Male heroism, at least in the movies, is a simplistic thing: upper body strength, good reaction times, speed/agility, nerves of steel. Around that you can wrap slightly less essential things: good looks, a way with the women (or at least the leading lady), and erm… puzzle-solving, I guess. They will be on a quest of some sort, after all. Then there’s the slightly more esoteric things like supernatural agency and descendancy from (or ascendancy into) one pantheon or another.

Female heroism on the other hand is a less clear-cut thing – it hasn’t really been thought out as a template for mass-storytelling at the same scale. But templates are in and of themselves problematic, so perhaps this is a good thing. Regardless, we don’t seem to have any real understanding of (or perhaps just agreement on) what a female hero IS… so that when a female hero needs to be instantiated for celluloid storytelling purposes, we resort to just picking up the male hero character archetype and it’s related styles of cinema/film-making and storytelling, according to the genre, and then we plug in a female actor for the lead role.

She will be as pubescent in form as possible, and either tightly-clad or scantily clad; take your pick. If she’s a contemporary heroine, she will have just enough chesticles to communicate the fact that they have been strapped down in utilitarian service of her fantastically hectic lifestyle, keeping the critical feminists at arm’s length while giving fans of chesticles something to hope for. We might go to some trouble to make her dark-haired, or at least brunnette, for this is what will convey her badass kungfuciousness. We the audience undertake the remaining run-time suspensions of belief so her morphology, which will necessarily deviate substantially from that of someone who might actually be able to take or throw meaningful punches… will not negate acts of ass-kicking. Continue reading →