Gender avengers

Thelma (Geena Davis) wears the lacy ivory top, skirt and embellished denim jacket, displayed in Goddess, at the start of Thelma & Louise (1991), when she hits the road with her best friend. The pieces are highly feminine and frame her as a bootscooting Southern belle. After Thelma is plied with tequila and assaulted, her adventure is derailed and her life is at a crossroads. When Louise (Susan Sarandon) avenges her, Thelma embraces life as an outlaw, represented by the grungy shirt and jeans.

Read an interview with Geena Davis and Goddess curator Bethan Lloyd Johnson in The Age.

The predatory behaviour of men in Thelma & Louise is exactly the behaviour that Cassie (Carey Mulligan) exposes in Promising Young Woman (2020). Like Louise, Cassie takes the law into her own hands to get justice for a friend who has been assaulted. She hides her quest for revenge behind a cupcake-pink palette that satirises expectations of femininity found in romantic comedies. By the time she strikes, she’s transformed the male fantasy of a buxom nurse into a nightmare. Unlike Thelma & Louise’s gritty, cowboy aesthetic, Promising Young Woman shows that, 30 years later, women no longer need to shed their femininity to find strength.

Read an interview with Promising Young Woman director Emerald Fennell

Read an interview with Promising Young Woman costume designer Nancy Steiner on the subversive costume design

Read an interview with Carey Mulligan in the New York Times

Taking control

The anti-heroes in Thelma & Louise and Promising Young Woman seek their own justice because they know they won’t be heard or believed. The end of both films signifies the justice system’s failure to protect or empower women under patriarchy; they have no recourse to be heard, believed or seek justice. Instead, they’re forced to operate outside the bounds of society. The characters on the Taking control screen in Goddess similarly fight back to redress society’s indifference, avenge oppression and take a stand, joining a cinematic tradition that stretches from gritty exploitation films like Foxy Brown (1974) and Ms .45 (1982) to today.

When Thelma & Louise was release in 1991, it faced a wave of controversy. The central characters, portrayed by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, go on the run from the police after shooting a man who assaulted Thelma outside a bar. While suitably remembered mostly as a feminist road film, it also falls into the rape-revenge genre. Ms .45 does too and like Thelma (Davis) embracing a grungy look when she becomes an outlaw, costuming is important to this transition.

After being raped twice, Thana (Zoë Tamerlis), a mute seamstress, takes the law into her own hands in Ms .45. In Thana’s case, she literally cannot be heard, so she lets her .45 calibre pistol speak for her. The intimacy that her trauma has taken from her is transported into her weapon – while loading her gun, she kisses the bullets, blows on the barrel and blows a kiss in the mirror she’s just practised her aim in, which is a gendered inversion of the famous mirror scene in Taxi Driver (1976). She is bidding her former self goodbye, donning a nun’s habit to transform into a symbol of divine feminine justice. But her costume is also highly sexualised, representing the male expectation (and male gaze) to make any Halloween costume ‘slutty’. Yet like Cassie (Carey Mulligan) in Promising Young Woman, who dresses as a buxom nurse in that film’s climactic scene, Thana turns the fantasy into a nightmare. Ms .45 is the definition of an exploitation film, but in its own way reflected the women’s liberation movement. The cult classic subverted the traditional revenge thriller like Death Wise and Taxi Driver by casting a woman as the vigilante.

Eight years earlier, government agent Cleopatra Jones (Tamara Dobson) takes down a drug operation in LA’s seedy underbelly in the Blaxploitation classic Cleopatra Jones (1973). Though her main object is disrupting the drug syndicate, in one scene Cleopatra intervenes when a gang of men are assaulting a woman in an alleyway. This scene is juxtaposed in Goddess with two scenes from Foxy Brown: one showing Foxy (Pam Grier) chasing down a drug lord in a grounded airplane with the propeller spinning and the other showing Foxy circling enemies in a martial arts stance. The latter reflects the connection between Blaxploitation films and martial arts films – people of colour, using only their innate physicality and abilities to overcome authorities (usually White) and overwhelming odds. A common trope in cinema is a physically smaller character using martial arts to overpower a larger one. In many on-screen instances, this scenario is gendered, with the smaller character a woman and the larger male. The women characters’ strength and skills deny the misogynistic expectation of their fragility. In Goddess, the circling Foxy Brown scene is juxtaposed with both La Femme Nikkita (1990) and Mardaani (2014) to illuminate this trope.

