#AtomicBlonde Feminism Bisexual Spy

[humanitypolitics-blog]

Atomic Blonde

And now for something completely different.

This article is the first in a series of articles I'll be writing about diversity in popular culture. This first article analyzes the gender and sexual politics of Atomic Blonde.

Here's your spoiler alert.

For all the cheap thrills, Atomic Blonde was enjoyable. It was fun listening to 80's pop music and watching a hot spy (Lorraine Broughton, played by Charlize Theron) beat up men and get it on with another hot spy (Delphine Lasalle, played by Sofia Boutella), sometimes nude, and sometimes wearing fabulous vintage clothing, usually flatteringly lit by neon lights.

However, the movie was a little lacking otherwise.

There were twists, because spies were in it, so it had to have twists, but the twists were mostly delivered in confusingly pointless ways. Why did Broughton meet with the Soviets at the end, and wear a brunette wig, after she had not only obtained the List, but also most definitely blown her cover with the Soviets when David Percival (James McAvoy) inevitably told them she was Sachel? Just so we could see her play Russian dressup and shoot more people? She didn't trust Percival from the beginning, but didn't think to check her belongings for bugs? Wait - so what DID Lasalle tell Broughton in the beginning when Voices Carry was blasting in the background? Where did this List thing come from anyway, and isn't "List" more of an accurate label than a "code name," and who on earth could have even known who Broughton was in order for her name to appear on it in the first place?

In addition to the twists / lame excuses for stylish action sequences, the phrase, "[pronoun] set [pronoun] up" was overused to the point that it seemed like either the writers didn't understand the concept of being set up but really thought it was a cool thing to say, or the "setups" happened in scenes that got cut in editing, although the idea of editing that bad in a movie of this level is unrealistically sad.

Moving on to the inclusion of diversity in Atomic Blonde, there are good and bad points to be made. One bad point is that for all the "strength" they gave one female character, they more than made up for it by making the other one the worst spy possible. Lasalle can't follow Broughton the way Percival can - without Broughton knowing - and even worse, she threatens Percival (one of the strange uses of the phrase "you set me up") before running around her hotel room in her underwear, with her headphones on and music blasting, standing in doorways with her back turned and her defenses lowered, waiting for him to come strangle her. It's a pretty common device, to make characters that are so weak, anyone else would look strong in comparison, and I guess it still works - Broughton and Percival look like masterminds compared to Lasalle.

One good point is that Charlize Theron is visibly, physically strong, and it is because of this, rather than in spite of it, that she has such sex appeal, both in Mad Max and in Atomic Blonde. Playing up her strength in a sexualized way might even inspire more women to do more at the gym than run gazillions of miles while starving themselves, and it might even inspire more men to stop saying "ew, muscles" every time they see women who are striving for anything besides the Victoria's Secret Angel physique (pro tip: the skinnier you are, the bigger your boobs look in that padded pushup bra, no matter how anorexically shrunken they are without it).

Also, I can't ignore the fact that Broughton is bi, and that the movie doesn't even have to make too big of a deal out of it other than to be direct about it, which I appreciate about any inclusion of diversity - otherwise it's this self-congratulatory parading of diversity that shows that the makers of the film think it's a huge deal their movie contains THAT kind of person, like they think they're being really rebellious in featuring a bisexual / woman who knows about science / POC / whoever they happened to cast or write in specifically for that purpose, like they think it's a big deal that some bigots somewhere might see something wrong with that, like some bigots they take seriously, like maybe even themselves.

Unfortunately, if you're looking for an example of the self-conscious inclusion of diversity I just described, you need look no further than Atomic Blonde's gender politics. Percival is made to be more villainous and unlikable than necessary by being given one line about women always getting in the way of progress, which he says after learning that Broughton survived the border crossing. Thus, the movie forfeits the depth that it could have kept simply by not rendering the antagonist flat with that sentence. I mean, we all get it: war and global politics are complicated. Percival is still a sleaze, so he could still be the bad guy, and Broughton is shown in plenty of scenes making effort to do the right thing, so she could still be the good guy, and the audience would still follow the main character. People aren't as stupid as you think they are, Hollywood.

I wouldn't say I don't appreciate that, in 2017, a bisexual woman is easy to simply insert into a movie without self-congratulatory fanfare - Rather, I'd say that the juxtaposing of the matter-of-fact inclusion of bisexuality with the self-conscious inclusion of feminism highlights just how ridiculous this outdated form of feminism is.

So, for the music-video quality lighting, clothing, cinematography, music, and choreography, not to mention the actors and inclusion of a beautiful, muscular, bi, and yes, female heroine, Atomic Blonde gets plenty of points. However, for the bad writing and lame gender politics, this movie loses all of its spy cred and half of its diversity cred.

Now, if you want to know what ACTUAL feminism in film looks like, you'll have to go back to the 70s, to what I'll probably reiterate many times as my gold standard of feminist films: Alien. Lately, a lot of articles have surfaced about how the script of Alien was written to be gender-neutral before Sigourney Weaver was even cast as the last survivor. The simple decisions to write a gender-neutral script and cast a woman in the leading role highlight the true definition of feminism - the idea that women are people. Despite all the arguments that ensue on the Nostromo, none of them has anything to do with the idea that Ripley's ownership of a vagina makes her opinion somehow less valid. She can analyze Mother's data and root out Weyland-Yutani's secrets with the best of them, because she's treated by script-writers, protagonists, aliens, and evil robots alike as a HUMAN. The viewer isn't distracted from her character's qualities by her having to irrelevantly defend them from sexists. Compare that to Broughton's character in Atomic Blonde, who is somehow supposed to be heightened simply by the fact that she kills a man who speaks ill of her feminality, as if that needs to be included in the movie for it to be at all possible for a female character to be strong or relatable.

See the difference?