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Wham! Bam! Pam! Pam Grier as Hot Action Babe and Cool Action Mama

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509200590461819

1543-5326

Chris Holmlund,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size He is a Professor of Cinema Studies, Women's Studies and French at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (Routledge, 2003) and co-editor of Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary (Minnesota UP, 1997). A second co-edited anthology, Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream, is forthcoming from Routledge. She is working on a book on action films (for Cambridge UP) and editing a third anthology on 1990s films (for Rutgers UP). Notes 1Knutsvik, "Pam Grier: en actiondronning vender tilbake," p. 11. 2While Brown draws extensively on Yvonne Tasker's Spectacular Bodies, the phrase "hard body hardware heroines" is his, and is obviously meant to recall Susan Jeffords" earlier work on 1980s male action stars in Hard Bodies. See Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and The Point of No Return," pp. 52–71. See also Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema and Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. 3Because so much work concentrates on female stars from the 1980s on, Ben Singer's work on serial queens, Claire Johnston's discussion of 1940s pirate molls, Brian Taves's mention of women in adventure films, and Steve Neale's survey of action antecedents are eminently useful. See Singer, "Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly," pp. 91–129; Johnston, "Femininity and the Masquerade in Anne of the Indies," pp. 36–44; Taves, The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies; and Neale, Genre and Hollywood, especially pp. 52–60. 4Grier, quoted on an MTV special on the DVD version of Jackie Brown. Academic critics split over how they define Grier, but even those who emphasize her macho attributes also somehow acknowledge her femininity. Mark Reid, for example, finds Grier "a physically threatening but sexually appealing Amazon." Reid, Redefining Black Film, p. 87. Ed Guerrero says she is a "black female superheroin[e] configured along the macho lines of the black action-fantasy heroes." Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, p. 97. Tasker refers to the "hybridity" of masculine/feminine attributes in her personae. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 21. 5As Linda Williams observes: "The [race] card has been in play whenever racial abuse is invoked to cast one racially constituted group as the victim of another. It would seem, then, that there is no single race card; rather, there is a history of mutually informing, perpetually trumping, race cards animating a long tradition of black and white racial melodrama." Williams, Playing the Race Card, p. 5. 6Grier is one of very few Black actresses to be nominated for a Golden Globe as best actress (for Jackie Brown). She won the Phoenix Award from the Black Cinema Society for career achievement. 7See Salvo, "Pam Grier: The Movie Super-Sex Goddess Who's Fed Up with Sex and Violence," pp. 48–54; Kincaid, "Pam Grier: The Mocha Mogul of Hollywood," pp. 49–53; Eimer, "Reborn," p. 18; and Rickey, "Little Sheba's Comeback," p. 42. 8See Guerrero, Framing Blackness, especially pp. 97–100, and Reid, Redefining Black Film, especially pp. 86–88. See also Robinson, "Blaxploitation and the Misrepresentation of Liberation," pp. 1–12; Mayne, "Caged and Framed: The Women-in-Prison Film," pp. 115–145; and Cruz, "Between Cinematic Imperialism and the Idea of Radical Politics: Philippines Based Women's Prison Films of the 1970s." Mia Mask is working on a book that includes Grier, based on her dissertation, "Divas of the Silver Screen: Black Women in American Film 1950–2000." Finally, see Sims, "From Mammies to Action Heroines: Female Empowerment in Black Popular Culture," especially pp. 97–167. 9Williams cites Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 29. For Williams as for Brooks the "icon of home" is a not a person but a place which "helps establish the 'space of innocence' of its virtuous victims." Williams, Playing the Race Card, p. 7. 10Salvo, "Pam Grier," pp. 49 and 53. 11Studio publicity for Coffy described Grier as "part Afro, part Mexican, part Indian … part Filipino [and] yet all vengeance." "Synopsis," p. 2. See also Kincaid, "Pam Grier," p. 50. Arguably, as someone of "mixed blood" (listing African, Asian, Caucasian, and American Indian ancestors), Grier also serves as model for younger male stars with multi-ethnic appeal, among them Keanu Reeves and Vin Diesel. 