Though Blaxploitation films were criticised for being violent, explicit and perpetuating stereotypes, they also reflected the Black Power and women’s liberation movements, offering a chance for Black stars to receive top billing in action movies. Despite the criticism, before these strong and sensual Blaxploitation characters took the law into their own hands, it would’ve been uncommon to see a Black woman piloting a plane or racing cars like Cleopatra Jones. This kind of high-octane action, particularly in Cleopatra Jones, is honoured in Grindhouse: Death Proof (2007), Quentin Tarantino's exploitation homage, which features New Zealand stunt woman Zoë Bell hanging from the hood of a speeding car while Rosario Dawson cheers her on from inside. By the time the oil wars destroyed the world and Furiosa (Charlize Theron) took over saving the wasteland in Mad Max: Fury Road (2018), women on-screen were driving war-rigs while blowing up their enemies.

Perhaps the most iconic Blaxploitation character is Pam Grier’s Coffy (1973), a nurse avenging her sister’s drug addiction with strength, sensuality and a shotgun. Like Cassie in Promising Young Woman, Coffy pretends to be vulnerable to lure men into her trap. In the scene featured in Goddess, Coffy has just coaxed two drug dealers to an apartment, where she pulls a shotgun on the lacky. Again, it’s unlikely that there were many Black women on screen wielding guns at the time. The scene is juxtaposed with Clare (Aisling Franciosi) lifting a gun in The Nightingale (2018) and Molly Johnson (Leah Purcell) arming herself in The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson (2020). In these three scenes, traditionally marginalised women – a Black woman, an Irish convict and an Indigenous woman – take aim at racism and colonial violence. Like Thelma, Louise and Cassie, they’ve little chance of help from the authorities.

Another sequence of scenes in Goddess shows women in situations where they’ve had to overpower dangerous men in the immediate moment. In Stage Mother, Maybelline (Jackie Weaver) aims a gun at a “woman beater”. Olivia Benson, in episode one of season fifteen of Law & Order: SVU, finally gets the upper hand on her captor Louis, a serial killer who has tortured and sexually assaulted her. Though she pulls the gun on Louis, she doesn’t pull the trigger. Here, the gun may represent taking a stand, but it not being used says something greater about Olivia’s character. Louis wants her to kill him, and despite being armed, she inflicts a greater wound by upholding her morals. For over 20 years, Benson has been a staunch advocate for victims, often putting herself deliberately in hostage situations in order to save an innocent. That kind of scenario is featured in the scene besides the one from the Law & Order: SVU in Dead Calm (1989), where a dangerous psychopath boards a couple’s yacht under false pretences. In Dead Calm, Rae (Nicole Kidman) has to seduce the psychopath to gain his trust, drug him and fight him off, alone, holding him at bay with a spear-gun while she waits for help. The juxtaposition of an Australian thriller and a TV series that debuted ten years later in 1999, and is still screening, shows the ongoing scourge of gendered violence.

Wielding a gun doesn’t only serve the narrative or character development in the films featured in Goddess, its barrel can also stand in for the camera. Despite featuring strong characters, many of the films featured in Goddess still frame women in the male gaze of the filmmakers, objectifying women even as they show their strength (this is particularly the case in exploitation cinema). To reframe women and focus on their strength, we have juxtaposed scenes of women looking down the barrel of the gun like Nicole Kidman in Destroyer (2018) and Cassandra Davey in Fair Game (1986) with men surrendering to female strength in The 10th Victim (1965), Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Tank Girl (1995). In the latter, Naomi Watts’ character Jet Girl blows the barrel of her pistol like Thana in Miss .45.

In the years between exploitation films and Promising Young Woman,  female characters have triumphed despite being disbelieved. In Aliens (1986), Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) would not of had to don a mechanised suit and tell the alien queen, “Get away from her you bitch” if the men in Alien (1979) had heeded her warnings not to mess with extraterrestrial life forms. In Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) has to fight her way out of an asylum because no one believes she averted an AI apocalypse seven years earlier in Terminator (1984). These two iconic action characters not only fought aliens and robots, but the misogynistic dismissiveness of the patriarchy, despite taking place in sci-fi futures or current-day dystopias. In the Terminator 2 scene featured in goddess, Sarah Connor stares directly at camera through her sweaty fringe. This determined glare is mimicked in another sci-fi blockbuster, Stranger Things (2016–), when Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) uses her powers to protect her friends atop a cliff. Like Sarah Connor, who once escaping from the asylum dresses in ‘masculine’ black military fatigues, Eleven isn’t concerned with gendered modes of dress. In this scene she wears a dress, but the attempts to make her more ‘feminine’ haven’t taken and her stare demonstrates her will and power. This determination is also apparent in the scene from The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–), which shows Offred (Elisabeth Moss) walking away, flanked by two handmaids, after refusing to take part in a public stoning of a fellow handmaid. Here, Moss’ acting  transcends the theological smock and headdress she’s forced to wear as a sexually subservient, baby-incubating handmaid. The conservative costume cannot contain her determination and the coned headdress cannot limit her vision for a better future.

