An analysis of how the female action hero has been portrayed in films over time, focusing on Hitchcock's 1954 film 'Rear Window, McG's 2000 film 'Charlie's Angels' and Boden and Fleck's 2019 film 'Captain Marvel'.
Full Description:
This was a task that I really enjoyed doing. The assignment was to analyse the depiction of gender and link it into contextual influences for three different texts. In this exploration, we also had to show the evolution of this representation of gender over time. I chose to focus on the depiction of the female action hero and how this had changed over time. I was inspired to choose this topic as I had recently watched the movie 2000’s movie Charlie’s Angels. It made me furious as to how sexualised the characters were and how a large portion of their power was derived from their skimpy clothes. Before watching it, I believed that it was a film with strong female power, demonstrating to the world that women don’t need to rely on a man. After watching it, I was shocked to see that while the character’s engage in the fights without much help from a man, they still work under ‘Charlie’, a man who they’ve never met but happily follow instructions from. I really wanted to take this representation of the female action hero and see how it has progressed. I chose Rear Window and Captain Marvel as I felt that they accurately captured the societal views of women for the time they were made in and as such, comparing these three distinctive representations produces an interesting result.
