This article contains spoilers for “Atomic Blonde.”
“Atomic Blonde,” the Charlize Theron-led spy flick by “John Wick” director David Leitch, is currently lighting up the box office. Boasting a $18.3 million opening weekend behind “Dunkirk,” “The Emoji Movie,” and “Girls Trip,” this action-packed dynamo is well on track to recoup its $30 million budget. The film is certified fresh at Rotten Tomatoes (despite our so-so review), with countless critics praising its brash thrills and neon aesthetic. Some writers and fans are calling Theron’s Lorraine Broughton the female James Bond, and the hype just might be strong enough to see Universal’s franchise plans realized. In a cinematic world deprived of female characters, especially in the action genre, “Atomic Blonde” should be shaking off bits of detritus from its proverbial rocket-launch into the glass ceiling. And yet, some female fans just aren’t buying it – and maybe those that are should up their price.
Soon after its wide release last week, the film lit up gay women’s social media circles. Lesbian fans were heartbroken to learn that “Atomic Blonde,” whose trailer boasted a female/female romance (complete with anatomically impossible sex), brutally murders its only lesbian character in the third act. Soon after she and Lorraine embark on an athletic sexual rendezvous, French spy Delphine (Sophia Boutella) is brutally strangled to death by double-crosser David Percival (James McAvoy). Delphine dies in a highly sexualized, intimate scene, clad only in lingerie (as women enjoying alone time in their apartments often are). The scene upset so many fans because of its adherence to the regressive Bury Your Gays trope, a trend in films and television wherein gay characters are disproportionately killed off for dramatic effect.
This trope originated during the Motion Picture Production Code of the 1930s, which sought to morally improve upon (read: keep conservative) Hollywood films. The Code banned “sex perversion or any inference to it,” which filmmakers skirted in the 1940s by bogging down gay-coded characters in stereotypes. Gay characters for the next three decades were cold, villainous, and predatory (as in “Rope” and “Rebecca”) or outright suicidal (as in “The Children’s Hour” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”). Either way, their deaths were encouraged by censors as moral justification for their deviance.
Though the Code has been dead for nearly 50 years, Bury Your Gays persists today as part of straight-dominated media’s inherent bias toward gay fans and characters. Gay characters are seen as secondary and dispensable in contrast to straight (or at least bisexual) protagonists. As in “Atomic Blonde,” gay characters coupled with main characters are frequently killed off to move their partner’s storyline forward – see: “Buffy The Vampire Slayer,” “The 100,” “United States Of Tara,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “A Single Man.” The trope overwhelmingly affects lesbian characters, who are dealt the unfortunate hand of being both gay and women. According to a 2013 study by Funeralwise, though men died more frequently and casually on TV, women were murdered in more intimate and violent ways – much like being strangled in one’s underwear. Since 2010, 118 lesbians/bi women have died on the small screen, with 33 of those deaths occurring just last year. This rush of lesbian deaths drew newfound attention to the Bury Your Gays phenomenon.
Though fans are already jumping to defend “Atomic Blonde” following the BYG controversy, maybe it’s time for female fans, gay or straight, to admit that this movie was never going to provide the progressive female representation it so ardently promised. Though the action genre is overwhelmingly male, kick-ass women have become a gimmicky fixture in the recent media landscape – and maybe that’s not a good thing.
Rather than, “Is she is a complex, well-rounded human being?” the standard for modern female character multi-dimensionality is now, “Can she beat up guys and look pretty simultaneously?” This misfire mainly occurs in modern cinema’s most lucrative genre: action/adventure/superhero films. From Wonder Woman and Black Widow to literally any woman written by Zack Snyder, “complex” female characters in some of the world’s best-selling movies are not nearly as valuable for their ideas, emotions, or personhood as they are for their physical strength and good looks. These women can be admired by other women without being inaccessible or threatening to men. Their counterparts, genuinely well-written women, are often either too young to sexualize (Moana from “Moana,” Merida from “Brave”), or they’re hypersexualized and condemned as irrational, villainous harpies (Amy from “Gone Girl,” Jennifer from “Jennifer’s Body”). Even when a female character is not objectified, she then becomes the most physically competent or hyper-intelligent character in the film as an act of overcompensation (Furiosa from “Mad Max Fury Road,” Michelle from “10 Cloverfield Lane”).
These examples gesture toward an industry trend, not a hard-and-fast rule. It would be impossible to claim that any one industry, especially one as multifaceted and hydralike as entertainment, treats or views women any one way. However, these examples do prove that media representations of women often mirror society’s expectations – women should wear makeup, women shouldn’t be so emotional, women can only be sexual if it turns men on – and that female characters have to be inhumanly amazing to be as likable as your average male character. Mad Max, the ostensible protagonist of ‘Fury Road,’ is incapacitated for a good chunk of the movie while Furiosa literally drives the plot. In “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” Rey, a charming, attractive young woman imbued with otherworldly powers, has to battle with the Nazi-like antagonist of her own film for fan attention. The issue with Lorraine in “Atomic Blonde” is not nearly so complex.
As a rule, if your female character could be easily rewritten as a guy, she’s doing very little to further women’s representation. Poor women’s representation will not be amended by simply injecting more and more women into as many genres as possible – writers and creators must also work to make content that doesn’t overwhelmingly value masculinity. If a female character has to be emotionally repressed, physically strong, sexually voracious, and nearly invulnerable to fit into the film industry’s most popular genre, then the industry and the genre should be called into question. In “Atomic Blonde,” Lorraine mires her stoicism in alcohol and meaningless sex. Calling Lorraine a female James Bond is fairly accurate, but it shouldn’t be a compliment. Like Bond, Lorraine’s personality revolves around bedding women and killing baddies, with no emotional core to really motivate either action. If you strip away the panache, Lorraine and Bond both make for insanely boring people. “Atomic Blonde” glorifies toxic masculine traits, at the expense of Lorraine’s credible humanity.
That doesn’t mean that female action heroes should go the opposite way and be hysterical bimbos. On the contrary, a well-written woman cannot be reduced to (or will at least offer a satirical take on) gender stereotypes. Furiosa begins ‘Mad Max’ as a seemingly stoic, emotionally masculine action hero, but her vulnerability and desperate need for intimacy develops along with the plot. Well-rounded, female action heroes exist, but they’re pitifully rare. Instead, as with “Atomic Blonde,” creators expect female fans to settle for hollow female substitutes of badly-written men.
None of this is to fault or mock those female fans that are excited or intrigued by “Atomic Blonde.” After all, the film is a step up from no female representation whatsoever. But female characters are never going to improve or get more interesting if women continue settling for superhuman shells whose most impressive trait is their ability to simultaneously abet male self-identification and cater to the male gaze. Couple that with a sexy, homophobic/misogynistic murder scene, and “Atomic Blonde” becomes a whole lot less worthwhile. Scraps are scraps, but money talks, and this might be one to save for streaming.