk is not dissolved, but rather compounded, when the answering, avenging violence is staged and shot in almost exactly the same kind of gruesome detail, since the audience knows it is supposed to enjoy that. In other words, even though the earlier violation can be said to justify the later revenge, that logic turns out to be reversible. You could call this the I Spit on Your Grave paradigm. It is definitely at work in Sucker Punch, which gains in sleaziness by coyly keeping its rape fantasies within PG-13 limits and fairly quivering with ecstasy as it contemplates scenes of female victimization.
But I don’t want to sound like I’m wagging my finger at all of these movies. As the father of a confident, athletic twelve-year-old girl, I certainly want to see more than princesses (most of whom are also action heroines these days, like Rapunzel in Tangled) and sideline sweethearts. I like tough women, and I don’t think I’m the only guy who does. I have certainly enjoyed meeting the ones in Winter’s Bone, True Grit, and, most recently, Meek’s Cutoff. Not an action movie, I know (very little happens at all) but somehow, when Michelle Williams draws a bead on a bad guy, she writes a whole new chapter in the history of the western.

Dargis: I don’t know about an entire chapter, maybe a paragraph. I just don’t believe that scene where her character pulls out a rifle to protect the wagon train’s Indian prisoner or, should I say, when she takes possession of the symbolic phallus. I think the movie would be more honest (and more interesting) if this woman, who appears to take pity on the Indian really because she’s the designated moral center— a quality that blurs uncomfortably with the fact that she’s a woman— were as despicable as the men. This frontier proto-feminism is unpersuasive and certainly not as convincing as the film’s vision of Manifest Destiny as collective insanity. By saving the Indian, she ends up mounting the same pedestal on which women have been historically placed, to our detriment.
It’s tricky whenever a woman holds a gun on screen, even if the movie is independently produced and the director is female. I’m glad that Meek’s Cutoff exists, and that Kelly Reichardt is making a new film every few years; long may she direct. I complain about the representations of women, but I’m more offended when, in movie after movie, there are no real representations to eviscerate, when all or most of the big roles are taken by men, and the only women around are those whose sole function is, essentially, to reassure the audience that the hero isn’t gay. The gun-toting women and girls in this new rash of movies may be performing much the same function for the presumptive male audience: It’s totally “gay” for a guy to watch a chick flick, but if a babe is packing heat, no worries, man!

Scott: Well, Ms. Williams’s character does pull the gun on a particular man, one she has hated from the start, so protection of the Indian may be as much a pretext as a principle. Her action is also governed by the practical consideration that she trusts him more than she does the other guy, which may turn out to be a big mistake. But anyway, on the topic of, ahem, possession of the symbolic phallus, Adrian Curry, inspired by the Meek’s Cutoff poster that shows Ms. Williams taking aim at the Male Gaze, recently posted a slew of similar images on the Mubi.com site, from much older Westerns. One of them, for a movie called Five Bold Women, which I am extremely sorry never to have seen, has a tag line perfectly suited to our topic: They Used a Weapon No Bad Man Could... Sex!”
Jean-Luc Godard posited that all he needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. (Some of his later work makes me wish he'd stuck to that formula.) To put the gun in the hands of the girl may be a way to cut out the middleman, as it were, and also to maximize commercial potential by providing something for everyone. I think that calculation works best when the filmmakers show some interest in exploring the complex intertwinings of sex and violence, rather than simply mashing them up or using one as a substitute for the other. On the other hand, it’s sometimes just fun to watch Saoirse Ronan or Ellen Page— or all the other sisters of Angelina Jolie, our era’s pioneering and still supreme female action star— beat up some deserving bad man.