FIGHTING ANGELS
-How women are represented in martial movies
By Chu Qian

As feminism becomes one of the hottest topics people have discussed today, it is widely represented in mass media, namely, the film industry. More and more movies now shift to display women in a more active position, especially in martial fighting movies, where this once being considered as weak and submissive group, turns to bravery and domination.

There are several movies whose heroin figures are extremely impressive and noteworthy: Kill Bill series and Resident Evil series. These two movies had been one of the Year’s bestsellers; using filming as the medium, they drew in millions of people worldwide to go to the theatre where they started to perceived the idea that women could also be the KILLING MACHINE, a term which had been so popularly used before to solely describe masculine male figures such as Rambo in First Blood. In some senses, women have replaced men in the pop culture of martial movies.

In this Kill Bill Volume one poster, Uma Therman is wearing the notorious yellow suits. If you can recall that it is the symbolic clothing of Bruce Lee, the Hollywood Chinese kung fu actor of 1960s, it will not be hard for you to get the idea that partially, this movie wants to pay tribute to the male legendary actor Bruce Lee. However, now it is a woman standing in this suit, with an undefeatable look on her face, with the clothes so perfectly fit to her body, with the curve of her thighs charmingly formed good angles with her samurai sword, and a long splash of blood all the way behind her. No men can present this soft-but-strong, straight-but-flexible image better than woman does. It is the power of femininity, of which the outside appearance and inside strength coexists.

Movie posters tell us a lot about the attitude of heroines in those movies. Now, let’s now shift to the posters of Kill Bill Volume2 and Resident Evil. You would have no trouble finding out that in these two posters, the heroines are all in feminine dresses, and both with weapons in their hands. Also noticeably, Milla Jovovich is not wearing a bra(we can’t see if Uma does it too)! This is a really interesting detail because from this we can formulate an atitude this female character has. The function of brassiere basically is to hold breasts in a place that is pleasurable to look at, but who to look at? Of course, it’s man. “Male gaze” is the spotlight man concentrated on woman’s dressing, wording and behaving; male gaze is everywhere around a woman, restricted her from being a both physically and mentally free woman when she herself has felt being looked at. As a result, Milla’s no-bra seems to be a retreat women take to be away from this cage of male gaze . She seems to be saying, “ I don’t care if you like my breasts or not; all I wanna do is to get zombies down, not you down”.

As a result, if men just come to the theatre to see beautiful women, then martial movies are probably not the best for them: women in these movies very frequently get sweating, get bruised and get bleeding during fighting, which is going to impair their stereotypic impressions of submissive beauties. Nevertheless, now we all could see that women are not just vases, and that they have the ability to do what men are capable of.