12The studies of Ripley and Sarah Connor as mothers are too numerous to list. See for example Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema, pp. 65–88. 13Mayne, "Caged and Framed," p. 118. 14Ibid., p. 135. 15There is somewhat less nudity in Foxy Brown and Friday Foster, but both offer glimpses of Grier, completely naked. 16The only exception is Grier's girl gladiator film, The Arena (Steve Carver, 1974). 17Cruz, "Between Cinematic Imperialism and the Idea of Radical Politics," p. 7. 18Eimer, "Reborn," p. 18. 19Robinson, "Blaxploitation and the Misrepresentation of Race," p. 7. Robinson argues that Grier impersonated Angela Davis in all her prison and blaxploitation work. 20"Only Black women possessed the savage, primordial instinct of self-survival to resist sexual degradation and their male predators." Ibid., p. 5. Tasker notes that "it is in part Grier's blackness … that opens up, through notions of black animality, the production of an aggressive female heroine within existing traditions of representation." Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 21. 21See Jack Hill's commentary on the DVD version of Foxy Brown. 22Lipsitz, "Genre Anxiety and Racial Representation in 1970s Cinema," p. 218. 23Salvo, "Pam Grier," p. 52. 24Grier, "Pam Grier," p. 53. 25Mayne, "Caged and Framed," p. 138. 26According to Hill's DVD commentary, this scene was the first time that women stunt artists appeared, and they relished getting the chance to "fight." For an insightful and detailed commentary on the sequence and Inyang Etang's appropriation of it in Badass Supermama, see Hankin, "Badass Supermama Meets Foxy Brown," pp. 81–113. 27Tag lines for Foxy Brown and Friday Foster followed suit: "She's MURDER 'Foxy' style…"; "She's smoother 'n satin and sexier 'n sin…. A pinch of sugar and a kiss of spice and, for an ace she keeps a cold steel .38 in a nice warm place." 28For a similar argument regarding gender and Stephanie Rothman's work for AIP and, especially, New World Productions, see Cook, "Exploitation Films and Feminism," pp. 122–127. For a similar argument regarding race, see Lipsitz, "Genre Anxiety and Racial Representation." 29Salvo, "Pam Grier," p. 52. 30Rhines, Black Film, White Money, p. 82. 31Salvo, "Pam Grier," p. 50. See also Jacobson, "Sex Goddess of the 1970s," p. 44. 32That Charlotte attacks men with less rhyme or reason than Coffy, Foxy or Friday did makes her seem truly crazy. Perhaps she's a lesbian? In the book the film is based on, Charlotte lives with a rough-looking older woman who is described as bisexual. See Stacy and Hale, "Fort Apache, the Bronx: Saints, Sinners, and Symbols," p. 55. 33Hunt, "Pam Grier Is Shedding Her Redundant Image," p. 1. See also Rickey, "Little Sheba's Comeback," p. 42. 34Kael, "The Current Cinema," p. 101. 35"Pam Grier Is Sinister and Sexy in Something Wicked This Way Comes," p. 5. 36Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 23. 37Howe, "Above the Law." 38For her stage roles, Grier altered her body more drastically still, in 1990 gaining 80 pounds to play Frankie in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune because, she said, "I wanted to improve my acting and expand my repertoire … [W]hen you're thin and glamorous all you get is the shallow roles, the pretty 'F me' parts." Schubert, "Still Foxy after All These Years," p. 53. 39The comedies are Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (Peter Hewitt, 1991) and Fakin' Da Funk (Timothy Chey, 1997). 40See McHugh, " 'Sounds that Creep Inside You': Female Narration and Voiceover in the Films of Jane Campion," pp. 193–218. 41Watching Mario Van Peebles parade and preen in Posse, J. Hoberman derisively remarked: "The director-star keeps sneaking up on his stylish self in fractured 360-degree pans (a reminder that the anagram of Posse is Poses)." Hoberman, "New Jack Prairie," n.p. 42See Roger Ebert's commentary on the Collector's Edition DVD version of Jackie Brown. Jackie Brown's emphasis on romance is especially apparent by comparison with Grier's blaxploitation movies: Tarantino's film contains very little graphic violence. See further Andrew, Stranger than Paradise: Maverick Filmmakers in Recent American Cinema, pp. 334–340. 43On gangsta films, see Smith-Shomade, " 'Rock-a-Bye, Baby!': Black Women Disrupting Gangs and Constructing Hip-Hop Gangsta Films," pp. 25–40. 44McCarthy, "Posse," p. 40. 45See further Holmlund, "Nouveaux Westerns for the 1990s: Genre Offshoots, Audience Reroutes," pp. 51–67, 182–184. 46Boyd, "Original Gangstas," p. 50. 47Ebert, "Mars Attacks!" 48Pellerin, "Holy Smoke: Un symbolisme excessif," p. 46. 