Between attraction and anxiety: Scarlett Johansson, female knowledge and the mind–body split in Lucy

Sf, both as a literary and cinematic genre, provides a site where contemporary anxieties and desires have long been interrogated. The nature of the genre, which enables it to construct new worlds, possible futures, imagined pasts and alternative presents that in themselves break the very foundations of scientific thought and the previously thought immutable laws of nature, means that it also offers a site where social conventions and constructions can be disrupted and interrogated. Of particular interest to this short article is the way in which sf cinema acts as a space where contemporary anxieties about gender, and particularly those connected to issues of female empowerment, knowledge and sexuality can be played out. Feminist theorists such as Judith Newton (1990), Barbara Creed (1990, 1993), Donna Haraway (1991, 1997), Mary Ann Doane (1990, 1993) and Hellen Merrick (2003), among many more, have examined various means through which sf, its technologies and apparatus, as well as related examples of horror cinema, have explored issues of female subjectivity and sexuality and the perceived threat this poses to traditional gender roles and hierarchies. Within their work, examples of dangerous women and female monsters do not simply frighten because of the immediate physical threat they pose to other characters within the filmic text. Rather, they are frightening because of the threat they pose to established orders of power and knowledge, and for what they speak to within the societies of the audiences watching them.

As a genre traditionally conceived as masculine, with an audience long assumed to be heavily populated by adolescent males, sf has often tended to reinforce stereotypical gender roles and patriarchal social orders (see, for instance, Doane 1990; Hollinger 2003; and Cranny-Francis 2015). As Hellen Merrick explains: 'Traditionally, sf has been considered a predominantly masculine field which, through its focus on science and technology, "naturally" excludes women and, by implication, considerations of gender' (Merrick 241). As Merrick clarifies, sf in fact provides a fertile space for the exploration of socio-cultural understandings of gender and often relies on the problematic spaces that concepts of 'gender' offer to provide the base and catalyst for narrative development. Nevertheless, the genre also has a long history of reinforcing conservative gender norms. Women have often been cast as victims or assistants within sf narratives, inserted into the story as a source of masculine desire while positioned as inherently inferior to the male heroes whose combination of physical power and intellectual acumen mark them as the rightful heir to the knowledge and power granted within the realm of science. More specifically, the Cartesian divide between mind and body is often perpetuated within sf texts through the representation and gendering of the male mind and the female body: where rationality, technological advancement and science more generally become synonymous with masculine achievement, emotionality and nature are feminised. While there are many films that have problematised these simple distinctions, this article examines one from recent years that has highlighted the ongoing tension around the scientific or knowledgeable female mind. Looking to Luc Besson's 2014 film Lucy and the impact that the mobilisation of Scarlett Johansson's star persona has within it, this essay explores how the mind/body and male/female binaries continue to operate as a site of tension within sf texts. In particular, it considers how the preoccupation with Johansson's body and its place within Lucy's narrative of cerebral extension works to expose the latent anxieties that exist over the destabilisation of conservative gender roles and, more specifically, the embodiment of female knowledge and sexuality within discourses of reproduction.

Lucy tells the story of an international American student in Taipei who is exposed to a lethal dose of a new designer drug, CPH4. Revealed as the chemical produced by pregnant women at a crucial moment in pregnancy – 'for a baby it packs the power of an atomic bomb' – the drug unlocks Lucy's mind, removing the 'obstacles' from her cerebral capacity and enabling her to access more of her mind than the 10% conventionally assumed to be used by humans. As the film...