Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television

Introduction: Unmaking Vulnerability

1 Introduction unmaking vulnerability In the first season of the Baltimore cop drama The Wire (HBO, 2002–­ 2008), police officer Kima Greggs recalls her experience as a rookie cop. “You’re in your radio car alone, working your post. Most women aren’t getting out of that car—­not without side partners showing up. They’re intimidated, physically.” Kima’s description of being “straight-out-of-the-academy-type scared” accurately captures the uncomfortable cocktail of fear and pain that has been at the heart of cinematic depictions of women’s difference.The calculation Kima ascribes to “most women” is the advice patriarchal culture gives all women: don’t get out of the car; don’t jog by yourself; don’t walk outside after dark. In response to the cultural imperatives that ask women to stay scared in order to avoid injury, Kima offers a surprising solution. “I wasn’t about to stay scared. You know, you get your ass kicked once or twice, you realize it’s not the end of the world, right? Most of the women, they don’t want to believe that. Most of the men, too—­they don’t even want to go there.” Kima’s bracing insight—­ that certain kinds of pain don’t end the world—­ remains something that we, as feminists and film critics, haven’t wanted to know. This book argues that our ideas about vulnerability reside in bodies, but they also shape perception. Why do we think of women’s and children’s bodies as especially vulnerable? Doing so has enabled important antiviolence and antirape work, but the discourses that construct vulnerability also work to reify whiteness, infantilize women, and hide a more widespread vulnerability. Traditionally, vulnerability has been constructed onscreen in a way that valorizes patriarchy, or at least hides its ideologies. If women think of themselves as especially vulnerable, they will be more compliant to a system that claims to protect them. We must name the thing in order to see and then dismantle it. But it is also my contention that popular culture is richer, more nuanced, and more full of progressive possibilities than we sometimes know or acknowledge, particularly in big-budget middlebrow films like G.I. Jane and Saving Private Ryan that are often assumed to parrot dominant ideologies. I trace the cinematic construction of vulnerability onscreen, arguing that two competing models of vulnerability—­sentimental and resistant—­structure the way we think about men, about women, and about our shared vulnerability. The readings that follow, of westerns, war films, and other fictions of the body in danger or pain, reveal the logics of paternalism, erasure, and replacement that 2 reel vulnerability are at the heart of our social belief in women’s special vulnerability. Patriarchy has made women’s bodies the site of political, social, and physical violence and policing, but the assumption that women need special protection also enables our continued compliance. This book asks what happens when pain doesn’t rob the woman onscreen of her subjectivity. Women take a step toward being seen as people, not merely as humans rather than objects, but as diverse and complex—­ in other words, as fully human. Defining Vulnerability The first printed use of the word “vulnerable”—­ “susceptible of receiving wounds or physical injury”—­ occurs in the final act of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1605). Macbeth , having murdered his way through much of the cast list (in person or by proxy), taunts Macduff during their final battle: “Thou losest labour. As easy mayst thou the intrenchant air with thy keen sword impress as make me bleed. Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests; I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to one of woman born.”1 This play, so fixated on the physical properties of blood, ends with a debate about Macbeth’s own blood. Shakespeare uses the word “vulnerable ” to signify several different anxieties. When Macbeth claims that his is not a “vulnerable crest,” he speaks on one hand of his lineage, his house—­ represented by the crest that depicts his family coat of arms. In this context, the term “vulnerable ” implies that Macbeth’s claim to the throne is shaky, politically and ethically indefensible. On the other hand, the line literally refers to the crest’s placement on Macbeth’s shield. When Macbeth challenges Macduff to “let thy blade fall” on other crests, he means those other claimants to Scotland’s crown, but the spectacle onstage is of two human bodies, fighting to...