Hanna (2011)
Cert : 12A
Director: Joe Wright
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana, Jason Flemyng, Jessica Barden, Michelle Dockery, Olivia Williams, Saoirse Ronan
Imagine a film that celebrates an adolescent boy who's trained from birth to kill other people and ruthlessly committed to doing just that. Hug him, and he'll snap your neck. If one of his arrows somehow misses your heart, he'll shoot you in the back of the head. Even if you're the unsuspecting young recipient of his first-ever kiss, he'll feel obliged to give you a surprise beating afterwards for no obvious reason.
Such a character's possible influence on young cinemagoers might give cause for concern. However, Hanna's a girl, so that's all right. Is it?
As a remorselessly homicidal young cutie, Hanna is just one member of what's becoming something of a big-screen sorority. Her most obvious antecedent is Kick-Ass's Mindy (aged 11), but we've been seeing a lot of Lisbeth Salander as well as quite a few other tigerish women like those in Sucker Punch. Katniss Everdeen is eagerly awaited in the forthcoming adaptation of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games.
These brutish babes were perhaps foreshadowed by Luc Besson's Nikita and Mathilda, as well as by various Japanese pitiless poppets. Now, however, they seem to be becoming not only mainstream but both attractive and praiseworthy. This is clearly good news for blokes who are titillated by murderous misses; but what's it doing for women?
To find out, Hanna's star, Saoirse Ronan, went to a screening for an all-female audience. "What they really got out of the film was a sense of empowerment," she reports. The women found that her character, who "is female and has this strength over so many people", was "very exciting to see on screen". Maybe, but perhaps it's worth asking whether ultra-violence is the optimal form of female assertiveness.
Some might imagine that violent behaviour by fictional young women would be unlikely to infect their real-life counterparts, because girls, unlike boys, are hard-wired to shun brutality, and can therefore be relied on to interpret female-enacted savagery merely metaphorically. Maybe such thinking should be regarded as either feminist or misogynist poppycock; anyway, apparently it's wrong.
Research at the University of Montreal has shown that baby girls are just as aggressive as baby boys; they become less so only because of the social pressure that's brought to bear on them from infancy. Some researchers, such as Professor James Garbarino, a Chicago psychologist who has advised the FBI on criminal violence, believe that growing on-screen endorsement of violence perpetrated by women is stripping away this conditioning.
According to Garbarino, girls appeared immune to contagion by screen violence in the 1960s, but this had changed by the 1980s. He attributes this shift partly to the emergence of violent female protagonists. Even Hermione Granger gives him cause for disquiet. At the end of the third Potter film, she punches Draco Malfoy, exclaims "That felt good", and is rewarded with cheers from her friends. Says Garbarino: "Girls hit, it feels good and people appreciate it: that's the message."
If Hermione's modest fisticuffs have indeed sent out such a signal, the more robust activities of bruisers such as Hanna must surely prove yet more baleful. There are indications that girls are particularly likely to approve on-screen violence when they can see it as symbolising the triumph of good over evil. The mayhem perpetrated by characters such as Hanna is calculated to create just such an impression.
Of course, no one can be sure that cinema has had any impact at all on the way young women behave. Yet something has. In England and Wales, assaults have become the most common first-time crime for females under 17; such offenders now constitute more than a third of all girls receiving court sentences. Overall, the number of offences involving violence committed by female juveniles increased by 28% between 2002/3 and 2009/10. A similar pattern has emerged across the developed world.
Some may view this trend as evidence in itself of a kind of female empowerment. Others, however, may consider young women to be merely aping the pitiful conduct of their menfolk.
A perhaps surprising feature of the bloodthirsty heroics of characters such as Hanna and Mindy is that they're often wholly directed by some kind of patriarch. The young women in these films play out an entirely male-dictated version of what their self-realisation might constitute. Just how empowering is that?
See also: Six Kick-ass movie women to see.
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