Strength can be more than physical though. In A Fantastic Woman (2017), Marina (Daniela Vega) walks stupefied down a corridor to, her energy drained from battling the grief from her partner’s death, his family’s discrimination and a legal system that doesn’t recognise the rights of transgender women. In the final scene of the Goddess piece, Marina levels her eyes on the camera, suggesting an inner strength necessary to navigate a transphobic society. In We Are Lady Parts (2021–), we use a scene of the all-Muslim punk band kicking down an apartment door, not to show their physical strength, but the strength it takes to fight for space in the music industry as an outsider. The resilience to carry on, despite being seen as an outsider, is also expressed in the scenes of Alex Irving (Deborah Mailman), a senator in the halls of power who fight bureaucracy and political rivals to achieve her aims for social justice and Indigenous rights. In another two scenes in Goddess, we explore how walking away is an act of resistance. Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths) leaves toxic friendships behind in Muriel’s Wedding (1994) and Beth (Rena Owen) in Once Were Warriors (1994) finds the strength to leave her marriage, telling her husband, “If my spirit can survive living with you for 18 years, I can survive anything.”

These films and TV shows highlight the continued fight for gender equality, justice, and empowerment for women. They demonstrate the strength and resilience of women in the face of oppression and the importance of creating space for women's voices to be heard and believed.

Spotlighting change features excerpts from the following sources

Stranger Things (2016–)
S1, E6 (2016)
Netflix

The Handmaid's Tale (2017–)
S1, E10 (2017)
MGM Television, Relentless Productions

Total Control (2019)
S1, E4
Blackfella Films Pty Limited, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Create NSW, Screen Canberra, Screen Queensland, Screen Australia

Kamikaze Girls (2004)
Third Window Films

We Are Lady Parts (2021)
S1, E2 (2021)
WWTV Limited, NBCUniversal

Looking for Alibrandi (2000)
Australian Film Finance Corporation Ltd, The Premium Movie Partnership, New South Wales Film and Television Office, Australian Asset Securities Limited and Belle Regazze Pty Ltd

A Fantastic Woman (2017)
Asesorias y Producciones Fabula Limitada, Sony Picture Classics.

Chungking Express (1994)
Jet Tone Productions

Promising Young Woman (2020)
Focus Features LLC.

La Femme Nikita (1990)
Gaumont

Dead Calm (1989)
Warner Bros.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999–)
S15, E1 (2013)
Universal TV

Andhadhun (2018)
Viacom18 Motion Pictures

Oceans 8 (2018)
Warner Bros.

Aliens (1986)
20th Century Fox

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)
StudioCanal

The Drover's Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson (2021)
Oombarra Productions

Destroyer (2018)
Annapurna Pictures, LLC

Coffy (1973)
Orion Pictures Corporation

The Nightingale (2018)
IFC Films

Stage Mother (2020)
Momentum Pictures

Fair Game (1986)
Umbrella Entertainment Pty Ltd.

Cleopatra Jones (1973)
Warner Bros.

The 10th Victim (1965)
Compagnia Cinematografica Champion S.p.A

Tank Girl (1995)
MGM

Ms .45 (1981)
Navaron Films, Drafthouse Films

Foxy Brown (1974)
Orion Pictures Corporation

Mardaani (2014)
Yash Raj Films

Tiger Zinda Hai (2017)
Yash Raj Films

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
New Line Productions Inc.

Stray Cat Rock: Beat '71 (1971)
Arrow Films

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Warner Bros.

Grindhouse: Death Proof (2007)
Lionsgate

Shame (1988)
Umbrella Entertainment Pty Ltd.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Warner Bros.

Muriel's Wedding (1994)
House & Moorhouse Films, Australian Film Finance Corporation, Film Victoria, Peter Szabo & Associates.

Thelma & Louise (1991)
MGM

Once Were Warriors (1994)
Fine Line Features, Film Movement