49Queer characters appear in none of the other films, save in Holy Smoke. There, to make P. J. Jealous, Ruth briefly flirts with a lesbian in a bar. Of course, P. J.'s cross-dressing near film's end is certainly queer, if also all about heterosexual power relations. 50That Grier is so frequently associated with singers is no coincidence: many 1990s and 2000 films rely on world and hip-hop music connections. In the 1980s, moreover, Grier often provided vocals for commercial jingles and for artists like Quincy Jones. In 1996, she appeared with Snoop Doggy Dogg in the music video "It's a Doggy Dogg World." The performance netted her 7,000 pieces of mail. Schubert, "Still Foxy after All These Years," p. 53. See also Braxton, "She's Back and Badder Than Ever," pp. 4, 31–32. 51Major, "Jackie Speaks," Boxoffice, p. 28. 52On Jennifer Lopez, see further Holmlund, "Latinas in La La Land," pp. 117–122, 194–198 and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, "Jennifer's Butt, pp. 189–194. 53Bogle suggests that the blaxploitation Grier was a favorite pin-up of black college boys. Bogle, Brown Sugar, 1980, p. 190. Guerrero maintains that audiences for these movies were predominantly comprised of black, inner city, adolescent males. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, p. 98. Reid argues the films were made to engage male fantasies. Reid, Redefining Black Film, p. 87. 54Salvo, "Pam Grier," p. 49. 55Per Daniel Leab's summary, the films represented "black women as persons of loose morals … glorified drugs, imitated successful white stereotypes, set forth impossible and ultimately debilitating fantasies, developed a negative image of the American black man, and took no real cognizance of black oppression in the United States." Leab, From Sambo to Superspade, p. 258. According to Sergio Alejandro Mims, the NAACP was one of "the groups most opposed to blaxploitation." Mims, "1970–1975: Le phénomène de la 'Blaxploitation,' " p. 128. My translation. Gary Null argues that the new Black hero/heroine has more in common with Bond than any political ideals of Black movement. Null, Black Hollywood: The Negro in Motion Pictures, p. 209. 56Smith-Shomade, " 'Rock-a-Bye, Baby,' " p. 29. 57Lott, "A No-Theory Theory of Black Cinema," p. 86. 58See Elizabeth Hadley Freydberg, "Sapphires, Spitfires, Sluts, and Superbitches: Aframericans and Latinas in Contemporary American Film," p. 236. 59See Quentin Tarantino's commentary on the Collector's Edition DVD version of Jackie Brown. 60Lott, "A No-Theory Theory of Black Cinema," p. 90. 61See, for example, Leab, From Sambo to Superspade, p. 258; Lott, "A No-Theory Theory of Black Cinema," p. 86; and Reid, Redefining Black Film, p. 90. 62"Term of Endearment," p. 138. 63Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender, p. 127. My emphasis. Similarly, Sergio Alejandro Mims charges that the NAACP preferred "films like Sounder which portrayed blacks as 'servile and defeatist.' " Mims, "1970–1975" p. 128. My translation. 64Bogle, Brown Sugar, p. 95. 65See, for example, Sims, "From Mammies to Action Heroines," especially pp. 160–167, and Dunye, "Cheryl Dunye," pp. 145–148. My students, too, often tell me how much their moms, not just their dads, loved Coffy, Foxy and Friday. 66Kincaid, "Pam Grier," p. 52. 67Johnson and Fantle, "Coffy Time," p. 64. 68See Bruce Diones: "Grier's toughness, her confidence, her raw sexuality announced a new direction for African-American women…. You can still detect her influence in the wise-ass bravado of Salt-N-Pepe, Lil'Kim, and any number of other rap divas." Diones, "Knockout," p. 253. 69Beck and Smith, "Just Call Pam Grier a 'Super Bad Momma,' " n.p. See also Singleton, "Singular Filmmaker John Singleton Greets Comeback Queen Pam Grier," Interview, p. 40. 70See Gabbard, "Black Angels in America: Millennial Solutions to the 'Race Problem,' " pp. 143–176. 71Salvo, "Pam Grier," p. 53. 72Ebert, "Pam Grier: Coming into Focus," p. 107. Grier remarked similarly in Jet: "I really believe that I did open a door at the time and other women weren't ready to be as physical…. [T]here was still a mindset of not being as independent … it was okay to be tough, okay to be smart, okay to be assertive and still be feminine and soft and caring." Grier, cited in Yvonne Denise Sims, "From Mammies to Action Heroines," p. 155. See also Grier, "Pam Grier," p. 53. 73hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze," pp. 115–117. 74Lipsitz, "Genre Anxiety and Racial Representation," pp. 210 and 215. 75Ebert, cited in Farber, "Pam Grier," p. 4. 76See Braxton, "She's Back and Badder than Ever," p. 31. 77Green, Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood, p. 239, note 32.