A façade of feminism: Scarlett Johansson and Miss Representation

The rhetorical function of Scarlett Johansson

From 2013 to 2017, Scarlett Johansson starred in four films that captured the popular imagination, challenged phallocentric humanism and hailed the arrival of a feminised posthuman prototype. While Johansson the actor is playing a role, however, Johansson the rhetorical construct acts according to a separate script. My goal in this article is to identify Johansson, in the context of these four sample films, as a cultural mechanism with a distinct rhetorical function and to challenge the implication that her four corresponding characters represent figures of female empowerment.

The sf genre serves as a helpful laboratory in which to undertake this project. The films Under the Skin (Glazer UK 2013), Her (Jonze US 2013), Lucy (Besson France 2014) and Ghost in the Shell (Sanders US 2017) employ Johansson in the service of what appears to be female empowerment, but each film ends with a reactionary assertion of masculinity and the eradication of the Johansson character. As a rhetorical 'text', Johansson is singularly suited to advertise a type of disguised misogyny reflective of male resistance to a looming posthuman, gender and species-egalitarian ontology. Posthumanist scholars such as Rosi Braidotti, N. Katherine Hayles and Claire Colebrook have written extensively about posthumanism and its implications for a technologically mediated and post-anthropocentric society. Less frequent are more detailed analyses of the fate of masculinity in such a speculative world. Scarlett Johansson's four films bring the future of masculinity into the posthumanist debate. It is a conversation in which the woman's voice and body are present only for as long as men allow them to be.

As a Hollywood icon, Johansson functions as a posthuman 'pin-up girl'. Like all pin-up girls, she is both apotheosised and objectified, regarded and disregarded. As noted in the introduction to this symposium, she is a household name and a major box-office draw. As one of the key faces of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, among other mainstream roles, she functions as a cultural model for twenty-first-century women and as evidence that feminist cultural movements remain effective. But is that all that is going on here? Might there be a disconnect between the flesh-and-blood Johansson as a feminist 'über-female' and this collection of characters and their telos? In what ways can Johansson's paradoxical role as idolised subject and manipulated object be reconciled?

In attempting to answer this question, I will first position Johansson and her characters in these four films as the centre of an oversight that fails to consider male reaction to posthumanism's assault on existing gender hierarchies. I will then demonstrate Johansson's function, address the evolution and telos of her four characters, identify the rhetorical U-turn that punctuates the end of each film and conclude with evidence that Scarlett Johansson, due largely to her prominent celebrity in a gendered cultural narrative, is uniquely suited to embody this rhetorical capacity.

Johansson and the posthuman predicament

Initially, Johansson's characters represent a privileging of the female over the male and a re-evaluation of subjectivity in non-phallocentric terms. Posthumanist scholar Rosi Braidotti calls for just such a reinvigorated conception of subjectivity in the egalitarianism of zoëism, or 'the non-human, vital force of Life' (Braidotti The Posthuman 60). However, what incentive do men have to embrace egalitarianism at the expense of their hegemony?

Addressing this question, Braidotti lays out a roadmap for an egalitarian ontology that 'requires a modicum of good will on the part of the dominant party, in this case anthropos himself, towards his non-human others. I am aware, of course, that this is asking a lot' (88). Although Braidotti refers here to man's relationship with his 'non-human others', the dynamic of power and its abdication applies equally to man's relationship with women. Johansson intrigues in no small part because, in her assertion of female agency, she reconfigures the 'dominant party' (88). Her characters are imbued with power and are the hub of the narratives they inhabit. In this surrender of cultural power, where man's...